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Title: Burke
Author: Young, George Malcolm (1882-1959)
Date of first publication: 1943
   [Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume XXIX]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Humphrey Milford, 1943
   [Annual Lecture on a Master Mind.
   Henriette Hertz Trust of the British Academy.]
Date first posted: 2 June 2011
Date last updated: 2 June 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #798

This ebook was produced by:
Barbara Watson, Carol Robbins, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                    B U R K E

                       By

                   G. M. YOUNG


          ANNUAL LECTURE ON A MASTER MIND
               HENRIETTE HERTZ TRUST
                      of the
                 BRITISH ACADEMY

                       1943



          FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE
          BRITISH ACADEMY. VOLUME XXIX
          LONDON:    HUMPHREY MILFORD
              AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4




  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
  BY JOHN JOHNSON, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY




        ANNUAL LECTURE ON A MASTER MIND
             HENRIETTE HERTZ TRUST

                     BURKE
                By G. M. YOUNG

            _Read_ 17 February 1943


When I received the honour of your invitation to speak on Burke, my
first feeling, as you will well believe, was one of doubt--doubt whether
indeed I had anything that should to say not be a tedious repetition of
things adequately said before, unless, avoiding that, I fell into the
ungainly and affected originality of a new interpretation. I put that by
way of preface and disclaimer, because I shall have to say one or two
things about Burke that I should not have said forty years ago; and the
difference does mark a change of method and attitude, of which I suppose
we are all aware, and which has undoubtedly been brought about by the
explorations of modern psychology. We should do wrong not to avail
ourselves of anything they may contribute to our understanding of past
times and famous men, while never forgetting Sir Walter Scott's
injunction to the doctors, to heal all their contemporaries before they
begin to practise on the illustrious dead. I say past times, because
it is undeniable that just as every age has its own characteristic
temperament, which we can read in its pictures and hear in its prose,
so it has its characteristic departures and outbreaks, typical lesions
and recognizable insanities. Enter that Eighteenth Century, that age
of prose and reason, of balance and system, landscape gardening, heroic
couplets and senatorial eloquence. Gracefully escorted over the
threshold by Addison, we find ourselves in such strange company as to
make us wonder how many inhabitants of this elegant establishment, so
rationally designed and furnished, are quite sane. There is no doubt of
Walpole or Pelham, of Chesterfield or Mansfield, of Hastings or the
younger Pitt, Coke of Norfolk or Cook of the South Pacific. But there is
something very strange and disconcerting at times in the atmosphere
which surrounds them. In no age would Blake or Johnson, Beckford or
Wesley, Clive or Chatham, rank as what the world agrees to call a normal
man. Yet whether we have in mind the art, the literature, the taste, the
religion, or the politics of the century, no names are more significant
than these. 'Sir,' said Boswell once, 'I am really uneasy about Burke.
They represent him as actually mad.' 'Sir,' said Johnson, 'if a man will
appear extravagant, as he does, can he wonder that he is represented as
mad?' Extravagant, that is the word, and Johnson has given us a good
choice of meanings, 'roving beyond just limits or prescribed methods,
outrageous vehemence, unnatural tumour'. What terms more apt for Burke
in the Regency Crisis, Burke of the Impeachment, Burke on the French
Revolution? But is there one of them which would not equally well fit
Chatham?

The Eighteenth Century, as we all know, never succeeded in fixing any
philosophic sense to the words Nature or Natural; and the whole of that
ferment which we call the Romantic or the Revolutionary Movement might
be said to spring from a desire to give them a new interpretation, so
as to legitimate, as it were, moods and feelings which the current
regulations had kept outside the pale. Into all that I need not, and
cannot, enter now. But the opposition of Natural and Revealed Religion,
say, if you like, of Faith and Reason, or best of all perhaps, Custom
and Philosophy, is in truth a fundamental issue of the century, and one,
I think, which throws a great deal of necessary light on the development
of Burke's mind. 'I call that Natural Religion', so wrote Bishop Wilkins
in the book which introduced the name and idea into English philosophy,
'which men might know, and be obliged unto, by the mere principles of
reason, improved by consideration and experience, without the help of
revelation.' To that well-drawn definition you have only to add: 'by the
principles of reason operating on observation, actual or historic', and
you have a complete view of Burke's political philosophy. There is, we
may say, a Natural Politic just as there is a Natural Religion. But this
Politic is not to be deduced from the principles of Reason immediately.
It must be built up, it must be sustained by an unremitting attention to
all those phenomena which in real life present themselves daily to our
notice, psychological phenomena, we may say, out of which we construct
our conception of man as a political animal. Here, Burke is in the line
of the great political thinkers of England: here, in what I once called
the academic realism of their outlook, their constant rise and fall
between the contemplation of social man as he might be, and the actual
doings and motives of men at the polling booth or in the counting house.
Of this art or discipline Burke is confessedly our great master and
our great exemplar, the finest of political observers, the most
comprehensive of political reasoners. True; and if this were all, we
might, I think, have placed him in a yet more illustrious line; and that
'almost divine man' as Gladstone called him, the greatest man since
Milton, Macaulay said, could also have taken rank as the greatest
political philosopher since Aristotle. What bars him from that seat? The
answer perhaps is that Aristotle was not, and Burke was, under the
necessity of justifying the Revolution Settlement of 1689: or to put it
another way, that Aristotle was not much interested in the counting
house and had never heard of a polling booth.

But let us follow a little further that analogy I have suggested between
Natural Religion and Natural Politics. They have or ought to have this
in common, that neither of them can appeal to a sacred book, to any
recorded and authentic revelation. But suppose that one or other of them
has embodied itself in an institution of great splendour and antiquity,
an institution served and governed by the noblest figures in the land,
and drawing wealth and power from the unaffected homage of the
multitude: its very antiquity ensuring that there will remain embedded
in its structure tokens of its own history, sacred in themselves, and
necessary--so we may persuade ourselves--to the stability of the
edifice, and the security of the worshippers.

Now it is a commonplace, and therefore not a thing to dwell upon, that
under some such figure as this, and in an attitude of corresponding
veneration, Burke regarded the Revolution Settlement, the Constitution
of the mid-Eighteenth Century, the Whig party and the ancient
aristocracy. Under the same figure he seems to have contemplated the old
rgime in France, and in India, the Empire of the Great Mogul--the
descendant of Tamerlane: 'as high as human veneration can look, amiable
in his manners, respectable for his piety, accomplished in all the
Oriental literature'--

    Could it be believed that when I entered into existence, or you
    Sir, a younger man, were born, that on this day, in this House,
    we should be employed in discussing the conduct of those British
    subjects who had disposed of the power and person of the Grand
    Mogul?

Was this pattern created in Burke's mind by the dominance in his
intellectual constitution of the historic interest? This also is a
commonplace, but one to which, with all submission to authority, I must
demur. I can see no evidence that Burke was more familiar, or more
concerned, with the history of France or India, or indeed of England,
than any other educated man of his day; less I should judge than
Bolingbroke, far less than Gladstone or Disraeli, though Disraeli was,
I grant you, inclined to make up his history as he went along. There
is, I know, printed among Burke's writings, a lengthy essay entitled
'An Abridgement of the English History', which is sometimes quoted to
show his knowledge of, and his reverence for, our Middle Ages. Of this
work I need only observe: first, that it is very dull; second, that
it is written in very bad English; third, that it is demonstrably a
translation from the French. When I remark that the author places
Lindisfarne in the mouth of the Tees and spells it Landisforn; that, in
consequence of the Danish invasion, he removes its celebrated monastery
to the adjacent part of the Continent; and proceeds to hold forth upon
King Alfred in form and manner following, that is to say,

    With great promises attending a little money he engaged in his
    service a number of Frisian seamen, neighbours to the Dane, and
    pirates as they were. He was himself present to everything and
    having performed the part of a King in drawing together supplies
    of everything, he descended with no less dignity into the
    artist: improving the construction: inventing new machines: and
    supplying by the greatness of his genius the defects and
    imperfections of the arts in that rude period,

you will perhaps share my doubt whether Burke had so much as a finger in
this production.

But if this lucubration is struck out of the canon of Burke's writings,
very little will be found to show that his interest in history went much
behind the Revolution Settlement or farther afield than the Kingdoms of
Great Britain and Ireland. It is, I think, plain that he had no clear
conception of the state of India following the collapse of the Mogul
monarchy; the materials for the historical introduction to the great
speeches on the India Bill and the Impeachment were, it is now known,
supplied by Philip Francis. Burke certainly had studied the history and
the condition of our American settlements, but either he never saw, or
else he closed his eyes to, the movement for independence which was in
strong growth long before the Stamp Act was passed; and where or when he
discovered that excellent constitution which France had once had and
ought to have proceeded upon, instead of engaging in an unnecessary and
superfluous revolution, contemporaries and later readers have asked and
asked in vain. No, it is not from any historic sensibility that Burke
drew his passion for the historic order, for prescription, for things as
they have come to be. That passion wells up from a deeper source, and
the vehemence with which he gives it utterance, a vehemence sometimes
verging on frenzy, is by itself a proof that prescription, order, and
stability were things necessary to his mind: change, and the fear of
change, started somewhere in the depths of his being a horror, a blind
horror, which set that mind rocking on its foundations.

There is I believe no better way of focusing our ideas of some famous
man than to consider what picture or description comes first into our
mind. With Burke it is for me those lines in the _Prelude_, in which
Wordsworth recalls his early visits to the House of Commons, where he
saw the great orator,

                          Old, but vigorous in age,
        Stand like an oak whose staghorn branches start
        Out of its leafy brow, the more to awe
        The younger brethren of the grove. . . .
        While he forewarns, denounces, launches forth
        Against all systems built on abstract rights
        Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
        Of institutes and laws hallowed by time,
        Declares the vital power of social ties
        Endeared by custom, and with high disdain,
        Exploding upstart theory, insists
        Upon the allegiance to which men are born.

To which men are born. But men are born in families, the first, the
most primitive and persistent of all societies: the seed plot of the
social virtues, and the radiating point of all social energies. Aristotle
would have agreed. His language glows with an unusual warmth when he
that one society which goes on and on for ever, and is by nature the
speaks of home: words to which Burke, I am sure, would gladly have
appealed and gladly made his own. There is one thing never to be
forgotten about Burke; the strength, the sweetness, and the exclusiveness
of his domestic relationships. What follows therefrom is perhaps a matter
for a professional psychologist: I can only speak of what I have myself
observed, and it is that the primitive sense of security and settlement
within the home, the equally primitive fear of insecurity and
unsettlement if for any reason the home is broken up, is one of the most
potent strains in the formation of human character. In no man was this
strain more imaginatively or more generously diffused than in Burke. And
this passion is the ground tone on which he lays, in hues of earthquake
and eclipse, his picture of the constitution of India before and after
the coming of the invaders; of France before and after the cataclysm of
1789; the outrage done to an ancient priesthood; the violation of
sacred and family ties. Macaulay said that Burke felt about the French
Revolution like a connoisseur whose shield had been scrubbed. Nearer the
truth, I think, it would be to say that he felt like a child whose home
has been desolated and whose playthings have been trodden on by wicked
strangers who do not understand. Can you recall that hour of hopeless
and helpless fury? Then suppose to yourself this passion and this fury,
this tenderness and this terror, animating, and sometimes dominating, an
intellect of astonishing power, intensely logical, geometrically exact,
and above all things masculine. Hazlitt, I think it was, once remarked
that no woman could read Burke. Maybe; but it was once said to me that
the chief difference between men and women is that they both begin as
babies, but the girls grow up and the boys never do. Nothing could be
more true. Never have I known a man of outstanding gifts or character
but had his lapses into babyhood, his days when he must be petted and
played with, his hours of irresponsible mischief and unbridled display,
and his moments black and crimson with the child's rage over justice
denied, a fancy slighted, or a friend traduced. And that is Burke.

He was born, you will remember, in 1729. But a man's birth-year is only
of importance because it directs us to look for what was happening in
the world when he was twenty, and at that age by 'what was happening' we
ordinarily mean what books were in the air. There were two from which a
young man, even if he had not read them, could not protect himself:
Hume's _Essays_, with that Essay on Miracles which was a thrust at
the heart of revealed religion, and Bolingbroke's _Patriot King_, a
challenge not to the Revolution Settlement so much as to the political
philosophy by which the Settlement was legitimated, and the political
practice by which it was applied. And Bolingbroke--a man of whom his
contemporaries all seem to have been a little afraid and later
historians all a little ashamed--is none the less a man to be reckoned
with. It is plain, I think, that for a while he fascinated Burke:
the _Vindication of Natural Society_ is Burke's effort to break the
enchantment by stealing the spell of the enchanter. Regarded as a parody
or pastiche, it is as remarkable a feat of stylistic ingenuity as any in
the language, and it might amuse some minute philosopher of literature
to compare the _Vindication_ and its Preface, phrase by phrase and
cadence by cadence, and observe Burke trying to recover his native
speech after a prolonged mimicry of Bolingbroke. But the charm lay not
in words only. Remember we are in 1749: seven years after the fall of
Sir Robert Walpole. The Pelhams are in power, and, as far as human eyes
can see, in power they always will be. Is there not something to be said
for the Patriot King who would break the chains laid on his family by
the triumphant Whigs, exalt the Land, keep the City in its place, and,
reigning like Elizabeth, say to the world once more, We and Our People?

    Concord will appear, brooding peace and prosperity on the happy
    land: joy sitting in every face, content in every heart: a
    people unoppressed, undisturbed, unalarmed: busy to improve
    their private prosperity and the public stock: fleets covering
    the ocean, bringing home wealth by the return of industry,
    carrying assistance or terror abroad by the direction of wisdom,
    and asserting triumphantly the right and the honour of Great
    Britain as far as waters roll and as winds can waft them.

You may have anticipated the objection that Frederick Prince of
Wales was not in the least like Elizabeth. But since we are in
fairyland--Burke says so in his preface--let us make one flight more.
Imagine that the same queer fortune which took Swift to Moor Park and
the library of Sir William Temple, had brought this other Irishman to
Battersea, there to learn the craft and mystery of politics from the
most eloquent, the most experienced, and when all is said and done, not
the worst of English statesmen, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke.

Instead, after some mysterious and not happy years in London, fate, in
the person of William Burke, introduced him to Rockingham and the Whig
Party. Of William Burke the best that can be averred is that he was a
man with a very powerful financial imagination, while of Edmund Burke it
is not enough to say that all his geese were swans: the dirtiest little
house-sparrow that bore the name of Burke was a very bird of Paradise:
and William in particular rose in Edmund's eyes as far above the common
level of humanity as Warren Hastings fell below it. But what, I think,
is of most concern to us to remember is that the cousinhood on the one
side, the common purse, the common table at Beaconsfield; and on the
other, the close and loyal group that surrounded Rockingham, gave Burke
that home, and that security within the home, which was necessary to the
balance of his reason. No one I suppose has ever thought of Burke or
read in Burke for long, without recalling Goldsmith's line,

        To party gave up what was meant for mankind.

But the limitations of great minds--and of small minds too,
perhaps--are in truth the frame within which they must work if they are
to work at all. If Burke had not given himself up to party, he might be
known to the curious as the author of an essay on aesthetics which had
some influence in Germany, and to be remembered so is, in effect, to be
forgotten.

The world, moreover, on which Burke opened, so to speak, his political
eyes was one in which the old stability of our parliamentary
constitution was certainly threatened, perhaps endangered. I say
perhaps, because I find it very difficult in my own mind to determine
what real prospect there was in 1760 of Personal Government being
effectively established in England. The latter part of the century was,
let us not forget, an age of enlightened despotism, the age of Joseph
II, of Charles III in Spain and Gustavus III in Sweden; and on that name
I should like for a moment to dwell. George III and Gustavus were near
of an age, and came early to the throne: and when I consider certain
elements in the character of the Briton, his untiring industry, his
unscrupulous resolution, the prompt courage which never failed him; the
plain dignity and simple piety with which he won and kept the hearts of
plain and simple people for sixty years, I do not think it altogether
impossible that, with favouring circumstances, George might have carried
through such a revolution as Gustavus effected in Sweden when he broke
the power of the nobility, Hats and Caps alike, and, with the faithful
peasantry of Dalecarlia at his back, imposed on the States his Act of
Union and Security. The ground had been well surveyed: the lines had
been clearly drawn,

    To espouse no party, but to govern like the common father of his
    people, is so essential to the character of a Patriot King, that
    he who does otherwise forfeits the title.

Forget that this is Bolingbroke speaking to Frederick and the circle of
Leicester House. Forget Bute and the King's Friends. Think of the
proposition: Party is a political evil: and its corollary: Measures not
Men: as a theorem of political science. How do you propose to refute the
proposition? How will you answer the cry?

    The cant of not men but measures is a sort of charm by which
    many people get loose from every honourable engagement.

Fine, and scornful, eloquence. But is it an answer?

Consider Burke's own political career, not forgetting one thing to which
I think sufficient importance has never been attached. He was not only
an outsider, he was an elderly outsider. He entered Parliament at 37,
an age at which in his century a man was certainly not young, not young
enough to pick up the tone of his surroundings easily--Burke was never a
good Parliamentarian--and yet not old enough to figure as the elder
statesman, the experienced sage. In fighting for the Rockingham group,
therefore, Burke was in the most literal sense of the word fighting _pro
domo sua_, fighting to keep a place and standing for himself: a party
man as we commonly use the term, though a party man of no common
calibre. It was the good party man who, when Rockingham died, refused to
follow Shelburne, and who did follow Fox into the coalition with North.
And this was the Burke whose principles made Johnson uneasy. 'I was
present,' he said, 'when he maintained that a member of Parliament
should go along with his party right or wrong. Now, Sir, this is so
remote from native virtue, scholastick virtue, that a good man must have
undergone a great change before he can reconcile himself to such a
doctrine. It is maintaining that you may lie to the public, for you lie
when you call that right which you think wrong.' Again, what is your
answer?

The reason why Burke has been canonized by both parties in the State is
that, rightly or not, he is supposed to have found the answer, to have
justified party, not as a convenience, even though an indispensable
convenience, of political practice, but as a necessary mode of political
thought, and because necessary, therefore right. Here we reach the
foundation of Burke's political belief, his doctrine of the higher
expediency, in which the Divine will reveals itself to political man.

    Political problems do not primarily concern truth or falsehood.
    They relate to good or evil. What in the result is likely to
    produce evil is politically false: that what is productive of
    good, politically true.

No wonder that native virtue, scholastic virtue, grew uneasy when it
heard Burke talking like this. And the argument, considered as an
argument, is travelling in manifest circle. What gives it weight is the
not less manifest conviction behind it. Why is it then that starting
from the same point and pursuing for some way the same path, Burke and
Bolingbroke suddenly divide?

    Faction [wrote Bolingbroke] is to party what the superlative is
    to the positive: party is a political evil and faction is the
    worst of all parties,

and Burke answers

    Party divisions, whether on the whole operating for good or
    evil, are things inseparable from free government.

But this was in 1769, when Burke was a Rockingham Whig and a figure in
the House. For the point of departure we must go farther back.

In the _Annual Register_ for 1763, Burke--there can I think be no
question of the authorship--sets out, with admirable judgement and
restraint, the contending views of the day as to the relations between
the King and the Administration. No Whig would have denied the full
right of the Crown to appoint its own servants. No Tory would have
denied that

    Great talents, great and eminent services to the country,
    confidence among the nobility and influence among the landed and
    mercantile interests, were the directions which the crown ought
    to observe in exercising

that right. But it is impossible to carry the Whig hypothesis into
practice without inviting the question which Burke asks--and does not
answer--

    Are these ideas consistent with any degree of monarchical
    authority in the Commonwealth?

What Burke is arguing for here is not so much Party as, to use a
favourite word of the time, for a Parliamentary Connexion (which Tories
would call a Cabal) against a Palace Connexion (which Whigs would call a
Faction), as the basis of administration. And if, as Tories again might
say--it was indeed the groundwork of the Tory creed--that Cabal was
incompatible with the authority of the King, it was certainly open to
Whigs to rejoin that Faction was incompatible with the existence of
Parliament. And, if there were two men whom Burke thoroughly detested,
one was Chatham and the other was George III, George, the great master
of faction, and Chatham, who had broken the Parliamentary connexion of
the Whigs.

Nothing is so dead as dead politics. Can we give these ghosts their
draught of blood, compel them to speak to us, and so ground Burke's
conviction on something larger, more general, and more permanent, than
the state of England in 1762, '65, or '69? I think we can, if we
reflect that when the counties and boroughs rose in 1784 and ground
the Coalition into the dust, they did something more than place the
younger Pitt in office. They transferred 'the real permanent monarchical
power' from the King to the Cabinet, and so fixed the seat of that
sovereignty which had hitherto floated vaguely between the two. Indeed,
I have sometimes thought that the reason why American notions of our
constitution in general, and of the monarchy in particular, strike us so
often as antediluvian is, that they are antediluvian, derived from the
lost landscape and submerged configuration of the world before that
flood. There cannot, in a well-ordered state, be two centres of ultimate
authority, and where was the centre to be fixed? That was the problem;
it is one which must constantly recur in a moving and developing state,
because in such a state there will always be acknowledged powers which
time is antiquating, and latent powers which time is calling into
action. It was so in England between King and Cabinet (some day it
might be between Cabinet and Parliament); it was so in India between
Company and Crown: and the inter-reflections between these two, the
unending criss-cross of relationships between Calcutta and Westminster,
Leadenhall Street and Downing Street, the Directors and the Whips,
involved the politics of England in a further complication which is
to-day almost indecipherable. That also is part of the lost landscape.
From our distance, seeing only the broad lines of the issue, we may
regard as inevitable the solution imposed by Pitt, whose victory
stabilized the constitution of England for nearly fifty years, and the
government of India for seventy, under the rule of the great patrician
Viceroys from Cornwallis to Canning. But was it inevitable? In history,
as we cannot make experiments, cannot replace the pieces on the board
and play them another way, the might-have-been, I have always thought,
is a perfectly legitimate instrument of speculation. And I have
often wondered what might have been, if George III had assumed his
constitutional right to preside in his own Cabinet. The tradition which
excluded him was not so old that it might not have been reversed; in
practical intelligence he was quite up to the Cabinet average; and
constitutional respect for the Crown, allowing free scope to his
excellent talents for business, would, I think, have given him a real
ascendancy in Council. Let us imagine that to one such council
Rockingham had been summoned, Rockingham briefed by Burke, Rockingham
with humble duty laying at the foot of the throne a minute drawn by
Burke, Burke admitted to the very sanctuary of power, and his own place
fixed and acknowledged in the august hierarchy of the British State.
Might we not have seen the Patriot King on the throne? If we had not
seen him, we should certainly have heard a great deal about him.

Fixed and acknowledged--that was Burke's trouble. Outside those two
circles, the Burkes and the Rockinghams, he had no place of his own; he
was a new-comer, an adventurer, a mystery. I forget if he ever cites
Quintus Cicero's warning to his brother, but he knew his Cicero so well
that it must often have been in his ears, 'Consulatum petis: Roma est:
novus homo es.' An adventurer, and a mystery: he was a Jacobite, he was
a Jesuit: fouler things than that were muttered of the Weird Sibyl of
Beaconsfield. It is therefore nothing to be wondered at if he made haste
to establish himself in the only way a man could establish himself--by
office, by wealth, by an estate, a connexion of his own, a family.
Burke, nearing forty, had no time to lose. The Parliament which he
entered in January 1767 was dominated by the brilliant irresponsibility
of Charles Townshend; and Townshend, at least Burke's match in debate,
had been in office of one kind or another since he was twenty-nine. Such
calculations do force themselves into the mind of an aspiring man: and
in the summer of that year, when the Duke of Grafton resigned, Burke for
some hours or days nursed the fancy of succeeding him as Secretary of
State, not as he afterwards explained with any intention of retaining
the office but--shall we say--to show himself that he was the sort of
man who might be Secretary of State. Of one thing only do I feel
certain: that he would have held it long enough to bestow a handsome
official appointment on everybody who bore the name of Burke.

Because the cousinhood was as absorbent as it was adhesive and
unsavoury. 'Burke', said Mrs. Thrale, 'was the first man I ever saw
drunk, and the first man I ever heard talk obscenity'. This lightning
draft was elaborated in verse to match Goldsmith's _Retaliation_,

        See Burke's bright intelligence beams from his face,
        To his language gives splendour, his action gives grace:
        Let us list to the learning that tongue can display,
        Let it steal all reflection, all reason, away;
        Lest home to his house we the patriot pursue,
        Where scenes of another sort rise to the view:
        Where Avarice usurps sage Economy's look,
        And Humour cracks jokes out of Ribaldry's book:
        Till no longer in silence suspicion can lurk
        That from chaos and cobwebs could spring even Burke.

If anyone cares to undertake the task, more congenial perhaps to our
age than the last, of exploring chaos in search of cobwebs, the
investigations of Wentworth Dilke 100 years ago, and more recently, of
Mr. Dixon Wecter, have already furnished him with abundant provision for
the journey, and much more I have no doubt is to be found on the way.
Fifteen years ago Mr. Namier showed us, or reminded us, how little we
really knew of the minute anatomy of political England in the days when
the Burkes were speculating in East India Stock. What is still lacking
is an equally exact analysis of that unknown world east of Temple Bar.
As we go from Westminster to the City, the air grows thicker and
murkier. What are the names we faintly read above the counting houses,
and what dark gigantic transactions are conducted within them? They are
the names of the rulers of India: the Dewans of Bengal, Orissa, and
Behar: Mr. Sulivan, Mr. Sykes, Mr. De Vaynes, Mr. Reitlinger, Sir George
Wombwell. But they are names only, unless the bearers wriggle an hour or
so on the table of a Parliamentary Committee, and then withdraw,
ruffled, but not, except in reputation, damaged, to the suburban
magnificence of Charlton or Mitcham, Westcombe of the Angersteins,
Bexley of the Vansittarts. An aged matron, as Burke might have called
her, whom I knew, to the end of her life spoke of Blackheath Park as
Gregory Page's, though the palace, rivalling Walpole's Houghton, which
sheltered and displayed the wealth of that great Indian dynasty, had
been pulled down in the year when Warren Hastings was brought to the
bar of the Lords. There is much to be unravelled there. And in the
unravelling we may discover the secret of Burke's maniacal hatred of the
Governor-General. Miss Weitzmann's researches have indeed, I think,
established her conclusion that of the Impeachment Francis was at once
the instigator, the author, the prompter, and the producer. 'Burke, Fox,
Dundas, Sheridan, all the host arrayed against Hastings were actors in a
stupendous drama conceived by the tortured brain of Philip Francis.' But
how, and by what agencies, what allurements, what seductions, Francis
was able to infuse his venom into the mind of Burke, remains, to me at
least, a mystery.

But, as Hobbes had said, to stumble from overhaste is shame: like the
day-dream of office, those speculations in East India Stock went wrong;
from the age of forty onwards Burke was a tormented, impoverished, and
suspected man, and, in that strange verbose apologia which he wrote in
1771, it is impossible, I think, not to hear at times the accent of a
mind unbalanced. Yet from its explanations and avowals we can construct
a picture not out of keeping with the Burke whom we might divine if
we had nothing but the reports of his enemies to instruct us. His
intolerance of censure: his arrogance: his extravagant ambition: his
insolence towards the great, including the greatest of all: his verging
on courses both desperate and dangerous: his unhappy facetiousness: his
loss of temper. Whoever the faithful friend may have been--Bishop
Markham or another--who provoked this anger, he had very fairly drawn
the portrait of Burke in his furies, Burke in his exaltation, Burke on
the Regency, Burke on Hastings. But it is observable that this strain,
though undoubtedly present from the beginning, only becomes dominant
after Rockingham was gone. While Rockingham was there, Burke had
his place, his footing. He was the brain of a party, the framer of
policies, the orator of a great cause. All that in Burke is truly and
unquestionably great came to birth, I think, in those years which begin
with _The Present Discontents_ of 1770 and close with the death of
Rockingham twelve years later. But not even Rockingham could make him
fit for Cabinet office, and, when Rockingham died, Burke was more than
ever the outsider. He would not serve under Shelburne. So he had to
serve under Fox and North: he had to share in their discredit and their
defeat: to see himself displaced in party standing by Sheridan: to be
received with open mockery in a House where he had always been heard, if
not with patience, at least with respect.

What then _is_ this Burke, Burke of that splendid early afternoon, Burke
on America, on Ireland, on Economic Reform, whose maxims are proverbs,
whose speeches and writings did go far to furnish politics with a sacred
book and an authentic revelation? Suppose we take what by the consent of
the world is acknowledged to be the finest and fullest exposition of his
political beliefs, the speech of 1775 on Conciliation with America, and
see what it all amounts to. 'Things there are in a bad way. I have been
challenged to say what I think should be done. I accept the challenge.
I propose to remove the ground of difference between the Mother Country
and the Colonies. But first we must consider the true nature and
peculiar circumstances of the object before us.' So much by way of
preface: and what follows, one may say, is an attempt to make the right
conclusion emerge by an exact and exhaustive analysis of the situation.
In form, the speech is marred towards the end by the introduction of
matter necessary to the debate though surplus to the argument. But if
the three or four pages in which Burke disposes of Lord North's latest
device for taxation without tears be left out, what strikes a reader
first is the scientific urgency and comprehensiveness of the argument,
the superb fertility of imagination with which it is illustrated and
enforced, and the magisterial asseveration with which the links are
closed in phrases which are part of our political heritage. Here,
indeed, in Macaulay's phrase, is reason made white-hot with passion.
But all the same I feel a formidable doubt whether if I had been
listening I should have been convinced. The House was not convinced.
And why? Because, as Thurlow said, 'Fox speaks to the House of Commons,
Burke speaks to himself'. There was one aspect of the situation which
Burke leaves entirely out of view, and that aspect was the House of
Commons itself. There is only one way to appreciate the oratory of the
eighteenth century, and that is to imagine yourself on the back benches.
And, really, Burke, in the impenetrable egoism of his impracticable
wisdom, has so constructed his speech that, by the end, no small number
of country gentlemen must have felt that they had never realized before
how much they hated the Americans, or how right they were to hate them.
Think of that famous picture of the American character. What does it
prove? That the Americans are by nature democrats, lawyers, and
dissenters, the three things that country gentlemen most detest, and
if by chance some of them, in Virginia and Carolina, are gentlemen
and members of the Church of England, they make up for it by being
slave-owners as well. And finally, if there was one thing Burke ought
not to have said--which no man of any Parliamentary intelligence would
have said--it was this,

    For some time past the Old World has been fed from the New. The
    scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine
    if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a
    Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful
    exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.

The dullest baronet sent by the Cider Counties to Westminster had wit
enough to wrinkle an anxious brow at that forecast: to see what that
youthful exuberance might mean to his rent roll, and to the profits,
perhaps, of those Bristol shippers who two months before had shown such
singular zeal to have Mr. Burke as their member--Mr. Burke, who, after
all, was making a very comfortable income as agent for the Colony of New
York.

Pass to another theme. Let us imagine that Burke had been challenged to
apply his analysis to a topic nearer home, to the composition of that
House of Commons in which Cornwall had forty-four members and Manchester
none. How would he have responded? We know the answer because we have
his speech and to call it sophistry would be to insult a sufficiently
maligned race of men. In the first five minutes he lays down his
proposition,

    Neither _now_ nor at _any_ time is it prudent or safe to be
    meddling with the ancient tried usage of our constitution. Our
    representation is as nearly perfect as the necessary
    imperfection of human affairs and of human creatures will suffer
    it to be; it is a subject of prudent and honest use and thankful
    enjoyment, and not of captious criticism and rash experiment.

This, remember, was seven years before the French Revolution. But is
there no such thing as honest criticism and prudent experiment? And if
anything could show how lacking Burke was in any real historic sense,
how unhistoric his famous doctrine of prescription is, it would be one
sentence where he is arguing that the House of Commons having by
prescription come to be what it was, could therefore by prescription
never be anything else.

    To ask whether a thing which has always been the same stands to
    its original principle seems to me to be perfectly absurd, for
    how do you know the principles but from the construction, and if
    that remains the same the principles remain the same.

Half the arguments in support of the Reform Bill in 1831 were in
substance a reply to that one sentence of Burke: half the arguments
against it the expansion of another.

    I do not vilify theory and speculation: no, because that would
    be to vilify reason itself. _Neque decipitur ratio, nec decipit
    unquam._ No: whenever I speak against theory, I mean always a
    weak, erroneous, fallacious, unfounded or imperfect theory; and
    one of the ways of discovering that it is a false theory is by
    comparing it with practice. This is the true touchstone of all
    theories which regard man and the affairs of man--does it suit
    his nature in general--does it suit his nature as modified by
    his habits?

In short, does it work? But are we never to ask whether by prudent
experiment it might not be made to work even better? The truth is that
the discord between Burke on Conciliation and Burke on Parliamentary
Reform is not to be resolved on any rational plane. But though there is
a discord, there is at bottom no emotional inconsistency. In one he is
struggling to preserve an ancient fabric from disunion and collapse, and
in the other to save a fabric so familiar, up to its last finial and
crocket so dear, that the thought of change and innovation came over him
like a desolating wind, and one, we know, which was the forerunner of a
tempest. Like his Americans, Burke had snuffed the tainted gale: he had
felt the hot breath of Rousseau. I have often thought that if there was
one man in Europe who really understood the Genevan, it was the
Irishman, and the understanding reveals itself as much in their
conflicts and recoils as in their approximations and intersections.
'The wild beast of the desert shall also meet with the wild beast of the
island: and the satyr shall cry to his fellow.'

Prescription and party, prescription to ground the stability of the
state, party to ensure its freedom: about these two ideas, magnified
and glorified till they had come in Burke's imagination to have the
sacredness of nature, his mind continued to revolve as it were in a
closed ellipse. And where, a man of sixty, had they brought him? In
political practice to a furious and desperate championship of Fox and
the Prince of Wales against Pitt and the Constitution. In political
thinking? Thirty years after his death, one night a member in a debate
on the Silk Trade, called Huskisson, of all men, a philosopher. Canning
came to his colleague's support in a speech which must have made the
unhappy man wish himself back in his native wolds.

    Why is it to be supposed that the application of philosophy--for
    I will use that odious word--to the affairs of common life,
    indicates obduracy of feeling or obtuseness of sensibility? We
    must deal with the affairs of men on abstract principles,
    modified of course according to times and circumstances. Is not
    the doctrine and the spirit which now animates those who
    persecute my Right Honourable Friend the same which in former
    times stirred up persecutors against the best benefaction of
    mankind? It embittered the life of Turgot. It consigned Galileo
    to the dungeon. It is a doctrine and a spirit which at all times
    have been at work to stay public advancement and to roll back
    the tide of civilization.

Canning was not only answering Mr. Williams of Lincoln. He was replying
to the spirit of Burke, to that blind and infantile conservatism which
Burke for nearly two generations imposed on the mind of the party that
governed England--and broke Napoleon.

Could we have anticipated it? Could we have deduced Burke on the French
Revolution from Burke on Ireland, on the Catholics, on the Dissenters,
on the wrongs of Benares and the Rohillas? I think we could, if we had
rightly plotted the curve of his development. The Revolution--or say
plainly Rousseau--was a challenge not to prescription only, but to
the whole body of experience, consideration, and observation on
which Burke's natural Politic was built. To this new philosophy, his
limitations were meaningless, his co-ordinates were irrelevant: and man,
as Burke saw him, conditioned by the Revolution Settlement and the
processes of Party Government, the 400,000 whom he considered to be by
leisure and instruction worth calling the people, were no more than a
figment of aristocratic self-interest. The intensity and exclusiveness
of his affections had generated, had, shall we say, rationalized
themselves in, an equal intensity and exclusiveness of the intelligence.
And now, Chaos was advancing, Chaos and a host of monstrous forms,

        Orcus and Ades and the dreaded name
        Of Demogorgon: Rumour next and Chance
        And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled:

things unintelligible, inexplicable, except as embodiments of primeval
disorder, and wickedness unchained. It has, I think, been more than once
observed that Burke's imagination most naturally runs into Miltonic
imagery: less often, perhaps, that there was another poet, then alive
and going about the streets of London, with a red cap of liberty above
an aureole of flaming hair, who saw exactly what Burke saw, who exactly
understood his wrath and his terror, and who knew precisely the bounds
of his experience and therefore the limitations of his thought.

        The bars of Chaos are burst: her millions
          prepare their fiery way
        Through the orbed abode of the holy dead,
          to root up and pull down and remove:
        And Nobles and Clergy shall fail from before me,
          and my cloud and vision be no more:
        The mitre become black, the crown vanish,
          and the sceptre and ivory staff.

It is the voice of Orleans. But it might be the voice of Burke. And
another answers:

        Go, merciless man, enter the infinite labyrinth
          of another's brain
        Ere thou measure the circle that he shall run. Go
          into the fires
        Of another's high flaming rich bosom, and return
          unconsumed and write laws.
        If thou canst not do this, doubt thy theories.

A conservatism infantile and blind? Let us say, rather, of a contracted
horizon, with limits drawn more by the affections than by the reason:
not childish perhaps so much as child-like, with the ultimate invincible
confidence of childhood behind the terror; because, if the men who went
on year by year fighting the Revolution and fighting Napoleon, year by
year of disaster, of broken treaties, false friends and insatiable
allies, if those men were children, at least they were the children of
the gods.




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

Minor variations in spelling and punctuation in this text have been
preserved. In the text version, italicized expressions are indicated
by _underscores_.

The following change was made to the original text:

Page 20: "Where Avarice usurps sage Economy's book,"
     ==> "Where Avarice usurps sage Economy's look,".




[End of Burke, by G. M. Young]
