A History of English Literature

which statesmen and orators deal are usually temporary; the spirit and
style which give a spoken address the strongest appeal to an audience often
have in them something of superficiality; and it is hard for the orator
even to maintain his own mind on the higher level of rational thought and
disinterested purpose. Occasionally, however, a man appears in public life
who to the power of compelling speech and the personality on which it is
based adds intellect, a philosophic temperament, and the real literary,
poetic, quality. Such men were Demosthenes, Cicero, Webster, and at times
Lincoln, and beside them in England stands Burke. It is certainly an
interesting coincidence that the chief English representatives of four
outlying regions of literature should have been closely
contemporaneous--Johnson the moralist and hack writer, Boswell the
biographer, Gibbon the historian, and Burke the orator.
Burke was born in Dublin in 1729 of mixed English and Irish parentage. Both
strains contributed very important elements to his nature. As English we
recognize his indomitable perseverance, practical good sense, and devotion
to established principles; as largely Irish his spontaneous enthusiasm,
ardent emotion, and disinterested idealism. Always brilliant, in his
earlier years he was also desultory and somewhat lawless. From Trinity
College in Dublin he crossed over to London and studied law, which he soon
abandoned. In 1756 he began his career as an author with 'A Vindication of
Natural Society,' a skilful satire on the philosophic writings which
Bolingbroke (the friend of Swift and Pope) had put forth after his
political fall and which, while nominally expressing the deistic principles
of natural religion, were virtually antagonistic to all religious faith.
Burke's 'Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime
and Beautiful,' published the same year, and next in time after Dryden
among important English treatises on esthetics, has lost all authority with
the coming of the modern science of psychology, but it is at least sincere
and interesting. Burke now formed his connection with Johnson and his
circle. An unsatisfactory period as secretary to an official in Ireland
proved prolog to the gift of a seat in Parliament from a Whig lord, and
thus at the age of thirty-six Burke at last entered on the public life
which was his proper sphere of action. Throughout his life, however, he
continued to be involved in large debts and financial difficulties, the
pressure of which on a less buoyant spirit would have been a very serious
handicap.
As a politician and statesman Burke is one of the finest figures in English
history. He was always a devoted Whig, because he believed that the party
system was the only available basis for representative government; but he
believed also, and truly, that the Whig party, controlled though it was by
a limited and largely selfish oligarchy of wealthy nobles, was the only
effective existing instrument of political and social righteousness. To
this cause of public righteousness, especially to the championing of
freedom, Burke's whole career was dedicated; he showed himself altogether
possessed by the passion for truth and justice. Yet equally conspicuous was
his insistence on respect for the practicable. Freedom and justice, he
always declared, agreeing thus far with Johnson, must be secured not by
hasty violence but under the forms of law, government, and religion which
represent the best wisdom of past generations. Of any proposal he always
asked not only whether it embodied abstract principles of right but whether
it was workable and expedient in the existing circumstances and among
actual men. No phrase could better describe Burke's spirit and activity
than that which Matthew Arnold coined of him--'the generous application of
ideas to life.' It was England's special misfortune that, lagging far
behind him in both vision and sympathy, she did not allow him to save her
from the greatest disaster of her history. Himself she repaid with the