meaning that he should seek the prizes of his profession in England
rather than in the little world at home; but he did not take up his
residence in London until 1750, by which time he had attained his
majority. What he did with the intervening two years, his biographers
do not at all know, and it is idle to speculate, being confident, as we
must, that he quite certainly did whatever he pleased. He did the same
when he went up to London to live his terms at the Temple. “The law,”
he declared to Parliament more than twenty years afterwards, “is, in
my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,--a science
which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all
other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in
persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly
in the same proportion;” and, although himself a person “very happily
born” in respect of all natural powers, he felt that the life of a
lawyer would inevitably confine his roving mind within intolerably
narrow limits. He learned the law, as he learned everything else, with
an eye to discovering its points of contact with affairs, its intimate
connections with the structure and functions of human society; and,
studying it thus, he made his way to so many of its secrets, won so
firm a mastery of its central principles, as always to command the
respect and even the admiration of lawyers. But the good attorney in
Dublin was sorely disappointed. This was not what he had wanted. The
son in whom he had centred his hopes preferred the life of the town
to systematic study in his chambers; wrote for the papers instead of
devoting himself to the special profession he had been sent to master.
“Of his leisure time,” said the “Annual Register” just after his death,
“of his leisure time much was spent in the company of Mrs. Woffington,
a celebrated actress, whose conversation was not less sought by men of
wit and genius than by men of pleasure.”
We know very little about the life of Burke for the ten years,
1750–60, his first ten years in England,--except that he did _not_
diligently apply himself to his nominal business, the study of the
law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his biographers can show
hardly one authentic trace of his real life. They know neither his
whereabouts nor his employments. Only one scrap of his correspondence
remains from those years to give us any hint of the time. Even Richard
Shackleton, his invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never a
word from him during that period, and is told afterwards only that
his correspondent has been “sometimes in London, sometimes in remote
parts of the country, sometimes in France,” and will “shortly, please
God, be in America.” He disappears a poor law student, under suspicion
of his father for systematic neglect of duty; when he reappears he is
married to the daughter of a worthy physician and is author of two
philosophical works which are attracting a great deal of attention. We
have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he did as much writing
as they would take for the booksellers; we know that he frequented the
London theatres and several of the innumerable debating clubs with
which nether London abounded, whetting his faculties, it is said, upon
those of a certain redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries and
lobbies of the House of Commons. His health showed signs of breaking,
and Dr. Nugent took him from his lodgings in the Temple to his own
house and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter. Partly for
the sake of his health, perhaps, but more particularly, no doubt, for
the sake of satisfying an eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered
off to “remote parts of the country” and to France, with one William
Burke for company, a man either related to him or not related to him,
he did not himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering patience at
length exhausted, his father shut the home treasury against him; and
then,--’twas the next year,--he published two philosophical works and
married Miss Nugent.
One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelligible enough account of
a young fellow’s life between twenty and thirty: and that we can fill
in the particulars for ourselves. We have known other young Irishmen
of restless and volatile natures, and need make no mystery of this
one. Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that same decade,
making show of studying medicine in Edinburgh, but not really studying
it, and then wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot in
light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through the haunts both of the
gay Latin races and the sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no
doubt, of the natives,--for all the world loves an innocent Irishman,
with his heart upon his sleeve. ’Twould all be very plain indeed if
we found in Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not. The fellow
is sober and strenuous from the first, studying the things he was not
sent to study with even too intent application, to the damage of his
health, and looking through the pleasures of the town to the heart of
the nation’s affairs. He was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his
mind rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought; and when he
emerges from obscurity it is first to give us a touch of his quality in
the matter of intellectual amusement, and then to turn at once to the
serious business of the discussion of affairs to which the rest of his
life was to be devoted.
The two books which he gave the world in 1756 were “A Vindication of
Natural Society,” a satirical piece in the manner of Bolingbroke,
and “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful,” which he had begun when he was nineteen and
had since reconsidered and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed
religion to his taste, had written a “Vindication of Natural Religion”
which his vigorous and elevated style and skillful dialectic had
done much to make plausible. Burke put forth his “Vindication of
Natural Society” as a posthumous work of the late noble lord, and so
skillfully veiled the satirical character of the imitation as wholly
to deceive some very grave critics, who thought they could discern
Bolingbroke’s flavor upon the tasting. For the style, too, they took to
be unmistakably Bolingbroke’s own. It had all his grandeur and air of
distinction: it had his vocabulary and formal outline of phrase. The
imitation was perfect. And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style
is not Bolingbroke’s, except in a trick or two, but Burke’s. It seems
Bolingbroke’s rather because it is cold and without Burke’s usual moral
fervor than because it is rich and majestic and various. There is no
great formal difference between Burke’s style and Bolingbroke’s: but
there is a great moral and intellectual difference. When Burke is not
in earnest there is perhaps no important difference at all. And in the
“Vindication of Natural Society” Burke is not in earnest. The book is
not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical quality is much too covert
to make it a successful satire. Much that Burke urges against civil
society he could urge in good faith, and his mind works soberly upon
it. It is only the main thesis that he does not seriously mean. The
rest he might have meant as Bolingbroke would have meant it.
The essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, though much admired by so great
a master as Lessing, has not worn very well as philosophy. It is full,
however, of acute and interesting observations, and is adorned in
parts with touches of rich color put on with the authentic strokes of a
master. We preserve it, perhaps, only because Burke wrote it; and yet
when we read it we feel inclined to pronounce it worth keeping for its
own sake.
Both these essays were apprentice work. Burke was trying his hand. They
make us the more curious about the conditions of what must have been
a notable apprenticeship. Young Burke must have gone to school to the
world in a way worth knowing. But we cannot know, and that’s the end on
’t. Probably even William Burke, Edmund’s companion, could give us no
very satisfactory account of the matter. The explanation lay in what he
thought and not in what he did as he knocked about the world.
The company Burke kept was as singular as his talents, though scarcely
so eminent. _We_ speak of “Burke,” but the London of his day spoke of
“the Burkes,” meaning William, who may or may not have been Edmund’s
kinsman, Edmund himself, and Richard, Edmund’s younger brother, who
had followed him to London to become, to say truth, an adventurer
emphatically not of the elevated sort. Edmund was destined to become
the leader of England’s thought in more than one great matter of
policy, and has remained a master among all who think profoundly
upon public affairs; but William was for long the leader and master
of “the Burkes.” He was English born; had been in Westminster School;
and had probably just come out from Christ Church, Oxford, when he
became the companion of Edmund’s wanderings. He was a man of intellect
and literary power enough to be deemed the possible author of the
“Letters of Junius;” he was born moreover with an eye for the ways of
the world, and could push his own fortunes with an unhesitating hand.
It was he who first got public office, and it was he who formed the
influential connections which got Edmund into Parliament. He himself
entered the House at the same time, and remained there, a useful party
member, for some eight years. He made those from whom he sought favors
dislike him for his audacity in demanding the utmost, and more than
the utmost, that he could possibly hope to get; but he seems to have
made those whom he served love him with a very earnest attachment. He
was self-seeking; but he was capable of generosity, to the point of
self-sacrifice even, when he wished to help his friend. He early formed
a partnership with Richard Burke in immense stock-jobbing speculations
in the securities of the East India Company; but he also formed a
literary partnership with Edmund in the preparation of a sketch of the
European settlements in America, and made himself respected as a strong
party writer in various pamphlets on questions of the day. He could
unite the two brothers by speculating with the one and thinking with
the other.
Such were “the Burkes.” Edmund’s home was always the home also of the
other two, whenever they wished to make it so; the strongest personal
affection, avowed always by Edmund with his characteristic generous
warmth, bound the three men together; their purses they had in common.
Edmund was not expected, apparently, to take part in the speculations
which held William and Richard together; something held him aloof to
which they consented,--some natural separateness of mind and character
which they evidently accepted and respected. There can hardly be said
to have been any aloofness of _disposition_ on Edmund’s part. There
is something in an Irishman,--even in an Irishman who holds himself
to the strictest code of upright conduct,--which forbids his acting
as moral censor upon others. He can love a man none the less for
generous and manly qualities because that man does what he himself
would not do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all his life
about accepting money favors. He seems to have felt somehow that his
intense and whole-hearted devotion to his friends justified gifts and
forgiven loans of money from them. He shared the prosperity of his
kinsmen without compunction, using what he got most liberally for the
assistance of others; and when their fortunes came to a sudden ruin,
he helped them with what he had. We ought long ago to have learned
that the purest motives and the most elevated standards of conduct
may go along with a singular laxness of moral detail in some men; and
that such characters will often constrain us to love them to the point
of justifying everything that they ever did. Edmund Burke’s close
union with William and Richard does not present the least obstacle to
our admiration for the noble qualities of mind and heart which he so
conspicuously possessed, or make us for a moment doubt the thorough
disinterestedness of his great career.
Burke’s marriage was a very happy one. Mrs. Burke’s thoroughly sweet
temperament acted as a very grateful and potent charm to soothe her
husband’s mind when shaken by the agitations of public affairs; her
quiet capacity for domestic management relieved him of many small cares
which might have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied his
ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as “my entirely beloved
and incomparable wife,” and every glimpse we get of their home life
confirms the estimate. After his marriage the most serious part of
his intellectual life begins; the commanding passion of his mind is
disclosed. He turns away from philosophical amusements to public
affairs. In 1757 appeared “An Account of the European Settlements in
America,” which William Burke had doubtless written, but which Edmund
had almost certainly radically revised; and Edmund himself published
the first part of “An Abridgment of the History of England” which
he never completed. In 1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher,
a yearly volume, to be known as the “Annual Register,” which should
chronicle and discuss the affairs of England and the Continent. It was
the period of the Seven Years’ War, which meant for England a sharp and
glorious contest with France for the possession of America. Burke was
willing to write the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred
pounds; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the “Annual Register”
appeared; and the plan then so wisely conceived has yielded its annual
volume to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his connection
with this great work,--he never publicly recognized anything he had
done upon contract for the publishers,--but it is quite certain that
for very many years his was the presiding and planning mind in the
production of the “Register.” For the first few years of its life he
probably wrote the whole of the record of events with his own hand.
It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in philosophy. It gave
him an intimate acquaintance with affairs which must have served as a
direct preparation for the great contributions he was destined to make
to the mind and policy of the Whig party.
But this, even in addition to other hack work for the booksellers, did
not keep Burke out of pecuniary straits. He sought, but failed to get,
an appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest of Dr. Markham,
William’s master at Westminster School; and then he engaged himself as
a sort of private secretary or literary attendant to William Gerard
Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to the almost entire exclusion of
all other employments, for some four years, going with him for a season
to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held the appointment of Secretary
to the Lord Lieutenant. Hamilton is described by one of Burke’s friends
as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile,”
and Mr. Morley says that there is “not a word too many nor too strong
in the description.” At any rate, Burke’s proud spirit presently
revolted from further service, and he threw up a pension of three
hundred pounds which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than retain
any connection with the man, or remain under any sort of obligation to
him. In the mean time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put him
in the way of meeting many public men of weight and influence, and he
had gotten his first direct introduction to the world of affairs.
It was 1764 when he shook himself free from this connection. 1764 is
a year to be marked in English literary annals. It was in the spring
of that year that that most celebrated of literary clubs was formed at
the Turk’s Head Tavern, Gerrard Street, Soho, by notable good company:
Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Gibbon,
Dr. Barnard, Beauclerk, Langton,--we know them all; for has not Boswell
given us the freedom of the Club and made us delighted participants in
its conversations and diversions? Into this company Burke was taken at
once. His writings had immediately attracted the attention of such men
as these, and had promptly procured him an introduction into literary
society. His powers told nowhere more brilliantly than in conversation.
“It is when you come close to a man in conversation,” said Dr. Johnson,
“that you discover what his real abilities are. To make a speech in
an assembly is a sort of knack. Now I honor Thurlow; Thurlow is a fine
fellow, he fairly puts his mind to yours.” There can be no disputing
the dictum of the greatest master of conversation: and the admirer of
Burke must be willing to accept it, at any rate for the nonce, for
Johnson admitted that Burke invariably put him on his mettle. “That
fellow,” he exclaimed, “calls forth all my powers!” “Burke’s talk,” he
said, “is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire
of distinction, but because his mind is full; he is never humdrum,
never unwilling to talk, nor in haste to leave off.” The redoubtable
doctor loved a worthy antagonist in the great game of conversation,
and he always gave Burke his ungrudging admiration. When he lay dying,
Burke visited his bedside, and, finding Johnson very weak, anxiously
expressed the hope that his presence cost him no inconvenience. “I must
be in a wretched state indeed,” cried the great-hearted old man, “when
your company would not be a delight to me.” It was short work for Burke
to get the admiration of the company at the Turk’s Head. But he did
much more than that: he won their devoted affection. Goldsmith said
that Burke wound his way into a subject like a serpent; but he made his
way straight into the hearts of his friends. His powers are all of a
piece: his heart is inextricably mixed up with his mind: his opinions
are immediately transmuted into convictions: he does not talk for
distinction, because he does not use his mind for the mere intellectual
pleasure of it, but because he also deeply feels what he thinks. He
speaks without calculation, almost impulsively.
That is the reason why we can be so sure of the essential purity of
his nature from the character of his writings. They are not purely
intellectual productions: there is no page of abstract reasoning to be
found in Burke. His mind works upon concrete objects, and he speaks
always with a certain passion, as if his affections were involved. He
is irritated by opposition, because opposition in the field of affairs,
in which his mind operates, touches some interest that is dear to him.
Noble generalizations, it is true, everywhere broaden his matter: there
is no more philosophical writer in English in the field of politics
than Burke. But look, and you shall see that his generalizations are
never derived from abstract premises. The reasoning is upon familiar
matter of to-day. He is simply taking questions of the moment to the
light, holding them up to be seen where great principles of conduct
may shine upon them from the general experience of the race. He is
not constructing systems of thought, but simply stripping thought of
its accidental features. He is even deeply impatient of abstractions
in political reasoning, so passionately is he devoted to what is
practicable, and fit for wise men to do. To know such a man is to
experience all the warmer forces of the mind, to feel the generous and
cheering heat of character; and all noble natures will love such a
man, because of kinship of quality. All noble natures that came close
to Burke did love him and cherish their knowledge of him. They loaned
him money without stint, and then forgave him the loans, as if it were
a privilege to help him, and no way unnatural that he should never
return what he received, finding his spirit made for fraternal, not for
commercial relations.
It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to see how his
companions thus freely accorded to Burke the immunities and
prerogatives of a prince amongst them. No one failed to perceive how
large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts and in the wonderful
range of his varied acquirements. Sir James Mackintosh, though he
very earnestly combated some of Burke’s views, intensely admired his
greatness. He declared that Gibbon “might have been taken from a
corner of Burke’s mind without ever being missed.” “A wit said, of
Gibbon’s ‘Autobiography’ that he did not know the difference between
himself and the Roman Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions from
London to Buriton and from Buriton to London’ in the same monotonous,
majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.”
And we certainly feel a sense of incongruity: the two subjects, we
perceive, are hardly commensurable. Perhaps in Burke’s case we should
have felt differently,--we _do_ feel differently. In that extraordinary
“Letter to a Noble Lord,” in which he defends his pension so proudly
against the animadversions of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently
he speaks of his services to the country; how proud and majestic a
piece of autobiography it is! How insignificant does the ancient house
of Bedford seem, with all its long generations, as compared with this
single and now lonely man, without distinguished ancestry or hope of
posterity! He speaks grandly about himself, as about everything; and
yet I see no disparity between the subject and the manner!
Outside the small circle of those who knew and loved him, his
generation did not wholly perceive this. There seemed a touch of
pretension in this proud tone taken by a man who had never held high
office or exercised great power. He had made great speeches, indeed,
no one denied that; he had written great party pamphlets,--that
everybody knew; his had been the intellectual force within the group of
Whigs that followed Lord Rockingham,--that, too, the world in general
perceived and acknowledged; and when he died, England knew the man who
had gone to be a great man. But, for all that, his tone must, in his
generation, have seemed disproportioned to the part he had played. His
great authority is over us rather than over the men of his own day.
Burke had the thoughts of a great statesman, and uttered them with
unapproachable nobility; but he never wielded the power of a great
statesman. He was kept always in the background in active politics,
in minor posts, and employed upon subordinate functions. This would
be a singular circumstance, if there were any novelty in it; but
the practice of keeping men of insignificant birth out of the great
offices was a practice which had “broadened down from precedent to
precedent” until it had become too strong for even Burke to breast or
stem. Perhaps, too, there were faults of temper which rendered Burke
unfit to exercise authority in directing the details, and determining
the practical measures, of public policy:--but we shall look into that
presently.
In July, 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister
of England, and Burke became his private secretary. He owed his
introduction to Lord Rockingham, as usual, to the good offices of
William Burke, who seems to have found means of knowing everybody
it was to the interest of “the Burkes” to know. A more fortunate
connection could hardly have been made. Lord Rockingham, though not
a man of original powers, was a man of the greatest simplicity and
nobleness of character, and, like most upright men, knew how to trust
other men. He gave Burke immediate proof of his manly qualities. The
scheming old Duke of Newcastle, who ought to have been a connoisseur
in low men, mistook Burke for one. Shocked that this obscurely born
and unknown fellow should be accorded confidential relations by Lord
Rockingham, he hurried to his lordship with an assortment of hastily
selected slanders against Burke. His real name, he reported, was
O’Bourke; he was an Irish adventurer without character, and a rank
Papist to boot; it would ruin the administration to have such a man
connected with the First Lord of the Treasury. Rockingham, with great
good sense and frankness, took the whole matter at once to Burke; was
entirely satisfied by Burke’s denials; and admitted him immediately to
intimate relations of warm personal friendship which only death broke
off. William Burke obtained for himself an Undersecretaryship of State
and arranged with Lord Verney, at that time his partner in East India
speculations, that two of his lordship’s parliamentary boroughs should
be put at his and Edmund’s disposal. Edmund Burke, accordingly, entered
Parliament for the borough of Wendover on the 14th of January, 1766, at
the age of thirty-seven, and in the first vigor of his powers.