it is said, declared that of all lost fragments of literature he would most gladly recover a speech of Bolingbroke. Burke asked, about the same time: Who now reads Bolingbroke? Who ever read him through? Pitt's remark, thoughtless enough, testifies to the impression made by Bolingbroke upon his contemporaries and preserved in parliamentary tradition. Burke's question indicates the general verdict upon that part of his utterances of which we are able to judge. Possibly the Patriot King'-his most finished performance-would have thrilled the House of Commons as a speech. Read in cold blood, the weakness of the substance weakens our appreciation of the elegance of the style. Bolingbroke was clearly a man of great talents. His brief career as a combatant in the open arena, and his long career as the prompter of visible actors in the struggle when the arena was closed to him, prove that he had the great gift of influencing men. His most brilliant contemporaries expressed for him the warmest admiration. Pope idolised him; and he was in some degree the channel of the inspiration which made Voltaire the prophet of English ideas in France. Voltaire, dedicating to him the tragedy of 'Brutus,' declares that Bolingbroke could give him lessons in French as well as in English, or could at least teach him to impart to his own tongue the force and energy due to a noble liberty of thought. And yet, every reader of Bolingbroke must ask whether this brilliant statesman and philosopher was anything but a showy actor declaiming popular platitudes without himself understanding them? 45. The answer may be given briefly. Bolingbroke had in his youth the vulgar ambition which would combine the inconsistent characters of a devotee of pleasure and a man cf business. He was to be the English Alcibiades, dazzling at all hazards and replacing labour by genius. Such affectation generally drops off a man of real power with his early youth. The lesson is quickly and painfully learnt that genius involves, though it cannot be resolved into, an infinite capacity for taking trouble. That simple truth never forced itself upon a mind corrupted to the core by vanity. To the end of his days Bolingbroke fancied that he could take political and philosophical eminence by storm, and surmount all difficulties at a bound. 46. The traditional estimate of his style is not without foundation. So far as it is possible to separate words from thought, we may call it excellent. The mould of his sentences is generally good; and one perceives that they must once have contained glowing thoughts which have somehow evaporated in the course of time. Here and there a happy expression testifies to a genuine vivacity of intellect. Such, for example, is the familiar description of the House of Commons. The members of that assembly, he says, 'grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose halloo they are to be encouraged.' Nor, perhaps, is it a bad illustration of the fact that enthusiasm is sometimes more blinding than dullness, when he remarks that 'Don Quixote believed, but even Sancho doubted.'2 More frequently he descends to the mere coxcombry of learning. If, he says, a voluntary exile were a complete proof of guilt, we should often pass false judgments. Metellus and Rutilius must be condemned; Apuleius and Apicius must be justified.'3 Walpole probably smiled grimly at this undergraduate affectation. Bolingbroke himself, one would think, must have laughed at his own reflections on solitude, with their pompous plagiarisms from Seneca, before the ink was dry. An imaginary dialogue between Swift and Bolingbroke might suggest the question whether bitterness of soul is more palpably evident in direct cynicism or in hollow affectation. In any case, we pity Swift, dying 'like a poisoned rat in a hole;' we can but despise Bolingbroke, the rake and intriguer, professing to console himself with the thought that 'the same azure vault, bespangled over with stars, will be everywhere spread over our heads.' It was not precisely under the roof of heaven that Bolingbroke consoled himself for the sorrows of exile. The fact that he might be everywhere under the roof of a gambling-house supplied him with more tangible consolations. 4 47. To seek in such a writer for a coherent scheme of political philosophy would be like criticising Gothic architecture from the sham cloisters of Strawberry Hill. His fine phrases are a transparent covering for personal hostilities, and his affected regard for his country a periphrasis for a cynical disbelief Bolingbroke's Works, i. 13. 2 Ib. ii. 320. • Ib. i. 543. Ib. i. 108. 2 in the honesty of his countrymen. Catching at any taunt which serves his purpose for the moment, he falls into flat contradiction, and proposes remedies whose natural consequences he would be the last to welcome seriously. Bolingbroke is interesting as a representative of the current insincerity of the time. The letter to Sir W. Windham, written in 1717, but published after his death, draws aside the veil. He avows with cynical candour the principles which guided him and his party on their accession to power. The enjoyment of great employments and of great patronage supplied, he says, the animating motives of his own party, as, he adds, that it has supplied the animating motives of all parties.' He afterwards joined the Pretender under stress of circumstances rather than from design; and the most respectable of his excuses for his conduct is a vague point of party honour. Not even as secretary to the Pretender did he believe in Jacobite theories, and he always speaks of them in terms of the bitterest contempt. A sceptic in religion, he naturally regards the dogma of the divine right as too childish for refutation. The doctrines connected with it were, in his eyes, the cause of all the seventeenth-century troubles, and he thinks them absurd enough to 'shock the common sense of a Samoyede or a Hottentot.'3 A king is nothing but a man with a crown on his head and a sceptre in his hand, as a bishop is a man who holds a crozier and wears a mitre. The symbols are arbitrary marks intended to designate a responsible official; not the outward signs of an inherent grace. All virtue is gone out of secular and spiritual rulers, and the philosopher sees that they owe their distinction to the tailor and the jeweller. What, then, is to be put in their place? Liberty, according to his most grandiloquent declamations, is the true end of government. Liberty, unfortunately, is a 'tender plant,'" only to be preserved by incessant care. The notion of a perpetual danger to liberty is inseparable from the very notion of government,' and the danger is especially great in a mixed government. To keep alive the spirit of liberty should, therefore, be the great aim of a patriot, and, so long as it is kept alive, it may save the State 'Bolingbroke's Works, i. 9, 'Letter to Sir W. Windham.' 3 Ib. ii. 43, 'Dissertation on Parties.' 2 Ib. i. 39. Ib. ii. 188. 1 even in 'the most desperate cases.' But liberty, taken absolutely, means anarchy. How is government to be made out of the formal opposite to government? Bolingbroke's simple expedient is to call the spirit of liberty the spirit of faction, whenever he dislikes its results. He is a type of the easygoing philosophers who escape from the dilemma of defining the excess of liberty by calling it license, whilst they never condescend to tell us what is liberty and what is license. His nearest approach to a definition lies in the statement that liberty aims at promoting public interests, and license at promoting private interests; but the true theory was, doubtless, that the spirit of liberty animated Bolingbroke's hostility to Walpole, while the spirit of faction animated Walpole's hostility to Bolingbroke. 48. If we still hunt for a guiding principle, we occasionally come upon the social compact. Hooker's theory that all public regiment hath arisen from deliberate advice, consultation, and composition between men' is 'undoubtedly and universally true;' as true, he proceeds to add, in Morocco as in England.3 But what is the use of a principle which is equally applicable to Morocco and England? Bolingbroke was perhaps sensible of the defect in this argument; and, at any rate, he instinctively inclines by preference to the purely empirical theory of the balance of powers. He comments admiringly on the doctrine that, 'in a constitution like ours, the safety of the whole depends on the balance of the parts, and the balance of the parts on their mutual independency on each other.' The doctrine has been sanctioned by much greater names; and elsewhere we find the theory of the judicious mixture of the three forms in English government applied to support another favourite commonplace of great vitality—namely, that absolute democracy, though deviating less from nature than monarchy, is 'tyranny and anarchy both.' It is characteristic of Bolingbroke's hand-to-mouth method of reasoning that he elsewhere declares that a 'perfect democracy' provides the best precautions against tyranny.6 1 1 Bolingbroke's Works, i. 289, 'Remarks on History of England.' 2 Ib. i. 294. Ib. ii. 172, 'Dissertation on Parties.' Ib. ii. 178,' Dissertation on Parties.' Ib. i. 280, 'Remarks on History of England.' The inevitable difficulty, however, arises. What is this balance and what is the test of its being rightly adjusted? Since no English party avowedly desired to extrude any one of the elements, a mere assertion that all are to be present leaves us in the safe region of generalities. Bolingbroke is perhaps nowhere more sincere than when expounding the analogous theory in foreign politics. The whole art and mystery of European policy consisted, according to him, in maintaining an equipoise of the scales of the balance of power. The houses of France and Austria were to be always able to neutralise each other, and neither was to obtain a decisive victory. This theory, which has served the politicians of many generations, is at least clear in principle. But to apply it to the different constituents of a single government was to justify anarchy. If King and Commons were to be as independent as France and Austria, the sovereignty was nowhere. The theory would destroy all rule as decisively as the theory of absolute liberty. 49. The only escape lies in an appeal to history. Experience, properly interrogated, may tell us what are the best relations between bodies so intricately connected. Bolingbroke endeavoured to make that appeal, and we may possibly give him credit for some faint glimpses of a method which, in later and more powerful hands, has shown greater promise of fertility. Bolingbroke's conceptions of history, however, are still in an utterly disorganised state. Pedantic in his style, he has yet an indiscriminating hatred for that laborious investigation of facts by which pedants have laid a sound foundation for more scientific methods. He can draw an argument for English use from the annual election of Roman consuls,' and he might be countenanced by the authority of Montesquieu ; but, in striking opposition to the spirit of Montesquieu's writings, he begins his 'Letters on History' by expressing a thorough contempt for the whole business of these learned lives' of the lives, that is, of such men as Scaliger, Bochart, Petavius, Usher, and Marsham. Those pioneers of historical enquiry had accumulated a vast amount of learned lumber, E.g. Bolingbroke's Works, ii. 439, Study of History.' 2 Ib. ii. 154, 'Dissertation on Parties.' Ib. ii. 261, 'Letters on History.' |