The Portable Edmund Burke (Portable Library) (4 page)

Burke’s contemporaries on the left were generally enraged by the
Reflections
on the Revolution in France. Their reactions capture what would be the dominant response from liberals and radicals to this day. The radical novelist Robert Bage mocked the very passage in the Reflections that so moved Burke and many of his readers. The knight-errant becomes modern man striking blows at the chains of chivalry and at such as Burke who glory in that servitude:

Joseph Priestley, in responding to the Reflections, dealt metaphor for metaphor. His concern was Burke’s discussion of the clothes and the drapery of life that cover naked, shivering man. Priestley replied with the characteristic radical metaphor of a new day dawning:

Among the radicals who had self-consciously put aside all cloaks of mist and mystery was Jeremy Bentham, who was not above using, against the Reflections, the same exaggerated near-hysterical rhetoric that was Burke’s trademark. Bentham described Burke as “blinded by his rage, in this his frantic exclamation, wrung from him by the unquenched thirst for lucre—this mad man, than whom none perhaps was ever more mischievous—this incendiary.”
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Two of the most famous radical replies to Burke’s
Reflections
emphasized the same theme—Burke’s disregard for the age-old suffering of the common people in his preoccupation with the brutality of revolutionary justice. Thomas Paine, in his Rights of Man, saw Burke venerating power and “all the governments in the world, while the victims who suffer under them, whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence, are wholly forgotten.”
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But it was the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who best captured this common radical response to Burke.

Burke was, of course, soundly praised by members of the belleslettres circles in which he moved after his literary and political debut in London. He was feted by the likes of Samuel Johnson, David Garrick, and Oliver Goldsmith, on the one hand, and by bluestockings like Mrs. Montagu, Mrs. Carter, and Mrs. Veysey, on the other. James Boswell, Horace Walpole, Arthur Young, and Fanny Burney sang his praises. They all were dazzled primarily by his reputation for spellbinding oratory in the Commons. It would be the French Revolution, however, and his response to it that made him a legendary figure. In seventeen days after its publication on November 1, 1790, 5,500 copies of his
Reflections
were sold. By November 29 the sales had reached twelve thousand, according to Burke’s account. Within a year some nineteen thousand copies had been sold in England.

The establishment loved Reflections, and with its response began the myth of Burke as heroic Tory defender of the faith. Conservatives rallied to what they had long sought—a resounding defense of their privileges and a clarion call for resistance to Jacobinism, to democracy and leveling in both France and England. William Windham, fast becoming a leader in the House of Commons, wrote that “never was there, I suppose, a work so valuable in its kind, or that displayed powers of so extraordinary a nature.” It was a work, he wrote, quite “capable of ... turning the stream of opinion throughout Europe.”
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George III is quoted as having said, “Burke’s
Reflections
is a good book, a very good book; every gentleman
ought
to read it.”
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At Oxford there was talk of awarding Burke an LL.D. “in consideration of his very able Representation of the True Principles of our Constitution Ecclesiastical and Civil.”
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The Times of London saw it as a welcome antidote to “all those dark insidious minds who would wish to level it in a similar manner with the French for the sake of their own selfish purposes.”
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The great historian Edward Gibbon agreed. Reflections was “a most admirable medicine against the French disease,” which was making too much headway in England. He admired Burke’s eloquence and “adored his chivalry.” He even forgave him his superstition.
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The mythic figure of Burke was fast taking form even in the last years of the eighteenth century. Two people crucial in helping to give Burke to history were poets who came to Burke guilt-ridden over their own early enthusiasm for Jacobinism. The young Coleridge, for example, had attacked in an ode of 1794 Burke’s “wizard spell” in rallying Europe against Jacobinism. Years later he wrote of Burke as “a great man,” a man of “transcendent greatness” and “of measureless superiority to those about him.” He could not conceive “of a time or a state of things in which the writings of Burke will not have the highest value.” He saw in Burke’s writings “the germs of almost all political truths.”
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Wordsworth in 1799 wrote of “that great stage, where Senators, tongue-favoured men, perform.” One senator he remembers above all. And so the legend of Burke who said “no” took shape.

In the nineteenth century, however, Burke the heroic and legendary figure, the conservative prophet, lay dormant. He was remembered more as the model of the prudent statesman whose teaching contained the essence of political wisdom. Even more than this, he was eulogized as a great master of the English language. William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincey, and Matthew Arnold praised Burke’s prose. According to Macaulay he was the greatest Englishman of letters since Milton. Nineteenth-century biographers MacKnight and Prior went even further, the latter noting, for example, that it took “two thousand years to produce one Cicero and one Burke.”
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One nineteenth-century biographer, however, did keep alive the myth of heroic Tory Burke, and in doing so was an early example of a tendency in Burkeana that would flower in the twentieth century—the latter-day partisan use of Burke. George Croly was an Anglican minister actively opposed to the Chartist movement. It was a time, he felt, much like the last decade of the eighteenth century. His purpose in writing on and editing Burke in 1840, he informed his readers, was to compile “an anti-revolutionary manual of the wisdom of the wisest of men.” Burke had been the genius behind “the forces that preserved society as it was,” and his words could do that again against the new menace. Croly may well have been the first to refer to Burke’s “renown as a prophet,” as well as to use him as a weapon in counterrevolutionary politics. Until our own day few have written of Burke as the Reverend Croly did.

Croly was an exception, however. The nineteenth century in general had little of Burke as prophet of reaction. He was percieved, on the contrary, as an exemplar of the school that dominated Victorian thought, utilitarian liberalism. This was in no small part due to the efforts of Burke’s great nineteenth-century biographer, John Morley. Morley was a liberal and a positivist, schooled like John Stuart Mill in the writings of Auguste Comte. His two biographies of Burke rooted him in the liberal cause, emphasizing his years of opposition to the Crown and especially his role in the American Revolution, “that part of his history about the majestic and noble wisdom of which there can be least dispute.” On the French Revolution there was indeed dispute. Morley avoided the problem by leaving the verdict to history, “to our grandchildren.”
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What attracted Morley to Burke was his conviction that Burke’s political philosophy was at bottom Benthamite utilitarianism. It seemed this way to Morley because Burke had rejected natural rights and other abstract and absolute principles. His every utterance praised expediency and prudence at the expense of rigid adherence to ultimate values. Henry Buckle, Leslie Stephen, and William Lecky agreed; Burke was a utilitarian liberal.

These Victorian liberals who wrote of Burke as in their camp were no less outspoken in their praise for him. It was in fact partly because of his alleged utilitarian affinities that they were so effusive. They considered utility, expediency, and prudential calculation to be the heart of politics, and so it was that they saw in Burke a kindred spirit. While they had little taste for the gorgeous excesses of his prose, he was for them the theorist par excellence of political wisdom. Lecky wrote of Burke’s writings that “the time may come when they will no longer be read. The time will never come in which men would not grow wiser by reading them.”
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Buckle described Burke as “one of the greatest men, and, Bacon alone excepted, the greatest thinker who ever devoted himself to English politics.”
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What happened to Burke at the hands of the Victorian liberals is of crucial importance. It represents the first and most important step in his capture by the middle class and his enlistment to save their cause and their interests. His aristocratic biases as displayed in his writings on France and India were pushed to the side, and his writings on America are pushed front and center. More important than this, however, was the realization that his empiricism—and his skepticism, when severed from his “unfortunate” predilection for aristocracy—could serve the new status quo in which the middle class dominates. The age of chivalry was indeed dead and buried. The powers that be were now the triumphant middle class, which had already turned its back on the French Revolution and the politics of upheaval. The romance of Jacobinism was appropriate only for the assertive and struggling bourgeoisie seeking to find its place in the sun. It might not even be necessary then to overlook Burke’s writings on the Revolution. For it would come to pass that middle-class liberals could find wisdom in this very tirade against their earlier struggle. It was after all, a plea for order, for stability, for submissive obedience to the powers that be.

One sees this deep conservative strain in the nineteenth-century liberal embrace of Burke at work in Woodrow Wilson. It is not surprising that Wilson, the professor of government enamored of English parliamentary politics, would gravitate so naturally to the pull of this House of Commons man. But it is the passion of Wilson’s attraction that is so striking, and which seems to bespeak some deeper response that Burke struck in the repressed conservative Presbyterian within the liberal Wilson. For the soon-to-be president, Burke was the embodiment of racial wisdom, the instinctive common sense and practical soul of the Anglo-Saxon. An interaction with Burke was emotionally and physically stimulating. To read him was to hasten the pulse, quicken the breath. “Does not your blood stir at these passages?” Wilson asks the reader. Like his contemporaries, the liberal scholars who were writing on Burke in England, Wilson was struck by Burke’s “concrete mind.” Burke’s disdain for “abstract speculation” and for “system” appealed to him, as did his “practical” approach and his preference for “expediency.” Wilson, however, unlike his contemporaries, was not afraid to meet the French Revolution head on, and to shout amen to Burke’s crusade against Jacobinism. “The things he hated are truly hateful,” Wilson wrote of Burke. “He hated the French Revolutionary philosophy and deemed it unfit for free men, and that philosophy is in fact radically evil and corrupting.”
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That this liberal president could be so taken by Burke is additional evidence of the general historical process by which Burke was possessed and used by the middle class, a process of course intensified in the United States, where that class lacked even an aristocratic enemy to overthrow. They were no longer frightened off by Burke; indeed, some of their spokesmen were quite taken by his conservatism and how it could now serve their interests.