by Will Durant
One of George’s faults was a suspicious jealousy of ability and independence. He could never forgive William Pitt I for conscious pre-eminence in political vision and understanding, penetration of judgment, force and eloquence of speech. We have seen elsewhere18 the career of this extraordinary man from his entry into Parliament (1735) to his triumph in the Seven Years’ War. He could be arrogant and obstinate—far more so than George III; he felt himself to be the proper custodian of the empire that had been created under his leadership, and when the king in name met the king in deed there followed a duel for the throne. Pitt was personally honest, untouched by the bribery that flourished around him, but he thought of politics purely in terms of national power, and allowed no sentiment of humanity to divert his resolve to make England supreme. He was called “the Great Commoner” because he was the greatest man in the House of Commons, not because he thought of improving the lot of the commonalty; however, he rose to defend Americans and the people of India against oppression by Englishmen. Like the King he resented criticism, and was “unapt to forget or to forgive.”19 He would not serve the King unless he could rule him; he resigned from the ministry (1761) when George III insisted on violating England’s compact with Frederick and making a separate peace with France. If in the end he was defeated it was by no other foe than gout.
Pitt’s influence on English politics was matched by Edmund Burke’s influence on English thought. Pitt disappeared from the scene in 1778; Burke appeared on it in 1761, and held the attention of educated England, intermittently, till 1794. The fact that he was born in Dublin (1729), the son of an attorney, may have handicapped him in his struggle for political office and power; he was not an Englishman except by adoption, and not a member of any aristocracy except that of the mind. The fact that his mother and sister were Catholics must have entered into his lifelong sympathy for the Catholics of Ireland and England, and his persistent emphasis upon religion as an indispensable bulwark of morality and the state. He received his formal education at a Quaker school in Ballitore, and at Trinity College, Dublin. He learned enough Latin to admire Cicero’s orations and to make them the foundation of his own forensic style.
In 1750 he passed to England to study law at the Middle Temple. Later he praised law as “a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together,” but he thought it “not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion.”20 About 1775 his father withdrew Edmund’s allowance on the ground that he was neglecting his legal studies for other pursuits. Apparently Edmund had developed a taste for literature, and was frequenting the theaters and the debating clubs of London. A legend arose that he fell in love with the famous actress Peg Woffington. He wrote to a friend in 1757: “I have broken all rules; I have neglected all decorum”; and he described his “manner of life” as “chequered with various designs; sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country, sometimes in France, and shortly, please God, to be in America.” Otherwise we know nothing about Burke in those experimental years, except that in 1756, in uncertain sequence, he published two remarkable books, and married.
One book was entitled A Vindication of Natural Society, or a View of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind from Every Species of Artificial Society. A Letter to Lord——. By a late Noble Writer. The essay, some forty-five pages long, is on its face a vigorous condemnation of all government, far more anarchistic than Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, which had appeared only a year before. Burke defined “natural society” as “society founded in natural appetites and instincts, and not in any positive institution.”21 “The development of laws was a degeneration.”22 History is a record of butchery, treachery, and war;23 and “political society is justly charged with much the greater part of this destruction.”24 All governments follow the Machiavellian principles, reject all moral restraints, and give the citizens a demoralizing example of greed, deceit, robbery, and homicide.25 Democracy in Athens and Rome brought no cure for the evils of government, for it soon became dictatorship through the ability of demagogues to win admiration from gullible majorities. Law is injustice codified; it protects the idle rich against the exploited poor,26 and adds a new evil—lawyers.27 “Political society has made the many the property of the few.”28 Look at the condition of the miners of England, and consider whether such misery could have existed in a natural society—i.e., before the making of laws.—Should we nevertheless accept the state, like the religion that upholds it, as being made necessary by the nature of man? Not at all.
If we are resolved to submit our reason and our liberty to civil usurpation, we have nothing to do but to conform as quietly as we can to the vulgar [popular] notions which are connected with this, and take up the theology of the vulgar as well as their politics. But if we think this necessity rather imaginary than real, we shall renounce their dreams of society together with their visions of religion, and vindicate ourselves into perfect liberty.29
This has the bold ring and angry sincerity of a young radical, a youth religious in spirit but rejecting the established theology, and sensitive to the poverty and degradation that he had seen in England; a talent conscious of itself but as yet without place and standing in the stream of the world. Every alert youngster passes through this stage on his way to position, possessions, and such frightened conservatism as we shall find in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. We note that the author of the Vindication covered his tracks with anonymity, even to playing dead. Nearly all readers, including William Warburton and the Earl of Chesterfield, understood the tract as a genuine attack upon current evils,30 and many ascribed it to Viscount Bolingbroke, who, having died in 1751, was “a late Noble Writer.” Nine years after publishing the essay Burke ran for election to Parliament. Fearing that his youthful ebullition would be held against him, he reprinted it in 1765 with a preface that said in part: “The design of the following little piece was to show that … the same [literary] engines which were employed for the destruction of religion might be employed with equal success for the subversion of government.”31 Most biographers of Burke have accepted this explanation as sincere; we cannot join them, but we can understand the effort of a political candidate to protect himself against popular prejudice. Which of us would have a future if his past were known?
Just as eloquent as the Vindication, and much subtler, was Burke’s other publication in 1756: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful; to which in a second edition he added A Discourse on Taste. We must admire the courage of the twenty-seven-year-old youth who pursued these elusive subjects a full decade before Lessing’s Laokoon. He may have taken a lead from the opening of Book II of Lucretius’ De rerum natura: “Pleasant it is, when the winds are troubling the waters in a mighty sea, to witness from the land another’s great toil; not because it is a delight to behold anyone’s tribulation, but because it is sweet to see from what evils you yourself are free.” So Burke wrote: “The passions which belong to self-preservation turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger without being actually in such circumstances. … Whatever excites this delight I call sublime.” Secondarily, “all works of great labor, expense, and magnificence are sublime, … and all buildings of very great richness and splendor, … for in contemplating them the mind applies the ideas of the greatness of exertion necessary to produce such works, to the works themselves.”32 Gloom, darkness, mystery help to arouse a sense of sublimity; hence the care of medieval builders to let only dim and filtered light enter their cathedrals. Romantic fiction, as in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) or Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), profited from these ideas.
“Beauty,” said Burke, “is a name I shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce in us a sense of affection and tenderness, or some
other passion the most nearly resembling these.”33 He rejected the classical reduction of these qualities to harmony, unity, proportion, and symmetry; we all agree that the swan is beautiful, though its long neck and short tail are quite disproportionate to its body. Usually the beautiful is small (and thereby contrasts with the sublime). “I do not now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth”;34 a broken or rugged surface, a sharp angle or sudden projection, will disturb us and limit our pleasure even in objects otherwise beautiful. “An air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to beauty. An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to it.”35 Color adds to beauty, especially if it is varied and bright, but not glaring or strong.—Strange to say, Burke did not ask whether a woman is beautiful because she is small, smooth, delicate, and colorful, or whether these qualities seem beautiful because they remind us of woman, who is beautiful because she is desired.
In any case June Nugent was desirable, and Burke married her in this fecund year 1756. She was the daughter of an Irish physician; she was a Catholic, but she soon conformed to the Anglican worship. Her mild and gentle disposition soothed her husband’s irascible temperament.
The impression made by the style, if not the arguments, of the Vindication and the Enquiry opened doors to Burke. The Marquis of Rockingham engaged him as secretary, despite the Duke of Newcastle’s warning that Burke was a wild Irishman, a Jacobite, a secret papist and Jesuit.36 Late in 1765 Burke was elected to Parliament from the borough of Wendover through the influence of Lord Verney, “who owned it.”37 In the House of Commons the new member acquired the reputation of an eloquent, yet not persuasive, orator. His voice was harsh, his accent Hibernian, his gestures awkward, his jests occasionally coarse, his denunciations unduly passionate. Only in reading him did men perceive that he was creating literature as he spoke—by his command of the English language, his luminous descriptions, his range of knowledge and illustrations, his ability to bring philosophic perspective to the issues of the day. Perhaps these qualities were handicaps in the House. Some hearers, Goldsmith tells us, “loved to see him wind into his subject like a serpent,”38 but many others were impatient with his excessive detail, his digressions into theory, his ornate declamations, his massive periodic sentences, his flights into literary elegance; they wanted practical considerations and immediate relevance; they praised his diction, but ignored his advice. So, when Boswell said that Burke was like a hawk, Johnson countered, “Yes, sir, but he catches nothing.”39 Almost to the end of his career he defended policies unpalatable to the people, the ministry, and the King. “I know,” he said, “that the road I take is not the road to preferment.”40
Apparently, during the years of his climb, he read much and judiciously. One contemporary described him as an encyclopedia, from whose stores everyone received instruction. Fox paid him an unmeasured compliment: “If he [Fox] were to put all the political information which he had learned from books, all which he had gained from science, and all which any knowledge of the world and its affairs had taught him, into one scale, and the improvement which he had derived from his right honorable friend’s instruction and conversation were placed in the other, he should be at a loss to decide to which to give the preference.”41 Johnson, who usually administered praise in small doses, agreed with Fox: “You could not stand five minutes with that man beneath a shed while it rained, but you must be convinced you had been standing with the greatest man you had ever yet seen.”42
Burke joined the Johnson-Reynolds circle about 1758. He rarely entered into debate with the invincible debater, probably fearing his own temper as well as Johnson’s; but when he did, the Great Cham drew in his horns. When Johnson was sick, and someone mentioned Burke, the Doctor cried out, “That fellow calls forth -all my powers; were I to see Burke now it would kill me.”43 Yet the two men agreed on almost all basic questions of politics, morals, and religion. They accepted the aristocratic rule of Britain, though both were commoners; they scorned democracy as the enthronement of mediocrity; they defended orthodox Christianity and the Established Church as irreplaceable bastions of morality and order. Only the revolt of the American colonies divided them. Johnson called himself a Tory, and denounced Whigs as criminals and fools; Burke called himself a Whig, and gave a stronger, better-reasoned defense of Tory principles than any other man in English history.
He seemed at times to uphold the most questionable elements of the existing order. He opposed changes in the rules for the election of members or the enactment of laws. He thought “rotten” or “pocket” boroughs forgivable, since they sent good men like himself to Parliament. Instead of widening the suffrage he would, “by lessening the number, add to the weight and independency, of our voters.”44 Nevertheless he espoused a hundred liberal causes. He advocated freedom of trade before Adam Smith, and attacked the slave trade before Wilbérforce. He advised removing the political disabilities of Catholics, and supported the petition of the Dissenters for full civil rights. He tried to soften the barbarous severity of the penal code, and the handicaps of a soldier’s life. He vindicated the freedom of the press though he himself had felt its sting. He stood up for Ireland, America, India in the face of chauvinistic majorities. He championed Parliament against the King with a candor and audacity that forfeited all chance of political office. We may debate his views and his motives, but we can never doubt his courage.
The last crusade of Burke’s career—against the French Revolution—cost him the friendship of a man whom he had long admired and loved. Charles James Fox returned his affection and shared with him the dangers of battle in a dozen causes, but differed from him in almost every quality of mind and character except humanity and bravery. Burke was Irish, poor, conservative, religious, moral; Fox was English, rich, radical, and kept only so much religion as comported with gambling, drinking, mistresses, and the French Revolution. He was the third but favorite son of Henry Fox, who inherited one fortune, squandered it, married another, accumulated a third as paymaster of the forces, helped Bute to buy M.P.s, was rewarded by being created Baron Holland, and was denounced as “the public defaulter of unaccounted millions.”45 His wife, Caroline Lennox, was granddaughter of Charles II by Louise de Kéroualle, so that Charles James had in his veins the diluted blood of a rakish Stuart king and a Frenchwoman of complaisant morals. His very names were Stuart memories, and must have grated on Hanoverian ears.
Lady Holland tried to bring up her sons to integrity and responsibility, but Lord Holland indulged Charles in every humor, and inverted old maxims for him: “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, nor ever do yourself what you can get anyone else to do for you.”46 When the boy was barely fourteen his father took him from Eton College for a tour of Continental casinos and spas, and allowed him five guineas per night for play. The youth returned to Eton a confirmed gambler, and kept this up at Oxford. He found time to read much, both in classical and in English literature, but he left Oxford after two years to spend two years in travel. He learned French and Italian, lost £ 16,000 in Naples, visited Voltaire at Ferney, and received from him a list of books to enlighten him on Christian theology.47 In 1768 the father bought a borough for him, and Charles took a seat in Parliament at the age of nineteen. This was quite illegal, but so many members were impressed by the youth’s personal charm and presumptive wealth that no protest made itself heard. Two years later, through his father’s influence, he was made a lord of the admiralty in the ministry of Lord North. In 1774 the father, the mother, and an elder son died, and Charles became the master of a large fortune.
His physical appearance in his mature years was as careless as his morals. His stockings were loosely tied, his coat and waistcoat were rumpled, his shirt was open at the neck, his face was puffed and ruddy with food and drink, and his swelling paunch, when he sat, threatened to tumble over his knees. When he fought a duel with William Adam he rejected the advice of his second to assume the customary sideways stance, for he said, “I am as thick on
e way as the other.”48 He took no pains to conceal his faults. It was common gossip that he proved to be an amiable victim of sharpers. Once (Gibbon tells us) he played for twenty-two hours at a sitting, and lost in that time £ 200,000. Fox remarked that the greatest pleasure in life, next to winning, was losing.49 He kept a stable of racing horses, bet heavily on them, and (we are asked to believe) won more on them than he lost.50
Sometimes he was as careless of his political principles as of his morals and his dress; more than once he let his personal interests or animosity determine his course. He tended to indolence, and did not prepare his parliamentary speeches or measures with that care and study which distinguished Burke. He had few graces as an orator, and sought none; his addresses were often formless and repetitious, sometimes shocking the grammarians; he “threw himself into the middle of his sentences,” said the scholar Richard Porson, “and left it to God Almighty to get him out again.”51 But he was gifted with such quickness of mind and power of memory that he became, by general consent, the ablest debater in the House. “Charles Fox,” wrote Horace Walpole, “has tumbled old Saturn [Chatham] from the throne of oratory.”52
Fox’s contemporaries were lenient with his faults since these were so widely shared, and they almost unanimously testified to his virtues. Through most of his life after 1774 he followed liberal causes at reckless sacrifice of preferment and popularity. Burke, who scorned vice, nevertheless loved Fox because he saw that Fox was unselfishly devoted to social justice and human liberty. “He is a man made to be loved,” said Burke, “of the most artless, open, candid, and benevolent disposition; disinterested in the extreme, of a temper mild and placable to a fault, without one drop of gall in his whole constitution.”53 Gibbon agreed: “Perhaps no human being was ever more perfectly exempt from the taint of malevolence, vanity, or falsehood.”54 Only George III was immune to that spontaneous charm.