Mere literature, and other essays

by Woodrow Wilson

The company Burke kept was as singular as his talents, though scarcely so eminent. We speak of “Burke,” but the London of his day spoke of “the Burkes,” meaning William, who may or may not have been Edmund’s kinsman, Edmund himself, and Richard, Edmund’s younger brother, who had followed him to London to become, to say truth, an adventurer emphatically not of the elevated sort. Edmund was destined to become the leader of England’s thought in more than one great matter of policy, and has remained a master among all who think profoundly upon public affairs; but William was for long the leader and master of “the Burkes.” He was English born; had been in Westminster School; and had probably just come out from Christ Church, Oxford, when he became the companion of Edmund’s wanderings. He was a man of intellect and literary power enough to be deemed the possible author of the “Letters of Junius;” he was born moreover with an eye for the ways of the world, and could push his own fortunes with an unhesitating hand. It was he who first got public office, and it was he who formed the influential connections which got Edmund into Parliament. He himself entered the House at the same time, and remained there, a useful party member, for some eight years. He made those from whom he sought favors dislike him for his audacity in demanding the utmost, and more than the utmost, that he could possibly hope to get; but he seems to have made those whom he served love him with a very earnest attachment. He was self-seeking; but he was capable of generosity, to the point of self-sacrifice even, when he wished to help his friend. He early formed a partnership with Richard Burke in immense stock-jobbing speculations in the securities of the East India Company; but he also formed a literary partnership with Edmund in the preparation of a sketch of the European settlements in America, and made himself respected as a strong party writer in various pamphlets on questions of the day. He could unite the two brothers by speculating with the one and thinking with the other.

Such were “the Burkes.” Edmund’s home was always the home also of the other two, whenever they wished to make it so; the strongest personal affection, avowed always by Edmund with his characteristic generous warmth, bound the three men together; their purses they had in common. Edmund was not expected, apparently, to take part in the speculations which held William and Richard together; something held him aloof to which they consented,—some natural separateness of mind and character which they evidently accepted and respected. There can hardly be said to have been any aloofness of disposition on Edmund’s part. There is something in an Irishman,—even in an Irishman who holds himself to the strictest code of upright conduct,—which forbids his acting as moral censor upon others. He can love a man none the less for generous and manly qualities because that man does what he himself would not do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all his life about accepting money favors. He seems to have felt somehow that his intense and whole-hearted devotion to his friends justified gifts and forgiven loans of money from them. He shared the prosperity of his kinsmen without compunction, using what he got most liberally for the assistance of others; and when their fortunes came to a sudden ruin, he helped them with what he had. We ought long ago to have learned that the purest motives and the most elevated standards of conduct may go along with a singular laxness of moral detail in some men; and that such characters will often constrain us to love them to the point of justifying everything that they ever did. Edmund Burke’s close union with William and Richard does not present the least obstacle to our admiration for the noble qualities of mind and heart which he so conspicuously possessed, or make us for a moment doubt the thorough disinterestedness of his great career.

Burke’s marriage was a very happy one. Mrs. Burke’s thoroughly sweet temperament acted as a very grateful and potent charm to soothe her husband’s mind when shaken by the agitations of public affairs; her quiet capacity for domestic management relieved him of many small cares which might have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied his ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as “my entirely beloved and incomparable wife,” and every glimpse we get of their home life confirms the estimate. After his marriage the most serious part of his intellectual life begins; the commanding passion of his mind is disclosed. He turns away from philosophical amusements to public affairs. In 1757 appeared “An Account of the European Settlements in America,” which William Burke had doubtless written, but which Edmund had almost certainly radically revised; and Edmund himself published the first part of “An Abridgment of the History of England” which he never completed. In 1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher, a yearly volume, to be known as the “Annual Register,” which should chronicle and discuss the affairs of England and the Continent. It was the period of the Seven Years’ War, which meant for England a sharp and glorious contest with France for the possession of America. Burke was willing to write the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred pounds; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the “Annual Register” appeared; and the plan then so wisely conceived has yielded its annual volume to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his connection with this great work,—he never publicly recognized anything he had done upon contract for the publishers,—but it is quite certain that for very many years his was the presiding and planning mind in the production of the “Register.” For the first few years of its life he probably wrote the whole of the record of events with his own hand. It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in philosophy. It gave him an intimate acquaintance with affairs which must have served as a direct preparation for the great contributions he was destined to make to the mind and policy of the Whig party.

But this, even in addition to other hack work for the booksellers, did not keep Burke out of pecuniary straits. He sought, but failed to get, an appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest of Dr. Markham, William’s master at Westminster School; and then he engaged himself as a sort of private secretary or literary attendant to William Gerard Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to the almost entire exclusion of all other employments, for some four years, going with him for a season to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held the appointment of Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. Hamilton is described by one of Burke’s friends as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile,” and Mr. Morley says that there is “not a word too many nor too strong in the description.” At any rate, Burke’s proud spirit presently revolted from further service, and he threw up a pension of three hundred pounds which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than retain any connection with the man, or remain under any sort of obligation to him. In the mean time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put him in the way of meeting many public men of weight and influence, and he had gotten his first direct introduction to the world of affairs.

It was 1764 when he shook himself free from this connection. 1764 is a year to be marked in English literary annals. It was in the spring of that year that that most celebrated of literary clubs was formed at the Turk’s Head Tavern, Gerrard Street, Soho, by notable good company: Dr. Johnson, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Gibbon, Dr. Barnard, Beauclerk, Langton,—we know them all; for has not Boswell given us the freedom of the Club and made us delighted participants in its conversations and diversions? Into this company Burke was taken at once. His writings had immediately attracted the attention of such men as these, and had promptly procured him an introduction into literary society. His powers told nowhere more brilliantly than in conversation. “It is when you come close to a man in conversation,” said Dr. Johnson, “that you discover what his real abilities are. To make a speech in an assembly is a sort of knack. Now I honor Thurlow; Thurlow is a fine fellow, he fairly puts his mind to yours.” There can be no disputing the dictum of the greatest master of conversation: and the admirer of Burke must be willing to accept it, at any rate for the nonce, for Johnson admitted that Burke invariably put him on his mettle. “That fellow,” he exclaimed, “calls forth all my powers!” “Burke’s talk,” he said, “is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full; he is never humdrum, never unwilling to talk, nor in haste to leave off.” The redoubtable doctor loved a worthy antagonist in the great game of conversation, and he always gave Burke his ungrudging admiration. When he lay dying, Burke visited his bedside, and, finding Johnson very weak, anxiously expressed the hope that his presence cost him no inconvenience. “I must be in a wretched state indeed,” cried the great-hearted old man, “when your company would not be a delight to me.” It was short work for Burke to get the admiration of the company at the Turk’s Head. But he did much more than that: he won their devoted affection. Goldsmith said that Burke wound his way into a subject like a serpent; but he made his way straight into the hearts of his friends. His powers are all of a piece: his heart is inextricably mixed up with his mind: his opinions are immediately transmuted into convictions: he does not talk for distinction, because he does not use his mind for the mere intellectual pleasure of it, but because he also deeply feels what he thinks. He speaks without calculation, almost impulsively.

That is the reason why we can be so sure of the essential purity of his nature from the character of his writings. They are not purely intellectual productions: there is no page of abstract reasoning to be found in Burke. His mind works upon concrete objects, and he speaks always with a certain passion, as if his affections were involved. He is irritated by opposition, because opposition in the field of affairs, in which his mind operates, touches some interest that is dear to him. Noble generalizations, it is true, everywhere broaden his matter: there is no more philosophical writer in English in the field of politics than Burke. But look, and you shall see that his generalizations are never derived from abstract premises. The reasoning is upon familiar matter of to-day. He is simply taking questions of the moment to the light, holding them up to be seen where great principles of conduct may shine upon them from the general experience of the race. He is not constructing systems of thought, but simply stripping thought of its accidental features. He is even deeply impatient of abstractions in political reasoning, so passionately is he devoted to what is practicable, and fit for wise men to do. To know such a man is to experience all the warmer forces of the mind, to feel the generous and cheering heat of character; and all noble natures will love such a man, because of kinship of quality. All noble natures that came close to Burke did love him and cherish their knowledge of him. They loaned him money without stint, and then forgave him the loans, as if it were a privilege to help him, and no way unnatural that he should never return what he received, finding his spirit made for fraternal, not for commercial relations.

It is pleasing, as it is also a little touching, to see how his companions thus freely accorded to Burke the immunities and prerogatives of a prince amongst them. No one failed to perceive how large and imperial he was, alike in natural gifts and in the wonderful range of his varied acquirements. Sir James Mackintosh, though he very earnestly combated some of Burke’s views, intensely admired his greatness. He declared that Gibbon “might have been taken from a corner of Burke’s mind without ever being missed.” “A wit said, of Gibbon’s ‘Autobiography’ that he did not know the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has narrated his ‘progressions from London to Buriton and from Buriton to London’ in the same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” And we certainly feel a sense of incongruity: the two subjects, we perceive, are hardly commensurable. Perhaps in Burke’s case we should have felt differently,—we do feel differently. In that extraordinary “Letter to a Noble Lord,” in which he defends his pension so proudly against the animadversions of the Duke of Bedford, how magnificently he speaks of his services to the country; how proud and majestic a piece of autobiography it is! How insignificant does the ancient house of Bedford seem, with all its long generations, as compared with this single and now lonely man, without distinguished ancestry or hope of posterity! He speaks grandly about himself, as about everything; and yet I see no disparity between the subject and the manner!

Outside the small circle of those who knew and loved him, his generation did not wholly perceive this. There seemed a touch of pretension in this proud tone taken by a man who had never held high office or exercised great power. He had made great speeches, indeed, no one denied that; he had written great party pamphlets,—that everybody knew; his had been the intellectual force within the group of Whigs that followed Lord Rockingham,—that, too, the world in general perceived and acknowledged; and when he died, England knew the man who had gone to be a great man. But, for all that, his tone must, in his generation, have seemed disproportioned to the part he had played. His great authority is over us rather than over the men of his own day.

Burke had the thoughts of a great statesman, and uttered them with unapproachable nobility; but he never wielded the power of a great statesman. He was kept always in the background in active politics, in minor posts, and employed upon subordinate functions. This would be a singular circumstance, if there were any novelty in it; but the practice of keeping men of insignificant birth out of the great offices was a practice which had “broadened down from precedent to precedent” until it had become too strong for even Burke to breast or stem. Perhaps, too, there were faults of temper which rendered Burke unfit to exercise authority in directing the details, and determining the practical measures, of public policy:—but we shall look into that presently.

In July, 1765, the Marquis of Rockingham became prime minister of England, and Burke became his private secretary. He owed his introduction to Lord Rockingham, as usual, to the good offices of William Burke, who seems to have found means of knowing everybody it was to the interest of “the Burkes” to know. A more fortunate connection could hardly have been made. Lord Rockingham, though not a man of original powers, was a man of the greatest simplicity and nobleness of character, and, like most upright men, knew how to trust other men. He gave Burke immediate proof of his manly qualities. The scheming old Duke of Newcastle, who ought to have been a connoisseur in low men, mistook Burke for one. Shocked that this obscurely born and unknown fellow should be accorded confidential relations by Lord Rockingham, he hurried to his lordship with an assortment of hastily selected slanders against Burke. His real name, he reported, was O’Bourke; he was an Irish adventurer without character, and a rank Papist to boot; it would ruin the administration to have such a man connected with the First Lord of the Treasury. Rockingham, with great good sense and frankness, took the whole matter at once to Burke; was entirely satisfied by Burke’s denials; and admitted him immediately to intimate relations of warm personal friendship which only death broke off. William Burke obtained for himself an Undersecretaryship of State and arranged with Lord Verney, at that time his partner in East India speculations, that two of his lordship’s parliamentary boroughs should be put at his and Edmund’s disposal. Edmund Burke, accordingly, entered Parliament for the borough of Wendover on the 14th of January, 1766, at the age of thirty-seven, and in the first vigor of his powers.