William Pitt and national revival

by J. Holland Rose

All this was very pleasing; but it could only end in bitter estrangement when France was found to be concerned, not with “preventing a Revolution” (as Burke finely showed that England did in 1688[902]), but in carrying through with unimaginable zeal a political overturn, along with social, religious, and agrarian changes of the most drastic kind. This was evident enough even by the summer of 1790. Feudalism had been swept away root and branch; copy-holders had become freeholders; the old taxes were no more—and none had definitely taken their place; titles of nobility were abolished; and the Assembly declared war on the discipline and on one of the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church. Well might Burke stand aghast and declare that this cataclysm had little or nothing in common with the insular, conservative, and constitutional efforts of Englishmen a century before.

Strange to say, the defects of his book arose largely from his underrating the differences between the two movements. In his eagerness to preserve Englishmen from the risk of hazily sympathizing with French democracy, he inveighed against the new doctrines with a zeal that was not always born of knowledge. Forgetting his earlier adage respecting America—“I will never draw up an indictment against a whole people”—he sought to convict Frenchmen of fickleness and insanity. He calls the Revolution “this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies”; and he even ventured to prophesy that in France learning would be “trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.” Coming nearer to facts, he took the French to task for not repairing their old constitution. He likened it to a venerable castle in which some of the walls and all the foundations were still in existence, and added the surprising statement—“you had the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished.”

Here Burke went wholly astray. A constitution, which gave to the King a power limited only by the occasional protests of the Paris and other “Parlements”; under which the States-General (at best little more than an advisory body) had not been summoned for 175 years; which assigned to the “Tiers Etat” only one third of the legislative power and no control over the executive, though the Commons of France paid nearly all the taxation; and which promised to perpetuate the old division into three classes,—such a constitution was merely an interesting blend of the principles of Feudalism and Absolute Monarchy, but could never satisfy a nation which had listened to Voltaire and given its heart to Rousseau. Sir Philip Francis, with his usual incisiveness, pointed out to Burke that the French could not act as we did in 1688, for they had no constitution to recur to, much less one that was “very nearly as good as could be wished.”

In truth, Burke did not know France. Hence his work is of permanent value only where he praises English methods and launches into wise and noble generalizations. For his own people it will ever be the political Book of Proverbs. His indictments against the French people in the main flew over their heads. On most insufficient knowledge he ventured on sweeping assertions which displayed the subtlety and wide sweep of his thought, but convinced only those who did not know the difficulties besetting the men of 1789. Nevertheless, as readers are influenced far more by emotion than by close and exact reason, the vast majority were carried away by the rush of feeling of that mighty soul; and hence in the view of a philosophic monarchist like Dumont, the publication of the “Reflections” was destined to be “the salvation of Europe.” Certainly it was the first noteworthy effort of a literary man to stem the tide of democracy; and if the writer had advocated a practicable scheme for saving the French monarchy—say, on the lines of that of Mirabeau—he would have rendered an inestimable service. As it was, even the voice of a genius failed to convince the French people that they must build their new fabric on the lines laid down by Philip the Fair and Louis the Fourteenth.

While the “Reflections” caused little but irritation in France, they also worked some harm in England. Readers by the thousand were captivated by the glamour of Burke’s style, and became forthwith the sworn foes of the persecutors of Marie Antoinette. The fall of that erstwhile “morning star, full of life and splendour and joy,” involved in one common gloom the emotions and the reason of Britons. “It is the noblest, deepest, most animated and exalted work that I think I have ever read.” So wrote Fanny Burney. The superlatives are significant. Thenceforth events in France were viewed through the distorting medium of a royalist romance. The change was fatal in every way. England, which heretofore had guardedly sympathized with the French reformers, now swung round to antagonism; and the French princes who at Turin and Coblentz were striving to frame a Coalition against their native land, saw in fancy John Bull as the paymaster of the monarchist league, with Burke as the chief trumpeter.

In truth the great writer ran some risk of sinking to this level. He became the unofficial representative of the French princes in this country, while his son, Richard Burke, proceeded to Coblentz to work on behalf of that clamorous clique. Memoir after memoir appeared from the pen of Burke himself. Now it was a protest, purporting to emanate from George III, against despoiling the French monarchy of all its rights, and asserting that, if this caution were unheeded, our ambassador would leave Paris.[903] Now again it was a memorandum of advice to the Queen of France, urging her to have nothing to do with traitors (i.e., reformers), to maintain an attitude of silent disdain of their offered help, and, above all, to induce her consort to refuse the new democratic constitution.[904] Fortunately neither of these documents went beyond the doors of Burke’s study; but they survive as curious proofs of his now distracted mood.

It was the misfortune of Burke at this time that majesty of diction deserted him at Westminster, where his speeches and demeanour bore the imprint of petulance and sourness. This appeared most painfully in the famous scene which marked his severance from Fox. It occurred during the debates on the Canada Bill in the spring of 1791. The preoccupation of men’s minds with the French constitution, then slowly taking shape, had been apparent in the course of the session. Fox had often dragged in the subject to express his warm sympathy with the democrats of Paris, and now desired to assimilate the Canada Bill somewhat to the French model. To this Burke offered vehement opposition, out-doing Fox in iteration. On 6th May, when the subject at issue was Canada, he defied the rules of the House by speaking solely on France. Six times he was called to order. Still he went on, in more and more heated tones, until he crowned his diatribe with the declaration that the difference between him and his friend involved an end of their connection; for with his latest words he would exclaim: “Fly from the French Constitution.” Fox here whispered to him: “There is no loss of friends.” “Yes,” retorted Burke, “there is a loss of friends; I know the price of my conduct; I have done my duty at the price of my friend; our friendship is at an end.” A little later, when Fox rose to reply, words failed him and tears trickled down his cheeks.[905] No scene in Parliament in that age produced so profound an emotion. It deepened the affection felt for that generous statesman; while the once inspiring figure of Burke now stood forth in the hard and repellent outlines of a fanatic.

Far better would it have been had he confined himself to the higher domains of literature, where he was at home. His “Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” which appeared in July 1791, is a great and moving production; and his less known “Thoughts on French Affairs” (December 1791) is remarkable for its keen insight into the causes that made for disruption or revolt in the European lands, not even excluding Great Britain.[906] In this one respect Burke excelled Pitt, just as nervous apprehension will detect dangers ahead that are hidden from the serene gaze of an optimist. Wilberforce judged Pitt to be somewhat deficient in foresight;[907] and we may ascribe this defect to his intense hopefulness and his lack of close acquaintance with men in this country and, still more, on the Continent. Burke found that both the Prime Minister and Grenville had not the slightest fear of the effect of revolutionary ideas in this Kingdom “either at present or at any time to come.”[908] Here Burke was the truer prophet. But how could Pitt sift the wise from the unwise in the copious output of Burke’s mind? They mingle so closely as to bewilder the closest observer even now, when the mists of passion enveloping those controversies have partly cleared away. Sentiment palpitated visibly in all Burke’s utterances; and the teachings of the philosopher were lost amidst the diatribes of the partisan.

In fact, it was difficult for a practical statesman to take the orator seriously. In April 1791 he had furiously attacked Pitt’s Russian policy; and, as we have seen, the differences between them were more than political, they were temperamental. No characteristic of Pitt is more remarkable than the balance of his faculties and the evenness of his disposition. No defect in Burke’s nature is more patent than his lack of self-control, to which, rather than to his poverty, I am inclined to ascribe his exclusion from the Whig Cabinets. Irritability in small things had long been his bane; and now to the solution of the greatest problem in modern history he brought a fund of passion and prejudice equal to that of any of the French émigrés who were pestering the Courts of Europe to crush the new ideas by force.

Yet, however much Pitt mistrusted Burke the politician, he admired him as a writer; so at least we gather from a somewhat enigmatical reference in Wilberforce’s diary. “22nd November (1790): Went to Wimbledon—Dundas, Lord Chatham, Pitt, Grenville, Ryder. Much talk about Burke’s book. Lord Chatham, Pitt and I seemed to agree: contra, Grenville and Ryder.”[909] If this entry be correct, Wilberforce and Grenville were destined soon to change their opinions. It may be that Pitt and Wilberforce agreed with Burke owing to their dislike of the iconoclastic methods of the French democrats, and that Grenville’s cold nature was repelled by the sentimentalism of the book.