ATTITUDE TO FRENCH REVOLUTION The scene grew still more sinister in his eyes after the march of the mob from Paris to Versailles in October, and the violent transport of the king and queen from Versailles to Paris. The same hatred of lawlessness and violence which fired him with a divine rage against the Indian malefactors was aroused by the violence and lawlessness of the Parisian insurgents. The same disgust for abstractions and naked doctrines of right that had stirred him against the pretensions of the British parliament in 1774 and 1776, was revived in as lively a degree by political con ceptions which he judged to be identical in the French assembly of i 789. And this anger and disgust were exasperated by the dread with which certain proceedings in England had inspired him, that the aims, principles, methods and language which he so 'misdoubted or abhorred in France were likely to infect the people of Great Britain.
In November 1790 the town, which had long been eagerly expecting a manifesto from Burke's pen, was electrified by the Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the proceedings in certain societies in London relative to that event. The generous Windham made an entry in his diary of his reception of the new book. "What shall be said," he added, "of the state of things, when it is remembered that the writer is a man decried, perse cuted and proscribed; not being much valued even by his own party, and by half the nation considered as little better than an ingenious madman?" But the writer now ceased to be decried, persecuted and proscribed, and his book was seized as the expres sion of that new current of opinion in Europe which the more recent events of the Revolution had slowly set flowing. Its vogue was instant and enormous. Eleven editions were exhausted in little more than a year, and there is probably not much exaggera tion in the estimate that 30,00o copies were sold before Burke's death seven years afterwards. George III. was extravagantly delighted; Stanislaus of Poland sent Burke words of thanks and high glorification and a gold medal. Catherine of Russia, the friend of Voltaire and the benefactress of Diderot, sent her con gratulations to the man who denounced French philosophers as miscreants and wretches. "One wonders," Romilly said, by and by, "that Burke is not ashamed at such success." Mackintosh replied to him temperately in the Vindiciae Gallicae, and Thomas Paine replied to him less temperately but far more trenchantly and more shrewdly in the Rights of Man. Arthur Young, with whom he had corresponded years before on the mysteries of deep ploughing and fattening hogs, added a cogent polemical chapter to that ever admirable work, in which he showed that he knew as much more than Burke about the old system of France as he knew more than Burke about soils and roots. Philip Francis, to whom he had shown the proof-sheets, had tried to dissuade Burke from publishing his performance. The passage about Marie Antoinette, which has since become a stock piece in books of recitation, seemed to Francis a mere piece of foppery; for was she not a Messalina and a jade ? "I know nothing of your story of Messalina," answered Burke; "am I obliged to prove judicially the virtues of all those I shall see suffering every kind of wrong and contumely and risk of life, before I endeavour to interest others in their sufferings? . . . Are not high rank, great splendour of descent, great personal elegance and outward accom plishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of men ? . . • I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between that brilliancy, splendour and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a nation to her, and the abominable scene of 1789 which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted my paper. These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I looked at the description,---they may again. You do not believe this fact, nor that these are my real feelings; but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, downright foppery. My friend, I tell you it is truth ; and that it is true and will be truth when you and I are no more; and will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist" (Corr. iii. Burke's conservatism was, as such a passage as this may illus trate, the result partly of strong imaginative associations cluster ing round the more imposing symbols of social continuity, partly of a sort of corresponding conviction in his reason that there are certain permanent elements of human nature out of which the European order had risen and which that order satisfied, and of whose immense merits, as of its mighty strength, the revo lutionary party in France were most fatally ignorant. When Romilly saw Diderot in 1783, the great encyclopaedic chief assured him that submission to kings and belief in God would be at an end all over the world in a very few years. When Con dorcet described the Tenth Epoch in the long development of human progress, he was sure not only that fulness of light and perfection of happiness would come to the sons of men, but that they were coming with all speed. Only those who know the incredible rashness of the revolutionary doctrine in the mouths of its most powerful professors at that time ; only those who know their absorption in ends and their inconsiderateness about means, can feel how profoundly right Burke was in all this part of his contention. Napoleon, who had begun life as a disciple of Rous seau, confirmed the wisdom of the philosophy of Burke when he came to make the Concordat. That measure was in one sense the outcome of a mere sinister expediency, but that such a measure was expedient at all sufficed to prove that Burke's view of the present possibilities of social change was right, and the view of the Rousseauites and too sanguine Perfectibilitarians wrong. As we have seen, Burke's very first piece, the satire on Bolingbroke, sprang from his conviction that merely rationalistic or destructive criticism, applied to the vast complexities of man in the social union, is either mischievous or futile, and mischievous exactly in proportion as it is not futile.
To discuss Burke's writings on the Revolution would be to write first a volume upon the abstract theory of society, and then a second volume on the history of France. But we may make one or two further remarks. One of the most common charges against Burke was that he allowed his imagination and pity to be touched only by the sorrows of kings and queens, and forgot the thousands of oppressed and famine-stricken toilers of the land. "No tears are shed for nations," cried Francis, whose sym pathy for the Revolution was as passionate as Burke's execration of it. "When the provinces are scourged to the bone by a mer cenary and merciless military power, and every drop of its blood and substance extorted from it by the edicts of a royal council, the case seems very tolerable to those who are not involved in it. When thousands after thousands are dragooned out of their country for the sake of their religion, or sent to row in the galleys for selling salt against law—when the liberty of every individual is at the mercy of every prostitute, pimp or parasite that has access to power or any of its basest substitutes—my mind, I own, is not at once prepared to be satisfied with gentle palliatives for such disorders" (Francis to Burke, Nov. 3, r 79o). This is a very terse way of putting a crucial objection to Burke's whole view of French affairs in 178g. His answer was tolerably simple. The Revolution, though it had made an end of the Bastille, did not bring the only real practical liberty; that is to say, the liberty which comes with settled courts of justice, admin istering settled laws, undisturbed by popular fury, independent of everything but law, and with a clear law for their direction. The people, he contended, were no worse off under the old mon archy than they will be in the long run under assemblies that are bound by the necessity of feeding one part of the community at the grievous charge of other parts, as necessitous as those who are so fed ; that are obliged to flatter those who have their lives at their disposal by tolerating acts of doubtful influence on corn merce and agriculture, and for the sake of precarious relief to sow the seeds of lasting want ; that will be driven to be the instru ments of the violence of others from a sense of their own weak ness, and, by want of authority to assess equal and proportional charges upon all, will be compelled to lay a strong hand upon the possessions of a part. As against the moderate section of the Constituent Assembly this was just.
One secret of Burke's views of the Revolution was the con tempt which he had conceived for the popular leaders in the earlier stages of the movement. In spite of much excellence of intention, much heroism, much energy, it is hardly to be denied that the leaders whom that movement brought to the surface were almost without exception men of the poorest political capac ity. Danton, no doubt, was abler than most of the others, yet the timidity or temerity with which he allowed himself to be vanquished by Robespierre showed that even he was not a man of commanding quality. The spectacle of men so rash, and so incapable of controlling the forces which they seemed to have presumptuously summoned, excited in Burke both indignation and contempt. And the leaders of the Constituent who came first on the stage, and hoped to make a revolution with rose-water, and hardly realized any more than Burke did how rotten was the structure which they had undertaken to build up, almost deserved his contempt, even if, as is certainly true, they did not deserve his indignation. It was only by revolutionary methods, which are in their essence and for a time as arbitrary as despotic methods, that the knot could be cut. Burke's vital error was his inability to see that a root and branch revolution was, under the conditions, inevitable. His cardinal position, from which he deduced so many important conclusions, namely, that the parts and organs of the old constitution of France were sound, and only needed moderate invigoration, is absolutely mistaken and unten able. There was not a single chamber in the old fabric that was not crumbling and tottering. The court was frivolous, vacillating, stone deaf and stone blind ; the gentry were amiable, but dis tinctly bent to the very last on holding to their privileges, and they were wholly devoid both of the political experience that only comes of practical responsibility for public affairs, and of the political sagacity that only comes of political experience. The parliaments or tribunals were nests of faction and of the deepest social incompetence. The very sword of the state broke short in the king's hand. If the king or queen could either have had the political genius of Frederick the Great, or could have had the good fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and good faith to trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convul sion. But none of these conditions existed.
When he dealt with the affairs of India, Burke passed over the circumstances of British acquisition of power in that continent. "There is a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginnings of all government," he said. "The first step to empire is revolution, by which power is conferred ; the next is good laws, good order, good institutions, to give that power stability." Exactly on this broad principle of political force, revolution was the first step to the assumption by the French people of their own govern ment. Granted that the Revolution was inevitable and indis pensable, how was the nation to make the best of it ? And how were surrounding nations to make the best of it ? This was the true point of view. But Burke never placed himself at such a point. He never conceded the postulate, because, though he knew France better than anybody in England except Arthur Young, he did not know her condition well enough. "Alas !" he said, "they little know how many a weary step is to be taken before they can form themselves into a mass which has a true political personality."