Let us examine, as an example of Burke’s method, his remarks on the New Year’s Address presented to Louis XVI. They conclude with the following paragraph:
A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to administer the opiate potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients of scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of “the balm of hurt minds,” the cup of human misery full to the brim, and to force him to drink it to the dregs. (p. 164.)
The exceeding strength and fulness of these lines depend on the fact that every word in them, saving mere auxiliaries, represents a distinct image. When we apply to them Burke’s well-known canon that the master sentence of every paragraph should involve, firstly, a thought, secondly, an image, and thirdly, a sentiment, we see how all such canons fail. The thought and the sentiment are clear enough, but they are completely enveloped in this congeries of images. Turning back, however, we shall see how it is prepared for in the preceding pages. The Address is introduced at the end of a previous paragraph (p. 163), as the climax of a sustained rhetorical arsis. Pausing to give this striking feature its due effect, the writer then drops suddenly in a fresh paragraph into a vein of irony, bitter and elaborate, but not strongly coloured. In fact, both the beginning and the end of this paragraph are relieved by something approaching very nearly to a quaint equivocation. It is slightly prosaic, diffuse, and familiar. We have another pause, and another change. The writer gathers [lvi] himself up for a strong effort, and pours out, in these half-a-dozen lines, a series of images coloured with all the depth which words can give, destined to unite with and deepen the effect of the preceding periods. The three paragraphs are, as it were, in three keys of colour, one over the other, the deepest, the most vigorous, and at the same time the most sparingly applied, coming last. Burke does not in general severely tax the memory. He may expect you to carry your vision through a dozen pages, but he lends you every assistance that art can give. He puts his most striking images last, that the reader may pause upon them, and see how they sum up and illustrate his previous argument. If this volume is opened at p. 191, the three terminations of the paragraphs, though in each case he ends with an image, will curiously illustrate the variety of his resources.
Let us see again how an image is varied, another is grafted upon it, and it disappears in the vein of pure irony to which it is intended to conduct:
“The ears of the people of England are distinguishing. They hear these men speak broad. Their tongue betrays them.1 Their language is in the patois of fraud; in the cant and gibberish of hypocrisy. The people of England must think so, when these praters affect to carry back the clergy to that primitive evangelic poverty,” &c. (p. 201.)
Burke excels in this preparation of transitions: and it always distinguishes the master. The passage on the Queen (p. 169), which is perhaps the most famous in the book, is intended in this way. It fitly concludes the reflections on the sufferings of the Royal Family, and prepares the way for the animated contrast which follows of ancient and modern modes of social and political feeling. In these pages (170–72) we observe Burke’s happiest manner, that progressive and self-developing method which distinguishes him among prose writers, as it does Dryden among poets. “His thesis grows in the very act of unfolding it.”2 Each sentence seems, by a kind of scintillation, to suggest the image contained in the next; and this again instantly flames and germinates into a crowd of others. There is no loss, however, of the ultimate aim, and the rich fancy never gets, so to speak, out of hand [lvii] or seems to burst into mere wanton coruscations. The boldest strokes come in exactly in the right places, and we acquiesce in the judgment with which the strain on our imagination is duly relaxed, and we are allowed to relapse into the strain of plain statement and direct argument. “Burke,” says Hazlitt, “is really one of the severest of writers.” Even in his half-prophetic mood we never miss a certain understood calmness, and a background of self-restraint and coolness: there is always a principle of restoration in the opposite direction. “In the very whirlwind of his passion he begets a temperance.” To this effect his habit of repetition very much contributes. He produces the same thought, first expanded and illustrated with all his imagery, then contracted and weighed with all his sententiousness. Fulness and brevity, ardour and philosophical calm, light and shade, are ever alternating.
In style, as in everything else, the nature of things is best seen in their smallest proportions. The best writers are immediately discernible by their mere phrases, by the ability and the happiness with which they conjoin the simple elements of substantive and verb, adjective or participle. It is not that words are coerced into a strange collocation, or that the writer “will for a tricksy phrase defy the matter”; but that expressions are constructed which seem natural, without being common or obvious. Notwithstanding the depth and rapidity of the current of Burke’s ideas, it flows in general as clear as if it were the shallowest of rills. Still, the freedom with which he employs his extraordinary copia verborum occasionally leads him into obscurity. One passage has been often marked as an instance. It occurs near the end of the book (pp. 361–62), where it is remarked that the little arts and devices of popularity are not to be condemned:
They facilitate the carrying of many points of moment; they keep the people together; they refresh the mind in its exertions; and they diffuse occasional gaiety over the severe brow of moral freedom.
The last sentence has been confidently pronounced to be nonsense in the strict acceptance of the word—that is, to have no meaning, and to be neither true nor false. The obscurity lies in the involution, in an abbreviated form, of a statement which occurs at page 126, that all nations but France had [lviii] begun political reformation in a serious and even severe temper. “All other people have laid the foundations of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of more austere and masculine morality.” France, on the other hand, doubled the licence of her ferocious dissoluteness in manners. The contrast, in the passage criticised, is between the political licence of the demagogues of France, and the occasional condescension of the more austere English patriot to the humours of his constituents.1 It is not denied that Burke wrote, in the first instance, hastily, and that there are occasional blemishes in this book; but most of them disappeared before it issued from the press. Pages 149–50, for instance, were amended after the first edition, and might have been amended somewhat more. Burke was, however, averse from making any important alterations, and he refused to correct some palpable errors, on the ground of their non-importance. He himself considered that he had elaborated the work with even more than his habitual carefulness of composition; and it is known that large portions of it were recomposed, and the whole subjected to a never-satisfied revision, which excited the remonstrances of his printer. “The fragments of his manuscripts which remain,” says Dr. Croly,2 “show that not words but things were the objects of his revision. At every fresh return some fine idea found enlargement; some strong feeling was invigorated; some masculine moral was aggrandised into universal application, and coloured into poetic beauty.” The blemishes which are still left are partially shielded by the extraordinary compass of Burke’s writing. His great art and originality in putting together his phrases and sentences makes even his negligence seem less than it really is. We are often tempted to think that his most heedless combinations are rather studied than spontaneous. It cannot, however, escape notice, that the workmanship of the treatise is [lix] very unequal. Burke always relied much upon correction, and extensively pruned and altered his first draughts. On the strength of many marks of carelessness which this process has left on the face of the work, it has, from the merely literary point of view, been undervalued. Francis (Junius) wrote to Burke,1 “Why will you not learn that polish is material to preservation? . . . I wish you would let me teach you to write English!” Such expressions from Francis were mere impudence. It has been well remarked that compared to the athletic march of the writings of Burke, the best letters of Junius remind us irresistibly of the strut of a petit-maître. It is the ramp of the lion by the side of the mordacious snarl of the cur. Of literature, in the highest sense, Francis knew next to nothing. He represented, however, in some measure those current canons of literary taste which Burke recklessly broke through. But let it be remembered that Burke was not writing as an aspirant for literary or any other fame.