IVEDMUND BURKE

Burke, we are told, was known as “the dinner-bell” because the House of Commons emptied when he rose to speak. This is usually put down to the uncouthness of his delivery. But, after all, there was nothing in his delivery to prevent his indictment of Warren Hastings from so affecting his hearers in places that, as Lord Morley writes, “every listener, including the great criminal, held his breath in an agony of horror,” and “women were carried out fainting.” I fancy Burke’s virtues rather than his vices were at the bottom of his failure in the House of Commons. He took the imagination of an artist into politics, and he soared high above the questions of the hour among eternal principles of human nature in which country gentlemen had only a very faint interest. Not that he was a theoretical speaker in the sense of being a doctrinaire. He had no belief in paper Utopias. His object in politics was not to construct an ideal society out of hishead but to construct an acceptable society out of human beings as their traditions, their environment, and their needs have moulded them. He never forgot that actual human beings are the material in which the politician must work. His constant and passionate sense of human nature is what puts his speeches far above any others that have been delivered in English. Even when he spoke or wrote on the wrong side, he was often right about human nature. Page after page of hisReflections on the French Revolutionis as right about human nature as it is wrong about its ostensible subject. One might say with truth that, whatever his ostensible subject may be, Burke’s real subject is always human nature.

If he was indignant against wrong in America or India or Ireland, it was not with the indignation of a sentimentalist so much as of a moralist outraged by the degradation of human nature. He loved disinterestedness and wisdom in public affairs, and he mourned over the absence of them as a Shakespeare might have mourned over the absence of noble characters about whom to write plays. In his greatSpeech at Bristolhe pilloried that narrow and selfish conception of freedom according to which freedom consists in the right to dominate over others. Burke demanded ofhuman nature not an impossible perfection but at least the first beginnings of magnanimity. Thus he loathed every form of mean domination, whether it revealed itself as religious persecution or political repression. He attacked both the anti-Catholic and the anti-American would-be despots in theSpeech at Bristol, and his comment may serve for almost any “anti” in any age:

It is but too true that the love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty is extremely rare. It is but too true that there are many whose whole scheme of freedom is made up of pride, perverseness and insolence. They feel themselves in a state of thraldom, they imagine that their souls are cooped and cabined in, unless they have some man, or some body of men, dependent on their mercy. This desire of having some one below them descends to those who are the very lowest of all; and a Protestant cobbler, debased by his poverty, but exalted by his share of the ruling Church, feels a pride in knowing it is by his generosity alone that the peer, whose footman’s instep he measures, is able to keep his chaplain from a jail. This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American War.Oursubjects in America,ourcolonies,ourdependants. This lust of party-power is the liberty they hunger and thirst for; and this syren song of ambition has charmed ears that one would have thought were never organised to that sort of music.

All through his life Burke set his face against what may be called the lusts of human nature.As a Member of Parliament he refused to curry favour with his constituents by gratifying their baser appetites. In the farewell speech from which I have quoted, he has left us an impassioned statement of his position:

No man carries farther than I do the policy of making government pleasing to the people. But the widest range of this politic complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that must be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in my nature. I would bear, I would even myself play part in, any innocent buffooneries to divert them. But I will never act the tyrant for their amusement. If they will mix malice in their sports, I shall never consent to throw them any living, sentient creature whatsoever—no, not so much as a kitling—to torment.

Burke spent the greater part of his life summoning men to the discipline of duty and away from anarchic graspings after rights. George III’s war against America, as well as the French Revolution is the assertion of a “right,” and Burke’s hatred of the war, as of the Revolution, arose from his belief that the assertion of “rights,” not for great public ends, but from ill-tempered obstinacy in clinging to a theory, was no likely means of increasing the happiness and libertiesof human beings. He once received a letter from a gentleman who declared that, even if the assertion of her right to tax America meant the ruin of England, he would nevertheless say “Let her perish!” All through the American War Burke saw that what prevented peace was this sort of doctrinaire theory of the rights of England. In 1775 the American Congress appointed a deputation to lay a petition before the House of Commons. The Cabinet refused to receive an “illegal” body. Penn brought over an “olive branch of peace” from Congress in the same year, and again, holding fast to their theory of the rights of Empire, ministers replied that Congress was an illegal body. Burke saw the vital thing to decide between England and America was not some metaphysical point in the disputed question of rights, but the means by which two groups of human beings could learn to live in peace and charity in the same world. I do not wish to suggest that he cared nothing for the rights or wrongs of the quarrel. He was the impassioned champion of right, in the noble sense of the word, beyond any other statesman of his time. On the other hand, he detested the assertion of a right for its own sake—the politics born of the theory that one has the right (whether one is a man or a nation) to do what one likeswith one’s own. Burke saw that this is the humour of children quarrelling in the nursery. “The question with me is,” he said, “not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.” He regarded peace as almost an end in itself, and he besought his fellow-countrymen not to stand upon their rights at the cost of making peace impossible. “Whether liberty be advantageous or not,” he told them during the war, “(for I know it is a fashion to decry the very principle), none will dispute that peace is a blessing; and peace must in the course of human affairs be frequently bought by some indulgence of liberty.” Thus we find him all through the war reminding his fellow-countrymen that the Americans were human beings—a fact of a kind that is always forgotten in time of war—and that the Anglo-American problem was chiefly a problem in human nature. “Nobody shall persuade me,” he declared, drawing on his knowledge of human nature, “when a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Again, when he was told that America was worth fighting for, his reply was: “Certainly it is, if fighting a people be the best way of gaining them.” Though opposed to the separation of America, he was in the end convincedthat, if the alternatives were separation and coercion, England was more likely to gain a separate America than a bludgeoned America as a friend. Addressing his former constituents, he said:

I parted with it as with a limb, but as a limb to save the body; and I would have parted with more if more had been necessary: anything rather than a fruitless, hopeless, unnatural civil war. This mode of yielding would, it is said, give way to independency without a war. I am persuaded from the nature of things, and from every information, that it would have had a directly contrary effect. But if it had this effect, I confess that I should prefer independency without war to independency with it; and I have so much trust in the inclinations and prejudices of mankind, and so little in anything else, that I should expect ten times more benefit to this kingdom from the affection of America, though under a separate establishment, than from her perfect submission to the Crown and Parliament, accompanied with her terror, disgust and abhorrence. Bodies tied together by so unnatural a bond of union as mutual hatred are only converted to their ruin.

There, again, you see the appeal to the “nature of things,” the use of the imagination instead of blind partisan passion. He himself might have called this distinguishing quality not imagination so much as a capacity to take long views. He looked on the taking of long views as itself aprimary virtue in politics. He praised Cromwell and other statesmen whom he regarded as great bad men because “they had long views, and sanctified their ambition by aiming at the orderly rule, and not the destruction of their country.” Who, reading to-day his speeches on America and India, can question that Burke himself possessed the genius of the long view, which is only another name for imagination in politics?

Mr. Murison’s admirable student’s edition of some of the writings of Burke gives us examples of Burke not only during the American but during the French period. He has called his book, indeed, not after theLetter to the Sheriffs of Bristolor theSpeech at Bristol, but after theLetter to a Noble Lord, in which Burke defends himself in the French period against the Duke of Bedford. Here, as during the American War, we find him protesting against the introduction of “metaphysical” disputes about rights into politics. During the American War he had said, in regard to the question of rights: “I do not enter into these metaphysical distinctions. I hate the very sound of them.” Now, during the Revolution, he declared: “Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailtyand passion of man.” Unfortunately, Burke himself was something of a “metaphysician” in his attack on the French Revolution. He wrote against France from prejudice and from theory, and his eye is continually distracted from the facts of human nature to a paper political orthodoxy. Even here, however, he did not forget human nature, and, in so far as the French Revolution was false to human nature—if the phrase is permissible—Burke has told the truth in lasting prose.

His greatness as an artist is shown by the fact that he can move us to silent admiration even when we disagree with him. There is plenty of dull matter in most of his writings, since much of them is necessarily occupied with the detail of dead controversies, but there is a tide of eloquence that continually returns into his sentences and carries us off our feet. We never get to love him as a man. We do not know him personally as we know Johnson. He is a voice, a figure, not one of ourselves. His eloquence is the eloquence of wisdom, seldom of personal intimacy. He is not a master of tears and laughter, but, like Milton, seems rather to represent a sort of impassioned dignity of human nature. But what an imagination he poured into the public affairs of his time—an imagination to which histime was all but indifferent until he used his eloquence in support of (in Lord Morley’s phrase) “the great army of the indolent good, the people who lead excellent lives and never use their reason.” Even then, however, the imagination survived, and, hackneyed though it is by quotation, one never grows weary of coming on that great passage in which he mourns over the fate of Marie Antoinette and the passing of the age of chivalry from Europe.

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in; glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendour, and joy. Oh, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguishedfor ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiments and heroic enterprise is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

As we read these sentences we cease to ask ourselves whether Burke was on the right or the wrong side in the French Revolution. We are content that a great artist has spoken from the depths of his soul. He has released the truth that is in him to the eternal enrichment of the human race.

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