To lift the discussion to the height of a philosophical argument was reserved for William Godwin, a mind steeped in the French and English speculation of his century, gifted with rare powers of analysis, and inspired with a faith in human reason in general and his own logical capacity in particular, which no English mind before him or after him has approached. In spite of a lucid style and a certain cold eloquence which illumines if it does not warm, Godwin's Political Justice was dead before its author, while Burke lives and was never more widely read than to-day.
The ghosts of great men have an erratic habit in walking. It is passion rather than any mere intellectual momentum which drives them from the tomb. There is, moreover, in Burke a variety and a humanity which appeals in some one of its phases and moods to all of us in turn. The great store-house of his emotions and his phrases has the catholicity of the Bible. Each man can find in it what he seeks. He is like the luminous phantom which walked in Faust through the witcheries of the Brocken. Each man saw in her his own first love. He has been hero and prophet to Whigs and Tories, and in our own generation we have seen him bequeath an equal inspiration to a Cecil and a Morley. It is no part of our task to attempt even the briefest exposition of his philosophy; we are concerned with him here chiefly as an influence which helped by its vehemence and its superb rhetorical exaggerations to drive the revolutionary thinkers who answered him to parallel exaggerations and opposite extremes. Inspired himself with a distrust of generalisation, and a hatred of philosophers, he none the less evolved a philosophy as he talked. Against his will he was forced into the upper air in his furious pursuit of the "political aeronauts." His was a volcanic intellect which flung up principles in its moments of eruption, and poured them forth pell-mell with the vituperations and the exaltations.
No logical dissection can reach the inner truth of Burke. Every statement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured by the occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it is addressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by the subversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the French Revolution. It was in the process of "diffusing the Terror" that most of his philosophical obiter dicta were uttered. The real nerve of the thinking of a mind so vehement, so passionate, so essentially dramatic is to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise of his syllogisms, but in some pervading emotion. Fanny Burney said of him that when he spoke of the Revolution his face immediately assumed "the expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers." That is exactly the tone of all his later utterances. His mission was to spread panic because he felt it. By no other reading can one explain or excuse the rage of his denunciation of the excellent Dr. Price.
If his was philosophy it was philosophy seeing red. He predicted the Terror before it occurred, and by his work in stirring Europe to the coalition against France, he did much to realise his own forebodings. But, to do Burke justice, his was a disinterested fear, and it would be fairer to call it a hatred of cruelty. Burke was not a man to take fire because he thought a principle false. His was rather the practical logic which found a principle false because it led to evil; and the evil which caused his mind to blaze was nearly always cruelty. He hated the French philosophers because in the groves of their Academy "at the end of every vista you see nothing but the gallows." He pursued Rousseau and Dr. Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a maddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering.
To rouse Burke's genius to its noblest utterance, there must needs be a suffering which he could personify and dramatise. He saw nothing of the dull peasant misery which in truth explained the Revolution. He ignored those catalogues of injustice and wrong that composed the mandates (the cahiers) which the Deputies carried with them to the National Assembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he "pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird." But it is paradoxically true that while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he was always true. No abstract principle, but always this dominating passion, covers his inconsistencies, and bridges the gulf between his earlier Whiggery and his later Toryism. In the French Revolution he saw only cruelty, and he opposed it as he had opposed Indian Imperialism, negro slavery, the savage criminal justice of his day, and the penal laws against the Irish Catholics. Of Burke one must ask not so much What did he believe? as Whom did he pity?
It was the contrast of temperament and attitude which made the cleavage between Burke and the friends of the French Revolution deep and irreconcilable. In the fundamentals of political theory he often seems to agree with some of them, and they differ as often among themselves. Burke seems often to retain the typical eighteenth century fiction that the State is based on some original pact or social contract. That was Rousseau's starting point, and it was Godwin's work (after Hume) to shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been content to accept from Locke. There are passages in which Burke appears to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or as he put it, "primitive," rights of man. He reserved his contempt for those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question, what in the given emergency was best for the good of society, or the happiness of men. Paine, when he was in his more a priori moods, was capable of deducing his whole practical system from the abstract rights of man; Godwin was a modern in virtually dismissing the whole notion. While Burke was belabouring Dr. Price, he whittled away the whole theoretic significance of the English Revolution of 1688, but he remained its partisan. He tried to deny Dr. Price's claim to "choose our governors," but he could not relapse into the seventeenth-century Tory doctrine of non-resistance, and would always allow in extreme cases the right of rebellion. Here again there was no final opposition, for there are passages in Godwin against rash rebellion and the anarchy of revolution more impressive, if less emotional, than anything in Burke.
Modern criticism is disposed to base the greatness of Burke on his inspired anticipation of the historical view of politics. Quotation has made classical those noble passages which glorify the continuous life of mankind, link the present by a chain of pieties to the past, conjure up a glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of our ancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a real opposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of the historical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionary school despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knew nothing of history and cared less. But Godwin wrote history with success and even penned a remarkable essay (On Sepulchres) in which he anticipated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed a national scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory. Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the noblest character among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematic evolutionary interpretation of history.
But it makes some difference whether a man sees history from above or from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable altitude of the Whig aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw its inverse, from the standpoint of the "swinish multitude" (an angry indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine was a man of the people, and Godwin belonged by birth to the dissenting community for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution, illuminated by rebellion. For Burke the product of history was the sacred constitution in which he saw an "entailed heritage," the social fabric "well cramped and bolted together in all its parts." For Godwin it was mainly a chronicle of criminal wars, savage oppressions, and social misery. Burke, in a moment of paradoxical exaltation, was capable of singing the praises of "prejudice," which "renders a man's virtue his habit." For Condorcet, on the other hand, history was the orderly procession of the human mind, advancing through a series of well-marked epochs (he enumerated nine) from the pastoral state to the French Revolution, each epoch marked primarily by the shedding of some moral, social, or theological "prejudice," which had hampered its advance.
It is easy to criticise the naïve intellectualism of such a view as this, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causes of advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistorical view. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which "turn men's duties into doubts." The revolutionary school believed that all progress depended on the daring and thoroughness of these discussions. History for them was a continuous Socratic dialogue, in which the philosophers of innovation were always arrayed against the sophists of authority. They hoped everything from the leadership of the illuminated few who gradually permeate the mass and raise it with them. Burke held that "the individual is foolish, but the species is wise," and the "natural aristocracy" in whom he trusted was to keep the inert mass in a condition of stable equilibrium.
We retain from Burke to-day the sonorous generalisations, the epigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But to Burke's contemporaries they meant only one thing—a defence of the unreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order of providence, the "divine tactic" which had made society what it was, meant for them in bald prose that Old Sarum should have two members. Burke had not "a doubt that the House of Commons represents perfectly the whole commons of Great Britain." They, with no mystical view of history to guide them, pointed out that its electors were a mere handful of 12,000 in the whole population, and that Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford had not a Member among them. While Burke perorated about the ways of providence, they pointed to that auctioneer who put up for sale to the highest bidder the fee simple of the Borough of Gatton with the power of nominating two members for ever. That auctioneer is worth quoting: "Need I tell you, gentlemen, that this elegant contingency is the only infallible source of fortune, titles, and honours in this happy country? That it leads to the highest situations in the State? And that, meandering through the tempting sinuosities of ambition, the purchaser will find the margin strewed with roses, and his head quickly crowned with those precious garlands that flourish in full vigour round the fountain of honour? On this halcyon sea, if any gentleman who has made his fortune in either of the Indies chooses once more to embark, he may repose in perfect quiet. No hurricanes to dread; no tormenting claims of insolent electors to evade; no tinkers' wives to kiss.... With this elegant contingency in his pocket, the honours of the State await his plucking, and with its emoluments his purse will overflow."