EDMUND BURKE (1729—­1797)

To read all of Burke’s collected works, and so to understand him thoroughly, is something of a task.  Few are equal to it.  On the other hand, to read selections here and there, as most of us do, is to get a wrong idea of the man and to join either in fulsome praise of his brilliant oratory, or in honest confession that his periods are ponderous and his ideas often buried under Johnsonian verbiage.  Such are the contrasts to be found on successive pages of Burke’s twelve volumes, which cover the enormous range of the political and economic thought of the age, and which mingle fact and fancy, philosophy, statistics, and brilliant flights of the imagination, to a degree never before seen in English literature.  For Burke belongs in spirit to the new romantic school, while in style he is a model for the formal classicists.  We can only glance at the life of this marvelous Irishman, and then consider his place in our literature.

LIFE.  Burke was born in Dublin, the son of an Irish barrister, in 1729.  After his university course in Trinity College he came to London to study law, but soon gave up the idea to follow literature, which in turn led him to politics.  He had the soul, the imagination of a poet, and the law was only a clog to his progress.  His two first works, A Vindication of Natural Society and The Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, brought him political as well as literary recognition, and several small offices were in turn given to him.  When thirty-six years old he was elected to Parliament as member from Wendover; and for the next thirty years he was the foremost figure in the House of Commons and the most eloquent orator which that body has ever known.  Pure and incorruptible in his politics as in his personal life, no more learned or devoted servant of the Commonwealth ever pleaded for justice and human liberty.  He was at the summit of his influence at the time when the colonies were struggling for independence; and the fact that he championed their cause in one of his greatest speeches, “On Conciliation with America,” gives him an added interest in the eyes of American readers.  His championship of America is all the more remarkable from the fact that, in other matters, Burke was far from liberal.  He set himself squarely against the teachings of the romantic writers, who were enthusiastic over the French Revolution; he denounced the principles of the Revolutionists, broke with the liberal Whig party to join the Tories, and was largely instrumental in bringing on the terrible war with France, which resulted in the downfall of Napoleon.

It is good to remember that, in all the strife and bitterness of party politics, Burke held steadily to the noblest personal ideals of truth and honesty; and that in all his work, whether opposing the slave trade, or pleading for justice for America, or protecting the poor natives of India from the greed of corporations, or setting himself against the popular sympathy for France in her desperate struggle, he aimed solely at the welfare of humanity.  When he retired on a pension in 1794, he had won, and he deserved, the gratitude and affection of the whole nation.