Chapter III · BURKE AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION

“Everybody knows,” Burke writes of the members of the French National Assembly, “that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his life he is their canon of Polycletus; he is their standard figure of perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to Frenchmen, the founderies of Paris are now running for statues, with the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches.”

I have presented Rousseau in his essential influence as the extremist and foe of compromise. In contrast to Rousseau, Burke is usually and rightly supposed to embody the spirit of moderation. Many of his utterances on the French Revolution, however (the passage I have just quoted may serve as a sample), are scarcely suggestive of moderation, and towards the end he becomes positively violent. There is at least this much to be said in justification of Burke, that in his writings on the Revolution, he is for the most part debating first principles, and when it comes to first principles, the issue raised is not one of moderation, but of truth or error. Burke was no mere partisan of the status quo. He was not opposed on principle to revolutions. He is perhaps open to the charge of pushing too far his admiration for the Revolution of 1688. His attitude towards the American Revolution was consistently one of compromise and in many respects of sympathy. He did not stand in any undue awe of those in authority. No one could on occasion call them to a stricter accounting or show himself a more disinterested champion of the victims of unjust power. He recognized specifically the abuses of the Old Régime in France, and was ready to admit the application to these abuses of fairly drastic remedies. If he refused, therefore, to compromise with the French Revolution, the reason is to be sought less in the field of politics than in that of general philosophy, and even of religion. He saw that the Revolution did not, like other revolutions, seek to redress certain specific grievances, but had universal pretensions. France was to become the “Christ of nations” and conduct a crusade for the political regeneration of mankind. This particular mixture of the things of God and the things of Cæsar seemed to him psychologically unsound, and in any case subversive of the existing social order of Europe. The new revolutionary evangel was the final outcome of the speculations that had been going on for generations about a state of nature, natural rights, the social contract, and abstract and unlimited sovereignty. Burke is the chief opponent of this tendency towards what one may term metaphysical politics, especially as embodied in the doctrine of the rights of man. “They are so taken up with the rights of man,” he says of the members of this school, “that they have totally forgotten his nature.” Under cover of getting rid of prejudice they would strip man of all the habits and concrete relationships and network of historical circumstance in which he is actually implicated and finally leave him shivering “in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” They leave no limit to logic save despotism. In his attack on the enemies of prejudice, by which was meant practically everything that is traditional and prescriptive, Burke has perhaps neglected unduly certain minor though still important distinctions, especially the distinction between those who were for getting rid of prejudice in the name of reason, and those who, like Rousseau, were for getting rid of it in the name of feeling. The rationalists and the Rousseauists were actually ready to guillotine one another in the Revolution, an opposition prefigured in the feud between Rousseau and various “philosophers,” notably Voltaire. Rousseau was as ready as Burke, though on different grounds, as I shall try to show presently, to protest against the “solid darkness of this enlightened age.”

By the dismissal as mere prejudice of the traditional forms that are in no small measure the funded experience of any particular community, the State loses its historical continuity, its permanent self, as it were, that unites its present with its past and future. By an unprincipled facility in changing the State such as is encouraged by Rousseau’s impressionistic notion of the general will, the generations of men can no more link with one another than the flies of a summer. They are disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality. In point of fact, any political philosophy, whether that of Hobbes or of Rousseau, which starts from the supposition that men are naturally isolated units, and achieve society only as the result of an artifice, is in its essence violently individualistic. For this atomistic, mechanical view of the State, Burke is usually supposed to have substituted an organic, historical conception. Much of his actual influence, in Germany⁠[34] and elsewhere, has certainly been along these lines. Yet this is far from being the whole truth about Burke. A one-sided devotion to the organic, historical conception is itself an outcome of the naturalistic movement. It may lead to fatalistic acquiescence in traditional forms, and discourage, not merely abstract rationalism, but a reasonable adjustment of these forms to shifting circumstance. It relates itself very readily to that side of the romantic movement that exalts the unconscious at the expense of moral choice and conscious deliberation. Once obscure this capacity in the individual, which alone raises him above phenomenal nature, and it will not be easy in the long run to preserve his autonomy; he will tend, as so often in German theory, to lose his independent will and become a mere organ of the all-powerful State. Though Taine, again, often professes to speak as a disciple of Burke in his attacks on the French Revolution, it is not easy to see a true follower in a philosopher who proclaimed that “vice and virtue are products like sugar and vitriol.”

The truth is that Burke is in no sense a collectivist, and still less, if possible, a determinist. If he had been either, he would not have attained to that profound perception of true liberty in which he surpasses perhaps any other political thinker, ancient or modern. For one who believes in personal liberty in Burke’s sense, the final emphasis is necessarily not on the State but on the individual. His individualism, however, is not, like that of Rousseau, naturalistic, but humanistic and religious. Only, in getting the standards by which the individual may hope to surpass his ordinary self, and achieve humanism or religion, he would have him lean heavily on prescription. Burke is anti-individualistic in that he would not set the individual to trading on his own private stock of wit. He would have him respect the general sense, the accumulated experience of the past that has become embodied in the habits and usages that the superficial rationalist would dismiss as prejudice. If the individual condemns the general sense, and trusts unduly his private self, he will have no model; and a man’s first need is to look up to a sound model and imitate it. He may thus become exemplary in his turn. The principle of homage and service to what is above one has its culmination and final justification in fealty to God, the true sovereign and supreme exemplar. Burke’s conception of the State may be described as a free and flexible adaptation of genuinely Platonic and Christian elements. “We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and all comfort.” “God willed the State.” (Thus to conceive the highest in terms of will is Christian.) “He willed its connection with the source and original archetype of all perfection.” (The language is here Platonic.) Not merely religion but the actual church establishment is held by Englishmen to be essential to their State, as being indeed the very foundation of their constitution.

“Society is indeed a contract,” though the basis of the contract is not mere utility. The State is not to be regarded as a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee. It is not, as a contemporary pacifist has maintained, the “pooled self-esteem” of the community, but rather its permanent ethical self. It is, therefore, a partnership in all science and art and in every virtue and perfection. “As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”

Though Burke thus uses the language of contract, it is plain that he moves in a different world from all those, including Locke, for whom the idea of contract meant that man has certain rights as a free gift of nature and anterior to the performance of his duties. Talk to the child, says Rousseau, of something that will interest him—talk to him of his rights, and not of his duties.⁠[35] To assert, as Burke does in the main, that one has only concrete historical rights, acquired as the result of the fulfilment of definite obligations, is evidently remote from Rousseau’s assertion that a man enjoys certain abstract rights simply because he has taken the trouble to be born. The difference here is not merely between Burke and Rousseau, but also between Burke and Locke. The final superficiality of Locke is that he granted man abstract natural rights anterior to his duties, and then hoped that it would be possible to apply this doctrine moderately. But it has been justly said that doctrines of this kind are most effective in their extreme logical form because it is in this form that they capture the imagination. Now if the out-and-out radical is often highly imaginative in the fashion that I have attributed to Rousseau, the Whigs and the liberals who follow the Whig tradition are rather open to the suspicion of being deficient on the side of imagination. One cannot help feeling, for instance, that if Macaulay had been more imaginative, he would have shown less humanitarian complacency in his essay on Bacon. Disraeli again is said to have looked with disdain on J. S. Mill because of his failure to perceive the rôle of the imagination in human affairs, a lack that can scarcely be charged against Disraeli himself, whatever one may think of the quality of his imagination.

Now Burke is the exceptional Whig, in that he is not only splendidly imaginative, but admits the supreme rôle of the imagination rather more explicitly than is common among either Christians or Platonists with whom I have associated him. He saw how much of the wisdom of life consists in an imaginative assumption of the experience of the past in such fashion as to bring it to bear as a living force upon the present. The very model that one looks up to and imitates is an imaginative creation. A man’s imagination may realize in his ancestors a standard of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; so that he may be enabled to rise with the example to whose imitation he has aspired. The forms of the past and the persons who administer them count in Burke’s eyes chiefly as imaginative symbols. In the famous passage on Marie Antoinette one almost forgets the living and suffering woman to see in her with Burke a gorgeous symbol of the age of chivalry yielding to the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.” There is in this sense truth in the taunt of Tom Paine that Burke pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. All the decent drapery of life, Burke complains of the new philosophy, is to be rudely torn off. “All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, ... are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.”

The apostles of the rights of man were, according to Burke, undermining the two principles on which everything that was truly civilized in the European order had for ages depended: the spirit of religion and the spirit of a gentleman. The nobility and the clergy, who were the custodians of these principles and of the symbols that embodied them and ministered to the moral imagination, had received in turn the support of the learned. Burke warns the learned that in deserting their natural protectors for Demos, they run the risk of being “cast into the mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”

Burke is in short a frank champion of aristocracy. It is here especially, however, that he applies flexibly his Christian-Platonic, and humanistic principles. He combines a soundly individualistic element with his cult of the traditional order. He does not wish any static hierarchy. He disapproves of any tendency to deal with men in classes and groups, a tendency that the extreme radical shares with the extreme reactionary. He would have us estimate men, not by their hereditary rank, but by their personal achievement. “There is,” he says, “no qualification for government but virtue or wisdom, actual or presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, they have in whatever state, condition, profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to human place and honor.” He recognizes, to be sure, that it is hard for the manual worker to acquire such virtue and wisdom for the reason that he lacks the necessary leisure. The ascent of rare merit from the lower to the higher levels of society should, however, always be left open, even though this merit be required to pass through a severe probation.

In the same fashion, Burke would admit innovations in the existing social order only after a period of severe probation. He is no partisan of an inert traditionalism. His true leader or natural aristocrat, as he terms him, has, in his adjustment of the contending claims of new and old, much of the character of the “trimmer” as Halifax has described him. “By preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the State, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obsolete.” “The disposition to preserve, and ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.” In such utterances Burke is of course simply giving the theory of English liberty at its best, a theory almost too familiar for restatement. In his imaginative grasp of all that is involved in the task of mediating between the permanent and the fluctuating element in life, the Platonic art, as one may say, of seeing the One in the Many, he has had few equals in the field of political thinking.

Burke is, however, in one important respect highly un-Platonic, and that is in his attitude towards the intellect. His distrust of what we should call nowadays the intellectual may be variously explained. It is related in some respects to one side, the weak side, one is bound to add, of Christianity. “A certain intemperance of intellect,” he writes, “is the disease of the time, and the source of all its other diseases.” He saw so clearly the dangers of this abuse that he was led at times, as the Christian has at times been led, to look with suspicion on intellect itself. And then he was familiar, as we are all familiar, with persons who give no reasons at all, or the wrong reasons, for doing the right thing, and with other persons who give the most logical and ingenious reasons for doing the wrong thing. The basis for right conduct is not reasoning but experience, and experience much wider than that of the individual, the secure possession of which can result only from the early acquisition of right habits. Then, too, there is something specifically English in Burke’s disparagement of the intellect. The Englishman, noting the results of the proneness of a certain type of Frenchman to reason rigorously from false or incomplete premises, comes to prefer his own piecemeal good sense and proclivity for “muddling through.” As Disraeli told a foreign visitor, the country is governed not by logic but by Parliament. In much the same way Bagehot in the course of a comparison between the Englishman and the Frenchman in politics, reaches the semi-humorous conclusion that “in real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled.”

The anti-intellectual side of Burke reminds one at times of the anti-intellectual side of Rousseau: when, for instance, he speaks of “the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection and above it.” The resemblance is, however, only superficial. The wisdom that Rousseau proclaimed was not above reflection but below it. A distinction of this kind is rather meaningless unless supported by careful psychological analysis. Perhaps the first contrast between the superrational and the subrational is that between awe and wonder.⁠[36] Rousseau is plainly an apostle of wonder, so much so that he is probably the chief single influence in the “renascence of wonder” that has resulted from the romantic movement. The romantic objection to intellect is that by its precise analysis and tracing of cause and effect, it diminishes wonder. Burke, on the other hand, is fearful lest an indiscreet intellectual activity may undermine awe and reverence. “We ought,” he says, “to venerate where we are unable presently to understand.” As the best means of securing veneration, Burke leans heavily upon habit, whereas the romantics, from Rousseau to Walter Pater, are no less clearly hostile to habit because it seems to lead to a stereotyped world, a world without vividness and surprise. To lay stress on veneration meant for Burke, at least in the secular order, to lay stress on rank and degree; whereas the outstanding trait perhaps of the state of nature projected by Rousseau’s imagination, in defiance of the actual facts of primitive life so far as we know them, is that it is equalitarian. This trait is common to his no-state and his all-state, his anarchistic and his collectivistic Utopia. The world of the “Social Contract,” no less than that of the “Second Discourse,” is a world without degree and subordination; a world in which no one looks up to any one else or expects any one to look up to him; a world in which no one (and this seems to Rousseau very desirable) has either to command or to obey. In his predominant emphasis on equality,⁠[37] Rousseau speaks, to some extent at least, not merely for himself but for France, especially the France of the last two centuries. “Liberty,” says Mallet du Pan, “a thing forever unintelligible to Frenchmen.”⁠[38] Perhaps liberty has not been intelligible in its true essence to many persons anywhere. “The love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty,” Burke himself admits, “is extremely rare.” If the basis of this genuine liberty is, as Burke affirms, an act of subordination, it is simply incompatible with Rousseauistic equality.

The act of subordination to any earthly authority is justified only in case this authority is looking up to something still higher; so that genuine liberty is rooted in the virtue that also underlies genuine Christianity. “True humility, the basis of the Christian system, is the low, but deep and firm foundation of all real virtue. But this, as very painful in the practice and little imposing in the appearance,” he goes on to say of the French revolutionists, “they have totally discarded.” They have preferred to follow Rousseau, the great “professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity.” Rousseau himself said that he based his position on the “noblest pride,” and pride is, even more than vanity, the significant opposite of humility. I have already spoken of Rousseau’s depreciation of humility in favor of patriotic pride. The problem of pride versus humility is, of course, not primarily political at all. It is a problem of the inner life. Rousseau undermined humility in the individual by substituting the doctrine of natural goodness for the older doctrine of man’s sinfulness and fallibility. The forms and traditions, religious and political, that Burke on the other hand defends, on the ground that they are not arbitrary but are convenient summings up of a vast body of past experience, give support to the imagination of the individual; the imagination, thus drawn back as it were to an ethical centre, supplies in turn a standard with reference to which the individual may set bounds to the lawless expansion of his natural self (which includes his intellect as well as his emotions). From a purely psychological point of view, Burke’s emphasis on humility and on the imaginative symbols that he deems necessary to secure it, reduces itself to an emphasis on what one may term the centripetal element in liberty. Rousseau, at least the Rousseau that has influenced the world, practically denies the need of any such centripetal element in liberty, inasmuch as what will emerge spontaneously on the disappearance of the traditional controls is an expansive will to brotherhood. If one rejects like Burke this gospel of “universal benevolence,” it is hard not to conceive of liberty in Burke’s fashion—namely, as a nice adjustment between the taking on of inner control and the throwing off of outer control. “Society,” he says, “cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.” This adjustment between inner and outer control, which concerns primarily the individual, is thus seen to determine at last the degree to which any community is capable of political liberty. True statesmanship is in this sense a humanistic mediation and not an indolent oscillation between extremes. “To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government—that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.”

I have already said that Burke is very exceptional in that he is a splendidly imaginative Whig. As a matter of fact, most of the typical Whigs and liberals in the Whig tradition, are, like Burke, partisans of liberty in the sense of personal liberty and of moderation. They do not, however, give their personal liberty and moderation the same basis of religion and humanistic control. On the contrary, they incline to be either rationalists or emotionalists, which means practically that they found their ethics either on the principle of utility, or else on the new spirit of sympathy and service, or more commonly on some compound of these main ingredients of humanitarianism. The liberty of Burke, I have tried to show, is not only religiously grounded, but involves in its political application a genuine humanistic mediation. The Whig compromise, on the other hand, is only too often an attempt to compromise between views of life, namely, the religious-humanistic and the utilitarian-sentimental, which are in their essence incompatible. Thus the liberalism of J. S. Mill is, compared with the liberalism of Burke, open to the charge of being unimaginative. Furthermore, from a strictly modern point of view, it is open to the charge of being insufficiently critical. For the liberty Mill desires is of the kind that will result only from the traditional spiritual controls, or from some adequate substitute, and his philosophy, as I shall try to show more fully later, supplies neither.

Burke can scarcely be charged with the form of superficiality that consists in an attempt to mediate between incompatible first principles. One may, however, feel that he failed to recognize the full extent and gravity of the clash between the new principles and the old; and one may also find it hard to justify the obscurantist element that enters into his defence of his own religious and humanistic position. One might gather from Burke that England was almost entirely made up of Christian gentlemen ready to rally to the support of the majestic edifice of traditional civilization, to all the decencies of life based finally on the moral imagination, whereas the “sophisters, economists, and calculators” who were destroying this edifice by their substitution for the moral imagination of an abstract metaphysical reason were almost entirely French. He does indeed refer to the English deists, but only to dismiss them as obscure eccentrics. The English intellectuals and radical thinkers of his own time he waves aside with the utmost contempt, opposing to them not those who think more keenly, but those who do not think at all. “Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course, they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.”

In this passage we have the obscurantist Burke at his weakest. The truth is that the little, meagre, hopping insects of the hour were representatives of an international movement of vast scope, a movement destined finally to prevail over the prejudice and prescription that Burke was defending. Moreover, this movement was largely, if not indeed primarily, of English origin. “It is from England,” says Joubert, “that have issued forth, like fogs, the metaphysical and political ideas which have darkened everything.” It is hard to trace the main currents of European life and thought from the Renaissance, especially the rise of humanitarianism in both its utilitarian and its sentimental aspects, and not assent in large measure to the assertion of Joubert. Burke’s conception of man and of the State with its strong tinge of Platonic realism (in the older sense of the word) and its final emphasis on humility, or submission to the will of God, has important points of contact with the mediæval conception. Now, even before Francis Bacon, men from the British Islands played an important part in breaking down this realism. Duns Scotus discredited reason in theology in favor of an arbitrary divine will, and so released reason for use in the secular order. William of Occam asserted a nominalism that looks forward to our type of realism, a realism, that is, not of the One but of the Many, and, therefore, at the opposite pole from the mediæval variety. Roger Bacon is significant for the future both by his interest in the physical order and by the experimental temper that he displays in dealing with this order.

To come to a later period, the upshot of the civil convulsions of seventeenth-century England was to diminish imaginative allegiance to the past. The main achievement of Cromwell himself was, as his admirer Marvell avowed, to “ruin the great work of Time.” As loyalty to the great traditions declined, England concentrated on the utilitarian effort of which Francis Bacon is the prophet, and thus did more than any other country to prepare and carry through the industrial revolution, compared with which the French Revolution is only a melodramatic incident.

If the Christian classical England that Burke took to be truly representative has survived in a place like Oxford, utilitarian England has got itself embodied in cities like Birmingham, so that the opposition between the two Englands, an opposition that is one of first principles, has come to be written on the very face of the landscape. The Englishman, however, does not proceed by logical exclusions, and is capable of maintaining in more or less friendly juxtaposition things that are ultimately incompatible. Thus a young man receives a religious-humanistic training at Oxford as a preparation for helping to administer the British Empire in India, an empire which is, in its origins, chiefly an outcome of the utilitarian and commercially expansive England. The kind of leadership that Burke desired, the leadership of the true gentleman, still plays no small part in the affairs of England and of the world. The Englishman whom he conceives to be typical, who “fears God, looks up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility,” is still extant, but is considerably less typical. Above all, his psychology is not that of the great urban masses that owe their existence to the industrial revolution. What Birmingham stands for has been gaining steadily on what Oxford stands for, and that even at Oxford itself. I have said that the only effective conservatism is an imaginative conservatism. Now it has not only become increasingly difficult to enter imaginatively into certain traditional symbols, but in general the imagination has been drawn away more and more from the element of unity in things to the element of diversity. As a result of the type of progress that has been proclaimed, everything good has come to be associated with novelty and change, with the piling up of discovery on discovery. Life, thus viewed, no longer involves any reverence for some centre or oneness, but is conceived as an infinite and indefinite expansion of wonder and curiosity. As a result of all this intoxication with change, the world is moving, we are asked to believe, towards some “far-off divine event.” It is at this point that the affinity appears between the utilitarian or Baconian, and the emotional or Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement. The far-off divine event is, no less than Rousseau’s state of nature, a projection of the idyllic imagination. The felicity of the divine event, like that of the state of nature, is a felicity that can be shown to involve no serious moral effort or self-discipline on the part of the individual. Rousseau himself put his golden age in the past, but nothing is easier than to be a Rousseauist, and at the same time, like the Baconian, put one’s golden age in the future. The differences between Baconian and Rousseauist, and they are numerous, are, compared with this underlying similarity in the quality of their “vision,” unimportant. I remarked at the outset that the modern political movement may be regarded in its most significant aspect as a battle between the spirit of Rousseau and that of Burke. Whatever the explanation, it is an indubitable fact that this movement has been away from Burke and towards Rousseau. “The star of Burke is manifestly fading,” Lecky was able to write a number of years ago, “and a great part of the teaching of the ‘Contrat Social’ is passing into English politics.” Professor Vaughan, again, the editor of the recent standard edition of Rousseau’s political writings, remarked in his introduction, apparently without awakening any special contradiction or surprise, that in the essentials of political wisdom Burke is “immeasurably inferior to the man of whom he never speaks but with scorn and loathing; to the despised theorist, the metaphysical madman of Geneva.”

Burke will be cherished as long as any one survives in the world who has a perception of the nature of true liberty. It is evident, however, that if a true liberalism is to be successfully defended under present circumstances, it will not be altogether by Burke’s method. The battle for prejudice and prescription and a “wisdom above reflection” has already been lost. It is no longer possible to wave aside the modernists as the mere noisy insects of an hour, or to oppose to an unsound activity of intellect mere stolidity and imperviousness to thought—the great cattle chewing their cud in the shadow of the British oak. But before coming to the question of method, we need to consider what the triumph of Rousseau has actually meant in the history of modern Europe, during and since the Great Revolution. A survey of this kind will be found to involve a consideration of the two chief political problems of the present time, the problem of democracy and the problem of imperialism, both in themselves and in their relation to one another.