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

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СКАЧАТЬ of Daniel’s contemporaries. Compare, for instance, Fletcher’s portraiture of Dichostasis, or Sedition,

      That wont but in the factious court to dwell,

       But now to shepherd swains close linked is.

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

       A subtle craftsman fram’d him seemly arms,

       Forg’d in the shop of wrangling sophistry;

       And wrought with curious arts, and mighty charms,

       Temper’d with lies, and false philosophy.

      The Purple Island, Canto vii.

      [xxix] Among Shakspere’s most obvious characteristics is that which is often called his objectiveness. He does not task his characters to utter his private sentiments and convictions. His characters are realities, not masks. But no one who has endeavoured to penetrate the mind of Shakspere as reflected in his whole works will deny to him a full participation in Burke’s doctrine of faith in the order of society. To borrow the words of Hartley Coleridge,¹ Shakspere, as manifested in his writings, is one of those “who build the commonweal, not on the shifting shoals of expedience, or the incalculable tides of popular will, but on the sure foundations of the divine purpose, demonstrated by the great and glorious ends of rational being; who deduce the rights and duties of men, not from the animal nature, in which neither right nor duty can inhere, not from a state of nature which never existed, nor from an arbitrary contract which never took place in the memory of man nor angels, but from the demands of the complex life of the soul and the body, defined by reason and conscience, expounded and ratified by revelation.” So exact is the application, one might think he was speaking of Burke. A book might be made up by illustrating the political conceptions of Shakspere out of his plays: but it will be enough for our purpose to consider one or two specimens. The following extract from the speech in which Ulysses demonstrates the ills arising from the feuds of the Greek champions is alike remarkable for the compass of its thought and for the accuracy with which it reflects a feeling which has always been common among Englishmen. A narrower conception of the same argument is summed up in a famous epigram of Pope commencing “Order is heaven’s first law.”

      The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre,

       Observe degree, priority, and place,

       Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

       Office and custom, in all line of order:

       And therefore is the glorious planet, Sol,

       In noble eminence enthroned and sphered

       Amidst the other: whose med’cinable eye

       Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,

       And posts, like the commandment of a king,

       Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets

       [xxx] In evil mixture to disorder wander,

       What plagues and what portents! what mutiny!

       What raging of the sea! shaking of earth!

       Commotion in the winds! frights, changes, horrors,

       Divert and crack, rend and deracinate

       The unity and married calm of states

       Quite from their fixture! O, when degree is shak’d,

       Which is the ladder of all high designs,

       The enterprise is sick! How could communities,

       Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,

       Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

       The primogenitive and due of birth,

       Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

      But by degree, stand in authentic place?

       Take but degree away, untune that string,

       And, hark! what discord follows! Each thing meets

       In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

       Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

       And make a sop of all this solid globe:

       Strength should be lord of imbecility,

       And the rude son should strike his father dead:

       Force should be right: or rather, right and wrong,

       (Between whose endless jar justice resides)

       Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

       Then everything includes itself in power,

       Power into will, will into appetite:

       And appetite, an universal wolf,

       So doubly seconded with will and power,

       Must make perforce an universal prey,

       And, last, eat up himself. Great Agamemnon,

       This chaos, when degree is suffocate,

       Follows the choking.

      Troilus and Cressida, Act i. Sc. 3.

      No passage in literature reflects more faithfully the general spirit of the present work. The grave tone of mingled doctrine and portent, and the two contrasted moral effects, are in each exactly similar.

      Jack Cade and his rout, and the mob in Coriolanus, will doubtless occur to the student as instances of sharp satire against Democracy. Shakspere always conceives political action, especially in England, as proceeding from a lawful monarch, wielding [xxxi] real power under the guidance of wise counsellors: and this does not differ greatly from the Whig theory to which Burke always adhered.

      Quitting the Elizabethan period, it would be easy to continue the historical vindication of Burke’s claim. The popular party of the Commonwealth and the Revolution were the true conservatives of their age. They fought, as Burke had pointed out in a previous work, for a liberty that had been consecrated by long usage and tradition; and outside this memorable strife the greatest of English minds, with a few exceptions, surrendered themselves to the general tide of anti-revolutionary opinion. Dryden, always a favourite authority with Burke, is an obvious instance. One passage from his prose works may be adduced to show that the worst arguments employed by Burke in the present treatise do not lack the authority of great and popular English names:

      Neither does it follow that an unalterable succession supposes England to be the king’s estate, and the people his goods and chattels on it. For the preservation of his right destroys not our propriety, but maintains us in it. He has tied himself by law not to invade our possessions, and we have obliged ourselves as subjects to him and all his lawful successors: by which irrevocable act of ours, both for ourselves and our posterity, we can no more exclude the successor than we can depose the present king. The estate of England is indeed the king’s, and I may safely grant their supposition, as to the government of England: but it follows not that the people are his goods and chattels on it, for then he might sell, alienate, or destroy СКАЧАТЬ