Part 7

Of the public life of Burke we know all that we could wish. He became so prominent a figure in the great affairs of his day that even the casual observer cannot fail to discern the main facts of his career; while the close student can follow him year by year through every step of his service. But his private life was withdrawn from general scrutiny in an unusual degree. He manifested always a marked reserve about his individual and domestic affairs, deliberately, it would seem, shielding them from impertinent inquiry. He loved the privacy of life in a great city, where one may escape notice in the crowd and enjoy a grateful “freedom from remark and petty censure.” “Though I have the honor to represent Bristol,” he said to Boswell, “I should not like to live there; I should be obliged to be _so much upon my good behavior_. In London a man may live in splendid society at one time, and in frugal retirement at another, without animadversion. There, and there alone, a man’s house is truly his _castle_, in which he can be in perfect safety from intrusion whenever he pleases. I never shall forget how well this was expressed to me one day by Mr. Meynell: ‘The chief advantage of London,’ he said, ‘is, that a man is always _so near his burrow_.’” Burke took to his burrow often enough to pique our curiosity sorely. This singular, high-minded adventurer had some queer companions, we know: questionable fellows, whose life he shared, perhaps with a certain Bohemian relish, without sharing their morals or their works. It seems as incongruous that such wisdom and public spirit as breathe through his writings should have come to his thought in such company as that an exquisite idyll like Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield” should have been conceived and written in squalid garrets. But neither Burke nor Goldsmith had been born into such comradeships or such surroundings. Doubtless, as sometimes happens, their minds kept their first freshness, taking no taint from the world that touched them on every hand in their manhood, after their minds had been formed. Goldsmith, as everybody knows, remained an innocent all his life, a naïf and pettish boy amidst sophisticated men; and Burke too, notwithstanding his dignity and commanding intellectual habit, shows sometimes a touch of the same simplicity, a like habit of unguarded self-revelation. ’Twas their form, no doubt, of that impulsive and ingenuous quality which we observe in all Irishmen, and which we often mistake for simplicity. ’Twas a flavor of their native soil. It was also something more and better than that, however. Not every Irishman displays such hospitality for direct and simple images of truth as these men showed, for that is characteristic only of the open and unsophisticated mind,--the mind that has kept pure and open eyes. Not that Burke always sees the truth; he is even deeply prejudiced often, and there are some things that he cannot see. But the passion that dominates him when he is wrong, as when he is right, is a natural passion, born with him, not acquired from a disingenuous world that mistakes interest for justice. His nature tells in everything. It is stock of his character which he contributes to the subjects his mind handles. He is trading always with the original treasure he brought over with him at the first. He has never impaired his genuineness, or damaged his principles.

Just where Burke got his generous constitution and predisposition to enlightened ways of thinking it is not easy to see. Certainly Richard Burke, his brother, the only other member of the family whose character we discern distinctly, had a quite opposite bent. The father was a steady Dublin attorney, a Protestant, and a man, so far as we know, of solid but not brilliant parts. The mother had been a Miss Nagle, of a Roman Catholic family, which had multiplied exceedingly in County Cork. Of the home and its life we know singularly little. We are told that many children were born to the good attorney, but we hear of only four of them that grew to maturity, Garret, Edmund, Richard, and a sister best known to Edmund’s biographers as Mrs. French. Edmund, the second son, was born on the twelfth of January, 1729, in the second year of the reign of George II., Robert Walpole being chief minister of the Crown. How he fared or what sort of lad he was for the first twelve years of his life we have no idea. We only know that in the year 1741, being then twelve years old, he was sent with his brothers Garret and Richard to the school of one Abraham Shackleton, a most capable and exemplary Quaker, at Ballytore, County Kildare, to get, in some two years’ time, what he himself always accounted the best part of his education. The character of the good master at Ballytore told upon the sensitive boy, who all his life through had an eye for such elevation and calm force of quiet rectitude as are to be seen in the best Quakers; and with Richard Shackleton, the master’s son, he formed a friendship from which no vicissitude of his subsequent career ever loosened his heart a whit. All his life long the ardent, imaginative statesman, deeply stirred as he was by the momentous agitation of affairs,--swept away as he was from other friends,--retained his love for the grave, retired, almost austere, but generous and constant man who had been his favorite schoolfellow. It is but another evidence of his unfailing regard for whatever was steady, genuine, and open to the day in character and conduct.

At fourteen he left Ballytore and was entered at Trinity College, Dublin. Those were days when youths went to college tender, before they had become too tough to take impressions readily. But Burke, even at that callow age, cannot be said to have been teachable. He learned a vast deal, indeed, but he did not learn much of it from his nominal masters at Trinity. Apparently Master Shackleton, at Ballytore, had enabled him to find his own mind. His four years at college were years of wide and eager reading, but not years of systematic and disciplinary study. With singular, if not exemplary, self-confidence, he took his education into his own hands. He got at the heart of books through their spirit, it would seem, rather than through their grammar. He sought them out for what they could yield him in thought, rather than for what they could yield him in the way of exact scholarship. That this boy should have had such an appetite for the world’s literature, old and new, need not surprise us. Other lads before and since have found big libraries all too small for them. What should arrest our attention is, the law of mind disclosed in the habits of such lads: the quick and various curiosity of original minds, and particularly of imaginative minds. They long for matter to expand themselves upon: they will climb any dizzy height from which an exciting prospect is promised: it is their joy by some means to see the world of men and affairs. Burke set out as a boy to see the world that is contained in books; and in his journeyings he met a man after his own heart in Cicero, the copious orator and versatile man of affairs,--the only man at all like Burke for richness, expansiveness, and variety of mind in all the ancient world. Cicero he conned as his master and model. And then, having had his fill for the time of discursive study and having completed also his four years of routine, he was graduated, taking his degree in the spring of 1748.

His father had entered him as a student at the Middle Temple in 1747, meaning that he should seek the prizes of his profession in England rather than in the little world at home; but he did not take up his residence in London until 1750, by which time he had attained his majority. What he did with the intervening two years, his biographers do not at all know, and it is idle to speculate, being confident, as we must, that he quite certainly did whatever he pleased. He did the same when he went up to London to live his terms at the Temple. “The law,” he declared to Parliament more than twenty years afterwards, “is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,--a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion;” and, although himself a person “very happily born” in respect of all natural powers, he felt that the life of a lawyer would inevitably confine his roving mind within intolerably narrow limits. He learned the law, as he learned everything else, with an eye to discovering its points of contact with affairs, its intimate connections with the structure and functions of human society; and, studying it thus, he made his way to so many of its secrets, won so firm a mastery of its central principles, as always to command the respect and even the admiration of lawyers. But the good attorney in Dublin was sorely disappointed. This was not what he had wanted. The son in whom he had centred his hopes preferred the life of the town to systematic study in his chambers; wrote for the papers instead of devoting himself to the special profession he had been sent to master. “Of his leisure time,” said the “Annual Register” just after his death, “of his leisure time much was spent in the company of Mrs. Woffington, a celebrated actress, whose conversation was not less sought by men of wit and genius than by men of pleasure.”

We know very little about the life of Burke for the ten years, 1750–60, his first ten years in England,--except that he did _not_ diligently apply himself to his nominal business, the study of the law; and between the years 1752 and 1757 his biographers can show hardly one authentic trace of his real life. They know neither his whereabouts nor his employments. Only one scrap of his correspondence remains from those years to give us any hint of the time. Even Richard Shackleton, his invariable confidant and bosom friend, hears never a word from him during that period, and is told afterwards only that his correspondent has been “sometimes in London, sometimes in remote parts of the country, sometimes in France,” and will “shortly, please God, be in America.” He disappears a poor law student, under suspicion of his father for systematic neglect of duty; when he reappears he is married to the daughter of a worthy physician and is author of two philosophical works which are attracting a great deal of attention. We have reason to believe that, in the mean time, he did as much writing as they would take for the booksellers; we know that he frequented the London theatres and several of the innumerable debating clubs with which nether London abounded, whetting his faculties, it is said, upon those of a certain redoubtable baker. He haunted the galleries and lobbies of the House of Commons. His health showed signs of breaking, and Dr. Nugent took him from his lodgings in the Temple to his own house and allowed him to fall in love with his daughter. Partly for the sake of his health, perhaps, but more particularly, no doubt, for the sake of satisfying an eager mind and a restless habit, he wandered off to “remote parts of the country” and to France, with one William Burke for company, a man either related to him or not related to him, he did not himself know which. In 1755, a long-suffering patience at length exhausted, his father shut the home treasury against him; and then,--’twas the next year,--he published two philosophical works and married Miss Nugent.

One might say, no doubt, that this is an intelligible enough account of a young fellow’s life between twenty and thirty: and that we can fill in the particulars for ourselves. We have known other young Irishmen of restless and volatile natures, and need make no mystery of this one. Goldsmith, too, disappeared, we remember, in that same decade, making show of studying medicine in Edinburgh, but not really studying it, and then wandering off to the Continent, and going it afoot in light-hearted, happy-go-lucky fashion through the haunts both of the gay Latin races and the sad Teutonic, greatly to the delectation, no doubt, of the natives,--for all the world loves an innocent Irishman, with his heart upon his sleeve. ’Twould all be very plain indeed if we found in Burke that light-hearted vein. But we do not. The fellow is sober and strenuous from the first, studying the things he was not sent to study with even too intent application, to the damage of his health, and looking through the pleasures of the town to the heart of the nation’s affairs. He was a grave youth, evidently, gratifying his mind rather than his senses in the pleasures he sought; and when he emerges from obscurity it is first to give us a touch of his quality in the matter of intellectual amusement, and then to turn at once to the serious business of the discussion of affairs to which the rest of his life was to be devoted.

The two books which he gave the world in 1756 were “A Vindication of Natural Society,” a satirical piece in the manner of Bolingbroke, and “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,” which he had begun when he was nineteen and had since reconsidered and revised. Bolingbroke, not finding revealed religion to his taste, had written a “Vindication of Natural Religion” which his vigorous and elevated style and skillful dialectic had done much to make plausible. Burke put forth his “Vindication of Natural Society” as a posthumous work of the late noble lord, and so skillfully veiled the satirical character of the imitation as wholly to deceive some very grave critics, who thought they could discern Bolingbroke’s flavor upon the tasting. For the style, too, they took to be unmistakably Bolingbroke’s own. It had all his grandeur and air of distinction: it had his vocabulary and formal outline of phrase. The imitation was perfect. And yet if you will scrutinize it, the style is not Bolingbroke’s, except in a trick or two, but Burke’s. It seems Bolingbroke’s rather because it is cold and without Burke’s usual moral fervor than because it is rich and majestic and various. There is no great formal difference between Burke’s style and Bolingbroke’s: but there is a great moral and intellectual difference. When Burke is not in earnest there is perhaps no important difference at all. And in the “Vindication of Natural Society” Burke is not in earnest. The book is not, indeed, a parody, and its satirical quality is much too covert to make it a successful satire. Much that Burke urges against civil society he could urge in good faith, and his mind works soberly upon it. It is only the main thesis that he does not seriously mean. The rest he might have meant as Bolingbroke would have meant it.

The essay on The Sublime and Beautiful, though much admired by so great a master as Lessing, has not worn very well as philosophy. It is full, however, of acute and interesting observations, and is adorned in parts with touches of rich color put on with the authentic strokes of a master. We preserve it, perhaps, only because Burke wrote it; and yet when we read it we feel inclined to pronounce it worth keeping for its own sake.

Both these essays were apprentice work. Burke was trying his hand. They make us the more curious about the conditions of what must have been a notable apprenticeship. Young Burke must have gone to school to the world in a way worth knowing. But we cannot know, and that’s the end on ’t. Probably even William Burke, Edmund’s companion, could give us no very satisfactory account of the matter. The explanation lay in what he thought and not in what he did as he knocked about the world.

The company Burke kept was as singular as his talents, though scarcely so eminent. _We_ speak of “Burke,” but the London of his day spoke of “the Burkes,” meaning William, who may or may not have been Edmund’s kinsman, Edmund himself, and Richard, Edmund’s younger brother, who had followed him to London to become, to say truth, an adventurer emphatically not of the elevated sort. Edmund was destined to become the leader of England’s thought in more than one great matter of policy, and has remained a master among all who think profoundly upon public affairs; but William was for long the leader and master of “the Burkes.” He was English born; had been in Westminster School; and had probably just come out from Christ Church, Oxford, when he became the companion of Edmund’s wanderings. He was a man of intellect and literary power enough to be deemed the possible author of the “Letters of Junius;” he was born moreover with an eye for the ways of the world, and could push his own fortunes with an unhesitating hand. It was he who first got public office, and it was he who formed the influential connections which got Edmund into Parliament. He himself entered the House at the same time, and remained there, a useful party member, for some eight years. He made those from whom he sought favors dislike him for his audacity in demanding the utmost, and more than the utmost, that he could possibly hope to get; but he seems to have made those whom he served love him with a very earnest attachment. He was self-seeking; but he was capable of generosity, to the point of self-sacrifice even, when he wished to help his friend. He early formed a partnership with Richard Burke in immense stock-jobbing speculations in the securities of the East India Company; but he also formed a literary partnership with Edmund in the preparation of a sketch of the European settlements in America, and made himself respected as a strong party writer in various pamphlets on questions of the day. He could unite the two brothers by speculating with the one and thinking with the other.

Such were “the Burkes.” Edmund’s home was always the home also of the other two, whenever they wished to make it so; the strongest personal affection, avowed always by Edmund with his characteristic generous warmth, bound the three men together; their purses they had in common. Edmund was not expected, apparently, to take part in the speculations which held William and Richard together; something held him aloof to which they consented,--some natural separateness of mind and character which they evidently accepted and respected. There can hardly be said to have been any aloofness of _disposition_ on Edmund’s part. There is something in an Irishman,--even in an Irishman who holds himself to the strictest code of upright conduct,--which forbids his acting as moral censor upon others. He can love a man none the less for generous and manly qualities because that man does what he himself would not do. Burke, moreover, had an easy standard all his life about accepting money favors. He seems to have felt somehow that his intense and whole-hearted devotion to his friends justified gifts and forgiven loans of money from them. He shared the prosperity of his kinsmen without compunction, using what he got most liberally for the assistance of others; and when their fortunes came to a sudden ruin, he helped them with what he had. We ought long ago to have learned that the purest motives and the most elevated standards of conduct may go along with a singular laxness of moral detail in some men; and that such characters will often constrain us to love them to the point of justifying everything that they ever did. Edmund Burke’s close union with William and Richard does not present the least obstacle to our admiration for the noble qualities of mind and heart which he so conspicuously possessed, or make us for a moment doubt the thorough disinterestedness of his great career.

Burke’s marriage was a very happy one. Mrs. Burke’s thoroughly sweet temperament acted as a very grateful and potent charm to soothe her husband’s mind when shaken by the agitations of public affairs; her quiet capacity for domestic management relieved him of many small cares which might have added to his burdens. Her affection satisfied his ardent nature. He speaks of her in his will as “my entirely beloved and incomparable wife,” and every glimpse we get of their home life confirms the estimate. After his marriage the most serious part of his intellectual life begins; the commanding passion of his mind is disclosed. He turns away from philosophical amusements to public affairs. In 1757 appeared “An Account of the European Settlements in America,” which William Burke had doubtless written, but which Edmund had almost certainly radically revised; and Edmund himself published the first part of “An Abridgment of the History of England” which he never completed. In 1758, he proposed to Dodsley, the publisher, a yearly volume, to be known as the “Annual Register,” which should chronicle and discuss the affairs of England and the Continent. It was the period of the Seven Years’ War, which meant for England a sharp and glorious contest with France for the possession of America. Burke was willing to write the annals of the critical year 1758 for a hundred pounds; and so, in 1759, the first volume of the “Annual Register” appeared; and the plan then so wisely conceived has yielded its annual volume to the present day. Burke never acknowledged his connection with this great work,--he never publicly recognized anything he had done upon contract for the publishers,--but it is quite certain that for very many years his was the presiding and planning mind in the production of the “Register.” For the first few years of its life he probably wrote the whole of the record of events with his own hand. It was a more useful apprenticeship than that in philosophy. It gave him an intimate acquaintance with affairs which must have served as a direct preparation for the great contributions he was destined to make to the mind and policy of the Whig party.

But this, even in addition to other hack work for the booksellers, did not keep Burke out of pecuniary straits. He sought, but failed to get, an appointment as consul at Madrid, using the interest of Dr. Markham, William’s master at Westminster School; and then he engaged himself as a sort of private secretary or literary attendant to William Gerard Hamilton, whom he served, apparently to the almost entire exclusion of all other employments, for some four years, going with him for a season to Ireland, where Hamilton for a time held the appointment of Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. Hamilton is described by one of Burke’s friends as “a sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile,” and Mr. Morley says that there is “not a word too many nor too strong in the description.” At any rate, Burke’s proud spirit presently revolted from further service, and he threw up a pension of three hundred pounds which Hamilton had obtained for him rather than retain any connection with the man, or remain under any sort of obligation to him. In the mean time, however, his relations with Hamilton had put him in the way of meeting many public men of weight and influence, and he had gotten his first direct introduction to the world of affairs.