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Vol 24: The Classics
EDMUND BURKE
ON TASTE
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL
REFLECTIONS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD
WITH INTRODUCTION, NOTES
AND ILLUSTRATIONS
DR ELIOT'S FIVE-FOOT SHELF OF BOOKS"
P F COLLIER & SON
NEW YORK
Copyright, 1909
By P. F. Collier & Son
Designed, Printed, and Bound at
Ct)e Collier Press, ^cto gorfe
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 7
ON TASTE
Introductory Discourse u
THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL
PART I.
Section I. — Novelty 29
Sect. II. — Pain and Pleasure 30
Sect. III. — The Difference Between the Removal
of Pain, and Positive Pleasure 31
Sect. IV. — Of Delight and Pleasure as Opposed to
Each Other 33
Sect. V. — Joy and Grief 34
Sect. VI. — Of the Passions Which Belong to Self-
Preservation ... 35
Sect. VII. — Of the Sublime 36
Sect. VIII. — Of the Passions Which Belong to
Society - 37
Sect. IX. — The Final Cause of the Difference
Between the Passions Belonging to Self-
Preservation, and Those Which Regard the
Society of the Sexes 38
Sect. X. — Of Beauty 38
Sect. XL — Society and Solitude 40
Sect. XII. — Sympathy, Imitation, and Ambition . . 40
Sect. XIII. — Sympathy . 40
Sect. XIV. — The Effects of Sympathy in the Dis-
tresses of Others 41
Sect. XV. — Of the Effects of Tragedy 43
hc 1 a — VOL. XXIV
CONTENTS
PAGE
Sect. XVI. — Imitation 44
Sect. XVII. — Ambition 45
Sect. XVIII. — The Recapitulation 46
Sect. XIX. — The Conclusion 47
PART II.
Section I. — Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime . 51
Sect. II. — Terror 51
Sect. III. — Obscurity 52
Sect. IV. — Of the Difference Between Clearness
and Obscurity with Regard to the Passions . . 53
Sect. [IV.] — The Same Subject Continued .... 54
Sect. V. — Power 57
Sect. VI. — Privation 63
Sect. VII. — Vastness 63
Sect. VIIT. — Infinity 64
Sect. IX. — Succession and Uniformity 65
Sect. X. — Magnitude in Building 67
Sect. XI. — Infinity in Pleasing Objects 67
Sect. XII. — Difficulty 68
Sect. XIII. — Magnificence 68
Sect. XIV. — Light 70
Sect. XV. — Light in Building 71
Sect. XVI. — Colour Considered as Productive of the
Sublime 72
Sect. XVII. — Sound and Loudness 72
Sect. XVIII. — Suddenness 73
Sect. XIX. — Intermitting 73
Sect. XX. — The Cries of Animals 74
Sect. XXI. — Smell and Taste. Bitters and Stenches 75
Sect. XXII. — Feeling. Pain 76
PART III.
Section I. — Of Beauty 77
Sect. II. — Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in
Vegetables 78
Sect. III. — Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in
Animals 81
Sect. IV. — Proportion not the Cause of Beauty in
the Human Species 82
CONTENTS 3
PAGE
Sect. V. — Proportion Further Considered" 87
Sect. VI. — Fitness not the Cause of Beauty ... 89
Sect. VII. — The Real Effects of Fitness 91
Sect. VIII. — The Recapitulation 93
Sect. IX. — Perfection not the Cause of Beauty . . 93
Sect. X. — How Far the Idea of Beauty May be Ap-
plied to the Qualities of the Mind 94
Sect. XI. — How Far the Idea of Beauty May be Ap-
plied to Virtue 95
Sect. XII. — The Real Cause of Beauty 96
Sect. XIII. — Beautiful Objects Small 96
Sect. XIV. — Smoothness 97
Sect. XV. — Gradual Variation 98
Sect. XVI. — Delicacy 99
Sect. XVII. — Beauty in Colour 100
Sect. XVIII. — Recapitulation 100
Sect. XIX. — The Physiognomy 101
Sect. XX. — The Eye 101
Sect. XXI. — Ugliness 102
Sect. XXII.— Grace 102
Sect. XXIII. — Elegance and Speciousness .... 102
Sect. XXIV. — The Beautiful in Feeling 103
Sect. XXV. — The Beautiful in Sounds 104
Sect. XXVI. — Taste and Smell 106
Sect. XXVII. — The Sublime and Beautiful Com-
pared 106
PART IV. .
Section I. — Of the Efficient Cause of the Sublime
and Beautiful 108
Sect. II. — Association 109
Sect. III. — Cause of Pain and Fear no
Sect. IV. — Continued in
Sect. V. — How the Sublime is Produced 112
Sect. VI. — How Pain Can be a Cause of Delight . 113
Sect. VII. — Exercise Necessary for the Finer Or-
gans 114
Sect. VIII. — Why Things not Dangerous Produce a
Passion Like Terror 114
4 CONTENTS
PAGE
Sect. IX. — Why Visual Objects of Great Dimen-
sions are Sublime . 115
Sect. X. — Unity, Why Requisite to Vastness . . .116
Sect. XI. — The Artificial Infinite 117
Sect. XII. — The Vibrations Must be Similar . . .118
Sect. XIII. — The Effects of Succession in Visual
Objects Explained 118
Sect. XIV. — Locke's Opinion Concerning Darkness
Considered 120
Sect. XV. — Darkness Terrible in its Own Nature . 121
Sect. XVI. — Why Darkness is Terrible 122
Sect. XVII. — The Effects of Blackness 123
Sect. XVIII. — The Effects of Blackness Moderated 125
Sect. XIX. — The Physical Cause of Love .... 125
Sect. XX. — Why Smoothness is Beautiful .... 127
Sect. XXI. — Sweetness, Its Nature 127
Sect. XXII. — Sweetness Relaxing 129
Sect. XXIII. — Variation, Why Beautiful .... 130
Sect. XXIV. — Concerning Smallness 131
Sect. XXV. — Of Colour 134
PART V.
Section I. — Of Words 136
Sect. II. — The Common Effects of Poetry, Not by
Raising Ideas of Things 136
Sect. III. — General Words Before Ideas 138
Sect. IV. — The Effect of Words 139
Sect. V. — Examples that Words May Affect With-
out Raising Images 140
Sect. VI. — Poetry not Strictly an Imitative Art . . 144
Sect. VII. — How Words Influence the Passions . . 145
REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 151
A LETTER FROM THE RIGHT HON. EDMUND
BURKE TO A NOBLE LORD 401
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Edmund Burke was born in Dublin in January, 1729, the son
of an attorney. His father was Protestant, his mother Catholic;
and though the son followed his father's religion, he was always
tolerant of the other faith. He was educated at Trinity College,
Dublin, where he took his B.A. in 1748, coming to London two
years later to study law. But his tastes were more literary than
legal, and on giving up law, against his father's wish, before he
was called to the bar, he was forced to resort to his pen for a
livelihood.
The first of his productions to gain notice was his "Vindica-
tion of Natural Society, by a late noble writer/' an ironical
imitation of the style and arguments of Bolingbroke, carried out
with great skill. This pamphlet already showed Burke as a de-
fender of the established order of things. In the same year,
I 756, appeared his famous ( Philosophical Inquiry into the Ori-
gin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.'*
For five years, from 1759 to 1764, Burke's time was largely
occupied by his duties as secretary to William Gerard Hamilton,
practically his only publications being in the ''Annual Register,"
with which he was connected for many years; yet in this period
he found time to form intimacies with the famous group con-
taining, among others, Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Dr.
Johnson. During the short administration of Lord Rockingham,
Burke acted as that nobleman's private secretary, and in Janu-
ary, 1766, he became a member of the House of Commons. Al-
most at once he came into prominence as a speaker, displaying
in the debates on American affairs, which then occupied the
House, much independence and a disposition toward a wise ex-
pediency rather than a harsh insistence on theoretical sover-
eignty in dealing with the colonists.
In 1768 Burke bought an estate in Buckinghamshire, for which
he was never able to pay in full; and during most of his life he
was in financial difficulties. During the Grafton ministry his
chief publication was his "Thoughts on the Present Discontents/*
in which he opposed the reviving influence of the court, and
championed the interests of the people. American affairs con-
tinued to engage the attention of Parliament, and throughout the
6 INTRODUCTION
struggle with the colonies Burke's voice was constantly raised
on behalf of a policy of conciliation. With the aid of his dis-
ciple, C. J. Fox, he forced the retirement of Lord North, and
when the Whigs came into power in 1782 he was made pay-
master of the forces. Aristocratic jealousy, and the difficulties
of his own temperament, kept him out of a cabinet position then
and later.
The next great issue on which Burke employed his oratorical
talents was the impeachment of Warren Hastings. Beginning in
1787, it dragged on for seven years, Burke closing his colossal
labors with a nine days* speech. Though Hastings was acquitted,
Burke's fervid indignation in supporting the impeachment, and
the impeachment itself, were indications of the growth of the
sense of responsibility for the humane treatment of subject
peoples.
Meantime, the sympathy expressed in England for the French
Revolution in its earlier stages roused Burke to express his op-
position in his famous "Reflections." In the debates which fol-
lowed, Burke became separated from his friends Sheridan and
Fox, and finally from his party, and he closed his political career
in practical isolation.
On his retirement from Parliament in 1794, the King granted
him a pension which Pitt found means to increase, but even this
well-earned reward he was not allowed to enjoy without the
grudging assaults of enemies. His last days were spent in vig-
orous support of the war against France; and he died July 9,
1797.
Burke never attained a political office in any degree propor-
tioned to his ability and services, but he succeeded, nevertheless,
in affecting profoundly the opinion of his time. Latterly the
House of Commons tired of his fervid and imaginative eloquence,
unwilling perhaps to make the effort necessary to follow his
keen intellectual processes, but he found through his writings a
larger audience. "Bacon alone excepted" says Buckle, Burke
was "the greatest political thinker who has ever devoted him-
self to the practise of English politics"
PREFACE
I have endeavoured to make this edition something more full
and satisfactory than the first. I have sought with the utmost
care, and read with equal attention, everything which has ap-
peared in public against my opinions; I have taken advantage of
the candid liberty of my friends ; and if by these means I have
been better enabled to discover the imperfections of the work, the
indulgence it has received, imperfect as it was, furnished me with
a new motive to spare no reasonable pains for its improvement.
Though I have not found sufficient reason, or what appeared to
me sufficient, for making any material change in my theory, I
have found it necessary in many places to explain, illustrate, and
enforce it. I have prefixed an introductory discourse concerning
Taste: it is a matter curious in itself; and it leads naturally
enough to the principal inquiry. This, with the other explana-
tions, has made the work considerably larger; and by increasing
its bulk, has, I am afraid, added to its faults; so that, notwith-
standing all my attention, it may stand in need of a yet greater
share of indulgence than it required at its first appearance.
They who are accustomed to studies of this nature will expect,
and they will allow too for many faults. They know that many
of the objects of our inquiry are in themselves obscure and intri-
cate; and that many others have been rendered so by affected
refinements or false learning; they know that there are many im-
pediments in the subject, in the prejudices of others, and even in
our own, that render it a matter of no small difficulty to show
in a clear light the genuine face of nature. They know that,
whilst the mind is intent on the general scheme of things, some
particular parts must be neglected; that we must often submit
the style to the matter, and frequently give up the praise of
elegance, satisfied with being clear.
The characters of nature are legible, it is true; but they are
not plain enough to enable those who run, to read them. We
7
8 PREFACE
must make use of a cautious, I had almost said a timorous,
method of proceeding. We must not attempt to fly, when we
can scarcely pretend to creep. In considering any complex mat-
ter, we ought to examine every distinct ingredient in the com-
position, one by one; and reduce everything to the utmost
simplicity; since the condition of our nature binds us to a strict
law and very narrow limits. We ought afterwards to re-examine
the principles by the effect of the composition, as well as the
composition by that of the principles. We ought to compare our
subject with things of a similar nature, and even with things of
a contrary nature; for discoveries may be, and often are, made
by the contrast, which would escape us on the single view. The
greater number of the comparisons we make, the more general
and the more certain our knowledge is like to prove, as built upon
a more extensive and perfect induction.
If an inquiry thus carefully conducted should fail at last of
discovering the truth, it may answer an end perhaps as useful, in
discovering to us the weakness of our own understanding. If it
does not make us knowing, it may make us modest. If it does
not preserve us from error, it may at least from the spirit of
error ; and may make us cautious of pronouncing with positive-
ness or with haste, when so much labour may end in so much
uncertainty.
I could wish that, in examining this theory, the same method
were pursued which I endeavoured to observe in forming it. The
objections, in my opinion, ought to be proposed, either to the sev-
eral principles as they are distinctly considered, or to the justness
of the conclusion which is drawn from them. But it is common
to pass over both the premises and conclusion in silence, and to
produce, as an objection, some poetical passage which does not
seem easily accounted for upon the principles I endeavour to es-
tablish. This manner of proceeding I should think very improper.
The task would be infinite, if we could establish no principle
until we had previously unravelled the complex texture of every
image or description to be found in poets and orators. And
though we should never be able to reconcile the effect of such
images to our principles, this can never overturn the theory
itself, whilst it is founded on certain and indisputable facts. A
theory founded on experiment, and not assumed, is always good
for so much as it explains. Our inability to push it indefinitely
PREFACE 9
is no argument at all against it. This inability may be owing to
our ignorance of some necessary mediums; to a want of proper
application; to many other causes besides a defect in the prin-
ciples we employ. In reality, the subject requires a much closer
attention than we dare claim from our manner of treating it.
If it should not appear on the face of the work, I must caution
the reader against imagining that I intended a full dissertation
on the Sublime and Beautiful. My inquiry went no farther than
to the origin of these ideas. If the qualities which I have ranged
under the head of the Sublime be all found consistent with each
other, and all different from those which I place under the head
of Beauty; and if those which compose the class of the Beautiful
have the same consistency with themselves, and the same opposi-
tion to those which are classed under the denomination of Sub-
lime, I am in little pain whether anybody chooses to follow the
name I give them or not, provided he allows that what I dispose
under different heads are in reality different things in nature.
The use I make of the words may be blamed, as too confined or
too extended; my meaning cannot well be misunderstood.
To conclude: whatever progress may be made towards the dis-
covery of truth in this matter, I do not repent the pains I have
taken in it. The use of such inquiries may be very considerable.
Whatever turns the soul inward on itself, tends to concentre its
forces, and to fit it for greater and stronger flights of science.
By looking into physical causes our minds are opened and en-
larged ; and in this pursuit, whether we take or whether we los^
our game, the chase is certainly of service. Cicero, true as he
was to the academic philosophy, and consequently led to reject
the certainty of physical, as of every other kind of knowledge, yet
freely confesses its great importance to the human understand-
ing; "Est animorum ingeniorumque nostrorum naturale quoddam
quasi pabulum consideratio contemplatioque nature?" If we can
direct the lights we derive from such exalted speculations, upon
the humbler field of the imagination, whilst we investigate the
springs, and trace the courses of our passions, we may not only
communicate to the taste a sort of philosophical solidity, but we
may reflect back on the severer sciences some of the graces and
elegancies of taste, without which the greatest proficiency in those
sciences will always have the appearance of something illiberal.
ON TASTE
INTRODUCTORY DISCOURSE
ON A superficial view, we may seem to differ very
widely from each other in our reasonings, and no
less in our pleasures: but notwithstanding this dif-
ference, which I think to be rather apparent than real, it is
probable that the standard both of reason and taste is the
same in all human creatures. For if there were not some
principles of judgment as well as of sentiment common to
all mankind, no hold could possibly be taken either on their
reason or their passions, sufficient to maintain the ordinary
correspondence of life. It appears indeed to be generally
acknowledged, that with regard to truth and falsehood there
is something fixed. We find people in their disputes con-
tinually appealing to certain tests and standards, which are
allowed on all sides, and are supposed to be established in
our common nature. But there is not the same obvious
concurrence in any uniform or settled principles which
relate to taste. It is even commonly supposed that this
delicate and aerial faculty, which seems too volatile to en-
dure even the chains of a definition, cannot be properly
tried by any test, nor regulated by any standard. There is
so continual a call for the exercise of the reasoning faculty,
and it is so much strengthened by perpetual contention, that
certain maxims of right reason seem to be tacitly settled
amongst the most ignorant. The learned have improved on
this rude science, and reduced those maxims into a system.
If taste has not been so happily cultivated, it was not that
the subject was barren, but that the labourers were few or
negligent; for, to say the truth, there are not the same
interesting motives to impel us to fix the one, which urge
us to ascertain the other. And, after all, if men differ in
11
12 EDMUND BURKE
their opinion concerning such matters, their difference is not
attended with the same important consequences ; else I
make no doubt but that the logic of taste, if I may be allowed
the expression, might very possibly be as well digested, and
we might come to discuss matters of this nature with as
much certainty, as those which seem more immediately
within the province of mere reason. And indeed, it is very
necessary, at the entrance into such an inquiry as our pres-
ent, to make this point as clear as possible; for if taste has
no fixed principles, if the imagination is not affected accord-
ing to some invariable and certain laws, our labour is likely
to be employed to very little purpose ; as it must be judged
a useless, if not an absurd undertaking, to lay down rules
for caprice, and to set up for a legislator of whims and
fancies.
The term taste, like all other figurative terms, is not ex-
tremely accurate; the thing which we understand by it is
far from a simple and determinate idea in the minds of most
men, and it is therefore liable to uncertainty and confusion.
I have no great opinion of a definition, the celebrated remedy
for the cure of this disorder. For, when we define, we seem
in danger of circumscribing nature within the bounds of
our own notions, which we often take up by hazard, or em-
brace on trust, or form out of a limited and partial consid-
eration of the object before us; instead of extending our
ideas to take in all that nature comprehends, according to
her manner of combining. We are limited in our inquiry
by the strict laws to which we have submitted at our setting
out.
— Circa vilem patulumque morabimur orbem,
Unde pudor proferre pedem vetat aut operis lex.
A definition may be very exact, and yet go but a very little
way towards informing us of the nature of the thing de-
fined; but let the virtue of a definition be what it will, in the
order of things, it seems rather to follow than to precede our
inquiry, of which it ought to be considered as the result. It
must be acknowledged, that the methods of disquisition and
teaching may be sometimes different, and on very good
reason undoubtedly ; but, for my part, I am convinced that
the method of teaching which approaches most nearly to the
ON TASTE 13
method of investigation is incomparably the best; since, not
content with serving up a few barren and lifeless truths, it
leads to the stock on which they grew; it tends to set the
reader himself in the track of invention, and to direct him
into those paths in which the author has made his own dis-
coveries, if he should be so happy as to have made any that
are valuable.
But to cut off all pretence for cavilling, I mean by the
word Taste no more than that faculty or those faculties of
the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judg-
ment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.
This is, I think, the most general idea of that word, and
what is the least connected with any particular theory. And
my point in this inquiry is, to find whether there are any
principles, on which the imagination is affected, so common
to all, so grounded and certain, as to supply the means of
reasoning satisfactorily about them. And such principles of
taste I fancy there are ; however paradoxical it may seem to
those, who on a superficial view imagine, that there is so
great a diversity of tastes, both in kind and degree, that
nothing can be more indeterminate.
All the natural powers in man, which I know, that are
conversant about external objects, are the senses; the
imagination ; and the judgment. And first with regard to
the senses. We do and we must suppose, that as the con-
formation of their organs are nearly or altogether the same
in all men, so the manner of perceiving external objects is
in all men the same, or with little difference. We are
satisfied that what appears to be light to one eye, appears
light to another ; that what seems sweet to one palate, is
sweet to another; that what is dark and bitter to this man,
is likewise dark an^ bitter to that ; and we conclude in the
same manner of great and little, hard and soft, hot and cold,
rough and smooth, and indeed of all the natural qualities
and affections of bodies. If we suffer ourselves to imagine,
that their senses present to different men different images of
things, this sceptical proceeding will make every sort of
reasoning on every subject vain and frivolous, even that
sceptical reasoning itself which had persuaded us to enter-
tain a doubt concerning the agreement of our perceptions.
14 EDMUND BURKE
But as there will be little doubt that bodies present similar
images to the whole species, it must necessarily be allowed,
that the pleasures and the pains which every object excites
in one man, it must raise in all mankind, whilst it operates
naturally, simply, and by its proper powers only; for if we
deny this, we must imagine that the same cause, operating in
the same manner, and on subjects of the same kind, will pro-
duce different effects; which would be highly absurd. Let
us first consider this point in the sense of taste, and the
rather, as the faculty in question has taken its name from
that sense. All men are agreed to call vinegar sour, honey
sweet, and aloes bitter ; and as they are all agreed in finding
these qualities in those objects, they do not in the least
differ concerning their effects with regard to pleasure and
pain. They all concur in calling sweetness pleasant, and
sourness and bitterness unpleasant. Here there is no
diversity in their sentiments ; and that there is not, appears
fully from the consent of all men in the metaphors which
are taken from the sense of taste. A sour temper, bitter
expressions, bitter curses, a bitter fate, are terms well and
strongly understood by all. And we are altogether as well
understood when we say, a sweet disposition, a sweet per-
son, a sweet condition, and the like. It is confessed, that
custom and some other causes have made many deviations
from the natural pleasures or pains which belong to these
several tastes: but then the power of distinguishing between
the natural and the acquired relish remains to the very last.
A man frequently comes to prefer the taste of tobacco to that
of sugar, and the flavour of vinegar to that of milk; but
this makes no confusion in tastes, whilst he is sensible that
the tobacco and vinegar are not sweet, and whilst he knows
that habit alone has reconciled his palate to these alien
pleasures. Even with such a person we may speak, and
with sufficient precision, concerning tastes. But should any
man be found who declares, that to him tobacco has a taste
like sugar, and that he cannot distinguish between milk and
vinegar; or that tobacco and vinegar are sweet, milk bitter,
and sugar sour; we immediately conclude that the organs
of this man are out of order, and that his palate is utterly
vitiated. We are as far from conferring with such a per-
ON TASTE IS
son upon tastes, as from reasoning concerning the relations
of quantity with one who should deny that all the parts
together were equal to the whole. We do not call a man of
this kind wrong in his notions, but absolutely mad. Excep-
tions of this sort, in either way, do not at all impeach our
general rule, nor make us conclude that men have various
principles concerning the relations of quantity or the taste
of things. So that when it is said, taste cannot be disputed,
it can only mean, that no one can strictly answer what
pleasure or pain some particular man may find from the taste
of some particular thing. This indeed cannot be disputed;
but we may dispute, and with sufficient clearness too, con-
cerning the things which are naturally pleasing or disagree-
able to the sense. But when we talk of any peculiar or ac-
quired relish, then we must know the habits, the prejudices,
or the distempers of this particular man, and we must draw
our conclusion from those.
This agreement of mankind is not confined to the taste
solely. The principle of pleasure derived from sight is the
same in all. Light is more pleasing than darkness. Sum-
mer, when the earth is clad in green, when the heavens are
serene and bright, is more agreeable than winter, when
everything makes a different appearance. I never remember
that anything beautiful, whether a man, a beast, a bird, or a
plant, was ever shown, though it were to a hundred people,
that they did not all immediately agree that it was beautiful,
though some might have thought that it fell short of their ex-
pectation, or that other things were still finer. I believe no
man thinks a goose to be more beautiful than a swan, or
imagines that what they call a Friezland hen excels a pea-
cock. It must be observed, too, that the pleasures of the
sight are not near so complicated, and confused, and altered
by unnatural habits and associations, as the pleasures of the
taste are ; because the pleasures of the sight more commonly
acquiesce in themselves ; and are not so often altered by con-
siderations which are independent of the sight itself. But
things do not spontaneously present themselves to the palate
as they do to the sight; they are generally applied to it,
either as food or as medicine ; and, from the qualities which
they possess for nutritive or medicinal purposes, they often
16
EDMUND BURKE
form the palate by degrees, and by force of these associa-
tions. Thus opium is pleasing to Turks, on account of the
agreeable delirium it produces. Tobacco is the delight of
Dutchmen, as it diffuses a torpor and pleasing stupefaction.
Fermented spirits please our common people, because they
banish care, and all consideration of future or present evils.
All of these would lie absolutely neglected if their prop-
erties had originally gone no further than the taste;
but all these together, with tea and coffee, and some other
things, have passed from the apothecary's shop to our tables,
and were taken for health long before they were thought of
for pleasure. The effect of the drug has made us use it
frequently; and frequent use, combined with the agreeable
effect, has made the taste itself at last agreeable. But this
does not in the least perplex our reasoning; because we
distinguish to the last the acquired from the natural relish.
In describing the taste of an unknown fruit, you would
scarcely say that it had a sweet and pleasant flavour like
tobacco, opium, or garlic, although you spoke to those who
were in the constant use of these drugs, and had great
pleasure in them. There is in all men a sufficient remem-
brance of the original natural causes of pleasure, to enable
them to bring all things offered to their senses to that stand-
ard, and to regulate their feelings and opinions by it. Sup-
pose one who had so vitiated his palate as to take more
pleasure in the taste of opium than in that of butter or honey,
to be presented with a bolus of squills; there is hardly any
doubt but that he would prefer the butter or honey to this
nauseous morsel, or to any bitter drug to which he had not
been accustomed ; which proves that his palate was naturally
like that of other men in all things, that it is still like the
palate of other men in many things, and only vitiated in
some particular points. For in judging of any new thing,
even of a taste similar to that which he has been formed
by habit to like, he finds his palate affected in a natural
manner, and on the common principles. Thus the pleasure
of all the senses, of the sight, and even of the taste, that
most ambiguous of the senses, is the same in all, high and
low, learned and unlearned.
Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures.
ON TASTE 17
which are presented by the sense; the mind of man pos-
sesses a sort of creative power of its own ; either in repre-
senting at pleasure the images of things in the order and
manner in which they were received by the senses, or in
combining those images in a new manner, and according
to a different order. This power is called imagination ; and
to this belongs whatever is called wit, fancy, invention, and
the like. But it must be observed, that this power of the
imagination is incapable of producing anything absolutely
new; it can only vary the disposition of those ideas which
it has received from the senses. Now the imagination is
the most extensive province of pleasure and pain, as it is
the region of our fears and our hopes, and of all our pas-
sions that are connected with them ; and whatever is calcu-
lated to affect the imagination with these commanding ideas,
by force of any original natural impression, must have the
same power pretty equally over all men. For since the
imagination is only the representation of the senses, it can
only be pleased or displeased with the images, from the
same principle on which the sense is pleased or displeased
with the realities; and consequently there must be just as
close an agreement in the imaginations as in the senses of
men. A little attention will convince us that this must of
necessity be the case.
But in the imagination, besides the pain or pleasure aris-
ing from the properties of the natural object, a pleasure is
perceived from the resemblance which the imitation has to
the original : the imagination, I conceive, can have no
pleasure but what results from one or other of these causes.
And these causes operate pretty uniformly upon all men,
because they operate by principles in nature, and which are
not derived from any particular habits or advantages. Mr.
Locke very justly and finely observes of wit, that it is chiefly
conversant in tracing resemblances : he remarks, at the same
time, that the business of judgment is rather in finding
differences. It may perhaps appear, on this supposition,
that there is no material distinction between the wit and the
judgment, as they both seem to result from different opera-
tions of the same faculty of comparing. But in reality,
whether they are or are not dependent on the same power
18 EDMUND BURKE
of the mind, they differ so very materially in many respects,
that a perfect union of wit and judgment is one of the rarest
things in the world. When two distinct objects are unlike
to each other, it is only what we expect ; things are in their
common way; and therefore they make no impression on
the imagination: but when two distinct objects have a re-
semblance, we are struck, we attend to them, and we are
pleased. The mind of man has naturally a far greater
alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in
searching for differences: because by making resemblances
we produce new images; we unite, we create, we enlarge
our stock ; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all
to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irk-
some, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of
a negative and indirect nature. A piece of news is told
me in the morning ; this, merely as a piece of news, as a fact
added to my stock, gives me some pleasure. In the evening
I find there was nothing in it. What do I gain by this, but
the dissatisfaction to find that I have been imposed upon?
Hence it is that men are much more naturally inclined to
belief than to incredulity. And it is upon this principle, that
the most ignorant and barbarous nations have frequently
excelled in similitudes, comparisons, metaphors, and alle-
gories, who have been weak and backward in distinguishing
and sorting their ideas. And it is for a reason of this kind,
that Homer and the Oriental writers, though very fond of
similitudes, and though they often strike out such as are
truly admirable, seldom take care to have them exact; that
is, they are taken with the general resemblance, they paint
it strongly, and they take no notice of the difference which
may be found between the things compared.
Now, as the pleasure of resemblance is that which princi-
pally flatters the imagination, all men are nearly equal in
this point, as far as their knowledge of the things repre-
sented or compared extends. The principle of this knowl-
edge is very much accidental, as it depends upon experience
and observation, and not on the strength or weakness of any
natural faculty; and it is from this difference in knowledge,
that what we commonly, though with no great exactness,
call a difference in taste proceeds. A man to whom sculp-
ON TASTE 19
ture is new, sees a barber's block, or some ordinary piece of
statuary, he is immediately struck and pleased, because he
sees something like a human figure; and, entirely taken up
with this likeness, he does not at all attend to its defects.
No person, I believe, at the first time of seeing a piece of
imitation ever did. Some time after, we suppose that this
novice lights upon a more artificial work of the same nature ;
he now begins to look with contempt on what he admired at
first ; not that he admired it even then for its unlikeness to a
man, but for that general, though inaccurate, resemblance
which it bore to the human figure. What he admired at
different times in these so different figures, is strictly the
same; and though his knowledge is improved, his taste is
not altered. Hitherto his mistake was from a want of
knowledge in art, and this arose from his inexperience; but
he may be still deficient from a want of knowledge in nature.
For it is possible that the man in question may stop here,
and that the masterpiece of a great hand may please him no
more than the middling performance of a vulgar artist:
and this not for want of better or higher relish, but because
all men do not observe with sufficient accuracy on the human
figure to enable them to judge properly of an imitation of
it. And that the critical taste does not depend upon a
superior principle in men, but upon superior knowledge, may
appear from several instances. The story of the ancient
painter and the shoemaker is very well known. The shoe-
maker set the painter right with regard to some mistakes
he had made in the shoe of one of his figures, and which
the painter, who had not made such accurate observations
on shoes, and was content with a general resemblance, had
never observed. But this was no impeachment to the taste
of the painter; it only showed some want of knowledge in
the art of making shoes. Let us imagine, that an anatomist
had come into the painter's working-room. His piece is in
general well done, the figure in question in a good attitude,
and the parts well adjusted to their various movements; yet
the anatomist, critical in his art, may observe the swell of
some muscle not quite just in the peculiar action of the
figure. Here the anatomist observes what the painter had
not observed; and he passes by what the shoemaker had re-
20 EDMUND BURKE
marked. But a want of the last critical knowledge in
anatomy no more reflected on the natural good taste of the
painter or of any common observer of his piece, than the
want of an exact knowledge in the formation of a shoe. A
fine piece of a decollated head of St. John the Baptist was
shown to a Turkish emperor ; he praised many things, but he
observed one defect ; he observed that the skin did not shrink
from the wounded part of the neck. The sultan on this
occasion, though his observation was very just, discovered
no more natural taste than the painter who executed this
piece, or than a thousand European connoisseurs, who
probably never would have made the same observation. His
Turkish Majesty had indeed been well acquainted with that
terrible spectacle, which the others could only have repre-
sented in their imagination. On the subject of their dislike
there is a difference between all these people, arising from
the different kinds and degrees of their knowledge ; but there
is something in common to the painter, the shoemaker, the
anatomist, and the Turkish emperor, the pleasure arising
from a natural object, so far as each perceives it justly
imitated ; the satisfaction in seeing an agreeable figure ; the
sympathy proceeding from a striking and affecting incident.
So far as taste is natural, it is nearly common to all.
In poetry, and other pieces of imagination, the same parity
may be observed. It is true, that one man is charmed with
Don Bellianis, and reads Virgil coldly: whilst another is
transported with the Eneid, and leaves Don Bellianis to
children. These two men seem to have a taste very differ-
ent from each other; but in fact they differ very little. In
both these pieces, which inspire such opposite sentiments, a
tale exciting admiration is told; both are full of action, both
are passionate; in both are voyages, battles, triumphs, and
continual changes of fortune. The admirer of Don Bel-
lianis perhaps does not understand the refined language of
the Eneid, who, if it was degraded into the style of the
Pilgrim's Progress, might feel it in all its energy, on the
same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis.
In his favourite author he is not shocked with the con-
tinual breaches of probability, the confusion of times, the
offences against manners, the trampling upon geography;
ON TASTE 21
for he knows nothing of geography and chronology, and he
has never examined the grounds of probability. He perhaps
reads of a shipwreck on the coast of Bohemia; wholly taken
up with so interesting an event, and only solicitous for the
fate of his hero, he is not in the least troubled at this ex-
travagant blunder. For why should he be shocked at a
shipwreck on the coast of Bohemia, who does not know but
that Bohemia may be an island in the Atlantic ocean? and
after all, what reflection is this on the natural good taste of
the person here supposed?
So far then as taste belongs to the imagination, its princi-
ple is the same in all men ; there is no difference in the
manner of their being affected, nor in the causes of the affec-
tion ; but in the degree there is a difference, which arises
from two causes principally ; either from a greater degree of
natural sensibility, or from a closer and longer attention to
the object. To illustrate this by the procedure of the senses,
in which the same difference is found, let us suppose a very
smooth marble table to be set before two men; they both
perceive it to be smooth, and they are both pleased with it
because of this quality. So far they agree. But suppose
another, and after that another table, the latter still smoother
than the former, to be set before them. It is now very proba-
ble that these men, who are so agreed upon what is smooth,
and in the pleasure from thence, will disagree when they
come to settle which table has the advantage in point of
polish. Here is indeed the great difference between tastes,
when men come to compare the excess or diminution of
things which are judged by degree and not by measure. Nor
is it easy, when such a difference arises, to settle the point,
if the excess or diminution be not glaring. If we differ in
opinion about two quantities, we can have recourse to a com-
mon measure, which may decide the question with the utmost
exactness; and this, I take it, is what gives mathematical
knowledge a greater certainty than any other. But in
things whose excess is not judged by greater or smaller, as
smoothness and roughness, hardness and softness, darkness
and light, the shades of colours, all these are very easily dis-
tinguished when the difference is any way considerable, but
not when it is minute, for want of some common measures,
22 EDMUND BURKE
which perhaps may never come to be discovered. In these
nice cases, supposing the acuteness of the sense equal, the
greater attention and habit in such things will have the ad-
vantage. In the question about the tables, the marble-
polisher will unquestionably determine the most accurately.
But notwithstanding this want of a common measure for
settling many disputes relative to the senses, and their repre-
sentative the imagination, we find that the principles are the
same in all, and that there is no disagreement until we come
to examine into the pre-eminence or difference of things,
which brings us within the province of the judgment.
So long as we are conversant with the sensible qualities
of things, hardly any more than the imagination seems con-
cerned; little more also than the imagination seems con-
cerned when the passions are represented, because by the
force of natural sympathy they are felt in all men without
any recourse to reasoning, and their justness recognized in
every breast. Love, grief, fear, anger, joy, all these passions
have, in their turns, affected every mind; and they do not
affect it in an arbitrary or casual manner, but upon certain,
natural, and uniform principles. But as many of the works
of imagination are not confined to the representation of
sensible objects, nor to efforts upon the passions, but ex-
tend themselves to the manners, the characters, the actions,
and designs of men, their relations, their virtues, and vices,
they come within the province of the judgment, which is im-
proved by attention, and by the habit of reasoning. All
these make a very considerable part of what are considered
as the objects of taste; and Horace sends us to the schools
of philosophy and the world for our instruction in them.
Whatever certainty is to be acquired in morality and the sci-
ence of life; just the same degree of certainty have we in
what relates to them in the works of imitation. Indeed it is
for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observ-
ances of time and place, and of decency in general, which is
only to be learned in those schools to which Horace recom-
mends us, that what is called taste, by way of distinction,
consists ; and which is in reality no other than a more refined
judgment. On the whole it appears to me, that what is called
taste, in its most general acceptation, is not a simple idea, but
ON TASTE 23
is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures
of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and
of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the
various relations of these, and concerning the human pas-
sions, manners, and actions. All this is requisite to form
taste, and the ground-work of all these is the same in the
human mind; for as the senses are the great originals of all
our ideas, and consequently of all our pleasures, if they are
not uncertain and arbitrary, the whole ground-work of taste
is common to all, and therefore there is a sufficient founda-
tion for a conclusive reasoning on these matters.
Whilst we consider taste merely according to its nature
and species, we shall find its principles entirely uniform;
but the degree in which these principles prevail in the
several individuals of mankind, is altogether as different as
the principles themselves are similar. For sensibility and
judgment, which are the qualities that compose what we
commonly call a taste, vary exceedingly in various people.
From a defect in the former of these qualities arises a want
of taste; a weakness in the latter constitutes a wrong or a
bad one. There are some men formed with feelings so
blunt, with tempers so cold and phlegmatic, that they can
hardly be said to be awake during the whole course of their
lives. Upon such persons the most striking objects make
but a faint and obscure impression. There are others so
continually in the agitation of gross and merely sensual
pleasures, or so occupied in the low drudgery of avarice, or
so heated in the chase of honours and distinction, that their
minds, which had been used continually to the storms of
these violent and tempestuous passions, can hardly be put
in motion by the delicate and refined play of the imagina-
tion. These men, though from a different cause, become as
stupid and insensible as the former; but whenever either of
these happen to be struck with any natural elegance or
greatness, or with these qualities in any work of art, they
are moved upon the same principle.
The cause of a wrong taste is a defect of judgment. And
this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding, (in
whatever the strength of that faculty may consist,) or,
I which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a
24 EDMUND BURKE
want of proper and well-directed exercise, which alone can
make it strong and ready. Besides that ignorance, inatten-
tion, prejudice, rashness, levity, obstinacy, in short, all those
passions, and all those vices, which pervert the judgment in
other matters, prejudice it no less in this its more refined and
elegant province. These causes produce different opinions
upon everything which is an object of the understanding,
without inducing us to suppose that there are no settled
principles of reason. And indeed, on the whole, one may ob-
serve that there is rather less difference upon matters of
taste among mankind, than upon most of those which depend
upon the naked reason ; and that men are far better agreed
on the excellency of a description in Virgil, than on the
truth or falsehood of a theory of Aristotle.
A rectitude of judgment in the arts, which may be called a
good taste, does in a great measure depend upon sensibility ;
because, if the mind has no bent to the pleasures of the im-
agination, it will never apply itself sufficiently to works of
that species to acquire a competent knowledge in them. But,
though a degree of sensibility is requisite to form a good
judgment, yet a good judgment does not necessarily arise
from a quick sensibility of pleasure; it frequently happens
that a very poor judge, merely by force of a greater com-
plexional sensibility, is more affected by a very poor piece,
than the best judge by the most perfect; for as everything
new, extraordinary, grand, or passionate, is well calculated to
affect such a person, and that the faults do not affect him,
his pleasure is more pure and unmixed ; and as it is merely a
pleasure of the imagination, it is much higher than any which
is derived from a rectitude of the judgment; the judgment is
for the greater part employed in throwing stumbling-blocks
in the way of the imagination, in dissipating the scenes of its
enchantment, and in tying us down to the disagreeable yoke
of our reason: for almost the only pleasure that men have in
judging better than others, consists in a sort of conscious
pride and superiority, which arises from thinking rightly; but
then, this is an indirect pleasure, a pleasure which does not
immediately result from the object which is under contem-
plation. In the morning of our days, when the senses are
unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every
ON TASTE 25
part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all the objects that
surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but
how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of things?
I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from
the most excellent performances of genius, which I felt at
that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as
trifling and contemptible. Every trivial cause of pleasure is
apt to affect the man of too sanguine a complexion: his ap-
petite is too keen to suffer his taste to be delicate; and he is
in all respects what Ovid says of himself in love,
Molle meum levibus cor est violabile telis,
Et semper causa est, cur ego semper amem.
One of this character can never be a refined judge; never
what the comic poet calls elegans formarum spectator. The
excellence and force of a composition must always be imper-
fectly estimated from its effect on the minds of any, except
we know the temper and character of those minds. The
most powerful effects of poetry and music have been dis-
played, and perhaps are still displayed, where these arts are
but in a very low and imperfect state. The rude hearer is
affected by the principles which operate in these arts even
in their rudest condition ; and he is not skilful enough to
perceive the defects. But as the arts advance towards
their perfection, the science of criticism advances with equal
pace, and the pleasure of judges is frequently interrupted
by the faults which are discovered in the most finished
compositions.
Before I leave this subject I cannot help taking notice of
an opinion which many persons entertain, as if the taste
were a separate faculty of the mind, and distinct from the
judgment and imagination ; a species of instinct, by which
we are struck naturally, and at the first glance, without any
previous reasoning, with the excellencies, or the defects, of
a composition. So far as the imagination and the passions
are concerned, I believe it true, that the reason is little con-
sulted; but where disposition, where decorum, where con-
gruity are concerned, in short, wherever the best taste
differs from the worst, I am convinced that the understand-
ing operates, and nothing else; and its operation is in
26 EDMUND BURKE
reality far from being always sudden, or, when it is sudden,
it is often far from being right. Men of the best taste, by
consideration, come frequently to change these early and
precipitate judgments, which the mind, from its aversion to
neutrality and doubt, loves to form on the spot. It is
known that the taste (whatever it is) is improved exactly
as we improve our judgment, by extending our knowledge,
by a steady attention to our object, and by frequent exer-
cise. They who have not taken these methods, if their
taste decides quickly, it is always uncertainly; and their
quickness is owing to their presumption and rashness, and
not to any sudden irradiation, that in a moment dispels all
darkness from their minds. But they who have cultivated
that species of knowledge which makes the object of taste,
by degrees, and habitually, attain not only a soundness, but
a readiness of judgment, as men do by the same methods on
all other occasions. At first they are obliged to spell, but
at last they read with ease and with celerity ; but this celerity
of its operation is no proof that the taste is a distinct faculty.
Nobody, I believe, has attended the course of a discussion,
which turned upon matters within the sphere of mere naked
reason, but must have observed the extreme readiness with
which the whole process of the argument is carried on, the
grounds discovered, the objections raised and answered, and
the conclusions drawn from premises, with a quickness alto-
gether as great as the taste can be supposed to work with;
and yet where nothing but plain reason either is or can be
suspected to operate. To multiply principles for every dif-
ferent appearance, is useless, and unphilosophical too in a
high degree.
This matter might be pursued much further; but it is not
the extent of the subject which must prescribe our bounds,
for what subject does not branch out to infinity? It is the
nature of our particular scheme, and the single point of
view in which we consider it, which ought to put a stop tc
our researches.
A PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY
INTO THE ORIGIN OF OUR IDEAS
OF
THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL
WITH SEVERAL OTHER ADDITIONS
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
Burke's eminence in the field of esthetic theory is not com,'
parable to the distinction he achieved as a statesman, orator,
and political thinker; yet it is probable that, in England espe-
cially, his political writings have unduly overshadowed his con-
tributions to the theory of the beautiful.
His "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful: with an Introductory Discourse concern-
ing Taste" was published in its first form in 1756, and in its
enlarged form in 1757; but it is understood that it was composed
some years earlier. "It was a vigorous enlargement of the prin-
ciple," says Morley, ee 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, en-
gravings, 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 basis of the most scientific psy-
chology 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."
The influence of the treatise outside of England was consid-
erable and important. Lessing undertook to translate it, and
many instances have been pointed out in which his "Laocobn"
is indebted to Burke; so that Burke ranks among the sources of
that fertilising contribution to the mind of the great German
thinker which he was always eager to acknowledge.
28
//.
s??
THE
SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL
PART I
Section i. — Novelty
THE first and the simplest emotion which we discover in
the human mind, is Curiosity. By curiosity, I mean
whatever desire we have for, or whatever pleasure
we take in, novelty. We see children perpetually running
from place to place, to hunt out something new: they catch
with great eagerness, and with very little choice, at whatever
comes before them ; their attention is engaged by everything,
because everything has, in that stage of life, the charm of
novelty to recommend it. But as those things, which engage
us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for any length
of time, curiosity is the most superficial of all the affections ;
it changes its object perpetually, it has an appetite which is
very sharp, but very easily satisfied; and it has always an
appearance of giddiness, restlessness, and anxiety. Curiosity,
from its nature, is a very active principle; it quickly runs
over the greatest part of its objects, and soon exhausts tht
variety which is commonly to be met with in nature; the
same things make frequent returns, and they return with
less and less of any agreeable effect. In short, the occur-
rences of life, by the time we come to know it a little, would
be incapable of affecting the mind with any other sensations
than those of loathing and weariness, if many things were
not adapted to affect the mind by means of other powers be-
sides novelty in them, and of other passions besides curiosity
in ourselves. These powers and passions shall be considered
in their place. But whatever these powers are, or upon
what principle soever they affect the mind, it is absolutely
29
30 EDMUND BURKE
necessary that they should not be exerted in those things
which a daily and vulgar use have brought into a stale un-
affecting familiarity. Some degree of novelty must be one
of the materials in every instrument which works upon the
mind; and curiosity blends itself more or less with all our
passions.
SECT. II. — PAIN AND PLEASURE
It seems then necessary towards moving the passions
of people advanced in life to any considerable degree, that
the objects designed for that purpose, besides their being
in some measure new, should be capable of exciting pain or
pleasure from other causes. Pain and pleasure are simple
ideas, incapable of definition. People are not liable to be
mistaken in their feelings, but they are very frequently
wrong in the names they give them, and in their reasonings
about them. Many are of the opinion, that pain arises neces-
sarily from the removal of some pleasure; as they think
pleasure does from the ceasing or diminution of some pain.
For my part, I am rather inclined to imagine, that pain and
pleasure, in their most simple and natural manner of affect-
ing, are each of a positive nature, and by no means neces-
sarily dependent on each other for their existence. The
human mind is often, and I think it is for the most part, in
a state neither of pain nor pleasure, which I call a state of
indifference. When I am carried from this state into a state
of actual pleasure, it does not appear necessary that I should
pass through the medium of any sort of pain. If in such
a state of indifference, or ease, or tranquillity, or call it
what you please, you were to be suddenly entertained with
a concert of music; or suppose some object of a fine shape,
and bright, lively colours, to be presented before you; or
imagine your smell is gratified with the fragrance of a rose ;
or if without any previous thirst you were to drink of some
pleasant kind of wine, or to taste of some sweetmeat with-
out being hungry; in all the several senses, of hearing,
smelling and tasting, you undoubtedly find a pleasure; yet
if I inquire into the state of your mind previous to these
gratifications, you will hardly tell me that they found you in
any kind of pain; or, having satisfied these several senses
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 31
with their several pleasures, will you say that any pain has
succeeded, though the pleasure is absolutely over? Suppose
on the other hand, a man in the same state of indifference,
to receive a violent blow, or to drink of some bitter potion,
or to have his ears wounded with some harsh and grating
sound; here is no removal of pleasure; and yet here is felt
in every sense which is affected, a pain very distinguishable.
It may be said, perhaps, that the pain in these cases had its
rise from the removal of the pleasure which the man enjoyed
before, though that pleasure was of so low a degree as to be
perceived only by the removal. But this seems to me a
subtilty, that is not discoverable in nature. For if, previous
to the pain, I do not feel any actual pleasure, I have no
reason to judge that any such thing exists; since pleasure
is only pleasure as it is felt. The same may be said of pain,
and with equal reason. I can never persuade myself that
pleasure and pain are mere relations, which can only exist
as they are contrasted; but I think I can discern clearly
that there are positive pains and pleasures, which do not at
all depend upon each other. Nothing is more certain to
my own feelings than this. There is nothing which I can
distinguish in my mind with more clearness than the three
states, of indifference, of pleasure, and of pain. Every one
of these I can perceive without any sort of idea of its rela-
tion to anything else. Caius is afflicted with a fit of the
colic; this man is actually in pain; stretch Caius upon the
rack, he will feel a much greater pain : but does this pain of
the rack arise from the removal of any pleasure? or is the
fit of the colic a pleasure or a pain, just as we are pleased
to consider it?
SECT. III. — THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE REMOVAL OF PAIN,
AND POSITIVE PLEASURE
We shall carry this proposition yet a step farther. We
shall venture to propose, that pain and pleasure are not only
not necessarily dependent for their existence on their mu-
tual diminution or removal, but that, in reality, the diminu-
tion or ceasing of pleasure does not operate like positive
pain; and that the removal or diminution of pain, in its
32 ED1VTUND BURKE
effect, has very little resemblance to positive pleasure. 1 The
former of these propositions will, I believe, be much more
readily allowed than the latter; because it is very evident
that pleasure, when it has run its career, sets us down very
nearly where it found us. Pleasure of every kind quickly
satisfies ; and when it is over, we relapse into indifference, or
rather we fall into a soft tranquillity, which is tinged with
the agreeable colour of the former sensation. I own it is not
at first view so apparent, that the removal of a great pain
does not resemble positive pleasure; but let us recollect in
what state we have found our minds upon escaping some im-
minent danger, or on being released from the severity of some
cruel pain. We have on such occasions found, if I am not
much mistaken, the temper of our minds in a tenor very re-
mote from that which attends the presence of positive pleas-
ure; we have found them in a state of much sobriety, im-
pressed with a sense of awe, in a sort of tranquillity shadowed
with horror. The fashion of the countenance and the gesture
of the body on such occasions is so correspondent to this state
of mind, that any person, a stranger to the cause of the ap-
pearance, would rather judge us under some consternation,
than in the enjoyment of anything like positive pleasure.
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•fcwra KaraKTelvas, &\\u>t> £%Ik€to 5tjim)v,
'Ay5/)6s & d^i-eiou, dd/xj3os 5' ex ei daopbiavras.
Iliad, ii. 480.
As when a wretch, who, conscious of his crime,
Pursued for murder from his native clime,
Just gains some frontier, breathless, pale, amazed ;
All gaze, all wonder !
This striking appearance of the man whom Homer sup-
poses to have just escaped an imminent danger, the sort of
mixed passion of terror and surprise, with which he affects
the spectators, paints very strongly the manner in which we
find ourselves affected upon occasions any way similar. For
when we have suffered from any violent emotion, the mind
1 Mr. Locke [Essay on the Human Understanding, 1. ii. c. 20, sect. 16]
thinks that the removal or lessening of a pain is considered and operates
as a pleasure, and the loss or diminishing of pleasure as a pain. It is
this opinion which we consider here.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 33
naturally continues in something like the same condition,
after the cause which first produced it has ceased to operate.
The tossing of the sea remains after the storm ; and when
this remain of horror has entirely subsided, all the passion,
which the accident raised, subsides along with it; and the
mind returns to its usual state of indifference. In short,
pleasure (I mean anything either in the inward sensation,
or in the outward appearance, like pleasure from a positive
cause) has never, I imagine, its origin from the removal of
pain or danger.
SECT. IV. OF DELIGHT AND PLEASURE AS OPPOSED TO
EACH OTHER
But shall we therefore say, that the removal of pain or
its diminution is always simply painful? or affirm that the
cessation or the lessening of pleasure is always attended
itself with a pleasure? By no means. What I advance is
no more than this; first, that there are pleasures and pains
of a positive and independent nature; and, secondly, that
the feeling which results from the ceasing or diminution
of pain does not bear a sufficient resemblance to positive
pleasure, to have it considered as of the same nature, or to
entitle it to be known by the same name; and, thirdly, that
upon the same principle the removal or qualification of pleas-
ure has no resemblance to positive pain. It is certain that
the former feeling (the removal or moderation of pain) has
something in it far from distressing or disagreeable in its
nature. This feeling, in many cases so agreeable, but in
all so different from positive pleasure, has no name which I
know; but that hinders not its being a very real one, and
very different from all others. It is most certain that every
species of satisfaction or pleasure, how different soever in
its manner of affecting, is of a positive nature in the mind of
him who feels it. The affection is undoubtedly positive;
but the cause may be, as in this case it certainly is, a sort
of Privation. And it is very reasonable that we should
distinguish by some term two things so distinct in nature,
as a pleasure that is such simply, and without any relation,
from that pleasure which cannot exist without a relation,
Hc B— vol. xxiv
34 EDMUND BURKE
and that too a relation to pain. Very extraordinary it
would be, if these affections, so distinguishable in their
causes, so different in their effects, should be confounded
with each other, because vulgar use has ranged them under
the same general title. Whenever I have occasion to speak
of this species of relative pleasure, I call it Delight; and I
shall take the best care I can to use that word in no other
sense. I am satisfied the word is not commonly used in
this appropriated signification; but I thought it better to
take up a word already known, and to limit its signification,
than to introduce a new one, which would not perhaps in-
corporate so well with the language. I should never have
presumed the least alteration in our words, if the nature of
the language, framed for the purposes of business rather
than those of philosophy, and the nature of my subject, that
leads me out of the common track of discourse, did not in
a manner necessitate me to it. I shall make use of this
liberty with all possible caution. As I make use of the
word Delight to express the sensation which accompanies
the removal of pain or danger; so when I speak of positive
pleasure, I shall for the most part call it simply Pleasure.
SECT. V. — JOY AND GRIEF
It must be observed that the cessation of pleasure affects
the mind three ways. If it simply ceases, after having
continued a proper time, the effect is indifference; if it be
abruptly broken off, there ensues an uneasy sense called
disappointment ; if the object be so totally lost that there is
no chance of enjoying it again, a passion arises in the mind,
which is called grief. Now there is none of these, not even
grief, which is the most violent, that I think has any re-
semblance to positive pain. The person who grieves, suffers
his passion to grow upon him; he indulges it, he loves it:
but this never happens in the case of actual pain, which
no man ever willingly endured for any considerable time.
That grief should be willingly endured, though far from a
simply pleasing sensation, is not so difficult to be under-
stood. It is the nature of grief to keep its object per-
petually in its eye, to present it in its most pleasurable
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 35
views, to repeat all the circumstances that attend it, even to
the last minuteness; to go back to every particular enjoy-
ment, to dwell upon each, and to find a thousand new per-
fections in all, that were not sufficiently understood before;
in grief, the pleasure is still uppermost;* and the affliction
we suffer has no resemblance to absolute pain, which is al-
ways odious, and which we endeavor to shake off as soon
as possible. The Odyssey of Homer, which abounds with
so many natural and affecting images, has none more strik-
ing than those which Menelaus raises of the calamitous fate
of his friends, and his own manner of feeling it. He owns,
indeed, that he often gives himself some intermission from
such melancholy reflections ; but he observes, too, that, mel-
ancholy as they are, they give him pleasure.
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IIo\\(£/as iv fteydpoicn Ka,drip.evos ^/xer^pocatv^
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Still in short intervals of pleasing woe,
Regardful of the friendly dues I owe,
I to the glorious dead, for ever dear,
Indulge the tribute of a grateful tear.
On the other hand, when we recover our health, when we
escape an imminent danger, is it with joy that we are
affected? The sense on these occasions is far from that
smooth and voluptuous satisfaction which the assured pros-
pect of pleasure bestows. The delight which arises from
the modifications of pain confesses the stock from whence
it sprung, in its solid, strong, and severe nature.
SECT. VI. — OF THE PASSIONS WHICH BELONG TO SELF-
PRESERVATION
Most of the ideas which are capable of making a power-
ful impression on the mind, whether simply of Pain or
Pleasure, or of the modifications of those, may be reduced
very nearly to these two heads, self-preservation and society ;
to the ends of one or the other of which all our passions are
36 EDMUND BURKE
calculated to answer. The passions which concern self-
preservation, turn mostly on pain or danger. The ideas of
pain, sickness, and death, fill the mind with strong emotions
of horror; but life and health, though they put us in a
capacity of being affected with pleasure, make no such im-
pression by the simple enjoyment. The passions therefore
which are conversant about the preservation of the indi-
vidual turn chiefly on pain and danger, and they are the
most powerful of all the passions.
SECT. VII. — OF THE SUBLIME
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain
and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or
is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner
analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is
productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capa-
ble of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am
satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than
those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all
doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are
much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any
pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest,
or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and
exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy. Nay, I am in great
doubt whether any man could be found, who would earn a
life of the most perfect satisfaction, at the price of ending
it in the torments, which justice inflicted in a few hours on
the late unfortunate regicide in France. But as pain is
stronger in its operation than pleasure, so death is in gen-
eral a much more affecting idea than pain; because there
are very few pains, however exquisite, which are not pre-
ferred to death: nay, what generally makes pain itself, if
I may say so, more painful, is, that it is considered as an
emissary of this king of terrors. When danger or pain press
too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are
simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain
modifications, they may be, and they are, delightful, as we
every day experience. The cause of this I shall endeavour
to investigate hereafter.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 37
SECT. VIII. — OF THE PASSIONS WHICH BELONG TO SOCIETY
The other head under which I class our passions, is that
of society, which may be divided into two sorts. I. The soci-
ety of the sexes, which answers the purposes of propagation ;
and next, that more general society, which we have with men
and with other animals, and which we may in some sort be
said to have even with the inanimate world. The passions
belonging to the preservation of the individual turn wholly
on pain and danger: those which belong to generation have
their origin in gratifications and pleasures; the pleasure most
directly belonging to this purpose is of a lively character,
rapturous and violent, and confessedly the highest pleasure
of sense; yet the absence of this so great an enjoyment scarce
amounts to an uneasiness ; and, except at particular times, I
do not think it affects at all. When men describe in what
manner they are affected by pain and danger, they do not
dwell on the pleasure of health and the comfort of security,
and then lament the loss of these satisfactions: the whole
turns upon the actual pains and horrors which they endure.
But if you listen to the complaints of a forsaken lover, you
observe that he insists largely on the pleasures which he en-
joyed, or hoped to enjoy, and on the perfection of the object
of his desires; it is the loss which is always uppermost in his
mind. The violent effects produced by love, which has some-
times been even wrought up to madness, is no objection to
the rule which we seek to establish. When men have suffer-
ed their imaginations to be long affected with any idea, it so
wholly engrosses them as to shut out by degrees almost every
other, and to break down every partition of the mind which
would confine it. Any idea is sufficient for the purpose, as
is evident from the infinite variety of causes, which give rise
to madness : but this at most can only prove, that the passion
of love is capable of producing very extraordinary effects, not
that its extraordinary emotions have any connexion with
positive pain.
38 EDMUND BURKE
SECT. IX. — THE FINAL CAUSE OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
THE PASSIONS BELONGING TO SELF-PRESERVATION, AND
THOSE WHICH REGARD THE SOCIETY OF THE SEXES
The final cause of the difference in character between the
passions which regard self-preservation, and those which are
directed to the multiplication of the species, will illustrate
the foregoing remarks yet further; and it is, I imagine,
worthy of observation even upon its own account. As the
performance of our duties of every kind depends upon life,
and the performing them with vigour and efficacy depends
upon health, we are very strongly affected with whatever
threatens the destruction of either: but as we are not
made to acquiesce in life and health, the simple enjoyment
of them is not attended with any real pleasure, lest, satisfied
with that, we should give ourselves over to indolence and
inaction. On the other hand, the generation of mankind is
a great purpose, and it is requisite that men should be
animated to the pursuit of it by some great incentive. It
is therefore attended with a very high pleasure ; but as it is
by no means designed to be our constant business, it is not
fit that the absence of this pleasure should be attended with
any considerable pain. The difference between men and
brutes, in this point, seems to be remarkable. Men are at
all times pretty equally disposed to the pleasures of love,
because they are to be guided by reason in the time and
manner of indulging them. Had any great pain arisen
from the want of this satisfaction, reason, I am afraid, would
find great difficulties in the performance of its office. But
brutes, who obey laws, in the execution of which their own
reason has but little share, have their stated seasons; at
such times it is not improbable that the sensation from the
want is very troublesome, because the end must be then
answered, or be missed in many, perhaps for ever; as the
inclination returns only with its season.
SECT. X. — OF BEAUTY
The passion which belongs to generation, merely as such,
is lust only. This is evident in brutes, whose passions are
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 39
more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more
directly than ours. The only distinction they observe with
regard to their mates, is that of sex. It is true, that they
stick severally to their own species in preference to all
others. But this preference, I imagine, does not arise from
any sense of beauty which they find in their species, as Mr.
Addison supposes, but from a law of some other kind, to
which they are subject; and this we may fairly conclude,
from their apparent want of choice amongst those objects
to which the barriers of their species have confined them.
But man, who is a creature adapted to a greater variety
and intricacy of relation, connects with the general passion
the idea of some social qualities, which direct and heighten
the appetite which he has in common with all other animals ;
and as he is not designed like them to live at large, it is fit
that he should have something to create a preference, and
fix his choice; and this in general should be some sensible
quality; as no other can so quickly, so powerfully, or so
surely produce its effect. The object therefore of this
mixed passion, which we call love, is the beauty of the sex.
Men are carried to the sex in general, as it is the sex, and
by the common law of nature: but they are attached to
particulars by personal beauty. (J call beauty a social quality ;
for where women and men, and not only they, but when
other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in behold-
ing them, (and there are many that do so,) they inspire us
with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their
persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter will-
ingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should
have strong reasons to the contrary. But to what end, in
many cases, this was designed, I am unable to discover; for
I see no greater reason for a connexion between man and
several animals who are attired in so engaging a manner,
than between him and some others who entirely want this
attraction, or possess it in a far weaker degree. But it is
probable, that Providence did not make even this distinction,
but with a view to some great end; though we cannot per-
ceive distinctly what it is, as his wisdom is not our wisdom,
nor our ways his ways.
40 EDMUND BURKE
SECT. XI. SOCIETY AND SOLITUDE
The second branch of the social passions is that which
administers to society in general. With regard to this, I
observe, that society, merely as society, without any parti-
cular heightenings, gives us no positive pleasure in the
enjoyment; but absolute and entire solitude, that is, the
total and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a
positive pain as can almost be conceived. Therefore in the
balance between the pleasure of general society and the
pain of absolute solitude, pain is the predominant idea. But
the pleasure of any particular social enjoyment outweighs
very considerably the uneasiness caused by the want of that
particular enjoyment; so that the strongest sensations rel-
ative to the habitudes of particular society are sensations of
pleasure. Good company, lively conversation, and the en-
dearments of friendship, fill the mind with great pleasure ;
a temporary solitude, on the other hand, is itself agreeable.
This may perhaps prove that we are creatures designed for
contemplation as well as action ; since solitude as well as
society has its pleasures; as from the former observation
we may discern, that an entire life of solitude contradicts
the purposes of our being, since death itself is scarcely an
idea of more terror.
SECT. XII. SYMPATHY, IMITATION, AND AMBITION
Under this denomination of society, the passions are of a
complicated kind, and branch out into a variety of forms,
agreeably to that variety of ends they are to serve in the
great chain of society. The three principal links in this
chain are sympathy, imitation, and ambition.
SECT. XIII. SYMPATHY
It is by the first of these passions that we enter into the
concerns of others; that we are moved as they are moved,
and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators of almost
anything which men can do or suffer. For sympathy must
be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 41
into the place of another man, and affected in many respects
as he is affected; so that this passion may either partake of
the nature of those which regard self-preservation, and turn-
ing upon pain may be a source of the sublime or it may
turn upon ideas of pleasure; and then whatever has been
said of the social affections, whether they regard society in
general, or only some particular modes of it, may be applica-
ble here. It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, paint-
ing, and other affecting arts, transfuse their passions from
one breast to another, and are often capable of grafting a
delight on wretchedness, misery, and death itself. It is a
common observation, that objects which in the reality would
shock, are in tragical, and such like representations, the
source of a very high species of pleasure. This, taken as a
fact, has been the cause of much reasoning. The satisfac-
tion has been commonly attributed, first, to the comfort we
receive in considering that so melancholy a story is no more
than a fiction ; and, next, to the contemplation of our own
freedom from the evils which we see represented. I am
afraid it is a practice much too common in inquiries of
this nature, to attribute the cause of feelings which merely
arise from the mechanical structure of our bodies, or from
the natural frame and constitution of our minds, to certain
conclusions of the reasoning faculty on the objects presented
to us ; for I should imagine, that the influence of reason in
producing our passions is nothing near so extensive as it is
commonly believed.
SECT. XIV. THE EFFECTS OF SYMPATHY IN THE
DISTRESSES OF OTHERS
To examine this point concerning the effect of tragedy in
a proper manner, we must previously consider how we are
affected by the feelings of our fellow-creatures in circum-
stances of real distress. I am convinced we have a degree
of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and
pains of others ; for let the affection be what it will in ap-
pearance, if it does not make us shun such objects, if on the
contrary it induces us to approach them, if it makes us
dwell upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a de-
42 EDMUND BURKE
light or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating
objects of this kind. Do we not read the authentic histories
of scenes of this nature with as much pleasure as romances
or poems, where the incidents are fictitious? The prosperity
of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably
affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon,
and the distress of its unhappy prince. Such a catastrophe
touches us in history as much as the destruction of Troy
does in fable. Our delight, in cases of this kind, is very
greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person
who sinks under an unworthy fortune. Scipio and Cato are
both virtuous characters; but we are more deeply affected
by the violent death of the one, and the ruin of the great
cause he adhered to, than with the deserved triumphs and
uninterrupted prosperity of the other; for terror is a passion
which always produces delight when it does not press too
closely; and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure,
because it arises from love and social affection. Whenever
we are formed by nature to any active purpose, the passion
which animates us to it is attended with delight, or a pleasure
of some kind, let the subject-matter be what it will; and as
our Creator has designed that we should be united by the
bond of sympathy, he has strengthened that bond by a pro-
portionable delight; and there most where our sympathy is
most wanted, — in the distresses of others. If this passion
was simply painful, we would shun with the greatest care all
persons and places that could excite such a passion ; as some,
who are so far gone in indolence as not to endure any strong
impression, actually do. But the case is widely different
with the greater part of mankind; there is no spectacle we
so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous
calamity ; so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes,
or whether they are turned back to it in history, it always
touches with delight. This is not an unmixed delight, but
blended with no small uneasiness. The delight we have in
such things, hinders us from shunning scenes of misery; and
the pain we feel prompts us to relieve ourselves in relieving
those who suffer; and all this antecedent to any reasoning,
by an instinct that works us to its own purposes without
our concurrence.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 43
SECT. XV. OF THE EFFECTS OF TRAGEDY
It is thus in real calamities. In imitated distresses the
only difference is the pleasure resulting from the effects of
imitation; for it is never so perfect, but we can perceive it
is imitation, and on that principle are somewhat pleased with
it. And indeed in some cases we derive as much or more
pleasure from that source than from the thing itself. But
then I imagine we shall be much mistaken, if we attribute
any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to the
consideration that tragedy is a deceit, and its representations
no realities. The nearer it approaches the reality, and the
farther it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more per-
fect is its power. But be its power of what kind it will, it
never approaches to what it represents. Choose a day on
which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy
we have ; appoint the most favourite actors ; spare no cost
upon the scenes and decorations, unite the greatest efforts of
poetry, painting, and music; and when you have collected
your audience, just at the moment when their minds are
erect with expectation, let it be reported that a state criminal
of high rank is on the point of being executed in the adjoin-
ing square; in a moment the emptiness of the theatre would
demonstrate the comparative weakness of the imitative arts,
and proclaim the triumph of the real sympathy. I believe
that this notion of our having a simple pain in the reality,
yet a delight in the representation, arises from hence, that
we do not sufficiently distinguish what we would by no
means choose to do, from what we should be eager enough
to see if it was once done. The delight in seeing things,
which, so far from doing, our heartiest wishes would be to
see redressed. This noble capital, the pride of England and
of Europe, I believe no man is so strangely wicked as to
desire to see destroyed by a conflagration or an earthquake,
though he should be removed himself to the greatest distance
from the danger. But suppose such a fatal accident to have
happened, what numbers from all parts would crowd to be-
hold the ruins, and amongst many who would have been con-
tent never to have seen London in its glory ! Nor is it,
either in real or fictitious distresses, our immunity from them
44 EDMUND BURKE
which produces our delight ; in my own mind I can discover
nothing like it. I apprehend that this mistake is owing to a
sort of sophism, by which we are frequently imposed upon ;
it arises from our not distinguishing between what is indeed
a necessary condition to our doing or suffering anything in
general, and what is the cause of some particular act. If a
man kills me with a sword, it is a necessary condition to
this that we should have been both of us alive before the
fact ; and yet it would be absurd to say, that our being both
living creatures was the cause of his crime and of my death.
So it is certain, that it is absolutely necessary my life should
be out of any imminent hazard, before I can take a delight
in the sufferings of others, real or imaginary, or indeed in
anything else from any cause whatsoever. But then it is a
sophism to argue from thence, that this immunity is the
cause of my delight either on these or on any occasions. No
one can distinguish such a cause of satisfaction in his own
mind, I believe; nay, when we do not suffer any very acute
pain, nor are exposed to any imminent danger of our lives,
we can feel for others, whilst we suffer ourselves ; and often
then most when we are softened by affliction; we see with
pity even distresses which we would accept in the place of
our own.
SECT. XVI. IMITATION
The second passion belonging to society is imitation, or,
if you will, a desire of imitating, and consequently a pleasure
in it. This passion arises from much the same cause with
sympathy. For as sympathy makes us take a concern in
whatever men feel, so this affection prompts us to copy what-
ever they do; and consequently we have a pleasure in imi-
tating, and in whatever belongs to imitation, merely as it is
such, without any intervention of the reasoning faculty, but
solely from our natural constitution, which Providence has
framed in such a manner as to find either pleasure or delight,
according to the nature of the object, in whatever regards the
purposes of our being. It is by imitation far more than by
precept, that we learn everything; and what we learn thus,
we acquire not only more effectually, but more pleasantly.
This forms our manners, our opinions, our lives. It is one
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 45
of the strongest links of society ; it is a species of mutual
compliance, which all men yield to each other, without con-
straint to themselves, and which is extremely flattering to all.
Herein it is that painting and many other agreeable arts have
laid one of the principal foundations of their power. And
since, by its influence on our manners and our passions, it is
of such great consequence, I shall here venture to lay down
a rule, which may inform us with a good degree of certainty
when we are to attribute the power of the arts to imitation,
or to our pleasure in the skill of the imitator merely, and
when to sympathy, or some other cause in conjunction with
it. When the object represented in poetry or painting is such
as we could have no desire of seeing in the reality, then I
may be sure that its power in poetry or painting is owing to
the power of imitation, and to no cause operating in the thing
itself. So it is with most of the pieces which the painters
call still-life. In these a cottage, a dunghill, the meanest and
most ordinary utensils of the kitchen, are capable of giving
us pleasure. But when the object of the painting or poem
is such as we should run to see if real, let it affect us with
what odd sort of sense it will, we may rely upon it, that the
power of the poem or picture is more owing to the nature of
the thing itself than to the mere effect of imitation, or to a
consideration of the skill of the imitator, however excellent.
Aristotle has spoken so much and so boldly upon the force
of imitation in his Poetics, that it makes any further dis-
course upon this subject the less necessary.
SECT. XVII. AMBITION
Although imitation is one of the great instruments used
by Providence in bringing our nature towards its perfection,
yet if men gave themselves up to imitation entirely, and each
followed the other, and so on in an eternal circle, it is easy to
see that there never could be any improvement amongst them.
Men must remain as brutes do, the same at the end that they
are at this day, and that they were in the beginning of the
world. To prevent this, God has planted in man a sense of
ambition, and a satisfaction arising from the contemplation
of his excelling his fellows in something deemed valuable
46 EDMUND BURKE
amongst them. It is this passion that drives men to all the
ways we see in use of signalizing themselves, and that tends
to make whatever excites in a man the idea of this distinc-
tion so very pleasant. It has been so strong as to make very
miserable men take comfort, that they were supreme in
misery; and certain it is, that, where we cannot distinguish
ourselves by something excellent, we begin to take a com-
placency in some singular infirmities, follies, or defects of
one kind or other. It is on this principle that flattery is so
prevalent; for flattery is no more than what raises in a
man's mind an idea of a preference which he has not. Now,
whatever, either on good or upon bad ground, tends to raise
a man in his own opinion, produces a sort of swelling and
triumph, that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and
this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more
force, than when without danger we are conversant with
terrible objects; the mind always claiming to itself some part
of the dignity and importance of the things which it con-
templates. Hence proceeds what Longinus has observed
of that glorying sense of inward greatness, that always
fills the reader of such passages in poets and orators as are
sublime; it is what every man must have felt in himself
upon such occasions.
SECT. XVIII. THE RECAPITULATION
To draw the whole of what has been said into a few dis-
tinct points : — The passions which belong to self-preserva-
tion turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when
their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when
we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually
in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure,
because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough
from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this
delight, I call sublime. The passions belonging to self-pres-
ervation are the strongest of all the passions.
The second head to which the passions are referred with
relation to their final cause, is society. There are two sorts
of societies. The first is, the society of sex. The passion
belonging to this is called love, and it contains a mixture of
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 47
lust; its object is the beauty of women. The other is the
great society with man and all other animals. The passion
subservient to this is called likewise love, but it has no
mixture of lust, and its object is beauty; which is a name I
shall apply to all such qualities in things as induce in us a
sense of affection and tenderness, or some other passion the
most nearly resembling these. The passion of love has its
rise in positive pleasure; it is, like all things which grow
out of pleasure, capable of being mixed with a mode of
uneasiness, that is, when an idea of its object is excited in
the mind with an idea at the same time of having irre-
trievably lost it. This mixed sense of pleasure I have not
called pain, because it turns upon actual pleasure, and be-
cause it is, both in its cause and in most of its effects, of a
nature altogether different.
Next to the general passion we have for society, to a
choice in which we are directed by the pleasure we have in
the object, the particular passion under this head called
sympathy has the greatest extent. The nature of this
passion is, to put us in the place of another in whatever
circumstance he is in, and to affect us in a like manner;
so that this passion may, as the occasion requires, turn
either on pain or pleasure; but with the modifications
mentioned in some cases in sect. u. As to imitation and
preference, nothing more need be said.
SECT. XIX. THE CONCLUSION
I believed that an attempt to range and methodize some
of our most leading passions would be a good preparative to
such an inquiry as we are going to make in the ensuing dis-
course. The passions I have mentioned are almost the only
ones which it can be necessary to consider in our present
design; though the variety of the passions is great, and
worthy in every branch of that variety, of an attentive in-
vestigation. The more accurately we search into the human
mind, the stronger traces we everywhere find of his wisdom
who made it. If a discourse on the use of the parts of the
body may be considered as an hymn to the Creator; the use
of the passions, which are the organs of the mind, cannot be
48 EDMUND BURKE
barren of praise to him, nor unproductive to ourselves of
that noble and uncommon union of science and admiration,
which a contemplation of the works of infinite wisdom alone
can afford to a rational mind : whilst, referring to him what-
ever we find of right or good or fair in ourselves, discover-
ing his strength and wisdom even in our own weakness
and imperfection, honouring them where we discover them
clearly, and adoring their profundity where we are lost in
our search, we may be inquisitive without impertinence, and
elevated without pride ; we may be admitted, if I may dare
to say so, into the counsels of the Almighty by a consider-
ation of his works. The elevation of the mind ought to be
the principal end of all our studies; which if they do not in
some measure effect, they are of very little service to us.
But, beside this great purpose, a consideration of the ratio-
nale of our passions seems to me very necessary for all who
would affect them upon solid and sure principles. It is not
enough to know them in general : to affect them after a deli-
cate manner, or to judge properly of any work designed to
affect them, we should know the exact boundaries of their
several jurisdictions; we should pursue them through all
their variety of operations, and pierce into the inmost, and
what might appear inaccessible, parts of our nature,
Quod latet arcana non enarrabile libra.
Without all this it is possible for a man, after a confused
manner, sometimes to satisfy his own mind of the truth of
his work ; but he can never have a certain determinate rule
to go by, nor can he ever make his propositions sufficiently
clear to others. Poets, and orators, and painters, and those
who cultivate other branches of the liberal arts, have, with-
out this critical knowledge, succeeded well in their several
provinces, and will succeed: as among artificers there are
many machines made and even invented without any exact
knowledge of the principles they are governed by. It is, I
own, not uncommon to be wrong in theory, and right in
practice; and we are happy that it is so. Men often act
right from their feelings, who afterwards reason but ill on
them from principle: but as it is impossible to avoid an at-
tempt at such reasoning, and equally impossible to prevent
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 49
its having some influence on our practice, surely it is worth
taking some pains to have it just, and founded on the basis
of sure experience. We might expect that the artists them-
selves would have been our surest guides; but the artists
have been too much occupied in the practice: the philoso-
phers have done little ; and what they have done, was mostly
with a view to their own schemes and systems: and as for
those called critics, they have generally sought the rule of
the arts in the wrong place; they sought it among poems,
pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings. But art can
never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe,
the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have
been confined in so narrow a circle : they have been rather
imitators of one another than of nature; and this with so
faithful an uniformity, and to so remote an antiquity, that
it is hard to say who gave the first model. Critics follow
them, and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge but
poorly of anything, whilst I measure it by no other standard
than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man's
power ; and an easy observation of the most common, some-
times of the meanest, things in nature, will give the truest
lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry, that slights
such observation, must leave us in the dark, or, what is
worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights. In an inquiry
it is almost everything to be once in a right road. I am
satisfied I have done but little by these observations con-
sidered in themselves; and I never should have taken the
pains to digest them, much less should I have ever ventured
to publish them, if I was not convinced that nothing tends
more to the corruption of science than to suffer it to stag-
nate. These waters must be troubled, before they can exert
their virtues. A man who works beyond the surface of
things, though he may be wrong himself, yet he clears the
way for others, and may chance to make even his errors
subservient to the cause of truth. In the following parts I
shall inquire what things they are that cause in us the affec-
tions of the sublime and beautiful, as in this I have con-
sidered the affections themselves. I only desire one favour,
— that no part of this discourse may be judged of by itself,
and independently of the rest; for I am sensible I have not
50 EDMUND BURKE
disposed my materials to abide the test of a captious con-
troversy, but of a sober and even forgiving examination,
that they are not armed at all points for battle, but dressed
to visit those who are willing to give a peaceful entrance
to truth.
PART II
Section I. — Of the Passion Caused by the Sublime
THE passion caused by the great and sublime in nature.
when those causes operate most powerfully, is as-
tonishment ; and astonishment is that state of the soul,
in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of
horror. 1 In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its
object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence
reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the
great power of the sublime, that, far from being produced
by them, it anticipates our reasonings, and hurries us on by
an irresistible force. Astonishment, as I have said, is the
effect of the sublime in its highest degree; the inferior ef-
fects are admiration, reverence, and respect.
SECT. II. TERROR
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers
of acting and reasoning as fear.' For fear being an appre-
hension of pain or death, it operates in a manner that re-
sembles actual pain. Whatever therefore is terrible, with
regard to sight, is sublime too, whether this cause of terror
be endued with greatness of dimensions or not; for it is
impossible to look on anything as trifling, or contemptible,
that may be dangerous. There are many animals, who
though far from being large, are yet capable of raising ideas
of the sublime, because they are considered as objects of
terror. As serpents and poisonous animals of almost all
kinds. And to things of great dimensions, if we annex an
adventitious idea of terror, they become without comparison
greater. A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly
no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as ex-
1 Part I. sect. 3, 4, 7. a Part IV. sect. 3 — 6.
51
52 EDMUND BURKE
tensive as a prospect of the ocean: but can it ever fill the
mind with anything so great as the ocean itself? This is
owing to several causes; but it is owing to none more than
this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror. Indeed,
terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or
latently, the ruling principle of the sublime. Several lan-
guages bear a strong testimony to the affinity of these ideas.
They frequently use the same word, to signify indifferently
the modes of astonishment or admiration, and those of
terror. Sdpiftos is in Greek, either fear or wonder; detvo$
is terrible or respectable; aldiut, to reverence or to fear.
Vereor in Latin, is what aidlat is in Greek. The Romans
used the verb stupeo, a term which strongly marks the state
of an astonished mind, to express the effect either of simple
fear or of astonishment; the word attonitus (thunder-struck)
is equally expressive of the alliance of these ideas; and do
not the French etonnement, and the English astonishment
and amazement, point out as clearly the kindred emotions
which attend fear and wonder? They who have a more
general knowledge of languages, could produce, I make no
doubt, many other and equally striking examples.
SECT. III. — OBSCURITY
To make anything very terrible, obscurity 1 seems in gen-
eral to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any
danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal
of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible
of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread,
in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts
and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect
minds which give credit to the popular tales concerning such
sorts of beings. Those despotic governments, which are
founded on the passions of men, and principally upon the
passion of fear, keep their chief as much as may be from
the public eye. The policy has been the same in many cases
of religion. Almost all the heathen temples were dark.
Even in the barbarous temples of the Americans at this day,
they keep their idol in a dark part of the hut, which is con-
1 Part IV. sect. 14—16.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL S3
secrated to his worship. For this purpose too the Druids
performed all their ceremonies in the bosom of the darkest
woods, and in the shade of the oldest and most spreading
oaks. No person seems better to have understood the
secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may
use the expression, in their strongest light, by the force of
a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of
Death in the second book is admirably studied; it is aston-
ishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and
expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring, he has
finished the portrait of the king of terrors:
— The other shape,
If shape it might be called that shape had none
Distinguishable, in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called that shadow seemed ;
For each seemed either ; black he stood as night ;
Fierce as ten furies ; terrible as hell ;
And shook a deadly dart. What seemed his head
The likeness of a kingly crown had on.
In this description all is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible,
and sublime to the last degree.
SECT. IV. OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CLEARNESS AND
OBSCURITY WITH REGARD TO THE PASSIONS
It is one thing to make an idea clear, and another to
make it affecting to the imagination. If I make a drawing
of a palace, or a temple, or a landscape, I present a very
clear idea of those objects; but then (allowing for the effect
of imitation, which is something) my picture can at most
affect only as the palace, temple, or landscape would have
affected in the reality. On the other hand, the most lively
and spirited verbal description I can give raises a very
obscure and imperfect idea of such objects; but then it is in
my power to raise a stronger emotion by the description than
I could do by the best painting. This experience constantly
evinces. The proper manner of conveying the affections of
the mind from one to another, is by words ; there is a great
insufficiency in all other methods of communication; and so
far is a clearness of imagery from being absolutely neces-
54 EDMUND BURKE
sary to an influence upon the passions, that they may be
considerably operated upon, without presenting any image
at all, by certain sounds adapted to that purpose; of which
we have a sufficient proof in the acknowledged and power-
ful effects of instrumental music. In reality, a great clear-
ness helps but little towards affecting the passions, as it is in
some sort an enemy to all enthusiasms whatsoever.
SECT. [IV.] — THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED
There are two verses in Horace's Art of Poetry, that
seem to contradict this opinion; for which reason I shall
take a little more pains in clearing it up. The verses are,
Segnius irritant animos demissa per aures,
Quam qucB sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus.
On this the Abbe du Bos founds a criticism, wherein he
gives painting the preference to poetry in the article of
moving the passions; principally on account of the greater
clearness of the ideas it represents. I believe this excellent
judge was led into this mistake (if it be a mistake) by his
system; to which he found it more conformable than I ima-
gine it will be found by experience. I know several who ad-
mire and love painting, and yet who regard the objects of
their admiration in that art with coolness enough in com-
parison of that warmth with which they are animated by
affecting pieces of poetry or rhetoric. Among the common
sort of people, I never could perceive that painting had much
influence on their passions. It is true, that the best sorts
of painting, as well as the best sorts of poetry, are not much
understood in that sphere. But it is most certain, that their
passions are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, or
by the ballads of Chevy-chace, or the Children in the Wood,
and by other little popular poems and tales that are current
in that rank of life. I do not know of any paintings, bad or
good, that produce the same effect. So that poetry, with all
its obscurity, has a more general, as well as a more powerful,
dominion over the passions, than the other art. And I
think there are reasons in nature, why the obscure idea,
when properly conveyed, should be more affecting than the
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 55
clear. It is our ignorance of things that causes all our ad-
miration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and
acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little.
It is thus with the vulgar ; and all men are as the vulgar in
what they do not understand. The ideas of eternity and
infinity are among the most affecting we have; and yet
perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so
little, as of infinity and eternity. We do not anywhere meet
a more sublime description than this justly celebrated one of
Milton, wherein he gives the portrait of Satan with a dignity
so suitable to the subject:
— He above the rest
In shape and gesture proudly eminent
Stood like a tower ; his form had yet not lost
All her original brightness, nor appeared
Less than archangel ruined, and th' excess
Of glory obscured : as when the sun new risen
Looks through the horizontal misty air
Shorn of his beams ; or from behind the moon
In dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds
On half the nations ; and with fear of change
Perplexes monarchs. —
Here is a very noble picture; and in what does this poetical
picture consist ? In images of a tower, an archangel, the sun
rising through mists, or in an eclipse, the ruin of monarchs,
and the revolutions of kingdoms. The mind is hurried out
of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images; which
affect because they are crowded and confused. For, separate
them, and you lose much of the greatness; and join them,
and you infallibly lose the clearness. The images raised by
poetry are always of this obscure kind; though in general
the effects of poetry are by no means to be attributed to the
images it raises ; which point we shall examine more at large
hereafter. 1 But painting, when we have allowed for the
pleasure of imitation, can only affect simply by the images it
presents; and even in painting, a judicious obscurity in some
things contributes to the effect of the picture; because the
images in painting are exactly similar to those in nature;
and in nature, dark, confused, uncertain images have a
greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions,
1 Part V.
56 EDMUND BURKE
than those have which are more clear and determinate. But
where and when this observation may be applied to practice,
and how far it shall be extended, will be better deduced from
the nature of the subject, and from the occasion, than from
any rules that can be given.
I am sensible that this idea has met with opposition, and
is likely still to be rejected by several. But let it be con-
sidered, that hardly anything can strike the mind with its
greatness, which does not make some sort of approach
towards infinity; which nothing can do whilst we are able
to perceive its bounds; but to see an object distinctly, and
to perceive its bounds, is one and the same thing. A clear
idea is therefore another name for a little idea. There is
a passage in the book of Job amazingly sublime, and this
sublimity is principally due to the terrible uncertainty of
the thing described: In thoughts from the visions of the
night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, fear came upon
me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.
Then a spirit passed before my face; the hair of my Hesh
stood up. It stood still, but I could not discern the form
thereof: an image was before mine eyes, there was silence,
and I heard a voice, — Shall mortal man be more just than
God? We are first prepared with the utmost solemnity for
the vision ; we are first terrified, before we are let even
into the obscure cause of our emotion ; but when this
grand cause of terror makes it appearance, what is it? Is it
not wrapt up in the shades of its own incomprehensible
darkness, more awful, more striking, more terrible, than the
liveliest description, than the clearest painting, could pos-
sibly represent it? When painters have attempted to give
us clear representations of these very fanciful and terrible
ideas, they have, I think, almost always failed ; insomuch
that I have been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of
hell, to determine whether the painter did not intend some-
thing ludicrous. Several painters have handled a subject
of this kind, with a view of assembling as many horrid phan-
toms as their imagination could suggest; but all the designs
I have chanced to meet of the temptation of St. Anthony
were rather a sort of odd, wild grotesques, than anything
capable of producing a serious passion. In all these sub-
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 57
jects poetry in very happy. Its apparitions, its chimeras, its
harpies, its allegorical figures, are grand and affecting; and
though Virgil's Fame and Homer's Discord are obscure,
they are magnificent figures. These figures in painting
would be clear enough, but I fear they might become
ridiculous.
sect. v. — POWER
Besides those things which directly suggest the idea of
danger, and those which produce a similar effect from a
mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime, which is not
some modification of power. And this branch rises, as
naturally as the other two branches, from terror, the com-
mon stock of everything that is sublime. The idea of power,
at first view, seems of the class of those indifferent ones,
which may equally belong to pain or to pleasure. But in
reality, the affection, arising from the idea of vast power, is
extremely remote from that neutral character. For first,
we must remember, 1 that the idea of pain, in its highest
degree, is much stronger than the highest degree of pleas-
ure; and that it preserves the same superiority through all
the subordinate gradations. From hence it is, that where
the chances for equal degrees of suffering or enjoyment
are in any sort equal, the idea of the suffering must always
be prevalent. And indeed the ideas of pain, and, above all,
of death, are so very affecting, that whilst we remain in
the presence of whatever is supposed to have the power of
inflicting either, it is impossible to be perfectly free from
terror. Again, we know by experience, that, for the en-
joyment of pleasure, no great efforts of power are at all
necessary ; nay, we know, that such efforts would go a great
way towards destroying our satisfaction : for pleasure must
be stolen, and not forced upon us ; pleasure follows the will ;
and therefore we are generally affected with it by many
things of a force greatly inferior to our own. But pain is
always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because
*ve never submit to pain willingly. So that strength, vio-
lence, pain, and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind
together. Look at a man, or any other animal of prodigious
1 Part I. sect. 7.
58 EDMUND BURKE
strength, and what is your idea before reflection? Is it that
this strength will be subservient to you, to your ease, to
your pleasure, to your interest in any sense? No; the emo-
tion you feel is, lest this enormous strength should be
employed to the purposes of rapine 8 and destruction. That
power derives all its sublimity from the terror with which it
is generally accompanied, will appear evidently from its effect
in the very few cases, in which it may be possible to strip
a considerable degree of strength of its ability to hurt.
When you do this, you spoil it of everything sublime, and it
immediately becomes contemptible. An ox is a creature of
vast strength ; but he is an innocent creature, extremely
serviceable, and not at all dangerous; for which reason the
idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too:
but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive,
seldom (at least amongst us) of any use in our business; the
idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a
place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons. Let
us look at another strong animal, in the two distinct lights in
which we may consider him. The horse in the light of a
useful beast, fit for the plough, the road, the draft; in every
social, useful light, the horse has nothing sublime: but is it
thus that we are affected with him, whose neck is clothed
with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, who
swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage, neither be-
lieveth that it is the sound of the trumpet? In this descrip-
tion, the useful character of the horse entirely disappears,
and the terrible and sublime blaze out together. We have
continually about us animals of a strength that is consid-
erable, but not pernicious. Amongst these we never look
for the sublime; it comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and
in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger,
the panther, or rhinoceros. Whenever strength is only
useful, and employed for our benefit or our pleasure, then
it is never sublime: for nothing can act agreeably to us,
that does not act in conformity to our will ; but to act agree-
ably to our will, it must be subject to us, and therefore can
never be the cause of a grand and commanding conception.
The description of the wild ass, in Job, is worked up into
2 Vide Part III. sect. 21.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 59
no small sublimity, merely by insisting on his freedom, and
his setting mankind at defiance ; otherwise the description of
such an animal could have had nothing noble in it. Who
hath loosed (says he) the bands of the wild ass? whose
house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his
dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither
regardeth he the voice of the driver. The range of the
mountains is his pasture. The magnificent description of
the unicorn and of leviathan, in the same book, is full of
the same heightening circumstances: Will the unicorn be
willing to serve thee? canst thou bind the unicorn with his
band in the furrow? wilt thou trust him because his strength
is great? — Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? —
will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for
a servant for ever? shall not one be cast down even at the
sight of him? In short, wheresoever we find strength, and
in what light soever we look upon power we shall all along
observe the sublime the concomitant of terror, and contempt
the attendant on a strength that is subservient and in-
noxious. The race of dogs, in many of their kinds, have
generally a competent degree of strength and swiftness}.
and they exert these and other valuable qualities which
they possess, greatly to our convenience and pleasure. Dogs
are indeed the most social, affectionate, and amiable animals
of the whole brute creation; but love approaches much
nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined; and ac-
cordingly, though we caress dogs, we borrow from them an
appellation of the most despicable kind, when we employ
terms of reproach ; and this appellation is the common mark
of the last vileness and contempt in every language. Wolves
have not more strength than several species of dogs; but,
on account of their unmanageable fierceness, the idea of a
wolf is not despicable; it is not excluded from grand de-
scriptions and similitudes. Thus we are affected by strength,
which is natural power. The power which arises from in-
stitution in kings and commanders, has the same connexion
with terror. Sovereigns are frequently addressed with the
title of dread majesty. And it may be observed, that young
persons, little acquainted with the world, and who have not
been used to approach men in power, are commonly struck
60 EDMUND BURKE
with an awe which takes away the free use of their facul-
ties. When I prepared my seat in the street, (says Job,)
the young men saw me, and hid themselves. Indeed, so
natural is this timidity with regard to power, and so strongly
does it inhere in our constitution, that very few are able to
conquer it, but by mixing much in the business of the great
world, or by using no small violence to their natural dis-
positions. I know some people are of opinion, that no awe,
no degree of terror, accompanies the idea of power ; and
have hazarded to affirm, that we can contemplate the idea
of God himself without any such emotion. I purposely avoided,
when I first considered this subject, to introduce the idea
of that great and tremendous Being, as an example in an
argument so light as this; though it frequently occurred to
me, not as an objection to, but as a strong confirmation of,
my notions in this matter. I hope, in what I am going to
say, I shall avoid presumption, where it is almost impossible
for any mortal to speak with strict propriety. I say then,
that whilst we consider the Godhead merely as he is an
object of the understanding, which forms a complex idea of
power, wisdom, justice, goodness, all stretched to a degree
far exceeding the bounds of our comprehension, whilst we
consider the Divinity in this refined and abstracted light,
the imagination and passions are little or nothing affected.
But because we are bound, by the condition of our nature,
to ascend to these pure and intellectual ideas, through the
medium of sensible images, and to judge of these divine
qualities by their evident acts and exertions, it becomes ex-
tremely hard to disentangle our idea of the cause from the
effect by which we are led to know it. Thus when we con-
template the Deity, his attributes and their operation, coming
un?ted on the mind, form a sort of sensible image, and as
such are capable of affecting the imagination. Now, though
in a just idea of the Deity perhaps none of his attributes
are predominant, yet, to our imagination, his power is by far
the most striking. Some reflection, some comparing, is nec-
essary to satisfy us of his wisdom, his justice, and his good-
ness. To be struck with his power, it is only necessary
that we should open our eyes. But whilst we contemplate
so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 61
power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we
shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in
a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consid-
eration of his other attributes may relieve, in some measure,
our apprehensions ; yet no conviction of the justice with
which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tem-
pered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises
from a force which nothing can withstand. If we rejoice,
we rejoice with trembling: and even whilst we are receiv-
ing benefits, we cannot but shudder at a power which can
confer benefits of such mighty importance. When the
prophet David contemplated the wonders of wisdom and
power which are displayed in the economy of man, he seems
to be struck with a sort of divine horror, and cries out,
Fearfully and wonderfully am I made ! An heathen poet has
a sentiment of a similar nature ; Horace looks upon it as the
last effort of philosophical fortitude, to behold without terror
and amazement, this immense and glorious fabric of the
universe :
Hunc solem, et Stellas, et decedentia certis
Tempora momentis, sunt qui formidine nulla
Imbuti spectent.
Lucretius is a poet not to be suspected of giving way to su-
perstitious terrors ; yet when he supposes the whole mechan-
ism of nature laid open by the master of his philosophy, his
transport on this magnificent view, which he has represented
in the colours of such bold and lively poetry, is overcast with
a shade of secret dread and horror :
His ibi me rebus qu&datn divina voluptas
Percipit, atque horror ; quod sic Natura, tua vi
Tarn manifesto patens, ex omni parte retecta est.
But the Scripture alone can supply ideas answerable to the
majesty of this subject. In the Scripture, wherever God is
represented as appearing or speaking, everything terrible in
nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the
Divine presence. The Psalms, and the prophetical books, are
crowded with instances of this kind. The earth shook,
(says the psalmist,) the heavens also dropped at the presence
of the Lord. And, what is remarkable, the painting pre-
62
EDMUND BURKE
serves the same character, not only when he is supposed
descending to take vengeance upon the wicked, but even
when he exerts the like plenitude of power in acts of
beneficence to mankind. Tremble, thou earth! at the pres-
ence of the Lord; at the presence of the God of Jacob;
which turned the rock into standing water, the Hint into a
fountain of waters! It were endless to enumerate all the
passages,, both in the sacred and profane writers, which es-
tablish the general sentiment of mankind, concerning the
inseparable union of a sacred and reverential awe, with
our ideas of the Divinity. Hence the common maxim,
Primus in orbe deos fecit timor. This maxim may be, as I
believe it is, false with regard to the origin of religion.
The maker of the maxim saw how inseparable these ideas
were, without considering that the notion of some great
power must be always precedent to our dread of it. But
this dread must necessarily follow the idea of such a power,
when it is once excited in the mind. It is on this principle
that true religion has, and must have, so large a mixture
of salutary fear; and that false religions have generally
-nothing else but fear to support them. Before the Chris-
tian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the
Divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us, there was
very little said of the love of God. The followers of Plato
have something of it, and only something; the other writers
of pagan antiquity, whether poets or philosophers, nothing
at all. And they who consider with what infinite attention,
by what a disregard of every perishable object, through what
long habits of piety and contemplation, it is that any man is
able to attain an entire love and devotion to the Deity, will
easily perceive, that it is not the first, the most natural and
the most striking, effect which proceeds from that idea.
Thus we have traced power through its several gradations
unto the highest of all, where our imagination is finally lost;
and we find terror, quite throughout the progress, its in-
separable companion, and growing along with it, as far as
we can possibly trace them-. Now as power is undoubtedly
a capital source of the sublime, this will point out evidently
from whence its energy is derived, and to what class of ideas
we ought to unite it.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 63
SECT. VI. — PRIVATION
All general privations are great, because they are all terri-
ble ; Vacuity, Darkness, Solitude, and Silence. With what a
fire of imagination, yet with what severity of judgment, has
Virgil amassed all these circumstances, where he knows that
all the images of a tremendous dignity ought to be united, at
the mouth of hell ! where, before he unlocks the secrets of
the great deep, he seems to be seized with a religious horror,
and to retire astonished at the boldness of his own designs :
Dii, quibus imperium est animarum, umbr&que — silentes !
Et Chaos, et Phlegethon, loca nocte silentia late,
Sit mihi fas audita loqui ; sit, numine vestro,
Pandere res alta terra et caligine mersas.
Ibant obscuri, sola sub nocte, per umbram,
Perque domos Ditis vacuas, et inania regna.
Ye subterraneous gods, whose awful sway
The gliding ghosts and silent shades obey ;
O Chaos hoar ! and Phlegethon profound !
Whose solemn empire stretches wide around ;
Give me, ye great, tremendous powers, to tell
Of scenes and wonders in the depth of hell :
Give me your mighty secrets to display
From those black realms of darkness to the day. — Pitt.
Obscure they went through dreary shades that led
Along the waste dominions of the dead. — Dryden.
SECT. VII. — VASTNESS
Greatness 1 of dimension is a powerful cause of the
sublime. This is too evident, and the observation too com-
mon, to need any illustration : it is not so common to con-
sider in what ways greatness of dimension, vastness of ex-
tent or quantity, has the most striking effect. For certainly,
there are ways and modes, wherein the same quantity of
extension shall produce greater effects than it is found to
do in others. Extension is either in length, height, or depth.
Of these the length strikes least; an hundred yards of even
ground will never work such an effect as a tower an hundred
yards high, or a rock or mountain of that altitude. I am
apt to imagine likewise, that height is less grand than depth ;
1 Part IV. sect. 9.
€4 EDMUND BURKE
and that we are more struck at looking down from a
precipice, than looking up at an object of equal height;
but of that I am not very positive. A perpendicular has
more force in forming the sublime, than an inclined plane;
and the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem
stronger than where it is smooth and polished. It would
carry us out of our way to enter in this place into the cause
of these appearances; but certain it is they afford a large
and fruitful field of speculation. However, it may not be
amiss to add to these remarks upon magnitude, that, as the
great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme
of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise: when we
attend to the infinite divisibility of matter, when we pursue
animal life into these excessively small, and yet organized
beings, that escape the nicest inquisition of the sense; when
we push our discoveries yet downward, and consider those
creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the still diminish-
ing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is
lost as well as the sense ; we become amazed and confounded
at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its
effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself. For
division must be infinite as well as addition ; because the idea
of a perfect unity can no more be arrived at, than that of a
complete whole, to which nothing may be added.
SECT. VIII. — INFINITY
Another source of the sublime is infinity; if it does not
rather belong to the last. Infinity has a tendency to fill the
mind with that sort of delightful horror, which is the most
genuine effect and truest test of the sublime. There are
scarce any things which can become the objects of our
senses, that are really and in their own nature infinite. But
the eye not being able to perceive the bounds of many
things, they seem to be infinite, and they produce the same
effects as if they were really so. We are deceived in the like
manner, if the parts of some large object are so continued
to any indefinite number, that the imagination meets no
check which may hinder its extending them at pleasure.
Whenever we repeat any idea frequently, the mind, by a
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 65
sort of mechanism, repeats it long after the first cause has
ceased to operate. 1 After whirling about, when we sit down,
the objects about us still seem to whirl. After a long suc-
cession of noises, as the fall of waters, or the beating of
forge-hammers, the hammers beat and the water roars in
the imagination long after the first sounds have ceased to
affect it; and they die away at last by gradations which are
scarcely perceptible. If you hold up a straight pole, with your
eye to one end, it will seem extended to a length almost
incredible. 2 Place a number of uniform and equi-distant
marks on this pole, they will cause the same deception, and
seem multiplied without end. The senses, strongly affected
in some one manner, cannot quickly change their tenor, or
adapt themselves to other things ; but they continue in their
old channel until the strength of the first mover decays.
This is the reason of an appearance very frequent in mad-
men ; that they remain whole days and nights, sometimes
whole years, in the constant repetition of some remark, some
complaint, or song; which having struck powerfully on their
disordered imagination in the beginning of their phrensy,
every repetition reinforces it with new strength ; and the
hurry of their spirits, unrestrained by the curb of reason,
continues it to the end of their lives.
SECT. IX. — SUCCESSION AND UNIFORMITY
Succession and uniformity of parts are what constitute
the artificial infinite. I. Succession; which is requisite that
the parts may be continued so long and in such a direction,
as by their frequent impulses on the sense to impress the
imagination with an idea of their progress beyond their
actual limits. 2. Uniformity ; because if the figures of the
parts should be changed, the imagination at every change
finds a check; you are presented at every alteration with
the termination of one idea, and the beginning of another;
by which means it becomes impossible to continue that un-
interrupted progression, which alone can stamp on bounded
objects the character of infinity. 8 It is in this kind of
1 Part IV. sect. 12. 2 Part IV. sect. 14.
3 Mr. Addison, in the Spectator, concerning the pleasures of imagina-
tion, thinks it is because in the rotund at one glance you see half the
building. This I do not imagine to be the real cause.
HC C — VOL. XXIV
66 EDMUND BURKE
artificial infinity, I believe, we ought to look for the cause
why a rotund has such a noble effect. For in a rotund,
whether it be a building or a plantation, you can nowhere
fix a boundary; turn which way you will, the same object
still seems to continue, and the imagination has no rest.
But the parts must be uniform, as well as circularly disposed,
to give this figure its full force; because any difference,
whether it be in the disposition, or in the figure, or even in
the color of the parts, is highly prejudicial to the idea of
infinity, which every change must check and interrupt, at
every alteration commencing a new series. On the same
principles of succession and uniformity, the grand appear-
ance of the ancient heathen temples, which were generally
oblong forms, with a range of uniform pillars on every side,
will be easily accounted for. From the same cause also may
be derived the grand effect of the aisles in many of our own
old cathedrals. The form of a cross used in some churches
seems to me not so eligible as the parallelogram of the an-
cients ; at least, I imagine it is not so proper for the outside.
For, supposing the arms of the cross every way equal, if you
stand in a direction parallel to any of the side walls, or colon-
nades, instead of a deception that makes the building more
extended than it is, you are cut off from a considerable part
(two-thirds) of its actual length; and to prevent all possi-
bility of progression, the arms of the cross, taking a new
direction, make a right angle with the beam, and thereby
wholly turn the imagination from the repetition of the
former idea. Or suppose the spectator placed where he
may take a direct view of such a building, what will be the
consequence? The necessary consequence will be, that a
good part of the basis of each angle formed by the intersec-
tion of the arms of the cross, must be inevitably lost; the
whole must of course assume a broken, unconnected figure;
the lights must be unequal, here strong, and there weak;
without that noble gradation which the perspective always
effects on parts disposed uninterruptedly in a right line.
Some or all of v these objections will lie against every figure
of a cross, in whatever view you take it. I exemplified them
in the Greek cross, in which these faults appear the most
strongly; but they appear in some degree in all sorts of
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 67
crosses. Indeed there is nothing more prejudicial to the
grandeur of buildings, than to abound in angles; a fault ob-
vious in many ; and owing to an inordinate thirst for variety,
which, whenever it prevails, is sure to leave very little true
taste.
SECT. X. — MAGNITUDE IN BUILDING
To the sublime in building, greatness of dimension seems
requisite; for on a few parts, and those small, the imagi-
nation cannot rise to any idea of infinity. No greatness in
the manner can effectually compensate for the want of
proper dimensions. There is no danger of drawing men
into extravagant designs by this rule; it carries its own cau-
tion along with it. Because too great a length in buildings
destroys the purpose of greatness, which it was intended to
promote ; the perspective will lessen it in height as it gains
in length; and will bring it at last to a point; turning the
whole figure into a sort of triangle, the poorest in its effect
of almost any figure that can be presented to the eye. I
have ever observed, that colonnades and avenues of trees of
a moderate length, were, without comparison, far grander,
than when they were suffered to run to immense distances.
A true artist should put a generous deceit on the spectators,
and effect the noblest designs by easy methods. Designs
that are vast only by their dimensions, are always the sign
of a common and low imagination. No work of art can be
great, but as it deceives; to be otherwise is the prerogative
of nature only. A good eye will fix the medium betwixt an
excessive length or height, (for the same objection lies
against both,) and a short or broken quantity; and perhaps
it might be ascertained to a tolerable degree of exactness, if
it was my purpose to descend far into the particulars of
any art.
SECT. XI. — INFINITY IN PLEASING OBJECTS
Infinity, though of another kind, causes much of our
pleasure in agreeable, as well as of our delight in sublime,
images. The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons; and
the young of most animals, though far from being completely
fashioned, afford a more agreeable sensation than the full-
68 EDMUND BURKE
grown ; because the imagination is entertained with the
promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the
present object of the sense. In unfinished sketches of draw-
ing, I have often seen something which pleased me beyond
the best finishing; and this I believe proceeds from the
cause I have just now assigned.
SECT. XII. — DIFFICULTY
Another 1 source of greatness is Difficulty. When any-
work seems to have required immense force and labor to
effect it, the idea is grand. Stonehenge, neither for disposi-
tion nor ornament, has anything admirable; but those huge
rude masses of stone, set on end, and piled each on other,
turn the mind on the immense force necessary for such a
work. Nay, the rudeness of the work increases this cause
of grandeur, as it excludes the idea of art and contrivance;
for dexterity produces another sort of effect, which is dif-
ferent enough from this.
SECT. XIII. — MAGNIFICENCE
Magnificence is likewise a source of the sublime. A great
profusion of things, which are splendid or valuable in them-
selves, is magnificent. The starry heaven, though it occurs
so very frequently to our view, never fails to excite an idea
of grandeur. This cannot be owing to the stars themselves,
. separately considered. The number is certainly the cause.
The apparent disorder augments the grandeur, for the ap-
pearance of care is highly contrary to our idea of magnifi-
cence. Besides, the stars lie in such apparent confusion, as
makes it impossible on ordinary occasions to reckon them.
This gives them the advantage of a sort of infinity. In
works of art, this kind of grandeur, which consists in multi-
tude, is to be very courteously admitted ; because a profusion
of excellent things is not to be attained, or with too much
difficulty ; and because in many cases this splendid confusion
would destroy all use, which should be attended to in most
of the works of art with the greatest care; besides, it is to
1 Part IV. sect. 4 — 6.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 69
be considered, that unless you can produce an appearance
of infinity by your disorder, you will have disorder only
without magnificence. There are, however, a sort of fire-
works, and some other things, that in this way succeed well,
and are truly grand. There are also many descriptions in
the poets and orators, which owe their sublimity to a rich-
ness and profusion of images, in which the mind is so
dazzled as to make it impossible to attend to that exact co-
herence and agreement of the allusions, which we should
require on every other occasion. I do not now remember a
more striking example of this, than the description which is
given of the king's army in the play of Henry the Fourth:
— All furnished, all in arms,
All plumed like ostriches that with the wind
Baited like eagles having lately bathed :
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun in Midsummer,
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry with his beaver on
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury ;
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,
As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus.
In that excellent book, so remarkable for the vivacity of
its descriptions as well as the solidity and penetration of its
sentences, the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach, there is a noble
panegyric on the high priest Simon the son of Onias ; and
it is a very fine example of the point before us :
How was he honoured in the midst of the people, in his
coming out of the sanctuary ! He was as the morning star
in the midst of a cloud, and as the moon at the full; as the
sun shining upon the temple of the Most High, and as the
rainbow giving light in the bright clouds: and as the flower
of roses in the spring of the year, as lilies by the rivers of
waters, and as the frankincense tree in summer; as fire and
incense in the censer, and as a vessel of gold set with pre-
cious stones; as a fair olive tree budding forth fruit, and
as a cypress which groweth up to the clouds. When he put
on the robe of honour, and was clothed zvith the perfection
of glory, when he went up to the holy altar, he made the gar-
70 EDMUXD BURKE
ment of holiness honourable. He himself stood by the hearth
of the altar, compassed with his brethren round about; as a
young cedar in Libanus, and as palm trees compassed they
him about. So were all the sons of Aaron in their glory,
and the oblations of the Lord in their hands, &c.
SECT. XIV. — LIGHT
Having considered extension, so far as it is capable of
• raising ideas of greatness; colour comes next under con-
sideration. All colours depend on light. Light therefore
ought previously to be examined; and with its opposite,
darkness. With regard to light, to make it a cause capable
of producing the sublime, it must be attended with some
circumstances, besides its bare faculty of showing other
objects. Mere light is too common a thing to make a strong
impression on the mind, and without a strong impression
nothing can be sublime. But such a light as that of the
sun, immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the
sense, is a very great idea. Light of an inferior strength to
this, if it moves with great celerity, has the same power;
for lightning is certainly productive of grandeur, which it
owes chiefly to the extreme velocity of its motion. A quick
transition from light to darkness, or from darkness to light,
has yet a greater effect. But darkness is more productive
of sublime ideas than light. Our great poet was convinced
of this; and indeed so full was he of this idea, so entirely
possessed with the power of a well-managed darkness, that
in describing the appearance of the Deity, amidst that pro-
fusion of magnificent images, which the grandeur of his
subject provokes him to pour out upon every side, he is far
from forgetting the obscurity which surrounds the most in-
comprehensible of all beings, but
— With majesty of darkness round
Circles his throne. —
And what is no less remarkable, our author had the secret
of preserving this idea, even when he seemed to depart the
farthest from it, when he describes the light and glory
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 71
which flows from the Divine presence; a light which by its
very excess is converted into a species of darkness.
Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear.
Here is an idea not only poetical in a high degree, but
strictly and philosophically just. Extreme light, by over-
coming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in
its effect exactly to resemble darkness. After looking for
some time at the sun, two black spots, the impression which
it leaves, seem to dance before our eyes. Thus are two
ideas as opposite as can be imagined reconciled in the
extremes of both ; and both, in spite of their opposite nature,
brought to concur in producing the sublime. And this is
not the only instance wherein the opposite extremes operate
equally in favour of the sublime, which in all things abhors
mediocrity.
SECT. XV. — LIGHT IN BUILDING
As the management of light is a matter of importance in
architecture, it is worth inquiring, how far this remark is
applicable to building. I think then, that all edifices calcu-
lated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be
dark and gloomy, and this for two reasons; the first is, that
darkness itself on other occasions is known by experience
to have a greater effect on the passions than light. The
second is, that to make an object very striking, we should
make it as different as possible from the objects with which
we have been immediately conversant; when therefore you
enter a building, you cannot pass into a greater light than
you had in the open air; to go into one some few degrees
less luminous, can make only a trifling change; but to make
the transition thoroughly striking, you ought to pass from
the greatest light, to as much darkness as is consistent with
the uses of architecture. At night the contrary rule will
hold, but for the very same reason; and the more highly a
room is then illuminated, the grander will the passion be.
72 EDMUND BURKE
SECT XVI. — COLOUR CONSIDERED AS PRODUCTIVE OF
THE SUBLIME
Among colours, such as are soft or cheerful (except per-
haps a strong red which is cheerful) are unfit to produce
grand images. An immense mountain covered with a
shining green turf, is nothing, in this respect, to one dark
and gloomy; the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue;
and night more sublime and solemn than day. Therefore
in historical painting, a gay or gaudy drapery can never
have a happy effect: and in buildings, when the highest
degree of the sublime is intended, the materials and orna-
ments ought neither to be white, nor green, nor yellow, nor
blue, nor a pale red, nor violet, nor spotted, but of sad
and fuscous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple, and
the like. Much of gilding, mosaics, painting, or statues,
contribute but little to the sublime. This rule need not be
put in practice, except where an uniform degree of the most
striking sublimity is to be produced, and that in every par-
ticular ; for it ought to be observed, that this melancholy
kind of greatness, though it be certainly the highest, ought
not to be studied in all sorts of edifices, where yet grandeur
must be studied: in such cases the sublimity must be drawn
from the other sources ; with a strict caution however against
anything light and riant; as nothing so effectually deadens
the whole taste of the sublime.
SECT. XVII. — SOUND AND LOUDNESS
The eye is not the only organ of sensation by which a
sublime passion may be produced. Sounds have a great
power in these as in most other passions. I do not mean
words, because words do not affect simply by their sounds,
but by means altogether different. Excessive loudness alone
is sufficient to overpower the soul, to suspend its action, and
to fill it with terror. The noise of vast cataracts, raging
storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensa-
tion in the mind, though we can observe no nicety or artifice
in those sorts of music. The shouting of multitudes has a
similar effect; and, by the sole strength of the sound, so
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 73
amazes and confounds the imagination, that, in this stagger-
ing and hurry of the mind, the best-established tempers can
scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining in the com-
mon cry, and common resolution of the crowd.
SECT. XVIII. — SUDDENNESS
A sudden beginning or sudden cessation of sound of any
considerable force, has the same power. The attention is
roused by this ; and the faculties driven forward, as it were,
on their guard. Whatever, either in sights or sounds, makes
the transition from one extreme to the other easy, causes no
terror, and consequently can be no cause of greatness. In
everything sudden and unexpected, we are apt to start; that
is, we have a perception of danger, and our nature rouses us
to guard against it. It may be observed that a single sound
of some strength, though but of short duration, if repeated
after intervals, has a grand effect. Few things are more
awful than the striking of a great clock, when the silence of
the night prevents the attention from being too much dissi-
pated. The same may be said of a single stroke on a drum,
repeated with pauses ; and of the successive firing of cannon
at a distance. All the effects mentioned in this section have
causes very nearly alike.
SECT. XIX. — INTERMITTING
A low, tremulous, intermitting sound, though it seems in
some respects opposite to that just mentioned, is productive
of the sublime. It is worth while to examine this a little.
The fact itself must be determined by every man's own expe-
rience and reflection. I have already observed, 1 that night
increases our terror, more perhaps than anything else; it is
our nature, when we do not know what may happen to us, to n
fear the worst that can happen; and hence it is, that uncer-
tainty is so terrible, that we often seek to be rid of it, at the
hazard of certain mischief. Now, some low, confused, un- >
certain sounds, leave us in the same fearful anxiety concern-
1 Sect. 3.
74 EDMUND BURKE
ing their causes, that no light, or an uncertain light, does
concerning the objects that surround us.
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
Est iter in sylvis* —
— A faint shadow of uncertain light,
Like as a lamp, whose life doth fade away;
Or as the moon clothed with cloudy night
Doth show to him who walks in fear and great affright.
Spenser.
But light now appearing and now leaving us, and so off
and on, is even more terrible than total darkness: and a
sort of uncertain sounds are, when the necessary dispositions
concur, more alarming than a total silence.
SECT. XX. — THE CRIES OF ANIMALS
Such sounds as imitate the natural inarticulate voices of
men, or any animals in pain or danger, are capable of con-
veying great ideas; unless it be the well-known voice of
some creature, on which we are used to look with contempt.
The angry tones of wild beasts are equally capable of causing
a great and awful sensation.
Hinc exaudiri gemitus iraque leonum
Vincla rccusantum, et sera sub node rudentum;
Sctigeriquc sues, atque in prasepibus ursi
Savire ; et forma magnorum ululare luporum.
It might seem that these modulations of sound carry some
connexion with the nature of the things they represent, and
are not merely arbitrary; because the natural cries of all
animals, even of those animals with whom we have not been
acquainted, never fail to make themselves sufficiently under-
stood; this cannot be said of language. The modifications
of sound, which may be productive of the sublime, are
almost infinite. Those I have mentioned are only a few
instances to show on what principles they are all built.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 75
SECT. XXI. — SMELL AND TASTE. BITTERS AND STENCHES
Smells and Tastes have some share too in ideas of great-
ness; but it is a small one, weak in its nature, and confined
in its operations. I shall only observe, that no smells or
tastes can produce a grand sensation, except excessive
bitters, and intolerable stenches. It is true, that these
affections of the smell and taste, when they are in their full
force, and lean directly upon the sensory, are simply painful,
and accompanied with no sort of delight; but when they
are moderated, as in a description or narrative, they become
sources of the sublime, as genuine as any other, and upon
the very same principle of a moderated pain. "A cup of
bitterness ; " " to drain the bitter cup of fortune ; " " the
bitter apples of Sodom ; " these are all ideas suitable to a
sublime description. Nor is this passage of Virgil without
sublimity, where the stench of the vapour in Albunea con-
spires so happily with the sacred horror and gloominess of
that prophetic forest:
At rex sollicitus monstris oracula Fauni
Fatidici genitoris adit, lucosque sub alta
Consulit Albunea, nemorum qua maxima sacro
Fonte sonat; ssevamque exhalat opaca Mephitim.
In the sixth book, and in a very sublime description, the
poisonous exhalation of Acheron is not forgotten, nor does
it all disagree with the other images amongst which it is
introduced :
Spelunca alta fuit, vastoque immanis hiatu,
Scrupea, tuta lacu nigro, nemorumque tenebris ;
Quam super haud ullce poterant impune volantes
Tendere iter pennis: talis sese halitus atris
Faucibus effundens supera ad convexa ferebat.
I have added these examples, because some friends, for
whose judgment I have great deference, were of opinion that
if the sentiment stood nakedly by itself, it would be subject,
at first view, to burlesque and ridicule; but this I imagine
would principally arise from considering the bitterness and
stench in company with mean and contemptible ideas, with
which it must be owned they are often united; such an
union degrades the sublime in all other instances as well as
76 • EDMUND BURKE
in those. But it is one of the tests by which the sublimity
of an image is to be tried, not whether it becomes mear.
when associated with mean ideas ; but whether, when united
with images of an allowed grandeur, the whole composition
is supported with dignity. Things which are terrible are
always great ; but when things possess disagreeable qualities,
or such as have indeed some degree of danger, but of a
danger easily overcome, they are merely odious; as toads
and spiders.
SECT. XXII. — FEELING. PAIN
Of feeling, little more can be said than that the idea of
bodily pain, in all the modes and degrees of labour, pain,
anguish, torment, is productive of the sublime ; and nothing
else in this sense can produce it. I need not give here any
fresh instances, as those given in the former sections abun-
dantly illustrate a remark that, in reality, wants only an
attention to nature, to be made by everybody.
Having thus run through the causes of the sublime with
reference to all the senses, my first observation (sect. 7)
will be found very nearly true; that the sublime is an idea
belonging to self-preservation ; that it is therefore one of the
most affecting we have; that its strongest emotion is an
emotion of distress; and that no pleasure 1 from a positive
cause belongs to it. Numberless examples, besides those
mentioned, might be brought in support of these truths, and
many perhaps useful consequences drawn from them —
Sed fugit interea, fugit irrevocabile tempus,
Singula dum capti circumvectamur amore.
1 Vide Part I. sect. 6.
PART III
Section I. — Of Beauty
IT IS my design to consider beauty as distinguished from
the sublime; and, in the course of the inquiry, to ex-
amine how far it is consistent with it. But previous to
this, we must take a short review of the opinions already
entertained of this quality ; which I think are hardly to be re-
duced to any fixed principles ; because men are used to talk of
beauty in a figurative manner, that is to say, in a manner ex-
tremely uncertain, and indeterminate. By beauty I mean that
quality or those qualities in bodies, by which they cause love,
or some passion similar to it. I confine this definition to the
merely sensible qualities of things, for the sake of preserving
the utmost simplicity in a subject, which must always distract
us whenever we take in those various causes of sympathy
which attach us to any persons or things from secondary con-
siderations, and not from the direct force which they have
merely on being viewed. I likewise distinguish love (by
which I mean that satisfaction which arises to the mind
upon contemplating anything beautiful, of whatsoever nature
it may be) from desire or lust; which is an energy of the
mind, that hurries us on to the possession of certain objects,
that do not affect us as they are beautiful, but by means alto-
gether different. We shall have a strong desire for a woman
of no remarkable beauty ; whilst the greatest beauty in men,
or in other animals, though it causes love, yet excites nothing
at all of desire. Which shows that beauty, and the passion
caused by beauty, which I call love, is different from desire,
though desire may sometimes operate along with it ; but it is
to this latter that we must attribute those violent and tem-
pestuous passions, and the consequent emotions of the body,
which attend what is called love in some of its ordinary ac-
ceptations, and not to the effects of beauty merely as it is such.
77
78 EDMUND BURKE
SECT. II. — PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY IN
VEGETABLES
Beauty hath usually been said to consist in certain pro-
portions of parts. On considering the matter, I have great
reason to doubt, whether beauty be at all an idea belonging
to proportion. Proportion relates almost wholly to conve-
nience, as every idea of order seems to do ; and it must there-
fore be considered as a creature of the understanding, rather
than a primary cause acting on the senses and imagination.
It is not by the force of long attention and inquiry that we
find any object to be beautiful; beauty demands no assist-
ance from our reasoning; even the will is unconcerned; the
appearance of beauty as effectually causes some degree of
love in us, as the application of ice or fire produces the ideas
of heat or cold. To gain something like a satisfactory con-
clusion in this point, it were well to examine, what propor-
tion is; since several who make use of that word do not
always seem to understand very clearly the force of the term,
nor to have very distinct ideas concerning the thing itself.
Proportion is the measure of relative quantity. Since all
quantity is divisible, it is evident that every distinct part,
into which any quantity is divided, must bear some relation
to the other parts, or to the whole. These relations give an
origin to the idea of proportion. They are discovered by
mensuration, and they are the objects of mathematical in-
quiry. But whether any part of any determinate quantity
be a fourth, or a fifth, or a sixth, or a moiety of the whole;
or whether it be of equal length with any other part, or
double its length, or but one half, is a matter merely indiffer-
ent to the mind; it stands neuter in the question; and it is
from this absolute indifference and tranquillity of the mind,
that mathematical speculations derive some of their most
considerable advantages; because there is nothing to interest
the imagination; because the judgment sits free and un-
biassed to examine the point. All proportions, every ar-
rangement of quantity, is alike to the understanding, because
the same truths result to it from all; from greater, from
lesser, from equality and inequality. But surely beauty is
no idea belonging to mensuration; nor has it anything to do
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 79
with calculation and geometry. If it had, we might then
point out some certain measures which we could demonstrate
to be beautiful, either as simply considered, or as relating to
others; and we could call in those natural objects, for whose
beauty we have no voucher but the sense, to this happy
standard, and confirm the voice of our passions by the deter-
mination of our reason. But since we have not this help,
let us see whether proportion can in any sense be considered
as the cause of beauty, as hath been so generally, and by
some so confidently, affirmed. If proportion be one of the
constituents of beauty, it must derive that power either from
some natural properties inherent in certain measures, which
operate mechanically ; from the operation of custom ; or from
the fitness which some measures have to answer some par-
ticular ends of conveniency. Our business therefore is to
inquire, whether the parts of those objects, which are found
beautiful in the vegetable or animal kingdoms, are constantly
so formed according to such certain measures, as may serve
to satisfy us that their beauty results from those measures,
on the principle of a natural mechanical cause; or from
custom ; or, in fine, from their fitness for any determinate
purposes. I intend to examine this point under each of these
heads in their order. But before I proceed further, I hope
it will not be thought amiss, if I lay down the rules which
governed me in this inquiry, and which have misled me in it,
if I have gone astray, i. If two bodies produce the same or
a similar effect on the mind, and on examination they are
found to agree in some of their properties, and to differ in
others; the common effect is to be attributed to the proper-
ties in which they agree, and not to those in which they dif-
fer. 2. Not to account for the effect of a natural object
from the effect of an artificial object. 3. Not to account for
the effect of any natural object from a conclusion of our rea-
son concerning its uses, if a natural cause may be assigned.
4. Not to admit any determinate quantity, or any relation of
quantity, as the cause of a certain effect, if the effect is pro-
duced by different or opposite measures and relations; or if
these measures and relations may exist, and yet the effect
may not be produced. These are the rules which I have
chiefly followed, whilst I examined into the power of propor-
80 EDMUND BURKE
tion considered as a natural cause; and these, if he thinks
them just, I request the reader to carry with him throughout
the following discussion ; whilst we inquire in the first place,
in what things we find this quality of beauty; next, to see
whether in these we can find any assignable proportions,
in such a manner as ought to convince us that our idea of
beauty results from them. We shall consider this pleasing
power, as it appears in vegetables, in the inferior animals,
and in man. Turning our eyes to the vegetable creation, we
find nothing there so beautiful as flowers; but flowers are
almost of every sort of shape, and of every sort of disposi-
tion ; they are turned and fashioned into an infinite variety
of forms; and from these forms botanists have given them
their names, which are almost as various. What proportion
do we discover between the stalks and the leaves of flowers,
or between the leaves and the pistils? How does the slender
stalk of the rose agree with the bulky head under which it
bends? But the rose is a beautiful flower; and can we under-
take to say that it does not owe a great deal of its beauty
even to that disproportion : the rose is a large flower, yet it
grows upon a small shrub; the flower of the apple is very
small, and grows upon a large tree; yet the rose and the
apple blossom are both beautiful, and the plants that bear
them are most engagingly attired, notwithstanding this dis-
proportion. W r hat by general consent is allowed to be a
more beautiful object than an orange-tree, flourishing at
once with its leaves, its blossoms, and its fruit? but it is in
vain that we search here for any proportion between the
height, the breadth, or anything else concerning the dimen-
sions of the whole, or concerning the relation of the particu-
lar parts to each other. I grant that we may observe, in
many flowers, something of a regular figure, and of a method-
ical disposition of the leaves. The rose has such a figure
and such a disposition of its petals; but in an oblique view,
when this figure is in a good measure lost, and the order of
the leaves confounded, it yet retains its beauty ; the rose is even
more beautiful before it is full blown; in the bud, before this
exact figure is formed; and this is not the only instance wherein
method and exactness, the soul of proportion, are found rather
prejudicial than serviceable to the cause of beauty.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 81
SECT. III. — PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY
IN ANIMALS
That proportion has but a small share in the formation
of beauty, is full as evident among animals. Here the great-
est variety of shapes and dispositions of parts are well fitted
to excite this idea. The swan, confessedly a beautiful bird,
has a neck longer than the rest of his body, and but a very
short tail: is this a beautiful proportion? We must allow
that it is. But then what shall we say to the peacock, who
has comparatively but a short neck, with a tail longer than
the neck and the rest of the body taken together? How
many birds are there that vary infinitely from each of these
standards, and from every other which you can fix; with
proportions different, and often directly opposite to each
other ! and yet many of these birds are extremely beautiful ;
when upon considering them we find nothing in any one
part that might determine us, a priori, to say what the
others ought to be, nor indeed to guess anything about
them, but what experience might show to be full of disap-
pointment and mistake. And with regard to the colours
either of birds or flowers, for there is something similar in
the colouring of both, whether they are considered in their
extension or gradation, there is nothing of proportion to be
observed. Some are of but one single colour, others have
all the colours of the rainbow; some are of the primary
colours, others are of the mixt; in short, an attentive ob-
server may soon conclude, that there is as little of propor-
tion in the colouring as in the shapes of these objects.
Turn next to beasts; examine the head of a beautiful horse;
find what proportion that bears to his body, and to his limbs,
and what relations these have to each other; and when you
have settled these proportions as a standard of beauty, then
take a dog or cat, or any other animal, and examine how far
the same proportions between their heads and their necks,
between those and the body, and so on, are found to hold.
I think we may safely say, that they differ in every species,
yet that there are individuals, found in a great many species
so differing, that have a very striking beauty. Now, if it be
allowed that very different and even contrary forms and dis-
g2 EDMUND BURKE
positions are consistent with beauty, it amounts I believe
to a concession, that no certain measures, operating from a
natural principle, are necessary to produce it; at least so
far as the brute species is concerned.
SECT. IV. — PROPORTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY IN
THE HUMAN SPECIES
There are some parts of the human body that are ob-
served to hold certain proportions to each other; but before
it can be proved that the efficient cause of beauty lies in
these, it must be shown, that wherever these are found ex-
act, the person to whom they belong is beautiful: I mean in
the effect produced on the view, either of any member dis-
tinctly considered, or of the whole body together. It must
be likewise shown, that these parts stand in such a relation
to each other, that the comparison between them may be
easily made, and that the affection of the mind may naturally
result from it. For my part, I have at several times very
carefully examined many of those proportions, and found
them hold very nearly or altogether alike in many subjects,
which were not only very different from one another, but
where one has been very beautiful, and the other very re-
mote from beauty. With regard to the parts which are
found so proportioned, they are often so remote from each
other, in situation, nature, and office, that I cannot see how
they admit of any comparison, nor consequently how any
effect owing to proportion can result from them. The neck,
say they, in beautiful bodies, should measure with the calf
of the leg; it should likewise be twice the circumference of
the wrist. And an infinity of observations of this kind are
to be found in the writings and conversations of many. But
what relation has the calf of the leg to the neck; or either
01 these parts to the wrist? These proportions are certainly
to be found in handsome bodies. They are as certainly in
ugly ones; as any who will take the pains to try may find.
Nay, I do not know but they may be least perfect in some
of the most beautiful. You may assign any proportion you
please to every part of the human body; and I undertake
that a painter shall religiously observe them all, and not-
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 83
withstanding produce, if he pleases, a very ugly figure. The
same painter shall considerably deviate from these propor-
tions, and produce a very beautiful one. And indeed it may
be observed in the master-pieces of the ancient and modern
statuary, that several of them differ very widely from the
proportions of others, in parts very conspicuous and of great
consideration; and that they differ no less from the pro-
portions we find in living men, of forms extremely striking
and agreeable. And after all, how are the partisans of pro-
portional beauty agreed amongst themselves about the pro-
portions of the human body? Some hold it to be seven
heads; some make it eight; whilst others extend it even
to ten ; a vast difference in such a small number of divisions !
Others take other methods of estimating the proportions,
and all with equal success. But are these proportions
exactly the same in all handsome men? or are they at all
the proportions found in beautiful women? Nobody will say
that they are; yet both sexes are undoubtedly capable of
beauty, and the female of the greatest; which advantage I
believe will hardly be attributed to the superior exactness of
proportion in the fair sex. Let us rest a moment on this
point; and consider how much difference there is between
the measures that prevail in many similar parts of the body,
in the two sexes of this single species only. If you assign
any determinate proportions to the limbs of a man, and if
you limit human beauty to these proportions, when you find
a woman who differs in the make and measures of almost
every part, you must conclude her not to be beautiful, in
spite of the suggestions of your imagination ; or, in obedience
to your imagination, you must renounce your rules; you
must lay by the scale and compass, and look out for some
other cause of beauty. For if beauty be attached to certain
measures which operate from a principle in nature, why
should similar parts with different measures of proportion be
found to have beauty, and this too in the very same species?
But to open our view a little, it is worth observing, that
almost all animals have parts of very much the same nature,
and destined nearly to the same purposes; a head, neck,
body, feet, eyes, ears, nose, and mouth; yet Providence to
provide in the best manner for their several wants, and to
84 EDMUND BURKE
display the riches of his wisdom and goodness in his creation,
has worked out of these few and similar organs and mem-
bers, a diversity hardly short of infinite in their disposition,
measures, and relation. But, as we have before observed,
amidst this infinite diversity, one particular is common to
many species: several of the individuals which compose
them are capable of affecting us with a sense of loveliness;
and whilst they agree in producing this effect, they differ
extremely in the relative measures of those parts which have
produced it. These considerations were sufficient to induce
me to reject the notion of any particular proportions that
operated by nature to produce a pleasing effect; but those
who will agree with me with regard to a particular propor-
tion, are strongly prepossessed in favour of one more in-
definite. They imagine, that although beauty in general is
annexed to no certain measures common to the several kinds
of pleasing plants and animals; yet that there is a certain
proportion in each species absolutely essential to the beauty
of that particular kind. If we consider the animal world in
general, we find beauty confined to no certain measures:
but as some peculiar measure and relation of parts is what
distinguishes each peculiar class of animals, it must of neces-
sity be, that the beautiful in each kind will be found in the
measures and proportions of that kind; for otherwise it
would deviate from its proper species, and become in some
sort monstrous: however, no species is so strictly confined
to any certain proportions, that there is not a considerable
variation amongst the individuals; and as it has been shown
of the human, so it may be shown of the brute kinds, that
beauty is found indifferently in all the proportions which
each kind can admit, without quitting its common form;
and it is this idea of a common form that makes the propor-
tion of parts at all regarded, and not the operation of any
natural cause: indeed a little consideration will make it ap-
pear, that it is not measure, but manner, that creates all the
beauty which belongs to shape. What light do we borrow
from these boasted proportions, when we study ornamental
design? It seems amazing to me, that artists, if they were
as well convinced as they pretend to be, that proportion is a
principal cause of beauty, have not by them at all times
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 85
accurate measurements of all sorts of beautiful animals to
help them to proper proportions, when they would contrive
anything elegant; especially as they frequently assert that
it is from an observation of the beautiful in nature they
direct their practice. I know that it has been said long
since, and echoed backward and forward from one writer to
another a thousand times, that the proportions of building
have been taken from those of the human body. To make
this forced analogy complete, they represent a man with his
arms raised and extended at full length, and then describe
a sort of square, as it is formed by passing lines along the
extremities of this strange figure. But it appears very
clearly to me, that the human figure never supplied the
architect with any of his ideas. For, in the first place, men
are very rarely seen in this strained posture ; it is not natural
to them ; neither is it at all becoming. Secondly, the view of
the human figure so disposed, does not naturally suggest the
idea of a square, but rather of a cross ; as that large space
between the arms and the ground must be filled with some-
thing before it can make anybody think of a square.
Thirdly, several buildings are by no means of the form of
that particular square, which are notwithstanding planned
by the best architects, and produce an effect altogether as
good, and perhaps a better. And certainly nothing could
be more unaccountably whimsical, than for an architect to
model his performance by the human figure, since no two
things can have less resemblance or analogy, than a man and
a house, or temple : do we need to observe, that their purposes
are entirely different? What I am apt to suspect is this:
that these analogies were devised to give a credit to the
work of art, by showing a conformity between them and the
noblest works in nature; not that the latter served at all to
supply hints for the perfection of the former. And I am the
more fully convinced, that the patrons of proportion have
transferred their artificial ideas to nature, and not borrowed
from thence the proportions they use in works of art ; be-
cause in any discussion of this subject they always quit as
soon as possible the open field of natural beauties, the animal
and vegetable kingdoms, and fortify themselves within the
artificial lines and angles of architecture. For there is in man-
86 EDMUND BURKE
kind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their
views, and their works, the measure of excellence in every-
thing whatsoever. Therefore, having observed that their
dwellings were most commodious and firm when they were
thrown into regular figures, with parts answerable to each
other; they transferred these ideas to their gardens; they
turned their trees into pillars, pyramids, and obelisks; they
formed their hedges into so many green walls, and fashioned
their walks into squares, triangles, and other mathematical
figures, with exactness and symmetry; and they thought, if
they were not imitating, they were at least improving nature,
and teaching her to know her business. But nature has at
last escaped from their discipline, and their fetters ; and our
gardens, if nothing else, declare we begin to feel that mathe-
matical ideas are not the true measures of beauty. And
surely they are full as little so in the animal as the vegetable
world. For is it not extraordinary, that in these fine de-
scriptive pieces, these innumerable odes and elegies, which
are in the mouths of all the world, and many of which have
been the entertainment of ages, that in these pieces which
describe love with such a passionate energy, and represent
its object in such an infinite variety of lights, not one word is
said of proportion, if it be, what some insist it is, the princi-
pal component of beauty; whilst, at the same time, several
other qualities are very frequently and warmly mentioned?
But if proportion has not this power, it may appear odd how
men came originally to be so prepossessed in its favour. It
arose, I imagine, from the fondness I have just mentioned,
which men bear so remarkably to their own works and
notions ; it arose from false reasonings on the effects of the
customary figure of animals; it arose from the Platonic
theory of fitness and aptitude. For which reason, in the next
section, I shall consider the effects of custom in the figure of
animals; and afterwards the idea of fitness: since, if pro-
portion does not operate by a natural power attending some
measures, it must be either by custom, or the idea of utility;
there is no other way.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 87
SECT. V. — PROPORTION FURTHER CONSIDERED
If I am not mistaken, a great deal of the prejudice in
favour of proportion has arisen, not so much from the
observation of any certain measures found in beautiful
bodies, as from a wrong idea of the relation which deform-
ity bears to beauty, to which it has been considered as the
opposite; on this principle it was concluded, that where
the causes of deformity were removed, beauty must naturally
and necessarily be introduced. This I believe is a mistake.
For deformity is opposed not to beauty, but to the complete
common form. If one of the legs of a man be found shorter
than the other, the man is deformed; because there is some-
thing wanting to complete the whole idea we form of a man ;
and this has the same effect in natural faults, as maiming
and mutilation produce from accidents. So if the back be
humped, the man is deformed; because his back has an
unusual figure, and what carries with it the idea of some
disease or misfortune. So if a man's neck be considerably
longer or shorter than usual, we say he is deformed in that
part, because men are not commonly made in that manner.
But surely every hour's experience may convince us, that a
man may have his legs of an equal length, and resembling
each other in all respects, and his neck of a just size, and
his back quite straight, without having at the same time the
least perceivable beauty. Indeed beauty is so far from
belonging to the idea of custom, that in reality what affects
us in that manner is extremely rare and uncommon. The
beautiful strikes us as much by its novelty as the deformed
itself. It is thus in those species of animals with which we
are acquainted; and if one of a new species were represented,
we should by no means wait until custom had settled an idea
of proportion, before we decided concerning its beauty or
ugliness: which shows that the general idea of beauty can
be no more owing to customary than to natural proportion.
Deformity arises from the want of the common proportions ;
but the necessary result of their existence in any object is
not beauty. If we suppose proportion in natural things to
be relative to custom and use, the nature of use and custom
will show, that beauty, which is a positive and powerful
88 EDMUND BURKE
quality, cannot result from it. We are so wonderfully
formed, that, whilst we are creatures vehemently desirous of
novelty, we are as strongly attached to habit and custom.
But it is the nature of things which hold us by custom, to
affect us very little whilst we are in possession of them, but
strongly when they are absent. I remember to have fre-
quented a certain place every day for a long time together;
and I may truly say, that so far from finding pleasure in it,
I was affected with a sort of weariness and disgust ; I came,
I went, I returned, without pleasure; yet if by any means I
passed by the usual time of my going thither, I was re-
markably uneasy, and was not quiet till I had got into my
old track. They who use snuff, take it almost without being
sensible that they take it, and the acute sense of smell is
deadened, so as to feel hardly anything from so sharp a
stimulus; yet deprive the snuff-taker of his box, and he is
the most uneasy mortal in the world. Indeed so far are use
and habit from being causes of pleasure, merely as such, that
the effect of constant use is to make all things of whatever
kind entirely unaffecting. For as use at last takes off the
painful effect of many things, it reduces the pleasurable
effect in others in the same manner, and brings both to a
sort of mediocrity and indifference. Very justly is use called
a second nature; and our natural and common state is one
of absolute indifference, equally prepared for pain or pleas-
ure. But when we are thrown out of this state, or deprived
of anything requisite to maintain us in it; when this chance
does not happen by pleasure from some mechanical cause,
we are always hurt. It is so with the second nature, custom,
in all things which relate to it. Thus the want of the usual
proportions in men and other animals is sure to disgust,
though their presence is by no means any cause of real pleas-
ure. It is true, that the proportions laid down as causes of
beauty in the human body, are frequently found in beautiful
ones, because they are generally found in all mankind;
but if it can be shown too, that they are found without
beauty, and that beauty frequently exists without them, and
that this beauty, where it exists, always can be assigned to
other less equivocal causes, it will naturally lead us to con-,
elude, that proportion and beauty are not ideas of the same
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 89
nature. The true opposite to beauty is not disproportion or
deformity, but ugliness: and as it proceeds from causes
opposite to those of positive beauty, we cannot consider it
until we come to treat of that. Between beauty and ugliness
there is a sort of mediocrity, in which the assigned propor-
tions are most commonly found; but this has no effect upon
the passions.
SECT. VI. — FITNESS NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY
It is said that the idea of utility, or of a part's being well
adapted to answer its end, is the cause of beauty, or indeed
beauty itself. If it were not for this opinion, it had been
impossible for the doctrine of proportion to have held its
ground very long; the world would be soon weary of hear-
ing of measures which related to nothing, either of a natural
principle, or of a fitness to answer some end ; the idea which
mankind most commonly conceive of proportion, is the suit-
ableness of means to certain ends, and, where this is not the
question, very seldom trouble themselves about the effect of
different measures of things. Therefore it was necessary
for this theory to insist, that not only artificial but natural
objects took their beauty from the fitness of the parts for
their several purposes. But in framing this theory, I am
apprehensive that experience was not sufficiently consulted.
For, on that principle, the wedge-like snout of a swine, with
its tough cartilage at the end, the little sunk eyes, and the
whole make of the head, so well adapted to its offices of dig-
ging and rooting, would be extremely beautiful. The great
bag hanging to the bill of a pelican, a thing highly useful to
this animal, would be likewise as beautiful in our ey«es. The
hedge-hog, so well secured against all assaults by his prickly
hide, and the porcupine with his missile quills, would be then
considered as creatures of no small elegance. There are few
animals whose parts are better contrived than those of the
monkey; he has the hands of a man, joined to the springy
limbs of a beast; he is admirably calculated for running,
leaping, grappling, and climbing; and yet there are few
animals which seem to have less beauty in the eyes of all
mankind. I need say little on the trunk of the elephant, of
such various usefulness, and which is so far from contribu-
90 EDMUND BURKE
ting to his beauty. How well fitted is the wolf for running
and leaping ! how admirably is the lion armed for battle ! but
will any one therefore call the elephant, the wolf, and the
lion, beautiful animals? I believe nobody will think the form
of a man's leg so well adapted to running, as those of a
horse, a dog, a deer, and several other creatures; at least
they have not that appearance: yet, I believe, a well-fash-
ioned human leg will be allowed to far exceed all these in
beauty. If the fitness of parts was what constituted the
loveliness of their form, the actual employment of them
would undoubtedly much augment it; but this, though it is
sometimes so upon another principle, is far from being al-
ways the case. A bird on the wing is not so beautiful as when
it is perched; nay, there are several of the domestic fowls
which are seldom seen to fly, and which are nothing the less
beautiful on that account; yet birds are so extremely dif-
ferent in their form from the beast and human kinds, that
you cannot, on the principle of fitness, allow them anything
agreeable, but in consideration of their parts being designed
for quite other purposes. I never in my life chanced to see
a peacock fly ; and yet before, very long before, I considered
any aptitude in his form for the aerial life, I was struck with
the extreme beauty which raises that bird above many of
the best flying fowls in the world; though, for anything I
saw, his way of living was much like that of the swine,
which fed in the farm-yard along with him. The same may
be said of cocks, hens, and the like; they are of the flying
kind in figure ; in their manner of moving not very different
from men and beasts. To leave these foreign examples; if
beauty in our own species was annexed to use, men would
be much more lovely than women; and strength and agility
would be considered as the only beauties. But to call
strength by the name of beauty, to have but one denomina-
tion for the qualities of a Venus and Hercules, so totally
different in almost all respects, is surely a strange confusion
of ideas, or abuse of words. The cause of this confusion, I
imagine, proceeds from our frequently perceiving the parts
of the human and other animal bodies to be at once very
beautiful, and very well adapted to their purposes; and we
are deceived by a sophism, which makes us take that for a
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 91
cause which is only a concomitant: this is the sophism of
the fly, who imagined he raised a great dust, because he
stood upon the chariot that really raised it. The stomach,
the lungs, the liver, as well as other parts, are incomparably
well adapted to their purposes ; yet they are far from having
any beauty. Again, many things are very beautiful, in
which it is impossible to discern any idea of use. And I
appeal to the first and most natural feelings of mankind,
whether on beholding a beautiful eye, or a well-fashioned
mouth, or a well-turned leg, any ideas of their being well
fitted for seeing, eating, or running, ever present themselves.
What idea of use is it that flowers excite, the most beautiful
part of the vegetable world? It is true, that the infinitely
wise and good Creator has, of his bounty, frequently joined
beauty to those things which he has made useful to us: but
this does not prove that an idea of use and beauty are the
same thing, or that they are any way dependent on each
other.
SECT. VII. THE REAL EFFECTS OF FITNESS
When I excluded proportion and fitness from any share
in beauty, I did not by any means intend to say that they
were of no value, or that they ought to be disregarded in
works of art. Works of art are the proper sphere of their
power ; and here it is that they have their full effect. When-
ever the wisdom of our Creator intended that we should be
affected with anything, he did not confide the execution of
his design to the languid and precarious operation of our
reason ; but he endued it with powers and properties that
prevent the understanding, and even the will ; which, seizing
upon the senses and imagination, captivate the soul before
the understanding is ready either to join with them, or to
oppose them. It is by a long deduction, and much study,
that we discover the adorable wisdom of God in his works:
when we discover it, the effect is very different, not only in
the manner of acquiring it, but in its own nature, from that
which strikes us without any preparation from the sublime
or the beautiful. How different is the satisfaction of an
anatomist, who discovers the use of the muscles and of the
skin, the excellent contrivance of the one for the various
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movements of the body, and the wonderful texture of the
other, at once a general covering, and at once a general
outlet as well as inlet; how different is this from the affec-
tion which possesses an ordinary man at the sight of a
delicate, smooth skin, and all the other parts of beauty,
which require no investigation to be perceived! In the
former case, whilst we look up to the Maker with admira-
tion and praise, the object which causes it may be odious
and distasteful; the latter very often so touches us by its
power on the imagination, that we examine but little into the
» artifice of its contrivance; and we have need of a strong
effort of our reason to disentangle our minds from the
allurements of the object, to a consideration of that wisdom
which invented so powerful a machine. The effect of pro-
portion and fitness, at least so far as they proceed from a
mere consideration of the work itself, produces approbation,
the acquiescence of the understanding, but not love, nor any
passion of that species. When we examine the structure of
a watch, when we come to know thoroughly the use of every
part of it, satisfied as we are with the fitness of the whole,
we are far enough from perceiving anything like beauty
in the watch-work itself; but let us look on the case, the
labour of some curious artist in engraving, with little or no
idea of use, we shall have a much livelier idea of beauty
than we ever could have had from the watch itself, though
the master-piece of Graham. In beauty, as I said, the effect
is previous to any knowledge of the use; but to judge of
proportion, we must know the end for which any work is
designed. According to the end, the proportion varies.
Thus there is one proportion of a tower, another of a house ;
one proportion of a gallery, another of a hall, another of
a chamber. To judge of the proportions of these, you must
be first acquainted with the purposes for which they were
designed. Good sense and experience, acting together,
find out what is fit to be done in every work of art. We
are rational creatures, and in all our works we ought to
regard their end and purpose ; the gratification of any pas-
sion, how innocent soever, ought only to be of a secondary
consideration. Herein is placed the real power of fitness
and proportion ; they operate on the understanding consider-
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 93
ing them, which approves the work and acquiesces in it.
The passions, and the imagination which principally raises
them, have here very little to do. When a room appears in
its original nakedness, bare walls and a plain ceiling; let its
proportion be ever so excellent, it pleases very little; a cold
approbation is the utmost we can reach; a much worse pro-
portioned room with elegant mouldings and fine festoons,
glasses, and other merely ornamental furniture, will make
the imagination revolt against the reason ; it will please
much more than the naked proportion of the first room,
which the understanding has so much approved as admira-
bly fitted for its purposes. What I have here said and before
concerning proportion, is by no means to persuade people
absurdly to neglect the idea of use in the works of art. It
is only to show that these excellent things, beauty and pro-
portion, are not the same; not that they should either of
them be disregarded.
SECT. VIII. — THE RECAPITULATION
On the whole; if such parts in human bodies as are found
proportioned, were likewise constantly found beautiful, as
they certainly are not; or if they were so situated, as that a
pleasure might flow from the comparison, which they seldom
are; or if any assignable proportions were found, either in
plants or animals, which were always attended with beauty,
which never was the case ; or if, where parts were well
adapted to their purposes, they were constantly beautiful,
and when no use appeared, there was no beauty, which is
contrary to all experience ; we might conclude, that beauty
consisted in proportion or utility. But since, in all respects,
the case is quite otherwise; we may be satisfied that beauty
does not depend on these, let it owe its origin to what else
it will.
SECT. IX. PERFECTION NOT THE CAUSE OF BEAUTY
There is another notion current, pretty closely allied
to the former; that Perfection is the constituent cause of
beauty. This opinion has been made to extend much further
than to sensible objects. But in these, so far is perfection,
$4 EDMUND BURKE
considered as such, from being the cause of beauty, that this
quality, where it is highest, in the female sex, almost always
carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection.
Women are very sensible of this; for which reason, they
learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness,
and even sickness. In all they are guided by nature. Beauty
in distress is much the most affecting beauty. Blushing has
little less power; and modesty in general, which is a tacit
allowance of imperfection, is itself considered as an amiable
quality, and certainly heightens every other that is so. I
know it is in everybody's mouth, that we ought to love per-
fection. This is to me a sufficient proof, that it is not the
proper object of love. Who ever said we ought to love a
fine woman, or even any of these beautiful animals which
please us? Here to be affected, there is no need of the con-
currence of our will.
SECT. X. HOW FAR THE IDEA OF BEAUTY MAY BE APPLIED
TO THE QUALITIES OF THE MIND
Nor is this remark in general less applicable to the quali-
ties of the mind. Those virtues which cause admiration,
and are of the sublimer kind, produce terror rather than
love; such as fortitude, justice, wisdom, and the like. Never
was any man amiable by force of these qualities. Those
which engage our hearts, which impress us with a sense of
loveliness, are the softer virtues; easiness of temper, com-
passion, kindness, and liberality; though certainly those lat-
ter are of less immediate and momentous concern to society,
and of less dignity. But it is for that reason that they are
so amiable. The great virtues turn principally on dangers,
punishments, and troubles, and -are exercised rather in pre-
venting the worst mischiefs, than in dispensing favours ; and
are therefore not lovely, though highly venerable. The sub-
ordinate turn on reliefs, gratifications, and indulgences; and
are therefore more lovely, though inferior in dignity. Those
persons who creep into the hearts of most people, who are
chosen as the companions of their softer hours, and their
reliefs from care and anxiety, are never persons of shining
qualities or strong virtues. It is rather the soft green of the
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 95
soul on which we rest our eyes, that are fatigued with be-
holding more glaring objects. It is worth observing how we
feel ourselves affected in reading the characters of Caesar
and Cato, as they are so finely drawn and contrasted in Sal-
lust. In one the ignoscendo largiundo; in the other, nil
larginndo. In one, the miseris perfugium; in the other,
malis perniciem. In the latter we have much to admire,
much to reverence, and perhaps something to fear; we re-
spect him, but we respect him at a distance. The former
makes us familiar with him ; we love him, and he leads us
whither he pleases. To draw things closer to our first and
most natural feelings, I will add a remark made upon read-
ing this section by an ingenious friend. The authority of a
father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable
upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love
for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental
authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness
and indulgence. But we generally have a great love for our
grandfathers, in whom this authority is removed a degree
from us, and where the weakness of age mellows it into
something of a feminine partiality.
SECT. XI. HOW FAR THE IDEA OF BEAUTY MAY BE APPLIED
TO VIRTUE
From what has been said in the foregoing section, we may
easily see how far the application of beauty to virtue may be
made with propriety. The general application of this
quality to virtue, has a strong tendency to confound our
ideas of things; and it has given rise to an infinite deal of
whimsical theory; as the affixing the name of beauty to
proportion, congruity, and perfection, as well as to quali-
ties of things yet more remote from our natural ideas of it,
and from one another, has tended to confound our ideas of
beauty, and left us no standard or rule to judge by, that was
not even more uncertain and fallacious than our own
fancies. This loose and inaccurate manner of speaking has
therefore misled us both in the theory of taste and of
morals; and induced us to remove the science of our duties
from their proper basis, (our reason, our relations, and ovf
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necessities,) to rest it upon foundations altogether vision-
ary and unsubstantial.
SECT. XII. THE REAL CAUSE OF BEAUTY
Having endeavoured to show what beauty is not, it re-
mains that we should examine, at least with equal attention,
in what it really consists. Beauty is a thing much too affect-
ing not to depend upon some positive qualities. And, since it
is no creature of our reason, since it strikes us without any
reference to use, and even where no use at all can be dis-
cerned, since the order and method of nature is generally
very different from our measures and proportions, we must
conclude that beauty is, for the greater part, some quality
in bodies acting mechanically upon the human mind by the
intervention of the senses. We ought therefore to consider
attentively in what manner those sensible qualities are dis-
posed, in such things as by experience we find beautiful, or
which excite in us the passion of love, or some correspond-
ent affection.
SECT. XIII. BEAUTIFUL OBJECTS SMALL
The most obvious point that presents itself to us in ex-
amining any object, is its extent or quantity. And what
degree of extent prevails in bodies that are held beautiful,
may be gathered from the usual manner of expression con-
cerning it. I am told that, in most languages, the objects
of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets. It is so in
all languages of which I have any knowledge. In Greek the
twv and other diminutive terms are almost always the terms
of affection and tenderness. These diminutives were com-
monly added by the Greeks to the names of persons with
whom they conversed on terms of friendship and familiarity.
Though the Romans were a people of less quick and delicate
feelings, yet they naturally slid into the lessening termina-
tion upon the same occasions. Anciently in the English
language the diminishing ling was added to the names of
persons and things that were the objects of love. Some we
retain still, as darling, (or little dear,) and a few others.
But, to this day, in ordinary conversation, it is usual to add
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 97
the endearing name of little to everything we love: the
French and Italians make use of these affectionate diminu-
tives even more than we. In the animal creation, out of our
own species, it is the small we are inclined to be fond of;
little birds, and some of the smaller kinds of beasts. A
great beautiful thing is a manner of expression scarcely
ever used; but that of a great ugly thing is very common.
There is a wide difference between admiration and love.
The sublime, which is the cause of the former, always
dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on small
ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we
love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the
other we are flattered, into compliance. In short, the ideas
of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so
different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to
think of reconciling them in the same subject, without con-
siderably lessening the effect of the one or the other upon
the passions. So that, attending to their quantity, beautiful
objects are comparatively small.
SECT. XIV. — SMOOTHNESS
The next property constantly observable in such objects is
smoothness: 1 a quality so essential to beauty, that I do not
now recollect anything beautiful that is not smooth. In trees
and flowers, smooth leaves are beautiful ; smooth slopes of
earth in gardens; smooth streams in the landscape; smooth
coats of birds and beasts in animal beauties; in fine women,
smooth skins ; and in several sorts of ornamental furniture,
smooth and polished surfaces. A very considerable part of
the effect of beauty is owing to this quality ; indeed the most
considerable. For, take any beautiful object, and give it a
broken and rugged surface ; and however well formed it may
be in other respects, it pleases no longer. Whereas, let it
want ever so many of the other constituents, if it wants not
this, it becomes more pleasing than almost all the others
without it. This seems to me so evident, that I am a good
deal surprised, that none who have handled the subject have
made any mention of the quality of smoothness, in the enu-
1 Part IV. sect. 21.
HC D — VOL. XXIV
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meration of those that go to the forming of beauty. For in-
deed any ruggedness, any sudden projection, any sharp
angle, is in the highest degree contrary to that idea.
SECT. XV. — GRADUAL VARIATION
But as perfectly beautiful bodies are not composed of an-
gular parts, so their parts never continue long in the same
right line, 2 They vary their direction every moment, and
they change under the eye by a deviation continually carry-
ing on, but for whose beginning or end you will find it diffi-
cult to ascertain a point. The view of a beautiful bird will
illustrate this observation. Here we see the head increasing
insensibly to the middle, from whence it lessens gradually
until it mixes with the neck ; the neck loses itself in a larger
swell, which continues to the middle of the body, when the
whole decreases again to the tail; the tail takes a new di-
rection; but it soon varies its new course: it blends again
with the other parts; and the line is perpetually changing,
above, below, upon every side. In this description I have
before me the idea of a dove ; it agrees very well with most
of the conditions of beauty. It is smooth and downy; its
parts are (to use that expression) melted into one another;
you are presented with no sudden protuberance through the
whole, and yet the whole is continually changing. Observe
that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the
most beautiful, about the neck and breasts ; the smoothness ;
the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of
the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same;
the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides
giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it is
carried. Is not this a demonstration of that change of sur-
face, continual, and yet hardly perceptible at any point,
which forms one of the great constituents of beauty? It
gives me no small pleasure to find that I can strengthen my
theory in this point, by the opinion of the very ingenious
Mr. Hogarth; whose idea of the line of beauty I take in
general to be extremely just. But the idea of variation,
without attending so accurately to the manner of the varia-
2 Part V. sect. 23.
'
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 99
tion, has led him to consider angular figures as beautiful:
these figures, it is true, vary greatly; yet they vary in a
sudden and broken manner; and I do not find any natural
object which is angular, and at the same time beautiful.
Indeed few natural objects are entirely angular. But I
think those which approach the most nearly to it are the
ugliest. I must add too, that, so far as I could observe of
nature, though the varied line is that alone in which com-
plete beauty is found, yet there is no particular line which
is always found in the most completely beautiful, and which
is therefore beautiful in preference to all other lines. At
least I never could observe it.
SECT. XVI. — DELICACY
An air of robustness and strength is very prejudicial to
beauty. An appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is
almost essential to it. Whoever examines the vegetable or
animal creation will find this observation to be founded in
nature. It is not the oak, the ash, or the elm, or any of the
robust trees of the forest, which we consider as beautiful;
they are awful and majestic; they inspire a sort of reverence.
It is the delicate myrtle, it is the orange, it is the almond, it
is the jasmine, it is the vine, which we look on as vegetable
beauties. It is the flowery species, so remarkable for its
weakness and momentary duration, that gives us the liveliest
idea of beauty and elegance. Among animals, the greyhound
is more beautiful than the mastiff; and the delicacy of a gen-
net, a barb, or an Arabian horse, is much more amiable than
the strength and stability of some horses of war or carriage.
I need here say little of the fair sex, where I believe the
point will be easily allowed me. The beauty of women is
considerably owing to their weakness or delicacy, and is
even enhanced by their timidity, a quality of mind analogous
to it. I would not here be understood to say, that weakness
betraying very bad health has any share in beauty; but the
ill effect of this is not because it is weakness, but because
the ill state of health, which produces such weakness, alters
the other conditions of beauty ; the parts in such a case col-
lapse; the bright color, the lumen purpureum juventce, is
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gone; and the fine variation is lost in wrinkles, sudden
breaks, and right lines.
SECT. XVII. — BEAUTY IN COLOUR
As to the colours usually found in beautiful bodies, it may-
be somewhat difficult to ascertain them, because, in the
several parts of nature, there is an infinite variety. How-
ever, even in this variety, we may mark out something on
which to settle. First, the colours of beautiful bodies must
not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair. Secondly, they
must not be of the strongest kind. Those which seem most
appropriated to beauty, are the milder of every sort ; light
greens; soft blues; weak whites; pink reds; and violets.
Thirdly, if the colours be strong and vivid, they are always
diversified, and the object is never of one strong colour;
there are almost always such a number of them, (as in
variegated flowers,) that the strength and glare of each is
considerably abated. In a fine complexion, there is not only
some variety in the colouring, but the colours: neither the
red nor the white are strong and glaring. Besides, they are
mixed in such a manner, and with such gradations, that it is
impossible to fix the bounds. On the same principle it is,
that the dubious colour in the necks and tails of peacocks,
and about the heads of drakes, is so very agreeable. In
reality, the beauty both of shape and colouring are as nearly
related, as we can well suppose it possible for things of such
different natures to be.
SECT. XVIII. RECAPITULATION
On the whole, the qualities of beauty, as they are merely
sensible qualities, are the following: First, to be compara-
tively small. Secondly, to be smooth. Thirdly, to have a
variety in the direction of the parts; but, fourthly, to have
those parts not angular, but melted as it were into each
other. Fifthly, to be of a delicate frame, without any re-
markable appearance of strength. Sixthly, to have its
colours clear and bright, but not very strong and glaring.
Seventhly, or if it should have any glaring colour, to have it
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 101
diversified with others. These are, I believe, the properties
on which beauty depends; properties that operate by nature,
and are less liable to be altered by caprice, or confounded
by a diversity of tastes, than any other.
SECT. XIX. THE PHYSIOGNOMY
The physiognomy has a considerable share in beauty,
especially in that of our own species. The manners give a
certain determination to the countenance; which, being ob-
served to correspond pretty regularly with them, is capable
of joining the effect of certain agreeable qualities of the
mind to those of the body. So that to form a finished human
beauty, and to give it its full influence, the face must be ex-
pressive of such gentle and amiable qualities as correspond
with the softness, smoothness, and delicacy of the outward
form.
SECT. XX. — THE EYE
I have hitherto purposely omitted to speak of the
eye, which has so great a share in the beauty of the animal
creation, as it did not fall so easily under the foregoing
heads, though in fact it is reducible to the same principles.
I think, then, that the beauty of the eye consists, first, in
its clearness; what coloured eye shall please most, depends
a good deal on particular fancies ; but none are pleased with
an eye whose water (to use that term) is dull and muddy. 1
We are pleased with the eye in this view, on the principle
upon which we like diamonds, clear water, glass, and such
like transparent substances. Secondly, the motion of the eye
contributes to its beauty, by continually shifting its direc-
tion; but a slow and languid motion is more beautiful than
a brisk one; the latter is enlivening; the former lovely.
Thirdly, with regard to the union of the eye with the
neighbouring parts, it is to hold the same rule that is given
of other beautiful ones; it is not to make a strong deviation
from the line of the neighbouring parts; nor to verge into
any exact geometrical figure. Besides all this, the eye
affects, as it is expressive of some qualities of the mind, and
1 Part IV. sect. 25.
102 EDMUND BURKE
its principal power generally arises from this; so that what
we have just said of the physiognomy is applicable here.
SECT. XXI. UGLINESS
It may perhaps appear like a sort of repetition of what we
have before said, to insist here upon the nature of ugliness;
as I imagine it to be in all respects the opposite to those
qualities which we have laid down for the constituents of
beauty. But though ugliness be the opposite to beauty, it
is not the opposite to proportion and fitness. For it is pos-
sible that a thing may be very ugly with any proportions,
and with a perfect fitness to any uses. Ugliness I imagine
likewise to be consistent enough with an idea of the sublime.
But I would by no means insinuate that ugliness of itself is
a sublime idea, unless united with such qualities as excite a
strong terror.
SECT. XXII. GRACE
Gracefulness is an idea not very different from beauty;
it consists of much the same things. Gracefulness is an
idea belonging to posture and motion. In both these, to be
graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of diffi-
culty; there is required a small inflection of the body; and
a composure of the parts in such a manner, as not to encum :
ber each other, not to appear divided by sharp and sudden
angles. In this ease, this roundness, this delicacy of attitude
and motion, it is that all the magic of grace consists, and
what is called its je ne sgai quoi; as will be obvious to any
observer, who considers attentively the Venus de Medicis,
the Antinous, or any statue generally allowed to be graceful
in a high degree.
SECT. XXIII. — ELEGANCE AND SPECIOUSNESS
When any body is composed of parts smooth and polished
without pressing upon each other, without showing any
ruggedness or confusion, and at the same time affecting
some regular shape, I call it elegant. It is closely allied to
the beautiful, differing from it only in this regularity;
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 103
which, however, as it makes a very material difference in the
affection produced, may very well constitute another species.
Under this head I rank those delicate and regular works of
art, that imitate no determinate object in nature, as elegant
buildings, and pieces of furniture. When any object par-
takes of the above-mentioned qualities, or of those of beauti-
ful bodies, and is withal of great dimensions, it is full as
remote from the idea of mere beauty; I call it fine or spe*
cious.
SECT. XXIV. THE BEAUTIFUL IN FEELING
The foregoing description of beauty, so far as it is taken
in by the eye, may be greatly illustrated by describing the
nature of objects, which produce a similar effect through
the touch. This I call the beautiful in Feeling. It corre-
sponds wonderfully with what causes the same species of
pleasure to the sight. There is a chain in all our sensations ;
they are all but different sorts of feelings calculated to be
affected by various sorts of objects, but all to be affected
after the same manner. All bodies that are pleasant to the
touch, are so by the slightness of the resistance they make.
Resistance is either to motion along the surface, or to the
pressure of the parts on one another : if the former be slight,
we call the body smooth; if the latter, soft. The chief
pleasure we receive by feeling, is in the one or the other of
these qualities ; and if there be a combination of both, our
pleasure is greatly increased. This is so plain, that it is
rather more fit to illustrate other things, than to be illus-
trated itself by an example. The next source of pleasure in
this sense, as in every other, is the continually presenting
somewhat new ; and we find that bodies which continually
vary their surface, are much the most pleasant or beautiful
to the feeling, as any one that pleases may experience. The
third property in such objects is, that though the surface
continually varies its direction, it never varies it suddenly.
The application of anything sudden, even though the im-
pression itself have little or nothing of violence, is disagree-
able. The quick application of a finger a little warmer or
colder than usual, without notice, makes us start; a slight
tap on the shoulder, not expected, has the same effect.
104 EDMUND BURKE
Hence it is that angular bodies, bodies that suddenly vary
the direction of the outline, afford so little pleasure to the
feeling. Every such change is a sort of climbing or falling
in miniature; so that squares, triangles, and other angular
figures, are neither beautiful to the sight nor feeling. Who-
ever compares his state of mind, on feeling soft, smooth,
variegated, unangular bodies, with that in which he finds
himself, on the view of a beautiful object, will perceive a
very striking analogy in the effects of both ; and which may
go a good way towards discovering their common cause.
Feeling and sight, in this respect, differ in but a few points.
The touch takes in the pleasure of softness, which is not
primarily an object of sight; the sight, on the other hand,
comprehends colour, which can hardly be made perceptible
to the touch; the touch, again, has the advantage in a new
idea of pleasure resulting from a moderate degree of
warmth; but the eye triumphs in the infinite extent and
multiplicity of its objects. But there is such a similitude
in the pleasures of these senses, that I am apt to fancy, if
it were possible that one might discern colour by feeling,
(as it is said some blind men have done,) that the same
colours, and the same disposition of colouring, which are
found beautiful to the sight, would be found likewise most
grateful to the touch. But, setting aside conjectures, let us
pass to the other sense ; of Hearing.
SECT. XXV. — THE BEAUTIFUL IN SOUNDS
In this sense we find an equal aptitude to be affected in a
soft and delicate manner; and how far sweet or beautiful
sounds agree with our descriptions of beauty in other senses,
the experience of every one must decide. Milton has de-
scribed this species of music in one of his juvenile poems. 1
I need not say that Milton was perfectly well versed in that
art ; and that no man had a finer ear, with a happier manner
of expressing the affections of one sense by metaphors taken
from another. The description is as follows:
— And ever against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs;
1 L' Allegro.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 105
In notes with many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out ;
With wanton heed, and giddy cunning,
The melting voice through mazes running;
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony.
Let us parallel this with the softness, the winding surface,
the unbroken continuance, the easy gradation of the beauti-
ful in other things ; and all the diversities of the several
senses, with all their several affections, will rather help to
throw lights from one another to finish one clear, consistent
idea of the whole, than to obscure it by their intricacy and
variety.
To the above-mentioned description I shall add one or two
remarks. The first is; that the beautiful in music will not
bear that loudness and strength of sounds, which may be
used to raise other passions; nor notes which are shrill, or
harsh, or deep; it agrees best with such as are clear, even,
smooth, and weak. The second is; that great variety, and
quick transitions from one measure or tone to another, are
contrary to the genius of the beautiful in music. Such
transitions 2 often excite mirth, or other sudden and tumultu-
ous passions ; but not that sinking, that melting, that lan-
guor, which is the characteristical effect of the beautiful as
it regards every sense. The passion excited by beauty is in
fact nearer to a species of melancholy, than to jollity and
mirth. I do not here mean to confine music to any one
species of notes, or tones, neither is it an art in which I can
say I have any great skill. My sole design in this remark
is, to settle a consistent idea of beauty. The infinite variety
of the affections of the soul will suggest to a good head, and
skilful ear, a variety of such sounds as are fitted to raise
them. It can be no prejudice to this, to clear and distin-
guish some few particulars, that belong to the same class,
and are consistent with each other, from the immense crowd
of different, and sometimes contradictory, ideas, that rank
vulgarly under the standard of beauty. And of these it is
my intention to mark such only of the leading points as
show the conformity of the sense of Hearing with all the
other senses, in the article of their pleasures.
2 I ne'er am merry, when I hear sweet music — Shakespeare.
106 EDMUND BURKE
SECT. XXVI. — TASTE AND SMELL
This general agreement of the senses is yet more evident
on minutely considering those of taste and smell. We meta-
phorically apply the idea of sweetness to sights and sounds;
but as the qualities of bodies, by which they are fitted to
excite either pleasure or pain in these senses, are not so
obvious as they are in the others, we shall refer an ex-
planation of their analogy, which is a very close one, to that
part, wherein we come to consider the common efficient
cause of beauty, as it regards all the senses. I do not think
anything better fitted to establish a clear and settled idea of
visual beauty than this way of examining the similar pleas-
ures of other senses; for one part is sometimes clear in one
of the senses, that is more obscure in another; and where
there is a clear concurrence of all, we may with more cer-
tainty speak of any one of them. By this means, they bear
witness to each other; nature is, as it were, scrutinized;
and we report nothing of her but what we receive from her
own xiiformation.
SECT. XXVII. — THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL COMPARED
On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs,
that we should compare it with the sublime; and in this
comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For sub-
lime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones
comparatively small: beauty should be smooth and polished;
the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the
right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many
cases loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes
a strong deviation : beauty should not be obscure ; the great
ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and
delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive.
They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being
founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and however they
may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes,
yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between
them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose busi-
ness it is to affect the passions. In the infinite variety of
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 107
natural combinations, we must expect to find the qualities
of things the most remote imaginable from each other united
in the same object. We must expect also to find combina-
tions of the same kind in the works of art. But when we
consider the power of an object upon our passions, we must
know that when anything is intended to affect the mind by
the force of some predominant property, the affection pro-
duced is like to be the more uniform and perfect, if all the
other properties or qualities of the object be of the same
nature, and tending to the same design, as the principal.
If black and white blend, soften, and unite
A thousand ways, are there no black and white?
If the qualities of the sublime and beautiful are sometimes
found united, does this prove that they are the same; does
it prove that they are any way allied ; does it prove even that
they are not opposite and contradictory? Black and
white may soften, may blend ; but they are not therefore the
same. Nor, when they are so softened and blended with
each other, or with different colours, is the power of black
as black, or of white as white, so strong as when each
stands uniform and distinguished.
PART IV
tion I. — Of the Efficient Cause of the Sublime
and Beautiful
WHEX I say I intend to inquire into the efficient
cause oi Sublimit}- and Beauty. I would not be
understood to say. that I can come to the ultimate
cause. I do not pretend that I shall ever be able to ex-
plain, why certain affections of the body produce such a
distinct emotion of mind, and no other; or why the body is
at all affected by the mind, or the mind by the body. A little
thought will show this to be impossible. But I conceive, if
we can discover what affections of the mind produce certain
emotions of the body, and what distinct feelings and quali-
ties of body shall produce certain determinate passions in
the mind, and no others. I fancy a great deal will be done;
something not unuseful towards a distinct knowledge of our
passions, so far at least as we have them at present under
our consideration. This is all. I believe, we can do. If we
could advance a step farther, difficulties would still remain,
we should be still equally distant from the first ca
When Xewton first discovered the property of attraction,
and settled its laws, he found it served very well to explain
several of the most remarkable phenomena in nature: but
with reference to the general system of things, he could
consider attraction but as an effect, whose cause at that time
he did not attempt to trace. But when he afterwards began
to account for it by a subtle elastic aether, this great man
(if in so great a man it be not impious to discover
anything like a blemish) seemed to have quitted sua!
cautious manner of philosophizing: since, perhaps, allowing
all that has been advanced on this subject to be sufficiently
proved. I think it leaves us with as many difficulties as it
found us. The great chain of cau hich links one to
m
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 109
another, even to the throne of God himself, can never be
unravelled by any industry of ours. When we go but one
step beyond the immediate sensible qualities of things, we
go out of our depth. All we do after is but a faint struggle,
that shows we are in an element which does not belong to
us. So that when I speak of cause, and efficient cause, I
only mean certain affections of the mind, that cause certain
changes in the body; or certain powers and properties in
bodies, that work a change in the mind. As if I were to
explain the motion of a body falling to the ground, I would
say it was caused by gravity; and I would endeavour to
show after what manner this power operated, without at-
tempting to show why it operated in this manner: or if I
were to explain the effects of bodies striking one another
by the common laws of percussion, I should not endeavour
to explain how motion itself is communicated.
SECT. II. ASSOCIATION
It is no small bar in the way of our inquiry into the cause
of our passions, that the occasions of many of them are
given, and that their governing motions are communicated
at a time when we have not capacity to reflect on them; at
a time of which all sort of memory is worn out of our minds.
For besides such things as affect us in various manners,
according to their natural powers, there are associations
made at that early season, which we find it very hard after-
wards to distinguish from natural effects. Not to mention
the unaccountable antipathies which we find in many per-
sons, we all find it impossible to remember when a steep
became more terrible than a plain; or fire or water more
terrible than a clod of earth ; though all these are very prob-
ably either conclusions from experience, or arising from the
premonitions of others; and some of them impressed, in all
likelihood, pretty late. But as it must be allowed that many
things affect us after a certain manner, not by any natural
powers they have for that purpose, but by association; so it
would be absurd, on the other hand, to say that all things
affect us by association only; since some things must have
been originally and naturally agreeable or disagreeable,
HO EDMUND BURKE
from which the others derive their associated powers; and
it would be, I fancy, to little purpose to look for the cause
of our passions in association, until we fail of it in the
natural properties of things.
SECT. III. — CAUSE OF PAIN AND FEAR
I have before observed, 1 that whatever is qualified to
cause terror is a foundation capable of the sublime ; to which
I add, that not only these, but many things from which we
cannot probably apprehend any danger, have a similar effect,
because they operate in a similar manner. I observed too, 2
that whatever produces pleasure, positive and original pleas-
ure, is fit to have beauty ingrafted on it. Therefore, to
clear up the nature of these qualities, it may be necessary
to explain the nature of pain and pleasure on which they
depend. A man who suffers under violent bodily pain, (I
suppose the most violent, because the effect may be the more
obvious,) I say a man in great pain has his teeth set, his eye-
brows are violently contracted, his forehead is wrinkled, his
eyes are dragged inwards, and rolled with great vehemence,
his hair stands on end, the voice is forced out in short
shrieks and groans, and the whole fabric totters. Fear, or
terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death, exhibits
exactly the same effects, approaching in violence to those
just mentioned, in proportion to the nearness of the cause,
and the weakness of the subject. This is not only so in
the human species; but I have more than once observed in
dogs, under an apprehension of punishment, that they have
writhed their bodies, and yelped, and howled, as if they
had actually felt the blows. From hence I conclude, that
pain and fear act upon the same parts of the body, and in
the same manner, though somewhat differing in degree ; that
pain and fear consist in an unnatural tension of the nerves ;
that this is sometimes accompanied with an unnatural
strength, which sometimes suddenly changes into an ex-
traordinary weakness ; that these effects often come on
alternately, and are sometimes mixed with each other. This
is the nature of all convulsive agitations, especially in
1 Part I. sect. 3. * Part I. sect. io.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL HI
weaker subjects, which are the most liable to the severest
impressions of pain and fear. The only difference between
pain and terror is, that things which cause pain operate on
the mind by the intervention of the body; whereas things
that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the
operation of the mind suggesting the danger; but both
agreeing, either primarily or secondarily, in producing a
tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves, 1 they
agree likewise in everything else. For it appears very clearly
to me, from this, as well as from many other examples, that
when the body is disposed, by any means whatsoever, to such
emotions as it would acquire by the means of a certain
passion; it will of itself excite something very like that
passion in the mind.
SECT. IV. — CONTINUED
To this purpose Mr. Spon, in his Recherches d' Antiquite,
gives us a curious story of the celebrated physiognomist
Campanella. This man, it seems, had not only made very
accurate observations on human faces, but was very expert
in mimicking such as were any way remarkable. When he
had a mind to penetrate into the inclinations of those he
had to deal with, he composed his face, his gesture, and his
whole body, as nearly as he could into the exact similitude of
the person he intended to examine; and then carefully ob-
served what turn of mind he seemed to acquire by this
change. So that, says my author, he was able to enter into
the dispositions and thoughts of people as effectually as if
he had been changed into the very men. I have often ob-
served, that on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry,
or placid, or frighted, or daring men, I have involuntarily
found my mind turned to that passion, whose appearance I
endeavoured to imitate; nay, I am convinced it is hard to
avoid it, though one strove to separate the passion from
its correspondent gestures. Our minds and bodies are so
closely and intimately connected, that one is incapable of
1 1 do not here enter into the question debated among physiologists,
whether pain be the effect of a contraction, or a tension of the nerves.
Either will serve my purpose; for by tension, I mean no more than a
violent pulling of the fibres, which compose any muscle or membrane, in
whatever way this is done.
112 EDMUND BURKE
pain or pleasure without the other. Campanella, of whom
we have been speaking, could so abstract his attention from
any sufferings of his body, that he was able to endure the
rack itself without much pain; and in lesser pains every-
body must have observed, that, when we can employ our
attention on anything else, the pain has been for a time
suspended: on the other hand, if by any means the body is
indisposed to perform such gestures, or to be stimulated into
such emotions, as any passion usually produces in it, that
passion itself never can arise, though its cause should be
never so strongly in action; though it should be merely
mental, and immediately affecting none of the senses. As
an opiate or spirituous liquors, shall suspend the operation
of grief, or fear, or anger, in spite of all our efforts to the
contrary; and this by inducing in the body a disposition
contrary to that which it receives from these passions.
SECT. V. HOW THE SUBLIME IS PRODUCED
Having considered terror as producing an unnatural ten-
sion and certain violent emotions of the nerves; it easily
follows, from what we have just said, that whatever is fitted
to produce such a tension must be productive of a passion
similar to terror, 1 and consequently must be a source of the
sublime, though it should have no idea of danger connected
with it. So that little remains towards showing the cause
of the sublime, but to show that the instances we have given
of it in the second part relate to such things as are fitted
by nature to produce this sort of tension, either by the
primary operation of the mind or the body. With regard
to such things as effect by the associated idea of danger,
there can be no doubt but that they produce terror, and act
by some modification of that passion ; and that terror, when
sufficiently violent, raises the emotions of the body just
mentioned, can as little be doubted. But if the sublime is
built on terror, or some passion like it, which has pain for its
object, it is previously proper to inquire how any species of
delight can be derived from a cause so apparently contrary
to it I say delight, because, as I have often remarked, it is
x Part II. sect. a.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 113
very evidently different in its cause, and in its own nature,
from actual and positive pleasure.
SECT. VI. — HOW PAIN CAN BE A CAUSE OF DELIGHT
Providence has so ordered it, that a state of rest and in-
action, however it may flatter our indolence, should be pro-
ductive of many inconveniences ; that it should generate such
disorders, as may force us to have recourse to some labour,
as a thing absolutely requisite to make us pass our lives with
tolerable satisfaction; for the nature of rest is to suffer all
the parts of our bodies to fall into a relaxation, that not only
disables the members from performing their functions, but
takes away the vigorous tone of fibre which is requisite for
carrying on the natural and necessary secretions. At the
same time, that in this languid inactive state, the nerves are
more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they
are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejec-
tion, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the
gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body.
The best remedy for all these evils is exercise or labour; and
labour is a surmounting of difficulties, an exertion of the
contracting power of the muscles ; and as such resembles
pain, which consists in tension or contraction, in everything
but degree. Labour is not only requisite to preserve the
coarser organs in a state fit for their functions; but it is
equally necessary to those finer and more delicate organs, on
which, and by which, the imagination, and perhaps the
other mental powers, act. Since it is probable, that not
only the inferior parts of the soul, as the passions are
called, but the understanding itself, makes use of some
fine corporeal instruments in its operation ; though what
they are, and where they are, may be somewhat hard to set-
tle; but that it does make use of such, appears from hence;
that a long exercise of the mental powers induces a remark-
able lassitude of the whole body ; and, on the other hand, that
great bodily labour, or pain, weakens, and sometimes actually
destroys, the mental faculties. Now, as a due exercise is es-
sential to the coarse muscular parts of the constitution, and
that without this rousing they would become languid and dis-
114 EDMUND BURKE
eased, the very same rule holds with regard to those finer
parts we have mentioned; to have them in proper order,
they must be shaken and worked to a proper degree.
SECT. VII. — EXERCISE NECESSARY FOR THE FINER ORGANS
As common labour, which is a mode of pain, is the exer-
cise of the grosser, a mode of terror is the exercise of the
finer parts of the system; and if a certain mode of pain be
of such a nature as to act upon the eye or the ear, as they
are the most delicate organs, the affection approaches more
nearly to that which has a mental cause. In all these cases,
if the pain and terror are so modified as not to be actually
noxious; if the pain is not carried to violence, and the
terror is not conversant about the present destruction of the
person, as these emotions clear the parts, whether fine or
gross, of a dangerous and troublesome encumbrance, they
are capable of producing delight ; not pleasure, but a sort of
delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror;
which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the
strongest of all the passions. Its object is the sublime. 1 Its
highest degree I call astonishment ; the subordinate degrees
are awe, reverence, and respect, which, by the very etymol-
ogy of the words show from what source they are derived,
and how they stand distinguished from positive pleasure.
SECT. VIII. — WHY THINGS NOT DANGEROUS PRODUCE A PAS-
SION LIKE TERROR
*A mode of terror or pain is always the cause of the sub-
lime. For terror, or associated danger, the foregoing ex-
plication is, I believe, sufficient. It will require something
more trouble to show, that such examples as I have given
of the sublime in the second part are capable of producing
a mode of pain, and of being thus allied to terror, and to be
accounted for on the same principles. And first of such
objects as are great in their dimensions. I speak of visual
objects.
1 Part II. sect. a. « Part I. sect. 7. Part II. sect. a.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 115
SECT. IX. WHY VISUAL OBJECTS OF GREAT DIMENSIONS
ARE SUBLIME
Vision is performed by having a picture, formed by the
rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in
one piece, instantaneously, on the retina, or last nervous
part of the eye. Or, according to others, there is but one
point of any object painted on the eye in such a manner as
to be perceived at once; but by moving the eye, we gather
up, with great celerity, the several parts of the object, so as
to form one uniform piece. If the former opinion be al-
lowed, it will be considered, 1 that though all the light re-
flected from a large body should strike the eye in one in-
stant; yet we must suppose that the body itself is formed of
a vast number of distinct points, every one of which, or the
ray from every one, makes an impression on the retina.
So that, though the image of one point should cause but
a small tension of this membrane, another, and another, and
another stroke, must in their progress cause a very great
one, until it arrives at last to the highest degree ; and the
whole capacity of the eye, vibrating in all its parts, must
approach near to the nature of what causes pain, and con-
sequently must produce an idea of the sublime. Again, if
we take it, that one point only of an object is distinguishable
at once, the matter will amount nearly to the same thing,
or rather it will make the origin of the sublime from
greatness of dimension yet clearer. For if but one point
is observed at once, the eye must traverse the vast space of
such bodies with great quickness, and consequently the fine
nerves and muscles destined to the motion of that part must
be very much strained; and their great sensibility must
make them highly affected by this straining. Besides, it
signifies just nothing to the effect produced, whether a body
has its parts connected and makes its impression at once;
or, making but one impression of a point at a time, causes a
succession of the same or others so quickly as to make
them seem united; as is evident from the common effect
of whirling about a lighted torch or piece of wood: which,
if done with celerity, seems a circle of fire.
1 Part II. sect. 7.
116 EDMUND BURKE
SECT. X. UNITY WHY REQUISITE TO VASTNESS
It may be objected to this theory, that the eye generally
receives an equal number of rays at all times, and that
therefore a great object cannot affect it by the number of
rays, more than that variety of objects which the eye must
always discern whilst it remains open. But to this I answer,
that admitting an equal number of rays, or an equal quantity
of luminous particles, to strike the eye at all times, yet if
these rays frequently vary their nature, now to blue, now to
red, and so on, or their manner of termination, as to a
number of petty squares, triangles, or the like, at every
change, whether of colour or shape, the organ has a sort of
relaxation or rest; but this relaxation and labour so often
interrupted, is by no means productive of ease ; neither has
it the effect of vigorous and uniform labour. Whoever has
remarked the different effects of some strong exercise, and
some little piddling action, will understand why a teasing,
fretful employment, which at once wearies and weakens the
body, should have nothing great; these sorts of impulses,
which are rather teasing than painful, by continually and
suddenly altering their tenor and direction, prevent that
full tension, that species of uniform labour, which is allied to
strong pain, and causes the sublime. The sum total of
things of various kinds, though it should equal the number
of the uniform parts composing some one entire object, is
not equal in its effect upon the organs of our bodies. Be-
sides the one already assigned, there is another very strong
reason for the difference. The mind in reality hardly ever
can attend diligently to more than one thing at a time;
if this thing be little, the effect is little, and a number of
other little objects cannot engage the attention; the mind
is bounded by the bounds of the object; and what is not
attended to, and what does not exist, are much the same in
effect; but the eye, or the mind, (for in this case there
is no difference,) in great, uniform objects, does not readily
arrive at their bounds ; it has no rest whilst it contemplates
them; the image is much the same everywhere. So that
everything great by its quantity must necessarily be one,
simple and entire.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 117
SECT. XI. — THE ARTIFICIAL INFINITE
We have observed, that a species of greatness arises from
the artificial infinite; and that this infinite consists in an
uniform succession of great parts: we observed, too, that
the same uniform succession had a like power in sounds.
But because the effects of many things are clearer in one of
the senses than in another, and that all the senses bear
analogy to and illustrate one another, I shall begin with this
power in sounds, as the cause of the sublimity from suc-
cession is rather more obvious in the sense of hearing. And
I shall here, once for all, observe, that an investigation of the
natural and mechanical causes of our passions, besides the
curiosity of the subject, gives, if they are discovered, a
double strength and lustre to any rules we deliver on such
matters. When the ear receives any simple sound, it is
struck by a single pulse of the air, which makes the ear-
drum and the other membranous parts vibrate according to
the nature and ipecies of the stroke. If the stroke be strong,
the organ of hearing suffers a considerable degree of tension.
If the stroke be repeated pretty soon after, the repetition
causes an expectation of another stroke. And it must be
observed, that expectation itself causes a tension. This is
apparent in many animals, who, when they prepare for
hearing any sound, rouse themselves, and prick up their ears :
so that here the effect of the sounds is considerably aug-
mented by a new auxiliary, the expectation. But though,
after a number of strokes, we expect still more, not being
able to ascertain the exact time of their arrival, when they
arrive, they produce a sort of surprise, which increases this
tension yet further. For I have observed, that when at any
time I have waited very earnestly for some sound, that
returned at intervals, (as the successive firing of cannon,)
though I fully expected the return of the sound, when it
came it always made me start a little ; the ear-drum suffered
a convulsion, and the whole body consented with it. The
tension of the part thus increasing at every blow, by the
united forces of the stroke itself, the expectation, and the
surprise, it is worked up to such a pitch as to be capable of
the sublime; it is brought just to the verge of pain. Even
H8 EDMUND BURKE
when the cause has ceased, the organs of hearing being
often successively struck in a similar manner, continue to
vibrate in that manner for some time longer; this is an
additional help to the greatness of the effect.
SECT. XII. THE VIBRATIONS MUST BE SIMILAR
But if the vibration be not similar at every impression, it
can never be carried beyond the number of actual impres-
sions ; for move any body, as a pendulum, in one way, and it
will continue to oscillate in an arch of the same circle, until
the known causes make it rest; but if after first putting it
in motion in one direction, you push it into another, it can
never reassume the first direction ; because it can never move
itself, and consequently it can have but the effect of that last
motion; whereas, if in the same direction you act upon it
several times, it will describe a greater arch, and move a
longer time.
SECT. XIII. — THE EFFECTS OF SUCCESSION IN VISUAL
OBJECTS EXPLAINED
If we can comprehend clearly how things operate upon
one of our senses, there can be very little difficulty in con-
ceiving in what manner they affect the rest. To say a great
deal therefore upon the corresponding affections of every
sense, would tend rather to fatigue us by an useless repeti-
tion, than to throw any new light upon the subject by that
ample and diffuse manner of treating it; but as in this dis-
course we chiefly attach ourselves to the sublime, as it
affects the eye, we shall consider particularly why a succes-
sive disposition of uniform parts in the same right line
should be sublime, 1 and upon what principle this disposition
is enabled to make a comparatively small quantity of matter
produce a grander effect, than a much larger quantity
disposed in another manner. To avoid the perplexity of
general notions; let us set before our eyes a colonnade of
uniform pillars planted in a right line; let us take our
stand in such a manner, that the eye may shoot along this
2 Part II. sect. 10.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 119
colonnade, for it has its best effect in this view. In our
present situation it is plain, that the rays from the first
round pillar will cause in the eye a vibration of that species ;
an image of the pillar itself. The pillar immediately suc-
ceeding increases it; that which follows renews and en-
forces the impression ; each in its order as it succeeds, repeats
impulse after impulse, and stroke after stroke, until the eye,
long exercised in one particular way, cannot lose that object
immediately; and, being violently roused by this continued
agitation, it presents the mind with a grand or sublime con-
ception. But instead of viewing a rank of uniform pillars,
let us suppose that they succeed each other, a round and
a square one alternately. In this case the vibration caused
by the first round pillar perishes as soon as it is formed:
and one of quite another sort (the square) directly occupies
its place; which, however, it resigns as quickly to the round
one; and thus the eye proceeds, alternately; taking up one
image, and laying down another, as long as the building con-
tinues. From whence it is obvious, that, at the last pillar,
the impression is as far from continuing as it was at the very
first; because, in fact, the sensory can receive no distinct
impression but from the last; and it can never of itself re-
sume a dissimilar impression : besides, every variation of the
object is a rest and relaxation to the organs of sight; and
these reliefs prevent that powerful emotion so necessary to
produce the sublime. To produce therefore a perfect gran-
deur in such things as we have been mentioning, there should
be a perfect simplicity, an absolute uniformity in disposition,
shape, and colouring. Upon this principle of succession and
uniformity it may be asked, why a long bare wall should not
be a more sublime object than a colonnade; since the suc-
cession is no way interrupted ; since the eye meets no check ;
since nothing more uniform can be conceived? A long bare
wall is certainly not so grand an object as a colonnade of the
same length and height. It is not altogether difficult to ac-
count for this difference. When we look at a naked wall,
from the evenness of the object, the eye runs along its whole
space, and arrives quickly at its termination ; the eye meets
nothing which may interrupt its progress ; but then it meets
nothing which may detain it a proper time to produce a very
120 EDMUND BURKE
great and lasting effect. The view of the bare wall, if it be
of a great height and length, is undoubtedly grand; but this
is only one idea, and not a repetition of similar ideas: it is
therefore great, not so much upon the principle of infinity,
as upon that of vastness. But we are not so powerfully
affected with any one impulse, unless it be one of a prodigious
force indeed, as we are with a succession of similar impulses;
because the nerves of the sensory do not (if I may use the
expression) acquire a habit of repeating the same feeling in
such a manner as to continue it longer than its cause is in
action ; besides, all the effects which I have attributed to
expectation and surprise in sect, n, can have no place in a
bare wall.
SECT. XIV. LOCKF.'S OPINION CONCERNING DARKNESS
CONSIDERED
It is Mr. Locke's opinion, that darkness is not naturally
an idea of terror; and that, though an excessive light is
painful to the sense, the greatest excess of darkness is no
ways troublesome. He observes indeed in another place,
that a nurse or an old woman having once associated the
idea of ghosts and goblins with that oi darkness, night,
ever after, becomes painful and horrible to the imagination.
The authority of this great man is doubtless as great as that
of any man can be, and it seems to stand in the way of our
general principle. 1 We have considered darkness as a cause
of the sublime; and we have all along considered the sub-
lime as depending on some modification of pain or terror:
so that if darkness be no way painful or terrible to any, who
have not had their minds early tainted with superstitions, it
can be no source of the sublime to them. But, with all
deference to such an authority, it seems to me, that an
association of a more general nature, an association which
takes in all mankind, and make darkness terrible; for in
I utter darkness it is impossible to know in what degree of
safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that sur-
round us; we may every moment strike against some dan-
gerous obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first
step we take; and if an enemy approach, we know not in
x Part II. sect. 3.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 121
what quarter to defend ourselves ; in such a case strength is
no sure protection ; wisdom can only act by guess ; the
boldest are staggered, and he, who would pray for nothing
else towards his defence, is forced to pray for light.
ZeO ir&rep, dXXct ri> pvo-cu vtt r/tpos vlas 'A^atwv
Hol-qaov 5" atdpyv, dbs 5' ocpdaKpxnaLv idtadaf
'Ep 5Z pdei Kal Skeaaov. —
As to the association of ghosts and goblins; surely it is
more natural to think, that darkness, being originally an
idea of terror, was chosen as a fit scene for such terrible
representations, than that such representations have made
darkness terrible. The mind of man very easily slides into
an error of the former sort ; but it is very hard to imagine,
that the effect of an idea so universally terrible in all times,
and in all countries, as darkness, could possibly have been
owing to a set of idle stories, or to any cause of a nature so
trivial, and of an operation so precarious.
SECT. XV. DARKNESS TERRIBLE IN ITS OWN NATURE
Perhaps it may appear on inquiry that blackness and
darkness are in some degree painful by their natural opera-
tion, independent of any associations whatsoever. I must
observe, that the ideas of darkness and blackness are much
the same; and they differ only in this, that blackness is a
more confined idea. Mr. Cheselden has given us a very
curious story of a boy, who had been born blind, and con- -
tinued so until he was thirteen or fourteen years old; he
was then couched for a cataract, by which operation he
received his sight. Among many remarkable particulars that
attended his first perceptions and judgments on visual ob-
jects, Cheselden tells us, that the first time the boy saw a
black object, it gave him great uneasiness; and that some
time after, upon accidentally seeing a negro woman, he was
struck with great horror at the sight. The horror, in this
case, can scarcely be supposed to arise from any association.
The boy appears by the account to have been particularly
observing and sensible for one of his age ; and therefore it is
probable, if the great uneasiness he felt at the first sight of
122 EDMUND BURKE
black had arisen from its connexion with any other disagree-
able ideas, he would have observed and mentioned it. For
an idea, disagreeable only by association, has the cause of
its ill effect on the passions evident enough at the first im-
pression; in ordinary cases, it is indeed frequently lost;
but this is, because the original association was made very
early, and the consequent impression repeated often. In our
instance, there was no time for such a habit; and there is
no reason to think that the ill effects of black on his imagin-
ation were more owing to its connexion with any disagree-
able ideas, than that the good effects of more cheerful colours
were derived from their connexion with pleasing ones. They
had both probably their effects from their natural operation.
SECT. XVI. — WHY DARKNESS IS TERRIBLE
It may be worth while to examine how darkness can
operate in such a manner as to cause pain. It is observable,
that still as we recede from the light, nature has so con-
trived it, that the pupil is enlarged by the retiring of the
iris, in proportion to our recess. Now, instead of declining
from it but a little, suppose that we withdraw entirely from
the light; it is reasonable to think, that the contraction of
the radial fibres of the iris is proportionably greater; and
that this part may by great darkness come to be so con-
tracted as to strain the nerves that compose it beyond their
natural tone; and by this means to produce a painful sensa-
tion. Such a tension it seems there certainly is, whilst we
are involved in darkness ; for in such a state, whilst the eye
remains open, there is a continual nisus to receive light;
this is manifest from the flashes and luminous appearances
which often seem in these circumstances to play before it;
and which can be nothing but the effect of spasms, pro-
duced by its own efforts in pursuit of its object: several
other strong impulses will produce the idea of light in the
eye, besides the substance of light itself, as we experience on
many occasions. Some, who allow darkness to be a cause of
the sublime, would infer, from the dilatation of the pupil,
that a relaxation may be productive of the sublime, as well
as a convulsion: but they do not, I believe, consider that
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 123
although the circular ring of the iris be in some sense a
sphincter, which may possibly be dilated by a simple relaxa-
tion, yet in one respect it differs from most of the other
sphincters of the body, that it is furnished with antagonist
muscles, which are the radial fibres of the iris: no sooner
does the circular muscle begin to relax, than these fibres,
wanting their counterpoise, are forcibly drawn back, and
open the pupil to a considerable wideness. But though
we were not apprized of this, I believe any one will find,
if he opens his eyes and makes an effort to see in a dark
place, that a very perceivable pain ensues. And I have heard
some ladies remark, that after having worked a long time
upon a ground of black, their eyes were so pained and weak-
ened, they could hardly see. It may perhaps be objected to
this theory of the mechanical effect of darkness, that the ill
effects of darkness or blackness seem rather mental than
corporeal : and I own it is true, that they do so ; and so
do all those that depend on the affections of the finer parts
of our system. The ill effects of bad weather appear often
no otherwise, than in a melancholy and dejection of spirits;
though without doubt, in this case, the bodily organs suffer
first, and the mind through these organs.
SECT. XVII. — THE EFFECTS OF BLACKNESS
Blackness is but a partial darkness; and therefore, it
derives some of its powers from being mixed and surrounded
with coloured bodies. In its own nature, it cannot be con-
sidered as a colour. Black bodies, reflecting none or but a
few rays, with regard to sight, are but as so many vacant
spaces dispersed among the objects we view. When the eye
lights on one of these vacuities, after having been kept in
some degree of tension by the play of the adjacent colours
upon it, it suddenly falls into a relaxation ; out of which it
as suddenly recovers by a convulsive spring. To illustrate
this : let us consider, that when we intend to sit on a chair,
and find it much lower than was expected, the shock is very
violent ; much more violent than could be thought from so
slight a fall as the difference between one chair and another
can possibly make. If, after descending a flight of stairs, we
124 EDMUND BURKE
attempt inadvertently to take another step in the manner
of the former ones, the shock is extremely rude and dis-
agreeable; and by no art can we cause such a shock by the
same means when we expect and prepare for it. When I
say that this is owing to having the change made contrary to
expectation, I do not mean solely, when the mind expects.
I mean, likewise, that when any organ of sense is for some
time affected in some one manner, if it be suddenly affected
otherwise, there ensues a convulsive motion ; such a convul-
sion as is caused when anything happens against the ex-
pectance of the mind. And though it may appear strange
that such a change as produces a relaxation should imme-
diately produce a sudden convulsion ; it is yet most certainly
so, and so in all the senses. Every one knows that sleep is
a relaxation ; and that silence, where nothing keeps the
organs of hearing in action, is in general fittest to bring
on this relaxation ; yet when a sort of murmuring sounds
dispose a man to sleep, let these sounds cease suddenly, and
the person immediately awakes ; that is, the parts are braced
up suddenly, and he awakes. This I have often experienced
myself, and I have heard the same from observing persons.
In like manner, if a person in broad day-light were falling
asleep, to introduce a sudden darkness would prevent his
sleep for that time, though silence and darkness in them-
selves, and not suddenly introduced, are very favourable to
it. This I knew only by conjecture on the analogy of the
senses when I first digested these observations; but I have
since experienced it. And I have often experienced, and
so have a thousand others, that on the first inclining towards
sleep, we have been suddenly awakened with a most violent
start ; and that this start was generally preceded by a sort
of dream of our falling down a precipice : whence does this
strange motion arise, but from the too sudden relaxation of
the body, which by some mechanism in nature restores
itself by as quick and vigorous an exertion of the contracting
power of the muscles? The dream itself is caused by this
relaxation; and it is of too uniform a nature to be attributed
to any other cause. The parts relax too suddenly, which is
in the nature of falling ; and this accident of the body in-
duces this image in the mind. When we are in a con-
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 125
firmed state of health and vigour, as all changes are then
less sudden, and less on the extreme, we can seldom complain
of this disagreeable sensation.
SECT. XVIII. THE EFFECTS OF BLACKNESS MODERATED
Though the effects of black be painful originally, we must
not think they always continue so. Custom reconciles us to
everything. After we have been used to the sight of black
objects, the terror abates, and the smoothness and glossiness,
or some agreeable accident, of bodies so coloured, softens in
some measure the horror and sternness of their original
nature; yet the nature of their original impression still
continues. Black will always have something melancholy in
it, because the sensory will always find the change to it from
other colours too violent ; or if it occupy the whole com-
pass of the sight, it will then be darkness; and what was said
of darkness will be applicable here. I do not purpose to go
into all that might be said to illustrate this theory of the
effects of light and darkness, neither will I examine all the
different effects produced by the various modifications and
mixtures of these two causes. If the foregoing observations
have any foundation in nature, I conceive them very suf-
ficient to account for all the phenomena that can arise from
all the combinations of black with other colours. To enter
into every particular, or to answer every objection, would be
an endless labour. We have only followed the most lead-
ing roads; and we shall observe the same conduct in our
inquiry into the cause of beauty.
SECT. XIX. — THE PHYSICAL CAUSE OF LOVE
When we have before us such objects as excite love and
complacency, the body is affected, so far as I could observe,
much in the following manner: the head reclines something
on one side ; the eyelids are more closed than usual, and the
eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object; the mouth
is a little opened, and the breath drawn slowly, with now and
then a low sigh ; the whole body is composed, and the hands
fall idly to the sides. All this is accompanied with an in-
126 EDMUND BURKE
ward sense of melting and languor. These appearances are
always proportioned to the degree of beauty in the object,
and of sensibility in the observer. And this gradation from
the highest pitch of beauty and sensibility, even to the lowest
of mediocrity and indifference, and their correspondent
effects, ought to be kept in view, else this description will
seem exaggerated, which it certainly is not. But from this
description it is almost impossible not to conclude, that
beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system.
There are all the appearances of such a relaxation; and a
relaxation somewhat below the natural tone seems to me to
be the cause of all positive pleasure. Who is a stranger to
that manner of expression so common in all times and in
all countries, of being softened, relaxed, enervated, dissolved,
melted away by pleasure? The universal voice of mankind,
faithful to their feelings, concurs in affirming this uniform
and general effect: and although some odd and particular
instance may perhaps be found, wherein there appears a
considerable degree of positive pleasure, without all the
characters of relaxation, we must not therefore reject the
conclusion we had drawn from a concurrence of many
experiments ; but we must still retain it, subjoining the
exceptions which may occur, according to the judicious rule
laid clown by Sir Isaac Newton in the third book of his
Optics. Our position will, I conceive, appear confirmed be-
yond any reasonable doubt, if we can show that such things
as we have already observed to be the genuine constituents
of beauty, have each of them, separately taken, a natural
tendency to relax the fibres. And if it must be allowed us,
that the appearance of the human body, when all these
constituents are united together before the sensory, further
favours this opinion, we may venture, I believe, to conclude,
that the passion called love is produced by this relaxation.
By the same method of reasoning which we have used in the
inquiry into the causes of the sublime, we may likewise con-
clude, that as a beautiful object presented to the sense, by
causing a relaxation of the body, produces the passion of love
in the mind; so if by any means the passion should first have
its origin in the mind, a relaxation of the outward organs will
as certainly ensue in a degree proportioned to the cause.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 127
SECT. XX. WHY SMOOTHNESS IS BEAUTIFUL
It is to explain the true cause of visual beauty, that I call
in the assistance of the other senses. If it appears that
smoothness is a principal cause of pleasure to the touch,
taste, smell, and hearing, it will be easily admitted a con-
stituent of visual beauty; especially as we have before
shown, that this quality is found almost without exception
in all bodies that are by general consent held beautiful.
There can be no doubt that bodies which are rough and
angular, rouse and vellicate the organs of feeling, causing a
sense of pain, which consists in the violent tension or con-
traction of the muscular fibres. On the contrary, the appli-
cation of smooth bodies relaxes ; gentle stroking with a
smooth hand allays violent pains and cramps, and re-
laxes the suffering parts from their unnatural tension; and
it has therefore very often no mean effect in removing
swellings and obstructions. The sense of feeling is highly
gratified with smooth bodies. A bed smoothly laid, and soft,
that is, where the resistance is every way inconsiderable, is
a great luxury, disposing to an universal relaxation, and
inducing beyond anything else that species of it called sleep.
SECT. XXI. — SWEETNESS, ITS NATURE
Nor is it only in the touch that smooth bodies cause posi-
tive pleasuie by relaxation. In the smell and taste, we find
all things agreeable to them, and which are commonly called
sweet, to be of a smooth nature, and that they all evidently
tend to relax their respective sensories. Let us first con-
sider the taste. Since it is most easy to inquire into the
property of liquids, and since all things seem to want a
fluid vehicle to make them tasted at all, I intend rather to
consider the liquid than the solid parts of our food. The
vehicles of all tastes are water and oil. And what deter-
mines the taste is some salt, which affects variously accord-
ing to its nature, or its manner of being combined with other
things. Water and oil, simply considered, are capable of
giving some pleasure to the taste. Water, when simple, is
insipid, inodorous, colourless, and smooth; it is found, when
128 EDMUND BURKE
not cold, to be a great resolver of spasms, and lubricator of
the fibres; this power it probably owes to its smoothness.
For as fluidity depends, according to the most general opin-
ion, on the roundness, smoothness, and weak cohesion, of
the component parts of any body; and as water acts merely
as a simple fluid ; it follows that the cause of its fluidity is
likewise the cause of its relaxing quality ; namely, the
smoothness and slippery texture of its parts. The other
fluid vehicle of taste is oil. This too, when simple, is insipid,
inodorous, colourless, and smooth to the touch and taste.
It is smoother than water, and in many cases yet more re-
laxing. Oil is in some degree pleasant to the eye, the touch,
and the taste, insipid as it is. Water is not so grateful ;
which I do not know on what principle to account for,
other than that water is not so soft and smooth. Suppose
that to this oil or water were added a certain quantity of a
specific salt, which had a power of putting the nervous
papillae of the tongue into a gentle vibratory motion ; as
suppose, sugar dissolved in it. The smoothness of the oil,
and the vibratory power of the salt, cause the sense we call
sweetness. In all sweet bodies, sugar, or a substance very
little different from sugar, is constantly found. Every
species of salt, examined by the microscope, has its own
distinct, regular, invariable form. That of nitre is a pointed
oblong; that of sea-salt an exact cube; that of sugar a per-
fect globe. If you have tried how smooth globular bodies,
as the marbles with which boys amuse themselves, have
affected the touch when they are rolled backward and for-
ward and over one another, you will easily conceive how
sweetness, which consists in a salt of such nature, affects the
taste; for a single globe, (though somewhat pleasant to the
feeling,) yet by the regularity of its form, and the some-
what too sudden deviation of its parts from a right line, is
nothing near so pleasant to the touch as several globes,
where the hand gently rises to one and falls to another;
and this pleasure is greatly increased if the globes are in
motion, and sliding over one another ; for this soft variety
prevents that weariness, which the uniform disposition of
the several globes would otherwise produce. Thus in sweet
liquors, the parts of the fluid vehicle, though most probably
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 129
round, are yet so minute, as to conceal the figure of their
component parts from the nicest inquisition of the micro-
scope ; and consequently, being so excessively minute, they
have a sort of flat simplicity to the taste, resembling the
effects of plain smooth bodies to the touch; for if a body
be composed of round parts excessively small, and packed
pretty closely together, the surface will be both to the sight
and touch as if it were nearly plain and smooth. It is clear
from their unveiling their figure to the microscope, that the
particles of sugar are considerably larger than those of
water or oil, and consequently, that their effects from their
roundness will be more distinct and palpable to the nervous
papillae of that nice organ the tongue: they will induce that
sense called sweetness, which in a weak manner we dis-
cover in oil, and in a yet weaker, in water; for, insipid as
they are, water and oil are in some degree sweet; and it
may be observed, that the insipid things of all kinds ap-
proach more nearly to the nature of sweetness than to that
of any other taste.
SECT. XXII. SWEETNESS RELAXING
In the other senses we have remarked, that smooth things
are relaxing. Now it ought to appear that sweet things,
which are the smooth of taste, are relaxing too. It is re-
markable, that in some languages, soft and sweet have but
one name. Doux in French signifies soft as well as sweet.
The Latin Dulcis, and the Italian Dolce, have in many cases
the same double signification. That sweet things are gen-
erally relaxing, is evident ; because all such, especially those
which are most oily, taken frequently, or in a large quantity,
very much enfeeble the tone of the stomach. Sweet smells,
which bear a great affinity to sweet tastes, relax very re-
markably. The smell of flowers disposes people to drowsi-
ness; and this relaxing effect is further apparent from the
prejudice which people of weak nerves receive from their
use. It were worth while to examine, whether tastes of
this kind, sweet ones, tastes that are caused by smooth oils
and a relaxing salt, are not the original pleasant tastes. For
many, which use has rendered such, were not at all agree-
hc e— vol. xxiv
130 EDMUND BURKE
able at first. The way to examine this, is to try what nature
has originally provided for us, which she has undoubtedly
made originally pleasant; and to analyze this provision.
Milk is the first support of our childhood. The component
parts of this are water, oil, and a sort of a very sweet salt,
called the sugar of milk. All these when blended have a
great smoothness to the taste, and a relaxing quality to the
skin. The next thing children covet is fruit, and of fruits
those principally which are sweet ; and every one knows that
the sweetness of fruit is caused by a subtle oil, and such
salt as that mentioned in the last section. Afterwards cus-
tom, habit, the desire of novelty, and a thousand other
causes, confound, adulterate, and change our palates, so that
we can no longer reason with any satisfaction about them.
Before we quit this article, we must observe, that as smooth
things are, as such, agreeable to the taste, and are found of
a relaxing quality; so, on the other hand, things which are
found by experience to be of a strengthening quality, and
fit to brace the fibres, are almost universally rough and
pungent to the taste, and in many cases rough even to the
touch. We often apply the quality of sweetness, metaphori-
cally, to visual objects. For the better carrying on this
remarkable analogy of the senses, we may here call sweet-
ness the beautiful of the taste.
SECT. XXIII. — VARIATION, WHY BEAUTIFUL
Another principal property of beautiful objects is, that
the line of their parts is continually varying its direction;
but it varies it by a very insensible deviation ; it never varies
it so quickly as to surprise, or by the sharpness of its angle
to cause any twitching or convulsion of the optic nerve.
Nothing long continued in the same manner, nothing very
suddenly varied, can be beautiful; because both are opposite
to that agreeable relaxation which is the characteristic effect
of beauty. It is thus in all the senses. A motion in a right
line is that manner of moving, next to a very gentle descent,
in which we meet the least resistance ; yet it is not that
manner of moving which, next to a descent, wearies us the
least. Rest certainly tends to relax: yet there is a species
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 131
of motion which relaxes more than rest; a gentle oscillatory
motion, a rising and falling. Rocking sets children to sleep
better than absolute rest; there is indeed scarce anything at
that age which gives more pleasure than to be gently lifted
up and down; the manner of playing which their nurses use
with children, and the weighing and swinging used after-
wards by themselves as a favourite amusement, evince this
very sufficiently. Most people must have observed the sort
of sense they have had on being swiftly drawn in an easy
coach on a smooth turf, with gradual ascents and declivities.
This will give a better idea of the beautiful, and point out
its probable course better, than almost anything else. On
the contrary, when one is hurried over a rough, rocky,
broken road, the pain felt by these sudden inequalities shows
why similar sights, feelings, and sounds are so contrary to
beauty : and with regard to the feeling, it is exactly the same
in its effect, or very nearly the same, whether, for instance,
I move my hand along the surface of a body of a certain
shape, or whether such a body is moved along my hand. But
to bring this analogy of the senses home to the eye: if a
body presented to that sense has such a waving surface,
that the rays of light reflected from it are in a continual
insensible deviation from the strongest to the weakest
(which is always the case in a surface gradually unequal,)
it must be exactly similar in its effects on the eye and touch ;
upon the one of which it operates directly, on the other, indi-
rectly. And this body will be beautiful, if the lines which
compose its surface are not continued, even so varied, in a
manner that may weary or dissipate the attention. The
variation itself must be continually varied.
SECT. XXIV. — CONCERNING SMALLNESS
To avoid a sameness which may arise from the too fre-
quent repetition of the same reasonings, and of illustrations
of the same nature, I will not enter very minutely into every
particular that regards beauty, as it is founded on the dis-
position of its quantity, or its quantity itself. In speaking
of the magnitude of bodies there is great uncertainty, be-
cause the ideas of great and small are terms almost entirely
132 EDMUND BURKE
relative to the species of the objects, which are infinite. It
is true, that having once fixed the species of any object, and
the dimensions common in the individuals of that species,
we may observe some that exceed, and some that fall short
of, the ordinary standard: those which greatly exceed are,
by that excess, provided the species itself be not very small,
rather great and terrible than beautiful; but as in the ani-
mal world, and in a good measure in the vegetable world like-
wise, the qualities that constitute beauty may possibly be
united to things of greater dimensions; when they are so
united, they constitute a species something different both
from the sublime and beautiful, which I have before called
fine: but this kind, I imagine, has not such a power on the
passions either as vast bodies have which are endued with
the correspondent qualities of the sublime, or as the quali-
ties of beauty have when united in a small object. The
affection produced by large bodies adorned with the spoils
of beauty, is a tension continually relieved ; which ap-
proaches to the nature of mediocrity. But if I were to say
how I find myself affected upon such occasions, I should
say, that the sublime suffers less by being united to some
of the qualities of beauty, than beauty does by being joined
to greatness of quantity, or any other properties of the
sublime. There is something so over-ruling in whatever
inspires us with awe, in all things which belongs ever so
remotely to terror, that nothing else can stand in their pres-
ence. There lie the qualities of beauty either dead or un-
operative; or at most exerted to mollify the rigour and
sternness of the terror, which is the natural concomitant of
greatness. Besides the extraordinary great in every species,
the opposite to this, the dwarfish and diminutive, ought to be
considered. Littleness, merely as such, has nothing con-
trary to the idea of beauty. The humming-bird, both in
shape and colouring, yields to none of the winged species,
of which it is the least ; and perhaps his beauty is enhanced
by his smallness. But there are animals, which, when they
are extremely small, are rarely (if ever) beautiful. There
is a dwarfish size of men and women, which is almost con-
stantly so gross and massive in comparison of their height,
that they present us with a very disagreeable image. But
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL i33
should a man be found not above two or three feet high,
supposing such a person to have all the parts of his body
of a delicacy suitable to such a size, and otherwise endued
with the common qualities of other beautiful bodies, I am
pretty well convinced that a person of such a stature might
be considered as beautiful ; might be the object of love ; might
give us very pleasing ideas on viewing hii. The only thing
which could possibly interpose to check our pleasure is, that
such creatures, however formed, are unusual, and are often
therefore considered as something monstrous. The large
and gigantic, though very compatible with the sublime, is
contrary to the beautiful. It is impossible to suppose a giant
the object of love. When we let our imagination loose in
romance, the ideas we naturally annex to that size are those
of tyranny, cruelty, injustice, and everything horrid and
abominable. We paint the giant ravaging the country, plun-
dering the innocent traveller, and afterwards gorged with
his half-living flesh: such are Polyphemus, Cacus, and
others, who make so great a figure in romances and heroic
poems. The event we attend to with the greatest satisfac-
tion is their defeat and death. I do not remember, in all that
multitude of deaths with which the Iliad is filled, that the
fall of any man, remarkable for his great stature and
strength, touches us with pity ; nor does it appear that the
author, so well read in human nature, ever intended it
should. It is Simoisius, in the soft bloom of youth, torn
from his parents, who tremble for a courage so ill suited
to his strength ; it is another hurried by war from the new
embraces of his bride, young, and fair, and a novice to the
field, who melts us by his untimely fate. Achilles, in spite
of the many qualities of beauty which Homer has bestowed
on his outward form, and the many great virtues with
which he has adorned his mind, can never make us love
him. It may be observed, that Homer has given the Trojans,
whose fate he has designed to excite our compassion, in-
finitely more of the amiable, social virtues than he has
distributed among his Greeks. With regard to the Trojans,
the passion he chooses to raise is pity; pity is a passion
founded on love ; and these lesser, and if I may say domestic
virtues, are certainly the most amiable. But he has made
134 EDMUND BURKE
the Greeks far their superiors in the politic and military
virtues. The councils of Priam are weak; the arms of
Hector comparatively feeble; his courage far below that of
Achilles. Yet we love Priam more than Agamemnon, and
Hector more than his conqueror Achilles. Admiration is
the passion which Homer would excite in favour of the
Greeks, and he has done it by bestowing on them the vir-
tues which have little to do with love. This short digres-
sion is perhaps not wholly beside our purpose, where our
business is to show, that objects of great dimensions are
incompatible with beauty, the more incompatible as they
are greater; whereas the small, if ever they fail of beauty,
this failure is not to be attributed to their size.
SECT. XXV. — OF COLOUR
With regard to colour, the disquisition is almost infinite:
but I conceive the principles laid down in the beginning of
this part are sufficient to account for the effects of them all,
as well as for the agreeable effects of transparent bodies,
whether fluid or solid. Suppose I look at a bottle of muddy
liquor, of a blue or red colour; the blue or red rays cannot
pass clearly to the eye, but are suddenly and unequally
stopped by the intervention of little opaque bodies, which
without preparation change the idea, and change it too into
one disagreeable in its own nature, conformably to the prin-
ciples laid down in sect. 24. But when the ray passes with-
out such opposition through the glass or liquor, when the
glass or liquor is quite transparent, the light is sometimes
softened in the passage, which makes it more agreeable even
as light; and the liquor reflecting all the rays of its proper
colour evenly, it has such an effect on the eye, as smooth
opaque bodies have on the eye and touch. So that the pleas-
ure here is compounded of the softness of the transmitted,
and the evenness of the reflected light. This pleasure may
be heightened by the common principles in other things, if
the shape of the glass which holds the transparent liquor be
so judiciously varied, as to present the colour gradually and
interchangeably, weakened and strengthened with all the
variety which judgment in affairs of this nature shall sug-
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 135
gest. On a review of all that has been said of the effects as
well as the causes of both, it will appear, that the sublime
and beautiful are built on principles very different, and that
their affections are as different: the great has terror for its
basis; which, when it is modified, causes that emotion in the
mind which I have called astonishment; the beautiful is
founded on mere positive pleasure, and excites in the soul
that feeling which is called love. Their causes have made
the subject of this fourth part.
PART V
Section I. — Of Words
NATURAL objects affect us, by the laws of that con-
nexion which Providence has established between
certain motions and configurations of bodies, and
certain consequent feelings in our mind. Painting affects
us in the same manner, but with the superadded pleasure of
imitation. Architecture affects by the laws of nature, and
the law of reason : from which latter result the rules of
proportion, which make a work to be praised or censured,
in the whole or in some part, when the end for which it was
designed is or is not properly answered. But as to words ;
they seem to me to affect us in a manner very different from
that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by
painting or architecture; yet words have as considerable a
share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime as many
of those, and sometimes a much greater than any of them :
therefore an inquiry into the manner by which they excite
such emotions is far from being unnecessary in a discourse
of this kind.
SECT. II. THE COMMON EFFECTS OF POETRY, NOT BY
RAISING IDEAS OF THINGS
The common notion of the power of poetry and eloquence,
as well as that of words in ordinary conversation, is that
they affect the mind by raising in it ideas of those things for
which custom has appointed them to stand. To examine the
truth of this notion, it may be requisite to observe, that
words may be divided into three sorts. The first are such as
represent many simple ideas united by nature to form some
one determinate composition, as man, horse, tree, castle, &c.
These I call aggregate words. The second are they that
136
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 137
stand for one simple idea of such compositions, and no
more; as red, blue, round, square, and the like. These I
call simple abstract words. The third are those which are
formed by an union, an arbitrary union, of both the others,
and of the various relations between them in greater or less
degrees of complexity; as virtue, honour, persuasion, magis-
trate, and the like. These I call compound abstract words.
Words, I am sensible, are capable of being classed into more
curious distinctions; but these seem to be natural, and
enough for our purpose; and they are disposed in that order
in which they are commonly taught, and in which the mind
gets the ideas they are substituted for. I shall begin with
the third sort of words ; compound abstracts, such as virtue,
honour, persuasion, docility. Of these I am convinced, that
whatever power they may have on the passions, they do not
derive it from any representation raised in the mind of
the things for which they stand. As compositions, they are
not real essences, and hardly cause, I think, any real ideas.
Nobody, I believe, immediately on hearing the sounds, vir-
tue, liberty, or honour, conceives any precise notions of the
particular modes of action and thinking together with the
mixt and simple ideas and the several relations of them for
which these words are substituted; neither has he any gen-
eral idea, compounded of them; for if he had, then some of
those particular ones, though indistinct perhaps, and con-
fused, might come soon to be perceived. But this, I take
it, is hardly ever the case. For, put yourself upon analyzing
one of these words, and you must reduce it from one set of
general words to another, and then into the simple abstracts
and aggregates, in a much longer series than may be at first
imagined, before any real idea emerges to light, before you
come to discover anything like the first principles of such
compositions; and when you have made such a discovery
of the original ideas, the effect of the composition is utterly
lost. A train of thinking of this sort is much too long to be
pursued in the ordinary ways of conversation ; nor is it at
all necessary that it should. Such words are in reality but
mere sounds; but they are sounds which being used on par-
ticular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer
some evil, or see others affected with good or evil ; or which
13 8 EDMUND BURKE
we hear applied to other interesting things or events; and
being applied in such a variety of cases, that we know
readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce
in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned,
effects similar to those of their occasions. The sounds
being often used without reference to any particular occa-
sion, and carrying still their first impressions, they at last
utterly lose their connexion with the particular occasions
that gave rise to them; yet the sound, without any annexed
notion, continues to operate as before.
SECT. III. — GENERAL WORDS BEFORE IDEAS
Mr. Locke has somewhere observed, with his usual sagac-
ity, that most general words, those belonging to virtue and
vice, good and evil, especially, are taught before the partic-
ular modes of action to which they belong are presented to
the mind; and with them, the love of the one, and the ab-
horrence of the other; for the minds of children are so
ductile, that a nurse, or any person about a child, by seem-
ing pleased or displeased with anything, or even any word,
may give the disposition of the child a similar turn. When,
afterwards, the several occurrences in life come to be ap-
plied to these words, and that which is pleasant often appears
under the name of evil ; and what is disagreeable to nature is
called good and virtuous; a strange confusion of ideas and
affections arises in the minds of many; and an appearance
of no small contradiction between their notions and their
actions. There are many who love virtue and who detest
vice, and this not from hypocrisy or affectation, who not-
withstanding very frequently act ill and wickedly in particu-
lars without the least remorse; because these particular
occasions never come into view, when the passions on the
side of virtue were so warmly affected by certain words
heated originally by the breath of others; and for this
reason, it is hard to repeat certain sets of words, though
owned by themselves unoperative, without being in some
degree affected; especially if a warm and affecting tone of
voice accompanies them, as suppose,
Wise, valiant, generous, good, and great.
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 139
These words, by having no application, ought to be un-
operative; but when words commonly sacred to great occa-
sions are used, we are affected by them even without the
occasions. When words which have been generally so
applied are put together without any rational view, or in
such a manner that they do not rightly agree with each
other, the style is called bombast. And it requires in
several cases much good sense and experience to be guarded
against the force of such language; for when propriety is
neglected, a greater number of these affecting words may
be taken into the service and a greater variety may be in-
dulged in combining them.
SECT. IV. — THE EFFECT OF WORDS
If words have all their possible extent of power, three
effects arise in the mind of the hearer. The first is, the '
sound; the second, the picture, or representation of the thing
signified by the sound; the third is, the affection of the soul
produced by one or by both of the foregoing. Compounded
abstract words, of which we have been speaking, (honour,
justice, liberty, and the like,) produce the first and the last
of these effects, but not the second. Simple abstracts are
used to signify some one simple idea, without much advert-
ing to others which may chance to attend it, as blue, green,
hot, cold, and the like; these are capable of affecting all
three of the purposes of words ; as the aggregate words, man,
castle, horse, &c, are in a yet higher degree. But I am of
opinion, that the most general effect, even of these words,
does not arise from their forming pictures of the several
things they would represent in the imagination ; because,
on a very diligent examination of my own mind, and getting
others to consider theirs, I do not find that once in twenty
times any such picture is formed, and when it is, there is
most commonly a particular effort of the imagination for
that purpose. But the aggregate words operate, as I said
of the compound-abstracts, not by presenting any image to
the mind, but by having from use the same effect on being
mentioned, that their original has when it is seen. Suppose
we were to read a passage to this effect : "The river Danube
140 EDMUND BURKE
rises in a moist and mountainous soil in the heart of Ger-
many, where winding to and fro, it waters several princi-
palities, until, turning into Austria, and leaving the walls of
Vienna, it passes into Hungary; there with a vast flood,
augmented by the Saave and the Drave, it quits Christen-
dom, and rolling through the barbarous countries which
border on Tartary, it enters by many mouths in the Black
Sea." In this description many things are mentioned, as
mountains, rivers, cities, the sea, &c. But let anybody ex-
amine himself, and see whether he has had impressed on
his imagination any pictures of a river, mountain, watery
soil. Germany, &c. Indeed it is impossible, in the rapidity
and quick succession of words in conversation to have ideas
both of the sound of the word, and of the thing represented:
besides, some words, expressing real essences, are so mixed
with others of a general and nominal import, that it is im-
practicable to jump from sense to thought, from particulars
to generals, from things to words, in such a manner as to
answer the purposes of life; nor is it necessary that we
should.
SECT. V. — EXAMPLES THAT WORDS MAY AFFECT WITHOUT
RAISING IMAGES
I find it very hard to persuade several that their passions
are affected by words from whence they have no ideas ; and
yet harder to convince them, that in the ordinary course of
conversation we are sufficiently understood without raising
any images of the things concerning which we speak. It
seems to be an odd subject of dispute with any man, whether
he has ideas in his mind or not. Of this, at first view, every
man, in his own forum, ought to judge without appeal. But,
strange as it may appear, we are often at a loss to know what
ideas we have of things, or whether we have any ideas at
all upon some subjects. It even requires a good deal of at-
tention to be thoroughly satisfied on this head. Since I wrote
these papers, I found two very striking instances of the pos-
sibility there is that a man may hear words without having
any idea of the things which they represent, and yet after-
wards be capable of returning them to others, combined in
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 141
a new way, and with great propriety, energy and instruc-
tion. The first instance is that of Mr. Blacklock, a poet
blind from his birth. Few men blessed with the most per-
fect sight can describe visual objects with more spirit and
justness than this blind man; which cannot possibly be at-
tributed to his having a clearer conception of the things he
describes than is common to other persons. Mr. Spence, in
an elegant preface which he has written to the works of
this poet, reasons very ingeniously,, and, I imagine, for the
most part, very rightly, upon the cause of this extraordinary
phenomenon ; but I cannot altogether agree with him, that
some improprieties in language and thought, which occur
in these poems, have arisen from the blind poet's imperfect
conception of visual objects, since such improprieties, and
much greater, may be found in writers even of a higher
class than Mr. Blacklock, and who notwithstanding pos-
sessed the faculty of seeing in its full perfection. Here is a
poet doubtless as much affected by his own descriptions as
any that reads them can be ; and yet he is affected with
this strong enthusiasm by things of which he neither has nor
can possibly have any idea further than that of a bare sound:
and why may not those who read his works be affected in
the same manner that he was, with as little of any real ideas
of the things described? The second instance is of Mr.
Saunderson, professor of mathematics in the university of
Cambridge. This learned man had acquired great knowl-
edge in natural philosophy, in astronomy, and whatever
sciences depend upon mathematical skill. What was the
most extraordinary and the most to my purpose, he gave
excellent lectures upon light and colours ; and this man
taught others the theory of these ideas which they had, and
which he himself undoubtedly had not. But it is probable
that the words red, blue, green, answered to him as well as
the ideas of the colours themselves; for the ideas of greater
or lesser degrees of refrangibility being applied to these
words, and the blind man being instructed in what other
respects they were found to agree or to disagree, it was as
easy for him to reason upon the words, as if he had been
fully master of the ideas. Indeed it must be owned he could
make no new discoveries in the way of experiment. He did
14 2 EDMUND BURKE
nothing but what we do every day in common discourse.
When I wrote this last sentence, and used the words every
day and common discourse, I had no images in my mind of
any succession of time; nor of men in conference with each
other; nor do I imagine that the reader will have any such
ideas on reading it. Neither when I spoke of red, or blue,
and green, as well as refrangibility, had I these several
colours or the rays of light passing into a different medium,
and there diverted from their course, painted before me in
the way of images. I know very well that the mind possesses
a faculty of raising such images at pleasure; but then an act
of the will is necessary to this; and in ordinary conversa-
tion or reading it is very rarely that any image at all is
excited in the mind. If I say, " I shall go to Italy next sum-
mer," I am well understood. Yet I believe nobody has by
this painted in his imagination the exact figure of the
speaker passing by land or by water, or both ; sometimes on
horseback, sometimes in a carriage; with all the particulars
of the journey. Still less has he any idea of Italy, the
country to which I propose to go; or of the greenness of the
fields, the ripening of the fruits, and the warmth of the air,
with the change to this from a different season, which are
the ideas for which the word summer is substituted: but
least of all has he any image from the word next; for this
word stands for the idea of many summers, with the ex-
clusion of all but one: and surely the man who says next
summer, has no images of such a succession and such an ex-
clusion.
In short, it is not only of those ideas which are com-
monly called abstract, and of which no image at all can
be formed, but even of particular, real beings, that we con-
verse without any idea of them excited in the imagination;
as will certainly appear on a diligent examination of our
minds. Indeed, so little does poetry depend for its effect
on the power of raising sensible images, that I am convinced
it would lose a very considerable part of its energy, if
this were the necessary result of all description. Because
that union of affecting words, which is the most powerful of
all poetical instruments, would frequently lose its force,
along with its propriety and consistency, if the sensible
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL' 143
images were always excited. There is not perhaps in the
whole Eneid a more grand and laboured passage tht,n the
description of Vulcan's cavern in Etna, and the works that
are there carried on. Virgil dwells particularly on the
formation of the thunder, which he describes unfinished
under the hammers of the Cyclops. But what are the
principles of this extraordinary composition?
Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosct
Addiderant ; rutili tres ignis, et alitis austri:
Fulgores nunc terrificos, sonitumque, metumque
Miscebant operi, flammisque sequacibus iras.
This seems to me admirably sublime; yet if we attend cooll)
to the kind of sensible images which a combination of ideas
of this sort must form, the chimeras of madmen cannot ap-
pear more wild and absurd than such a picture. "Three rays
of twisted showers, three of watery clouds, three of fire, and
three of the winged south wind; then mixed they in the work
terrific lightnings, and sound, and fear, and anger, with
pursuing flames." This strange composition is formed into
a gross body; it is hammered by the Cyclops, it is in part
polished, and partly continues rough. The truth is, if poetry
gives us a noble assemblage of words corresponding to many
noble ideas which are connected by circumstances of time
or place, or related to each other as cause and effect, or
associated in any natural way, they may be moulded to-
gether in any form, and perfectly answer their end. The
picturesque connexion is not demanded; because no real
picture is formed; nor is the effect of the description at all
the less upon this account. What is said of Helen by Priam
and the old men of his council, is generally thought to give
us the highest possible idea of that fatal beauty.
Ou v^/j.€(Ti5 i Tpwas Kal iiKuy/xiSas A%ato^s,
Totrj 5* afx(pl yvvaLKL iro\vv XP° V0V d\yea irdaxw
AtVws 5' adavdrrjcri derjs els tina €OiK€v.
They cried, No wonder such celestial charms
For nine long years have set the world in arms ;
What winning graces! what majestic mien!
She moves a goddess, and she looks a queen. Pope.
144 EDMUND BURKE
Here is not one word said of the particulars of her beauty;
nothing which can in the least help us to any precise idea of
her person ; but yet we are much more touched by this man-
ner of mentioning her than by those long and laboured de-
scriptions of Helen, whether handed down by tradition, or
formed by fancy, which are to be met with in some authors.
I am sure it affects me much more than the minute descrip-
tion which Spenser has given of Belphebe; though I own
that there are parts in that description, as there are in all
the descriptions of that excellent writer, extremely fine and
poetical.
The terrible picture which Lucretius has drawn of
religion, in order to display the magnanimity of his philo-
sophical hero in opposing her, is thought to be designed with
great boldness and spirit.
Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret,
In terris, oppressa gravi sub religione,
Qua caput e cceli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspectu mortalibus ins tans ;
Primus Graius homo mortales tollere contra
Est oculos ausus. —
What idea do you derive from so excellent a picture? none
at all, most certainly : neither has the poet said a single word
which might in the least serve to mark a single limb or fea-
ture of the phantom, which he intended to represent in all
the horrors imagination can conceive. In reality, poetry and
rhetoric do not succeed in exact description so well as paint-
ing does ; their business is, to affect rather by sympathy than
imitation ; to display rather the effect of things on the mind
of the speaker, or of others, than to present a clear idea of
the things themselves. This is their most extensive province,
and that in which they succeed the best.
SECT. VI POETRY NOT STRICTLY AN IMITATIVE ART
Hence we may observe that poetry, taken in its most gen-
eral sense, cannot with strict propriety be called an art of
imitation. It is indeed an imitation so far as it describes the
manners and passions of men which their words can express;
where animi motus effort interprete lingua. There it is
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 145
strictly imitation ; and all merely dramatic poetry is of this
sort. But descriptive poetry operates chiefly by substitution;
by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of
realities. Nothing is an imitation further than as it resem-
bles some other thing; and words undoubtedly have no sort
of resemblance to the ideas, for which they stand.
SECT. VII. — HOW WORDS INFLUENCE THE PASSIONS
Now, as words affect, not by any original power, but by
representation, it might be supposed, that their influence
over the passions should be but light; yet it is quite other-
wise ; for we find by experience, that eloquence and poetry
are as capable, nay indeed much more capable, of making
deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even
than nature itself in very many cases. And this arises chiefly
from these three causes. First, that we take an extraordinary
part in the passions of others, and that we are easily af-
fected and brought into sympathy by any tokens which are
shown of them ; and there are no tokens which can express
all the circumstances of most passions so fully as words; so
that if a person speaks upon any subject, he can not only
convey the subject to you, but likewise the manner in which
he is himself affected by it. Certain it is, that the influence
of most things on our passions is not so much from the
things themselves, as from our opinions concerning them;
and these again depend very much on the opinions of other
men, conveyable for the most part by words only. Secondly,
there are many things of a very affecting nature, which can
seldom occur in the reality, but the words that represent
them often do ; and thus they have an opportunity of making
a deep impression and taking root in the mind, whilst the
idea of the reality was transient; and to some perhaps never
really occurred in any shape, to whom it is notwithstanding
very affecting, as war, death, famine, &c. Besides, many
ideas have never been at all presented to the senses of any
men but by words, as God, angels, devils, heaven, and hell,
all of which have, however, a great influence over the pas-
sions. Thirdly, by words we have it in our power to make
such combinations as we cannot possibly do otherwise. By
146 EDMUND BURKE
this power of combining, we are able, by the addition of well-
chosen circumstances, to give a new life and force to the
simple object. In painting we may represent any fine figure
we please ; but we never can give it those enlivening touches
which it may receive from words. To represent an angel in
a picture, you can only draw a beautiful young man winged:
but what painting can furnish out anything so grand as the
addition of one word, "the angel of the Lord?" It is true,
I have here no clear idea; but these words affect the mind
more than the sensible image did; which is all I contend
for. A picture of Priam dragged to the altar's foot, and
there murdered, if it were well executed, would undoubtedly
be very moving; but there are very aggravating circum-
stances, which it could never represent:
Sanguine foedantem quos ipse saeraverat ignes.
As a further instance, let us consider those lines of Milton,
where he describes the travels of the fallen angels through
their dismal habitation :
— O'er many a dark and dreary vale
They passed, and many a region dolorous ;
O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp ;
Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death,
A universe of death. —
Here is displayed the force of union in
Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades;
which yet would lose the greatest part of their effect, if
they were not the
Rocks, caves, lakes, dens, bogs, fens, and shades —
of Death.
This idea or this affection caused by a word, which nothing
but a word could annex to the others, raises a very great
degree of the sublime; and this sublime is raised yet higher
by what follows, a ''universe of Death." Here are again
two ideas not presentable but by language; and an union of
them great and amazing beyond conception; if they may
ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL 147
properly be called ideas which present no distinct image to
the mind : — but still it will be difficult to conceive how words
can move the passions which belong to real objects, with-
out representing these objects clearly. This is difficult to
us, because we do not sufficiently distinguish, in our obser-
vations upon language, between a clear expression and a
strong expression. These are frequently confounded with
each other, though they are in reality extremely different.
The former regards the understanding, the latter belongs to
the passions. The one describes a thing as it is; the latter
describes it as it is felt. Now, as there is a moving tone of
voice, an impassioned countenance, an agitated gesture,
which affect independently of the things about which they
are exerted, so there are words, and certain dispositions of
words, which being peculiarly devoted to passionate sub-
jects; and always used by those who are under the influence
of any passion, touch and move us more than those which
far more clearly and distinctly express the subject matter.
We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description. The
truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description,
though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an
idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the
smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those
modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in
himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch
a fire already kindled in another, which probably might
never have been struck out by the object described. Words,
by strongly conveying the passions, by those means which
we have already mentioned, fully compensate for their weak-
ness in other respects. It may be observed, that very
polished languages, and such as are praised for their su-
perior clearness and perspicuity, are generally deficient in
strength. The French language has that perfection and
that defect, whereas the Oriental tongues, and in general
the languages of most unpolished people, have a great force
and energy of expression; and this is but natural. Unculti-
vated people are but ordinary observers of things, and not
critical in distinguishing them ; but, for that reason, they
admire more, and are more affected with what they see, and
therefore express themselves in a warmer and more pas-
148 EDMUND BURKE
sionate manner. If the affection be well conveyed, it will
work its effect without any clear idea, often without any
idea at all of the thing which has originally given rise to it.
It might be expected from the fertility of the subject, that
I should consider poetry, as it regards the sublime and beau-
tiful, more at large; but it must be observed that in this
light it has been often and well handled already. It was not
my design to enter into the criticism of the sublime and
beautiful in any art, but to attempt to lay down such princi-
ples as may tend to ascertain, to distinguish, and to form a
sort of standard for them; which purposes I thought might
be best effected by an inquiry into the properties of such
things in nature, as raise love and astonishment in us ; and
by showing in what manner they operated to produce these
passions. Words were only so far to be considered, as to
show upon what principle they w r ere capable of being the
representatives of these natural things, and by what powers
they were able to affect us often as strongly as the things
they represent, and sometimes much more strongly.
REFLECTIONS
ON
THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
AND
ON THE PROCEEDINGS IN CERTAIN SOCIETIES
IN LONDON RELATIVE TO THAT EVENT
IN A LETTER
INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT
TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS
1790
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
The characteristic passion of Burke's life was his love of
order. In spite of the varying relations held by him toward the
different parties in England during his political career, one may
easily find the key to his consistency in this central principle.
When the King's party sought to increase the royal prerogative,
he resisted ; when the old Whigs sought to make the government
of the country a means to the enrichment of their class, he re-
sisted; and when the sympathizers with the Revolution sought,
as Burke thought, to abolish government, lie resisted. Liberty
he claimed that he loved, but "a liberty connected with order" ;
and in each of the political movements just mentioned he dis-
cerned an attack on either liberty or order. He had a profound
veneration for the accumulated wisdom of centuries of experi-
ence, and held that the bounds of liberty should be enlarged with
great caution and very gradually. That a political system had
lasted a long time was to him an argument that it must to a
large extent be fit for its purpose, and that therefore it should
not be rashly changed.
With such views, Burke was bound to oppose the French Revo-
lution. The sweeping away of the traditions of ages, the erec-
tion of new forms of government built on abstract theories,
were abhorrent to him; and he threw himself with vehemence
into opposition. Much that was hopeful in the Revolution he
failed to see; and lie could not in his passion discriminate care-
fully among men and motives. But his treatment of the situa-
tion in these "Reflections," written before the Terror had begun
to alienate sympathy, shows great insight and prophetic wisdom.
This book led the reaction in England and made its arithor a
European figure. In tJiis country to-day, with our traditional
sympathy with the great upheaval, it is in the highest degree
valuable to see these momentous events through the eyes of a
great contemporary conservative.
150
REFLECTIONS
ON
THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE
IN A LETTER
INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SENT
TO A GENTLEMAN IN PARIS
[1790]
IT MAY not be unnecessary to inform the reader, that the
following Reflections had their origin in a correspond-
ence between the Author and a very young gentleman
at Paris, who did him the honour of desiring his opinion
upon the important transactions, which then, and ever since,
have so much occupied the attention of all men. An answer
was written some time in the month of October, 1789; but it
was kept back upon prudential considerations. That letter is
alluded to in the beginning of the following sheets. It has
been since forwarded to the person to whom it was addressed.
The reasons for the delay in sending it were assigned in a
short letter to the same gentleman. This produced on his
part a new and pressing application for the Author's senti-
ments.
The Author began a second and more full discussion on
the subject. This he had some thoughts of publishing early
in the last spring; but, the matter gaining upon him, he
found that what he had undertaken not only far exceeded
the measure of a letter, but that its importance required
rather a more detailed consideration than at that time he
had any leisure to bestow upon it. However, having thrown
down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and, indeed,
when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private
letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address,
1 151
152 EDMUND BURKE
when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent, and
had received another direction. A different plan, he is
sensible, might be more favourable to a commodious division
and distribution of his matter.
Dear Sir,
You are pleased to call again, and with some earnestness,
for my thoughts on the late proceedings in France. I will
not give you reason to imagine that I think my sentiments
of such value as to wish myself to be solicited about them.
They are of too little consequence to be very anxiously either
communicated or withheld. It was from attention to you,
and to you only, that I hesitated at the time when you first
desired to receive them. In the first letter I had the honour
to write to you, and which at length I send, I wrote neither
for, nor from, any description of men; nor shall I in this.
My errors, if any, are my own. My reputation alone is to
answer for them.
You see, Sir, by the long letter I have transmitted to you,
that though I do most heartily wish that France may be
animated by a spirit of rational liberty, and that I think you
bound, in all honest policy, to provide a permanent body in
which that spirit may reside, and an effectual organ by which
it may act, it is my misfortune to entertain great doubts
concerning several material points in your late transactions.
You imagined, when you wrote last, that I might possibly
be reckoned among the approvers of certain proceedings in
France, from the solemn public seal of sanction they have
received from two clubs of gentlemen in London, called the
Constitutional Society, and the Revolution Society.
I certainly have the honour to belong to more clubs than
one, in which the constitution of this kingdom, and the
principles of the glorious Revolution, are held in high rev-
erence and I reckon myself among the most forward in
my zeal for maintaining that constitution and those principles
in their utmost purity and vigour. It is because I do so
that I think it necessary for me that there should be no mis-
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 153
take. Those who cultivate the memory of our Revolution,
and those who are attached to the constitution of this king-
dom, will take good care how they are involved with persons,
who under the pretext of zeal towards the Revolution and
constitution too frequently wander from their true principles ;
and are ready on every occasion to depart from the firm but
cautious and deliberate spirit which produced the one, and
which presides in the other. Before I proceed to answer the
more material particulars in your letter, I shall beg leave to
give you such information as I have been able to obtain of
the two clubs which have thought proper, as bodies, to in-
terfere in the concerns of France; first assuring you, that I
am not, and that I have never been, a member of either of
those societies.
The first, calling itself the Constitutional Society, or So-
ciety for Constitutional Information, or by some such title, is,
I believe, of seven or eight years standing. The institution
of this society appears to be of a charitable, and so far of a
laudable nature: it was intended for the circulation, at the
expense of the members, of many books, which few others
would be at the expense of buying; and which might lie on
the hands of the booksellers, to the great loss of an useful
body of men. Whether the books, so charitably circulated,
were ever as charitably read, is more than I know. Possibly
several of them have been exported to France; and, like
goods not in request here, may with you have found a mar-
ket. I have heard much talk of the lights to be drawn from
books that are sent from hence. What improvements they
have had in their passage (as it is said some liquors are
meliorated by crossing the sea) I cannot tell: but I never
heard a man of common judgment, or the least degree of in-
formation, speak a word in praise of the greater part of the
publications circulated by that society; nor have their pro-
ceedings been accounted, except by some of themselves, as of
any serious consequence.
Your National Assembly seems to entertain much the same
opinion that I do of this poor charitable club. As a nation,
you reserved the whole stock of your eloquent acknowledg-
ments for the Revolution Society; when their fellows in the
Constitutional were, in equity, entitled to some share. Since
154 EDMUND BURKE
you have selected the Revolution Society as the great object
of your national thanks and praises, you will think me ex-
cusable in making its late conduct the subject of my observa-
tions. The National Assembly of France has given import-
ance to these gentlemen by adopting them: and they return
the favour, by acting as a committee in England for extend-
ing the principles of the National Assembly. Henceforward
we must consider them as a kind of privileged persons ; as no
inconsiderable members in the diplomatic body. This is one
among the revolutions which have given splendour to ob-
scurity, and distinction to undiscerned merit. Until very
lately I do not recollect to have heard of this club. I am
quite sure that it never occupied a moment of my thoughts ;
nor, I believe, those of any person out of their own set. I
find, upon inquiry, that on the anniversary of the Revolu-
tion in 1688, a club of dissenters, but of what denomination
I know not, have long had the custom of hearing a sermon
in one of their churches ; and that afterwards they spent the
day cheerfully, as other clubs do, at the tavern. But I never
heard that any public measure, or political system, much less
that the merits of the constitution of any foreign nation, had
been the subject of a formal proceeding at their festivals;
until, to my inexpressible surprise, I found them in a sort
of public capacity, by a congratulatory address, giving an
authoritative sanction to the proceedings of the National As-
sembly in France.
In the ancient principles and conduct of the club, so far at
least as they were declared, I see nothing to which I could
take exception. I think it very probable, that for some pur-
pose, new members may have entered among them ; and that
some truly Christian politicians, who love to dispense bene-
fits, but are careful to conceal the hand which distributes the
dole, may have made them the instruments of their pious de-
signs. Whatever I mav have reason to suspect concerning
private management, I shall speak of nothing as of a cer-
tainty but what is public.
For one, I should be sorry to be thought, directly or in-
directly, concerned in their proceedings. I certainly take
my full share, along with the rest of the world, in my indi-
vidual and private capacity, in speculating on what has been
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 155
done, or is doing, on the public stage, in any place ancient or
modern ; in the republic of Rome, or the republic of Paris ;
but having no general apostolical mission, being a citizen of
a particular state, and being bound up, in a considerable
degree, by its public will, I should think it at least im-
proper and irregular for me to open a formal public corre-
spondence with the actual government of a foreign nation,
without the express authority of the government under which
I live.
I should be still more unwilling to enter into that corre-
spondence under anything like an equivocal description, which
to many, unacquainted with our usages, might make the ad-
dress, in which I joined, appear as the act of persons in some
sort of corporate capacity, acknowledged by the laws of this
kingdom, and authorized to speak the sense of some part of
it. On account of the ambiguity and uncertainty of unau-
thorized general descriptions, and of the deceit which may
be practised under them, and not from mere formality, the
House of Commons would reject the most sneaking petition
for the most trifling object, under that mode of signature to
which you have thrown open the folding doors of your pres-
ence chamber, and have ushered into your National Assem-
bly with as much ceremony and parade, and with as great
a bustle of applause, as if you had been visited by the whole
representative majesty of the whole English nation. If what
this society has thought proper to send forth had been a
piece of argument, it would "have signified little whose argu-
ment it was. It would be neither the more nor the less
convincing on account of the party it came from. But this
is only a vote and resolution. It stands solely on authority;
and in this case it is the mere authority of individuals, few
of whom appear. Their signatures ought, in my opinion, to
have been annexed to their instrument. The world would
then have the means of knowing how many they are; who
they are ; and of what value their opinions may be, from their
personal abilities, from their knowledge, their experience, or
their lead and authority in this state. To me, who am but a
plain man, the proceeding looks a little too refined, and too
ingenious; it has too much the air of a political stratagem,
adopted for the sake of giving, under a high-sounding name,
156 EDMUND BURKE
an importance to the public declarations of this club, which,
when the matter came to be closely inspected, they did not
altogether so well deserve. It is a policy that has very much
the complexion of a fraud.
I flatter myself that I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty
as well as any gentleman of that society, be he who he
will ; and perhaps I have given as good proofs of my attach-
ment to that cause, in the whole course of my public con-
duct. I think I envy liberty as little as they do, to any other
nation. But I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame
to anything which relates to human actions, and human
concerns, on a simple view of the object, as it stands stripped
of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of meta-
physical abstraction. Circumstances (which with some
gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political
principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.
The circumstances are what render every civil and political
scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. Abstractedly
speaking, government, as well as liberty, is good; yet could
I, in common sense, ten years ago, have felicitated France on
her enjoyment of a government (for she then had a govern-
ment) without inquiry what the nature of that government
was, or how it was administered? Can I now congratulate
the same nation upon its freedom? Is it because liberty in
the abstract may be classed amongst the blessings of man-
kind, that I am seriously to felicitate a mad-man, who has
escaped from the protecting restraint and wholesome dark-
ness of his cell, on his restoration to the enjoyment of light
and liberty? Am I to congratulate a highwayman and
murderer, who has broke prison, upon the recovery of his
natural rights? This would be to act over again the scene
of the criminals condemned to the galleys, and their heroic
deliverer, the metaphysic knight of the sorrowful counten-
ance.
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong
principle at work ; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly
know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke
loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first
effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and
until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 157
and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before T ven-
ture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they
have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the re-
ceiver and the giver ; and adulation is not of more service to
the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my
congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was
informed how it had been combined with government; with
public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies;
with the collection of an effective and well-distributed
revenue ; with morality and religion ; with the solidity of prop-
erty; with peace and order; with civil and social manners.
All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without
them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely
to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that
they may do what they please : we ought to see what it will
please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may
be soon turned into complaints. Prudence would dictate
this in the case of separate, insulated, private men ; but
liberty, when men act in bodies, is power. Considerate
people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use
which is made of power; and particularly of so trying a
thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles,
tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience,
and in situations, where those who appear the most stirring
in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.
All these considerations however were below the transcen-
dental dignity of the Revolution Society. Whilst I con-
tinued in the country, from whence I had the honour of
writing to you, I had but an imperfect idea of their trans-
actions. On my coming to town, I sent for an account of
their proceedings, which had been published by their au-
thority, containing a sermon of Dr. Price, with the Duke de
Rochefaucault's and the Archbishop of Aix's letter, and
several other documents annexed. The whole of that publi-
cation, with the manifest design of connecting the affairs of
France with those of England, by drawing us into an imita-
tion of the conduct of the National Assembly, gave me a
considerable degree of uneasiness. The effect of that conduct
upon the power, credit, prosperity, and tranquillity of France,
became every day more evident. The form of consti-
158 EDMUND BURKE
tution to be settled, for its future polity, became more
clear. We are now in a condition to discern, with tolerable
exactness, the true nature of the object held up to our imita-
tion. If the prudence of reserve and decorum dictates silence
in some circumstances, in others prudence of a higher order
may justify us in speaking our thoughts. The beginnings of
confusion with us in England are at present feeble enough;
but, with you, we have seen an infancy, still more feeble,
growing by moments into a strength to heap mountains
upon mountains, and to wage war with heaven itself. When-
ever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for
the engines to play a little on our own. Better to be de-
spised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too
confident a security.
Solicitous chiefly for the peace of my own country, but
by no means unconcerned for yours, I wish to communicate
more largely what was at first intended only for your private
satisfaction. I shall still keep your affairs in my eye, and
continue to address myself to you. Indulging myself in the
freedom of epistolary intercourse, I beg leave to throw out
my thoughts, and express my feelings, just as they arise in
my mind, with very little attention to formal method. I set
out with the proceedings of the Revolution Society; but I
shall not confine myself to them. Is it possible I should?
It appears to me as if I were in a great crisis, not of the
affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more
than Europe. All circumstances taken together, the French
Revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened
in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about
in many instances by means the most absurd and ridicu-
lous; in the most ridiculous modes; and, apparently, by the
most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of
nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of
all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.
In viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most oppo-
site passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with
each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation;
alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.
It cannot, however, be denied, that to some this strange
scene appeared in quite another point of view. Into them
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 159
it inspired no other sentiments than those of exultation and
rapture. They saw nothing in what has been done in France,
but a firm and temperate exertion of freedom; so consistent,
on the whole, with morals and with piety as to make it
deserving not only of the secular applause of dashing Machi-
avelian politicians, but to render it a fit theme for all the
devout effusions of sacred eloquence.
On the forenoon of the 4th of November last, Doctor Rich-
ard Price, a non-conforming minister of eminence, preached
at the dissenting meeting-house of the Old Jewry, to his
club or society, a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon,
in which there are some good moral and religious sentiments,
and not ill expressed, mixed up in a sort of porridge of
various political opinions and reflections; but the Revolution
in France is the grand ingredient in the cauldron. I con-
sider the address transmitted by the Revolution Society to the
National Assembly, through Earl Stanhope, as originating
in the principles of the sermon, and as a corollary from
them. It was moved by the preacher of that discourse. It
was passed by those who came reeking from the effect of the
sermon, without any censure or qualification, expressed or
implied. If, however, any of the gentlemen concerned shall
wish to separate the sermon from the resolution, they know
how to acknowledge the one, and to disavow the other. They
may do it: I cannot.
For my part, I looked on that sermon as the public declara-
tion of a man much connected with literary caballers, and
intriguing philosophers; with political theologians, and theo-
logical politicians, both at home and abroad. I know they
set him up as a sort of oracle; because, with the best inten-
tions in the world, he naturally Philippines, and chants his
prophetic song in exact unison with their designs.
That sermon is in a strain which I believe has not been
heard in this kingdom, in any of the pulpits which are toler-
ated or encouraged in it, since the year 1648; when a pre-
decessor of Dr. Price, the Rev. Hugh Peters, made the vault
of the king's own chapel at St. James's ring with the honour
and privilege of the saints, who, with the " high praises of
God in their mouths, and a two-edged sword in their hands,
were to execute judgment on the heathen, and punishments
160 EDMUND BURKE
upon the people; to bind their kings with chains, and their
nobles with fetters of iron." 1 Few harangues from the
pulpit, except in the days of your league in France, or in
the days of our solemn league and covenant in England, have
ever breathed less of the spirit of moderation than this lecture
in the Old Jewry. Supposing, however, that something like
moderation were visible in this political sermon ; yet politics
and the pulpit are terms that have little agreement. No
sound ought to be heard in the church but the healing voice
of Christian charity. The cause of civil liberty and civil
government gains as little as that of religion by this con-
fusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character, to
assume what does not belong to them, are, for the greater
part, ignorant both of the character they leave, and of the
character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world
in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in
all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confi-
dence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they ex-
cite. Surely the church is a place where one day's truce ought
to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.
This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance,
had to me the air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly
without danger. I do not charge this danger equally to
every part of the discourse. The hint given to a noble and
reverend lay-divine, who is supposed high in office in one
of our universities, 2 and other lay-divines " of rank and
literature," may be proper and seasonable, though somewhat
new. If the noble Seekers should find nothing to satisfy
their pious fancies in the old staple of the national church,
or in all the rich variety to be found in the well-assorted
warehouses of the dissenting congregations, Dr. Price advises
them to improve upon non-conformity; and to set up, each
of them, a separate meeting-house upon his own particular
principles. 3 It is somewhat remarkable that this reverend
1 Psalm cxlix.
9 Discourse on the Love of our Country, Nov. 4th, 1789, by Dr. Richard
Price, 3rd edition, p. 17 and 18.
8 " Those who dislike that mode of worship which is prescribed by public
authority, ought, if they can find no worship out of the church which they
approve, to set up a separate worship for themselves; and by doing this,
and giving an example of a rational and manly worship, men of weight
from their rank and literature may do the greatest service to society and
the world."— P. 18, Dr. Price's Sermon.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 161
divine should be so earnest for setting up new churches, and
so perfectly indifferent concerning the doctrine which may
be taught in them. His zeal is of a curious character. It
is not for the propagation of his own opinions, but of any
opinions. It is not for the diffusion of truth, but for the
spreading of contradiction. Let the noble teachers but dis-
sent, it is no matter from whom or from what. This great
point once secured, it is taken for granted their religion will
be rational and manly. I doubt whether religion would reap
all the benefits which the calculating divine computes from
this " great company of great preachers." It would certainly
be a valuable addition of non-descripts to the ample collection
of known classes, genera and species, which at present beau-
tify the hortus siccus of dissent. A sermon from a noble duke,
or a noble marquis, or a noble earl, or baron bold, would
certainly increase and diversify the amusements of this town,
which begins to grow satiated with the uniform round of its
vapid dissipations. I should only stipulate that these new
Mess-Johns in robes and coronets should keep some sort of
bounds in the democratic and levelling principles which are
expected from their titled pulpits. The new evangelists will,
I dare say, disappoint the hopes that are conceived of them.
They will not become, literally as well as figuratively, polemic
divines, nor be disposed so to drill their congregations, that
they may, as in former blessed times, preach their doctrines
to regiments of dragoons and corps of infantry and artillery.
Such arrangements, however favourable to the cause of com-
pulsory freedom, civil and religious, may not be equally con-
ducive to the national tranquillity. These few restrictions I
hope are no great stretches of intolerance, no very violent
exertions of despotism.
But I may say of our preacher, " utinam nugis tota ilia
dedisset tempora scevitice." — All things in this his fulminating
bull are not of so innoxious a tendency. His doctrines af-
fect our constitution in its vital parts. He tells the Revo-
lution Society in this political sermon, that his Majesty "is
almost the only lawful king in the world, because the only
one who owes his crown to the choice of his people." As to
the kings of the world, all of whom (except one) this arch-
pontiff of the rights of men, with all the plenitude, and with
hc p — vol. XXIV
162 EDMUND BURKE
more than the boldness, of the papal deposing power in its
meridian fervour of the twelfth century, puts into one sweep-
ing clause, of ban and anathema, and proclaims usurpers by-
circles of longitude and latitude, over the whole globe, it
behoves them to consider how they admit into their terri-
tories these apostolic missionaries, who are to tell their sub-
jects they are not lawful kings. That is their concern. It
is ours, as a domestic interest of some moment, seriously to
consider the solidity of the only principle upon which these
gentlemen acknowledge a king of Great Britain to be en-
titled to their allegiance.
This doctrine, as applied to the prince now on the British
throne, either is nonsense, and therefore neither true nor
false, or it affirms a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and
unconstitutional position. According to this spiritual doctor
of politics, if his Majesty does not owe his crown to the
choice of his people, he is no lawful king. Now nothing can
be more untrue than that the crown of this kingdom is so
held by his Majest}^ Therefore if you follow their rule, the
king of Great Britain, who most certainly does not owe his
high office to any form of popular election, is in no respect
better than the rest of the gang of usurpers, who reign, or
rather rob, all over the face of this our miserable world,
without any sort of right or title to the allegiance of their
people. The policy of this general doctrine, so qualified, is
evident enough. The propagators of this political gospel are
in hopes that their abstract principle (their principle that a
popular choice is necessary to the legal existence of the
sovereign magistracy) would be overlooked, whilst the king
of Great Britain was not affected by it. In the mean time
the ears of their congregations would be gradually habitu-
ated to it, as if it were a first principle admitted without
dispute. For the present it would only operate as a theory,
pickled in the preserving juices of pulpit eloquence, and laid
by for future use. Condo et compono qua mox depromere
passim. By this policy, whilst our government is soothed
with a reservation in its favour, to which it has no claim, the
security, which it has in common with all governments, so
far as opinion is security, is taken away.
Thus these politicians proceed, whilst little notice is taken
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 163
of their doctrines ; but when they come to be examined upon
the plain meaning of their words, and the direct tendency of
their doctrines, then equivocations and slippery constructions
come into play. When they say the king owes his crown to
the choice of his people, and is therefore the only lawful
sovereign in the world, they will perhaps tell us they mean
to say no more than that some of the king's predecessors
have been called to the throne by some sort of choice; and
therefore he owes his crown to the choice of his people.
Thus, by a miserable subterfuge, they hope to render their
proposition safe, by rendering it nugatory. They are wel-
come to the asylum they seek for their offence, since they
take refuge in their folly. For, if you admit this interpreta-
tion, how does their idea of election differ from our idea of
inheritance?
And how does the settlement of the crown in the Bruns-
wick line derived from James the First come to legalize
our monarchy, rather than that of any of the neighbour-
ing countries? At some time or other, to be sure, all
the beginners of dynasties were chosen by those who called
them to govern. There is ground enough for the opinion
that all the kingdoms of Europe were, at a remote period,
elective, with more or fewer limitations in the objects of
choice. But whatever kings might have been here, or else-
where, a thousand years ago, or in whatever manner the
ruling dynasties of England or France may have begun, the
king of Great Britain is, at this day, king by a fixed rule of
succession, according to the laws of his country; and whilst
the legal conditions of the compact of sovereignty are per-
formed by him, (as they are performed,) he holds his crown
in contempt of the choice of the Revolution Society, who
have not a single vote for a king amongst them, either indi-
vidually or collectively; though I make no doubt they would
soon erect themselves into an electoral college, if things
were ripe to give effect to their claim. His Majesty's heirs
and successors, each in his time and order, will come to the
crown with the same contempt of their choice with which
his Majesty has succeeded to that he wears.
Whatever may be the success of evasion in explaining
away the gross error of fact, which supposes that his Majesty
164 EDMUND BURKE
(though he holds it in concurrence with the wishes) owes his
crown to the choice of his people, yet nothing can evade
their full explicit declaration concerning the principle of a
right in the people to choose; which right is directly main-
tained, and tenaciously adhered to. All the oblique insinua-
tions concerning election bottom in this proposition, and
are referable to it. Lest the foundation of the king's exclu-
sive legal title should pass for a mere rant of adulatory free-
dom, the political divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, 1
that, by the principles of the Revolution, the people of
England have acquired three fundamental rights, all which,
with him, compose one system, and lie together in one short
sentence; namely, that we have acquired a right,
1. " To choose our own governors."
2. " To cashier them for misconduct."
3. " To frame a government for ourselves."
This new, and hitherto unheard-of, bill of rights, though
made in the name of the whole people, belongs to those
gentlemen and their faction only. The body of the people
of England have no share in it. They utterly disclaim it.
They will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives
and fortunes. They are bound to do so by the laws of their
country, made at the time of that very Revolution which is
appealed to in favour of the fictitious rights claimed by the
Society which abuses its name.
These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings
on the Revolution of 1688, have a Revolution which hap-
pened in England about forty years before, and the late
French Revolution, so much before their eyes, and in their
hearts, that they are constantly confounding all the three to-
gether. It is necessary that we should separate what they
confound. We must recall their erring fancies to the acts
of the Revolution which we revere, for the discovery of its
true principles. If the principles of the Revolution of 1688
are anywhere to be found, it is in the statute called the Dec-
laration of Right. In that most wise, sober, and consider-
ate declaration, drawn up by great lawyers and great states-
men, and not by warm and inexperienced enthusiasts, not one
word is said, nor one suggestion made, of a general right " to
1 P- 34. Discourse on the Love of our Country, by Dr. Price.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 165
choose our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct;
and to form a government for ourselves."
This Declaration of Right (the act of the ist of William
and Mary, sess. 2, ch. 2) is the corner-stone of our consti-
tution, as reinforced, explained, improved, and in its funda-
mental principles for ever settled. It is called " An Act for
declaring the rights and liberties of the subject, and for set-
tling the succession of the crown." You will observe, that
these rights and this succession are declared in one body, and
bound indissolubly together.
A few years after this period, a second opportunity offered
for asserting a right of election to the crown. On the
prospect of a total failure of issue from King William, and
from the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, the consideration
of the settlement of the crown, and of a further security
for the liberties of the people, again came before the legis-
lature. Did they this second time make any provision for
legalizing the crown on the spurious revolution principles of
the Old Jewry? No. They followed the principles which
prevailed in the Declaration of Right; indicating with more
precision the persons who were to inherit in the Protestant
line. This act also incorporated, by the same policy, our
liberties, and an hereditary succession in the same act. In-
stead of a right to choose our own governors, they declared
that the succession in that line (the Protestant line drawn
from James the First) was absolutely necessary " for the
peace, quiet, and security of the realm," and that it was
equally urgent on them " to maintain a certainty in the suc-
cession thereof, to which the subjects may safely have re-
course for their protection." Both these acts, in which are
heard the unerring, unambiguous oracles of revolution policy,
instead of countenancing the delusive, gipsy predictions of a
" right to choose our governors," prove to a demonstration
how totally adverse the wisdom of the nation was from turn-
ing a case of necessity into a rule of law.
Unquestionably there was at the Revolution, in the per-
son of King William, a small and a temporary deviation from
the strict order of a regular hereditary succession; but it is
against all genuine principles of jurisprudence to draw a
principle from a law made in a special case, and regarding
166 EDMUND BURKE
an individual person. Privilegium non transit in exemplum.
If ever there was a time favourable for establishing the
principle, that a king of popular choice was the only legal
king, without all doubt it was at the Revolution. Its not
being done at that time is a proof that the nation was of
opinion it ought not to be done at any time. There is no
person so completely ignorant of our history as not to know,
that the majority in parliament of both parties were so little
disposed to anything resembling that principle, that at first
they were determined to place the vacant crown, not on the
head of the Prince of Orange, but on that of his wife Mary,
daughter of King James, the eldest born of the issue of that
king, which they acknowledged as undoubtedly his. It would
be to repeat a very trite story, to recall to your memory all
those circumstances which demonstrated that their accept-
ing King William was not properly a choice; but to all those
who did not wish, in effect, to recall King James, or to deluge
their country in blood, and again to bring their religion, laws,
and liberties into the peril they had just escaped, it was an
act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense in which neces-
sity can be taken.
In the very act, in which for a time, and in a single case,
parliament departed from the strict order of inheritance,
in favour of a prince, who, though not next, was however
very near, in the line of succession, it is curious to observe
how Lord Somers, who drew the bill called the Declaration
of Right, has comported himself on that delicate occasion.
It is curious to observe with what address this temporary
solution of continuity is kept from the eye; whilst all that
could be found in this act of necessity to countenance the
idea of an hereditary succession is brought forward, and
fostered, and made the most of, by this great man, and
by the legislature who followed him. Quitting the dry, im-
perative style of an act of parliament, he makes the Lords
and Commons fall to a pious, legislative ejaculation, and
declare, that they consider it " as a marvellous providence,
and merciful goodness of God to this nation, to preserve
their said Majesties' royal persons, most happily to reign
over us on the throne of their ancestors, for which, from the
bottom of their hearts, they return their humblest thanks
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 167
and praises." — The legislature plainly had in view the act of
recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 3rd, and of
that of James the First, chap. 1st, both acts strongly de-
claratory of the inheritable nature of the crown, and in
many parts they follow, with a nearly literal precision, the
words and even the form of thanksgiving which is found in
these old declaratory statutes.
The two Houses, in the act of King William, did not
thank God that they had found a fair opportunity to assert
a right to choose their own governors, much less to make an
election the only lawful title to the crown. Their having
been in a condition to avoid the very appearance of it, as
much as possible, was by them considered as a providential
escape. They threw a politic, well-wrought veil over every
circumstance tending to weaken the rights, which in the
meliorated order of succession they meant to perpetuate; or
which might furnish a precedent for any future departure
from what they had then settled for ever. Accordingly,
that they might not relax the nerves of their monarchy,
and that they might preserve a close conformity to the prac-
tice of their ancestors, as it appeared in the declaratory
statutes of Queen Mary 1 and Queen Elizabeth, in the next
clause they vest, by recognition, in their Majesties, all the
legal prerogatives of the crown, declaring, " that in them
they are most fully, rightfully, and entirely invested, incor-
porated, united, and annexed." In the clause which fol-
lows, for preventing questions, by reason of aay pretended
titles to the crown, they declare, (observing also in this the
traditionary language, along with the traditionary policy
of the nation, and repeating as from a rubric the language
of the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James,) that on the
preserving " a certainty in the succession thereof, the unity,
peace, and tranquillity of this nation doth, under God, wholly
depend."
They knew that a doubtful title of succession would but
too much resemble an election ; and that an election would
be utterly destructive of the " unity, peace, and tranquillity
of this nation," which they thought to be considerations of
some moment. To provide for these objects, and therefore
1 ist Mary, sess. 3, ch. 1.
168 EDMUND BURKE
to exclude for ever the Old Jewry doctrine of " a right to
choose our own governors," they follow with a clause con-
taining a most solemn pledge, taken from the preceding act
of Queen Elizabeth, as solemn a pledge as ever was or can
be given in favour of an hereditary succession, and as solemn
a renunciation as could be made of the principles by this
Society imputed to them. "The Lords spiritual and tem-
poral, and Commons, do, in the name of all the people afore-
said, most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their
heirs and posterities for ever; and do faithfully promise that
they will stand to maintain, and defend their said Majesties,
and also the limitation of the crown, herein specified and con-
tained, to the utmost of their powers," &c. &c.
So far is it from being true, that we acquired a right by
the Revolution to elect our kings, that if we had possessed
it before, the English nation did at that time most solemnly
renounce and abdicate it, for themselves, and for all their
posterity for ever. These gentlemen may value themselves
as much as they please on their Whig principles; but I
never desire to be thought a better Whig than Lord Somers ;
or to understand the principles of the Revolution better than
those by whom it was brought about; or to read in the Dec-
laration of Right any mysteries unknown to those whose
penetrating style has engraved in our ordinances, and in our
hearts, the words and spirit of that immortal law.
It is true, that, aided with the powers derived from force
and opportunity, the nation was at that time, in some sense,
free to take what course it pleased for filling the throne;
but only free to do so upon the same grounds on which they
might have wholly abolished their monarchy, and every
other part of their constitution. However, they did not
think such bold changes within their commission. It is in-
deed difficult, perhaps impossible, to give limits to the mere
abstract competence of the supreme power, such as was exer-
cised by parliament at that time; but the limits of a moral
competence, subjecting, even in powers more indisputably
sovereign, occasional will to permanent reason, and to the
steady maxims of faith, justice, and fixed fundamental policy,
are perfectly intelligible, and perfectly binding upon those
who exercise any authority, under any name, or under any
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 169
title, in the state. The House of Lords, for instance, is not
morally competent to dissolve the House of Commons;
no, nor even to dissolve itself, nor to abdicate, if it would,
its portion in the legislature of the kingdom. Though a king
may abdicate for his own person, he cannot abdicate for the
monarchy. By as strong, or by a stronger reason, the House
of Commons cannot renounce its share of authority. The
engagement and pact of society, which generally goes by the
name of the constitution, forbids such invasion and such
surrender. The constituent parts of a state are obliged to
hold their public faith with each other, and with all those
who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as
much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with
separate communities. Otherwise competence and power
would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will
of a prevailing force. On this principle the succession of
the crown has always been what it now is, an hereditary
succession by law: in the old line it was a succession by the
common law; in the new by the statute law, operating on
the principles of the common law, not changing the sub-
stance, but regulating the mode, and describing the persons.
Both these descriptions of law are of the same force, and are
derived from an equal authority, emanating from the com-
mon agreement and original compact of the state, communi
sponsione reipublicce, and as such are equally binding on king
and people too, as long as the terms are observed, and they
continue the same body politic.
It is far from impossible to reconcile, if we do not suffer
ourselves to be entangled in the mazes of metaphysic sophis-
try, the use both of a fixed rule and an occasional deviation ;
the sacredness of an hereditary principle of succession in
our government, with a power of change in its application
in cases of extreme emergency. Even in that extremity, (if
we take the measure of our rights by our exercise of them
at the Revolution,) the change is to be confined to the pec-
cant part only; to the part which produced the necessary
deviation ; and even then it is to be effected without a de-
composition of the whole civil and political mass, for the
purpose of originating a new civil order out of the first
elements of society.
170 EDMUND BURKE
A state without the means of some change is without the
means of its conservation. Without such means it might
even risk the loss of that part of the constitution which it
wished the most religiously to preserve. The two princi-
ples of conservation and correction operated strongly at the
two critical periods of the Restoration and Revolution, when
England found itself without a king. At both those periods
the nation had lost the bond of union in their ancient edifice ;
they did not, however, dissolve the whole fabric. On the
contrary, in both cases they regenerated the deficient part
of the old constitution through the parts which were not
impaired. They kept these old parts exactly as they were,
that the part recovered might be suited to them. They
acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their
old organization, and not by the organic molecules of a dis-
banded people. At no time, perhaps, did the sovereign
legislature manifest a more tender regard to that funda-
mental principle of British constitutional policy, than at the
time of the Revolution, when it deviated from the direct
fine of hereditary succession. The crown was carried some-
what out of the line in which it had before moved; but the
new line was derived from the same stock. It was still a
line of hereditary descent; still an hereditary descent in
the same blood, though an hereditary descent qualified with
Protestantism. When the legislature altered the direction, but
kept the principle, they showed that they held it inviolable.
On this principle, the law of inheritance had admitted
some amendment in the old time, and long before the era
of the Revolution. Some time after the conquest, great
questions arose upon the legal principles of hereditary
descent. It became a matter of doubt, whether the heir
per capita or the heir per stirpes was to succeed ; but whether
the heir per capita gave way when the heirdom per stirpes
took place, or the Catholic heir when the Protestant was
preferred, the inheritable principle survived with a sort of
immortality through all transmigrations — multosque per
annos stat fortuna domus, ct avi numerantur avorum. This
is the spirit of our constitution, not only in its settled course,
but in all its revolutions. Whoever came in, or, however he
came in, whether he obtained the crown by law, or by force,
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 171
the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted.
The gentlemen of the Society for Revolutions see nothing
in that of 1688 but the deviation from the constitution ; and
they take the deviation from the principle for the principle.
They have little regard to the obvious consequences of their
doctrine, though they must see, that it leaves positive author-
ity in very few of the positive institutions of this country.
When such an unwarrantable maxim is once established, that
no throne is lawful but the elective, no one act of the princes
who preceded this era of fictitious election can be valid. Do
these theorists mean to imitate some of their predecessors,
who dragged the bodies of our ancient sovereigns out of
the quiet of their tombs? Do they mean to attaint and dis-
able backwards all the kings that have reigned before the
Revolution, and consequently to stain the throne of England
with the blot of a continual usurpation? Do they mean to
invalidate, annul, or to call into question, together with the
titles of the whole line of our kings, that great body of our
statute law which passed under those whom they treat as
usurpers? to annul laws of inestimable value to our liberties
— of as great value at least as any which have passed at or
since the period of the Revolution? If kings, who did not
owe their crown to the choice of their people, had no title to
make laws, what will become of the statute de tallagio non
concedcndo? — of the petition of right? — of the act of habeas
corpus? Do these new doctors of the rights of men pre-
sume to assert, that King James the Second, who came to
the crown as next of blood, according to the rules of a then
unqualified succession, was not to all intents and purposes a
lawful king of England, before he had done any of those
acts which were justly construed into an abdication of his
crown? If he was not, much trouble in parliament might
have been saved at the period these gentlemen commemorate.
But King James was a bad king with a good title, and not an
usurper. The princes who succeeded according to the act
of parliament which settled the crown on the Electress
Sophia and on her descendants, being Protestants, came in
as much by a title of inheritance as King James did. He
came in according to the law, as it stood at his accession to
the crown ; and the princes of the House of Brunswick came
172 EDMUND BURKE
to the inheritance of the crown, not by election, but by the
law as it stood at their several accessions of Protestant
descent and inheritance, as I hope I have shown sufficiently.
The law, by which this royal family is specifically destined
to the succession, is the act of the 12th and 13th of King
William. The terms of this act bind " us and our heirs, and
our posterity, to them, their heirs, and their posterity," being
Protestants, to the end of time, in the same words as the
Declaration of Right had bound us to the heirs of King
William and Queen Mary. It therefore secures both an
hereditary crown and an hereditary allegiance. On what
ground, except the constitutional policy of forming an estab-
lishment to secure that kind of succession which is to pre-
clude a choice of the people for ever, could the legislature
have fastidiously rejected the fair and abundant choice
which our country presented to them, and searched in
strange lands for a foreign princess, from whose womb the
line of our future rulers were to derive their title to govern
millions of men through a series of ages?
The Princess Sophia was named in the act of settlement
of the 12th and 13th of King William, for a stock and root
of inheritance to our kings, and not for her merits as a
temporary administratrix of a power, which she might not,
and in fact did not, herself ever exercise. She was adopted
for one reason, and for one only, because, says the act, " the
most excellent Princess Sophia, Electress and Duchess Dow-
ager of Hanover, is daughter of the most excellent Princess
Elizabeth, late Queen of Bohemia, daughter of our late
sovereign lord King James the First, of happy memory, and
is hereby declared to be the next in succession in the Protes-
tant line," &c, &c. ; "and the crown shall continue to the
heirs of her body, being Protestants." This limitation was
made by parliament, that through the Princess Sophia an
inheritable line not only was to be continued in future, but
(what they thought very material) that through her it was
to be connected with the old stock of inheritance in King
James the First ; in order that the monarchy might preserve
an unbroken unity through all ages, and might be preserved
(with safety to our religion) in the old approved mode by
descent, in which, if our liberties had been once endangered,
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 173
they had often, through all storms and struggles of preroga-
tive and privilege, been preserved. They did well. No
experience has taught us, that in any other course or method
than that of an hereditary crown our liberties can be regu-
larly perpetuated and preserved sacred as our hereditary
right. An irregular, convulsive movement may be necessary
to throw off an irregular, convulsive disease. But the course
of succession is the healthy habit of the British constitution.
Was it that the legislature wanted, at the act for the limita-
tion of the crown in the Hanoverian line, drawn through
the female descendants of James the First, a due sense of
the inconveniences of having two or three, or possibly more,
foreigners in succession to the British throne ? No ! — they
had a due sense of the evils which might happen from such
foreign rule, and more than a due sense of them. But a
more decisive proof cannot be given of the full conviction
of the British nation, that the principles of the Revolution
did not authorize them to elect kings at their pleasure, and
without any attention to the ancient fundamental principles
of our government, than their continuing to adopt a plan of
hereditary Protestant succession in the old line, with all the
dangers and all the inconveniences of its being a foreign line
full before their eyes, and operating with the utmost force
upon their minds.
A few years ago I should be ashamed to overload a matter,
so capable of supporting itself, by the then unnecessary sup-
port of any argument; but this seditious, unconstitutional
doctrine is now publicly taught, avowed, and printed. The
dislike I feel to revolutions, the signals for which have so
often been given from pulpits; the spirit of change that is
gone abroad; the total contempt which prevails with you,
and may come to prevail with us, of all ancient institutions,
when set in opposition to a present sense of convenience, or
to the bent of a present inclination : all these considerations
make it not unadvisable, in my opinion, to call back our at-
tention to the true principles of our own domestic laws ; that,
you, my French friend, should begin to know, and that we
should continue to cherish them. We ought not, on either
side of the water, to suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by
the counterfeit wares which some persons, by a double fraud,
174 EDMUND BURKE
export to you in illicit bottoms, as raw commodities of
British growth, though wholly alien to our soil, in order
afterwards to smuggle them back again into this country,
manufactured after the newest Paris fashion of an improved
liberty.
The people of England will not ape the fashions they have
never tried, nor go back to those which they have found
mischievous on trial. They look upon the legal hereditary
succession of their crown as among their rights, not as
among their wrongs; as a benefit, not as a grievance; as a
security for their liberty, not as a badge of servitude. They
look on the frame of their commonwealth, such as it stands,
to be of inestimable value; and they conceive the undis-
turbed succession of the crown to be a pledge of the stability
and perpetuity of all the other members of our constitution.
I shall beg leave, before I go any further, to take notice
of some paltry artifices, which the abettors of election, as the
only lawful title to the crown, are ready to employ, in order
to render the support of the just principles of our consti-
tution a task somewhat invidious. These sophisters substi-
tute a fictitious cause, and feigned personages, in whose
favour they suppose you engaged, whenever you defend the
inheritable nature of the crown. It is common with them to
dispute as if they were in a conflict with some of those ex-
ploded fanatics of slavery, who formerly maintained, what I
believe no creature now maintains, " that the crown is held
by divine hereditary and indefeasible right." — These old
fanatics of single arbitrary power dogmatized as if heredi-
tary royalty was the only lawful government in the world,
just as our new fanatics of popular arbitrary power main-
tain that a popular election is the sole lawful source of
authority. The old prerogative enthusiasts, it is true, did
speculate foolishly, and perhaps impiously too, as if mon-
archy had more of a divine sanction than any other mode
of government; and as if a right to govern by inheritance
were in strictness indefeasible in every person, who should
be found in the succession to a throne, and under every cir-
cumstance, which no civil or political right can be. But an
absurd opinion concerning the king's hereditary right to
the crown does not prejudice one that is rational, and bot-
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 175
tomed upon solid principles of law and policy. If all the
absurd theories of lawyers and divines were to vitiate the
objects in which they are conversant, we should have no
law and no religion left in the world. But an absurd theory
on one side of a question forms no justification for alleging
a false fact, or promulgating mischievous maxims, on the
other.
The second claim of the Revolution Society is " a right of
cashiering their governors for mis conduct/' Perhaps the
apprehensions our ancestors entertained of forming such a
precedent as that " of cashiering for misconduct," was the
cause that the declaration of the act, which implied the
abdication of King James, was, if it had any fault, rather
too guarded, and too circumstantial. 1 But all this guard,
and all this accumulation of circumstances, serves to show
the spirit of caution which predominated in the national
councils in a situation in which men irritated by oppression,
and elevated by a triumph over it, are apt to abandon them-
selves to violent and extreme courses : it shows the anxiety
of the great men who influenced the conduct of affairs at
that great event to make the Revolution a parent of settle-
ment, and not a nursery of future revolutions.
No government could stand a moment, if it could be blown
down with anything so loose and indefinite as an opinion of
" misconduct." They who led at the Revolution grounded
the virtual abdication of King James upon no such light and
uncertain principle. They charged him with nothing less
than a design, confirmed by a multitude of illegal overt acts,
to subvert the Protestant church and state, and their funda-
mental, unquestionable laws and liberties : they charged him
with having broken the original contract between king and
people. This was more than misconduct. A grave and
overruling necessity obliged them to take the step they took,
and took with infinite reluctance, as under that most rigor-
ous of all laws. Their trust for the future preservation of
the constitution was not in future revolutions. The grand
1 " That King James the Second, having endeavoured to subvert the
constitution of the kingdom by breaking the original contract between King
and people, and, by the advice of Jesuits, and other wicked persons, having
violated the fundamental laws, and having withdrawn himself out of the
kingdom, hath abdicated the government, and the throne is thereby vacant."
176 EDMUND BURKE
policy of all their regulations was to render it almost im-
practicable for any future sovereign to compel the states
of the kingdom to have again recourse to those violent
remedies. They left the crown what, in the eye and esti-
mation of law, it had never been, perfectly irresponsible.
In order to lighten the crown still further, they aggravated
responsibility on ministers of state. By the statute of the
ist of King William, sess. 2nd, called " the act for declaring
the rights and liberties of the subject, and for settling the
succession to the crown," they enacted, that the ministers
should serve the crown on the terms of that declaration.
They secured soon after the frequent meetings of parlia-
ment, by which the whole government would be under the
constant inspection and active control of the popular repre-
sentative and of the magnates of the kingdom. In the next
great constitutional act, that of the 12th and 13th of King
William, for the further limitation of the crown, and better
securing the rights and liberties of the subject, they pro-
vided, " that no pardon under the great seal of England
should be pleadable to an impeachment by the Commons in
parliament." The rule laid down for government in the
Declaration of Right, the constant inspection of parliament,
the practical claim of impeachment, they thought infinitely
a better security not only for their constitutional liberty,
but against the vices of administration, than the reservation
of a right so difficult in the practice, so uncertain in the
issue, and often so mischievous in the consequences, as that
of " cashiering their governors."
Dr. Price, in his sermon, 1 condemns very properly the
practice of gross, adulatory addresses to kings. Instead of
this fulsome style, he proposes that his Majesty should be
told, on occasions of congratulation, that " he is to consider
himself as more properly the servant than the sovereign of
his people." For a compliment, this new form of address
does not seem to be very soothing. Those who are servants
in name, as well as in effect, do not like to be told of their
situation, their duty, and their obligations. The slave, in the
old play, tells his master, "Hac commemoratio est quasi ex-
frobatio." It is not pleasant as compliment; it is not
1 P. 32-34.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 177
wholesome as instruction. After all, if the king were to
bring himself to echo this new kind of address, to adopt it in
terms, and even to take the appellation of Servant of the
People as his royal style, how either he or we should be
much mended by it, I cannot imagine. I have seen very
assuming letters, signed, Your most obedient, humble ser-
vant. The proudest denomination that ever was endured
on earth took a title of still greater humility than that which
is now proposed for sovereigns by the Apostle of Liberty.
Kings and nations were trampled upon by the foot of one
calling himself " the Servant of Servants ;" and mandates
for deposing sovereigns were sealed with the signet of " the
Fisherman."
I should have considered all this as no more than a sort
of flippant, vain discourse, in which, as in an unsavoury
fume, several persons suffer the spirit of liberty to evaporate,
if it were not plainly in support of the idea, and a part of
the scheme, of " cashiering kings for misconduct." In that
light it is worth some observation.
Kings, in one sense, are undoubtedly the servants of the
people, because their power has no other rational end than
that of the general advantage ; but it is not true that they
are, in the ordinary sense, (by our constitution at least,)
anything like servants ; the essence of whose situation is to
obey the commands of some other, and to be removable at
pleasure. But the king of Great Britain obeys no other per-
son; all other persons are individually, and collectively too,
under him, and owe to him a legal obedience. The law,
which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high
magistrate, not our servant, as this humble divine calls him,
but " our sovereign Lord the king;" and we, on our parts,
have learned to speak only the primitive language of the
law, and not the confused jargon of their Babylonian pulpits.
As he is not to obey us, but as we are to obey the law
in him, our constitution has made no sort of provision
towards rendering him, as a servant, in any degree respon-
sible. Our constitution knows nothing of a magistrate like
the Justicia of Arragon ; nor of any court legally appointed,
nor of any process legally settled, for submitting the king
to the responsibility belonging to all servants. In this he
178 EDMUND BURKE
is not distinguished from the Commons and the Lords;
who, in their several public capacities, can never be called
to an account for their conduct; although the Revolution
Society chooses to assert, in direct opposition to one of the
wisest and most beautiful parts of our constitution, that
" a king is no more than the first servant of the public, cre-
ated by it, and responsible to it."
Ill would our ancestors at the Revolution have deserved
their fame for wisdom, if they had found no security for
their freedom, but in rendering their government feeble in
its operations, and precarious in its tenure ; if they had been
able to contrive no better remedy against arbitrary power
than civil confusion. Let these gentlemen state who that
representative public is to whom they will affirm the king, as
a servant, to be responsible. It will then be time enough
for me to produce to them the positive statute law which
affirms that he is not.
The ceremony of cashiering kings, of which these gentle-
men talk so much at their ease, can rarely, if ever, be per-
formed without force. It then become a case of war, and
not of constitution. Laws are commanded to hold their
tongues amongst arms; and tribunals fall to the ground
with the peace they are no longer able to uphold. The
Revolution of 1688 was obtained by a just war, in the only
case in which any war, and much more a civil war, can be
just. "Justa bella quibus necessaria." The question of de-
throning, or, if these gentlemen like the phrase better,
"cashiering kings," will always be, as it has always been,
an extraordinary question of state, and wholly out of the
law; a question (like all other questions of state) of dis-
positions, and of means, and of probable consequences,
rather than of positive rights. As it was not made for com-
mon abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds.
The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought
to end, and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not
easily definable. It is not a single act, or a single event,
which determines it. Governments must be abused and
deranged indeed, before it can be thought of ; and the pros-
pect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the
past. When things are in that lamentable condition, the
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 179
nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those
whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this
critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state.
Times, and occasions, and provocations, will teach their own
lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity of the
case ; the irritable, from sensibility to oppression ; the high-
minded, from disdain and indignation at abusive power in
unworthy hands; the brave and bold, from the love of
honourable danger in a generous cause : but, with or without
right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the
thinking and the good.
The third head of right, asserted by the pulpit of the Old
Jewry, namely, the " right to form a government for our-
selves," has, at least, as little countenance from anything
done at the Revolution, either in precedent or principle, as
the two first of their claims. The Revolution was made to
preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties, and
that ancient constitution of government which is our only
security for law and liberty. If you are desirous of know-
ing the spirit of our constitution, and the policy which pre-
dominated in that great period which has secured it to this
hour, pray look for both in our histories, in our records, in
our acts of parliament, and journals of parliament, and not
in the sermons of the Old Jewry, and the after-dinner toasts
of the Revolution Society. In the former you will find
other ideas and another language. Such a claim is as ill-
suited to our temper and wishes as it is unsupported by any
appearance of authority. The very idea of the fabrication
of a new government is enough to fill us with disgust and
horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and
do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance
from our forefathers. Upon that body and stock of in-
heritance we have taken care not to inoculate any scion alien
to the nature of the original plant. All the reformations we
have hitherto made have proceeded upon the principle of
reverence to antiquity ; and I hope, nay I am persuaded,
that all those which possibly may be made hereafter, will be
carefully formed upon analogical precedent, authority, and
example.
Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Charta. You
180 EDMUND BURKE
will see that Sir Edward Coke, that great oracle of our
law, and indeed all the great men who follow him, to Black-
stone, 1 are industrious to prove the pedigree of our liberties.
They endeavour to prove, that the ancient charter, the
Magna Charta of King John, was connected with another
positive charter from Henry L, and that both the one and
the other were nothing more than a re-affirmance of the still
more ancient standing law of the kingdom. In the matter
of fact, for the greater part, these authors appear to be in
the right; perhaps not always; but if the lawyers mistake
in some particulars, it proves my position still the more
strongly; because it demonstrates the powerful preposses-
sion towards antiquity, with which the minds of all our
lawyers and legislators, and of all the people whom they
wish to influence, have been always filled; and the stationary
policy of this kingdom in considering their most sacred
rights and franchises as an inheritance.
In the famous law of the 3rd of Charles I., called the
Petition of Right, the parliament says to the king, "Your
subjects have inherited this freedom," claiming their fran-
chises not on abstract principles "as the rights of men," but
as the rights of Englishmen, and as a patrimony derived
from their forefathers. Selden, and the other profoundly
learned men, who drew this Petition of Right, were as well
acquainted, at least, with all the general theories concerning
the "rights of men," as any of the discoursers in our pul-
pits, or on your tribune ; full as well as Dr. Price, or as the
Abbe Sieyes. But, for reasons worthy of that practical
wisdom which superseded their theoretic science, they pre-
ferred this positive, recorded, hereditary title to all which
can be dear to the man and the citizen, to that vague specu-
lative right, which exposed their sure inheritance to be
scrambled for and torn to pieces by every wild, litigious
spirit.
The same policy pervades all the laws which have since
been made for the preservation of our liberties. In the 1st
of William and Mary, in the famous statute, called the
Declaration of Right, the two Houses utter not a syllable of
"a right to frame a government for themselves." You will
1 See Blackstone's Magna Charta, printed at Oxford, 1759.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN cTtANCE 181
see, that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws,
and liberties, that had been long possessed, and had been
lately endangered. "Taking 1 into their most serious con-
sideration the best means for making such an establishment,
that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in dan-
ger of being again subverted/' they auspicate all their pro-
ceedings, by stating as some of those best means, "in the
first place" to do "as their ancestors in like cases have
usually done for vindicating their ancient rights and lib-
erties, to declare;" — and then they pray the king and queen,
"that it may be declared and enacted, that all and singular
the rights and liberties asserted and declared, are the true
ancient and indubitable rights and liberties of the people
of this kingdom."
You will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declara-
tion of Right, it has been the uniform policy of our consti-
tution to claim and assert our liberties, as an entailed in-
heritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be
transmitted to our posterity ; as an estate specially belonging
to the people of this kingdom, without any reference what-
ever to any other more general or prior right. By this
means our constitution preserves a unity in so great a
diversity of its parts. We have an inheritable crown ; an
inheritable peerage ; and a House of Commons and a people
inheriting privileges, franchises, and liberties, from a long
line of ancestors.
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound
reflection; or rather the happy effect of following nature,
which is wisdom without reflection, and above it. A spirit
of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper,
and confined views. People will not look forward to poster-
ity, who never look backward to their ancestors. Besides,
the people of England well know, that the idea of inherit-
ance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure
principle of transmission ; without at all excluding a prin-
ciple of improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it se-
cures what it acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained
by a state proceeding on these maxims, are locked fast as
in a sort of family settlement ; grasped as in a kind of mort-
1 i W. and M.
182 EDMUND BURKE
main for ever. By a constitutional policy, working after
the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our
government and our privileges, in the same manner in which
we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The in-
stitutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of provi-
dence, are handed down to us, and from us, in the same
course and order. Our political system is placed in a just
correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world,
and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent
body composed of transitory parts ; wherein, by the dispo-
sition of a stupendous wisdom, moulding together the great
mysterious incorporation of the human race, the whole, at
one time, is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but, in a
condition of unchangeable constancy, moves on through the
varied tenor of perpetual decay, fall, renovation, and pro-
gression. Thus, by preserving the method of nature in the
conduct of the state, in what we improve, we are never
wholly new; in what we retain, we are never wholly obso-
lete. By adhering in this manner and on those principles
to our forefathers, we are guided not by the superstition of
antiquarians, but by the spirit of philosophic analogy. In
this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of
polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the con-
stitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties;
adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family
affections; keeping inseparable, and cherishing with the
warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected chari-
ties, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres, and our altars.
Through the same plan of a conformity to nature in our
artificial institutions, and by calling in the aid of her un-
erring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and
feeble contrivances of our reason, we have derived several
other, and those no small benefits, from considering our
liberties in the light of an inheritance. Always acting as if
in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of free-
dom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with
an awful gravity. This idea of a liberal descent inspires
us with a sense of habitual native dignity, which prevents
that upstart insolence almost inevitably adhering to and dis-
gracing those who are the first acquirers of any distinction.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 183
By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It
carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedi-
gree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its
ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its mon-
umental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. We
procure reverence to our civil institutions on the principle
upon which nature teaches us to revere individual men ;
on account of their age, and on account of those from whom
they are descended. All your sophisters cannot produce
anything better adapted to preserve a rational and manly
freedom than the course that we have pursued, who have
chosen our nature rather than our speculations, our breasts
rather than our inventions, for the great conservatories and
magazines of our rights and privileges.
You might, if you pleased, have profited of our example,
and have given to your recovered freedom a correspondent
dignity. Your privileges, though discontinued, were not lost
to memory. Your constitution, it is true, whilst you were
out of possession, suffered waste and dilapidation; but you
possessed in some parts the walls, and, in all, the founda-
tions, of a noble and venerable castle. You might have re*
paired those walls ; you might have built on those old founda-
tions. Your constitution was suspended before it was per-
fected; but you had the elements of a constitution very
nearly as good as could be wished. In your old states you
possessed that variety of parts corresponding with the
various descriptions of which your community was happily
composed; you had all that combination, and all that oppo-
sition of interests, you had that action and counteraction,
which, in the natural and in the political world, from the
reciprocal struggle of discordant powers, draws out the
harmony of the universe. These opposed and conflicting
interests, which you considered as so great a blemish in
your old and in our present constitution, interpose a salu-
tary check to all precipitate resolutions. They render de-
liberation a matter not of choice, but of necessity; they
make all change a subject of compromise, which naturally
begets moderation ; they produce temperaments preventing
the sore evil of harsh, crude, unqualified reformations;
and rendering all the headlong exertions of arbitrary power.
184 EDMUND BURKE
in the few or in the many for ever impracticable. Through
that diversity of members and interests, general liberty had
as many securities as there were separate views in the
several orders; whilst by pressing down the whole by the
weight of a real monarchy, the separate parts would have
been prevented from warping, and starting from their al-
lotted places.
You had all these advantages in your ancient states ; but
you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil
society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill,
because you began by despising everything that belonged to
you. You set up your trade without a capital. If the last
generations of your country appeared without much lustre
in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived
your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a
pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations
would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wis-
dom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour : and you would
have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired.
Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to
respect yourselves. You would not have chosen to consider
the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born
servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789. In
order to furnish, at the expense of your honour, an excuse
to your apologists here for several enormities of yours, you
would not have been content to be represented as a gang of
Maroon slaves, suddenly broke loose from the house of
bondage, and therefore to be pardoned for your abuse of the
liberty to which you were not accustomed, and ill fitted.
Would it not, my worthy friend, have been wiser to have you
thought, what I, for one, always thought you, a generous and
gallant nation, long misled to your disadvantage by your
high and romantic sentiments of fidelity, honour, and loy-
alty ; that events had been unfavourable to you, but that you
were not enslaved through any illiberal or servile disposi-
tion ; that in your most devoted submission, you were actu-
ated by a principle of public spirit, and that it was your
country you worshipped, in the person of your king? Had
you made it to be understood, that in the delusion of this
amiable error you had gone further than your wise ances-
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 185
tors; that you were resolved to resume your ancient privi-
leges, whilst you preserved the spirit of your ancient and
your recent loyalty and honour; or if, diffident of yourselves,
and not clearly discerning the almost obliterated constitution
of your ancestors, you had looked to your neighbours in this
land, who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of
the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted to its
present state — by following wise examples you would have
given new examples of wisdom to the world. You would
have rendered the cause of liberty venerable in the eyes
of every worthy mind in every nation. You would have
shamed despotism from the earth, by showing that freedom
was not only reconcilable, but, as when well disciplined it is,
auxiliary to law. You would have had an unoppressive but
a productive revenue. You would have had a flourishing
commerce to feed it. You would have had a free constitu-
tion ; a potent monarchy ; a disciplined army ; a reformed
and venerated clergy; a mitigated but spirited nobility, to
lead your virtue, not to overlay it; you would have had a
liberal order of commons, to emulate and to recruit that no-
bility; you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious,
and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognise the hap-
piness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in
which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not
in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and
vain expectations into men destined to travel in the ob-
scure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and
embitter that real inequality, which it never can remove;
and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the
benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state, as
those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid,
but not more happy. You had a smooth and easy career of
felicity and glory laid open to you, beyond anything recorded
in the history of the world; but you have shown that diffi-
culty is good for man.
Compute your gains : see what is got by those extravagant
and presumptuous speculations which have taught your lead-
ers to despise all their predecessors, and all their contem-
poraries, and even to despise themselves, until the moment
in which they became truly despicable. By following those
186 EDMUND BURKE
false lights, France has bought undisguised calamities at a
higher price than any nation has purchased the most une-
quivocal blessings ! France has bought poverty by crime !
France has not sacrificed her virtue to her interest, but she
has abandoned her interest, that she might prostitute her
virtue. All other nations have begun the fabric of a new
government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing
originally, or by enforcing with greater exactness, some rites
or other of religion. All other people have laid the founda-
tions of civil freedom in severer manners, and a system of a
more austere and masculine morality. France, when she let
loose the reins of regal authority, doubled the license of a
ferocious dissoluteness in manners, and of an insolent irre-
ligion in opinions and practices; and has extended through
all ranks of life, as if she were communicating some privilege,
or laying open some secluded benefit, all the unhappy cor-
ruptions that usually were the disease of wealth and power.
This is one of the new principles of equality in France.
France, by the perfidy of her leaders, has utterly disgraced
the tone of lenient council in the cabinets of princes, and
disarmed it of its most potent topics. She has sanctified
the dark, suspicious maxims of tyrannous distrust; and
taught kings to tremble at (what will hereafter be called)
the delusive plausibilities of moral politicians. Sovereigns
will consider those, who advise them to place an unlimited
confidence in their people, as subverters of their thrones; as
traitors who aim at their destruction, by leading their easy
good-nature, under specious pretences, to admit combinations
of bold and faithless men into a participation of their power.
This alone (if there were nothing else) is an irreparable
calamity to you and to mankind. Remember that your
parliament of Paris told your king, that, in calling the states
together, he had nothing to fear but the prodigal excess of
their zeal in providing for the support of the throne. It is
right that these men should hide their heads. It is righJ-
that they should bear their part in the ruin which their
counsel has brought on their sovereign and their country.
Such sanguine declarations tend to lull authority asleep; to
encourage it rashly to engage in perilous adventures of un-
tried policy; to neglect those provisions, preparations, and
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 187
precautions, which distinguish benevolence from imbecility;
and without which no man can answer for the salutary effect
of any abstract plan of government or of freedom. For want
of these, they have seen the medicine of the state corrupted
into its poison. They have seen the French rebel against a
mild and lawful monarch, with more fury, outrage, and in-
sult, than ever any people has been known to rise against
the most illegal usurper, or the most sanguinary tyrant.
Their resistance was made to concession; their revolt was
from protection; their blow , was aimed at a hand holding
out graces, favours, and immunities.
This was unnatural. The rest is in order. They have
found their punishment in their success. Laws overturned;
tribunals subverted; industry without vigour; commerce ex-
piring; the revenue unpaid, yet the people impoverished; a
church pillaged, and a state not relieved; civil and military
anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom; everything
human and divine sacrificed to the idol of public credit, and
national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the
paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power, the dis-
credited paper securities of impoverished fraud and beg-
gared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an
empire, in lieu of the two great recognised species that repre-
sent the lasting, conventional credit of mankind, which dis-
appeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they
came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and
representatives they are, was systematically subverted.
Were all these dreadful things necessary? Were they the
inevitable results of the desperate struggle of determined
patriots, compelled to wade through blood and tumult, to the
quiet shore of a tranquil and prosperous liberty? No!
nothing like it. The fresh ruins of France, which shock our
feelings wherever we can turn our eyes, are not the devasta-
tion of civil war ; they are the sad but instructive monuments
of rash and ignorant counsel in time of profound peace.
They are the display of inconsiderate and presumptuous, be-
cause unresisted and irresistible, authority. The persons who
have thus squandered away the precious treasure of their
crimes, the persons who have made this prodigal and wild
waste of public evils, (the last stake reserved for the ultimate
188 EDMUND BURKE
ransom of the state,) have met in their progress with little,
or rather with no opposition at all. Their whole march was
more like a triumphal procession, than the progress of a war.
Their pioneers have gone before them, and demolished and
laid everything level at their feet. Not one drop of their
blood have they shed in the cause of the country they have
ruined. They have made no sacrifices to their projects of
greater consequence than their shoe-buckles, whilst they
were imprisoning their king, murdering their fellow-citizens,
and bathing in tears, and plunging in poverty and distress,
thousands of worthy men and worthy families. Their cruelty
has not even been the base result of fear. It has been the
effect of their sense of perfect safety, in authorizing treasons,
robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters, and burnings,
throughout their harassed land. But the cause of all was
plain from the beginning.
This unforced choice, this fond election of evil, would
appear perfectly unaccountable, if we did not consider the
composition of the National Assembly: I do not mean its
formal constitution, which, as it now stands, is exceptionable
enough, but the materials of which, in a great measure, it
is composed, which is of ten thousand times greater conse-
quence than all the formalities in the world. If we were
to know nothing of this assembly but by its title and func-
tion, no colours could paint to the imagination anything
more venerable. In that light the mind of an inquirer, sub-
dued by such an awful image as that of the virtue and wis-
dom of a whole people collected into a focus, would pause
and hesitate in condemning things even of the very worst
aspect. Instead of blameable, they would appear only mys-
terious. But no name, no power, no function, no artificial
institution whatsoever, can make the men of whom any sys-
tem of authority is composed any other than God, and nature,
and education, and their habits of life have made them.
Capacities beyond these the people have not to give. Virtue
and wisdom may be the objects of their choice; but their
choice confers neither the one nor the other on those upon
whom they lay their ordaining hands. They have not the
engagement of nature, they have not the promise of revela-
tion, for any such powers.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 189
After I had read over the list of the persons and descrip-
tions elected into the Tiers titat, nothing which they after-
wards did could appear astonishing. Among them, indeed,
I saw some of known rank; some of shining talents; but of
any practical experience in the state, not one man was to be
found. The best were only men of theory. But whatever
the distinguished few may have been, it is the substance and
mass of the body which constitutes its character, and must
finally determine its direction. In all bodies, those who will
lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must
conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and dispo-
sition, of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an
assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part
of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very
rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter
into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated
through it from becoming only the expert instruments of
absurd projects ! If, what is the more likely event, instead
of that unusual degree of virtue, they should be actuated by
sinister ambition, and a lust of meretricious glory, then the
feeble part of the assembly, to whom at first they conform,
becomes in its turn the dupe and instrument of their de-
signs. In this political traffic, the leaders will be obliged to
bow to the ignorance of their followers, and the followers
to become subservient to the worst designs of their leaders.
To secure any degree of sobriety in the propositions made
by the leaders in any public assembly, they ought to respect,
in some degree perhaps to fear, those whom they conduct.
To be led any otherwise than blindly, the followers must be
qualified, if not for actors, at least for judges; they must
also be judges of natural weight and authority. Nothing
can secure a steady and moderate conduct in such assemblies,
but that the body of them should be respectably composed,
in point of condition in life, or permanent property, of edu-
cation, and of such habits as enlarge and liberalize the un-
derstanding.
In the calling of the states-general of France, the first
thing that struck me, was a great departure from the ancient
course. I found the representation for the third estate com-
posed of six hundred persons. They were equal in number
190 EDMUND BURKE
to the representatives of both the other orders. If the orders
were to act separately, the number would not, beyond the con-
sideration of the expense, be of much moment. But when
it became apparent that the three orders were to be melted
down into one, the policy and necessary effect of this numer-
ous representation became obvious. A very small desertion
from either of the other two orders must throw the power of
both into the hands of the third. In fact, the whole power
of the state was soon resolved into that body. Its due com-
position became therefore of infinitely the greater impor-
tance.
Judge, Sir, of my surprise, when I found that a very
great proportion of the assembly (a majority, I believe, of
the members who attended) was composed of practitioners
in the law. It was composed, not of distinguished magis-
trates, who had given pledges to their country of their
science, prudence, and integrity; not of leading advocates,
the glory of the bar; not of renowned professors in univer-
sities; — but for the far greater part, as it must in such a
number, of the inferior, unlearned, mechanical, merely in-
strumental members of the profession. There were distin-
guished exceptions; but the general composition was of
obscure provincial advocates, of stewards of petty local juris-
dictions, country attornies, notaries, and the whole train of
the ministers of municipal litigation, the fomenters and con-
ductors of the petty war of village vexation. From the
moment I read the list, I saw distinctly, and very nearly as
it has happened, all that was to follow.
The degree of estimation in which any profession is held
becomes the standard of the estimation in which the pro-
fessors hold themselves. Whatever the personal merits of
many individual lawyers might have been, and in many it
was undoubtedly very considerable, in that military kingdom
no part of the profession had been much regarded, except the
highest of all, who often united to their professional offices
great family splendour, and were invested with great power
and authority. These certainly were highly respected, and
even with no small degree of awe. The next rank was not
much esteemed; the mechanical part was in a very low de-
gree of repute.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 191
Whenever the supreme authority is vested in a body so
composed, it must evidently produce the consequences of
supreme authority placed in the hands of men not taught
habitually to respect themselves; who had no previous for-
tune in character at stake ; who could not be expected to beat
with moderation, or to conduct with discretion, a power,
which they themselves, more than any others, must be sur-
prised to find in their hands. Who could flatter himself
that these men, suddenly, and, as it were, by enchantment,
snatched from the humblest rank of subordination, would
not be intoxicated with their unprepared greatness? Who
could conceive that men, who are habitually meddling, dar-
ing, subtle, active, of litigious dispositions and unquiet minds,
would easily fall back into their old condition of obscure
contention, and laborious, low, and unprofitable chicane?
Who could doubt but that, at any expense to the state, of
which they understood nothing, they must pursue their pri-
vate interests which they understood but too well? It was
not an event depending on chance, or contingency. It was
inevitable ; it was necessary ; it was planted in the natcire
of things. They must join (if their capacity did not per-
mit them to lead) in any project which could procure to
them a litigious constitution; which could lay open to them
those innumerable lucrative jobs, which follow in the train
of all great convulsions and revolutions in the state, and
particularly in all great and violent permutations of prop-
erty. Was it to be expected that they would attend to the
stability of property, whose existence had always depended
upon whatever rendered property questionable, ambiguous,
and insecure? Their objects would be enlarged with their
elevation, but their disposition and habits, and mode of ac-
complishing their designs, must remain the same.
Well ! but these men were to be tempered and restrained
by other descriptions, of more sober and more enlarged
understandings. Were they then to be awed by the super-
eminent authority and awful dignity of a handful of country
clowns, who have seats in that assembly, some of whom
are said not to be able to read and write? and by not a
greater number of traders, who, though somewhat more in-
structed, and more conspicuous in the order of society, had
192 EDMUND BURKE
never known anything beyond their counting-house. No !
both these descriptions were more formed to be overborne
and swayed by the intrigues and artifices of lawyers, than
to become their counterpoise. With such a dangerous dis-
proportion, the whole must needs be governed by them.
To the faculty of law was joined a pretty considerable pro-
portion of the faculty of medicine. This faculty had not,
any more than that of the law, possessed in France its
just estimation. Its professors, therefore, must have the
qualities of men not habituated to sentiments of dignity.
But supposing they had ranked as they ought to do, and as
with us they do actually, the sides of sick beds are not the
academies for forming statesmen and legislators. Then came
the dealers in stocks and funds, who must be eager, at any
expense, to change their ideal paper wealth for the more solid
substance of land. To these were joined men of other de-
scriptions, from whom as little knowledge of, or attention to,
the interests of a great state was to be expected, and as
little regard to the stability of any institution ; men formed
to be instruments, not controls. Such in general was the
composition of the Tiers Etat in the National Assembly; in
which was scarcely to be perceived the slightest traces of
what we call the natural landed interest of the country.
We know that the British House of Commons, without
shutting its doors to any merit in any class, is, by the sure
operation of adequate causes, filled with everything illustri-
ous in rank, in descent, in hereditary and in acquired opu-
lence, in cultivated talents, in military, civil, naval, and
politic distinction, that the country can afford. But sup-
posing, what hardly can be supposed as a case, that the
House of Commons should be composed in the same man-
ner with the Tiers Etat in France, would this dominion of
chicane be borne with patience, or even conceived without
horror? God forbid I should insinuate anything derogatory
to that profession, which is another priesthood, administrat-
ing the rights of sacred justice. But whilst I revere men in
the functions which belong to them, and would do as much
as one man can do to prevent their exclusion from any, I
cannot, to flatter them, give the lie to nature. They are
good and useful in the composition; they must be mischie-
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 193
vous if they preponderate so as virtually to become the
whole. Their very excellence in their peculiar functions
may be far from a qualification for others. It cannot es-
cape observation, that when men are too much confined to
professional and faculty habits, and as it were inveterate
in the recurrent employment of that narrow circle, they are
rather disabled than qualified for whatever depends on the
knowledge of mankind, on experience in mixed affairs, on
a comprehensive, connected view of the various, com-
plicated, external and internal interests, which go to the
formation of that multifarious thing called a state.
After all, if the House of Commons were to have a wholly
professional and faculty composition, what is the power of
the House of Commons, circumscribed and shut in by the
immoveable barriers of laws, usages, positive rules of doc-
trine and practice, counterpoised by the House of Lords,
and every moment of its existence at the discretion of the
crown to continue, prorogue, or dissolve us? The power of
the House of Commons, direct or indirect, is indeed great ;
and long may it be able to preserve its greatness, and the
spirit belonging to true greatness, at the full ; and it will do
so, as long as it can keep the breakers of law in India from
becoming the makers of law for England. The power, how-
ever, of the House of Commons, when least diminished, is
as a drop of water in the ocean, compared to that residing
in a settled majority of your National Assembly. That as-
sembly, since the destruction of the orders, has no funda-
mental law, no strict convention, no respected usage to re-
strain it. Instead of finding themselves obliged to conform
to a fixed constitution, they have a power to make a constitu-
tion which shall conform to their designs. Nothing in
heaven or upon earth can serve as a control on them. What
ought to be the heads, the hearts, the dispositions, that are
qualified, or that dare, not only to make laws under a fixed
constitution, but at one heat to strike out a totally new con-
stitution for a great kingdom, and in every part of it, from
the monarch on the throne to the vestry of a parish? But —
" fools rush in where angels fear to tread." In such a state
of unbounded power for undefined and undefinable purposes,
the evil of a moral and almost physical inaptitude of the
hc g — vol. xxiv
194 EDMUND BURKE
man to the function must be the greatest we can conceive to
happen in the management of human affairs.
Having considered the composition of the third estate as
it stood in its original frame, I took a view of the represent-
atives of the clergy. There too it appeared, that full as
little regard was had to the general security of property, or
to the aptitude of the deputies for the public purposes, in
the principles of their election. That election was so con-
trived, as to send a very large proportion of mere country-
curates to the great and arduous work of new-modelling a
state; men who never had seen the state so much as in a
picture; men who knew nothing of the world beyond the
bounds of an obscure village; who, immersed in hopeless
poverty, could regard all property, whether secular or eccle-
siastical, with no other eye than that of envy; among whom
must be many who, for the smallest hope of the meanest
dividend in plunder, would readily join in any attempts upon
a body of wealth, in which they could hardly look to have
any share, except in a general scramble. Instead of balanc-
ing the power of the active chicaners in the other assembly,
these curates must necessarily become the active coadjutors,
or at best the passive instruments, of those by whom they
had been habitually guided in their petty village concerns.
They too could hardly be the most conscientious of their
kind, who presuming upon their incompetent understanding,
could intrigue for a trust which led them from their natural
relation to their flocks, and their natural spheres of action, to
undertake the regeneration of kingdoms. This preponder-
ating weight, being added to the force of the body of chicane
in the Tiers Etat, completed that momentum of ignorance,
rashness, presumption, and lust of plunder, which nothing
has been able to resist.
To observing men it must have appeared from the begin-
ning, that the majority of the Third Estate, in conjunction
with such a deputation from the clergy as I have described,
whilst it pursued the destruction of the nobility, would in-
evitably become subservient to the worst designs of indi-
viduals in that class. In the spoil and humiliation of their
own order these individuals woulc* possess a sure fund for
the pay of their new, followers. T/0 squander away the
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 195
objects which made the happiness of their fellows, would be
to them no sacrifice at all. Turbulent, discontented men of
quality, in proportion as they are puffed up with personal
pride and arrogance, generally despise their own order. One
of the first symptoms they discover of a selfish and mis-
chievous ambition, is a profligate disregard of a dignity
which they partake with others. To be attached to the sub-
division, to love the little platoon we belong to in society,
is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affec-
tions. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed
towards a love to our country, and to mankind. The in-
terest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the
hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men
would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it
away for their own personal advantage.
There were in the time of our civil troubles in England,
(J do not know whether you have any such in your assembly
in France,) several persons, like the then Earl of Holland,
who by themselves or their families had brought an odium
on the throne, by the prodigal dispensation of its bounties
towards them, who afterwards joined in the rebellions aris-
ing from the discontents of which they were themselves the
cause ; men who helped to subvert that throne to which they
owed, some of them, their existence, others all that power
which they employed to ruin their benefactor. If any
bounds are set to the rapacious demands of that sort of
people, or that others are permitted to partake in the objects
they would engross, revenge and envy soon fill up the crav-
ing void that is left in their avarice. Confounded by the
complication of distempered passions, their reason is dis-
turbed ; their views become vast and perplexed ; to others
inexplicable; to themselves uncertain. They find, on all
sides, bounds to their unprincipled ambition in any fixed
order of things. Both in the fog and haze of confusion all
is enlarged, and appears without any limit.
When men of rank sacrifice all ideas of dignity to an
ambition without a distinct object, and work with low in-
struments and for low ends, the whole composition becomes
low and base. Does not something like this now appear in
France? Does it not produce something ignoble and in-
196 EDMUND BURKE
glorious? a kind of meanness in all the prevalent policy? a
tendency in all that is done to lower along with individuals
all the dignity and importance of the state? Other revolu-
tions have been conducted by persons, who, whilst they
attempted or affected changes in the commonwealth, sancti-
fied their ambition by advancing the dignity of the people
whose peace they troubled. They had long views. They
aimed at the rule, not at the destruction, of their country.
They were men of great civil and great military talents, and
if the terror, the ornament of their age. They were not
like Jew brokers, contending with each other who could best
remedy with fraudulent circulation and depreciated paper the
wretchedness and ruin brought on their country by their
degenerate councils. The compliment made to one of the
great bad men of the old stamp (Cromwell) by his kinsman,
a favourite poet of that time, shows what it was he proposed,
and what indeed to a great degree he accomplished, in the
success of his ambition :
" Still as you rise, the state exalted too,
Finds no distemper whilst 'tis changed by you;
Changed like the world's great scene, when without noise
The rising sun night's vulgar lights destroys."
These disturbers were not so much like men usurping
power, as asserting their natural place in society. Their
rising was to illuminate and beautify the world. Their con-
quest over their competitors was by outshining them. The
hand that, like a destroying angel, smote the country, com-
municated to it the force and energy under which it suffered.
I do not say, (God forbid,) I do not say, that the virtues of
such men were to be taken as a balance to their crimes : but
they were some corrective to their effects. Such was, as I
said, our Cromwell. Such were your whole race of Guises,
Condes, and Colignis. Such the Richelieus, who in more
quiet times acted in the spirit of a civil war. Such, as better
men, and in a less dubious cause, were your Henry the
Fourth and your Sully, though nursed in civil confusions,
and not wholly without some of their taint. It is a thing
to be wondered at, to see how very soon France, when she
had a moment to respire, recovered and emerged from the
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 19?
longest and most dreadful civil war that ever was known in
any nation. Why? Because among all their massacres, they
had not slain the mind in their country. A conscious dig-
nity, a noble pride, a generous sense oi glory and emulation,
was not extinguished. On the contrary, it was kindled and
inflamed. The organs also of the state, however shattered,
existed. All the prizes of honour and virtue, all the rewards,
all the distinctions remained. But your present confusion,
like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself. Every
person in your country, in a situation to be actuated by a
principle of honour, is disgraced and degraded, and can
entertain no sensation ot life, except in a mortified and
humiliated indignation. But this generation will quicklj
pass away. The next generation of the nobility will resem-
ble the artificers and clowns, and money -jobbers, usurers,
and Jews, who will be always their fellows, sometimes their
masters.
Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalise.
In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citi-
zens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers
therefore only change and pervert the natural order of
things ; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the
air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the
ground. The association of tailors and carpenters, of which
the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot
be equal to the situation, into which, by the worst of usur-
pations, an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature, you
attempt to force them.
The Chancellor of France at the opening of the states,
said, in a tone of oratorical flourish, that all occupations
were honourable. If he meant only, that no honest employ-
ment was disgraceful, he would not have gone beyond the
truth. But in asserting that anything is honourable, we
imply some distinction in its favour. The occupation of
a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a
matter of honour to any person — to say nothing of a num-
ber of other more servile employments. Such descriptions
of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state ; but
the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individ-
ually or collectively are permitted to rule. In this you
198 EDMUND BURKE
think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with
nature. 1
I do not, my dear Sir, conceive you to be of that sophis-
tical, captious spirit, or of that uncandid dulness, as to re-
quire, for every general observation or sentiment, an explicit
detail of the correctives and exceptions, which reason will
presume to be included in all the general propositions which
come from reasonable men. You do not imagine, that I wish
, to confine power, authority, and distinction to blood, and
names, and titles. No, Sir. There is no qualification for
government but virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive.
Wherever they are actually found, they have, in whatever
state, condition, profession, or trade, the passport of Heaven
to human place and honour. Woe to the country which
would madly and impiously reject the service of the talents
and virtues, civil, military, or religious, that are given to
grace and to serve it ; and would condemn to obscurity every-
thing formed to diffuse lustre and glory around a state ! Woe
to that country too, that, passing into the opposite extreme,
considers a low education, a mean contracted view of things,
a sordid, mercenary occupation, as a preferable title to com-
mand ! Everything ought to be open ; but not indifferently
to every man. No rotation ; no appointment by lot ; no
mode of election operating in the spirit of sortition, or rota-
tion, can be generally good in a government conversant in
extensive objects. Because they have no tendency, direct or
indirect, to select the man with a view to the duty, or to ac-
commodate the one to the other. I do not hesitate to say,
that the road to eminence and power, from obscure condition,
ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of
1 Ecclesiasticus, chap, xxxviii. verse 24, 25. " The wisdom of a learned
man come*th by opportunity of leisure; and he that hath little business
shall become wise. — " How can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough,
and that glorieth in the goad; that driveth oxen; and is occupied in their
labours; and whose talk is of bullocks? "
Ver. 2j. " So every carpenter and work-master that laboureth night
and day," &c.
Ver. 33. " They shall not be sought for in public counsel, nor sit high
in the congregation: they shall not sit on the judge's seat, nor understand
the sentence of judgment; they cannot declare justice and judgment, and
they shall not be found where parables are spoken."
Ver. 34. " But they will maintain the state of the world."
I do not determine whether this book be canonical, as the Gallican
chuith (till lately) has considered it, or apocryphal, as here it is taken. I
am sure it contains a great deal of sense and truth.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 199
course. If rare merit be the rarest of all rare things, it
ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple
of honour ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be
opened through virtue, let it be remembered too, that virtue
is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.
Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state,
that does not represent its ability, as well as its property.
But as ability is a vigorous and active principle, and as prop-
erty is sluggish, inert, and timid, it never can be safe from
the invasions of ability, unless it be, out of all proportion,
predominant in the representation. It must be represented
too in great masses of accumulation, or it is not rightly pro-
tected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out
of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation,
is to be unequal. The great masses therefore which excite
envy, and tempt rapacity, must be put out of the possibility
of danger. Then they form a natural rampart about the
lesser properties in all their gradations. The same quantity
of property, which is by the natural course of things divided
among many, has not the same operation. Its defensive
power is weakened as it is diffused. In this diffusion each
man's portion is less than what, in the eagerness of his de-
sires, he may flatter himself to obtain by dissipating the
accumulations of others. The plunder of the few would
indeed give but a share inconceivably small in the distribu-
tion to the many. But the many are not capable of making
this calculation ; and those who lead them to rapine never
intend this distribution.
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is
one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances be-
longing to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetua-
tion of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to
our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The
possessors of family wealth, and of the distinction which at-
tends hereditary possession, (as most concerned in it,) are
the natural securities for this transmission. With us the
House of Peers is formed upon this principle. It is wholly
composed of hereditary property and hereditary distinction;
and made therefore the third of the legislature; and, in the
last event, the sole judge of all property in all its subdivisions.
200 EDMUND BURKE
The House of Commons too, though not necessarily, yet in
fact, is always so composed, in the far greater part. Let
those large proprietors be what they will, and they have
their chance of being amongst the best, they are, at the very
worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth. For
though hereditary wealth, and the rank which goes with it,
are too much idolized by creeping sycophants, and the blind,
abject admirers of power, they are too rashly slighted in
shallow speculations of the petulant, assuming, short-sighted
coxcombs of philosophy. Some decent, regulated pre-emi-
nence, some preference (not exclusive appropriation) given
to birth, is neither unnatural, nor unjust, nor impolitic.
It is said, that twenty-four millions ought to prevail over
two hundred thousand. True ; if the constitution of a king-
dom be a problem of arithmetic. This sort of discourse does
well enough with the lamp-post for its second: to men who
may reason calmly, it is ridiculous. The will of the many,
and their interest, must very often differ ; and great will be
the difference when they make an evil choice. A government
of five hundred country attornies and obscure curates is not
good for twenty-four millions of men, though it were chosen
by eight and forty millions; nor is it the better for being
guided by a dozen of persons of quality, who have betrayed
their trust in order to obtain that power. At present, you
seem in everything to have strayed out of the high road of
nature. The property of France does not govern it. Of
course property is destroyed, and rational liberty has no ex-
istence. All you have got for the present is a paper circula-
tion, and a stock-jobbing constitution : and, as to the future,
do you seriously think that the territory of France, upon
the republican system of eighty-three independent munic-
ipalities, (to say nothing of the parts that compose them,)
can ever be governed as one body, or can ever be set in
motion by the impulse of one mind? When the National As-
sembly has completed its work, it will have accomplished its
ruin. These commonwealths will not long bear a state of
subjection to the republic of Paris. They will not bear that
this one body should monopolize the captivity of the king, and
the dominion over the assembly calling itself national. Each
will keep its own portion of the spoil of the church to itself;
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 201
and it will not suffer either that spoil, or the more just fruits
of their industry, or the natural produce of their soil, to be
sent to swell the insolence, or pamper the luxury, of the
mechanics of Paris. In this they will see none of the
equality, under the pretence of which they have been tempted
to throw off their allegiance to their sovereign, as well as the
ancient constitution of their country. There can be no cap-
ital city in such a constitution as they have lately made. They
have forgot, that when they framed democratic governments,
they had virtually dismembered their country. The person,
whom they persevere in calling king, has not power left to
him by the hundredth part sufficient to hold together this
collection of republics. The republic of Paris will endeav-
our indeed to complete the debauchery of the army, and
illegally to perpetuate the assembly, without resort to its
constituents, as the means of continuing its despotism. It
will make efforts, by becoming the heart of a boundless
paper circulation, to draw everything to itself; but in vain.
All this policy in the end will appear as feeble as it is
now violent.
If this be your actual situation, compared to the situation
to which you were called, as it were by the voice of God and
man, I cannot find it in my heart to congratulate you on
the choice you have made, or the success which has attended
your endeavours. I can as little recommend to any other
nation a conduct grounded on such principles, and produc-
tive of such effects. That I must leave to those who can
see farther into your affairs than I am able to do, and who
best know how far your actions are favourable to their de-
signs. The gentlemen of the Revolution Society, who were
so early in their congratulations, appear to be strongly of
opinion that there is some scheme of politics relative to this
country in which your proceedings may, in some way, be
useful. For your Dr. Price, who seems to have speculated
himself into no small degree of fervour upon this subject,
addresses his auditory in the following very remarkable
words : " I cannot conclude without recalling particularly
to your recollection a consideration which I have more than
once alluded to, and which probably your thoughts have
been all along anticipating ; a consideration with which
202 EDMUND BURKE
my mind is impressed more than I can express. I mean the
consideration of the favourableness of the present times to
all exertions in the cause of liberty."
It is plain that the mind of this political preacher was at
the time big with some extraordinary design; and it is very
probable that the thoughts of his audience, who understood
him better than I do, did all along run before him in
his reflection, and in the whole train of consequences to
which it led.
Before I read that sermon, I really thought I had lived
in a free country; and it was an error I cherished, because
it gave me a greater liking to the country I lived in. I was
indeed, aware, that a jealous, ever-waking vigilance, to guard
the treasure of our liberty, not only from invasion, but
from decay and corruption, was our best wisdom, and our
first duty. However, I considered that treasure rather as a
possession to be secured, than as a prize to be contended for.
I did not discern how the present time came to be so very
favourable to all exertions in the cause of freedom. The
present time differs from any other only by the circum-
stance of what is doing in France. If the example of that
nation is to have an influence on this, I can easily conceive
why some of their proceedings which have an unpleasant
aspect, and are not quite reconcilable to humanity, generos-
ity, good faith, and justice, are palliated with so much milky
good-nature towards the actors, and borne with so much
heroic fortitude towards the sufferers. It is certainly not
prudent to discredit the authority of an example we mean to
follow. But allowing this, we are led to a very natural
question ; — What is that cause of liberty, and what are those
exertions in its favour, to which the example of France is
so singularly auspicious? Is our monarchy to be annihi-
lated, with all the laws, all the tribunals, and all the ancient
corporations of the kingdom? Is every land-mark of the
country to be done away in favour of a geometrical
and arithmetical constitution? Is the House of Lords to
be voted useless? Is episcopacy to be abolished? Are the
church lands to be sold to Jews and jobbers; or given to
bribe new-invented municipal republics into a participation
in sacrilege? Are all the taxes to be voted grievances, and
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 203
the revenue reduced to a patriotic contribution, or patriotic
presents? Are silver shoe-buckles to be substituted in the
place of the land tax and the malt tax, for the support of
the naval strength of this kingdom? Are all orders, ranks,
and distinctions to be confounded, that out of universal
anarchy, joined to national bankruptcy, three or four thou-
sand democracies should be formed into eighty-three, and
that they may all, by some sort of unknown attractive power,
be organized into one? For this great end is the army to
be seduced from its discipline and its fidelity, first by every
kind of debauchery, and then by the terrible precedent of a
donative in the increase of pay? Are the curates to be
seduced from their bishops, by holding out to them the
delusive hope of a dole out of the spoils of their own order?
Are the citizens of London to be drawn from their allegiance
by feeding them at the expense of their fellow-subjects? Is
a compulsory paper currency to be substituted in the place
of the legal coin of this kingdom? Is what remains of the
plundered stock of public revenue to be employed in the
wild project of maintaining two armies to watch over and
to fight with each other? If these are the ends and means
of the Revolution Society, I admit that they are well as-
sorted; and France may furnish them for both with prece-
dents in point.
I see that your example is held out to shame us. I know
that we are supposed a dull, sluggish race, rendered passive
by finding our situation tolerable, and prevented by a medi-
ocrity of freedom from ever attaining to its full perfection.
Your leaders in France began by affecting to admire, almost
to adore, the British constitution; but as they advanced,
they came to look upon it with a sovereign contempt. The
friends of your National Assembly amongst us have full as
mean an opinion of what was formerly thought the glory of
their country. The Revolution Society has discovered that \
the English nation is not free. They are convinced that
the inequality in our representation is a " defect in our con-
stitution so gross and palpable, as to make it excellent
chiefly in form and theory/' 1 That a representation in the
legislature of a kingdom is not only the basis of all consti-
* Discourse on the Love of our Country, 3rd edit. p. 39.
204 EDMUND BURKE
tutional liberty in it, but of "all legitimate government; that
without it a government is nothing but an usurpation;" —
that " when the representation is partial, the kingdom pos-
sesses liberty only partially; and if extremely partial, it
gives only a semblance; and if not only extremely partial,
but corruptly chosen, it becomes a nuisance." Dr. Price con-
siders this inadequacy of representation as our fundamental
grievance; and though, as to the corruption of this sem-
blance of representation, he hopes it is not yet arrived to its
full perfection of depravity, he fears that " nothing will be
done towards gaining for us this essential blessing, until
some great abuse of power again provokes our resent-
ment, or some great calamity again alarms our fears, or
perhaps till the acquisition of a pure and equal represen-
tation by other countries, whilst we are mocked with the
shadow, kindles our shame." To this he subjoins a note in
these words: "A representation chosen chiefly by the treas-
ury, and a few thousands of the dregs of the people, who
are generally paid for their votes."
You will smile here at the consistency of those democra-
tists, who, when they are not on their guard, treat the hum-
bler part of the community with the greatest contempt,
whilst, at the same time, they pretend to make them the
depositories of all power. It would require a long discourse
to point out to you the many fallacies that lurk in the gener-
ality and equivocal nature of the terms " inadequate repre-
sentation." I shall only say here, in justice to that old-
fashioned constitution, under which we have long prospered,
that our representation has been found perfectly adequate to
all the purposes for which a representation of the people
can be desired or devised. I defy the enemies of our con-
stitution to show the contrary. To detail the particulars in
which it is found so well to promote its ends, would demand
a treatise on our practical constitution. I state here the
doctrine of the Revolutionists, only that you and others may
see what an opinion these gentlemen entertain of the consti-
tution of their country, and why they seem to think that
some great abuse of power, or some great calamity, as
giving a chance for the blessing of a constitution according
to their ideas, would be much palliated to their feelings;
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 205
you see why they are so much enamoured of your fair and
equal representation, which being once obtained, the same
effects might follow. You see they consider our House of
Commons as only " a semblance," " a form," " a theory,"
" a shadow," " a mockery," perhaps " a nuisance."
These gentlemen value themselves on being systematic;
and not without reason. They must therefore look on this
gross and palpable defect of representation, this fundamental
grievance, (so they call it,) as a thing not only vicious in
itself, but as rendering our whole government absolutely
illegitimate, and not at all better than a downright usurpa-
tion. Another revolution, to get rid of this illegitimate and
usurped government, would of course be perfectly justifiable,
if not absolutely necessary. Indeed their principle, if you
observe it with any attention, goes much further than to an
alteration in the election of the House of Commons; for, if
popular representation, or choice, is necessary to the legiti-
macy of all government, the House of Lords is, at one
stroke, bastardized and corrupted in blood. That House is
no representative of the people at all, even in " semblance
or in form." The case of the crown is altogether as bad.
In vain the crown may endeavour to screen itself against
these gentlemen by the authority of the establishment made
on the Revolution. The Revolution which is resorted to for
a title, on their system, wants a title itself. The Revolution
is built, according to their theory, upon a basis not more
solid than our present formalities, as it was made by a
House of Lords, not representing any one but themselves;
and by a House of Commons exactly such as the present,
that is, as they term it, by a mere " shadow and mockery "
of representation.
Something they must destroy, or they seem to themselves
to exist for no purpose. One set is for destroying the civil
power through the ecclesiastical; another, for demolishing
the ecclesiastic through the civil. They are aware that the
worst consequences might happen to the public in accom-
plishing this double ruin of church and state; but they are
so heated with their theories, that they give more than hints,
that this ruin, with all the mischiefs that must lead to it and
attend it, and which to themselves appear quite certain,
206 EDMUND BURKE
would not be unacceptable to them, or very remote from
their wishes. A man amongst them of great authority, and
certainly of great talents, speaking of a supposed alliance
between church and state says, " perhaps we must wait for
the fall of the civil powers before this most unnatural alli-
ance be broken. Calamitous no doubt will that time be. But
what convulsion in the political world ought to be a subject
of lamentation, if it be attended with so desirable an
effect ? " You see with what a steady eye these gentlemen
are prepared to view the greatest calamities which can befall
their country.
It is no wonder therefore, that with these ideas of every-
thing in their constitution and government at home, either
in church or state, as illegitimate and usurped, or at best as
a vain mockery, they look abroad with an eager and passion-
ate enthusiasm. Whilst they are possessed by these notions,
it is vain to talk to them of the practice of their ancestors,
the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed form of a
constitution, whose merits are confirmed by the solid test
of long experience, and an increasing public strength and
national prosperity. They despise experience as the wisdom
of unlettered men; and as for the rest, they have wrought
under-ground a mine that will blow up, at one grand ex-
plosion, all examples of antiquity, all precedents, charters,
and acts of parliament. They have " the rights of men."
Against these there can be no prescription ; against these
no agreement is binding: these admit no temperament, and
no compromise: anything withheld from their full demand
is so much of fraud and injustice. Against these their rights
of men let no government look for security in the length
of its continuance, or in the justice and lenity of its admin-
istration. The objections of these speculatists, if its forms
do not quadrate with their theories, are as valid against
such an old and beneficent government, as against the most
violent tyranny, or the greenest usurpation. They are
always at issue with governments, not on a question of
abuse, but a question of competency, and a question of title.
I have nothing to say to the clumsy subtilty of their political
metaphysics. Let them be their amusement in the schools. —
"Ilia se jactat in aula — Molus, et clauso ventorum careers
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 207
regnet." — But let them not break prison to burst like a
Levanter, to sweep the earth with their hurricane, and to
break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us.
Far am I from denying in theory, full as far is my heart
from withholding in practice, (if I were of power to give or
to withhold,) the real rights of men. In denying their false
claims of right, I do not mean to injure those which are real,
and are such as their pretended rights would totally destroy.
If civil society be made for the advantage of man, all the
advantages for which it is made become his right. It is an
institution of beneficence; and law itself is only beneficence
acting by a rule. Men have a right to live by that rule ; they
have a right to do justice, as between their fellows, whether
their fellows are in public function or in ordinary occupa-
tion. They have a right to the fruits of their industry;
and to the means of making their industry fruitful. They
have a right to the acquisitions of their parents; to the
nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to instruc-
tion in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each
man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he
has a right to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair
portion of all which society, with all its combinations of skill
and force, can do in his favour. In this partnership all men
have equal rights; but not to equal things. He that has
but five shillings in the partnership, has as good a right to
it, as he that has five hundred pounds has to his larger pro-
portion. But he has not a right to an equal dividend in the
product of the joint stock; and as to the share of power,
authority, and direction which each individual ought to have
in the management of the state, that I must deny to be
amongst the direct original rights of man in civil society;
for I have in my contemplation the civil social man, and no
other. It is a thing to be settled by convention.
If civil society be the offspring of convention, that con-
vention must be its law. That convention must limit and
modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed
under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory
power are its creatures. They can have no being in any
other state of things ; and how can any man claim under the
conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as
208 EDMUND BURKE
suppose its existence? rights which are absolutely repugnant
to it? One of the first motives to civil society, and which
becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man should
be judge in his own cause. By this each person has at once
divested himself of the first fundamental right of uncov-
enanted man, that is, to judge for himself, and to assert his
own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own governor.
He inclusively, in a great measure, abandons the right of
self-defence, the first law of nature. Men cannot enjoy the
rights of an uncivil and of a civil state together. That he
may obtain justice, he gives up his right of determining
what it is in points the most essential to him. That he may
secure some liberty, he makes a surrender in trust of the
whole of it.
Government is not made in virtue of natural rights, which
may and do exist in total independence of it; and exist in
much greater clearness, and in a much greater degree of ab-
stract perfection : but their abstract perfection is their prac-
tical defect. By having a right to everything they want
everything. Government is a contrivance of human wisdom
to provide for human wants. Men have a right that these
wants should be provided for by this wisdom. Among these
wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a
sufficient restraint upon their passions. Society requires not
only that the passions of individuals should be subjected,
but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the indi-
viduals, the inclinations of men should frequently be
thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought
into subjection. This can only be done by a power out of
themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject
to that will and to those passions which it is its office to
bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as
well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights.
But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and
circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they
cannot be settled upon any abstract rule ; and nothing is so
foolish as to discuss them upon that principle.
The moment you abate anything from the full rights of
men, each to govern himself, and suffer any artificial, posi-
tive limitation upon those rights, from that moment the
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 209
whole organization of government becomes a consideration
of convenience. This it is which makes the constitution of
a state, and the due distribution of its powers, a matter of
the most delicate and complicated skill. It requires a deep
knowledge of human nature and human necessities, and of
the things which facilitate or obstruct the various ends,
which are to be pursued by the mechanism of civil institu-
tions. The state is to have recruits to its strength, and
remedies to its distempers. What is the use of discussing
a man's abstract right to food or medicine? The question
is upon the method of procuring and administering them. In
that deliberation I shall always advise to call in the aid of
the farmer and the physician, rather than the professor of
metaphysics.
The science of constructing a commonwealth, or reno-
vating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental
science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short ex-
perience that can instruct us in that practical science: be-
cause the real effects of moral causes are not always imme-
diate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may
be excellent in its remoter operation ; and its excellence may
arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning.
The reverse also happens : and very plausible schemes,
with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and
lamentable conclusions. In states there are often some ob-
scure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first
view of little moment, on which a very great part of its
prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The
science of government being therefore so practical in itself,
and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which
requires experience, and even more experience than any
person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and
observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man
ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has
answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common pur-
poses of society, or on building it up again, without having
models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.
These metaphysic rights entering into common life, like
rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the
laws of nature, refracted from their straight line. Indeed
210 EDMUND BURKE
in the gross and complicated mass of human passions and
concerns, the primitive rights of men undergo such a variety
of refractions and reflections, that it becomes absurd to
talk of them as if they continued in the simplicity of their
original direction. The nature of man is intricate; the ob-
jects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and
therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be
suitable either to man's nature, or to the quality of his
affairs. When I hear the simplicity of contrivance aimed at
and boasted of in any new political constitutions, I am at no
loss to decide that the artificers are grossly ignorant of
their trade, or totally negligent of their duty. The simple
governments are fundamentally defective, to say no worse
of them. If you were to contemplate society in but one
point of view, all these simple modes of polity are infinitely
captivating. In effect each would answer its single end
much more perfectly than the more complex is able to attain
all its complex purposes. But it is better that the whole
should be imperfectly and anomalously answered, than that,
while some parts are provided for with great exactness,
others might be totally neglected, or perhaps materially in-
jured, by the over-care of a favourite member.
The pretended rights of these theorists are all extremes:
and in proportion as they are metaphysically true, they are
morally and politically false. The rights of men are in a sort
of middle, incapable of definition, but not impossible to be
discerned. The rights of men in governments are their ad-
vantages; and these are often in balances between differ-
ences of good; in compromises sometimes between good
and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil. Political
reason is a computing principle; adding, subtracting, mul-
tiplying, and dividing, morally and not metaphysically, or
mathematically, true moral denominations.
By these theorists the right of the people is almost always
sophistically confounded with their power. The body of the
community, whenever it can come to act, can meet with no
effectual resistance; but till power and right are the same,
the whole body of them has no right inconsistent with virtue,
and the first of all virtues, prudence. Men have no right to
what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit;
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 211
for though a pleasant writer said, Liceat perire poelis, when
one of them, in cold blood, is said to have leaped into the
flames of a volcanic revolution, Ardent em frigidus 2Etnam
insiluit, I consider such a frolic rather as an unjustifiable
poetic license, than as one of the franchises of Parnassus;
and whether he was a poet, or divine, or politician, that chose
to exercise this kind of right, I think that more wise, because
more charitable, thoughts would urge me rather to save the
man than to preserve his brazen slippers as the monuments
of his folly.
The kind of anniversary sermons to which a great part of
what I write refers, if men are not shamed out of their
present course, in commemorating the fact, will cheat many
out of the principles, and deprive them of the benefits, of the
revolution they commemorate. I confess to you, Sir, I
never liked this continual talk of resistance, and revolution,
or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the con-
stitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society
dangerously valetudinary: it is taking periodical doses of
mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provo-
catives of cantharides to our love of liberty.
This distemper of remedy, grown habitual, relaxes and
wears out, by a vulgar and prostituted use, the spring of that
spirit which is to be exerted on great occasions. It was in
the most patient period of Roman servitude that themes of
tyrannicide made the ordinary exercise of boys at school —
cum perimit scevos classis numerosa tyrannos. In the ordi-
nary state of things, it produces in a country like ours the
worst effects, even on the cause of that liberty which it
abuses with the dissoluteness of an extravagant speculation.
Almost all the high-bred republicans of my time have, after
a short space, become the most decided, thorough-paced
courtiers ; they soon left the business of a tedious, moderate,
but practical resistance, to those of us whom, in the pride and
intoxication of their theories, they have slighted as not much
better than Tories. Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the
most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go be-
yond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.
But even in cases where rather levity than fraud was to be
suspected in these ranting speculations, the issue has been
fl2 EDMUND BURKE
much the same. These professors, finding their extreme
principles not applicable to cases which call only for a quali-
fied, or, as I may say, civil and legal resistance, in such
cases employ no resistance at all. It is with them a war
or a revolution, or it is nothing. Finding their schemes of
politics not adapted to the state of the world in which they
live, they often come to think lightly of all public principle ;
and are ready, on their part, to abandon for a very trivial
interest what they find of very trivial value. Some indeed
are of more steady and persevering natures; but these are
eager politicians out of parliament, who have little to tempt
them to abandon their favourite projects. They have some
change in the church or state, or both, constantly in their
view. When that is the case, they are always bad citizens,
and perfectly unsure connexions. For, considering their
speculative designs as of infinite value, and the actual ar-
rangement of the state as of no estimation, they are at
best indifferent about it. They see no merit in the good,
and no fault in the vicious, management of public affairs;
they rather rejoice in the latter, as more propitious to
revolution. They see no merit or demerit in any man, or
any action, or any political principle, any further than
as they may forward or retard their design of change:
they therefore take up, one day, the most violent and
stretched prerogative, and another time the wildest dem-
ocratic ideas of freedom, and pass from one to the other
without any sort or regard to cause, to person, or to
party.
In France you are now in the crisis of a revolution, and
in the transit from one form of government to another — you
cannot see that character of men exactly in the same situ-
ation in which we see it in this country. With us it is
militant; with you it is triumphant; and you know how it
can act when its power is commensurate to its will. I would
not be supposed to confine those observations to any descrip-
tion of men, or to comprehend all men of any description
within them — No ! far from it. I am as incapable of that
injustice, as I am of keeping terms with those who profess
principles of extremities; and who, under the name of
religion, teach little else than wild and dangerous politics.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 213
The worst of these politics of revolution is this: they tem-
per and harden the breast, in order to prepare it for the
desperate strokes which are sometimes used in extreme
occasions. But as these occasions may never arrive, the
mind receives a gratuitous taint ; and the moral sentiments
suffer not a little, when no political purpose is served by the
depravation. This sort of people are so taken up with
their theories about the rights of man, that they have
totally forgotten his nature. Without opening one new
avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stop-
ping up those that lead to the heart. They have perverted in
themselves, and in those that attend to them, all the well-
placed sympathies of the human breast.
This famous sermon of the Old Jewry breathes nothing
but this spirit through all the political part. Plots, massacres,
assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtain-
ing a revolution. Cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless
liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be
a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage
effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagi-
nation, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years'
security and the still unanimating repose of public pros-
perity. The preacher found them all in the French Revolu-
tion. This inspires a juvenile warmth through his whole
frame. His enthusiasm kindles as he advances; and when
he arrives at his peroration it is in a full blaze. Then viewing,
from the Pisgah of his pulpit, the free, moral, happy, flour-
ishing and glorious state of France, as in a bird's-eye land-
scape of a promised land, he breaks out into the following
rapture :
" What an eventful period is this ! I am thankful that I
have lived to it; I could almost say, Lord, now lettest thou
thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy
salvation. — I have lived to see a diffusion of knowledge,
which has undermined superstition and error. — I have lived
to see the rights of men better understood than ever; and
nations panting for liberty which seemed to have lost the
idea of it. — I have lived to see thirty millions of people, in-
dignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding
liberty with an irresistible voice. Their king led in triumph
214 EDMUND BURKE
and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his
subjects/' 1
Before I proceed further, I have to remark, that Dr. Price
seems rather to overvalue the great acquisitions of light
which he has obtained and diffused in this age. The last
century appears to me to have been quite as much enlight-
ened. It had, though in a different place, a triumph as
memorable as that of Dr. Price; and some of the great
preachers of that period partook of it as eagerly as he has
done in the triumph of France. On the trial of the Rev.
Hugh Peters for high treason, it was deposed, that when
King Charles was brought to London for his trial, the
Apostle of Liberty in that day conducted the triumph. " I
saw," says the witness, " His Majesty in the coach with six
horses, and Peters riding before the king, triumphing/' Dr.
Price, when he talks as if he had made a discovery, only
follows a precedent; for, after the commencement of the
king's trial, this precursor, the same Dr. Peters, concluding
a long prayer at the Royal Chapel at Whitehall, (he had
very triumphantly chosen his place,) said, "I have prayed
and preached these twenty years; and now I may say with
old Simeon, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in
peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation/' 2 Peters had
not the fruits of his prayer; for he neither departed so
soon as he wished, nor in peace. He became (what T
heartily hope none of his followers may be in this coun-
try) himself a sacrifice to the triumph which he led as
pontiff.
They dealt at the Restoration, perhaps, too hardly with this
poor good man. But we owe it to his memory and his
sufferings, that he had as much illumination, and as much
zeal, and had as effectually undermined all the superstition
and error which might impede the great business he was
engaged in, as any who follow and repeat after him, in
this age, which would assume to itself an exclusive title
1 Another of these reverend gentlemen, who was witness to some of the
spectacles which Paris has lately exhibited, expresses himself thus: — " A
king dragged in submissive triumph by his conquering subjects, is one of
those appearances of grandeur which seldom rise in the prospect of hmman
affairs, and which, during the remainder of my life, I shall think of with
wonder and gratification." These gentlemen agree marvellously in their
feelings. 3 State Trials, vol. ii. p. 360, 363.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRaNCE 215
to the knowledge of the rights of men, and all the glorious
consequences of that knowledge.
After this sally of the preacher of the Old Jewry, which
differs only in place and time, but agrees perfectly with the
spirit and letter of the rapture of 1648, the Revolution
Society, the fabricators of governments, the heroic band of
cashier ers of monarchs, electors of sovereigns, and leaders of
kings in triumph, strutting with a proud consciousness of
the diffusion of knowledge, of which every member had ob-
tained so large a share in the donative, were in haste to
make a generous diffusion of the knowledge they had thus
gratuitously received. To make this bountiful communi-
cation, they adjourned from the church in the Old Jewry to
the London Tavern; where the same Dr. Price, in whom
the fumes of his oracular tripod were not entirely evaporated,
moved and carried the resolution, or address of congratu-
lation transmitted by Lord Stanhope to the National As-
sembly of France.
I find a preacher of the gospel profaning the beautiful and
prophetic ejaculation, commonly called "nunc dimittis,"
made on the first presentation of our Saviour in the temple,
and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to
the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that per-
haps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of man-
kind. This " leading in triumph," a thing in its best form
unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such
unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste
of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupe-
fied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was
(unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more
resembling a procession of American savages, entering into
Onondaga, after some of their murders called victories, and
leading into hovels hung round with scalps, their captives,
overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as fero-
cious as themselves, much more than it resembled the tri-
umphal pomp of a civilized, martial nation ; — if a civilized
nation, or any men who had a sense of generosity, were
capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and afflicted.
This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must
believe that, as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and
216 EDMUND BURKE
horror. I must believe that the National Assembly find
themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation in not being
able to punish the authors of this triumph, or the actors in
it; and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry
they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of
the appearance of liberty or impartiality. The apology of
that assembly is found in their situation; but when we ap-
prove what they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice
of a vitiated mind.
With a compelled appearance of deliberation, they vote
under the dominion of a stern necessity. They sit in the
heart, as it were, of a foreign republic : they have their resi-
dence in a city whose constitution has emanated neither
from the charter of their king, nor from their legislative
power. There they are surrounded by an army not raised
either by the authority of their crown, or by their command ;
and which, if they should order to dissolve itself, would
instantly dissolve them. There they sit, after a gang of
assassins had driven away some hundreds of the members;
whilst those who held the same moderate principles, with
more patience or better hope, continued every day exposed
to outrageous insults and murderous threats. There a ma-
jority, sometimes real, sometimes pretended, captive itself,
compels a captive king to issue as royal edicts, at third hand,
the polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy
coffee-houses. It is notorious, that all their measures are
decided before they are debated. It is beyond doubt, that
under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post, and the
torch to their houses, they are obliged to adopt all the
crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed
of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and na-
tions. Among these are found persons, in comparison of
whom Catiline would be thought scrupulous, and Cethegus
a man of sobriety and moderation. Nor is it in these clubs
alone that the public measures are deformed into monsters.
They undergo a previous distortion in academies, intended
as so many seminaries for these clubs, which are set up in
all the places of public resort. In these meetings of all sorts,
every counsel, in proportion as it is daring, and violent,
and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 217
Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fru!ts of
superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is
considered as treason to the public. Liberty is always to be
estimated perfect as property is rendered insecure. Amidst
assassination, massacre, and confiscation, perpetrated or
meditated, they are forming plans for the good order of
future society. Embracing in their arms the carcases of
base criminals, and promoting their relations on the title of
their offences, they drive hundreds of virtuous persons to
the same end, by forcing them to subsist by beggary or by
crime.
The assembly, their organ, acts before them the farce of
deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like
the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience; they act
amidst the tumultuous cries of a mixed mob of ferocious
men, and of women lost to shame, who, according to their
insolent fancies, direct, control, applaud, explode them ;
and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them;
domineering over them with a strange mixture of servile
petulance and proud, presumptuous authority. As they have
inverted order in all things, the gallery is in the place of the
house. This assembly, which overthrows kings and king-
doms, has not even the physiognomy and aspect of a grave
legislative body — nee color imperii, nee frons ulla senatus.
They have a power given to them, like that of the evil prin-
ciple, to subvert and destroy; but none to construct, except
such machines as may be fitted for further subversion and
further destruction.
Who is it that admires, and from the heart is attached to,
national representative assemblies, but must turn with hor-
ror and disgust from such a profane burlesque, and abomina-
ble perversion of that sacred institute? Lovers of monarchy,
lovers of republics, must alike abhor it. The members of
your assembly must themselves groan under the tyranny of
which they have all the shame, none of the direction, and
little of the profit. I am sure many of the members who
compose even the majority of that body must feel as I do,
notwithstanding the applauses of the Revolution Society.
Miserable king ! miserable assembly ! How must that as-
sembly be silently scandalized with those of their members.
218 EDMUND BURKE
who could call a day which seemed to blot the sun out ot
heaven, " un beau jour!" 1 How must they be inwardly
indignant at hearing others, who thought fit to declare to
them, " that the vessel of the state would fly forward in her
course towards regeneration with more speed than ever,"
from the stiff gale of treason and murder, which preceded
our preacher's triumph ! What must they have felt, whilst,
with outward patience, and inward indignation, they heard
of the slaughter of innocent gentlemen in their houses, that
" the blood spilled was not the most pure ! " What must
they have felt, when they were besieged by complaints of
disorders which shook their country to its foundations, at
being compelled coolly to tell the complainants, that they
were under the protection of the law, and that they would
address the king (the captive king) to cause the laws to be
enforced for their protection ; when the enslaved ministers
of that captive king had formally notified to them, that there
were neither law, nor authority, nor power left to protect !
What must they have felt at being obliged, as a felicitation
on the present new year, to request their captive king to
forget the stormy period of the last, on account of the great
good which he was likely to produce to his people ; to the
complete attainment of which good they adjourned the
practical demonstrations of their loyalty, assuring him of
their obedience, when he should no longer possess any
authority to command !
This address was made with much good nature and affec-
tion, to be sure. But among the revolutions in France must
be reckoned a considerable revolution in their ideas of
politeness. In England we are said to learn manners at
second-hand from your side of the water, and that we dress
our behaviour in the frippery of France. If so, we are still
in the old cut ; and have not so far conformed to the new
Parisian mode of good breeding, as to think it quite in the
most refined strain of delicate compliment (whether in con-
dolence or congratulation) to say, to the most humiliated
creature that crawls upon the earth, that great public ben-
efits are derived from the murder of his servants, the at-
tempted assassination of himself and of his wife, and the
1 6th of October, 1789.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 219
mortification, disgrace, and degradation, that he has person-
ally suffered. It is a topic of consolation which our
ordinary of Newgate would be too humane to use to a crimi-
nal at the foot of the gallows. I should have thought that
the hangman of Paris, now that he is liberalized by the vote
of the National Assembly, and is allowed his rank and arms
in the herald's college of the rights of men, would be too
generous, too gallant a man, too full of the sense of his
new dignity, to employ that cutting consolation to any of the
persons whom the leze nation might bring under the admin-
istration of his executive power.
A man is fallen indeed, when he is thus flattered. The
anodyne draught of oblivion, thus drugged, is well calculated
to preserve a galling wakefulness, and to feed the living
ulcer of a corroding memory. Thus to administer the opiate
potion of amnesty, powdered with all the ingredients of
scorn and contempt, is to hold to his lips, instead of " the
balm of hurt minds," the cup of human misery full to the
brim, and to force him to drink it to the dregs.
Yielding to reasons, at least as forcible as those which
were so delicately urged in the compliment on the new year,
the king of France will probably endeavour to forget these
events and that compliment. But history, who keeps a
durable record of all our acts, and exercises her awful cen-
sure over the proceedings of all sorts of sovereigns, will not
forget either those events, or the era of this liberal refine-
ment in the intercourse of mankind. History will record,
that on the morning of the 6th of October, 1789, the king
and queen of France, after a day of confusion, alarm, dis-
may, and slaughter, lay down, under the pledged security
of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite,
and troubled, melancholy repose. From this sleep the queen
was first startled by the voice of the sentinel at her door,
who cried out to her to save herself by flight — that this was
the last proof of fidelity he could give — that they were upon
him, and he was dead. Instantly he was cut down. A band
of cruel ruffians and assassins, reeking with his blood,
rushed into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with a
hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from
whence this persecuted woman had but just time to fly
220 EDMUND BURKE
almost naked, and, through ways unknown to the murderers,
had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and hus-
band, not secure of his own life for a moment.
This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their
infant children, (who once would have been the pride and
hope of a great and generous people,) were then forced to
abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the
world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by
massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated
carcases. Thence they were conducted into the capital of
their kingdom.
Two had been selected from the unprovoked, unresisted,
promiscuous slaughter, which was made of the gentlemen
of birth and family who composed the king's body guard.
These two gentlemen, with all the parade of an execu-
tion of justice, were cruelly and publicly dragged to the
block, and beheaded in the great court of the palace. Their
neads were stuck upon spears, and led the procession ; whilst
the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly
moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams,
and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the
unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused
shape of the vilest of women.
After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more
than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a jour-
ney of twelve miles, protracted to six hours, they were,
under a guard, composed of those very soldiers who had
thus conducted them through this famous triumph, lodged
in one of the old palaces of Paris, now converted into a
bastile for kings.
Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars? to be com-
memorated with grateful thanksgiving? to be offered to the
divine humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastic ejacu-
lation? — These Theban and Thracian orgies, acted in
France, and applauded only in the Old Jewry, I assure you,
kindle prophetic enthusiasm in the minds but of very few
people in this kingdom : although a saint and apostle, who
may have revelations of his own, and who has so completely
vanquished all the mean superstitions of the heart, may in-
cline to think it pious and decorous to compare it with the
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 221
entrance into the world of the Prince of Peace, proclaimed
in a holy temple by a venerable sage, and not long before not
worse announced by the voice of angels to, the quiet in-
nocence of shepherds.
At first I was at a loss to account for this fit of unguarded
transport. I knew, indeed, that the sufferings of monarchs
make a delicious repast to some sort of palates. There were
reflections which might serve to keep this appetite within
some bounds of temperance. But when I took one circum-
stance into my consideration, I was obliged to confess, that
much allowance ought to be made for the society, and that
the temptation was too strong for common discretion; I
mean, the circumstance of the Io Paean of the triumph, the
animating cry which called " for all the BISHOPS to be
hanged on the lamp-posts," 1 might well have brought forth
a burst of enthusiasm on the foreseen consequences of this
happy day. I allow to so much enthusiasm some little devia-
tion from prudence. I allow this prophet to break forth
into hymns of joy and thanksgiving on an event which ap-
pears like the precursor of the Millenium, and the projected
fifth monarchy, in the destruction of all church establish-
ments.
There was, however, (as in all human affairs there
is,) in the midst of this joy, something to exercise the
patience of these worthy gentlemen, and to try the long-
suffering of their faith. The actual murder of the king and
queen, and their child, was wanting to the other auspicious
circumstances of this " beautiful day." The actual murder
of the bishops, though called for by so many holy ejacula-
tions, was also wanting. A group of regicide and sacri-
legious slaughter, was indeed boldly sketched, but it was
only sketched. It unhappily was left unfinished, in this great
history-piece of the massacre of innocents. What hardy
pencil of a great master, from the school of the rights of
men, will finish it, is to be seen hereafter. The age has not
yet the complete benefit of that diffusion of knowledge that
has undermined superstition and error; and the king of
France wants another object or two to consign to oblivion,
in consideration of all the good which is to arise from his
1 Tous les Eveques a la lanterne.
222 EDMUND BURKE
own sufferings, and the patriotic crimes of an enlightened
age. 1
Although thjs work of our new light and knowledge did
not go to the length that in all probability it was intended
it should be carried, yet I must think that such treatment of
any human creatures must be shocking to any but those
who are made for accomplishing revolutions. But I cannot
stop here. Influenced by the inborn feelings of my nature,
and not being illuminated by a single ray of this new-sprung
modern light, I confess to you, Sir, that the exalted rank of
the persons suffering, and particularly the sex, the beauty,
and the amiable qualities of the descendant of so many kings
and emperors, with the tender age of royal infants, insensi-
ble only through infancy and innocence of the cruel out-
rages to which their parents were exposed, instead of being
a subject of exultation, adds not a little to my sensibility on
that most melancholy occasion.
1 It is proper here to refer to a letter written upon this subject by an
eye-witness. That eye-witness was one of the most honest, intelligent,
and eloquent members of the National Assembly, one of the most active
and zealous reformers of the state. He was obliged to secede from the
assembly; and he afterwards became a voluntary exile, on account of the
horrors of this pious triumph, and the dispositions of men, who, profiting
of crimes, if not causing them, have taken the lead in public affairs.
Extract of M. de Lally Tollendal's Second Letter to a Friend
" Parlons du parti que j'ai pris; il est bien justifie dans ma conscience.
— Ni cette ville coupable, ni cette assemblee plus coupable encore, ne
meritoient que je me justifie; mais j'ai a coeur que vous, et les personnes
qui pensent comme vous, ne me condamnent pas. — Ma sante, je vous
jure, me rendoit mes fonctions impossibles; mais meme en les mettant de
cote il a ete au-dessus de mes forces de supporter plus longtems l'horreur
que me causoit ce sang, — ces tetes — cette reine presque egorgee, — ce roi,
— amene sclave, — entranta Paris, au milieu de ses assassins, et precede des
tetes de ses malheureux grades — ces perfides janissaires, ces assassins, ces
femmes cannibales, ce cri de tous les eveques a la lanterne, dans le
moment ou le roi entre sa capitale avec deux eveques de son conseil dans
sa voiture — un coup de fusil, que j'ai vu tirer dans un des carosses de la
reine. M. Bailly appellant cela un beau jour, — l'assemblee ayant declare
froidement le matin, qu'il n'etoit pas de sa dignite d'aller toute entiere
environner le roi — M % Mirabeau disant impunement dans cette assemblee
que le vaisseau de l'etat, loins d'etre arrete dans sa course, s'elanceroit
avec plus de rapidite que jamais vers sa regeneration — M. Barnave,
riant avec lui, quand des flots de sang coulaient autour de nous — le
vertueux Mounier * echappant par miracle a vingt assassins, qui avoient
voulu faire de sa tete un trophee de plus: Voila ce qui me fit jurer de
ne plus mettre le pied dans cette caverne d' Antropophages [the National
Assembly] ou je n'avois plus de force d'elever la voix, ou depuis six
semaines je l'avois elevee en vain.
" Moi, Mounier, et tous les honnetes gens, ont pense que le dernier
* N. B. Mr. Mounier was then speaker of the National Assembly. He has
since been obliged to live in exile, though one of the firmest asserters of liberty.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 223
I hear that the august person, who was the principal object
of our preacher's triumph, though he supported himself, felt
much on that shameful occasion. As a man, it became him
to feel for his wife and his children, and the faithful guards
of his person, that were massacred in cold blood about him;
as a prince, it became him to feel for the strange and fright-
ful transformation of his civilized subjects, and to be more
grieved for them than solicitous for himself. It derogates
little from his fortitude, while it adds infinitely to the honour
of his humanity. I am very sorry to say it, very sorry
indeed, that such personages are in a situation in which it
is not becoming in us to praise the virtues of the great.
I hear, and I rejoice to hear, that the great lady, th° other
object of the triumph, has borne that day, (one is interested
that beings made for suffering should suffer well,) and that
she bears all the succeeding days, that she bears the impris-
onment of her husband, and her own captivity, and the exile
of her friends, and the insulting adulation of addresses,
and the whole weight of her accumulated wrongs, with a
serene patience, in a manner suited to her rank and race,
and becoming the offspring of a sovereign distinguished for
her piety and her courage : that, like her, she has lofty senti-
ments ; that she feels with the dignity of a Roman matron ;
that in the last extremity she will save herself from the last
disgrace; and that, if she must fall, she will fall by no ig-
noble hand.
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen
of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely
effort a faire pour le bien etoit d'en sortir. Aucune idee de crainte ne
s'est approchee de moi. Je rougirois de m'en defendre. J'avois encore
regu sur la route de la part de ce peuple, moins coupable que ceux qui
l'ont enivre de fureur, des acclamations, et des applaudissements, dont
d'autres auroient ete flattes, et qui m'ont fait fremir. C'est a. l'indignation,
c'est a l'horreur, c'est aux convulsions physiques, que le seul aspect du
sang me fait eprouver que j'ai cede. On brave une seul mort; on la brave
plusieurs fois, quand elle peut etre utile. Mais aucune puissance sous le
Ciel, mais aucune opinion publique, ou privee n'ont le droit de me con-
damner a souffrir inutilement mille supplices par minute, eta perir de
desespoir, de rage, au milieu des triomphes, du crime que je n'ai pu arreter.
lis me proscriront, ils confisqueront mes biens. Je labourerai la terre, et
je ne les verrai plus.— Voila ma justification. Vous pourrez la lire, la
montrer, la laisser copier; tant pis pour ceux qui ne la comprendront pas;
ce ne sera alors moi qui auroit eu tort de la leur donner."
This military man had not so good nerves as the peaceable gentleman of
the Old Jewry. — See Mons. Mounier's narrative of these transactions; a
man also of honour, and virtue, and talents, and therefore a fugitive.
224 EDMUND BURKE
never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch,
a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon,
decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began
to move in, — glittering like the morning-star, full of life,
and splendour, and joy. Oh ! what a revolution ! and what
a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that
elevation and that fall ! Little did I dream when she added
titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respect-
ful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp
antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did
I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen
upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of
honour, and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords
must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look
that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is
gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has
succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever.
Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty
to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedi-
ence, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even
in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The
unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the
nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone !
It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor,
which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage
whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it
touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by
losing all its grossness.
This mixed system of opinion and sentiment had its origin
in the ancient chivalry; and the principle, though varied in
its appearance by the varying state of human affairs, sub-
sisted and influenced through a long succession of genera-
tions, even to the time we live in. If it should ever be totally
extinguished, the loss I fear will be great. It is this which
has given its character to modern Europe. It is this which
has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and
distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia,
and possibly from those states which flourished in the most
brilliant periods of the antique world. It was this, which,
without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality,
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 225
and handed it down through all the gradations of social life.
It was this opinion which mitigated kings into companions,
and raised private men to be fellows with kings. Without
force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and
power ; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of
social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to ele-
gance, and gave a dominating vanquisher of laws to be
subdued by manners.
But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions,
which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which har-
monized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland
assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which
beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by
this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the
decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the
superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral
imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding
ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked,
shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own esti-
mation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and an-
tiquated fashion.
On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen
is but a woman ; a woman is but an animal, and an animal
not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in
general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded
as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sac-
rilege, are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurispru-
dence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king N
or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homi-
cide; and if the people are by any chance, or in any way,
gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable,
and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.
On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the
offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and
which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all
taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their
own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may
find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare
to them from his own private interests. In the groves of
their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing
HC H — VOL. XXIV
226 EDMUND BURKE
but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affec-
tions on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles
of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be
embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to
create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment.
But that sort of reason which banishes the affections is
incapable of filling their place. These public affections,
combined with manners, are required sometimes as supple-
ments, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. The
precept given by a wise man, as well as a great critic, for
the construction of poems, is equally true as to states : — Non
satis est pulchra esse poemata, dtilcia sunto. There ought to
be a system of manners in every nation, which a well-formed
mind would be disposed to relish. To make us love our
country, our country ought to be lovely.
But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock
in which manners and opinions perish; and it will find other
and worse means for its support. The usurpation which, in
order to subvert ancient institutions, has destroyed ancient
principles, will hold power by arts similar to those by which
it has acquired it. When the old feudal and chivalrous
spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from fear, freed
both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny,
shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations
will be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive
confiscation, and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims,
which form the political code of all power, not standing on
its own honour, and the honour of those who are to obey it.
Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels
from principle.
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away,
the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment
we have no compass to govern us ; nor can we know dis-
tinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly, taken
in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which
your revolution was completed. How much of that pros-
perous state was owing to the spirit of our old manners and
opinions is not easy to say ; but as such causes cannot be
indifferent in their operation, we must presume, that, on the
whole, their operation was beneficial.
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 227
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in
which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the
causes by which they have been produced, and possibly may
be upheld. Nothing is more certain, than that our manners,
our civilization, and all the good things which are connected
with manners and with civilization, have, in this European
world of ours, depended for ages upon two principles; and
were indeed the result of both combined; I mean the spirit
of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion. The nobility
and the clergy, the one by profession, the other by patron-
age, kept learning in existence, even in the midst of arms
and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their
causes than formed. Learning paid back what it received
to nobility and to priesthood, and paid it with usury, by en-
larging their ideas, and by furnishing their minds. Happy
if they had all continued to know their indissoluble union,
and their proper place ! Happy if learning, not debauched
by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor, and
not aspired to be the master ! Along with its natural pro-
tectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire,
and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude. 1
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are
always willing to owe to ancient manners, so do other in-
terests which we value full as much as they are worth.
Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of
our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but crea-
tures ; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we
choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same
shade in which learning flourished. They too may decay
with their natural protecting principles. With you, for the
present at least, they all threaten to disappear together.
Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people,
and the spirit of nobility and religion remains, sentiment
supplies, and not always ill supplies, their place ; but if com-
merce and the arts should be lost in an experiment to try
how well a state may stand without these old fundamental
principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of gross,
stupid, ferocious, and, at the same time, poor and sordid,
1 See the fate of Bailly and Condorcet, supposed to be here particu
larly alluded to. Compare the circumstances of the trial and execution
of the former with this prediction.
228 EDMUND BURKE
barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride,
possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing here-
after?
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest
cut, to that horrible and disgustful situation. Already there
appears a poverty of conception, a coarseness and a vul-
garity, in all the proceedings of the Assembly and of all
their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal. Their science
is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and
brutal.
It is not clear, whether in England we learned those grand
and decorous principles and manners, of which considerable
traces yet remain, from you, or whether you took them from
us. But to you, I think, we trace them best. You seem
to me to be — gentis incunabula nostra. France has always
more or less influenced manners in England ; and when your
fountain is choked up and polluted, the stream will not run
long, or not run clear, with us, or perhaps with any nation.
This gives all Europe, in my opinion, but too close and con-
nected a concern in what is done in France. Excuse me,
therefore, if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle
of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope
to the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion
of the most important of all revolutions, which may be dated
from that day, I mean a revolution in sentiments, manners,
and moral opinions. As things now stand, with everything
respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt to destroy
within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced
to apologize for harbouring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price,
and those of his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sen-
timents of his discourse? — For this plain reason — because
it is natural I should ; because we are so made, as to be
affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments upon
the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tre-
mendous uncertainty of human greatness; because in those
natural feelings we learn great lessons; because in events
like these our passions instruct our reason ; because when
kings are hurled from their thrones by the Supreme Direc-
tor of this great drama, and become the objects of insult to
ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE 229
the base, and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters
in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical,
order of things. We are alarmed into reflection; our minds
(as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror
and pity ; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled under the
dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might
be drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the
stage. I should be truly ashamed of finding in myself that
superficial, theatric sense of painted distress, whilst I could
exult over it in real life. With such a perverted mind, I
could never venture to show my face at a tragedy. People
would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that Siddons
not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of
hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.
