Edmund Burke

Appraisals and Applications

Daniel E. Ritchie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351316941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The eighteenth century remains contemporary more than 200 years later because the fundamental questions raised then about politics in both the American and French Revolutions still speak to us. The writings of Edmund Burke on these and other political events of his time are today acknowledged as the basis of modern conservative thought. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of interpretative essays on Burke, and serves as a basic introduction to this seminal thinker.

A member of the British Parliament from 1766 to 1794, Edmund Burke had sympathized with the American War of Independence and argued for reform of British policy toward Ireland and India, but he surprised many of his friends by his early, vehement opposition to the French Revolution. This volume brings together assessments of these and other statements by Burke by contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, along with essays by Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, who established his significance for twentieth-century conservatism.

This is a collection of the best, previously published interpretive essays on Burke. It will be of interest to all those interested in the philosophical roots of conservatism, in the history of political thought, in revolution, and in modern political ideologies.

Part One

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Burke and the Literary Imagination

1

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Coleridge’s Fragments on Burke

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I. The Friend, No. 9. Oct. 12, 1809

… I wished to give every advantage to the Opinions [of Rousseau and the French revolutionaries], which I deemed it of importance to confute. It is bad policy to represent a political System as having no charm but for Robbers and Assassins, and no natural origin but in the brains of Fools or Madmen, when Experience has proved, that the great danger of the System consists in the peculiar fascination, it is calculated to exert on noble and imaginative Spirits; on all those, who in the amiable intoxication of youthful Benevolence, are apt to mistake their own best Virtues and choicest Powers for the average qualities and Attributes of the human Character. The very Minds, which a good man would most wish to preserve or disentangle from the Snare, are by these angry misrepresentations rather lured into it. Is it wonderful, that a Man should reject the arguments unheard, when his own Heart proves the falsehood of the Assumptions by which they are prefaced? or that he should retaliate on the Aggressors their own evil Thoughts? I am well aware, that the provocation was great, the temptation almost inevitable; yet still I cannot repel the conviction from my mind, that in part to this Error and in part to a certain inconsistency in his fundamental Principles, we are to attribute the small number of Converts made by Burke during his life time. Let me not be misunderstood. I do not mean, that this great Man supported different Principles at different ffiras of his political Life. On the contrary, no Man was ever more like himself! From his first published Speech on the American Colonies to his last posthumous Tracts, we see the same Man, the same Doctrines, the same uniform Wisdom of practical Councils, the same Reasoning and the same Prejudices against all abstract grounds, against all deduction of Practice from Theory. The inconsistency to which I allude, is of a different kind: it is the want of congruity in the Principles appealed to in different parts of the same Work, it is an apparent versatility of the Principle with the Occasion. If his Opponents are Theorists, then every thing is to be founded on PRUDENCE, on mere calculations of EXPEDIENCY: and every Man is represented as acting according to the state of his own immediate self interest. Are his Opponents Calculators? Then Calculation itself is represented as a sort of crime. God has given us FEELINGS, and we are to obey them! and the most absurd Prejudices become venerable, to which these FEELINGS have given Consecration. I have not forgotten, that Burke himself defended these half contradictions, on the pretext of balancing the too much on the one side by a too much on the other. But never can I believe, but that the straight line must needs be the nearest; and that where there is the most, and the most unalloyed Truth, there will be the greatest and most permanent power of persuasion. But the fact was, that Burke in his most public Character found himself, as it were, in a Noah’s Ark, with a very few Men and a great many Beasts! he felt how much his immediate Power was lessened by the very circumstance of his measureless Superiority to those about him: he acted, therefore, under a perpetual System of Compromise—a Compromise of Greatness with Meanness; a Compromise of Comprehension with Narrowness; a Compromise of the Philosopher (who armed with the twofold knowledge of History and the Laws of Spirit, as with a Telescope, looked far around and into the far Distance) with the mere Men of Business, or with yet coarser Intellects, who handled a Truth, which they were required to receive, as they would handle an Ox, which they were desired to purchase. But why need I repeat what has been already said in so happy a manner by Goldsmith, of this great Man:

“Who, born for the universe narrow’d his mind,

And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

Tho’ fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat,

To persuade Tommy Townshend to give him a vote;

Who too deep for his hearers, still went on refining,

And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.”¹

And if in consequence it was his fate to “cut blocks with a razor” I may be permitted to add, that in respect of Truth, though not of Genius, the Weapon was injured by the misapplication.

5II. The Friend [1818]

What is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in a man of education? And which, among educated men, so instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was observed with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) “we cannot stand under the same arch-way during a shower of rain, without finding him out?”² … It is the unpremeditated and evidently habitual arrangement of his words, grounded on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral part, or (more plainly) in every sentence, the whole that he intends to communicate. However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments.

III. Biographia Literaria [1817]

… Edmund Burke possessed and had sedulously sharpened that eye, which sees all things, actions, and events, in relation to the laws that determine their existence and circumscribe their possibility. He referred habitually to principles. He was a scientific statesman; and therefore a seer. For every principle contains in itself the germs of a prophecy; and as the prophetic power is the essential privilege of science, so the fulfilment of its oracles supplies the outward and (to men in general) the only test of its claim to the title.³ … In Mr. Burke’s writings indeed the germs of almost all political truths may be found.

IV. Table Talk

The very greatest writers write best when calm, and exerting themselves upon subjects unconnected with party. Burke rarely shows all his powers, unless where he is in a passion. The French Revolution was alone a subject fit for him. (January 4,1823)

Burke was, indeed, a great man. No one ever read history so philosophically as he seems to have. Yet, until he could associate his general principles with some sordid interest, panic of property. Jacobinism, &c., he was a mere dinner-bell. Hence you will find so many half-truths in his speeches and writings. Nevertheless, let us heartily acknowledge his transcendent greatness. He would have been more influential if he had less surpassed his contemporaries, as Fox and Pitt, men of much inferior minds, in all respects. (April 8, 1833)

Notes

The sources for selections I–III of Coleridge’s works are:

The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Kathleen Coburn, and Bart Winer. 16 vols. Bollingen Series, no. 75. Princeton: Princeton University Press; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969-

I. The Friend, Edited by Barbara E. Rooke, 1969. vol. 4, part 2, pp. 123–124.

II. The Friend, Edited by Barbara E. Rooke, 1969. vol. 4, part 1, pp. 448, 449.

III. Biographia Literaria, Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 1983, vol. 7, part 1, pp. 191–92, 217.

The source for selection IV, from Coleridge’s Table Talk is: Specimens of the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by Henry Nelson Coleridge (London, 1858), pp. 10–11, 227.

The notes below are by the present editor, except as indicated.

1.Here and in the next phrase, Coleridge is remembering Oliver Goldsmith’s poem The Retaliation [1774], II. 31–36, 42. Goldsmith’s original of line 34 reads: “To persuade Tommy Townshend to lend him a vote.” Goldsmith’s assertion that Burke “to party gave up what was made for mankind” has been vigorously debated ever since the poem appeared.

2.As observed by Samuel Johnson. See Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ed. G. Birbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford 1934–1950) 5:34, 465; 4:275.—BER

3.Principle and prophecy in this passage are technical terms in the vocabulary of Coleridge. They are linked with other, related terms, such as reason, idea, image, metaphor, symbol, and, ultimately, imagination. Coleridge criticized many eighteenth-century theories of the imagination, especially as exemplified in Hume, for their reliance on “the universal law of passive fancy and mechanical memory” (Biographia Literaria 1:104). In Burke, by contrast, Coleridge found a truly imaginative (as opposed to a merely “mechanical”) mind, one that habitually “reason[ed] in metaphor” (Watchman, Vol. 2, pp. 30–31 in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge). In his fragmentary Notebooks he compared Burke’s quality of imagination with that of Jeremy Taylor and Shakespeare: “English by its … marvelously metaphorical Spirit (… What language can exhibit a style that resembles that of Shakespere, Jeremy Taylor, or Burke?) can express more meaning, image, and passion tri-unely in a given number of articulate sounds than any other in the world, not excepting even the ancient Greek” (The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn. 3 vols. Bollingen Series no. 50. New York: Pantheon, 1957, 3:2431f4).

The Watchman essay [March 1, 1796], a review of Burke’s Letter to a Noble Lord [February 24, 1796], is worth consulting in its own right.

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Hazlitt’s Criticism of Burke

William Hazlitt

Character of Mr. Burke [1807]

… [T]he only specimen of Burke is, all that he wrote. With respect to most other speakers, a specimen is generally enough, or more than enough. When you are acquainted with their manner, and see what proficiency they have made in the mechanical exercise of their profession, with what facility they can borrow a simile, or round a period, how dextrously they can argue, and object, and rejoin, you are satisfied; there is no other difference in their speeches than what arises from the difference of the subjects. But this was not the case with Burke. He brought his subjects along with him; he drew his materials from himself. The only limits which circumscribed his variety were the stores of his own mind. His stock of ideas did not consist of a few meagre facts, meagrely stated, of half a dozen common-places tortured in a thousand different ways: but his mine of wealth was a profound understanding, inexhaustible as the human heart, and various as the sources of nature. He therefore enriched every subject to which he applied himself, and new subjects were only the occasions of calling forth fresh powers of mind which had not been before exerted. It would therefore be in in vain to look for the proof of his powers in any one of his speeches or writings: they all contain some additional proof of power. In speaking of Burke, then, I shall speak of the whole compass and circuit of his mind—not of that small part or section of him which I have been able to give:¹ to do otherwise would be like the story of the man who put the brick in his pocket, thinking to show it as the model of a house. I have been able to manage pretty well with respect to all my other speakers, and curtailed them down without remorse. It was easy to reduce them within certain limits, to fix their spirit, and condense their variety; by having a certain quantity given, you might infer all the rest; it was only the same thing over again. But who can bind Proteus, or confine the roving flight of genius? …

… The only public man that in my opinion can be put in any competition with [Burke] is Lord Chatham:² and he moved in a sphere so very remote, that it is almost impossible to compare them. But though it would perhaps be difficult to determine which of them excelled most in his particular way, there is nothing in the world more easy to point out in what their peculiar excellences consisted. They were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Important Dates in the Life of Edmund Burke
• Short Titles
• Part One. Burke and the Literary Imagination
• Part Two. Burke and Revolution
• Part Three. Burke and Constitutional, Party Government
• Part Four. Burke and the Radical Mind
• Part Five. Burke and the Conservative Mind
• Bibliography
• Index