Computing but not calculating
David Nokes
EDMUND BURKE, HIS LIFE AND OPINIONS by Stanley Ayling John Murray, £17.95, pp.316 The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.' The name and reputation of Edmund Burke, who deli- vered this solemn valedictory on Europe's ancien regime, must be forever associated with the rhetoric of political nostalgia. He was a man who regarded all forms of political innovation with deep suspicion. `A spirit of innovation', he declared, 'is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views'. Yet, in the introduction to this new survey of Burke's life and opin- ions, Stanley Ayling insists on Burke's pragmatism, citing his memorable distinc- tion between the attitudes of the statesman and those of the university professor. The latter', wrote Burke, 'has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to take into his consideration . . . A statesman judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment may ruin his country for ever.'
Ayling presents Burke not as a man of settled principles, but as a man of circum- stances, judging every issue according to the exigencies of the moment. Yet when Burke asserts that 'nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or on any political subject' the manner of his utterance seems to belie its meaning. Like his friend and rival Samuel Johnson, Burke's predilection was to deliver his opinions, exigent as they might be, in the form of universal axioms. And the pre- sentation of him as a pragmatist, carefully sifting each circumstance and assaying .every claim, is fraught with paradoxes. For the man who deplored the post-chivalric age of `sophisters, economists and calcula- tors' was also the man who declared that `political reason is a computing principle, adding, subtracting, multiplying and divid- ing . . . ' It is not immediately apparent why the computer should be considered without argument to be morally superior to the calculator.
Indeed, it is Burke's tendency to dis- count political principle in favour of the computation of private interest that has done most to damage his reputation. 'It should not be doubted that the motives of Burke and his allies were honest', declares Ayling in the middle of a discussion of the Whig campaign to. restrict the number of crown sinecures. A few pages later, how- ever, he concedes that Burke's behaviour was 'more than a little ambivalent' in this matter, since he was simultaneously lobby- ing to obtain for himself the sinecure of the Clerkship of the Pells, worth £3,000 a year. As Horace Walpole acidly observed: 'Can one but smile at a reformer of abuses reserving the second greatest abuse for himself?'
Born in Dublin, Burke took a more humane view of the economic miseries of his native land than many of his contem- poraries, yet he vigorously resisted the proposal to impose a tax on absentee landlords. Is it possible, one wonders, that the • fact that he was himself an absentee Irish landlord played a part in the political computation which led him to dismiss this proposal as `abSurd and ridiculous'? Ayling thinks not, preferring to see Burke's mudd- led thinking on this matter as 'based on illogicalities' rather than on self-interest. Similarly, he regards Burke's vehement campaign against the nabobs of the East India Company, which culminated in the decade-long impeachment of Warren Hast- ings, as 'factious and ill-conceived'. Among Burke's contemporaries, however, there were several who saw this too as further evidence of his skills in political computation. William Hickey estimated that Burke hoped to gain some £80,000 of East India stock from his efforts to bring the company under government control.
Ayling does acknowledge that Burke had a 'blind' and 'blinkered' attachment to the interests of his family circle, an attach- ment which both dismayed his contempor- aries and has 'perpetually puzzled his biographers'. Other recent biographers have attempted to explain the fierceness of this attachment by suggesting that Burke was homosexual, but Ayling promptly quashes this idea. He refers somewhat quaintly to the disreputable William Burke (no relation) as Burke's 'bosom friend' but offers no explanation of the term. He briefly mentions Burke's eloquent inter- ventions on behalf of men convicted of sodomy, but prefers not to speculate on his motives. Instead he offers a rigidly formal- ised portrait of Burke's domestic life, describing his wife Jane as a 'necessary haven' for her 'storm-battered' husband. The formulaic language of this decription reads like an official statement, fixing a respectable frame around a worthy public image.
This is not the only area of Burke's life which Ayling seems reluctant to explore. His book, the first full-length study to appear since the completion of the massive ten-volume edition of Burke's correspond- ence, shows little evidence of research. Ayling has nothing new to tell us about Burke's formative years, skipping over the gap between his graduation in 1748 till his marriage in 1757 in a mere four pages. Equally disappointing, in a book which promises a study of Burke's opinions, is his cursory dismissal of the treatise on The Sublime and the Beautiful. Ayling relegates this work, widely regarded as the most significant discussion of aesthetic theory in the late Augustan period, to a couple of paragraphs, describing it as full of 'highly subjective assertions'.
The bulk of this book consists of set- piece parliamentary occasions and its pages are brought to life by the incandescence of Burke's oratory. His speeches were marathon efforts, quite unlike the `sound- bite' sprints of today's politicians. In 1785 he delivered a five-hour tirade against the East India Company's nabobs, 'those inex- pugnable tape-worms which devour the nutriment and eat up the bowels of India.' On such occasions he spoke with frenzied intensity, causing one listener to comment that it seemed a little unfair the King should be in a strait waistcoat when such a man as Burke was at large. Yet beneath the violence of his manner there remained a lucidity and cogency of argument which led Matthew Arnold to call him 'our greatest English prose-writer'.
One of the dangers inherent in writing about a great prose stylist is that one's own prose may appear irredeemably second- rate by comparison. This is a snare which Mr Ayling has not entirely contrived to escape. Beside the towering personality which thunders forth from Burke's own speeches, the character presented in this biography appears as an insipid, confused man of clichés, variously described as having several irons in the fire, a millstone round his neck and an axe to grind. What is chiefly missing from this book is any serious attempt to grapple with the para- doxes of a man whose character combined the instincts of a pragmatic politician with the inspiration of a poet. Burke will be remembered not for his skills in political computation but for his creation of a myth of nobility, embodied in the symbolic sufferings of Marie Antoinette: 'I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.'
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