Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination PDF
Preview Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination
EDMUND BURKE THE PRACTICAL IMAGINATION EDMUND BURKE, 1776 Mezzotini engraving ajter a poHrail hy George Ronimy Yak University Art Gallery, M. B. Garvan Collection EDMUND BURKE THE PRACTICAL IMAGINATION Gerald W. Chapman HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts 1967 Copyright 1967 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-17305 Printed in the United States of America TO RUTH, WHO ENDURED, AND TO JACK, WHO WAITED Foreword BURKE was a practical and imaginative thinker unpredict- able in the ränge and depth of his insights. In his feats of language, in the kind o£ open and reflective sensibility which he carried into the world o£ £act, he was, as Coleridge said, "almost a poet." A useful approach to his thought, therefore, must look for "sense" instead of "system." The unity in Burke's thinking is to be sought in its latent character or spirit, in what I have called "practical Imagination"—^his power to experience the life of a thing in its "organic" com- plexity, to discriminate its relations, and to act upon (or rev- erence) its latent good. Hence the form and method of this book. I have divided chapters to correspond with the five great issues or crises of his career—America, Ireland, Constitutional Reform, France, and India—not for the sake of geographical neatness, but be- cause these were the great political crises in his lifetime, and not to admit them in the Organization of the book would fal- sify things-as-Burke-encountered-them, the conscious horizons within which his thinking was carried out. Such was his fate, after he entered Parliament at age 36, that one crisis followed another, with steadily mounting weight and complexity, and I have wanted to preserve his sense of engagement with each, as well as with their interrelations. Accordingly, I have made an interpretive summary and analysis of his actual thinking about each crisis, more or less following the nature of the ma- terials, striving at once to be as precise and as inclusive as possible, and trying to resist fixation upon any Single drift of thinking to the exclusion of all others. I have wanted to ex- press the unique quality emergent from the mutual bearings of his particular thoughts upon one another, to elucidate viii Foreword characteristic principles with as little loss as possible o£ their concrete envelope of feeling and unspoken intention. In Short, I wanted to "get inside" Burke's thinking, his sense of things, and to follow its development, while at the same time maintaining an "over the Shoulders" distance and freedom of judgment. For this reason—as also because he is a writer of great beauty and force of intelligence—my method is heavily "quotative," to coin a word. I have allowed Burke to speak for himself as freely as I could, and I have relegated the most of general scholarship and criticism to the endnotes. Many of the quotations, I believe, are not well known, even to well-educated people; and many of the well-known quota- tions have appeared in misleading or, on occasion, openly false contexts. I have wanted to create a perpetual context which, while remaining readable in itself, would make the quotations yield a correct tone with correct implications. If the method fails, then it fails in a good cause, which was to search for some fresh way of dealing with prose values and of suggesting what happens, or should happen, in our transac- tions with a great prose writer. Burke has had a spirited re- vival since the end of World War II, and yet I confess to a considerable disappointment with some of the directions which the revival has taken, and the uses to which his pre- sumed ideas have been put. There is danger lest his greatness be lost, once again, in partisan bickering, so that shortly he may cease to be read for the right reasons—for humane wis- dom in the grand style. The remark of Matthew Arnold, who, almost a hundred years ago, was beset by a like anxiety, still seems to me relevant, though his choice of "stories" would have to be changed: Shakespeare and Milton we are all supposed to know something of; but of none of our prose classics, I think, if we leave stories out of the account, such as are the Pilgrim's Progress and the Vicar of Wake fielet, are we expected to have a like knowledge. . . . Our grandfathers were bound to know their Addison, but for us the Obligation has ceased; nor is that loss, indeed, a very serious matter. But to lose Swift and Burke out of our mind's circle of acquaintance is a loss indeed, and a loss for which no conversance Foreword ix with contemporary prose literature can make up, any more than conversance with contemporary poetry could make up to us for unacquaintance with Shakespeare and Milton. My method is really unmethodical; the result, a hybrid of biography and history of ideas, neither quite one nor the other, but akin to each insofar as they are both arts of charac- terizing the actual. To invent a term, the result might be called ideo-biography. In Chapter I, and off and on through- out the bcük, I have discussed some of the background from which Burke's thought emerged, especially the relation of his thought to the tradition of English philosophic empiricism and to the new organic premise gradually dawning in the eighteenth Century. But I am only too aware of the limita- tions and possible traps in such a discussion. When history is reduced to intellectual environments, the historian risks for- getting that ideas also are individual activities which a man "moves" on his own as surely as if they were parliamentary resolutions or proposals of marriage; that ideas are practical and characteristic; that an idea has quite as much of its "meaning" in the puzzled and frail dynamism of a man living along uniquely, as in its implications to a supposedly objec- tive logic or in its approximate repetition of ideas previous or later. Expository critics risk inventing an "intellectual man" quite as arbitrary as "economic man" in classical economics or "political man" in classical utilitarianism. With a hope therefore of doing some justice to the actual spirit and char- acter of Burke's thought (and, in passing, of hitting upon a better technique preciser et nuancer), I have tried to remem- ber that his ideas were the finite activities of a man who, day by day, like other men, feit the weight of his own existence, and exerted his thought as he could to lighten the weight, grope for the ideal ground where truth and practice meet; who comprehended some matters well, perhaps better than anyone eise in his day or since, but saw others in the twisted lights and dark glass of his passion; who drew upon inspira- tions of many unrelated kinds; who embodied much of his best thinking in a happy phrase as often as in a logical deduc'
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