Select Works of Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edmund Burke

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СКАЧАТЬ to that of philosophy. The poetry of the time, indeed, reflects it in more than one place. The idea is clearly traceable in Spenser’s Cantos of Mutability, the “hardy Titaness,” who, seduced by “some vain error,” dared

      To see that mortal eyes have never seen.

      The poet foreshadows a calamitous break-up of the established order of things, a mischievous contortion of the “world’s fair frame, which none yet durst of gods or men to alter or misguide,” and a reversal of the laws of nature, justice, and policy. It reminds us something of the bodings of the Greek chorus, when they sing that the founts of the sacred rivers are turned backward, and that justice and the universe are suffering a revolution. Such notions are unquestionably more than the over-wrought dreams of poets. They have their key in the defective moral tone of their age: but it by no means follows that the moral defect which this implies covers the whole ground to which they extend. Slumber seems natural to certain stages of human history: and a slumbering nation always resents the first signs of [xxvi] its awakenment. We may trace a similar vein of feeling, stimulated by the same revolutionary agencies, though in a later stage, in the poems of the philosophical and “well-languaged” Daniel. The faculty of looking on an institution on many sides enabled Daniel to point out

      How pow’rs are thought to wrong, that wrongs debar.

      Daniel had trained himself in an instructive school, in the preparation and composition of his History of the Civil Wars. Like Burke, he was of opinion that political wisdom was not to be obtained à priori. The statesman must study

      The sure records of books, in which we find

       The tenure of our state, how it was held

       By all our ancestors, and in what kind

       We hold the same, and likewise how in th’ end

       This frail possession of felicity

       Shall to our late posterity descend

       By the same patent of like destiny.

       In them we find that nothing can accrue

       To man, and his condition, that is new.¹

      It is an apt illustration of Burke’s vehement contention that Englishmen will never consent to abandon the sense of national continuity. The English nation is emphatically an old nation: it proceeds on the assumption that there is nothing new under the sun. It is always disposed to criticise severely any one who labours, as Warburton says, under that epidemic distemper of idle men, the idea of instructing and informing the world. The heart of men, and the greater heart of associated bodies of men, has been radically the same in all ages. In the laws of life we cannot hope for much additional illumination: new lights in general turn out to be old illusions. There is no unexplored terra australis, whether of morality or political science. The great principles of government and the ideas of liberty “were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law upon our pert loquacity.”¹ In a literary and scientific age, it is impossible that [xxvii] this dogmatism can pass unchallenged: but Burke is right in asserting an antagonism between the beliefs of the best minds of England, as represented in a great historic literary past, and those of the existing literary generation in France. Englishmen have in all times affected a taste for public matters and for scholarship: and this affectation is not ill exemplified in one who was a man of letters, with the superadded qualities of the philosopher and the politician. Curious illustrations of a normal antagonism between these elements may be derived from Daniel’s Dialogue entitled “Musophilus.” Musophilus is the man of letters, Philocosmus the man of the world. Philocosmus taunts Musophilus with his empty and purposeless pursuits, to which Musophilus replies by a spirited defence of learning. Philocosmus changes his ground, and lays to the charge of the professors of learning, who overswarm and infest the English world, a general spirit of discontent, amounting to sedition.

      Do you not see these pamphlets, libels, rhimes,

       These strange compressed tumults of the mind,

       Are grown to be the sickness of the times,

       The great disease inflicted on mankind?

       Your virtues, by your follies made your crimes,

       Have issue with your indiscretion joined.

      Burke insists on identifying the “literary cabal” as the chief element in the ferment of Revolution: “Men of letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation” (p. 208). See how a retired observer in the time of the first Stuart anticipates the effects of the same misplaced activity.

      For when the greater wits cannot attain

       Th’ expected good which they account their right,

       And yet perceive others to reap that gain

       Of far inferior virtues in their sight;

       They present, with the sharp of envy, strain

       To wound them with reproaches and despite.

       . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

       Hence discontented sects and schisms arise;

       Hence interwounding controversies spring,

       That feed the simple, and offend the wise.

      Action, Philocosmus goes on to say, differs materially from what is read of in books:

      [xxviii] The world’s affairs require in managing

       More arts than those wherein you clerks proceed.

      Men of letters, in the indulgence of the tastes which their pursuits have fostered, lose those faculties which are necessary to the conduct of affairs.

      The skill wherewith you have so cunning been

       Unsinews all your powers, unmans you quite.

       Public society and commerce of men

       Require another grace, another port.

      Beware of the philosopher who pretends to statesmanship. The Scholar replies, that the Statesman, with all his boasted skill, cannot anticipate the perils of the time, or see

      how soon this rolling world can take

       Advantage for her dissolution,

       Fain to get loose from this withholding stake

       Of civil science and discretion;

       How glad it would run wild, that it might make

       One formless form of one confusion.

      The mysteries of State, the “Norman subtleties,” says the Scholar, are now vulgarised and common. Giddy innovations would overthrow the whole fabric of society. But what is the remedy? To “pull back the onrunning state of things”? This might end in bringing men more astray, and destroy the faith in the unity and continuity of civil life, which is

      that close-kept palladium

       Which once remov’d, brings ruin evermore.

      Investigation would discover much СКАЧАТЬ