Table Of ContentEDMUND 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'
