triumphs, which establish beyond peradventure his fame as an orator, were due in part to his natural ardor, which in his happiest moments kindled all who came within range of his voice. He owed yet more of his success to his amazing knowledge of his subjects. He had never visited India, for example : nevertheless he had read and studied huge masses of facts about that country, and had animated them by his imagination until, as Macaulay puts it, "India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange vegetation of the palm and the cocoa-tree, the ricefield, the tank, the huge trees older than the Mogul Empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the thatched roof of the peasant's hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums and banners and gaudy idols, the devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden with the pitcher on her head, descending the steps to the river-side, the black faces, the long beards, the yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady, these things were to him as the objects amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James's Street.”1 With all India thus present to his eye, Burke drew pictures of such startling reality, he showed such thorough and easy mastery of every detail, that his listeners could not but value his opinion as that of a man who knew everything to be known about the matter; they could not help feeling with him that "oppression in Bengal was the same thing as oppression in the streets of London.” 2 1 Essay on Warren Hastings. sage to illustrate the same point. all Goodrich has already quoted this pas 2 Macaulay's Essay on Warren Hastings. The phrase was evidently suggested by a sentence from Burke's Speech in Opening the Impeachment Other important elements in Burke's oratory are the brilliancy of expression and the logical development of ideas, elements which have helped to give lasting influence to some of the speeches which at the moment were failures. An instance in point is the Speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, which Erskine is said to have slept through, but which he afterwards thumbed to pieces in the printed copy. These qualities, however, may be discussed more properly in relation to Burke's style. VII. BURKE AS A WRITER. One of the first things to strike the reader of Burke is the vigor which he displays in nearly every kind of prose in never-to-be-forgotten descriptions of the soft beauty of Marie Antoinette or of the horrors of war in India; in blood-curdling tales of the cruelty of Debi Sing at Rungpore; in clear-cut expositions of the effect of poetry upon the emotions, or the effect of Popery laws in Ireland; in arguments for toleration or conciliation which carry one along with the rush of rapid narrative; in the pathos of his laments for the death of his son; in the irony of the Vindication of Natural Society; in the terrific invective of the Letters on a Regicide Peace; in the splendor of the appeal at the close of the Speech on Conciliation; in the unadorned gravity of the Address to the King. Through all this range, from which humor alone is excluded, Burke moves with a sure and imperious stride. Since there is no notable piece of description in the Speech on Conciliation, the student of Burke's style should read such a of Warren Hastings, Second Day, Works, IX, 448: "The laws of morality are the same everywhere, and there is no action which would pass for an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and of oppression in England, that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and oppression in Europe, Asia, Africa and all the world over." passage as that which tells of the tortures at Rungpore1 or of the devastation of the Carnatic by Hyder Ali. Two fragments from the latter are worth quoting here to show in what large measure Burke had the poet's power of realizing by the imagination a scene on which his eyes had never rested: "All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants, flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank or sacredness of function, fathers torn from children, husbands from wives, enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword and exile, they fell into the jaws of famine. . . . For eighteen months without intermission this destruction raged from the gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve themselves of their impious vow, that, when the British armies traversed, as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions, through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description whatever. One dead, uniform silence reigned over the whole region.' وو In exposition Burke has done nothing better in small compass than his explanation of the causes of the American love of freedom in this Speech on Conciliation. As regards choice 4 1 Speech in Opening the Impeachment of Warren Hastings, Third Day, Works, X, 83-90. 2 This bit is in Professor Perry's Selections from Burke, a book which, though it contains nothing from the Speech on Conciliation, is useful for the study of Burke's style in general. 3 Works, III, 63-65. 4 Pages 19-25. of words as well as arrangement of ideas the English language hardly furnishes a better model of expository method. Here, as in Burke's descriptions and narrations, definite words bite the meaning into the mind, and concrete examples vivify the general statements. The effect of such specific terms is well brought out by Payne,1 who compares a quotation from this passage with one from Lord Brougham which is made up of general, or abstract, words: In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Egypt and Arabia and Kurdistan 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. — Pages 24, 25. 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 organization of the government. - Inquiry into the Colonial Policy of the I uro, ean Powers. These two bits show clearly enough Burke's superiority and one of the sources of it. 2 Another excellent example-this time argumentative - is the paragraph beginning "Ireland before the English conquest." Here figurative touches are not infrequent, but the figures are simple, even colloquial: "The roots of our primitive constitution were early transplanted into that soil, and grew and flourished there"; "Your ancestors did not churlishly sit down alone to the feast of Magna Charta"; "Your standard could never be advanced an inch before your privileges.' The whole speech, in fact, is strewn with such turns, which perhaps do more than anything else to impart vitality to a style: "The 4 995 4 42 31, 32. 5 43 2, 3. 66 2 1 public would not have patience to see us play the game out" They are not squeezed into this happy form by the constraints of watchful and suspicious government "; " "They will cling and grapple to you"; "I put my foot in the tracks of our forefathers, where I can neither wander nor stumble." 4 3 But Burke's exuberant imagination would not allow him to stop at such simple tropes. His mind was teeming with suggestions of subtle likenesses and relations, suggestions which, when translated into words, became similes or metaphors, many of which surpass in poetic force most of the verse of his century. Oddly enough, as Macaulay notes, his imagination grew more active, his style more florid, with his advancing years. In his youth, in the Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful," he wrote on the emotions produced by mountains and cascades, by the masterpieces of painting and sculpture, by the faces and necks of beautiful women, in the style of a parliamentary report. In his old age he discussed treaties and tariffs in the most fervid and brilliant language of romance." 5 It is interesting to notice the gradual change. The Inquiry contains only one or two bits which can be called flowery, such as "In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender." 6 There is one bold metaphor, " In this description the terrible and sublime blaze out together." At the period of the Speech on Conciliation Burke was at his best, splendid and yet restrained. The page containing the sentence, “If . . . that angel should have drawn up the curtain and unfolded the rising glories of his country," and the impassioned peroration with the imagery of "the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith," 9 these passages, though in a manner to be attempted by a genius only, and even then too ornate for modern taste, were 1 5 24, 25. 3 72 2. 4 51 27, 28. 5 Essay on Lord Bacon. 7 Ibid., 140. 8 14. 997 |