is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind,
steady, persevering attention, various powers of comparison and
combination, and the resources of an understanding fruitful in
expedients are to be exercised; they are to be exercised in a continued
conflict with the combined force of opposite vices, with the obstinacy
that rejects all improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and
disgusted with everything of which it is in possession.... Political
arrangement, as it is a work for social ends, is to be only wrought
by social means. There mind must conspire with mind. Time is required
to produce that union of minds which alone can produce all the good
we aim at. Our patience will achieve more than our force. If I might
venture to appeal to what is so much out of fashion in Paris,--I mean
to experience,--I should tell you that in my course I have known, and,
according to my measure, have coöperated with great men; and I have
never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations
of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took
the lead in the business. By a slow, but well sustained progress, the
effect of each step is watched; the good or ill success of the first
gives light to us in the second; and so, from light to light, we are
conducted with safety, through the whole series.... We are enabled to
unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending
principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence
arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an
excellence in composition. Where the great interests of mankind are
concerned through a long succession of generations, that succession
ought to be admitted into some share in the counsels which are so
deeply to affect them.”
It is not possible to escape deep conviction of the wisdom of these
reflections. They penetrate to the heart of all practicable methods of
reform. Burke was doubtless too timid, and in practical judgment often
mistaken. Measures which in reality would operate only as salutary and
needed reformations he feared because of the element of change that
was in them. He erred when he supposed that progress can in all its
stages be made without changes which seem to go even to the substance.
But, right or wrong, his philosophy did not come to him of a sudden and
only at the end of his life, when he found France desolated and England
threatened with madness for love of revolutionary principles of change.
It is the key to his thought everywhere, and through all his life.
It is the key (which many of his critics have never found) to his
position with regard to the revolution in France. He was roused to that
fierce energy of opposition in which so many have thought that they
detected madness, not so much because of his deep disgust to see brutal
and ignorant men madly despoil an ancient and honorable monarchy, as
because he saw the spirit of these men cross the Channel and find
lodgment in England, even among statesmen like Fox, who had been his
own close friends and companions in thought and policy; not so much
because he loved France as because he feared for England. For England
he had Shakespeare’s love:
“That fortress built by nature for herself
_Against infection and the hand of war_;
That happy breed of men, that little world,
That precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
_Against the envy of less happier lands_;
That blessed plot, that earth, that realm, that England.”
’T was to keep out infection and to preserve such precious stores
of manly tradition as had made that little world “the envy of less
happier lands” that Burke sounded so effectually that extraordinary
alarm against the revolutionary spirit that was racking France from
throne to cottage. Let us admit, if you will, that with reference
to France herself he was mistaken. Let us say that when he admired
the institutions which she was then sweeping away he was yielding to
sentiment, and imagining France as perfect as the beauty of the sweet
queen he had seen in her radiant youth. Let us concede that he did
not understand the condition of France, and therefore did not see how
inevitable that terrible revolution was: that in this case, too, the
wages of sin was death. He was not defending France, if you look to
the bottom of it; he was defending England:--and the things he hated
are truly hateful. He hated the French revolutionary philosophy and
deemed it unfit for free men. And that philosophy is in fact radically
evil and corrupting. No state can ever be conducted on its principles.
For it holds that government is a matter of contract and deliberate
arrangement, whereas in fact it is an institute of habit, bound
together by innumerable threads of association, scarcely one of which
has been deliberately placed. It holds that the object of government
is liberty, whereas the true object of government is justice; not
the advantage of one class, even though that class constitute the
majority, but right equity in the adjustment of the interests of all
classes. It assumes that government can be made over at will, but
assumes it without the slightest historical foundation. For governments
have never been successfully and permanently changed except by slow
modification operating from generation to generation. It contradicted
every principle that had been so laboriously brought to light in the
slow stages of the growth of liberty in the only land in which liberty
had then grown to great proportions. The history of England is a
continuous thesis against revolution; and Burke would have been no true
Englishman, had he not roused himself, even fanatically, if there were
need, to keep such puerile doctrine out.
If you think his fierceness was madness, look how he conducted the
trial against Warren Hastings during those same years: with what
patience, with what steadiness in business, with what temper, with
what sane and balanced attention to detail, with what statesmanlike
purpose! Note, likewise, that his thesis is the same in the one
undertaking as in the other. He was applying the same principles to
the case of France and to the case of India that he had applied to the
case of the colonies. He meant to save the empire, not by changing
its constitution, as was the method in France, and so shaking every
foundation in order to dislodge an abuse, but by administering it
uprightly and in a liberal spirit. He was persuaded “that government
was a practical thing, made for the happiness of mankind, and not
to furnish out a spectacle of uniformity to gratify the schemes of
visionary politicians. Our business,” he said, “was to rule, not to
wrangle; and it would be a poor compensation that we had triumphed in a
dispute, whilst we had lost an empire.” The monarchy must be saved and
the constitution vindicated by keeping the empire pure in all parts,
even in the remotest provinces. Hastings must be crushed in order
that the world might know that no English governor could afford to be
unjust. Good government, like all virtue, he deemed to be a practical
habit of conduct, and not a matter of constitutional structure. It is a
great ideal, a thoroughly English ideal; and it constitutes the leading
thought of all Burke’s career.
In short, as I began by saying, this man, an Irishman, speaks the
best English thought upon the essential questions of politics. He is
thoroughly, characteristically, and to the bottom English in all his
flunking. He is more liberal than Englishmen in his treatment of Irish
questions, of course; for he understands them, as no Englishman of his
generation did. But for all that he remains the chief spokesman for
England in the utterance of the fundamental ideals which have governed
the action of Englishmen in politics. “All the ancient, honest,
juridical principles and institutions of England,” such was his idea,
“are so many clogs to check and retard the headlong course of violence
and oppression. They were invented for this one good purpose, that what
was not _just_ should not be _convenient_.” This is fundamental English
doctrine. English liberty has consisted in making it unpleasant for
those who were unjust, and thus getting them in the habit of being just
for the sake of a _modus vivendi_. Burke is the apostle of the great
English gospel of Expediency.
The politics of English-speaking peoples has never been speculative;
it has always been profoundly practical and utilitarian. Speculative
politics treats men and situations as they are supposed to be;
practical politics treats them (upon no general plan, but in detail) as
they are found to be at the moment of actual contact. With reference
to America Burke argues: No matter what your legal right in the case,
it is not _expedient_ to treat America as you propose: a numerous and
spirited people like the colonists will not submit; and your experiment
will cost you your colonies. In the case of administrative reform,
again, it is the higher sort of expediency he urges: If you wish to
keep your government from revolution, keep it from corruption, and by
making it pure render it permanent. To the French he says, It is not
_expedient_ to destroy thus recklessly these ancient parts of your
constitution. How will you replace them? How will you conduct affairs
at all after you shall have deprived yourselves of all balance and of
all old counsel? It is both better and easier to reform than to tear
down and reconstruct.
This is unquestionably the message of Englishmen to the world, and
Burke utters it with incomparable eloquence. A man of sensitive
imagination and elevated moral sense, of a wide knowledge and capacity
for affairs, he stood in the midst of the English nation speaking
its moral judgments upon affairs, its character in political action,
its purposes of freedom, equity, wide and equal progress. It is the
immortal charm of his speech and manner that gives permanence to
his works. Though his life was devoted to affairs with a constant
and unalterable passion, the radical features of Burke’s mind were
literary. He was a man of books, without being under the dominance
of what others had written. He got knowledge out of books and the
abundance of matter his mind craved to work its constructive and
imaginative effects upon. It is singular how devoid of all direct
references to books his writings are. The materials of his thought
never reappear in the same form in which he obtained them. They
have been smelted and recoined. They have come under the drill and
inspiration of a great constructive mind, have caught life and taken
structure from it. Burke is not literary because he takes from books,
but because he makes books, transmuting what he writes upon into
literature. It is this inevitable literary quality, this sure mastery
of style, that mark the man, as much as his thought itself. He is a
master in the use of the great style. Every sentence, too, is steeped
in the colors of an extraordinary imagination. The movement takes your
breath and quickens your pulses. The glow and power of the matter
rejuvenate your faculties.
And yet the thought, too, is quite as imperishable as its incomparable
vehicle.
“The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen;
The voice most echoed by consenting men;
The soul which answered best to all well said
By others, and which most requital made;
Tuned to the highest key of ancient Rome,
Returning all her music with his own;
In whom, with nature, study claimed a part,
And yet who to himself owed all his art.”
VI.
THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER.
“Give us the facts, and nothing but the facts,” is the sharp injunction
of our age to its historians. Upon the face of it, an eminently
reasonable requirement. To tell the truth simply, openly, without
reservation, is the unimpeachable first principle of all right dealing;
and historians have no license to be quit of it. Unquestionably they
must tell us the truth, or else get themselves enrolled among a very
undesirable class of persons, not often frankly named in polite
society. But the thing is by no means so easy as it looks. The truth
of history is a very complex and very occult matter. It consists of
things which are invisible as well as of things which are visible. It
is full of secret motives, and of a chance interplay of trivial and yet
determining circumstances; it is shot through with transient passions,
and broken athwart here and there by what seem cruel accidents; it
cannot all be reduced to statistics or newspaper items or official
recorded statements. And so it turns out, when the actual test of
experiment is made, that the historian must have something more than a
good conscience, must be something more than a good man. He must have
an eye to see the truth; and nothing but a very catholic imagination
will serve to illuminate his matter for him: nothing less than keen
and steady insight will make even illumination yield him the truth
of what he looks upon. Even when he has seen the truth, only half
his work is done, and that not the more difficult half. He must then
make others see it just as he does: only when he has done that has he
told the truth. What an art of penetrative phrase and just selection
must he have to take others into the light in which he stands! Their
dullness, their ignorance, their prepossessions, are to be overcome
and driven in, like a routed troop, upon the truth. The thing is
infinitely difficult. The skill and strategy of it cannot be taught.
And so historians take another way, which is easier: they tell part of
the truth,--the part most to their taste, or most suitable to their
talents,--and obtain readers to their liking among those of similar
tastes and talents to their own.
We have our individual preferences in history, as in every other sort
of literature. And there are histories to every taste: histories full
of the piquant details of personal biography, histories that blaze
with the splendors of courts and resound with drum and trumpet, and
histories that run upon the humbler but greater levels of the life
of the people; colorless histories, so passionless and so lacking
in distinctive mark or motive that they might have been set up out
of a dictionary without the intervention of an author, and partisan
histories, so warped and violent in every judgment that no reader not
of the historian’s own party can stomach them; histories of economic
development, and histories that speak only of politics; those that tell
nothing but what it is pleasant and interesting to know, and those that
tell nothing at all that one cares to remember. One must be of a new
and unheard of taste not to be suited among them all.
The trouble is, after all, that men do not invariably find the truth
to their taste, and will often deny it when they hear it; and the
historian has to do much more than keep his own eyes clear: he has
also to catch and hold the eye of his reader. ’Tis a nice art, as much
intellectual as moral. How shall he take the palate of his reader at
unawares, and get the unpalatable facts down his throat along with the
palatable? Is there no way in which all the truth may be made to hold
together in a narrative so strongly knit and so harmoniously colored
that no reader will have either the wish or the skill to tear its
patterns asunder, and men will take it all, unmarred and as it stands,
rather than miss the zest of it?
It is evident the thing cannot be done by the “dispassionate” annalist.
The old chroniclers, whom we relish, were not dispassionate. We love
some of them for their sweet quaintness, some for their childlike
credulity, some for their delicious inconsequentiality. But our modern
chroniclers are not so. They are, above all things else, knowing,
thoroughly informed, subtly sophisticated. They would not for the world
contribute any spice of their own to the narrative; and they are much
too watchful, circumspect, and dutiful in their care to keep their
method pure and untouched by any thought of theirs to let us catch so
much as a glimpse of the chronicler underneath the chronicle. Their
purpose is to give simply the facts, eschewing art, and substituting a
sort of monumental index and table of the world’s events.
The trouble is that men refuse to be made any wiser by such means.
Though they will readily enough let their eyes linger upon a monument
of art, they will heedlessly pass by a mere monument of industry. It
suggests nothing to them. The materials may be suitable enough, but
the handling of them leaves them dead and commonplace. An interesting
circumstance thus comes to light. It is nothing less than this, that
the facts do not of themselves constitute the truth. The truth is
abstract, not concrete. It is the just idea, the right revelation of
what things mean. It is evoked only by such arrangements and orderings
of facts as suggest interpretations. The chronological arrangement
of events, for example, may or may not be the arrangement which most
surely brings the truth of the narrative to light; and the best
arrangement is always that which displays, not the facts themselves,
but the subtle and else invisible forces that lurk in the events and
in the minds of men,--forces for which events serve only as lasting
and dramatic words of utterance. Take an instance. How are you to
enable men to know the truth with regard to a period of revolution?
Will you give them simply a calm statement of recorded events, simply
a quiet, unaccentuated narrative of what actually happened, written
in a monotone, and verified by quotations from authentic documents of
the time? You may save yourself the trouble. As well make a pencil
sketch in outline of a raging conflagration; write upon one portion
of it “flame,” upon another “smoke;” here “town hall, where the fire
started,” and there “spot where fireman was killed.” It is a chart, not
a picture. Even if you made a veritable picture of it, you could give
only part of the truth so long as you confined yourself to black and
white. Where would be all the wild and terrible colors of the scene:
the red and tawny flame; the masses of smoke, carrying the dull glare
of the fire to the very skies, like a great signal banner thrown to
the winds; the hot and frightened faces of the crowd; the crimsoned
gables down the street, with the faint light of a lamp here and there
gleaming white from some hastily opened casement? Without the colors
your picture is not true. No inventory of items will even represent
the truth: the fuller and more minute you make your inventory, the
more will the truth be obscured. The little details will take up as
much space in the statement as the great totals into which they are
summed up; and, the proportions being false, the whole is false. Truth,
fortunately, takes its own revenge. No one is deceived. The reader
of the chronicle lays it aside. It lacks verisimilitude. He cannot
realize how any of the things spoken of can have happened. He goes
elsewhere to find, if he may, a real picture of the time, and perhaps
finds one that is wholly fictitious. No wonder the grave and monk-like
chronicler sighs. He of course wrote to be read, and not merely for the
manual exercise of it; and when he sees readers turn away his heart
misgives him for his fellow-men. Is it as it always was, that they do
not wish to know the truth? Alas! good eremite, men do not seek the
truth as they should; but do you know what the truth is? It is a thing
ideal, displayed by the just proportion of events, revealed in form and
color, dumb till facts be set in syllables, articulated into words,
put together into sentences, swung with proper tone and cadence. It is
not revolutions only that have color. Nothing in human life is without
it. In a monochrome you can depict nothing but a single incident; in a
monotone you cannot often carry truth beyond a single sentence. Only by
art in all its variety can you depict as it is the various face of life.
Yes; but what sort of art? There is here a wide field of choice. Shall
we go back to the art of which Macaulay was so great a master? We could
do worse. It must be a great art that can make men lay aside the novel
and take up the history, to find there, in very fact, the movement and
drama of life. What Macaulay does well he does incomparably. Who else
can mass the details as he does, and yet not mar or obscure, but only
heighten, the effect of the picture as a whole? Who else can bring
so amazing a profusion of knowledge within the strait limits of a
simple plan, nowhere encumbered, everywhere free and obvious in its
movement? How sure the strokes, and how bold and vivid the result! Yet
when we have laid the book aside, when the charm and the excitement
of the telling narrative have worn off, when we have lost step with
the swinging gait at which the style goes, when the details have faded
from our recollection, and we sit removed and thoughtful, with only the
greater outlines of the story sharp upon our minds, a deep misgiving
and dissatisfaction take possession of us. We are no longer young, and
we are chagrined that we should have been so pleased and taken with the
glitter and color and mere life of the picture. Let boys be cajoled by
rhetoric, we cry; men must look deeper. What of the judgment of this
facile and eloquent man? Can we agree with him, when he is not talking
and the charm is gone? What shall we say of his assessment of men and
measures? Is he just? Is he himself in possession of the whole truth?
Does he open the matter to us as it was? Does he not, rather, ride us
like an advocate, and make himself master of our judgments?
Then it is that we become aware that there were two Macaulays: Macaulay
the artist, with an exquisite gift for telling a story, filling his
pages with little vignettes it is impossible to forget, fixing these
with an inimitable art upon the surface of a narrative that did not
need the ornament they gave it, so strong and large and adequate was
it; and Macaulay the Whig, subtly turning narrative into argument, and
making history the vindication of a party. The mighty narrative is a
great engine of proof. It is not told for its own sake. It is evidence
summed up in order to justify a judgment. We detect the tone of the
advocate, and though if we are just we must deem him honest, we cannot
deem him safe. The great story-teller is discredited; and, willingly or
unwillingly, we reject the guide who takes it upon himself to determine
for us what we shall see. That, we feel sure, cannot be true which
makes of so complex a history so simple a thesis for the judgment.
There is art here; but it is the art of special pleading, misleading
even to the pleader.
If not Macaulay, what master shall we follow? Shall our historian not
have his convictions, and enforce them? Shall he not be our guide, and
speak, if he can, to our spirits as well as to our understandings?
Readers are a poor jury. They need enlightenment as well as
information; the matter must be interpreted to them as well as related.
There are moral facts as well as material, and the one sort must be as
plainly told as the other. Of what service is it that the historian
should have insight if we are not to know how the matter stands in his
view? If he refrain from judgment, he may deceive us as much as he
would were his judgment wrong; for we must have enlightenment,--that
is his function. We would not set him up merely to tell us tales, but
also to display to us characters, to open to us the moral and intent of
the matter. Were the men sincere? Was the policy righteous? We have but
just now seen that the “facts” lie deeper than the mere visible things
that took place, that they involve the moral and motive of the play.
Shall not these, too, be brought to light?
Unquestionably every sentence of true history must hold a judgment
in solution. All cannot be told. If it were possible to tell all, it
would take as long to write history as to enact it, and we should have
to postpone the reading of it to the leisure of the next world. A few
facts must be selected for the narrative, the great majority left
unnoted. But the selection--for what purpose it is to be made? For the
purpose of conveying _an impression_ of the truth. Where shall you
find a more radical process of judgment? The “essential” facts taken,
the “unessential” left out! Why, you may make the picture what you
will, and in any case it must be the express image of the historian’s
fundamental judgments. It is his purpose, or should be, to give a
true impression of his theme as a whole,--to show it, not lying upon
his page in an open and dispersed analysis, but set close in intimate
synthesis, every line, every stroke, every bulk even, omitted which
does not enter of very necessity into a single and unified image of the
truth.