IX. BURKE. 94. No English writer has received, or has deserved, more splendid panegyrics than Burke. To do justice to his multifarious activity, or to estimate accurately the influence which he exerted upon contemporary history, would involve a course of enquiry alien to the purpose of this book. I must try, however, to disengage his leading principles from the writing in which they are embedded, and to exhibit their relation to other systems of speculation. Considered simply as a master of English prose, Burke has not, in my judgment, been surpassed in any period of our literature. Critics may point to certain faults of haste; the evolution of his thought is sometimes too slow; his majestic march is trammelled by the sweep of his gorgeous rhetoric; or his imagination takes fire, and he explodes into fierce denunciations which shock the reader when the excitement which prompted them has become unintelligible. But, whatever blemishes may be detected, Burke's magnificent speeches stand absolutely alone in the language. They are, literally speaking, the only English speeches which may still be read with profit when the hearer and the speaker have long been turned to dust. His pamphlets, which are written speeches, are marked by a fervour, a richness, and a flexibility of style which is but a worthy incarnation of the wisdom which they embody. It matters little if we dissent from his appreciations of current events, for it is easy to supply the corrective for ourselves. The charge of over-refinement sometimes brought against him is in great part nothing more than the unconscious testimony of his critics that he could see farther than themselves. To a certain degree it is, perhaps, well founded. His political strategy was a little too complex for the rough give-and-take of ordinary partisans. His keen perception of the tendencies of certain politics led him to impute motives to their advocates, for which their stupidity rather than their morality incapacitated them. When, for example, we are told that the Court party persecuted Wilkes in order to establish a precedent tending to show 'that the favour of the people was not so sure a road as the favour of a Court, even to popular honours and popular trusts,' we may prefer the simpler explanation founded on the blunt instincts of obtuse rulers. It was doing them too much honour to attribute to them any design beyond that of crushing an antagonist by the weapons readiest at hand. The keen intelligence which thus some-. times takes the form of excessive ingenuity is more frequently revealed by passages in which profound wisdom is concentrated in a single phrase. We should not ask how we got into the American difficulty was the cry of the hand-to-mouth politicians, but how we are to get out of it. That is to say, is Burke's comment, 'we are to consult our invention, and reject our experience.' 'Nobody will be argued into slavery' is another phrase from the same speech, which compresses into half-a-dozen words the confutation of the special pleading and pettifogging of antiquarian lawyers, which the so-called practical men mistook for statesmanlike reasoning. I know no method,' he says elsewhere, of drawing up an indictment against a whole people;' but lawyers thought that nothing was beyond the reach of their art. His later writings are equally fertile. 'Art is man's nature's sums up his argument against the Rousseau school of theorists; and here is another phrase which might serve as text for a political treatise. On occasions of this nature, he says, 'I am most afraid of the weakest reasonings, because they discover the strongest passions.' Not to multiply instances, I quote one more passage of great significance in regard to Burke's method. 'From this source,' he says, speaking of history, 'much political wisdom may be learnt; that is, learnt as habit, not as a precept, and as an exercise to strengthen the mind, not as a repertory of cases and precedents for a lawyer." 95. Such sayings, which occur in profusion, illustrate the most marked peculiarity of Burke's mind-the admirable combination of the generalising faculty with a respect for concrete facts. His theorising is always checked and verified by the Burke's Works, ii. 294, Present Discontents.' * Ib. ii. 352, 'American Taxation.' test of specific instances, and yet in every special case he always sees a general principle. He explains his method himself in a speech made in 1792. The professor, he says, deals simply with general principles; a statesman applies them to varying circumstances; without 'abstract ideas' all political reasoning would be a jumble, without facts a useless frivolity. Burke was at one time suspected of being the author of 'Junius,' on the ground, not altogether devoid of plausibility, that he was the only living writer of the necessary capacity. Yet, if no other evidence were conclusive against the charge, the internal evidence derived from this characteristic would be convincing to those who have really studied the two writers. 'Junius' never deviates from personality into the higher regions of speculation, even when professedly advancing some general doctrine. Burke never condescends to mere personalities, even when his devotion to principles forces him to attack their assailants. He assails Hastings, or the Jacobins, as embodiments of evil tendencies, with fierce animosity, it is true, but with an animosity free from any stain of personal dislike; he attacks the king's friends, but instead of fastening, like 'Junius,' on hated individuals, scrupulously avoids giving countenance even to the popular cry against Lord Bute. And yet it is so much his habit to regard principles as embodied in concrete facts, that it is by no means easy to disentangle his speculative influence from the history of his share in current events. This is the specific quality which gives a unique character to his writings, and has led to frequent misunderstandings. Goldsmith's felicitous phrase indicates the nature of the difficulty. One party complained that so great a man To party gave up what was meant for mankind; for they could not conceive how a philosopher could care for the intrigues of Bedfords and Grenvilles. Another complained that He went on refining, And thought of convincing when they thought of dining; for they could not conceive how any political object, except Burke, x. 41, 'Speech on Subscription.' * Ib. ii. 257, 'Present Discontents.' the advancement of Bedfords or Grenvilles, could be worth serious struggle, and much less worth the devotion of a life. Burke alone felt that even the machinery of party might be used in the interest of mankind. And, therefore, if he is at times too visionary and at times too condescending to the men with whom he was unequally yoked, he contributed the most elevating influence of contemporary politics, and was the one man who accurately gauged the breadth and depth, though he may have partly misunderstood the direction, of the great political movements of his time. 96. The greatness of Burke as a thinker cannot be adequately appreciated without noticing the nobility of his moral nature. It is not from want of human feeling so much as from want of imaginative power that we are generally so dead to the sorrows and sufferings of the great mass of our fellow-creatures. Beneath the rough crust of Johnson and the versatile talent of Goldsmith lay hearts as true and tender as that of Burke. Hume possessed an intellect still more comprehensive, though he had little enough of imaginative power. But Burke stands alone in his generation for the combination of width of view with keenness of sympathy.. Thinking of the mass, he never forgets the individual. His habitual horizon stretches beyond the purlieus of Westminster and St. James's to include the American colonists and our Indian dependants; but the prospect, however distant, is never colourless. The wrongs of Massachusetts stirred him as deeply as the wrongs of Middlesex; and years of labour unrewarded, save by a good conscience, testified to his sympathy with a race which, to most Englishmen, were but a name, and to most Englishmen to whom they were more than a name, mere grist for the money-making mill. A noble unselfishness stamps all his efforts. 'I know the map of England,' he says, with admirable pride, as well as the noble lord, or any other person; and I know that the road I take is not the road to preferment.' Incomparably the greatest in intellectual power of all English politicians, the life and soul of his party for some thirty years, he was in office for a few months at the age of fifty-two when he declined the greatest part of the customary profits, and he received a pension two ' 1 Burke, ii. 440, American Taxation.' years before his death, when all ambition, and almost all hope, was dead within him. Few stories are sadder, to us who are accustomed to estimate a man's happiness by his last days, and to see good fortune only in immediate success, than the story of Burke's bereaved old age, when the man whom he loved most tenderly had died before him, and the cause to which he had devoted a life was tottering. Yet he had the right to remember that, throughout life he had, with one doubtful exception, taken the generous side. The exception namely, his assault on the French Revolution-placed him for once on the side of the oppressors, and, therefore, brought him the reward denied to his earlier labours. Yet no opponent will now impute to him, even in that case, sordid motive or blunted sensibility. He had defended the Americans against the blundering tyranny of George III., and the dogged stupidity of that part of the nation of which the dull. king was the fit representative. He had denounced the penal laws which nearly drove Ireland to follow the American precedent. He had laboured with surpassing industry in the ungrateful task of curbing English brutality in India. He had defended the rights of his countrymen at home as well as protested against the abuses of their power abroad. He had opposed the petty tyranny engendered by the corrupt government of a servile aristocracy; he had denounced the numerous abuses which flourished under the congenial shade of jobbery in high places. If once or twice an irritable temperament led him to sanction mere factious intrigue, his voice had always been the most powerful and the least selfish on the side of honour, justice, and mercy. It is the least of his merits that his views of political economy were as far in advance of his time as his view of wider questions of policy; but the fact deserves notice as a proof that, if an orator by temperament, he laid the foundations of his intellectual supremacy deep in the driest and most repulsive of studies. 97. Burke's judgments upon Montesquieu and Rousseau, to which I have already referred, are sufficiently indicative of the speculative tendencies of his writings from first to last. His first political publication was directed against a teaching identical with that of Rousseau. The 'Vindication of Natural Society,' published in 1756, is an ingenious imitation of |