The three-volume Select Works of Edmund Burke (1999) published by Liberty Fund is a reprint of Edward John Payne’s edition published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press between 1874 and 1878. Payne (1844–1904) was a barrister by profession, but as a fellow of University College, Oxford, he spent his spare time writing on English colonialism. Two volumes of a massive, unfinished History of the New World called America (1892–99) saw the light before his premature death, when he fell into the Wendover Canal during a dizzy spell. Payne also wrote extensively on music, which was his violon d’Ingres (in his case, a literal violin, which he mastered along with the viola da gamba and other stringed instruments). But even in his own day he never became a household name, nor would I have heard of him but for the happy accident of owning his edition of Burke.
The select works in question are Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), the two great speeches on America (1774 and 1775), the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796). Together, these texts constitute a natural introduction to Burke’s political thought, and they amply reward reading. No student of history, politics, or English letters can pass them over.
Burke, however, does not need my accolades; what interests us is Payne. Now, I have a policy of never reading an editor’s introduction before the work it prefaces, so as not to bias my judgment. Much I marveled, then, when eventually I did read Payne’s introductions to the first two volumes, which together form a brilliant, sweeping, and delightful essay in political and literary criticism.
With the usual stock-in-trade of these pieces—his author’s personal life, for instance—Payne does not concern himself. In fact, the editor of Liberty Fund’s reprint had to supply the defect with his own preface. Instead, Payne undertakes a comprehensive survey of English prose style, the party system, the canons of oratory, the aftermath of the French Revolution, and any other subject he can plausibly present as connected to Burke’s oeuvre. His tone is one we lack completely today: a serene, confident gentleman propounding his views with authority, as if they were the only views that any sane man could hold.
What is more, this effect is not significantly marred by the irruption of such ho-hum Whiggery as “No student of history by this time needs to be told that the French Revolution was, in a more or less extended sense, a very good thing” or, “Emperor Joseph [II] was forced by an ignorant people to reverse projects in which he had vainly tried to precede his age.” Even the most bigoted of modern university professors would struggle to be so genteel and peremptory. In the same spirit Payne also displays a penchant for aphorisms: “Every student must begin, if he does not end, with Conservatism”; “A man who is not thus far double-minded can never be a politician, though he may be a hero and a martyr.”
But despite Payne’s fundamental disagreements with Burke, he obviously holds his subject in the highest esteem. He begins with the following endorsement: “It has been well said of Paradise Lost, that while few general readers are attracted by the subject, and fewer read it through, or often enough to discern the art with which it is written, everyone who has once mastered it recurs to it with never-failing delight. There could not be a finer definition of a classical author, and it exactly describes Burke.” Payne considers him far and away the greatest English political orator and a fountain of sound political reasoning.
One is grimly amused to read that “the writings of Burke are the daily bread of statesmen, speakers, and political writers.” Granted that only eighty years had passed since Burke’s death, still there is no trace of a parallel phenomenon today. Who in the past eighty years would be eligible for such a role? Kennedy, whose memory survives only in a single hackneyed antimetabole? The best candidate since the American Revolution would be Lincoln, and even he draws but superficial notice; congressmen neither study his doctrine nor imitate his style. Most likely they would be mocked if they did.
We should feel free to leave the rivulet of contemporary rhetoric and rejoin the mainstream of the tradition—Payne will serve as our navigator. If he says, “Almost every device of the accomplished prose-writer may be learned from Burke,” we can add “with Payne’s edition as a textbook.” He compares Burke’s style to those of Dr. Johnson (“mechanical” and “monotonous”) and of Gibbon, who “set before himself a higher literary ideal than ever governed the pen of Burke.” He finds Burke willing to baptize certain vulgar expressions, and he advises against overstudying the purple patches (e.g., the famous eulogy of Marie Antoinette) for fear of distorting good taste; he declares that orators gain more from writing than from speaking. He censures “the yard-long sentences, the tangled notions, and the flat expression of an ordinary German book” and commends the English and French tendency to reflect the patterns of conversation.
The modern reader, however, may be surprised to learn that Burke “represents the transition from the formal style” of the eighteenth century “to the far less constrained one which has prevailed in the present.” Payne even refers to “those great English masters of prose, among whom Burke stands almost last.” When I was teaching school, one of the boys complained that he could not understand the “Old English” (ca. 1900) I had assigned them. Thinking to myself, I’ll give you Old English to cry about!, I sprang to the projector and put up Beowulf in the original. My point was well taken. Not to read literature from before the twentieth century is, frankly, not to speak English. Payne himself shows a broad—though, for that time, not unusual—command of English and French writers. He quotes Hooker, Daniel, Bacon, Oldham, Addison, Pope, Montesquieu, Chesterfield, Goldsmith, Johnson, Hazlitt, Sieyès, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Macaulay, and Whately, none of them forced but rather suggesting themselves naturally. One exception is a Latin sentence of Erasmus that appears, I think, only because Montesquieu has reminded Payne of it. His foibles, such as pronouncing Shakespeare a Whig, are charming. He is an amateur in the best sense, without being a dilettante, and when he remarks, “Englishmen have in all times affected a taste for public matters and for scholarship,” he describes his own character. This is the taste that produced such a wonderful essay, which one enjoys reading almost as much as what it introduces.
