Book: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4

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After taking his degree at Dublin he went in the year 1750 to London to
keep terms at the Temple. The ten years that followed were passed in
obscure industry. Burke was always extremely reserved about his private
affairs. All that we know of Burke exhibits him as inspired by a resolute
pride, a certain stateliness and imperious elevation of mind. Such a
character, while free from any weak shame about the shabby necessities of
early struggles, yet is naturally unwilling to make them prominent in after
life. There is nothing dishonourable in such an inclination. "I was not
swaddled and rocked and dandled into a legislator," wrote Burke when very
near the end of his days: "_Nitor in adversum_ is the motto for a man like
me. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step I was traversed
and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to show my
passport. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me."

All sorts of whispers have been circulated by idle or malicious gossip
about Burke's first manhood. He is said to have been one of the numerous
lovers of his fascinating countrywoman, Margaret Woffington. It is hinted
that he made a mysterious visit to the American colonies. He was for years
accused of having gone over to the Church of Rome, and afterwards
recanting. There is not a tittle of positive evidence for these or any of
the other statements to Burke's discredit. The common story that he was a
candidate for Adam Smith's chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, when Hume
was rejected in favour of an obscure nobody (1751), can be shown to be
wholly false. Like a great many other youths with an eminent destiny before
them, Burke conceived a strong distaste for the profession of the law. His
father, who was an attorney of substance, had a distaste still stronger for
so vagrant a profession as letters were in that day. He withdrew the annual
allowance, and Burke set to work to win for himself by indefatigable
industry and capability in the public interest that position of power or
pre-eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and
connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the
bottom of the ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the
Temple, practising oratory in the free and easy debating societies of
Covent Garden and the Strand, and writing for the booksellers.

In 1756 he made his first mark by a satire upon Bolingbroke entitled _A
Vindication of Natural Society_. It purported to be a posthumous work from
the pen of Bolingbroke, and to present a view of the miseries and evils
arising to mankind from every species of artificial society. The imitation
of the fine style of that magnificent writer but bad patriot is admirable.
As a satire the piece is a failure, for the simple reason that the
substance of it might well pass for a perfectly true, no less than a very
eloquent statement of social blunders and calamities. Such acute critics as
Chesterfield and Warburton thought the performance serious. Rousseau, whose
famous discourse on the evils of civilization had appeared six years
before, would have read Burke's ironical vindication of natural society
without a suspicion of its irony. There have indeed been found persons who
insist that the _Vindication_ was a really serious expression of the
writer's own opinions. This is absolutely incredible, for various reasons.
Burke felt now, as he did thirty years later, that civil institutions
cannot wisely or safely be measured by the tests of pure reason. His
sagacity discerned that the rationalism by which Bolingbroke and the
deistic school believed themselves to have overthrown revealed religion,
was equally calculated to undermine the structure of political government.
This was precisely the actual course on which speculation was entering in
France at that moment. His _Vindication_ is meant to be a reduction to an
absurdity. The rising revolutionary school in France, if they had read it,
would have taken it for a demonstration of the theorem to be proved. The
only interest of the piece for us lies in the proof which it furnishes,
that at the opening of his life Burke had the same scornful antipathy to
political rationalism which flamed out in such overwhelming passion at its
close.

In the same year (1756) appeared the _Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin
of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful_, a crude and narrow performance
in many respects, yet marked by an independent use of the writer's mind,
and not without fertile suggestion. It attracted the attention of the
rising aesthetic school in Germany. Lessing set about the translation and
annotation of it, and Moses Mendelssohn borrowed from Burke's speculation
at least one of the most fruitful and important ideas of his own
influential theories on the sentiments. In England the _Inquiry_ had
considerable vogue, but it has left no permanent trace in the development
of aesthetic thought.

Burke's literary industry in town was relieved by frequent excursions to
the western parts of England, in company with William Burke. There was a
lasting intimacy between the two namesakes, and they seem to have been
involved together in some important passages of their lives; but we have
Edmund Burke's authority for believing that they were probably not kinsmen.
The seclusion of these rural sojourns, originally dictated by delicate
health, was as wholesome to the mind as to [v.04 p.0826] the body. Few men,
if any, have ever acquired a settled mental habit of surveying human
affairs broadly, of watching the play of passion, interest, circumstance,
in all its comprehensiveness, and of applying the instruments of general
conceptions and wide principles to its interpretation with respectable
constancy, unless they have at some early period of their manhood resolved
the greater problems of society in independence and isolation. By 1756 the
cast of Burke's opinions was decisively fixed, and they underwent no
radical change.

He began a series of _Hints on the Drama_. He wrote a portion of an
_Abridgment of the History of England_, and brought it down as far as the
reign of John. It included, as was natural enough in a warm admirer of
Montesquieu, a fragment on law, of which he justly said that it ought to be
the leading science in every well-ordered commonwealth. Burke's early
interest in America was shown by an _Account of the European Settlements_
on that continent. Such works were evidently a sign that his mind was
turning away from abstract speculation to the great political and economic
fields, and to the more visible conditions of social stability and the
growth of nations. This interest in the concrete phenomena of society
inspired him with the idea of the _Annual Register_ (1759), which he
designed to present a broad grouping of the chief movements of each year.
The execution was as excellent as the conception, and if we reflect that it
was begun in the midst of that momentous war which raised England to her
climax of territorial greatness in East and West, we may easily realize how
the task of describing these portentous and far-reaching events would be
likely to strengthen Burke's habits of wide and laborious observation, as
well as to give him firmness and confidence in the exercise of his own
judgment. Dodsley gave him L100 for each annual volume, and the sum was
welcome enough, for towards the end of 1756 Burke had married. His wife was
the daughter of a Dr Nugent, a physician at Bath. She is always spoken of
by his friends as a mild, reasonable and obliging person, whose amiability
and gentle sense did much to soothe the too nervous and excitable
temperament of her husband. She had been brought up, there is good reason
to believe, as a Catholic, and she was probably a member of that communion
at the time of her marriage. Dr Nugent eventually took up his residence
with his son-in-law in London, and became a popular member of that famous
group of men of letters and artists whom Boswell has made so familiar and
so dear to all later generations. Burke, however, had no intention of being
dependent. His consciousness of his own powers animated him with a most
justifiable ambition, if ever there was one, to play a part in the conduct
of national affairs. Friends shared this ambition on his behalf; one of
these was Lord Charlemont. He introduced Burke to William Gerard Hamilton
(1759), now only remembered by the nickname "single-speech," derived from
the circumstance of his having made a single brilliant speech in the House
of Commons, which was followed by years of almost unbroken silence.
Hamilton was by no means devoid of sense and acuteness, but in character he
was one of the most despicable men then alive. There is not a word too many
nor too strong in the description of him by one of Burke's friends, as "a
sullen, vain, proud, selfish, cankered-hearted, envious reptile." The
reptile's connexion, however, was for a time of considerable use to Burke.
When he was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin, and
there learnt Oxenstiern's eternal lesson, that awaits all who penetrate
behind the scenes of government, _quam parva sapientia mundus regitur_.

The penal laws against the Catholics, the iniquitous restrictions on Irish
trade and industry, the selfish factiousness of the parliament, the jobbery
and corruption of administration, the absenteeism of the landlords, and all
the other too familiar elements of that mischievous and fatal system, were
then in full force. As was shown afterwards, they made an impression upon
Burke that was never effaced. So much iniquity and so much disorder may
well have struck deep on one whose two chief political sentiments were a
passion for order and a passion for justice. He may have anticipated with
something of remorse the reflection of a modern historian, that the
absenteeism of her landlords has been less of a curse to Ireland than the
absenteeism of her men of genius. At least he was never an absentee in
heart. He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate
country; and, as we shall see, made more than one weighty sacrifice on
behalf of the principles which he deemed to be bound up with her welfare.

When Hamilton retired from his post, Burke accompanied him back to London,
with a pension of L300 a year on the Irish Establishment. This modest
allowance he hardly enjoyed for more than a single year. His patron having
discovered the value of so laborious and powerful a subaltern, wished to
bind Burke permanently to his service. Burke declined to sell himself into
final bondage of this kind. When Hamilton continued to press his odious
pretensions they quarrelled (1765), and Burke threw up his pension. He soon
received a more important piece of preferment than any which he could ever
have procured through Hamilton.

The accession of George III. to the throne in 1760 had been followed by the
disgrace of Pitt, the dismissal of Newcastle, and the rise of Bute. These
events marked the resolution of the court to change the political system
which had been created by the Revolution of 1688. That system placed the
government of the country in the hands of a territorial oligarchy, composed
of a few families of large possessions, fairly enlightened principles, and
shrewd political sense. It had been preserved by the existence of a
Pretender. The two first kings of the house of Hanover could only keep the
crown on their own heads by conciliating the Revolution families and
accepting Revolution principles. By 1760 all peril to the dynasty was at an
end. George III., or those about him, insisted on substituting for the
aristocratic division of political power a substantial concentration of it
in the hands of the sovereign. The ministers were no longer to be the
members of a great party, acting together in pursuance of a common policy
accepted by them all as a united body; they were to become nominees of the
court, each holding himself answerable not to his colleagues but to the
king, separately, individually and by department. George III. had before
his eyes the government of his cousin the great Frederick; but not every
one can bend the bow of Ulysses, and, apart from difference of personal
capacity and historic tradition, he forgot that a territorial and
commercial aristocracy cannot be dealt with in the spirit of the barrack
and the drill-ground. But he made the attempt, and resistance to that
attempt supplies the keynote to the first twenty-five years of Burke's
political life.

Along with the change in system went high-handed and absolutist tendencies
in policy. The first stage of the new experiment was very short. Bute, in a
panic at the storm of unpopularity that menaced him, resigned in 1763.
George Grenville and the less enlightened section of the Whigs took his
place. They proceeded to tax the American colonists, to interpose
vexatiously against their trade, to threaten the liberty of the subject at
home by general warrants, and to stifle the liberty of public discussion by
prosecutions of the press. Their arbitrary methods disgusted the nation,
and the personal arrogance of the ministers at last disgusted the king. The
system received a temporary check. Grenville fell, and the king was forced
to deliver himself into the hands of the orthodox section of the Whigs. The
marquess of Rockingham (July 10, 1765) became prime minister, and he was
induced to make Burke his private secretary. Before Burke had begun his
duties, an incident occurred which illustrates the character of the two
men. The old duke of Newcastle, probably desiring a post for some nominee
of his own, conveyed to the ear of the new minister various absurd rumours
prejudicial to Burke,--that he was an Irish papist, that his real name was
O'Bourke, that he had been a Jesuit, that he was an emissary from St
Omer's. Lord Rockingham repeated these tales to Burke, who of course denied
them with indignation. His chief declared himself satisfied, but Burke,
from a feeling that the indispensable confidence between them was impaired,
at once expressed a strong desire to resign his post. Lord Rockingham
prevailed upon him to reconsider his resolve, and from that day until Lord
Rockingham's death in [v.04 p.0827] 1782, their relations were those of the
closest friendship and confidence.

The first Rockingham administration only lasted a year and a few days,
ending in July 1766. The uprightness and good sense of its leaders did not
compensate for the weakness of their political connexions. They were unable
to stand against the coldness of the king, against the hostility of the
powerful and selfish faction of Bedford Whigs, and, above all, against the
towering predominance of William Pitt. That Pitt did not join them is one
of the many fatal miscarriages of history, as it is one of the many serious
reproaches to be made against that extraordinary man's chequered and uneven
course. An alliance between Pitt and the Rockingham party was the surest
guarantee of a wise and liberal policy towards the colonies. He went
further than they did, in holding, like Lord Camden, the doctrine that
taxation went with representation, and that therefore parliament had no
right to tax the unrepresented colonists. The ministry asserted, what no
competent jurist would now think of denying, that parliament is sovereign;
but they went heartily with Pitt in pronouncing the exercise of the right
of taxation in the case of the American colonists to be thoroughly
impolitic and inexpedient. No practical difference, therefore, existed upon
the important question of the hour. But Pitt's prodigious egoism,
stimulated by the mischievous counsels of men of the stamp of Lord
Shelburne, prevented the fusion of the only two sections of the Whig party
that were at once able, enlightened and disinterested enough to carry on
the government efficiently, to check the arbitrary temper of the king, and
to command the confidence of the nation. Such an opportunity did not
return.

The ministerial policy towards the colonies was defended by Burke with
splendid and unanswerable eloquence. He had been returned to the House of
Commons for the pocket borough of Wendover, and his first speech (January
27, 1766) was felt to be the rising of a new light. For the space of a
quarter of a century, from this time down to 1790, Burke was one of the
chief guides and inspirers of a revived Whig party. The "age of small
factions" was now succeeded by an age of great principles, and selfish ties
of mere families and persons were transformed into a union resting on
common conviction and patriotic aims. It was Burke who did more than any
one else to give to the Opposition, under the first half of the reign of
George III., this stamp of elevation and grandeur. Before leaving office
the Rockingham government repealed the Stamp Act; confirmed the personal
liberty of the subject by forcing on the House of Commons one resolution
against general warrants, and another against the seizure of papers; and
relieved private houses from the intrusion of officers of excise, by
repealing the cider tax. Nothing so good was done in an English parliament
for nearly twenty years to come. George Grenville, whom the Rockinghams had
displaced, and who was bitterly incensed at their formal reversal of his
policy, printed a pamphlet to demonstrate his own wisdom and statesmanship.
Burke replied in his _Observations on a late Publication on the Present
State of the Nation_ (1769), in which he showed for the first time that he
had not only as much knowledge of commerce and finance, and as firm a hand,
in dealing with figures as Grenville himself, but also a broad, general and
luminous way of conceiving and treating politics, in which neither then nor
since has he had any rival among English publicists.

It is one of the perplexing points in Burke's private history to know how
he lived during these long years of parliamentary opposition. It is
certainly not altogether mere impertinence to ask of a public man how he
gets what he lives upon, for independence of spirit, which is so hard to
the man who lays his head on the debtor's pillow, is the prime virtue in
such men. Probity in money is assuredly one of the keys to character,
though we must be very careful in ascertaining and proportioning all the
circumstances. Now, in 1769, Burke bought an estate at Beaconsfield, in the
county of Buckingham. It was about 600 acres in extent, was worth some L500
a year, and cost L22,000. People have been asking ever since how the
penniless man of letters was able to raise so large a sum in the first
instance, and how he was able to keep up a respectable establishment
afterwards. The suspicions of those who are never sorry to disparage the
great have been of various kinds. Burke was a gambler, they hint, in Indian
stock, like his kinsmen Richard and William, and like Lord Verney, his
political patron at Wendover. Perhaps again, his activity on behalf of
Indian princes, like the raja of Tanjore, was not disinterested and did not
go unrewarded. The answer to all these calumnious innuendoes is to be found
in documents and title-deeds of decisive authority, and is simple enough.
It is, in short, this. Burke inherited a small property from his elder
brother, which he realized. Lord Rockingham advanced him a certain sum
(L6000). The remainder, amounting to no less than two-thirds of the
purchase-money, was raised on mortgage, and was never paid off during
Burke's life. The rest of the story is equally simple, but more painful.
Burke made some sort of income out of his 600 acres; he was for a short
time agent for New York, with a salary of L700; he continued to work at the
_Annual Register_ down to 1788. But, when all is told, he never made as
much as he spent; and in spite of considerable assistance from Lord
Rockingham, amounting it is sometimes said to as much as L30,000, Burke,
like the younger Pitt, got every year deeper into debt. Pitt's debts were
the result of a wasteful indifference to his private affairs. Burke, on the
contrary, was assiduous and orderly, and had none of the vices of
profusion. But he had that quality which Aristotle places high among the
virtues--the noble mean of Magnificence, standing midway between the two
extremes of vulgar ostentation and narrow pettiness. He was indifferent to
luxury, and sought to make life, not commodious nor soft, but high and
dignified in a refined way. He loved art, filled his house with statues and
pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a
collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a
helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the
opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made
the guests of such a man very numerous. _Non invideo equidem, miror magis_,
was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's fine
house and pleasant gardens. Johnson was of a very different type. There was
something in this external dignity which went with Burke's imperious
spirit, his spacious imagination, his turn for all things stately and
imposing. We may say, if we please, that Johnson had the far truer and
loftier dignity of the two; but we have to take such men as Burke with the
defects that belong to their qualities. And there was no corruption in
Burke's outlay. When the Pitt administration was formed in 1766, he might
have had office, and Lord Rockingham wished him to accept it, but he
honourably took his fate with the party. He may have spent L3000 a year,
where he would have been more prudent to spend only L2000. But nobody was
wronged; his creditors were all paid in time, and his hands were at least
clean of traffic in reversions, clerkships, tellerships and all the rest of
the rich sinecures which it was thought no shame in those days for the
aristocracy of the land and the robe to wrangle for, and gorge themselves
upon, with the fierce voracity of famishing wolves. The most we can say is
that Burke, like Pitt, was too deeply absorbed in beneficent service in the
affairs of his country, to have for his own affairs the solicitude that
would have been prudent.

In the midst of intense political preoccupations, Burke always found time
to keep up his intimacy with the brilliant group of his earlier friends. He
was one of the commanding figures at the club at the Turk's Head, with
Reynolds and Garrick, Goldsmith and Johnson. The old sage who held that the
first Whig was the Devil, was yet compelled to forgive Burke's politics for
the sake of his magnificent gifts. "I would not talk to him of the
Rockingham party," he used to say, "but I love his knowledge, his genius,
his diffusion and affluence of conversation." And everybody knows Johnson's
vivid account of him: "Burke, Sir, is such a man that if you met him for
the first time in the street, where you were stopped by a drove of oxen,
and you and he stepped aside to take shelter but for five minutes, he'd
talk [v.04 p.0828] to you in such a manner that when you parted you would
say, 'This is an extraordinary man.'" They all grieved that public business
should draw to party what was meant for mankind. They deplored that the
nice and difficult test of answering Berkeley had not been undertaken, as
was once intended, by Burke, and sighed to think what an admirable display
of subtlety and brilliance such a contention would have afforded them, had
not politics "turned him from active philosophy aside." There was no
jealousy in this. They did not grudge Burke being the first man in the
House of Commons, for they admitted that he would have been the first man
anywhere.

With all his hatred for the book-man in politics, Burke owed much of his
own distinction to that generous richness and breadth of judgment which had
been ripened in him by literature and his practice in it. He showed that
books are a better preparation for statesmanship than early training in the
subordinate posts and among the permanent officials of a public department.
There is no copiousness of literary reference in his work, such as
over-abounded in the civil and ecclesiastical publicists of the 17th
century. Nor can we truly say that there is much, though there is certainly
some, of that tact which literature is alleged to confer on those who
approach it in a just spirit and with the true gift. The influence of
literature on Burke lay partly in the direction of emancipation from the
mechanical formulae of practical politics; partly in the association which
it engendered, in a powerful understanding like his, between politics and
the moral forces of the world, and between political maxims and the old and
great sentences of morals; partly in drawing him, even when resting his
case on prudence and expediency, to appeal to the widest and highest
sympathies; partly, and more than all, in opening his thoughts to the many
conditions, possibilities and "varieties of untried being," in human
character and situation, and so giving an incomparable flexibility to his
methods of political approach.

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