Two Parliaments Escape Reform 233
liament by East Indian nabobs, can all be explained as a warm defense of parlia-
mentary dignity and independence. It is possible that he idealized Parliament all
the more because he was not natively English, having spent his youth in the
Anglo- Irish outpost of Dublin. One thinks of Herder idealizing German culture
from outposts on the Baltic.
Beginning about 1780 or 1782, however, the House showed an unwillingness
to listen to him. Members would bait him to make him angry, or noisily walk
out when he rose to speak. For one so dedicated to the greatness of Parliament
such cutting insults were a painful blow. He felt irritated, frustrated, unappre-
ciated, surrounded by enemies, wounded in the depths—like Rousseau. The no-
tion of Burke as a judicious observer of a turbulent revolutionary age is entirely
a later concoction. His contemporaries were dismayed by his outbursts of unstable
emotionalism.
“They represent him as actually mad,” said Boswell to Johnson. “Sir,” answered
the doctor, who was, indeed, no Whig, “if a man will appear extravagant as he
does, and cry, can he wonder that he is represented as mad?”^19
Burke was capable of a good deal of hard work, and of amassing exact knowl-
edge on large and complex subjects, such as the history of trade with the American
colonies, or the jungle of emoluments at the King’s disposal, or the details of the
case of Warren Hastings. He has been praised, indeed, and contrasted with French
philosophes and British radicals, for his avoidance of metaphysical abstractions, and
for his insistence on taking account of reality, facts, consequences, real choices, and
possible actions. The contrary could as well be argued—that his gift lay on the
plane of general statement, and his weakness in the perception and diagnosis of
real events. Sir Ernest Barker has declared that Burke violated his own principles
in his critique of the French Revolution, that in denouncing political “metaphys-
ics” he became himself metaphysical, and failed altogether to see what the French
Revolution was really about.^20 He could understand only that with which he could
sympathize. He could understand the Irish Catholics but not the Irish reformers.
He could understand the Americans as long as he thought them Whigs irritated at
royal misgovernment; but in his insistence on parliamentary trade controls over
the colonies, his offering them Ireland as a model, his belief in 1777 that America
might return under “the paternal care and nurture” of Parliament, and his utter
indifference to the new American constitutions that were exciting all Europe, he
showed little comprehension of what really happened to the American people in
his lifetime.
He was capable, too, of liberal and humane ideas. Many of his wisest apothegms
could be quoted by reformers. In one of his earliest writings he ridiculed the law-
yers’ idea that the constitution was changeless.^21 Defending the Wilkesite agitation
in 1770, he denied that it was stirred up by “a few puny libelers.” “When popular
discontents have been very prevalent,” he said on this occasion, “it may well be af-
19 Copeland, op.cit., 70.
20 E. Barker, “Edmund Burke et la Révolution française,” in Revue philosophique, Sept.–Dec,
1939, 129–60.
21 Writings (Boston, 1901), VII, 476. “An essay towards an abridgement of the English history,”
1758.