No More Learning

'
Against these there can be no prescription; against these no argument is
binding: these admit no temperament and no compromise : anything withheld
from their fall demand is so much of fraud and injustice.
The paragraphs on the abstract rights of man and the inevitable
tendency of such a doctrine to identify right with power leads
Burke back again to Price and his exultation over the leading in
triumph of the king and queen from Versailles. And, thence, he
passes to an impassioned outburst on the spirit of the revolution,
the temper of those in whom the religion of the ‘rights of man' has
*vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart,' has cast out all
the sentiments of loyalty and reverence which constitute ‘the decent
drapery of life,' serving 'to cover the defects of our naked shivering
nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation. From these
two sections, on the rights of man’and the spirit of their devotees,
1 Burke had himself declared, in 1777, that 'to the free choice therefore of the
people, without either king or parliament, we owe that happy establishment, out of
which both king and parliament were regenerated. ' An Address to the King. This
was not published till after Burke's death.
>
:


## p. 22 (#44) ##############################################

22
[CH.
Edmund Burke
naturally flows all that follows—the vindication of prejudice, the
importance of religion in the state and defence of an established
church, the review of the progress of democratic tyranny in France
in the abolition of nobility and confiscation of the church and the
examination of the constitution set up by the Assembly—the
legislature, executive, judicature and army, their consistence with
the doctrine of the rights of man' and their probable doom.
To the charge of inconsistency which the publication of
Reflections and his speeches in the House brought upon him,
Burke replied in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs
(1791), published anonymously and written in the third person.
From a general defence of the consistency of his denunciation of
the French revolution with his defence of the American colonies
and proposals for economic reform, Burke proceeds to elaborate
his defence of the view he had put forward in Reflections of
the revolution of 1688, as preserving, not destroying, inherited,
prescriptive rights; and closes with an elaboration of his views on
the prescriptive, inherited character of all the institutions and
rights which constitute a state ; the involuntary, inherited nature
of all our most sacred ties and duties. Taken together, these two
pamphlets form the most complete statement of Burke's anti-
revolutionary philosophy, which his other writings on the subject
serve only to amplify and adorn.
It is in his attack on the abstract and individualistic doctrine of
the ‘rights of man' that Burke develops most fully this philosophy
of society, and breaks most decisively with the mechanical and
atomic political theory which, inherited from Locke, had dominated
the thought of the eighteenth century. Over against the view of
the state as the product of a 'contract' among individuals, whose
‘rights' exist prior to that contract, and constitute the standard
by which at every stage the just claim of society on the individual
is to be tested, he develops the conception of the individual as
himself the product of society, born to an inheritance of rights
(which are 'all the advantages' for which civil society is made)
and of reciprocal duties, and, in the last resort, owing these con-
crete rights (actual rights which fall short in perfection of those
ideal rights 'whose abstract perfection is their practical defect')
to convention and prescription. Society originates not in a free
contract but in necessity, and the shaping factor in its institutions
has not been the consideration of any code of abstract preexistent
rights (“the inherent rights of the people') but 'convenience. '
And, of these conveniences or rights, two are supreme, government
6


## p. 23 (#45) ##############################################

1]
His Political Philosophy
23
6
and prescription, the existence of “a power out of themselves
by which the will of individuals may be controlled,' and the
recognition of the sacred character of prescription. In whatever
way a particular society may have originated—conquest, usurpation,
revolution ('there is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings
of all government')-in process of time, its institutions and rights
come to rest upon prescription. In any ancient community such
as that of France or Britain, every constituent factor, including
what we choose to call the people, is the product of convention.
The privileges of every order, the rights of every individual, rest
upon prescription embodied in law or established by usage. This
is the compact or agreement which gives its corporate form and
capacity to a state,' and, if it is once broken, the people are
a number of vague, loose individuals and nothing more. Alas! they little
know how many & weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves
into a mass which has a true politic personality 1.
There is, therefore, no right of revolution, or rebellion at will.
The 'civil, social man' never may rebel except when he must
rebel. Revolution is always the annulment of some rights. It
will be judged in the last resort by the degree in which it
preserves as well as destroys, and by what it substitutes for what
it takes away. At its best, revolution is the extreme medicine of
the constitution,' and Burke's quarrel with the Assembly is that
they have made it 'its daily bread'; that, when the whole constitu-
tion of France was in their hands to preserve and to reform, they
elected only to destroy.
Burke's denunciation of the spirit or temper of the revolution
follows as naturally from his philosophy of the state as that from
the doctrine of the revolutionists. The rights of man' was a
religion, a fanaticism expelling every other sentiment, and Burke
meets it with a philosophy which is also a religion, no mere
theory of the state but a passionate conviction. He and the
revolutionists were at one in holding that there is a law, a principle
superior to positive law, by which positive law must be tested.
Had he not declared that there were positive rights which, in their
exercise, were the most odious of all wrongs, and the most
vexatious of all injustice'? But, whereas they sought this law in
abstract rights prior to, and independent of, the state, for Burke,
the essential condition of every 'right' is the state itself. There
can be no right which is incompatible with the very existence of
the state. Justice is not to be sought in or by the destruction of
1 An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.


## p. 24 (#46) ##############################################

24
[ch.
Edmund Burke
that which has given us the idea of justice, has made us the moral
beings we are, for it is the privilege of 'that wonderful structure
Man’ to be in a great degree the creature of his own making,
and 'He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue willed
also the necessary means of its perfection; He willed therefore the
state? ' The state is no mere prudential contract for material ends,
security of property and life (though these are its primary ends
and fundamental conditions); it is the partnership between men
from which has sprung science and art and virtue—all human
perfection; a partnership which links one generation to another,
the living to the dead and the unborn. It is more; ' each contract
of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval
contract of eternal society,' which is the law of God and ‘holds all
physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place. To
the religion of the natural man, Burke thus opposes the religion
of the state, of man as civilisation has made him, for ‘Art is man's
nature. ' The established church is the recognition of the sacred
character of the state. The prejudices and sentiments which
attach us to the community are not to be abolished by the con-
quering light of reason, but cherished as the very substance of the
moral reason. It is this thought which underlies Burke's defence
of prejudice. Following, as it does, the highly coloured threnody
on the fate of the queen of France and the decay of the senti-
ments of loyalty and chivalry, Burke has exposed himself to the
charge of identifying moral feeling with fleeting and artificial
sentiments. But this is only partly just. Burke does not really
confound the sentiments which adorn life with those which sustain
life, the draperies of the moral life with its flesh and blood. His
defence of prejudice against the claims of a fanatical abstract
reason is just such a recognition of the nature of moral reason as
that which turned Wordsworth from Godwin's 'political justice'
to the emotions and prejudices of the peasant.
To Burke, thus encountering the philosophy and fanaticism of
the French revolution with a deeper philosophy and an equal zeal,
war with France was a crusade ; and he pressed for it passionately
1 It must be admitted, too, that, at this stage, Burke is more disposed than when
he wrote the Tracts relative to the Laws against Popery (see the first quotation at p. 14),
or defended the American rebellion or the Irish 'revolution,' to identify the state with
the particular constitution of a concrete state, Britain or France; to refuse to consider
any claim of right' which is incompatible with this position which comes near to
denying any right of reform at all. It is against this view that Wordsworth protested
in his early Apology for the French Revolution. But it is a mistake to take this rejection
of reform as the cardinal artiole of Burke's political creed. His thought, in its whole
drift and content, has a deeper significance.
>


## p. 25 (#47) ##############################################

1] Letters on a Regicide Peace
a
25
before Pitt's hand was forced by the invasion of Holland.
The rest of Burke's life was mainly devoted to the crusade
against Jacobinism at home and abroad, and it is well to
understand what he understood by the term. It is not republi-
canism, nor even democracy, though it is, he seems to think, that
to which a pure democracy inevitably tends. Burke did not
believe that this country was at war with the French people, for
there was no French public. "The country is composed but of
two descriptions; audacious tyrants and trembling slaves. ' By
Jacobinism, he understood the tyranny of unprincipled and irre-
sponsible ability or talent talent divorced from religious awe and
all regard for individual liberty and property, supporting itself
by appealing to the passions and ignorance of the poor. This was
the character of the government of France as one set of rulers
succeeded another in what he calls 'the tontine of infamy, and
the war which it waged was a war of conquest essential to its own
existence. Peace with such a power could only be made on the
same conditions as it was to be made with the Saracens in the full
tide of conquest. This is the burden of the impassioned and lurid
Letters on a Regicide Peace (1797), which, like the denunciations
of Warren Hastings, tend to weary us, by the reiteration of shrill
vituperation, the want of coolness and balance of judgment. Burke
was, in himself, the counter-revolution,' and, as in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, excess begat excess.
This is not the place for a full discussion of Burke's treatment
of the French revolution. He died before any final issue was even
in sight. It might be urged, with some justice, that he was so
moved by the furious symptoms of the disease that he never
thoroughly gauged its deeper sources or foresaw the course it
must ultimately run, clearly as he did foresee its immediate issues.
It might be contended that, fleeing from one abstraction, he drew
near to another, and consecrated prescription, inherited right, when
judged and condemned by that expediency which is the sanction
of prescription. In a history of literature, it is more interesting
to note that he had not enough faith in his own principles ; for
the deficiency reveals the writer's temperament. Believing, as he
did, that society and the particular form which society has taken
is of divine origin, that in the history of a nation was revealed
the working of providence shaping the moral and spiritual being
of those who composed it, he is singularly fearful of the issue.
1 Letter to William Smith (1795) and the first of the Letters on a Regicide Peace
(1797).


## p. 26 (#48) ##############################################

26
[CH.
Edmund Burke
Was the British constitution which the political wisdom of
generations had shaped so wanting in elasticity that it could
endure no change, adapt itself to no new conditions? Could the
folly of the Assembly, the madness of the Terror, the cynical
corruption of the Directory undo, in a few years, the work
of centuries and permanently alter the character of the French
people? The France which emerged from the revolution was, in
all essential respects, De Tocqueville has argued, the France of
the ancien régime. What disappeared was already dead. In
the Code Napoléon, which embodied the legal outcome of the
revolution, law became the expression of settled national
character, not of every passionate and casual mood. '
We touch here on a trait of Burke's character which is
evident in his earliest pamphlet, the ironical reply to Bolingbroke,
the want of any sanguine strain in his mental constitution,
or, if one cares to put it so, of faith. Despite all that he had
said of the wisdom latent in prejudice ; despite the wonder and
admiration with which, in the speech On Conciliation, he con-
templated a people governing themselves when the machinery of
government had been withdrawn; the advent of democracy inspired
him with anxiety qualified neither by faith in the inherent good
sense and rectitude of human nature, nor by any confidence in
the durability of inherited sentiment and prejudice. Nothing, it
seemed to him, but the overruling providence of God could have
evolved from the weak and selfish natures of men the miracle of a
free state with all its checks and balances and adjustments to
the complex character and manifold wants of the physical and
spiritual nature of man; and, in a moment, the work of ages
might be undone, the 'nice equipoise' overset, the sentiments and
prejudices of ages destroyed, and 'philosophy' and 'Jacobinism’
be among us, bringing with them anarchy and the end of all
things. ' Nothing marks so clearly the interval between Burke's
temperament and that of the romantic revival as it is revealed in
Wordsworth. What Burke has of the deeper spirit of that move-
ment is seen not so much in the poetic imagery of his finest prose
as in the philosophical imagination which informs his conception
of the state, in virtue of which he transcends the rationalism of the
century. His vision of the growth of society, his sense of something
mysterious and divine at work in human institutions and preju-
dices, of something at once sacred and beautiful in the sentiments
of chivalrous loyalty and honour, in the stately edifice of the
British constitution with all its orders, in the ancient civilisation
>


## p. 27 (#49) ##############################################

1]
His Temperament
27
of India-all these have in them more than Sir Walter Scott's love
of a romantic and picturesque past. There is in them the same
mood of mind as is manifest in Wordsworth's sense of something
mysterious and divine in the life of nature and the emotions of
simple men, which links the eternal process of the stars to the
moral admonitions of the human heart. But there is a difference.
The illusion or faith, call it what one will, which made lyrical the
prose of Rousseau and inspired the youthful Wordsworth when he
hailed the French revolution as a new era in the history of the race,
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven,
was a stranger to Burke's mind; nor has the stoicism with
which he contemplates the successive defeat of all his under-
takings anything in common with the soberer optimism, the
cultivation of a steadfast hopefulness, which, in Wordsworth's
mind, succeeded to disillusionment, and rested on his faith in the
invincibility of the moral reason. Wordsworth the post-masters
did not remain a democrat, but Wordsworth the poet derived from
his early experiences of the peasantry a faith in human nature, in
those who go to make the people, which Burke's experience of
'the swinish multitude' at contested elections, and in Gordon riots,
never permitted to his reflective mind and sensitive temperament.
In his crusade against Jacobinism and a regicide peace, Burke
appealed to kings and nobles and the duty of a government to
guide the people; in continuing the crusade against Napoleon,
Wordsworth delighted to note that the firmest opposition came
from the peasantry of Spain and the Tyrol : ‘In the conduct of
this argument,' he writes, in The Convention of Cintra, 'I am not
speaking to the humbler ranks of society: it is unnecessary: they
trust in nature and are safe. '
This temper of Burke's mind is reflected in his prose. In
essential respects, in idiom, structure and diction, the prose of
Burke is that of his period, the second half of the eighteenth
century. To the direct, conversational prose of Dryden and Swift,
changed social circumstances and the influence of Johnson had
given a more oratorical cast, more dignity and weight, but, also,
more of heaviness and conventional elegance. From the latter faults,
Burke is saved by his passionate temperament, his ardent imagina-
tion and the fact that he was a speaker conscious always of his
audience. Burke loves a generalisation as much as Johnson, and his
generalisations are profounder, more philosophic, if, like Johnson's,


## p. 28 (#50) ##############################################

28
[CH.
Edmund Burke
us,
they begin in common sense. But Burke never fails to illuminate his Reni
generalisations by concrete and glowing imagery. And the splen- en
dour of his imagery, the nervous vigour of his style, its pregnancy, i
connect his prose with that of the great sixteenth and seventeenth
century writers, Hooker and Milton and Browne and Clarendon.
Though he does not abuse quotation, like some of the seventeenth titt
century writers, he employs it with great effect, weaving the day
quotation with consummate skill into the texture of his own prose: te
‘Old religious factions,' he says, speaking of the unitarians, “are volcanoes
burnt ont. But when a new fire breaks out. . . when men come before and
rise up like an exhalation from the ground, they come in a questionable shape,
and we must exorcise them, and try whether their intents be wicked or
charitable; whether they bring airs from Heaven or blasts from Hell.
What Burke's prose has not is the lyrical note of the, not
more imaginative, but more romantic, prose of Wordsworth and
Coleridge, of Carlyle and Ruskin ; the note, not of exaltation,
which was often Burke's mood, but of exultation, a mood with
which he never was acquainted.
A rapid review of the main causes which engaged Burke's
oratory has necessitated the omission in their proper places of one
or two speeches and writings which deserve notice in even a short
sketch. The quietest, the lightest in tone--if Burke's oratory can
ever be so described—is the speech on economical reform of
February 1780. It forms a point of rest between the earlier and
the later storms. In no other speech is Burke so content to be
simply persuasive, at times genial and amusing ; and the philo-
sophical colour of his mind, the tendency to elevate the discussion
of every point by large generalisations, the fruit of long study
and deep insight, gains a new interest from the absence of the
passion with which his wisdom is usually coloured or set aglow.
The exordium, after stating the end of his reforms to be not
merely economy but the reduction of corrupt influence, winds its
way into the subject by a skilful suggestion of the odium which
such proposals must excite and of the necessity which alone has
induced him to incur that odium-a necessity arising at once from
the dire straits in which the war has involved the nation's finances
and from the imperative demand of the people. The first con-
sideration is skilfully heightened by a reference to the reform of
French finances under Louis XVI and Necker-'The French have
imitated us; let us, through them, imitate ourselves; ourselves
in our better and happier days. ' The second is used to point the
difference in characteristic fashion between a timely and temperate,
第四
​TE


## p. 29 (#51) ##############################################

6
1] Speech on Economical Reform
29
and a late and violent, reform. The principles which have shaped
his proposals are then enunciated and the details elaborated with
a knowledge of the expedients and methods of finance which
justifies Burke's claim that he had made political economy an
object of his studies before it had employed the thoughts of
speculative men in other parts of Europe. ' And, at every turn, the
dry details of economy are illuminated by broad generalisations,
on not the economic only, but the moral, aspects of the question-
'Kings are naturally lovers of low company'—and by the colours
of a rich imagination, as in the description of the last relics of
feudal institutions :
Our palaces are vast inhospitable balls. There the bleak winds, there 'Boreas
and Eurus and Caurus and Argestes loud, howling through the vacant
lobbies, and clattering the doors of deserted guard-rooms, appal the imagination
and conjure up the grim spectres of departed tyrants—the Saxon, the Norman,
and the Dane; the stern Edwards and fierce Henries-who stalk from deso-
lation to desolation, through the dreary vacuity and melancholy succession
of chill and comfortless chambers.
Burke's humour, when not barbed and winged with scorn, is some-
what elephantine. The paragraph on the difficulties which beset
Lord Talbot's attempts to reform the Household from the fact that
'the turnspit in the king's kitchen was a member of Parliament'
is a good example of his over-elaborate, somewhat turgid art.
The peroration, on the other hand, on the will of the people
and the responsibility of the House to its constituents, with a
covert reference to the corrupt influence of the court, illustrates the
power of this diffuseness, this elaboration of the details of a figure,
to adorn a sentiment which comes warm from the speaker's heart :
Let us cast away from us, with a generous scorn, all the love-tokens and
symbols that we have been vain and light enough to accept;-all the bracelets
and snuff-boxes and miniature pictures, and hair devices, and all the other
adulterous trinkets that are the pledges of our alienation, and monuments of
our shame. Let us return to our legitimate home and all jars and quarrels
will be lost in embraces. . . . Let us identify, let us incorporate ourselves with the
people. Let us cut all the cables and snap the chains which tie us to an un-
faithful shore, and enter the friendly harbour that shoots far out into the
main its moles and jettees to receive us.
Fifteen years after this speech, the government of Pitt was
attacked for granting a pension to Burke, and, in accepting it, he
was said to have been false to the principles laid down by himself
on the subject of economy. The chief critics of the pension in
the House of Lords were the duke of Bedford and the earl of
Lauderdale. Burke replied in A Letter to a Noble Lord, the
finest example of his blended irony, philosophy, feeling and
>


## p. 30 (#52) ##############################################

30
C
Edmund Burke
[CH.
imagination. As a master of pure irony, Burke is surpassed
by Swift, who is at once more unscrupulous and less elaborate,
more inventive and venomous. Except when he had to deal
with those whom he regarded as the enemies of the human race,
the professors of the cannibal philosophy of France,' Burke
could never have attacked anyone with the venom with which
Swift assailed Wharton. It is the truth which gives such deadly
force to Burke's ironical description of the duke of Bedford, this
noble champion of the rights of man, as himself the creature, the
Leviathan, of royal favour and prescriptive right. Burke has but
to elaborate the fact with the art of the rhetorician, and to point
the contrast between the merits which earned these favours in the
ancestor of the house of Russell and the services which he himself
has rendered to his country and to the constitution on whose
preservation depends the security of all the duke of Bedford's
inherited property and privileges. The pamphlet is a masterpiece
of its kind, but is not untouched with the overelaboration of
Burke's later rhetoric when the perils of Jacobinism had become
something in the nature of a fixed idea.
Of the three chief means by which Cicero, following the Greeks,
declares that the orator achieves his end of winning over men's
minds, docendo,conciliando, permovendo, tradition and the evidence
of his works point to Burke's having failed chiefly in the second. He
could delight, astound and convince an audience. He did not easily
conciliate and win them over. He lacked the first essential and
index of the conciliatory speaker, lenitas vocis ; his voice was
harsh and unmusical, his gesture ungainly. The high qualities,
artistic and intellectual, of his speeches are better appreciated by
readers and students than by 'even the most illustrious of those
who watched that tall gaunt figure with its whirling arms, and
listened to the Niagara of words bursting and shrieking from those
impetuous lips? ' And, even in the text of his speeches there is a
strain of irony and scorn which is not well fitted to conciliate. Si
The most persuasive of all his speeches are the American ; yet, in
these too, there is comparatively little effort to start from the time
point of view of his audience, to soothe and flatter them, to win
them over by any artifice other than an appeal to the rare qualities
of wisdom and magnanimity. And, when he speaks at Bristol on
the eve of his rejection, the tone is the same, not egotistic or
arrogant, but quite unyielding in his defence of principles, quite
unsparing in his exposure of error and folly.
1 Johnson, Lionel, Postliminium, p. 261.
The
月​通
​Tisch
Set
ET


## p. 31 (#53) ##############################################

I] Character of his Eloquence
31
Of Burke's power permovendi animos, of the passionate
quality of his eloquence, there can be no question, yet here, too, it
is necessary to distinguish. We have evidence that he could do
both things on which Cicero lays stress—move his audience to
tears and delight them by his wit. In the famous speech on the
employment of Indian auxiliaries, he did both, the first by the
manner in which he told the story of the murder of a Scottish
girl on the eve of her marriage, the second by his parody of
Burgoyne's address to the Indians. Yet, neither pathos nor
humour is Burke's forte. His style wants the penetrating sim-
plicity which is requisite to the highest effects in pathos. His
tendency in the Indian speeches is to overelaboration ; his sensi-
bility carries him away. There is more of sublime pathos alike
in the image, and in the simplicity of the language in which it is
conveyed, in Bright's famous sentence on the Angel of Death than
in all that Burke ever wrote. Of irony and scorn, again, there is
abundance in Burke; of the cavillatio, the raillery which is
diffused through the speech, there are examples in all the chief
speeches ; but, of pure wit, which conciliates an audience by
delighting it, there is little or none in the speeches as we know
them, and Johnson would never admit that, in conversation, Burke's
wit was felicitous.
Burke's unique power as an orator lies in the peculiar inter-
penetration of thought and passion. Like the poet and the prophet,
he thinks most profoundly when he thinks most passionately.
When he is not deeply moved, his oratory verges towards the
turgid; when he indulges feeling for its own sake, as in parts
of Letters on a Regicide Peace, it becomes hysterical. But, in
his greatest speeches and pamphlets, the passion of Burke's mind
shows itself in the luminous thoughts which it emits, in the
imagery which at once moves and teaches, throwing a flood of
light not only on the point in question but on the whole neigh-
bouring sphere of man's moral and political nature. Such oratory
is not likely to be immediately effective. 'One always came away
from Burke with one's mind full,' Wordsworth declared ; but it
was necessary first to have a mind. The young men who jeered at
Burke and interrupted him did so because they could not under-
stand him ; and Pitt and Dundas found it unnecessary to reply to
the speech On the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. The successful orator
moves most safely among the topics familiar to his audience,
trusting for success to the art with which he adapts and adorns
them. But Burke combined the qualities of the orator with


## p. 32 (#54) ##############################################

32
[CH, I
Edmund Burke
POLIT
sich a
·
T Antaly
03 als
those of the seer, the logical architecture of western oratory
with qualities which we find in the Hebrew prophets—moral
exaltation, the union of dignity with trenchancy of language,
vehemence, imagery that ranges from the sublime to the de-
grading. As the accidents of his political career recede into
the distance we perceive more and more clearly for what he
stood. He is the enemy of the spirit of Macchiavelli and Hobbes,
which would exempt politics from the control of morality, and,
in so far, is at one with Rousseau and the revolutionists. But,
he is equally opposed to the new puritanism of the revolutionists,
which claimed in the eighteenth century, as the puritans claimed
in the sixteenth and seventeenth, to break in pieces the state
or church that they might reconstruct it after an abstract and
ideal pattern.
His attitude to the doctrinaires of the rights
of man’ is very similar to that of Hooker towards the followers
of Cartwright. Yet, the first opposition is the more funda-
mental of the two. He is the great champion of the control of
politics, domestic and foreign, by moral considerations. Philo-
sophy was not so much the foe of his latter days as Jacobinism ;
and Jacobinism was simply Macchiavellism come back to fill the
void which the failure of philosophy had created. It may be that,
in his defence of moral prejudices and inherited institutions, he
sometimes mistook the unessential for the vital; that his too
passionate sensibility rendered his conduct at times factious,
unjust and unwise. He brought into politics the faults as well as
the genius of a man of letters and a prophet. When all is said,
his is one of the greatest minds which have concerned themselves
with political topics, and, alike, the substance and the form of his
works have made him the only orator whose speeches have secured
for themselves a permanent place in English literature beside
what is greatest in our drama, our poetry and our prose. Of his
many literary and artist friends, Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds and
others, the foremost is Johnson. They differed radically in party
politics, but they were knit together by a practical philosophy
rooted in common sense and religious feeling.
ulichte
Te voy
DE
Team
1 The k
triumph
the
sritton
數值​:
is the


## p. 33 (#55) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
POLITICAL WRITERS AND SPEAKERS
THE growth and improvement of the daily newspaper, in itself
not a strictly literary event, had a natural and marked effect on
political literature. In some ways, that effect was merely tem-
porary. The supersession of the weekly essay, of The North
Briton type, by the effusions of the letter-writers of 1760—75 in
a genuine newspaperl was soon cancelled; for the newspapers
introduced a daily essay, the leading article, and letter-writers
sank into the subordinate rôle they have held ever since. But, in
political verse, a more permanent effect of the new conditions is
noticeable. In 1760, we have still the pamphlet-poem and the
decadent ballad. Some twenty years later, beside these there
flourishes an almost new form, that of light, short, satiric verse,
altogether slighter in immediate purpose and more playfully
teasing in its objects and manner than its predecessors. It has
flourished in the nineteenth century and has been marked by an
ever-increasing attention to form, ending in a lyric precision
surpassing, in some cases, that of serious poetry. For long,
however, this new kind of verse was barely aware of its own
existence, and wavered tentatively in methods and in choice of
models; and, as often happens, in its careless youth it possessed
a virility and fire not to be found in the perfected elegance of a
later day.
Its rise seems traceable to the year 1784. At that time, the
whigs were smarting under their utter rout in the recent general
election. The king, their enemy, was victorious : the youthful
Pitt was triumphant master of parliament; and revenge, though
trifting and ephemeral, was sweet. The whig lampooners, indeed,
were not without a serious object. The nation had ratified the
king's choice of an administration. The whigs were concerned to
show that the choice was wrong; and, in default of evidence
derived from the acts of Pitt's ministry, they were reduced to
i See vol. x, chap. XVII.
E, L, XI.
3
CH. II.


## p. 34 (#56) ##############################################

34
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
merely personal mockery of him and his followers. Ministers
were to be discredited by whig satire, if not by their own actions.
And a number of brilliant devotees of Fox formed themselves
into a club, Esto Perpetua, with the intent to mar the king's
success.
Someone hit on the happy idea of a mock review of a mock
epic, and thus Criticisms of the Rolliad began. The successive
numbers of this production appeared, from time to time, in
The Morning Herald, and won instantaneous popularity; when
collected in book-form, they ran through twenty-two editions.
Each number professed to be a commentary on a new epic that
had just appeared. This mythical composition, The Rolliad, took
its name from one of the chief butts of its wit, John Rolle, M. P.
for Devonshire, whose stolid toryism had latterly found vent in
an attempt to cough down Burke. He was provided with an
ancestor, the Norman duke Rollo, whose adventures were a
burlesque version of the Aeneid, and who, in due course (in the
sixth book), is shown by Merlin in the House of Commons amid
his party friends. The contemporary House of Lords, on the other
hand, is revealed to Rollo by the dying Saxon drummer whom he
has mortally wounded at Hastings. With the advent of fresh
matter for ridicule, fresh editions of the epic were feigned to
appear, and the topical insertions its author was supposed to
make were quoted in prompt reviews, till, at last, even the dying
drummer is allowed to die:
Ha! ha! —this soothes me in severest woe;
Ho! ho ! -ah! ah! -oh! oh! --ha! ah! -ho! -oh! ! !
Although their vivacity and wit, very different from Churchill's
solemn tirades and the steely passion of Junius, had captivated
the public, the authors of The Rolliad were too wise to overdo
a happy invention. After a while, they transferred their efforts
to another style of railing. This took the form of Political
Eclogues, where prominent ministerialists lament or strive in
rime after the fashion of the outspoken, yet literary, shepherds of
Vergil. The new vein, in its turn, was worked out, and was
succeeded by a series of Probationary Odes for the laureateship,
vacant by the death of Whitehead in 1785, and filled by the
appointment of Thomas Warton. The victims thus made to submit
specimen odes to the lord chamberlain were by no means chosen
from purely literary circles. Politicians and divines are bur-
lesqued together with poets of lesser rank. To be a supporter of
Pitt was a sufficient ground for the fathership of an ode, in which
>


## p. 35 (#57) ##############################################

11]
The Rolliad
35
the peculiarities of 'the author' were gaily ridiculed. All these
compositions had to submit to some sort of plan, epic, or collection
of eclogues and odes; but, naturally, were accompanied by a
number of scattered jeux d esprit which had no such bond of con-
nection between them. They were afterwards republished as
Political Miscellanies, and, never very amusing, grew duller and
feebler as the zeal of The Rolliad clique declined.
Not many of the members of the Esto Perpetua club, who took
part in this baiting, were of the first rank of politicians. Two
of them, and two only, were ex-ministers : general Richard
Fitzpatrick, man of fashion and intimate of Fox, whose cheerful
countenance' and 'gay voice' are curiously apparent in his
printed page, and Lord John Townshend, less jovial but quite as
witty. Of higher literary eminence was the antiquary George
Ellis, a harbinger, in his way, of the so-called romantic movement.
Other members were journalists, of whom Joseph Richardson was
the chief; wbile French Laurence was professor of civil law at
Oxford, and Richard Tickell a librettist of repute. The names
now appeal to few; the importance of The Rolliad's creators,
in spite of their ability, was as fugitive as their verses ; but,
working in unison, they obtained a collective interest otherwise
denied them.
Nice respects and goodnature were not to be expected and
not called for in the rough and tumble of political battle ; but
the vindictive feelings of the ousted whigs spurred them on, some-
times, to venomous railing and, sometimes, to scurrility, and it
is characteristic of The Rolliad that personalities and barbed
gossip not only abound but form nearly the whole of its matter.
One and all of its authors are irresistibly diverted from the
public demerits of their quarry to his mannerisms, his oddities
and his private life. Pitt's continence and the dissoluteness of
Dundas, the piety of one minister, the profanity of another, any.
thing personal, in fact, form the staple of the jokes. Yet it is
impossible not to relish the humorous satire of Ellis's critique
on Pitt's style of eloquence or the similar squib by Laurence:
crisply nice
The muffin-toast, or bread and butter slice,
Thin as his arguments, that mock the mind,
Gone, ere you taste,-no relish left behind.
A whole gallery of caricatured portraits comes before us, each
touched with party malice and etched with cypical knowledge.
342


## p. 36 (#58) ##############################################

36
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
On one occasion, for instance, Richardson explored the kitchen of
the parsimonious duke of Richmond:
Whether thou go'st while summer suns prevail,
To enjoy the freshness of thy kitchen's gale,
Where, unpolluted by luxurions heat,
Its large expanse affords a cool retreat.
It is one of the merits of The Rolliad to have abandoned the
tragedy airs and desperate wrath of the political satire that
immediately preceded it. Severe and rasping as are its flouts,
they seldom lose the tone of club-room pleasantry, and its rimed
heroics recall Gay’s Eclogues rather than the polished verse of
Pope. Being so much concerned with the personal foibles of
forgotten men, its lines, for the most part, fall flat on a later
generation, since they lack the finish which would make them
interesting. The exceptions, like Fitzpatrick's couplets on the
bishops,
Who, still obedient to their Maker's nod,
Adore their Sov'reign, and respect their God-
are few and far between. Very seldom is any squib complete in
the verse alone; they are supported by a less epigrammatic raillery
in the prose comment; which, however, for humour and sly fun,
not infrequently surpasses the satire it is supposed to criticise.
To nothing more, perhaps, was The Rolliad indebted for its
success than to the high spirits of its authors. They were gay;
they seem to accompany their jokes with an infectious laugh. In
consequence, the longer we read them, the more we fall into their
humour; and their thin voices seem to gather volume as one
after another takes up the theme and adds his quota to the
burlesque. This may be one reason why the five Political
Eclogues, in continuous verse and isolated in subject, have lost
their savour, with the exception of Fitzpatrick's immortal Lyars,
where two of Pitt's henchmen strive for the prize of mendacity.
But, in The Probationary Odes, all ringing changes on the same
caricature, they regain audience, whether it is George Ellis
scoffing :
Oh! deep unfathomable Pitt!
To thee Ierne owes her happiest days!
Wait a bit,
And all her sons shall loudly sing thy praise !
Ierne, happy, happy Maid!
Mistress of the Poplin trade!
1 Probably suggested by Dryden's line : “Cool were his kitchens though his brain
were hot. ” Absalom and Achitophel, 1, l. 621.


## p. 37 (#59) ##############################################

11]
Peter Pindar
37
or another of the club penning an Ossianic duan :
A song shall rise !
Every soul shall depart at the sound! ! !
The wither'd thistle shall crown my head! ! !
I behold thee, O King!
I behold thee sitting on mist! ! !
Thy form is like a watery cloud,
Singing in the deep like an oyster! ! ! !
This admirable fooling was succeeded by the still more
amusing drolleries of a clerical black sheep, whose real talent,
allied with certain respectable qualities, is obscured by his sordid
life and offensive compositions. Peter Pindar was the pseudonym
of John Wolcot, a country surgeon's son, who hovered during a long
life on the dubious confines of society and Bohemia. He began
his career as a physician, but, while well employed in Jamaica, was
ordained in the hope of a living. Later, when practising as a
.
doctor in his native county Cornwall, he discovered the painter
Opie, helped to train him and came with him to London in 1781.
He was to receive half Opie's profits, and they soon quarrelled.
Wolcot's good judgment in art and his skill in minor verse, how-
ever,
enabled him to make an income by a series of severe squibs
on the royal academicians. Thus, he was led to satirise their
patron, the king, and The Rolliad gave him the cue for further
achievements in the same style. In 1785, he scored considerable
success in his mock-heroic poem, The Lousiad, which now, at
least, reads very tediously. He followed this up, in 1787, by his
profitable Ode upon Ode; it had an enormous, and, in a way,
deserved, vogue. The absurdities of the yearly official ode-writing
and the painful vagaries, together with some real faults, of
George III were well known; and Wolcot, hampered by few
convictions and fewer scruples, found a ready market among in-
dignant whigs for his small scandal. What with legal threats and
negotiations for a pension, which broke down, he decided, in two
or three years, to choose less potent objects of attack; but he
found his profits dwindle, and returned to the king and Pitt in
1792. His powers, of no uncommon vigour at best, were, however,
waning; he was worsted by the surly Gifford, both in fisticuffs and
in abusive verse.
His later satire and his serious rimes were not
of any merit, and he subsisted on a fortunate sale of his copyrights.
When blindness overtook him, he displayed a stoical good humour,
which makes us regret that a musical, artistic man, of a 'kind
and hearty disposition,' played so scurvy a literary role.


## p. 38 (#60) ##############################################

38
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
Peter Pindar's verse is not of the kind that appears in antho-
logies, from which the immense length of his rambling drollery
tends to bar him out. Still, the nature of his talent is the chief
reason for his exclusion. He lacks altogether elect phrase,
musical rhythm and any charm of imagination or thought. He
sins constantly in baseness and vulgarity. As an imitator of La
Fontaine, whose irregular verse was his chief model, and as a
precursor of The Ingoldsby Legends, he takes a position of hope-
less inferiority. None the less, one cannot but admire his positive
.
ability. A mixture of good sense and mischievousness transpires
successfully through his elaborately roguish airs. His shrewd hits
at the king's stinginess and obtuseness went home. He is, perhaps,
the very best of English caricaturists in verse, reaching his highest
in his account of the royal visit to Whitbread's brewery!
In its kind, it was delicate work; the lines of his drawing are very
little out of their natural position; but the whole forms a glaring
comic exaggeration. Bozzy and Piozzi, the amoebean strife of
the two worshippers of Dr Johnson in rimed quotations from
their books, is another masterpiece in this style. Each absurdity
of his two victims is emphasised with an adroit legerdemain
of words, and Woleot, for once, suppresses his irritating snigger.
The pair are left to tell their own tale. Bozzy, for instance,
says:
But to return unto my charming child-
About our Doctor Johnson she was wild;
And when he left off speaking, she would flutter,
Squall for him to begin again, and sputter!
And to be near him a strong wish express'd,
Which proves he was not such a horrid beast.
As appears in this instance, Peter Pindar's strength lies in his
power of realising for his reader a comic situation; polished
epigram and the keener arrows of wit are not in his quiver. He
loves to slip one or two sly colloquialisms into verses written in
the formal eighteenth century style, and, thus, brings out the
broad fun of his conceptions. But his tricky method could only
secure a temporary success; and, since his humour was not many-
sided and depended on one or two foibles in his subject, he lost
his hold on the public, when his lucky pocket of ore was exhausted.
Nor could the scolding, dull invective, to which he then resorted,
restore his popularity in an age that, after 1789, became engrossed
in greater matters than the tattle of the servants' hall at Windsor.
1 Instructions to a celebrated Laureat.


## p. 39 (#61) ##############################################

11]
The Anti-Jacobin
39
The French revolution was essentially a proselytising move-
ment. Republicanism, liberty, equality and fraternity, became a
kind of creed, which was zealously propagated by pen and sword.
Thus, the opposition to it in England was, at the same time, an
effort to maintain the ancient social order, with its ideals and
institutions, and a struggle to preserve national independence from
the universal aggressions of the new France. And the champion
of both endeavours was the younger Pitt. The times seemed to
grow more and more dangerous. In 1797, cash payments were sus-
pended at the Bank of England ; seamen were mutinying at the
Nore; Ireland was seething with discontent; the French arms were
victorious against their continental foes; while, in England itself,
a violent revolutionary propaganda was being carried on, which,
if it were more potent in appearance than in real significance, might
still decoy the younger generation. It was to combat this propa-
ganda and to hearten the national resistance that George Canning,
Pitt's ablest lieutenant, founded his periodical, The Anti-Jacobin.
The new journal, in addition to the customary contents of a news-
paper, was to contradict systematically the statements of the
other side, to ridicule any prominent person well-disposed towards
the revolution, and to hold up to honour the old ideals of English
polity. These objects it fulfilled. In contrast to its trivial pre-
decessors, The Anti-Jacobin breathed a proud conviction and a
religious fervour which lift it above mere party polemics. It is,
indeed, bigoted in tone; for was it not fighting in the cause of
righteousness and human happiness? To its authors, the favourers
of the revolution are miscreants whom it is necessary to pillory and
deride, and thus to render harmless. They themselves are confessors
of the true political faith.
The men who wrote this fiery periodical may surprise us by
their mundane character. There was the many-sided, brilliant
Canning, then in the heyday of his youth; George Ellis, the
amiable antiquary, by this time, a fervent tory and repentant of
The Rolliad ; and John Hookham Frere, the ideal of a cultivated
country gentleman, whose striking literary achievement it was to
introduce the satiric Italian epic into English. The editor was
a man of literary mark, William Gifford. No one, perhaps, of
the tribe of poor authors has gone through a more bitter struggle
than his with the obstacles and misfortunes in his way, although
they were not spread over a long term of years. He was the son
of a ne'er-do-well, whose main occupation was that of a glazier at
Ashburton in Devonshire. After a miserable boyhood, obsessed


## p. 40 (#62) ##############################################

40
[CH.
Political Writers and Speakers
w
.
by a passionate and seemingly hopeless desire for learning amid
the handicraft work to which he was forced, he was befriended by
William Cookesley, a surgeon, and sent to Oxford by subscription.
While there, he came to the notice of earl Grosvenor, and was
appointed travelling tutor to his son. He was able to make
something of a name, in 1794 and 1795, by his mediocre satires,
The Baviad and The Maeviad, directed against the ridiculous Della
Cruscan school of poets and the small dramatic fry of the day.
Although their merit was not great, his ample quotations from his
victims made his conquest easy. When The Anti-Jacobin was set
on foot, his sledge-hammer style and industry made him a fit editor
for it; but he was mainly concerned with its prose. He did his task
well, and, when The Quarterly Review was started in 1809, he
was selected as its editor, a post he occupied for fifteen years, in
despotic fashion, even finding it in his heart to mutilate an essay
by Lamb. Meanwhile, he did yeoman service to literature by
his translation of Juvenal in 1802 and by some editions of
older English dramatists. Sound common-sense redeems his
commonplace ability, while his sour, fierce criticisms find an ex-
planation in his early hardships and constant ill-health. He
seems to have written verse because it was, then, a regular
accomplishment of literary men.
Even in its own day, The Anti-Jacobin was chiefly notable for
its poets' corner, which contained the best political satire since
the age of Dryden. The greater part of these compositions
developed their wit in some form or another of parody. Jacobins
were supposed to write them-Jacobins, who always preferred the
most blatant version of extreme opinions. As usual, the idea was
not quite new. The Rolliad had feigned to be the work of
a ministerialist, and there was an element of parody in Political
Eclogues and in Probationary Odes, although the veil was
exceedingly conventional. Now, in The Anti-Jacobin, caustic
parody was the essence of the satire. Among the earliest
victims was the later tory poet laureate, Southey, who was just
recovering from a severe attack of revolutionary fever. His
conversion did not influence Canning and Frere, if they knew of
it, and to their hostility we owe the verses among which The
Needy Knife-grinder stands chief. Southey's sentimentalism and
his halting accentual sapphics and dactylics were mercilessly
imitated and surpassed. It was not only parody and ridicule
of a particular victim, but humorous mockery of a type of
in
12
lopet
1 See post, chap. VIII.
Women
nh
ins


## p. 41 (#63) ##############################################

6
11]
The Anti-Jacobin
41
thought, and, as such, has continued to live by reason of its
admirable combination of inventive power, metre, phrase and
artful contrast:
Weary Knife-grinder! Little think the proud ones,
Who in their coaches roll along the turnpike-
road, what hard work 'tis crying all day ‘Knives and
Scissars to grind 0! '
The scholarly négligé of the form, the whimsical plight of the
unlucky knife-grinder and the comedy of his 'hard work’ make us
indifferent to the temporary politics which inspired this immortal
skit.
More body, if less bouquet, is to be found in two longer
contributions. It was a time when the genuine muse had retired
to her 'interlunar cave,' and massive didactic poems enjoyed a
transitory reign. Two authors of note took the lead, Richard
Payne Knight and Erasmus Darwin? Both were philosophes
in their opinions and broached a variety of doctrines most
obnoxious to The Anti-Jacobin. And, however invulnerable to
attack they might be in their serious work, they were mortal
in their verse. Knight's Progress of Civil Society was pompous
and humourless; Darwin's machine-turned couplets glittered with
a profusion of inappropriate poetical trappings. Knight's turn
came first. The Progress of Man traced, with mischievous assur-
ance, the decline of the human race from the days of the blameless
savage, who fed 'on hips and haws. '
Man only,-rash, refined, presumptuous man,
Starts from his rank, and mars creation's plan.
Born the free heir of nature's wide domain,
To art's strict limits bounds his narrow'd reign;
Resigns his native rights for meaner things,
For faith and fetters-laws, and priests, and kings.
Darwin's Loves of the Plants was taken off as The Loves of the
Triangles. The merit of both these parodies consists, not only
in their sparkling wit, but in their genuine exaggeration of the
original authors' foibles. They are not a forced, ridiculous echo;
only the real traits are accentuated to caricature.
Burlesque of the same high rank appears in The Rovers. This
delicious mock-play parodies certain productions of the German
drama, then only beginning to be known in England by trans-
lations. Like its fellow-satires, it derived assistance from the
extravagances to be found in some of the works it derided. These
extravagances differed from one another in kind as well as in degree;
1 See post, chap. VIII.


## p. 42 (#64) ##############################################

42
[ch.
Political Writers and Speakers
-
. .
but Goethe, Schiller and Kotzebue seemed alike fair game to the
satirist, and the result was a spirited farce, which has remained
amusing long after the close of the literary controversy which
was its occasion.
The series of parodies surpass the other poetry of The Anti-
Jacobin in that they were perfect in their kind. None the less,
in absolute merit, they fall behind its most serious piece, The
New Morality. In 1798, The Anti-Jacobin had done its office of
cheapening and discrediting the revolutionary propagandists, and
its gall and licence of satire were in danger of alienating less
fervent supporters. So it was decided to cease its publication.
Canning gathered together all his power for a final, crushing blow.
With but little assistance from his friends, he composed a formal
satire in the manner of Churchill ; and, although The New
Morality is hardly the work of a great poet, yet its sincerity
of passionate conviction, no less than its admirable rhetoric and
skilful versification, raises it above the ill-formed genius of its
model. Canning was not a cosmopolitan philosopher; he was
full of insular patriotism, and produced his best when giving full-
hearted expression to it. From his sneering contempt of sympa-
thisers with France and of halfhearted—perhaps impartial-
*candid friends' of the ministry, he rises, through fierce denun-
ciatory scorn of the French publicists, to an appeal to maintain
the older England of law and right. Burke is his prophet :
Led by thy light, and by thy wisdom wise ;
he urges the claims of the native past
гу:
Guard we but our own hearts; with constant view
To ancient morals, ancient manners true;
True to the manlier virtues, such as nerv'd
Our fathers' breasts, and this proud isle preserv'd
For many a rugged age: and scorn the while
Each philosophic atheist's specious guile;
The soft seductions, the refinements nice,
Of gay Morality, and easy Vice;
So shall we brave the storm; our 'stablish'd pow'r
Thy refuge, EUROPE, in some happier hour.
Thus, The Anti-Jacobin, at its close, bade farewell to the bur-
lesque spirit which had guided political satire since the days of
The Rolliad. The utmost in that style of writing-after all, not
a lofty style, not an important species of literature—had been
achieved, and the exhausted wave drew back again. Canning's
own subsequent political verse, scanty in quantity as it was, never


## p. 43 (#65) ##############################################

11] William Godwin & Mary Wollstonecraft 43
attained the excellence of his contributions to his famous news-
paper; and the successors to The Anti-Jacobin, which borrowed
its title, were unable to supply verse of real merit.