Burke | Page 8

one of the most
serious of its more superficial interests. The essay on the Sublime and
Beautiful fell in with a set of topics on which the curiosity of the better
minds of the age, alike in France, England, and Germany, was fully
stirred. In England the essay has been ordinarily slighted; it has perhaps
been overshadowed by its author's fame in weightier matters. The
nearest approach to a full and serious treatment of its main positions is
to be found in Dugald Stewart's lectures. The great rhetorical art-critic
of our own day refers to it in words of disparagement, and in truth it
has none of the flummery of modern criticism. It is a piece of hard

thinking, and it has the distinction of having interested and stimulated
Lessing, the author of Laoköon (1766), by far the most definitely
valuable of all the contributions to aesthetic thought in an age which
was not poor in them. Lessing was so struck with the Inquiry that he set
about a translation of it, and the correspondence between him and
Moses Mendelssohn on the questions which Burke had raised contains
the germs of the doctrine as to poetry and painting which Laoköon
afterwards made so famous. Its influence on Lessing and on Kant was
such as to justify the German historian of the literature of the century in
bestowing on it the coveted epithet of epoch-making.
The book is full of crudities. We feel the worse side of the eighteenth
century when Burke tells us that a thirst for Variety in architecture is
sure to leave very little true taste; or that an air of robustness and
strength is very prejudicial to beauty; or that sad fuscous colours are
indispensable for sublimity. Many of the sections, again, are little more
than expanded definitions from the dictionary. Any tyro may now be
shocked at such a proposition as that beauty acts by relaxing the solids
of the whole system. But at least one signal merit remains to the
Inquiry. It was a vigorous enlargement of the principle, which Addison
had not long before timidly illustrated, that critics of art seek its
principles in the wrong place, so long as they limit their search to
poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings, instead of first
arranging the sentiments and faculties in man to which art makes its
appeal. Addison's treatment was slight and merely literary; Burke dealt
boldly with his subject on the base of the most scientific psychology
that was then within his reach. To approach it on the psychological side
at all was to make a distinct and remarkable advance in the method of
the inquiry which he had taken in hand.
CHAPTER II
IN IRELAND--PARLIAMENT--BEACONSFIELD
Burke was thirty years old before he approached even the threshold of
the arena in which he was destined to be so great a figure. He had made
a mark in literature, and it was to literature rather than to public affairs

that his ambition turned. He had naturally become acquainted with the
brother-authors who haunted the coffee-houses in Fleet Street; and
Burke, along with his father-in-law, Dr. Nugent, was one of the first
members of the immortal club where Johnson did conversational battle
with all comers. We shall, in a later chapter, have something to say on
Burke's friendships with the followers of his first profession, and on the
active sympathy with which he helped those who were struggling into
authorship. Meanwhile, the fragments that remain of his own attempts
in this direction are no considerable contributions. His Hints for an
Essay on the Drama are jejune and infertile, when compared with the
vigorous and original thought of Diderot and Lessing at about the same
period. He wrote an Account of the European Settlements in America.
His Abridgment of the History of England comes down no further than
to the reign of John. A much more important undertaking than his
history of the past was his design for a yearly chronicle of the present.
The Annual Register began to appear in 1759. Dodsley, the bookseller
of Pall Mall, provided the sinews of war, and he gave Burke a hundred
pounds a year for his survey of the great events which were then
passing in the world. The scheme was probably born of the
circumstances of the hour, for this was the climax of the Seven Years'
War. The clang of arms was heard in every quarter of the globe, and in
East and West new lands were being brought under the dominion of
Great Britain.
In this exciting crisis of national affairs, Burke began to be acquainted
with public men. In 1759 he was introduced, probably by Lord
Charlemont, to William Gerard Hamilton, who only survives in our
memories by his nickname of Single-speech. As a matter of