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FOX AND BURKE

It is, or it would be, if Mr. Schlosser were himself more interesting, luxurious to pursue his ignorance as to facts, and the craziness of his judgment as to the valuation of minds, throughout his comparison of Burke with Fox. The force of antithesis brings out into a feeble life of meaning, what, in its own insulation, had been languishing mortally into nonsense. The darkness of his ‘Burke’ becomes visible darkness under the glimmering that steals upon it from the desperate commonplaces of this ‘Fox.’ Fox is painted exactly as he would have been painted fifty years ago by any pet subaltern of the Whig club, enjoying free pasture in Devonshire House. The practised reader knows well what is coming. Fox is ‘formed after the model of the ancients’–Fox is ‘simple’–Fox is ‘natural’–Fox is ‘chaste’–Fox is ‘forcible;’ why yes, in a sense, Fox is even ‘forcible:’ but then, to feel that he was so, you must have heard him; whereas, for forty years he has been silent. We of 1847, that can only read him, hearing Fox described as forcible, are disposed to recollect Shakspeare’s Mr. Feeble amongst Falstaff’s recruits, who also is described as forcible, viz., as the ‘most forcible Feeble.’ And, perhaps, a better description could not be devised for Fox himself–so feeble was he in matter, so forcible in manner; so powerful for instant effect, so impotent for posterity. In the Pythian fury of his gestures–in his screaming voice–in his directness of purpose, Fox would now remind you of some demon steam-engine on a railroad, some Fire-king or Salmoneus, that had counterfeited, because he could not steal, Jove’s thunderbolts; hissing, bubbling, snorting, fuming; demoniac gas, you think–gas from Acheron must feed that dreadful system of convulsions. But pump out the imaginary gas, and, behold! it is ditch-water. Fox, as Mr. Schlosser rightly thinks, was all of a piece–simple in his manners, simple in his style, simple in his thoughts. No waters in him turbid with new crystalizations; everywhere the eye can see to the bottom. No music in him dark with Cassandra meanings. Fox, indeed, disturb decent gentlemen by ‘allusions to all the sciences, from the integral calculus and metaphysics to navigation!’ Fox would have seen you hanged first. Burke, on the other hand, did all that, and other wickedness besides, which fills an 8vo page in Schlosser; and Schlosser crowns his enormities by charging him, the said Burke (p. 99), with ‘wearisome tediousness.’ Among my own acquaintances are several old women, who think on this point precisely as Schlosser thinks; and they go further, for they even charge Burke with ‘tedious wearisomeness.’ Oh, sorrowful woe, and also woeful sorrow, when an Edmund Burke arises, like a cheeta or hunting leopard coupled in a tiger-chase with a German poodle. To think, in a merciful spirit, of the jungle–barely to contemplate, in a temper of humanity, the incomprehensible cane-thickets, dark and bristly, into which that bloody cheeta will drag that unoffending poodle!

But surely the least philosophic of readers, who hates philosophy ‘as toad or asp,’ must yet be aware, that, where new growths are not germinating, it is no sort of praise to be free from the throes of growth. Where expansion is hopeless, it is little glory to have escaped distortion. Nor is it any blame that the rich fermentation of grapes should disturb the transparency of their golden fluids. Fox had nothing new to tell us, nor did he hold a position amongst men that required or would even have allowed him to tell anything new. He was helmsman to a party; what he had to do, though seeming to give orders, was simply to repeat their orders–‘Port your helm,’ said the party; ‘Port it is,’ replied the helmsman.–But Burke was no steersman; he was the Orpheus that sailed with the Argonauts; he was their seer, seeing more in his visions than he always understood himself; he was their watcher through the hours of night; he was their astrological interpreter. Who complains of a prophet for being a little darker of speech than a post-office directory? or of him that reads the stars for being sometimes perplexed?