from a waterfall, or the scintillations from the iron under the blacksmith’s hammer.” It is less wonderful that a few errors of taste or [xxxvii] method should find their way into such a train of ideas, than that these errors should be so few and so insignificant. It is hazardous to approach this fiery element too nearly. “Rhetoric,” says Selden, “is very good, or stark naught: there’s no medium in Rhetoric.” These higher beauties will be imitated at the student’s peril. In the manner of them, as in that of Pindar, there is no harbour for mediocrity: you must either succeed or fail. And the continual study of the finest passages is not to be recommended. “If dwelt on exclusively as models of style,” says Dr. Goodrich, “they are sure to vitiate the taste. It is like taking all our nutriment from highly seasoned food and stimulating drinks.”40
The favourite epithet of Shakspere is “sweet”; that of Milton, “bright”; that of Taylor, “eternal.” That of Burke takes several forms, the chief being “great,” “noble,” “manly,” and “liberal.” Such epithets afford an index to the tendency of the works in which they abound. Taylor bears the thought of his reader in an irresistible current from the things of time to the things of eternity. Shakspere, above all things, refines the taste: Milton quickens and exalts the imagination. The peculiar effect of Burke is to enlarge, strengthen, liberalise, and ennoble the understanding. In following the train of his arguments, even in their minor particulars, he must be a wise man indeed who does not constantly perceive lights that never fell on him before. He must be an extraordinary man, and have laboured in an unusual degree in the study of the interests of Britain, who does not find his power of methodically comprehending those interests assisted and expanded by the perusal of every one of Burke’s political works, from the “Present State of the Nation” of 1769, to the posthumous Third Letter on the Regicide Peace. In the latter work Burke has been compared to an Atlas; not labouring, but sporting with the burden of a world on his shoulders. This Letter has been held to exceed in intellectual magnitude all other single efforts of the human brain. Compared to that astounding work, said a man fresh from perusing it, the most famous effusions of ancient and modern eloquence sink into child’s play.41
[xxxviii] In his manner of working Burke was unlike Sydney Smith, who composed slowly, and seldom corrected what he wrote. Charles Butler tells us that he never sent a manuscript to the press which he had not so often altered that every page was almost a blot, and never received from the press a first proof which he did not almost equally alter.42 Often the printers never attempted to correct his proofs, finding it less trouble to take the whole matter to pieces and begin afresh. Most writers have constantly beside them as a model some favourite classical author. Voltaire’s model for prose was the “Petit Carême” of Massillon: for poetry, Racine. Burke, according to Butler, always had a “ragged Delphin Virgil” not far from his elbow. Milton, Pope, and Dryden were quite as familiar to him. He is said to have known Young’s Night Thoughts by heart; but, if this is true, it is somewhat strange that not a single quotation from that author is to be found in all his writings. In his illustrations, no less than in the body of his work, he is remarkable for an exquisite instinct of selection; which is the polar opposite of what is often called, by a false application of a mathematical term, exhaustiveness—formerly much practised by the Germans, and consisting, to use the phrase of Goldsmith, in a certain manner of “writing the subject to the dregs”; saying all that can be said on a given subject, without considering how far it is to the purpose; and valuing facts because they are true, rather than because they are significant. Burke also excels in the selection of words and epithets, in which he was assisted by his knowledge of the writers of Queen Anne’s period; but he did not aim at the perfection attained in the most carefully elaborated works of Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke, like Pope in verse, loved to assemble specimens of the finer lights and shades of words. “He can bribe, but he cannot seduce; he can buy, but he cannot gain; he can lie, but he cannot deceive.” Burke, though not incurious of such effects, never stops in his course to seek for them. It was rather his practice to bring out the hidden force of common words and phrases, in such a way as to give dignity even to vulgarisms. This habit was early acquired. A passage in one of his earliest works (The “Sublime and Beautiful”), beginning, “In the morning of our days, when [xxxix] the senses are unworn and tender,” &c., is as worthy of note in this respect, as any of the most brilliant passages of his latest writings. Indeed the remarkable unity of Burke’s writings is produced, as much as by anything, by the ever fresh, natural, energetic air of his diction. He never appears to go out of his way for beauties, and yet his work is full of them. The study of law-books and state papers never blunted his keen sense of literary beauty and propriety, nor was the necessity of grappling with a definite mass of dry facts enough to defeat its habitual operation. Everything that he wrote charms in the reading. To understand the full meaning of these remarks the reader must be familiar with the manner, at once dry and verbose, of the speeches of the younger Pitt.
It is a well-known canon of rhetoric, that, in the selection of words with a view to energy, we must always prefer those terms which are the least abstract and general. Campbell and Whately have pointed out as a remarkable instance of this rule, the well-known passage, “Consider the lilies, how they grow,” &c.43 To illustrate the effect produced by its systematic employment, we will take a passage from the present volume, and compare it with a passage to the same purpose, in the ordinary style, from an early work of Lord Brougham:
| In large bodies, the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Aegypt and Arabia, and Curdistan, as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers, which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders (pp. 242–43). | In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed, that the further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges; the more inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and easily decayed is the organisation of the government, &c. (Brougham’s Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the European Powers). |
[xl] This particularising style is of the essence of poetry; and in prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy which it produces. Brougham’s passage is excellent in its way; but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke’s sentences. The best instances of this energy of style are to be found in the classical writers of the seventeenth century. When South says, “An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise, ” he communicates more effectually his notion of the difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermon put together.
Almost every device of the accomplished prose-writer may be learned from Burke. One of the first things to be learned is to avoid the opposite errors of extreme conciseness and of extreme prolixity. The practised rhetorician does this by an instinct which is bound by no rule. It is, however, a safe maxim to employ Repetition; not in our vulgar sense, but as answering to what the Rhetoricians called Interpretatio; in the words of Archbishop Whately, “to repeat the same sentiment and argument in many different forms of expression; each in itself brief, but all, together, affording such an expansion of the sense to be conveyed, and so detaining the mind upon it, as the case may require.” “Cicero among the ancients,” he proceeds, “and Burke among the modern writers, afford the most abundant practical exemplifications of this rule.” Almost every page of the “Present Discontents” will afford one or more of such exemplifications. The following passage from the First Letter on a Regicide Peace is one of the most remarkable examples of the employment of this effect:
Even when men are willing, as sometimes they are, to barter blood for lucre, to hazard their safety for the gratification of their avarice, the passion which animates them to that sort of conflict, like all short-sighted passions, must see its objects distinct and near at hand. The passions of the lower order are hungry and impatient. Speculative plunder; contingent spoil; future, long-adjourned, uncertain booty; pillage which must enrich
