Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

pages in his gloomy room in gloomy Gerard Street. The objects of earlier years had sunk below his horizon, and the fame of his book came as a mere corollary. What he wrote was the result of a mental convulsion, vast, though spontaneous. He alludes to it in his correspondence as “deeply occupying and agitating him.” His nerves were strung up to the pitch of the highest human sympathies. Tears, he averred, dropped from his eyes and wetted his paper as he wrote the passage on the Queen, which Mackintosh called “stuff,” and Francis “foppery.” Burke was a man of strong passions, and these passions mingled fiercely in all his pursuits.

      Anger is said to “make dull men witty.”¹ In excess, it far more frequently paralyses the intellect, or drives a man into mere verbal excesses.

      Some fierce thing, replete with too much rage,

       Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart.²

      If Burke’s wrath sometimes lost him personal respect, and occasionally hurried him into grossness of metaphor, it gave such [lx] terrible fire to his expression, that the gain was greater than the loss. It scathed like lightning the men, the systems, or the sentiments which were the objects of his moral indignation, and marked indelibly those who had incurred his personal resentment. The tension and force gained from anger seemed often to sustain his style long after his direct invective had ceased. Though high-tempered, he seems to have been free from the sort of ill-nature which indeed belongs to colder temperaments, noticeable in Swift and Junius. Even in the case of political opponents, he was almost universally a lenient and generous judge. His anger towards those who had excited it, if not absolutely just, was felt to be the result of his own full conviction, and so carried with him the sympathy of his hearers and readers, instead of exciting them, as is usually the case, to seek excuses for his victims. It is rare for so much force to produce so little reaction. Burke sways the mass of intelligent and cultivated readers with almost as little resistance as a demagogue experiences from a mob.³

      Burke suffers no sense of literary formality to veil and to break the force of his thoughts. He strives to stand face to face with the reader, as he would stand before a circle of listening friends, or on the floor of the House of Commons. To repeat a previous observation, Burke wrote as he talked. “Burke’s talk,” Johnson used to say, “is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full.” As a mark of his style, this naturally has the effect of investing his chief writings with something of a dramatic character. They possess something of what we mean when we ascribe to works of art a general dramatic unity. The statesman and the man are so finely blended in the contexture of his thought that it is difficult [lxi] to distinguish between warp and woof. This character is reflected not obscurely in his diction. In discussions upon literary matters, he was fond of pointing out the dramatic writer as the true model, instancing Plautus, Terence, and the fragments of Publius Syrus as among the best examples. The hint was the more applicable in an age when the theatre was still a great school of style and of manners. Junius, as is well known, modelled his letters on the pointed dialogue of Congreve. Burke was familiar with the lessons of a higher school. Humble, from the aesthetic point of view, as is the work of a political writer, there is often an almost Shakespearian freshness and originality about the mintage of Burke’s phrases, and the design of his paragraphs. In reading him we are less than usually conscious of the mere literary element. Burke, in fact, though commonly understood to be one of the greatest masters of English prose, does not fall naturally into a place in any historical series of the masters of the art. The Spectator seems to have been his early model, the Treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful being evidently suggested by Addison’s beautiful and original essays on the Pleasures of the Imagination. But he soon deserted the school of polite prose. Hume, on the other hand, is an instance of an accomplished writer, who throughout his long labours never cast the slough of his first style. Wholly disregarding the models of the strict, polished, and academic writers of his day, Burke fell back upon a free and expansive method, which reminds us of the great poet and dramatist, Dryden. The fact that no student of literature now thinks of consulting Temple or Sprat, while such prose as that of Dryden and Cowley still retains a large measure of popularity, is some testimony to the correctness of his taste. The father of modern criticism had not been neglected by Burke, and the freedom and copiousness of Dryden’s pen cannot have escaped his notice. He still remains the great master of good pedestrian prose; and for the best specimens of the somewhat more elevated key of political reasoning, we are still obliged to recur to Bolingbroke, another of Burke’s models. In both Bolingbroke and Burke the habit of public speaking moulded and transformed their literary style: and we can scarcely point to any other writer who, though at once accurate, polished, and striking, reflects Burke’s disregard of the set literary manner. Addison must have proceeded to compose [lxii] a Spectator much as he was wont to set about making a copy of his inimitable Latin verses; and something of the same kind never forsook Johnson, and other great essayists. Burke has nothing of this. He goes back, though not consciously, over the heads of his contemporaries. He writes with the tone of authoritative speech. He employs alternately the profound, stately, philosophical manner of Hooker,¹ the imaginative declamation of Taylor, the wise sarcasm of South, and the copious and picturesque facility of Dryden. We need not maintain that elements so multifarious never suffer in his hands. Burke lived in a time when literary ideals had degenerated. Both Hooker and Bacon—the former with his vast cycle of reasoning and his unapproachable compass of language, the latter with his dense, serried body of picked thought and his powerful concocting and assimilating style, represent a literary attitude which neither Burke nor any of his contemporaries ever dreamed of assuming. Burke, moreover, in his maturity, cared nothing for literature, except so far as it was useful in its effect on life; nor did he cherish the thought of living in his works.

      These pages are intended rather to put many threads of independent study into the hands of the student, and to afford hints for looking at the subject on many sides, than to exhaust any department of it. Burke’s works will be found to be at once a canon or measure to guide those who will undertake the pleasurable toil of exploring the inexhaustible field of English prose-writing, and in themselves a rich mine of the most useful practical examples. They strikingly illustrate, among other things, the fact that the works of a great writer of prose, like those of great poets, must, so to speak, drain a large area. He must possess something of the myriad-mindedness which has been ascribed, as the sum and substance of his intellectual [lxiii] qualities, to Shakespeare. “The understanding,” says Shelley, “grows bright by gazing upon many truths.” In like manner the taste is only to be justly regulated by applying it to many and various beauties, and the judgment is only to be ripened by directing it in succession upon many objects, and in various aspects.

      With one additional observation on a point of some moment, these hints on the general intention and style of Burke’s book are terminated. It has been said that the best styles are the freest from Latinisms, and it has been laid down that a good writer will never have recourse to a Latinism while a “Saxon” word will serve his purpose. The notion was first carelessly put forth by Sydney Smith. If it were true, Burke would often be liable to severe censure. The fact is, however, that the practice of almost every great master of the English tongue, from Chaucer downwards, makes very small account of any such consideration. Swift and Defoe, who are usually cited in illustration of it, count for little, and their authority on this point cannot be held to be exactly commensurate with the place in literature which their merits have earned them. Their vernacular cast is very much due to the fact that they were among the first political writers who aspired to be widely read among the common people. The same circumstance fostered the racy native English style of Cobbett, and had its effects on journalists like Mr. Fonblanque, and orators like Mr. Bright. But most of our great writers, unreservedly and freely as they use the Latin element in the language, are also thoroughly at home in the exclusive use of the vernacular. Brougham was wrong in saying that Burke excelled in every variety of style except the plain and unadorned. It is not a question of principle, but of art and of propriety. It may be worth while occasionally to study the art of writing in “pure Saxon,” but to confine ourselves in practice to this interesting feat, would be as absurd as for a musician to employ habitually and on principle the tour de force of playing the pianoforte with one hand. We should lose breadth, power, and richness of combination. The harmony of our language, as we find it