If the sublime intimidates, the beautiful attracts. Beauty is described by Burke as ‘a social quality’; it is not simply what elicits lust between the sexes, but the expression of a social preference for a relationship with a particular mate. More widely, it includes the emotions and instincts that bring people together in general society: these are sympathy, imitation and ambition, again implanted by providence in order to bring human capacities to their fullest expression.
Much of this is speculative and tendentious, to say the least. But through it we can clearly glimpse the writer himself. It would be hard to miss a young man’s yearning in passages like this: ‘Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness … the deceitful maze through which the eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried.’ Or later, in considering how the body is physically affected by love:
The head reclines something on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object, the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and then a little sigh: the whole body is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides. All this is accompanied with an inward sense of melting and languor.
This reads more like an erotic novel than a work of philosophy. It is little surprise that the book was later attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft, the great eighteenth-century feminist, for perpetuating a weak and feeble stereotype of women.
The Enquiry was published anonymously in 1757, and sold well enough in the right circles for Burke to become quickly and widely known as its author. It became something of a text on the sublime, in succession to the ancient critic Longinus. As a work of aesthetics it impressed one of the great intellectuals and critics of the eighteenth-century, Gotthold Lessing, and two of the greatest thinkers of all time, Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith. It may also have partly provoked William Gilpin into developing his own notion of the picturesque, which combined the sublime and the beautiful in art and nature, an idea which became wildly fashionable later in the century.
But what is perhaps still more striking is that even at this very early stage the Enquiry again lays out in embryo an array of themes always later to be identified with Burke. Humans have a distinctive nature, which is not purely subjective but governed by certain general laws; indeed, they are social animals heavily driven by instinct and emotion. The testimony of ordinary people is often of greater value than that of experts. Human passions are guided by empathy and imagination. Human well-being is grounded in a social order whose values are given by divine providence. Human reason is limited in scope, and insufficient as a basis for public morality. There may also be a hint here that, in the words of the American thinker Leo Strauss, ‘good order or the rational is the result of forces which do not lend themselves to good order or the rational’. People cannot reason themselves into a good society, for a good society is rooted not merely in reason but in the sentiments and the emotions; this was to prove a crucial precursor to Burke’s critique of the French revolution in the 1790s. Overall, then, a coherent, persuasive and strikingly modern set of ideas is already taking shape.
The years 1756–9 were a time in which Burke poured forth a profusion of different writings, mostly unfinished, under his developing relationship with Robert Dodsley. Despite some missed deadlines, these mark his transition from a writer from inspiration to a writer from demand, from something of an intellectual dilettante to a seasoned professional able to master a body of knowledge and set down his views quickly and cogently. They also required prodigious amounts of reading and reflection, deepening an already capacious personal reservoir of knowledge which was to serve Burke well in future years. It has been rightly said that political parties are elected when they are full of ideas, and turned out of office when those ideas run out. In Burke’s case, though he was only twice briefly in office, the ideas never did run out.
The next of his early works was An Account of the European Settlements in America (1757), in collaboration with his friend Will Burke. This was history and polemic, with a highly topical purpose. British foreign policy since time immemorial could be summarized as the desire to inhibit the emergence and restrain the actions of successive superpowers in mainland Europe, in particular Spain and latterly France under Louis XIV and his successors. Throughout the century the French and British had repeatedly clashed in their colonial expansions, from India to the West Indies to North America. In 1755 the uneasy peace of Aix-la-Chapelle broke down entirely, with the disastrous failure of an expedition by the British commander-in-chief General Braddock to capture Fort Duquesne, in modern-day Pittsburgh. In May of the following year war was formally declared between France and Britain. It would shortly spread across the globe, in what became known as the Seven Years War.
The Account summarized the prevailing state of knowledge about the European colonies in North America, covering their history, ethnography, geography, differing cultures and economic conditions. Inevitably, it was a compendium. But it also made an argument: well-regulated colonies mattered to Britain, and by implication were worth fighting for. Not only that: the fading Spanish Empire was less to be feared than French ambition and expansionism. Indeed the fate of the Dutch and Spanish empires gave, the authors held, an object lesson in what not to do. Having taken control of vast swathes of South America, the Dutch and Spanish had largely milked their territories for cash, extracting their immediate mineral resources rather than building sustainable colonies with proper infrastructure and orderly relations with local people. Their leaders had grossly abused their powers through self-enrichment. The result was colossal short-term wealth, followed by odium, failure and decline. Overall, the policy was trenchantly dismissed: ‘In government, tyranny; in religion, bigotry; in trade, monopoly.’
The Burkes’ own position combined free trade with a belief in the social order and an emphasis on institution-building. Monopolies were to be avoided and oligopoly discouraged. Regulation and economic incentives should be set to enhance the public good over the long term. Promising infant industries could properly be supported by public subsidy while they were being established. The colonies should be encouraged to specialize, and develop competitive advantage where they could; and they should be allowed to export in their own right to foreign markets. But they should continue to be prevented from importing, in order to protect Britain’s status as the source of higher-value finished goods.
We do not know the exact division of labour of the Account. It has been suggested that most of the hard work, and in particular that of compilation and summary, was done by Will, while its intellectual thrust, shape and power of generalization came from Edmund. But this may well be unfair, since Will was evidently no intellectual slouch. What we can say is that it too contributes to the body of Burkean ideas so far advanced in the Vindication and Enquiry. We have a common human nature, the Account avers; peoples differ crucially in their history, character and manners; what institutions and culture they develop make a huge difference to their well-being and success; the Christian religion is generally a civilizing force; great leaders are marked by their capacity for hard work and unselfish public service; divine providence creates opportunity, and the chance for failure to redeem itself.
The Account was a success. It ran through several editions and was translated into Italian, French and German. It also gave William a start in life, and he was appointed in 1759 to the British administration in the recently captured island of Guadeloupe, where he began an ill-starred and occasionally illegal career as a fortune-hunter. Edmund, meanwhile, had moved on to the last of his early literary projects for the Dodsleys. Having demonstrated a talent for historical writing in the Vindication and the Account, he now aspired to write nothing less than a short history of England – in under two years.
The first half of the century had seen at least five multi-volume narrative histories of England. Yet the feeling persisted that genius was somewhat lacking in this area, especially compared to the