Part 1 (2/2)

To rouse Burke's genius to its n.o.blest utterance, there must needs be a suffering which he could personify and dramatise. He saw nothing of the dull peasant misery which in truth explained the Revolution. He ignored those catalogues of injustice and wrong that composed the mandates (the _cahiers_) which the Deputies carried with them to the National a.s.sembly. He forgot the famines, the exactions, the oppressive privileges which made revolt, and saw only the pathos of the Queen's helplessness before it. In Paine's immortal epigram, he ”pitied the plumage and forgot the dying bird.” But it is paradoxically true that while he pursued the friends of humanity, his real impulse was the hatred of cruelty which modern men call humanitarian. To that hatred he was always true. No abstract principle, but always this dominating pa.s.sion, covers his inconsistencies, and bridges the gulf between his earlier Whiggery and his later Toryism. In the French Revolution he saw only cruelty, and he opposed it as he had opposed Indian Imperialism, negro slavery, the savage criminal justice of his day, and the penal laws against the Irish Catholics. Of Burke one must ask not so much What did he believe? as Whom did he pity?

It was the contrast of temperament and att.i.tude which made the cleavage between Burke and the friends of the French Revolution deep and irreconcilable. In the fundamentals of political theory he often seems to agree with some of them, and they differ as often among themselves.

Burke seems often to retain the typical eighteenth century fiction that the State is based on some original pact or social contract. That was Rousseau's starting point, and it was G.o.dwin's work (after Hume) to shatter this heritage which French and English speculation had been content to accept from Locke. There are pa.s.sages in which Burke appears to accept the notion, unintelligible to modern minds, of the natural, or as he put it, ”primitive,” rights of man. He reserved his contempt for those who sought to tabulate or codify these rights, and he would always brush aside any argument based upon them, by asking the prior question, what in the given emergency was best for the good of society, or the happiness of men. Paine, when he was in his more _a priori_ moods, was capable of deducing his whole practical system from the abstract rights of man; G.o.dwin was a modern in virtually dismissing the whole notion.

While Burke was belabouring Dr. Price, he whittled away the whole theoretic significance of the English Revolution of 1688, but he remained its partisan. He tried to deny Dr. Price's claim to ”choose our governors,” but he could not relapse into the seventeenth-century Tory doctrine of non-resistance, and would always allow in extreme cases the right of rebellion. Here again there was no final opposition, for there are pa.s.sages in G.o.dwin against rash rebellion and the anarchy of revolution more impressive, if less emotional, than anything in Burke.

Modern criticism is disposed to base the greatness of Burke on his inspired antic.i.p.ation of the historical view of politics. Quotation has made cla.s.sical those n.o.ble pa.s.sages which glorify the continuous life of mankind, link the present by a chain of pieties to the past, conjure up a glowing vision of the social organism, and celebrate the wisdom of our ancestors and the infallibility of the race. There was, indeed, a real opposition of temperament here; but Burke had no monopoly of the historical vision. It is a travesty to suggest that the revolutionary school despised history. Paine, indeed, was a self-taught man, who knew nothing of history and cared less. But G.o.dwin wrote history with success and even penned a remarkable essay (_On Sepulchres_) in which he antic.i.p.ated the Comtist veneration for the great dead, and proposed a national scheme for covering the country with monuments to their memory.

Condorcet, perhaps the greatest intellect and certainly the n.o.blest character among them, wrote the first attempt at a systematic evolutionary interpretation of history.

But it makes some difference whether a man sees history from above or from below. Burke saw it from the comfortable alt.i.tude of the Whig aristocracy to which he had allied himself. The revolutionary school saw its inverse, from the standpoint of the ”swinish mult.i.tude” (an angry indiscretion of Burke's) for whom it had worked to less advantage. Paine was a man of the people, and G.o.dwin belonged by birth to the dissenting community for whom history had been chiefly a record of persecution, illuminated by rebellion. For Burke the product of history was the sacred const.i.tution in which he saw an ”entailed heritage,” the social fabric ”well cramped and bolted together in all its parts.” For G.o.dwin it was mainly a chronicle of criminal wars, savage oppressions, and social misery. Burke, in a moment of paradoxical exaltation, was capable of singing the praises of ”prejudice,” which ”renders a man's virtue his habit.” For Condorcet, on the other hand, history was the orderly procession of the human mind, advancing through a series of well-marked epochs (he enumerated nine) from the pastoral state to the French Revolution, each epoch marked primarily by the shedding of some moral, social, or theological ”prejudice,” which had hampered its advance.

It is easy to criticise the nave intellectualism of such a view as this, which ignores or thrusts into the background the economic causes of advance and retrogression. But it is certainly not an unhistorical view. Burke dreaded fundamental discussions which ”turn men's duties into doubts.” The revolutionary school believed that all progress depended on the daring and thoroughness of these discussions. History for them was a continuous Socratic dialogue, in which the philosophers of innovation were always arrayed against the sophists of authority.

They hoped everything from the leaders.h.i.+p of the illuminated few who gradually permeate the ma.s.s and raise it with them. Burke held that ”the individual is foolish, but the species is wise,” and the ”natural aristocracy” in whom he trusted was to keep the inert ma.s.s in a condition of stable equilibrium.

We retain from Burke to-day the sonorous generalisations, the epigrammatic maxims, which each of us applies in his own way. But to Burke's contemporaries they meant only one thing--a defence of the unreformed franchise. All his reverence for the pre-ordained order of providence, the ”divine tactic” which had made society what it was, meant for them in bald prose that Old Sarum should have two members.

Burke had not ”a doubt that the House of Commons represents perfectly the whole commons of Great Britain.” They, with no mystical view of history to guide them, pointed out that its electors were a mere handful of 12,000 in the whole population, and that Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford had not a Member among them. While Burke perorated about the ways of providence, they pointed to that auctioneer who put up for sale to the highest bidder the fee simple of the Borough of Gatton with the power of nominating two members for ever. That auctioneer is worth quoting: ”Need I tell you, gentlemen, that this elegant contingency is the only infallible source of fortune, t.i.tles, and honours in this happy country? That it leads to the highest situations in the State? And that, meandering through the tempting sinuosities of ambition, the purchaser will find the margin strewed with roses, and his head quickly crowned with those precious garlands that flourish in full vigour round the fountain of honour? On this halcyon sea, if any gentleman who has made his fortune in either of the Indies chooses once more to embark, he may repose in perfect quiet. No hurricanes to dread; no tormenting claims of insolent electors to evade; no tinkers' wives to kiss.... With this elegant contingency in his pocket, the honours of the State await his plucking, and with its emoluments his purse will overflow.”

A reference to the elegant contingency of Gatton sufficed to deflate a good deal of eloquence.

Burke, indeed, believed in the pre-ordained order of the world, but he somehow omitted the rebels. When in his sublimest periods, he appealed to ”the known march of the ordinary providence of G.o.d,” and saw in revolution and change an a.s.sault on the divine order, one sees, rigid and forbidding, the limitations of his thinking. The man who sees in history a divine tactic must salute the regiment in its headlong charge no less than the regiment which stands with fixed bayonets around the ark of the covenant. Said the Hindoo saint, who saw all things in G.o.d and G.o.d in all things, to the soldier who was slaying him, ”And Thou also art He.” The march of providence embraced 1789 as well as 1688.

Paine and G.o.dwin, Danton and Robespierre might have answered Burke with a reminder that they also were His children.

The key to any understanding of the dialogue between Burke and the Revolutionists is that each side was moved by a pa.s.sion which meant nothing to the other. Burke was hoa.r.s.e with anger and fear at the excesses in France. They were afire with an almost religious faith in human perfectibility. Burke's is a great record of detailed reforms achieved or advocated, but for organic change there was no place in his system, and he indulged in no vision of human progress. ”The only moral trust with any certainty in our hands,” he wrote, ”is the care of our own time.” It was of to-morrow that the Revolution thought, and even of the day after to-morrow. Nothing could shake its faith. Proscribed amid the Terror for his moderation and independence, learning daily in the garret where he hid of the violent deaths of friends and comrades, witnessing, as it must have seemed to him, the ruin of his work and the frustration of his brightest hopes, Condorcet, solitary and disguised, sat down to write that sketch of human destinies which is, perhaps, the most confident statement of a reasoned optimism in European literature.

He finished his _Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind_, left his garret, and went out to meet his death. A year later, as if to show that the great prodigal hope could survive the brain that conceived it, the representatives of the French people had it circulated as a national doc.u.ment.

Its thesis is that no limit can be set to the perfection of human faculties, that the progress and perfectibility of man are independent of any power which can arrest them, and have no term unless it be the duration of the globe itself. The progress might be swift or slow, but the ultimate end was sure. Twenty years before, Turgot projecting a system of universal education in France, had promised to transform the nation in ten years. Condorcet was less sanguine, but his perspective was short. The indefinite advance of mankind presupposed, he argued, the elimination of inequality (1) among peoples, and (2) among cla.s.ses, and lastly the perfection of the individual. For all this he believed that the Revolution had already laid the foundation. Negro slavery, for example, would end; Africa would enter on a phase of culture dependent on settled agriculture, and the East adopt free inst.i.tutions. The time was at hand when the sun would rise only on free men, and tyrants, slaves, and priests would live only in history. The Revolution had proclaimed the equality of men, and the future would proceed to realise it. Monopolies abolished, fortunes would tend to a level of equality, and a system of insurance (Dr. Price's specific) would mitigate or abolish poverty. Universal education would reduce the natural inequality of talents, and break down the barriers of cla.s.s, so that men, retaining still the desire to be instructed by others, would no longer need to be controlled by their superiors. Science had made a dizzy progress in the past generation, but its advance must be still more rapid when general education enables it to be cultivated by still greater numbers, and by women as well as men. To the fear which Malthus afterwards used as the most formidable argument against revolutionary optimism, that a denser population would leave the means of subsistence inadequate, he opposed intensive cultivation, synthetic chemistry, and the progress of mankind in self-control and virtue. Human character itself will change with the amendment of human inst.i.tutions. Pa.s.sion can be dominated by reflection, and by the deliberate encouragement of gentle and altruistic sentiments.

The business of politics is to destroy the opposition between self-interest and altruism, and to make a world in which when a man seeks his own good, he need no longer infringe the good of others. A great share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction of the inequality of the s.e.xes, which Condorcet preached in France while Mary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has been ruinous even to the s.e.x which it favoured, and rests in nothing but an abuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of women but to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too will end, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is a perpetual confederation of mankind.

It would be a fascinating but too protracted study to follow this faith in the perfectibility of mankind to its final enthusiasms of prophecy, and to trace it to its origins in the speculations of Helvetius and Holbach, of Priestley and Price. It was a creative impulse which made for itself a psychology and a sociology; it rather led the thinking of men than followed from their reasonings. They seem at every turn to choose of two alternative views the one which would favour this sovereign hope. Is it reason and opinion, or some innate character which governs the actions of men? The philosophers of hope answer ”opinion,”

for opinion can be indefinitely changed and led from prejudice to science. Is it climate (as Montesquieu had urged) or political inst.i.tutions which differentiate the races of men? Clearly it is inst.i.tutions, for if it were climate there would be nothing to hope from reform. Burke opposed to all their schemes of construction and destruction, to their generalisations and philosophisings, the unchangeable fact of human nature. They answered (diving into Helvetius) that human nature is itself the product of ”education” or, as we should call it, ”environment.” Circ.u.mstances and above all political inst.i.tutions have made man what he is. Princes, as Holbach puts it, are gardeners who can by varying systems of cultivation alter the character of men as they would alter the form of trees. Change the inst.i.tutions and you will change human nature itself. There seemed no limit to the improvement which would follow if we could but discard the fetters of prejudice and despotism.

Wordsworth's ”shades of the prison-house” which close upon the growing boy, were an echo of this thought. G.o.dwin's friend, Holcroft, embodied it in a striking metaphor: ”Men do not become what by nature they are meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings and higher propensities of the soul are, as it were shrunk up, scared, violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse in the world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their children to make them fit for their future situation in life.”

The men of the Revolution phrased that idea each in his own way, according as they had been influenced, primarily, by Rousseau, Helvetius, or Condorcet. It gave to their controversy with Burke the appearance, not so much of a dispute between rival schools, as of a dialogue between men who spoke to each other in unknown tongues.

Burke condescended to reason with Dr. Price. But the main answer of authority to the friends of the French Revolution, was the answer which Burke prescribed for ”infidels”--”a refutation by criminal justice.” A curious parallel movement towards extremes went on simultaneously in the two camps. While Burke separated himself from Fox, split the Whig party, and devoted his genius to the task of fanning the general English dislike of the Revolution into a panic rage of anger and fear, the progressive camp in its turn was gradually captured by the ”intellectuals,” and pa.s.sed from a humdrum demand for political reform into a ferment of moral and social speculation. Societies grew up in all the chief centres of population, always with the same programme. ”An honest Parliament. An annual Parliament. A Parliament wherein each individual will have his representative.” Of these the most active, the most extreme, and the best organised was undoubtedly the London Corresponding Society.

It was founded by a Scottish boot-maker named Thomas Hardy. The sober, limited character of the man is plain to read in his records and pamphlets. The son of a sea-captain, who had had his education in a village school in Perths.h.i.+re where the scholars paid a penny a week, he was a leading member of the Scots' Kirk in Covent Garden, and had drawn his political education not at all from G.o.dless French philosophers, but from the Protestant fanatic, Lord George Gordon, and from Dr. Price's book on the American War. He gathered his own friends together to found his society, and nine of them met for the first time in the ”Bell”

tavern in Exeter Street in January, 1792. ”They had finished their daily labour and met there by appointment. After having their bread and cheese and porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with some conversation, on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life, which they in common with their fellow-citizens felt to their sorrow, the business for which they had met was brought forward--Parliamentary Reform.”

The Corresponding Society drew the bulk of its members from tradesmen, mechanics and shopkeepers, who contributed their penny a week, and organised itself under Hardy's methodical guidance into numerous branches each with twenty members. It is said to have counted in the end some 30,000 members in London alone. It was a focus of discontent and hope which soon attracted men of more conspicuous talents and wider experience. Horne Tooke, man about town, ex-clergyman, and philologist, who had been at first the friend and lieutenant and then the rival and enemy of Wilkes, was there to bridge the years between the last great popular agitation and the new hopes of reform. He was a man cautious and even timid in action, but there was a vanity in him which led him to say ”hanging matters” when he had an inflammable audience in front of him within the four walls of a room. There was Tom Paine, the man who had first dared to propose the independence of the United States, a veteran of revolution who had served on Was.h.i.+ngton's staff, penned those brilliant exhortations which led the American rebels to victory, and acted as Foreign Secretary to the insurgent Congress. On the fringes of the little inner circle of intellectuals one catches a glimpse of William Blake the poet, and Ritson, the first teacher and theorist of vegetarianism. Not the least interesting member of the group was Thomas Holcroft, the inseparable friend and ally of William G.o.dwin. Holcroft's vivid and masterful personality stands out indeed as the most attractive among the abler members of the circle. The son of a boot-maker, he had earned his bread as cobbler, ostler, village schoolmaster, strolling player and reporter. His insatiable pa.s.sion for knowledge had given him a mastery of French and German. He went in 1783 to Paris as correspondent of the _Morning Herald_, on the modest salary of a guinea-and-a-half a week. It was there that he acquired his familiarity with the writings of the French political philosophers, and performed the quaint achievement of pirating _Figaro_ for the English stage. No printed copy was obtainable, and Holcroft contrived to commit the whole play to memory by attending ten performances, much as Mozart had pirated the ancient exclusive music of St. Peter's in Rome. He was at this period a thriving literary craftsman, and the author of a series of popular plays in which the critics of the time had just begun to note and resent an obtrusive democratic tendency.

Under the influence of these eager speculative spirits, the Corresponding Society must have travelled far from its original business of Parliamentary Reform. Here is an extract from evidence given before the Privy Council, which relates the proceedings at one of its later meetings:

”The most gentlemanlike person took the chair and talked about an equal representation of the people, and of putting an end to war. Holcroft talked about the Powers of the Human Mind.... Mr. Holcroft talked a great deal about Peace, of his being against any violent or coercive means, that were usually resorted to against our fellow-creatures, urged the more powerful operation of Philosophy and Reason to convince man of his errors; that he would disarm his greatest enemy by these means and oppose his Fury. He spoke also about Truth being powerful, and gave advice to the above effect to the delegates present who all seemed to agree, as no person opposed his arguments.”

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