CHAPTER III.

POLITICAL WRITERS.

If one were to be marooned upon an island with the works of a single author of the Johnsonian epoch, one would probably ask for Fielding or Burns; but if one had to name the greatest genius of that age, one would confidently answer Edmund Burke. Shakespeare and Burke,' said Mackintosh with truth,' are above talent.' As a prosewriter Burke stands up with Swift and Scott, while for his ample store of political and moral wisdom we can find but one name to match him, that of Francis Bacon. His works constitute an armoury for politicians and statesmen, just as those of Plato serve metaphysicians, Galen physicians, Coke lawyers, Montesquieu and Adam Smith economists.

There is, as has been remarked, a certain unwillingness in the world to admit that the same man has excelled in various pursuits. Yet we find Erskine and Thurlow admitting that Burke had a profound knowledge of jurisprudence, and when Adam Smith came to London he was amazed to find to what extent Burke by sheer force of deductive reasoning had anticipated his own carefully constructed economic hypotheses.

Johnson's generous testimony to Burke's powers as a conversationalist is well known. 'Burke,' he said, 'is such a man that if you met him for the first time in

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the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen, and you and he stepped aside to take shelter for five minutes, he'd talk to you in such a manner that, when you parted, you would say, This is an extraordinary man.' And he appended to this- Why, sir, if he should go into a stable and talk a few minutes with the ostlers about horses, they would venerate him as the wisest of human beings.' He did not grudge Burke his pre-eminence in the Commons; Burke, he said, would be the first man anywhere. But the most remarkable of his tributes to Burke's power of speech was made when he was ill, and some one brought up Burke's name: 'That fellow calls forth all my powers,' cried Johnson; were I to see Burke now it would kill me.' His range and intensity were equally marvellous. 'C'est le spectacle de la vie humaine sur le théâtre de la société qu'il aimait à contempler.'1 His method of acquiring knowledge he has described in his own words. He took up one subject at a time, and stuck to it at a white heat till he was satisfied. He was not content to give his hearers the bare results of his powerful investigations; he took them rapidly over the field of exploration, for the survey of which his brilliant metaphors served as coigns of vantage. Who, asked Goldsmith, could expound like Burke, who winds into his subject like a serpent!' The wonderful persuasiveness, the glow of enthusiastic

1 Thus it was very truly said of Burke, ‘He cannot bear to blink or narrow a question, even when doing so may be supposed favourable to his views, but gives the hint of a difficulty in order to show his skill in overcoming it. It is contrary to the nature of the man to be pent up within a small compass: he must have room; give him vent or he continually threatens to explode and overwhelm you. He can no more be thrust up into the straitened corner of a subject—a trick which the practised debater and reasoner plays off on the more inexperienced-than you can squeeze an elephant into the cage of a parrot' (Prior).

appreciation that he excites preparatory to winning over his reader, is well shown by a few words in one of Cowper's letters. He wrote a satire upon Burke and his reforms one morning early in 1780, and called it The Modern Patriot. At night I read Mr. Burke's speech in a newspaper, and was so well pleased with his proposals and the temper in which he made them that I began to think better of his cause and burned my verses . . . what was just satire in the morning, in the evening becomes a libel!' This is the power that the Duc de Levis spoke of as residing in Burke when he first heard him speak in the Commons. His auditors passed, he tells us, in an instant from the tenderest emotions of feeling to bursts of laughter: never was the electric power of eloquence more imperiously felt; this extraordinary man seemed to raise and quell the passions of his auditors with as much ease, and as rapidly, as a skilful musician passes into the various modulations of his harpsichord.'1

Edmund Burke (1729-1797).

Born in January, 1729, the son of a solicitor in Dublin, Edmund Burke was educated at Ballitore school (1741-3), under Abraham Shackleton, to whom he always professed deep obligations. In 1743 he became a student at Trinity College, Dublin; but during the whole of his regular education he was much less academic than excursive. In 1747 he was entered at the Middle Temple, and he proceeded to London to pursue his legal studies in 1750.

On the other hand, Burke must have often been far above the heads of his auditory. The commonplaceness of mind, whether assumed or real, which seems a necessary adjunct of the successful party politician, was beyond his compass; the natural bent of a lofty understanding to big conceptions and general views precluded his attaining to the cunning indispensable in the manœuvres of debate.

Indifferent to law, he soon surrendered himself to a state of disponibilité universelle. This is often a phase in which, while waiting for something to turn up, men relapse into idleness and sterility. But in Burke's case the pause was fruitfully employed in preparation for the full life that he was to lead. The periodical press offered him some outlet; when a man of genius is young there are few subjects upon which he has not some lesson to impart. He filled up his time by frequenting the theatre, studying logic and natural philosophy, and writing poetry. The first literary production of Burke that is preserved is his reductio ad absurdum of Bolingbroke's plan for throwing ridicule upon established religion. Show me,' he says, 'in his Vindication of Natural Society (1756) one absurdity in religion, and I will undertake to show you a hundred in political institutions and laws.' His Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756) was more academic in tone, but is at least remarkable for its daring; for there are few subjects, as Tolstoi has shown, upon which ideas are more conflicting than this one of æsthetics. Setting out from a certain uniformity in the question of taste, the writer traces this consensus back to a general curiosity, to the constant operation of sensations of pleasure and pain, to the force of passion which has for its object beauty, and to the love of imitation. It showed at any rate that the principles of art criticism must be based upon psychological truth, and it stimulated its German translator, Lessing, in his great contribution to æsthetic thought in the Laokoon of 1766.

In 1759, under the auspices of Dodsley, one of the chief patrons of that Grub Street of which he was still to some extent an inmate, Burke began a yearly chronicle of events under the title of The Annual Register (which still survives as a most useful record of contemporary history), re

ceiving in payment one hundred guineas per annum to supplement a meagre allowance from his father, who was displeased at his alienation from the law.

From 1761 to 1765 Burke was in the employ of William Gerard Hamilton, known as Single-speech Hamilton; he accompanied him to Ireland, and was granted by him a pension of £300 a year from the Irish treasury. Hamilton was egotistic and exacting. In return for this pension he wanted to absorb the whole time and talent of Burke. This was resented, and the connection was broken. But a short time elapsed, however, before Burke was appointed private secretary to Rockingham, upon his taking office in 1765, and next year he entered Parliament for Wendover, and at once made his mark as a debater. In 1769, in his Observations on the Present State of the Nation, he defended the conduct of the Rockingham ministry during its one year of office, showing his remarkable grasp of details. But it was not until 1770 that he first showed his masterful understanding to the full in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, one of the monumental pieces of political literature. The dissatisfaction manifested by the people in the long conflict between Parliament and public opinion, in the matter of Wilkes, was here analyzed, and, to a certain extent, explained and justified. As for the populace, he remarked, in referring to the outbreaks which had been sternly quelled, it is never for a passion for attack that it rebels, but from impatience of suffering. It is, however, when he leaves the purely temporary question, and goes on to explain the real substance of our constitution, and to defend on general grounds the spirit of party, that Burke gives evidence of his full power, not merely as the refuter of Bolingbroke's specious plea for the arbitrary suppression of parties by a 'patriot king,' but also as the interpreter for the first