4Some Nineteenth-Century Appraisals of Burke’s Reflections: From Sir James Mackintosh to John Morley
Introduction
As the nineteenth century progressed the burdens and challenges of greatness provoked tendencies both to puffing self-advertisement and introspective self-scrutiny among the Victorians. Both propensities induced a desire to enlist suitable heroes into an expanding national pantheon. Kings and Queens, soldiers and sailors, eventually too, by the age of Smiles, inventors and engineers, populated this galaxy of role models. But so too did a few philosophers and political thinkers; Carlyle had (probably grudgingly) nominated Rousseau to join the greats responsible for creating the new organization of the men of letters, along with Robert Burns and Samuel Johnson.1 That such a renowned politician as Edmund Burke should have been one such figure throughout much of this period might appear indisputable. If one man had set Britain on the course to Waterloo and thus to predominance over the following century by firmly rejecting the principles of the French Revolution, Burke might legitimately claim to have done so. Not only France but other continental nations had been wracked by convulsion throughout the century following the storming of the Bastille. The model of revolutionary strategy and republican polity which had emerged after 1789 had seemingly eventuated in mindless bloodshed, turmoil and eventual dictatorship. Much of what Burke had predicted in the Reflections thus seemed adequately proven, and the cautious democratization of the British constitution and constitutional monarchy vindicated against intemperate ideologues. Late Victorian working-class conservatism had begun to set the pattern of popular electoral as well as cultural sentiment for much of the coming century. Whiggism had transformed into liberalism, but liberals, too, like John Stuart Mill and later James Bryce, often cautioned against the extremes of democracy. And Whiggish history, the ‘story of English freedom’, did indeed often draw upon Burke in crafting a narrative of English liberties lost and found.2 If a figure like Burke could not exemplify the Janus-faced, modernizing yet conservative nature of the British Sonderweg, who could?
Yet Burke’s standing in this epoch, as in the closing years of his life, was far from uncontested. Clearly there was not one, but many reputations. His career demonstrated complex and potentially contradictory political facets: the defender of American independence, opponent of the slave trade, the assailant of Warren Hastings, protector of Irish Catholics, scourge of French Jacobinism, the paragon of parliamentary eloquence in an age which still valued it. Burke’s non-political writings, notably the Vindication of Natural Society (1756) and the Philosophic Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), also gave him a cachet in philosophical circles. But for the nineteenth century there was considerable ambivalence about how parts of this inheritance should be understood, and then, particularly by the century’s end, adapted to the needs of a more unsettled era increasingly prone to impugn the wisdom of its ancestors. Choosing which Burke should be the best embodiment of Victorian virtues or paradigm for Victorian statesmen was as we will see a difficult task. And Burke’s would remain, indeed, one of the most contested reputations in the history of political thought to the present day, though in a transatlantic context a general drift from seeing Burke as a ‘liberal’ to portraying him as an archetypal ‘conservative’ is evident.
In this assessment the effect and reputation of all of Burke’s other writings put together was usually outweighed by that of the Reflections on the Revolution in France.3 To the revolutionary generation itself, looking backwards a few years later, the Reflections often provided a succinct account of the follies and error of their own youth, a mirror, so to speak, in which their own temporary intoxication appeared in distorting and degrading refraction. It also demonstrated the collective catastrophe of France’s efforts to remedy the defects of the ancien régime, and the misconception, malice, misplaced zeal and ineptitude which had characterized much of the revolutionary process. Much of the previous literature on the making of Burke’s early nineteenth-century reputation respecting the Reflections has thus rightly concentrated on his influence on the Romantic poets, the former radicals Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey in particular, and the novelist Walter Scott. Here the focus has chiefly been upon the doctrine of the divinely instituted, organic nature of constitutions, Burke’s account of nationality, and, at some points, a sensibility to the sufferings of the poor and oppressed, ensconced in the rapidly disappearing appeal of the doctrines of noblesse oblige and the aristocratic trusteeship of national wealth.4 In this, the first of what might be termed the two ‘heroic stages’ in the making of Burke’s reputation, the Napoleonic and the Bolshevik, the Reflections has been understood as offering an essential contribution to the crafting of an ideal of British national identity. Here it is presumed that the indispensable elements in the continuity of national consciousness are few: the established church, ‘the first of our prejudices’; the ‘Corinthian capital’ of a ‘natural’ aristocracy; and the force of traditional custom and habit and of ‘covenanted’ prescriptive rights tempered by those duties habitually binding us to that ‘partnership,’ ‘our little platoon’, by a ‘manly, moral, regulated liberty’.5 Abuses within this system might be reformed, but any fundamental alteration therein was to be approached with great prudence.
How far do these assumptions foreshadow the portrayal of Burke in the middle and later nineteenth century? A focus on the aftermath of the French Revolutionary debate tends to indicate that the Great Reform Act marks the apogee of Burke’s reputation in this period, as the case for parliamentary if not further constitutional reform would now become virtually omnipresent, constantly simmering below if not bubbling to the surface of British politics.
This chapter accordingly focuses in greater detail upon a range of later discussions of Burke in order to enrich the image now current. That image, of course, remains controversial. The Reflections on the Revolution in France, which appeared in November 1790, rapidly spawned a political debate of astonishing proportions and often bitter disagreement, still often (mis)described as the ‘Burke–Paine debate’.6 A variety of questions agitated the first generation of the Reflections’ readers. Does the text extend the defence of liberty central to Burke’s American writings? Or is it too caustically dismissive (in late 1790) of the claims of France to enjoy the benefits of constitutional monarchy, even a republic? And if so, why? What accounts for the vehemence and intensity of Burke’s opinions in the Reflections? How far are these driven by Catholic sentiments and sympathies? And how ought we to classify the text? Later commentators became increasingly fond of labelling Burke the ‘founder of modern conservatism’.7 But did he remain a ‘Whig’ rather than a ‘Tory’, even if an ‘old Whig’? In Carlyle’s judgement, ‘Burke was essentially a Whig, and only, on reaching the verge of the chasm towards which Whiggism from the first was inevitably leading, recoiled … recoiled with no measure, convulsively, and damaging what he drove back with him’ (1899, 3:121). We might expect, as we reach the period of the Second Reform Act (1867), and even more the Third (1884), that some tempering of the image of Burke the opponent of ‘democracy’ and parliamentary reform would be likely in an age when both were seemingly a foregone conclusion. After all, the Conservative Party under Disraeli was rapidly remaking itself as the party of the common man, albeit while robustly supporting both the aristocracy and an increasingly imperial monarchy. But equally we might anticipate that the central message of the Reflections, the hostility to violent revolutionary change as opposed to incremental, modest and timely progressive development, would find stronger support from the 1870s onwards than at any period since the 1790s, given the increasing popularity of revolutionary socialism. We might surmise, then, that the reincarnation of Burke after 1917, which induced such proclamations as that Burke’s importance was ‘never greater than it is today [in 1931]’ (Murray 1931, 407),8 and even more notably after 1945,9 does not mark an unbroken continuation of an unblemished reputation. Instead it represents the reapplication and renovation of principles widely perceived as outmoded a century after the French Revolution.
These hypotheses will be examined here by briefly treating the assessment of the Reflections by Burke’s chief biographers, by some leading nineteenth-century politicians, and at greater length by some historians of the period. It is necessary to commence, however, by introducing the most famous apostate from the original debate over the Reflections, James Mackintosh.
The ‘Whig Cicero’, as he is sometimes called, Mackintosh (1765–1832), is often described with Thomas Christie and a few others as one of the Reflections’ ablest opponents from among the educated classes and rising stars of the Whig party. His erudite Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) was an early, well-crafted Whig reply to the Reflections, and one of the few responses potentially capable of shifting middle-class opinion into the reformers’ camp. The shattering defeat of the latter in 1794–95 in the face of war, French dictatorship, and domestic repression laid any hopes of reform to rest for a generation. It also brought about a sobering volte-face for the young Scottish jurist: the later historian Spencer Walpole pompously termed this change ‘one of the most noteworthy that ever occurred in the mind of man’ (Walpole 1912–14, 1:229). In correspondence with Burke in 1796, Mackintosh now termed the latter’s principles ‘the only solid foundation both of political Science and of political prudence’ (Corr. 9:193).10 Following an amicable visit to Beaconsfield, Mackintosh lectured on the law of nations in the spring of 1799 at Lincoln’s Inn, where he had been called to the bar in 1795. This heralded his public conversion to the ranks of the Revolution’s opponents, particularly after a prudent introductory discourse was published reassuring those who feared a revival of the themes of the Vindiciae Gallicae.11 Unfortunately the printed version of the lectures is exceedingly sparse, their author having spoken from brief notes.12 After a review of Grotius, Pufendorf and other authors, Mackintosh offered an unqualified paean to the principles of marriage and private property (both under assault from the ‘New Philosophy’ of Godwinism), and politically condemned equally the ‘system of universal despotism in Hobbes, and of universal anarchy in Rousseau’ (Mackintosh 1846, 1:370).13 His commitment to the British constitution, social and civil, was equally unequivocal: ‘The best security which human wisdom can devise, seems to be the distribution of political authority among different individuals and bodies, with separate interests, and separate characters, corresponding to the variety of classes of which civil society is composed’ (Mackintosh 1846, 1:373). While linking him with Fox, Mackintosh expressed his ‘profound veneration’ for Burke (Burke himself doubted the sincerity of this ‘supposed conversion’ [Corr. 9:204–05]).14 Most importantly, Mackintosh now clearly opposed revolutionary change:
Such a body of political laws must in all countries arise out of the character and situation of a people; they must grow with its progress, be adapted to its peculiarities, change with its changes, and be incorporated with its habits. Human wisdom cannot form such a constitution by one act, for human wisdom cannot create the materials of which it is composed. (Mackintosh 1846, 1:375)
Constitutions, in other words, must evolve organically: they cannot be brewed from a stew-pot of ideas. This is perhaps the greatest of Burkean themes, often portrayed in terms of the confrontation of the ‘organic’ and ‘mechanistic’ conceptions of the state.15 Rousseau is a principal target. But the point is as relevant to twenty-first-century nationalism, and the assumptions behind the transplanting of political principles through liberal interventionism as it was to their eighteenth-century counterparts. A clearer conversion from the era of the Vindiciae could not be demonstrated, though by 1802 even Mackintosh would admit privately that the tone of the lectures had erred too far in the opposite direction.16 He was knighted in 1803, however, and then enjoyed a lucrative Indian career as Recorder of Bombay. If the 1799 lectures had been a risky gambit they paid off well enough.
Biographers and essayists
Historians have noted, as we reach the years approaching the Great Reform Act, that Burke’s star seemed to have waned. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine conceded in 1825 that ‘the ashes of Edmund Burke slumber almost without notice’, while John Wilson Croker lamented in the Quarterly Review a year later that Burke’s ‘mighty name was for a time obscured’.17 Later standard accounts of the rise of conservatism, like T. E. Kebbel’s History of Toryism (1886), though acknowledging the Reflections’ great impact (1886, 398), pay scant attention to Burke. It is thus tempting to conclude with James Sack that ‘Burke had no paradigmatic influence on most leading Conservative politicians of the Victorian age’. This ‘widespread neglect’ by Tories was, it is supposed, derived in part because ‘Burke may never have appeared completely convincing as a Tory’ (Sack 1997, 80, 83).18 To many nineteenth-century commentators, indeed, it would appear that Burke was indeed not a ‘Tory’ but rather what Keith Feiling later termed a ‘converted Whig’ (1913, 39).19 If we follow one possible teleological strand by attempting to track Burke’s reputation as a ‘Tory’ or ‘father of conservatism’, thus, we will inevitably be led astray. Here there is a clear advantage in concentrating on the more substantial treatments of the Reflections across the course of this period, and assessing what was actually said about Burke’s view on the Revolution. Even a superficial survey of this type may shed some light on Burke’s changing fortunes.
Let us turn, then, to biographers of Burke, and a few notable essayists. The first large-scale biography of Burke to appear was a hostile, Foxite account by Charles McCormick, which dismissed the Reflections as ‘a tissue of falshood and sophistry, however decorated with the splendors of artificial eloquence’ (1797, 339). The next major study, a two-volume life by Robert Bisset which appeared in 1798, was, however, paradigmatic for later interpreters in identifying two issues as central to assessing Burke’s views on the Revolution: whether his principles ‘were conformable to wisdom and rectitude’, and whether they were consistent with his previous ideas and actions (1800, 2:267).20
Bisset’s answer to the former question was twofold: that ‘esteeming arbitrary power a great evil, he knew that unwise efforts to shake it off might produce greater calamities’; and that with ‘religion he foresaw that morals would fall; and that instead of the old arbitrary government … a compound of impiety, anarchy & wickedness would be substituted’. To the latter question, Bisset responded that:
Uniformly inimical to metaphysics, as the instrument of intellect in planning conduct, he, CONSISTENTLY WITH HIMSELF, reprobated the speculative doctrine of the Rights of Man … his arguments and proceedings on the French revolution were on the same broad grounds as in the former parts of his life. (1800, 2:289–90, 295)
Several subsequent studies shed little light on these issues, however. In James Prior’s two-volume biography of Burke, published in 1826, some sixty pages are devoted to the Reflections and the revolutionary controversy. But ‘laboured analysis’ of the text itself is discountenanced from ‘want of inclination’, on the somewhat quaint grounds that every educated person had read the text, and those who had not would not benefit from a meagre digest thereof (1826, 2:102). George Croly’s Memoir of the Political Life of Edmund Burke describes the Reflections as ‘the most magnificent political prophecy ever given to the world’ (1840, 1:291). It summarizes the book extensively and celebrates its most famous passages, focussing on Burke’s defence of religious establishments, but again with little analytical acuity. This is equally true for Peter Burke’s The Public and Domestic Life of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, which merely offers copious extracts from the book (1853, 242–53).
By the mid-Victorian period accounts of Burke begin to reveal doubts about the essential and absolute correctness of the Reflections’ judgement on the French Revolution. In an oration delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1854, for example, Henry Montagu Butler, while fulsome in his praise of Burke’s ‘first characteristic’ and ‘loftiness of thought’, also contended that:
it was reserved for Burke to stand in the gap between the old and the new, to point out all the beauty and significance of the past, to detect the hidden harmonies which bind together social life, and to assert its divine foundation. A great work this, and one which never can become obsolete; yet still partial and one-sided … it must … be granted that his view of the French Revolution was most inadequate. He could neither see the necessity of the consequence upon the hopeless corruptions of the old system, nor yet the promise which it held out for the future. To appreciate existing good lying at the root of existing institutions was far more congenial to his nature than to search nicely for abuses, or even to foresee coming developments. The idea of human progress was not one which coloured his life. (1854, 10–12, 14–15)
Much the most impressive of the Victorian biographies was Thomas Macknight’s three-volume study (1858–60), which devotes one volume of some seven hundred pages to the French Revolution. Here (287–361) the Reflections is exonerated as having amply and justly judged the National Assembly and 1791 Constitution it produced as inexorably hastening the bloody culmination of the revolutionary process. Though the focus is upon narrative rather than analysis or theory, much praise is offered for Burke’s doctrines, with little belabouring of the issue of consistency (1858–60, 3:342–44). Macknight stresses that Burke judged the American Revolution by contrast to the French as ‘stained by no massacres, by the avowal of no monstrous doctrines of hostility to all sovereigns, or by the proclamation of principles incompatible with the existence of any good government or the peace of the world’ (1858–60, 3:498). His concluding judgement is that Burke was ‘the greatest political thinker of his time, and perhaps of any time’ (1858–60, 3:723). Here, too, we see the miscalculations of the Whiggish critics of Burke in the Reform era condemned as having misjudged Burke by the ‘the delusive medium of the Orleans Government’. Thus the view that Burke ‘had after all miscalculated greatly, and … ought to have foreseen France, after years of bloodshed and misery, happy, tranquillized, and regenerated under the benignant auspices of Louis Philippe’ was entirely disproved by the events of 1848 (1858–60, 3:749–50).
Politicians
We can now consider some appraisals of the Reflections by nineteenth-century politicians and political commentators, moving from left to right on the political spectrum. Most plebeian radicals and socialists were uniformly hostile to Burke, and their accounts are omitted here for lack of space. But the impact of Burke upon the Tory-turned-radical William Cobbett, whose edition of A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord was published in Philadelphia in May 1796, merits attention. For Cobbett, far and away the most influential radical journalist of the age, never warmed to republican principles after his ‘conversion’, and remained more sympathetic to the American than the French Revolution. He long remained an admirer of Burke, terming him ‘this great man … the profoundest of statesmen; the ornament of his country’, only later disavowing his views and attributing the doctrines of the Reflections to Burke’s government pension (Spater 1982, 1:117, 273). Similarly other radicals like William Hazlitt were insistent that ‘Mr. Burke, the opponent of the American war, and Mr. Burke, the opponent of the French Revolution, are not the same person, but opposite persons – not opposite persons only, but deadly enemies’ (1819, 161). As we would expect, the Chartists, by and large doctrinal Paineites, had little to say about the Reflections’ implications for their own campaign for the franchise. Burke was only one among many ‘champions of aristocracy’ to be opposed (Russell 2001, 5:186).
We would also expect that leading reformist Whigs like Charles James Fox’s nephew, Henry Vassall-Fox, Lord Holland, would be prone to dismiss Burke’s ‘intemperate view of the French Revolution’. This Holland blamed on an ‘extravagant veneration for all established rites and ceremonies in religion’ and an ‘absurd degree of reverence’ for even the abuses of aristocratic power (1852–54, 1:4–5, 7). Other prominent Whigs of this generation were equally harsh, however. Henry, Lord Brougham, not only emphasized that Burke’s views in ‘1770, were very different from those which breathe through every page of his Anti-Jacobin writings’ (1839, 1:157). He also stressed:
That Mr. Burke did, however, err, and err widely in the estimate which he formed of the merits of a restored Government, no one can now doubt. His mistake was in comparing the old régime with the anarchy of the Revolution; to which not only the monarchy of France but the despotism of Turkey was preferable. He never could get rid of the belief that because the change had been effected with a violence which produced, and inevitably produced the consequences foreseen by himself; and by him alone, therefore the tree so planted must for ever prove incapable of bearing good fruit. He forgot that after the violence, in its nature temporary, should subside, it might be both quite impossible to restore the old monarchy, and very possible to form a new, and orderly, and profitable government upon the ruins of the Republic. Above all, he had seen so much present mischief wrought to France during the convulsive struggle which was not over before his death, that he could not persuade himself of any possible good arising to her from the mighty change she had undergone. All this we now see clearly enough; having survived Mr. Burke forty years, and witnessed events which the hardiest dealers in prophecies assuredly could never have ventured to foretell. (1839, 1:280)
Among other leading liberal statesmen, William Ewart Gladstone, who began life as a Tory, and was wont to refer to Burke on Ireland (1886, 119), averred that Burke could not be ‘read too much nor too attentively’ (1910, 2:169). Yet revealingly, on one occasion when he discussed Burke at length, he commented, in 1877, that
very loth am I, except in some vital matters of the French Revolution, to dissent from that great authority. But, since the time of Mr. Burke, old dangers have disappeared, new dangers have come into view, new evils into almost a virulent activity; the adjustment of political and social forces has been entirely remodelled. (1879, 1:167)21
Similarly equivocal was Archibald Primrose, Lord Rosebery, who succeeded Gladstone as Prime Minister briefly in 1894, and who praised Burke as ‘our most splendid political figure’ (1921, 2:336). But at the unveiling of a statue of Burke in Bristol in October 1904, Rosebery noted that he had
failed with regard to the French Revolution … in being blinded, by his disgust at what was passing, to any appreciation of the other side of the question. He saw the horrors as we see them and as we read of them. What he did not see was that they were the outcome of a century of misgovernment, and of misrule and debauchery such as had caused a long continuance of terrible calamity … And the result is that Burke passes out of history with the appearance of a reactionary to whom the re-action of his day was totally insufficient, while he passed his life as a reformer, daring and grasping enough to frighten the very souls of his admirers. (1921, 1:136)
How far did more conservative political figures in the nineteenth century contribute to Burke’s reputation by adverting to the Reflections in the public arena, especially the House of Commons? The answer would seem to be remarkably little, at least to judge from collected editions of available speeches. (Doubtless a full perusal of Hansard would be more revealing.) References are more fulsome in the early decades, without doubt. The Anglo-Irish politician George Canning described ‘Mr. Burke’s last works and words [as] still the manual of my politics’ (Stapleton 1887, 1:74). The Reflections, he thought, had demonstrated ‘that series and succession of calamities, which the principles of the French Revolution, in all its parts, must inevitably produce’ (1836, 3:199), noting that ‘almost every sentence’ of the book ‘however canvassed and disputed at the time, has been justified by the course of subsequent events; and almost every prophecy has been strictly fulfilled’ (1836, 5:451). Sir Robert Peel referred to Burke in Parliament on many occasions, chiefly respecting Catholic issues, the rights of Dissenters, reform of the civil list, against slavery, on the revolt of the American colonies, and on the utility of a territorial aristocracy, but never at any length on the French Revolution. (At one point he did however compare Burke’s description of Marie Antoinette to Queen Victoria [1850, 129].) Although it has been asserted that Benjamin Disraeli ‘knew his Burke well’ (Bauman 1929, 64), the towering figure of later nineteenth-century conservatism spoke only rarely about him, though he praised ‘that rare union that has rendered Burke so memorable; blending with that intuitive knowledge of his race, which creative minds alone enjoy, all the wisdom which can be derived from literature, and a comprehensive experience of human affairs’ (1913, 218).
Among other Conservative premiers, Lord Salisbury and the Duke of Wellington virtually never referred to Burke in their major speeches.
Historians
Such omissions may seem surprising. But did Burke receive a more balanced, vigorous and judicious assessment at the hands of nineteenth-century historians? Among his contemporaries, of course, it is the judgement of Edward Gibbon which is most frequently cited in relation to the reception of the Reflections among historians: ‘I beg leave to subscribe my assent to Mr. Burke’s creed on the revolution of France’, Gibbon insisted: ‘I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can almost excuse his reverence for church establishments’ (1911, 178).22 Burke might have been ‘the most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew’, but Gibbon was pleased to term himself ‘as high an Aristocrate as Burke himself’ (Prothero 1896, 2:251). The great distance between their views on the central subject of religion, however, he did not dwell upon.
Respecting opinion in the next generation, the historian and Whig politician Thomas Babington Macaulay’s phrase, the ‘greatest man since Milton’, is often cited (Trevelyan 1889, 613). Another appraisal by Macaulay is, however, more ambiguous: ‘Burke saw much further than any of his contemporaries: but whatever his sagacity descried was refracted and discoloured by his passions and his imagination’ (Macaulay 1898–1908, 10:533). This assertion, that Burke’s emotions had got the better of his judgement in 1790, we will see, would prove to be a prominent theme in later decades.
More controversial was the assessment of that most encyclopaedic of mid-Victorian historians, Henry Thomas Buckle, for whom Burke’s breadth of thought marked him as an ‘extraordinary man’ and statesman who rose far above the ‘feeble and shallow’ politicians of his day (1908, 1:367). Yet in a lengthy digression on Burke’s last years in volume one of the History of Civilization in England (1857), consider his judgement on Burke’s view of the French Revolution:
When the French Revolution broke out his mind already fainting under the weight of incessant labour could not support the contemplation of an event so unprecedented so appalling and threatening results of such frightful magnitude. And when the crimes of that great revolution instead of diminishing continued to increase then it was that the feelings of Burke finally mastered his reason; the balance tottered; the proportions of that gigantic intellect were disturbed. From this moment his sympathy with present suffering was so intense that he lost all memory of the tyranny by which the sufferings were provoked. (1908, 1:378)
Nor is Buckle beyond hazarding a psychological interpretation of this development:
It would perhaps be displaying a morbid curiosity to attempt to raise the veil and trace the decay of so mighty a mind. Indeed in all such cases most of the evidence perishes; for those who have the best opportunities of witnessing the infirmities of a great man are not those who most love to relate them. But it is certain that the change was first clearly seen immediately after the breaking out of the French Revolution; that it was aggravated by the death of his son; and that it became progressively worse till death closed the scene. In his Reflections on the French Revolution; in his Remarks on the Policy of the Allies; in his Letter to Elliot; in his Letter to a Noble Lord; and in his Letters on a Regicide Peace we may note the consecutive steps of an increasing and at length an uncontrollable violence. To the single principle of hatred of the French Revolution he sacrificed his oldest associations and his dearest friends. (1908, 1:379)23
It is Fox, who ‘would not abandon that love of popular liberty’ (Buckle 1908, 1:380), in this context, who consequently earns Buckle’s loudest praise. For Buckle the Reflections represented both a change in ‘the associations and composition’ of Burke’s mind, and of both his opinions and their groundwork. These developments for Buckle manifestly contradicted Burke’s views of the American conflict, representing a painful descent from being ‘the most eminent political philosopher England has ever possessed’ (1908, 1:385) to the ‘noble wreck’ of a ‘diseased mind’.24 Spencer Walpole, too, reinforced the hint that Burke had been ‘weakened by affliction and disease’ (1912–14, 1:221).
Of historians writing in the high Victorian period, a certain partiality to Burke might be anticipated from the Irish writer W. E. H. Lecky, who boasted of carrying the Reflections ‘for many years [as] my favourite pocket companion in long solitary mountain walks in Ireland and Switzerland’ (Elisabeth Lecky 1909, 306). His History of England in the Eighteenth Century (1878–90) indeed regarded the work as
one of the most famous and valuable books of the eighteenth century … no other English book affords so many lessons of enduring value to those who are engaged in the study either of the British Constitution or of the general principles of government. (W. E. H. Lecky 1892, 6:389–90)
Yet Lecky, too, stressed that Burke’s ‘judgment was often obscured by violent gusts of passion’, and if his ‘judgment of the French Revolution was … far more profound and far-seeing than that of his contemporaries … it cannot reasonably be denied that he greatly underrated the faults and exaggerated the merits of the Government that preceded it’ (1892, 6:306–7). Lecky also added that Burke could not
be said to be in real harmony with our modern type of government. His conception of politics was indeed widely different from that which now generally prevails. He was as far as possible from a democratic statesman. He believed that pure democracy would always in the long run prove subversive of property, subversive of true freedom, subversive of all stability in the State. (Elisabeth Lecky 1909, 306–07)
This, Lecky clearly appreciated, was not a position likely to appeal to a late Victorian electorate.
A similar theme is taken up by Edward Alloway Pankhurst, writing in 1886. Here the Reflections is praised for having correctly foreseen tyranny arising ‘not as a random utterance, but given as a necessary consequence of that abolition of all CLASSES so dear to the republicans of his time’. But Pankhurst nonetheless queried why Burke had ‘resisted with strange pertinacity all schemes of parliamentary reform’, which rendered it ‘difficult to reconcile his conduct in this question with his own assertion, that his life had been given to the reform of abuses’. Burke thus ‘might have been mistaken in his views’. But, Pankhurst added,
no one now doubts the sincerity of his convictions or the purity of his motives … In the ‘Reflections’ there are, doubtless, truths too strongly stated. It presents only one side of the subject. The stick was bent too much one way, and Burke sought to bend it in the other, in order to regain the normal direction. (1886, 25–26, 56)
In accounting for this, the leading conservative Henry Maine described the ‘great disillusion’ which seemed to separate Burke’s American writings from those on the French Revolution (1886, 172).
Similar, too, is the judgement of another prominent late Victorian, Leslie Stephen, to whom ‘Burke was incomparably the greatest of all English political writers’ (1892, 2:38–39). In an extensive discussion in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), Stephen focused on the issue of Burke’s consistency. He acknowledged that in the ‘Appeal to the Old Whigs’ Burke had shown his lifelong antipathy to the principles of violent revolution, but contended that nonetheless, in some respects,
Burke may fairly be called inconsistent. Popular instinct sometimes outruns philosophical insight. Burke’s theory condemned the French, whilst it justified the American, movement; but the two movements had really a connection not contemplated in his philosophy. The man who is in intention only setting a precedent for maintaining an ancient right of way may be, in fact, encouraging his followers to break down established fences. Burke helped – much against his will – to stimulate the current of feeling which drew fresh strength from the American war, and brought about the crash of the French system. He was the less conscious of this because he was blind to the positive side of the revolutionary creed. (1902, 2:245–50)
Indisputably the best-known late Victorian exposition of Burke’s views, and probably that which had the greatest influence upon twentieth-century writers, was contained in two accounts by the liberal politician John Morley.25 Morley acknowledged in his memoirs that in his practical political conduct he ‘owed more to Burke for practical principles in the strategy and tactics of public life than to the others’ (1917, 1:81–82). His first study, Edmund Burke. An Historical Study, was begun in 1866 and was published in the Fortnightly Review in February 1867 before appearing as a book. It initially portrays the hero who ‘led the Whigs to the forgotten truth that a government exists for the sake of the whole people’ (Hirst 1927, 88–118). The last ninety pages are a study of the French Revolutionary period, which terms the Reflections ‘the soundest contemporary criticism we possess’ (Morley 1867, 260). Yet to Morley, too, Burke’s magnum opus was also essentially an unbalanced work which failed to appreciate the progressive elements and potential of the revolutionary movement. Burke had ‘ignored the sincerely constitutional character’ of the intentions of the revolutionaries ‘through anger at their total misapprehension of the only means by which, as he thought, their intentions could be carried out’. Morley found admirable Burke’s ‘hostile and reasoned judgment against the revolutionary methods, his extraordinary foresight into some of their remote consequences, his general theory of the sacredness of order’. But he condemned the fact that
at the bottom of all, we discern that the lessons deducible from all European history, that of England not excepted, had not yet made themselves felt within his mind. He shows no consciousness that feudalism and Catholicism, in a certain stage of progress the most binding and indispensable of social conditions, had now, in their season of decay, grown bitterly and fiercely anti-social.
Here then we have the apparent lesson of the debates surrounding and the consequences of the 1867 Reform Act:
It is the essence and significance of all separate classes – capitalist, hereditary, aristocratic, monarchic – to be more or less anti-social in the modern stage, until they have learnt by patient, disinterested, and humane meditation, that the claims of the multitude are sovereign and paramount, just because it is the multitude. (Morley 1867, 267, 299–301)
Morley’s second account of Burke began life as an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry (Hirst 1927, 2, 7) and appeared in 1879 to the praise of, among others, Gladstone. Recast as Burke (1888), in the ‘English Men of Letters’ series, it reiterated that Burke’s role in
the struggle for American independence, commands almost without alloy the admiration and reverence of posterity. His attitude in the second of them, the great revolution in France, has raised controversies which can only be compared in heat and duration to the master controversies of theology. (Morley 1888, 209)
Here, however, Morley’s condemnation was if anything considerably harsher than that voiced a decade earlier. ‘Unhappily’, he thought, Burke had ‘advanced from criticism to practical exhortation, in our opinion the most mischievous and indefensible that has ever been pressed by any statesman on any nation’. The point was one of mistaken timing:
The year 1790 was precisely the time when the hopes of the best men in France shone most brightly, and seemed most reasonable. There had been disorders, and Paris still had ferocity in her mien. But Robespierre was an obscure figure on the back benches of the Assembly. Nobody had ever heard of Danton. The name of Republic had never been so much as whispered. (224)
Burke, then, had in a sense created a self-fulfilling prophecy by taking sides at a moment when his intervention actually affected the Revolution’s outcome. Yet Morley credits Burke as not merely having had his prophecy ‘fulfilled to the letter. What is still more important for the credit of his foresight is, that not only did his prophecy come true, but it came true for the reasons that he had fixed upon’ (1888, 227), specifically because of the civil constitution of the clergy, and the levelling policies of the National Assembly. Nonetheless the true root of Burke’s error was his treatment of ‘the Revolution as the solution of a merely political question’ when, in fact,
[the] question was much deeper. It was a social question that burned under the surface of what seemed no more than a modification of external arrangements … It was not a question of the power of the king, or the measure of an electoral circumscription, that made the Revolution; it was the iniquitous distribution of the taxes, the scourge of the militia service, the scourge of the road service, the destructive tyranny exercised in the vast preserves of wild game, the vexatious rights and imposts of the lords of manors, and all the other odious burdens and heavy impediments on the prosperity of the thrifty and industrious part of the nation. If he had seen ever so clearly that one of the most important sides of the Revolution in progress was the rescue of the tiller of the soil, Burke would still doubtless have viewed events with bitter suspicion. (1888, 230–32)
Instead Burke’s sensibilities were dead in this direction, and alive only to ‘feeling on one side, and to a sensibility that is only alive to the consecrated force of historic associations’ (1888, 232). These were clearly lessons relevant to a Britain facing agricultural and industrial depression, deepening poverty, and the widespread perception that ‘social’ problems were rapidly rendering high Victorian political and economic assumptions obsolete.
At the end of our period, finally, we find another leading liberal historian, the Catholic Lord Acton, terming Burke ‘our best political writer, and the deepest of all Whigs’ (Figgis and Laurence 1917, 1:277), and the creator of ‘the noblest political philosophy in the world’ amidst the American crisis (Acton 1909, 56). ‘You can hardly imagine’, he wrote once, ‘what Burke is for all of us who think about politics, and are not wrapped in the blaze and the whirlwind of Rousseau’ (Paul 1904, 55–56). Clearly sympathetic to Burke’s philo-Catholicism and general sympathy for religious sentiment,26 Acton saw Burke as among the ‘greatest writers of the Whig party’ and a writer who ‘when true to himself’, was ‘the most intelligent of our instructors’ (1909, 53; 1906, 28). Religion, then, was central to this appraisal; to Acton, in ‘the writings of his last years (1792–1797) whatever was Protestant or partial or revolutionary of 1688 in his political views disappeared, and what remained was a purely Catholic view of political principles and of history’ (Gasquet 1906, 4).
Conclusion
The Victorian assessment of the Reflections was less hagiographical, more sceptical, and more driven by existing domestic political developments than in either of the two heroic phases in the making of Burke’s reputation. Burke was not a seminal figure for Victorian statesmen or historians because his anti-revolutionary writings were assumed to be palpably anti-democratic in an age when such elitism, if widely entertained in private, invited political isolation when aired in public. (But there are of course also more and less democratic readings of Burke’s oeuvre as a whole.)27 Whigs found it awkward identifying with someone so apparently at odds with the actual course travelled by European history in the nineteenth century. Tories found Burke inspirational, but nonetheless insufficiently Tory to ever become a figurehead in the reconstruction of their own tradition until the early twentieth century.28 Many in both camps were contemptuous of, perhaps also fearful of, American democracy. Yet Burke’s American writings thus remain the benchmark for most of the positive assessment of his thought in this period, rather than his analysis of the French Revolution. Many leading Victorians, as we have seen, were happy to countenance the thought that the French Revolution had contained progressive elements which Burke had chosen to overlook. More soberly, perhaps, they appreciated that ignoring the suffering masses had helped occasion the Revolution in the first place and, in the last third of the century, that moral was one that few could afford to overlook. Most were much more distant from the age of chivalry than Burke’s contemporaries, and some, no doubt, were themselves simply sophisters, economists or calculators. The Burke of the Reflections, then, did reach an era of irrelevance. ‘Though Burke lives we meet with no Burkites’, commented Henry Sidgwick (1904, 136). ‘Burke is out of fashion’, claimed a writer on South Africa in 1905 (Methuen 1905, 161). The great Burke revival of the mid-twentieth century, then, was occasioned by an entirely divergent set of developments, principally another revolution, and then several such, of a type recognisably condemnable on the criteria of the Reflections and Burke’s subsequent writings on the French Revolution. Long dismissed, the utility of the Reflections as a substantive analysis could again be brought to the fore. Burke again found his readers by the thousand, and a reincarnation which persists to the present.
Notes
1Carlyle (1885, 300–31), ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’.
2See Kumar (2003, 143–44).
3On the immediate reception of the text in the 1790s see Claeys (2000, 40–59), and the discussion offered in Claeys (1995, 1:xvii–lvi) and Claeys (2007).
4These lineages are already traced in nineteenth-century commentaries, e.g. Brooke (1896). They are explored most extensively in Cobban (1960).
5Burke (1899, 3:352, 416, 292, 240), Reflections on the Revolution in France.
6For this interpretation see Claeys (1989).
7For initial moves in this direction, see, e.g. Brooke (1896, 14–15).
8A similar later claim is made by Ayling (1988, 285), for the ‘special resonance’ the Reflections possesses for the twentieth century because of its account of egalitarianism.
9For an early example, see Carver (1942–43).
10James Mackintosh to Edmund Burke, 22 December 1796.
11Mackintosh declared privately in June 1799 that Burke was ‘in his estimation, without any parallel, in any age or country, except, perhaps, Lord Bacon and Cicero; that his works contained an ampler store of political and moral wisdom than could be found in any other writer whatever’ (1836, 1:91).
12The lectures are reprinted in Mackintosh (1846, 1:341–88).
13Isaac Kramnick (1983) has alluded to some of these changes in Godwin’s opinions in relation to Burke.
14To French Laurence, 25 December 1796. Burke suspected it did ‘not extend beyond the interior politicks of this Island, but that, with regard to France and many other Countries He remains as franc a Jacobin as ever. This conversion is none at all, but we must nurse up these nothings and think these negative advantages as we can have them.’ Other observers, however, spoke of the ‘immense revolution’ in Mackintosh’s opinions as evidenced by the lectures (Green 1810, 127).
15See e.g. Butler (1957, 36).
16‘As a political philosopher I will not say that I now entirely approve the very shades and tones of political doctrine which distinguished these lectures. I can easily see that I rebounded from my original opinions too far towards the opposite extreme. I was carried too far by anxiety to atone for my former errors. In opposing revolutionary principles, the natural heat of controversy led to excess’ (Mackintosh 1836, 1:133).
17Both cited in Sack (1997, 77). See also Sack (1987).
18Elsewhere, however, Sack (1993, 96) makes the claim that the Reflections was one of two texts, the other being Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland (1801), to define the ‘British Right’ in the nineteenth century.
19But Burke is later here also bracketed with ‘all the great Tory writers’ such as Bolingbroke and Coleridge (142).
20Coleridge, for instance, gave great stress to the fact that Burke’s principles in his American and French writings were ‘exactly the same and the deductions the same’ (Coleridge 1844, 98). The issue of Burke’s consistency has not disappeared. Carl Cone, for instance, stresses Burke’s early hostility to rationalism, secularism, materialism and perfectibilism (1964, 287).
21See Montgomery (1886), which focuses on Gladstone’s use of Burke in his speeches in support of his Irish policy, denying any analogy between the American colonists’ cause and the case presented for Home Rule.
22A slight variant is: ‘Burke’s book is a most admirable medicine against the French disease, which has made too much progress even in this happy country. I admire his eloquence, I approve his politics, I adore his chivalry, and I can forgive even his superstition’ (Prothero 1896, 2:237).
23This account was evidently written in 1852. See Taylor (1872, 1:xlii). It is worth noting that Burke himself had responded to the allegation of mental instability by retorting to his niece that ‘the Jacobins … affect to think, that I am mad; but believe me, the world twenty years hence will, and with reason too, think from their conduct that they must have been mad’ (quoted in Timbs 1862, 347).
24Among later interpreters, the extreme limits of the psychological interpretation are probed in Kramnick (1977).
25See the praise offered by MacCunn (1913, 17) in the first scholarly study of Burke’s political ideas.
26E.g. Figgis and Laurence (1908, 347).
27See the comments of MacCunn (1913, 161–62).
28By 1923 a leading commentator would claim that ‘from the publication of the Reflections [Burke] must be reckoned not a Whig but a Tory’ despite Burke’s own denial of this ‘accusation’ (Lord Hugh Cecil 1923, 41). But there are certainly much earlier echoes; cf. Dicey’s view that Burke ‘had always in constitutional matters leaned strongly towards historical conservatism’ (Dicey 1905, 72).