Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  Some great crisis, or threatening state of affairs, seems to furnish the necessary condition for the exercise of a great mind, and Burke is never so effective as when thoroughly aroused. His imagination needed the chastening which only a great moment or critical situation could give. Two of his greatest speeches — Conciliation, and Impeachment of Warren Hastings — were delivered under the restraining effect of such circumstances, and in each the figurative expression is subdued and not less beautiful in itself than, appropriate for the occasion.

  Finally, it must be observed that no other writer of English prose has a better command of words. His ideas, as multifarious as they are, always find fitting expression. He does not grope for a term; it stands ready for his thought, and one feels that he had opportunity for choice. It is the exuberance of his fancy, already mentioned, coupled with this richness of vocabulary, that helped to make Burke a tiresome speaker. His mind was too comprehensive to allow any phase of his subject to pass without illumination. He followed where his subject led him, without any great attention to the patience of his audience. But he receives full credit when his speeches are read. It is then that his mastery of the subject and the splendid qualities of his style are apparent, and appreciated at their worth.

  In conclusion, it is worth while observing that in the study of a great character, joined with an attempt to estimate it by conventional standards, something must always be left unsaid. Much may be learned of Burke by knowing his record as a partisan, more by a minute inspection of his style as a writer, but beyond all this is the moral tone or attitude of the man himself. To a student of Burke this is the greatest thing about him. It colored every line he wrote, and to it, more than anything else, is due the immense force of the man as a speaker and writer. It was this, more than Burke’s great abilities, that justifies Dr. Johnson’s famous eulogy: “He is not only the first man in the House of Commons, he is the first man everywhere.”

  A GROUP OF WRITERS COMING IMMEDIATELY AFTER BURKE

  Wordsworth . . . . 1770-1850

  Coleridge . . . . . 1772-1834

  Byron . . . . . . . 1788-1824

  Shelley . . . . . . 1792-1822

  Keats . . . . . . . 1795-1821

  Scott . . . . . . . 1771-1832

  TOPICS FOR SPECIAL REPORTS

  1. “Like Goldsmith, though in a different sphere, Burke belongs both to the old order and the new.” Discuss that statement.

  2. Burke and the Literary Club. (Boswell’s Life of Johnson.)

  3. Lives of Burke and Goldsmith. Contrast.

  4. An interpretation of ten apothegms selected from the Speech on Conciliation.

  5. A study of figures in the Speech on Conciliation.

  6. A definition of the terms: “colloquialism” and “idiom” Instances of their use in the Speech on Conciliation.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  1. Burke’s Life. John Morley. English Men of Letters Series.

  2. Burke. John Morley. An Historical Study.

  3. Burke. John Morley. Encyclopaedia Britannica.

  4. History of the English People. Green. Vol. IV., pp 193-271.

  5 History of Civilization in England. Buckle. Vol I, p-338

  6. The American Revolution. Fiske. Vol. I, Chaps. I., II.

  7. Life of Johnson. Boswell. (Use the Index)

  EDMUND BURKE by John Morley

  From Encyclopædia Britannica, 1911

  EDMUND BURKE (1729-1797), British statesman and political writer. His is one of the greatest names in the history of political literature. There have been many more important statesmen, for he was never tried in a position of supreme responsibility. There have been many more effective orators, for lack of imaginative suppleness prevented him from penetrating to the inner mind of his hearers; defects in delivery weakened the intrinsic persuasiveness of his reasoning; and he had not that commanding authority of character and personality which has so often been the secret of triumphant eloquence. There have been many subtler, more original and more systematic thinkers about the conditions of the social union. But no one that ever lived used the general ideas of the thinker more successfully to judge the particular problems of the statesman. No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy. And what is more than all for perpetuity of fame, he was one of the great masters of the high and difficult art of elaborate composition.

  A certain doubtfulness hangs over the circumstances of Burke’s life previous to the opening of his public career. The very date of his birth is variously stated. The most probable opinion is that he was born at Dublin on the 12th of January 1729, new style. Of his family we know little more than his father was a Protestant attorney, practising in Dublin, and that his mother was a Catholic, a member of the family of Nagle. He had at least one sister, from whom descended the only existing representatives of Burke’s family; and he had at least two brothers, Garret Burke and Richard Burke, the one older and the other younger than Edmund. The sister, afterwards Mrs French, was brought up and remained throughout life in the religious faith of her mother; Edmund and his brothers followed that of their father. In 1741 the three brothers were sent to school at Ballitore in the county of Kildare, kept by Abraham Shackleton, an Englishman, and a member of the Society of Friends. He appears to have been an excellent teacher and a good and pious man. Burke always looked back on his own connexion with the school at Ballitore as among the most fortunate circumstances of his life. Between himself and a son of his instructor there sprang up a close and affectionate friendship, and, unlike so many of the exquisite attachments of youth, this was not choked by the dust of life, nor parted by divergence of pursuit. Richard Shackleton was endowed with a grave, pure and tranquil nature, constant and austere, yet not without those gentle elements that often redeem the drier qualities of his religious persuasion. When Burke had become one of the most famous men in Europe, no visitor to his house was more welcome than the friend with whom long years before he had tried poetic flights, and exchanged all the sanguine confidences of boyhood. And we are touched to think of the simple-minded guest secretly praying, in the solitude of his room in the fine house at Beaconsfield, that the way of his anxious and overburdened host might be guided by a divine hand.

  In 1743 Burke became a student at Trinity College, Dublin, where Oliver Goldsmith was also a student at the same time. But the serious pupil of Abraham Shackleton would not be likely to see much of the wild and squalid sizar. Henry Flood, who was two years younger than Burke, had gone to complete his education at Oxford. Burke, like Goldsmith, achieved no academic distinction. His character was never at any time of the academic cast. The minor accuracies, the limitation of range, the treading and re-treading of the same small patch of ground, the concentration of interest in success before a board of examiners, were all uncongenial to a nature of exuberant intellectual curiosity and of strenuous and self-reliant originality. His knowledge of Greek and Latin was never thorough, nor had he any turn for critical niceties. He could quote Homer and Pindar, and he had read Aristotle. Like others who have gone through the conventional course of instruction, he kept a place in his memory for the various charms of Virgil and Horace, of Tacitus and Ovid; but the master whose page by night and by day he turned with devout hand, was the copious, energetic, flexible, diversified and brilliant genius of the declamations for Archias the poet and for Milo, against Catiline and against Antony, the author of the disputations at Tusculum and the orations against Verres. Cicero was ever to him the mightiest of the ancient names. In English literature Milton seems to have been more familiar to him than Shakespeare, and Spenser was perhaps more of a favourite with him than either.

  It is too often the case to be a mere accident that men who become eminent for wide compass of understanding and penetrating comprehension, are in their adolescence unsettled and desultory. Of this Burke is a signal illustration. He left
Trinity in 1748, with no great stock of well-ordered knowledge. He neither derived the benefits nor suffered the drawbacks of systematic intellectual discipline.

  After taking his degree at Dublin he went in the year 1750 to London to keep terms at the Temple. The ten years that followed were passed in obscure industry. Burke was always extremely reserved about his private affairs. All that we know of Burke exhibits him as inspired by a resolute pride, a certain stateliness and imperious elevation of mind. Such a character, while free from any weak shame about the shabby necessities of early struggles, yet is naturally unwilling to make them prominent in after life. There is nothing dishonourable in such an inclination. “I was not swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator,” wrote Burke when very near the end of his days: “Nitor in adversum is the motto for a man like me. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step I was traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my passport. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me.”

  All sorts of whispers have been circulated by idle or malicious gossip about Burke’s first manhood. He is said to have been one of the numerous lovers of his fascinating countrywoman, Margaret Woffington. It is hinted that he made a mysterious visit to the American colonies. He was for years accused of having gone over to the Church of Rome, and afterwards recanting. There is not a tittle of positive evidence for these or any of the other statements to Burke’s discredit. The common story that he was a candidate for Adam Smith’s chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, when Hume was rejected in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be wholly false. Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law. His father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the annual allowance, and Burke set to work to win for himself by indefatigable industry and capability in the public interest that position of power or pre-eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the bottom of the ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the Temple, practising oratory in the free and easy debating societies of Covent Garden and the Strand, and writing for the booksellers.

  In 1756 he made his first mark by a satire upon Bolingbroke entitled A Vindication of Natural Society. It purported to be a posthumous work from the pen of Bolingbroke, and to present a view of the miseries and evils arising to mankind from every species of artificial society. The imitation of the fine style of that magnificent writer but bad patriot is admirable. As a satire the piece is a failure, for the simple reason that the substance of it might well pass for a perfectly true, no less than a very eloquent statement of social blunders and calamities. Such acute critics as Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years before, would have read Burke’s ironical vindication of natural society without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who insist that the Vindication was a really serious expression of the writer’s own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons. Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His sagacity discerned that the rationalism by which Bolingbroke and the deistic school believed themselves to have overthrown revealed religion, was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political government. This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in France at that moment. His Vindication is meant to be a reduction to an absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it, would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The only interest of the piece for us lies in the proof which it furnishes, that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming passion at its close.

  In the same year (1756) appeared the Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, a crude and narrow performance in many respects, yet marked by an independent use of the writer’s mind, and not without fertile suggestion. It attracted the attention of the rising aesthetic school in Germany. Lessing set about the translation and annotation of it, and Moses Mendelssohn borrowed from Burke’s speculation at least one of the most fruitful and important ideas of his own influential theories on the sentiments. In England the Inquiry had considerable vogue, but it has left no permanent trace in the development of aesthetic thought.

  Burke’s literary industry in town was relieved by frequent excursions to the western parts of England, in company with William Burke. There was a lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have Edmund Burke’s authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen. The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate health, was as wholesome to the mind as to the body. Few men, if any, have ever acquired a settled mental habit of surveying human affairs broadly, of watching the play of passion, interest, circumstance, in all its comprehensiveness, and of applying the instruments of general conceptions and wide principles to its interpretation with respectable constancy, unless they have at some early period of their manhood resolved the greater problems of society in independence and isolation. By 1756 the cast of Burke’s opinions was decisively fixed, and they underwent no radical change.

  He began a series of Hints on the Drama. He wrote a portion of an Abridgment of the History of England, and brought it down as far as the reign of John. It included, as was natural enough in a warm admirer of Montesquieu, a fragment on law, of which he justly said that it ought to be the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth. Burke’s early interest in America was shown by an Account of the European Settlements on that continent. Such works were evidently a sign that his mind was turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic fields, and to the more visible conditions of social stability and the growth of nations. This interest in the concrete phenomena of society inspired him with the idea of the Annual Register (1759), which he designed to present a broad grouping of the chief movements of each year. The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it was begun in the midst of that momentous war which raised England to her climax of territorial greatness in East and West, we may easily realize how the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be likely to strengthen Burke’s habits of wide and laborious observation, as well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own judgment. Dodsley gave him £100 for each annual volume, and the sum was welcome enough, for towards the end of 1756 Burke had married. His wife was the daughter of a Dr Nugent, a physician at Bath. She is always spoken of by his friends as a mild, reasonable and obliging person, whose amiability and gentle sense did much to soothe the too nervous and excitable temperament of her husband. She had been brought up, there is good reason to believe, as a Catholic, and she was probably a member of that communion at the time of her marriage. Dr Nugent eventually took up his residence with his son-in-law in London, and became a popular member of that famous group of men of letters and artists whom Boswell has made so familiar and so dear to all later generations. Burke, however, had no intention of being dependent. His consciousness of his own powers animated him with a most justifiable ambition, if ever there was one, to play a part in the conduct of national affairs. Friends shared this ambition on his behalf; one of these was Lord Charlemont. He introduced Burke to William Gerard Hamilton (1759), now only remembered by the nickname “single-speech,” derived from the circumstance of his having made a single brilliant speech in the House of Commons, which was followed by years of almost unbroken silence. Hamilton was by no means devoid of sense and acuteness, but in character he was one of the most despicable
men then alive. There is not a word too many nor too strong in the description of him by one of Burke’s friends, as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile.” The reptile’s connexion, however, was for a time of considerable use to Burke. When he was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin, and there learnt Oxenstiern’s eternal lesson, that awaits all who penetrate behind the scenes of government, quam parva sapientia mundus regitur.

  The penal laws against the Catholics, the iniquitous restrictions on Irish trade and industry, the selfish factiousness of the parliament, the jobbery and corruption of administration, the absenteeism of the landlords, and all the other too familiar elements of that mischievous and fatal system, were then in full force. As was shown afterwards, they made an impression upon Burke that was never effaced. So much iniquity and so much disorder may well have struck deep on one whose two chief political sentiments were a passion for order and a passion for justice. He may have anticipated with something of remorse the reflection of a modern historian, that the absenteeism of her landlords has been less of a curse to Ireland than the absenteeism of her men of genius. At least he was never an absentee in heart. He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate country; and, as we shall see, made more than one weighty sacrifice on behalf of the principles which he deemed to be bound up with her welfare.

  When Hamilton retired from his post, Burke accompanied him back to London, with a pension of £300 a year on the Irish Establishment. This modest allowance he hardly enjoyed for more than a single year. His patron having discovered the value of so laborious and powerful a subaltern, wished to bind Burke permanently to his service. Burke declined to sell himself into final bondage of this kind. When Hamilton continued to press his odious pretensions they quarrelled (1765), and Burke threw up his pension. He soon received a more important piece of preferment than any which he could ever have procured through Hamilton.