Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism)

This study develops a detailed reading of the subtle and shifting interrelations between aesthetics, ideology, language, gender, and political economy in two highly influential works by E d m u n d Burke: his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), and the Reflections on the

Revolution in France (1790). Tom Furniss's close attention to the rhetorical labyrinths of these texts is combined with an attempt to locate them within the larger discursive networks of the period, including texts by Locke, Hume, and Smith. This process reveals that Burke's contradictions and inconsistencies are symptomatic of a strenuous engagement with the ideological problems endemic to the period. While the Enquiry develops a revolutionary aesthetic ideology which contributes towards the hegemonic struggle of the middle class in the period of the Seven Years War, the Reflections was written to contain a revolution threatening to destroy the very social formation which the Enquiry was written to promote. Yet the radical revolution can be seen to be already latent in Burke's earlier aesthetic ideology. It is this which constitutes Burke's dilemma, and which makes the Reflections an audacious compromise formation which simultaneously defends the ancien regime, contributes towards the articulation of radical thought, and makes possible the revolution which we call English Romanticism.

Cambridge Studies in Romanticism 4

EDMUND BURKE'S AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN ROMANTICISM

General Editors

Professor Marilyn Butler

Professor James Chandler

University of Cambridge

University of Chicago

Editorial Board J o h n Barrell, University of Sussex Paul Hamilton, University of Southampton Mary Jacobus, Cornell University Kenneth Johnston, Indiana University Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara Jerome McGann, University of Virginia David Simpson, University of Colorado

This series aims to foster the best new work in one of the most challenging fields within English literary studies. From the early 1780s to the early 1830s a formidable array of talented men and women took to literary composition, not just in poetry, which some of them famously transformed, but in many modes of writing. The expansion of publishing created new opportunities for writers, and the political stakes of what they wrote were raised again and again by what Wordsworth called those 'great national events' that were 'almost daily taking place': the French Revolution, the Napoleonic and American wars, urbanization, industrialization, religious revival, an expanded empire abroad and the reform movement at home. This was a literature of enormous ambition, even when it pretended otherwise. The relations between science, philosophy, religion and literature were reworked in texts such as Frankenstein and Biographia Literaria; gender relations in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Don Juan; journalism by Cobbett and Hazlitt; poetic form, content and style by the Lake School and the Cockney School. Outside Shakespeare studies, probably no body of writing has produced such a wealth of response or done so much to shape the responses of modern criticism. This indeed is the period that saw the emergence of those notions of 'literature' and of literary history, especially national literary history, on which modern scholarship in English has been founded. The categories produced by Romanticism have also been challenged by recent historicist arguments. The task of the series is to engage both with a challenging corpus of Romantic writings and with the changing field of criticism they have helped to shape. As with other literary series published by Cambridge, this one will represent the work of both younger and more established scholars, on either side of the Atlantic and elsewhere.

TITLES IN PREPARATION

Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters by Mary A. Favret British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire by Nigel Leask Edmund Burke's Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution by Tom Furniss Poetry as an Occupation and an Art in Britain, 1760-1830 by Peter Murphy Allegory in Romantic and Post-Romantic Culture by Theresa M. Kelley In the Theatre of Romanticism: Coleridge, Nationalism, Women by Julie A. Carlson Keats, Narrative and Audience by Andrew J. Bennett Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre by David Duff

EDMUND BURKE'S AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY Language, gender, and political economy in revolution

TOM FURNISS Lecturer in English Studies University of Strathclyde

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521418157 © Cambridge University Press 1993 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1993 This digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Furniss, Tom. Edmund Burke's aesthetic ideology: language, gender, and political economy in revolution / Tom Furniss. p. cm. — (Cambridge studies in Romanticism) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0 521 41815 1 (hardback) 1. Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797-Aesthetics. 2. Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797. Philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. 3. Burke, Edmund, 1729-1797. Reflections on the revolution in France. 4. France — History — Revolution. 1789-1799 - Historiography. 5. Great Britain Civilization - 18th century. 6. Aesthetics. British - 18th century. 7. Romanticism - Great Britain. 8. Sublime, The. I. Title. II. Series. DA506.B9F87 1993 lll'.85'092-dc20 92-35628 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-41815-7 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-05548-2 paperback

For my parents, Eric Thomas Furniss and Doreen Lily Furniss. And for Uwe Tollner.

Es sind viele antirevolutionare Biicher fur die Revolution geschrieben worden. Burke hat aber ein revolutionises Buch gegen die Revolution geschrieben. (Novalis)

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on texts

page xiii xiv

Introduction

i

PART ONE: AESTHETICS FOR A BOURGEOIS R E V O L U T I O N

1 A theory not to be revoked: A Philosophical Enquiry

15

17

2 Labour and luxury: aesthetics and the division of labour

41

3 The political economy of taste: limiting the sublime

68

4 The labour and profit of language

89

PART TWO: REFLECTIONS ON A RADICAL REVOLUTION

113

5 The genesis of the Reflections: resisting the irresistible voice of the multitude

115

6 Stripping the queen: Edmund Burke's magic lantern show 138 7 A revolution in manners: chivalry and political economy

164

8 Reform and revolution

197

9 Imaginary constitutions and economies

220

10 Speculation and the republic of letters

243

Notes Index

266 300

XI

Acknowledgements

I have received generous help and advice at various points in the preparation of this book. Gratitude is due to Isobel Armstrong, who oversaw its origins. Simon Frith was an enthusiastic reader of each chapter during the final stages. I owe especial thanks to Derek Attridge, who generously read and made incisive comments on the typescript at two important moments in its production. I would also like to thank Marilyn Butler, David Simpson, and John Barrell for their stimulating criticisms of the book's argument. Janet Banks was a diligent copy-editor whose suggestions about style and punctuation were always helpful. Josie Dixon was supportive throughout. I am indebted to the hard-pressed staff of the Department of English Studies at the University of Strathclyde for covering my teaching and administrative duties in the Autumn of 1991, thus allowing me to have a sabbatical semester in which I was able to concentrate on the book's penultimate redrafting. Earlier versions of parts of the argument of this book have appeared in the following: 'Stripping the Queen: Edmund Burke's Magic Lantern Show', in Burke and the French Revolution: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Steven

Blakemore (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 69-96. 'Gender in Revolution: Edmund Burke and Mary Wollstonecraft', in Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French

Revolution, ed. Kelvin Everest (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 65-100. 'Edmund Burke: Bourgeois Revolutionary in a Radical Crisis', in Socialism and the Limits of Liberalism, ed. Peter Osborne (London and New York: Verso, 1991), pp. 15—49. 'Burke, Paine, and the Language of Assignats' in The Yearbook of English Studies: The French Revolution in English Literature and Art,

19 (1989), ed. J. R. Watson (Modern Humanities Research Association), pp. 54-70. Xlll

Note on texts

All references to Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/9), a r e taken from the

edition by James T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), hereafter cited as Burke, Enquiry. References to Boulton's introduction are cited as Boulton. Reference has occasionally been made to the introduction to Boulton's revised edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987). All references to Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in

France (1790) are taken from the edition by Conor Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). References to O'Brien's introduction are cited as O'Brien. All other references to Burke's writings of the 1790s are taken from volumes VIII and IX of the Clarendon edition of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke: The French Revolution 1790-1794, ed. L. G.

Mitchell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), and The Revolutionary War 1794-97', ed. R. B. McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991).

xiv

Introduction: Edmund Burke's revolution

This book concentrates on two pivotal moments in Edmund Burke's writing career and in the history of Britain in the eighteenth century — the publication of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of

the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/9) during the Seven Years War, and the publication of the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) in

response to the way the French Revolution was being admired by radicals in Britain. Although the book is divided into two parts which focus on each of these moments in turn, the interpretive strategy adopted throughout is continuously to read each text in terms of the other. I move forwards and backwards between the Enquiry and the Reflections in order to establish and complicate the relationship between them, showing that a rereading of the former demands and enables a reinterpretation of the latter. Simultaneously with this close attention to Burke's texts, I attempt to read the various ways in which they interact with a range of texts which constitute their different historical and discursive moments. In the first part of the book, 'Aesthetics for a bourgeois revolution3, I claim that Burke's early aesthetic treatise needs to be read not simply as a ground-breaking intervention within the proliferating discussion of aesthetics in Britain, but as a contribution to the hegemonic struggle of the rising middle class in the first half of the eighteenth century. This involves developing a reading of the Enquiry which foregrounds embedded relations there between aesthetics, politics, and economics. Thus the Enquiry is read alongside texts by Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith in order to show how the theoretical assumptions which shape Burke's aesthetics emerge out of a larger debate about the social and political consequences of the commercial revolution in the first half of the eighteenth century. This allows me to claim that Burke's rigorous distinction between the sublime and the beautiful in terms of absolute differences between labour and

2

Introduction

repose, masculine and feminine, virtue and luxury, ambition and imitation, is driven by the need to refute traditionalist attacks on the 'corruptions' of middle-class commerce. In effect, Burke seeks to create an image of the upwardly mobile man of ability (the 'selfmade man') as an heroic and virtuous labourer whose sublime aspirations are quite different from the beautiful but debilitating luxury of the aristocracy (and of women). Burke can therefore be said to work out a 'revolutionary' aesthetic designed to establish the authenticity and authority of the middle-class ethos. But in forging this necessary aesthetic ideology, l Burke leaves his position vulnerable to a number of dangers: he foregrounds the ways in which the compromise between the men of ability and the Whig regime might be potentially unstable, and he articulates a meritocratic ethos which would seem to validate aspirations of the labouring poor to 'better' themselves. More importantly, Burke's emphatic distrust of the beautiful in favour of the sublime can be read as a symptomatic attempt to repress or exclude the middle class's own perhaps inevitable tendency towards the personal and political corruptions which were thought to result from material luxury. Thus the image of the middle-class subject which Burke labours to create is inadvertently revealed as a strategic fiction. The first section of this book explores how and why Burke should have got himself into this position and how he attempts to contain the problems opened up by the aesthetic ideology he is compelled to formulate. If Burke's early aesthetics may be seen as attempting to legitimize the socio-economic alliance between aristocracy and bourgeoisie which emerged from 1688, its need to validate the ambitions of the 'heroic' bourgeoisie indicates the ways in which that alliance might be inherently unstable - suggesting that, in Jacques Derrida's terms, it contains within itself'the "principle" of its own opening, dislocation, disintegration'.2 This internal incoherence, which already disorganizes Burke's aesthetic theory in 1757—9, *s rendered more critical in 1789-90, where an apparent alliance, in France, between the bourgeoisie and 'the people' sets an example which threatens to dislocate, from within, the potentially fragile structure of English society which Burke had long worked to maintain. This is made even more complicated for Burke since radical celebrations of the French Revolution appear to exploit the 'revolutionary' possibilities of his own aesthetics in ways which promise to destroy the very social formation which the Enquiry was written to promote. The second

Introduction

3

part of this book, 'Reflections on a radical revolution', begins by examining the 'origins' of the Reflections in this conundrum. The Reflections is read alongside three of the principal radical texts which make up the Revolution Controversy - Richard Price's Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men (1790), and Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791/2).3 I trace the way Price's Discourse draws on and extrapolates the egalitarian potential of the aesthetic ideology which Burke had developed in the Enquiry in order to induce revolutionary fervour in Britain. It is this paradox, this turn of history, which constitutes Burke's dilemma and precipitates his 'crisis', prompting his notorious about turn and energizing his counter-revolutionary writings. In meeting this unexpected crisis, Burke is driven to refashion his own position by downplaying the radicalism of his aesthetics in favour of its more reactionary impulses. Burke seeks to refute any claim that the Revolution might be either sublime or beautiful by attempting to show that it is both barbaric terror and ridiculous bathos, and works instead to convince his readers that the ancien regime is the locus of all things sublime and beautiful. Yet I suggest that this necessary response to the challenge which history had sprung upon Burke ends up multiplying rather than eliminating the contradictions and incoherencies of his position. In attempting to refashion his aesthetic ideology, Burke simultaneously forges a powerful support for the partnership between landed power and capitalist energies in Britain and exposes the ways in which that compromise formation was particularly susceptible to the radical critique. One symptom of this is that Burke is driven to rearticulate and redeploy his aesthetic categories in ways which often seem incompatible with their formulations in the Enquiry. These contradictions between the Enquiry and the Reflections are dramatized as tensions and inconsistencies within the text of the Reflections itself— as astute readings by Paine and Wollstonecraft were quick to point out. Thus the present book engages with and seeks to transform two 'problems' which have troubled Burke's readers from the beginning: the question of whether Burke's attack on the French Revolution and English radicalism represents a betrayal of his earlier 'liberal' politics, and the question as to the relationship between Burke's early aesthetics and his late politics. Radical readers such as Paine and Jean-Francois Depont (the nominal addressee of the Reflections) were puzzled that the apparent champion of the American Revolu-

4

Introduction

tion should have attacked the French Revolution — and especially so violently. 'Virtually every radical writer of this time', James K. Chandler writes, 'saw Burke's position on France as a change of political colors, and at the same time realized that Burke's reputation made him one of the worst English enemies the French Revolution could have made.' 4 Although Wollstonecraft analyses the implications of Burke's political 'reversal' precisely in terms drawn from his earlier aesthetics, Neal Wood could claim, in 1964, that 'apparently no systematic effort has been made to ascertain whether a relation exists between the aesthetic theory of Burke's The Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) a n d his political ideas'. Although such a claim could no longer be made,5 Wood's thesis claims to solve both Burke 'problems' in one go: Indeed, one can argue that these aesthetic categories [the sublime and the beautiful] are a unifying element of Burke's social and political outlook, that they give a degree of coherence and system to the welter of words which he bequeathed to mankind. This is of importance to the student of Burke who is plagued by the absence of architectonic intellectual structure.6 In contrast to this, the argument of the present book claims that while Burke's aesthetic categories clearly inform his political thought (and vice versa), they do not give a coherence to that thought. Instead, a close reading of Burke's texts suggests that his aesthetic ideology is riven and driven by contradictions which are endemic to the political tensions of its historical context. As a consequence, the challenge for Burke's readers is not to find a key which will 'solve' those contradictions, but to trace as carefully as possible the way they are dramatized in the structure and figurative strategies of his texts. Isaac Kramnick's 'psychobiography', The Range of Edmund Burke (1977), is an innovative account of the interplay between politics and aesthetics in Burke which my own interpretation both draws upon and overturns. Kramnick argues that Burke's political 'turn around' needs to be understood through the way the French Revolution releases internal forces in Burke's psyche over which he has no control, reactivating a never adequately resolved Oedipal anxiety. Kramnick's introduction — 'The Burke Problem' — claims that his study 'stands Burke on his head, replacing the Tory prophet with the ambivalent radical. There are two Burkes and doing the man and his works full justice requires a revision of the conven-

Introduction

5

tional image.'7 A rereading of Burke's ceuvre is said to reveal 'nothing less than a pivotal insight into that great turning point in our history - the transformation from the aristocratic to the bourgeois world' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. xii). Burke experiences the conflicts of this transformation in his own psyche: 'At the centre of Burke's life and thought is an unresolved ambivalence between his identification with what might be called the aristocratic personality on the one hand, and the bourgeois personality on the other' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 10). Since these bourgeois and aristocratic 'personalities' are gendered as masculine and feminine respectively in Burke's writings, Kramnick is able to map them onto the strongly gendered categories of the sublime and the beautiful in the Enquiry. Although Burke's aesthetics is said to indicate his partiality to 'the masculine principle' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 98), Kramnick claims that Burke's conception of art and taste entails maintaining a balance between the sublime and the beautiful (see Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 94). (In my own reading of the Enquiry I show, in fact, that the sublime and the beautiful are presented as incompatible with each other. I also argue that the beautiful represents a disturbing aspect of the bourgeois ethos itself more than it does the aristocratic principle. Furthermore, I demonstrate that the way Burke organizes his thought on a range of issues into gendered binary oppositions is not simply a manifestation of Burke's individual psyche, but characteristic of the discourse of the period.) The advent of the French Revolution, however, threatens to upset this 'balance' forever, since the active masculine principle represented by bourgeois radicalism seemed in the process of destroying the passive feminine principle represented by the aristocracy. Burke is both attracted to and repelled by the Oedipal energies of radicalism, at once despising passive femininity and regarding it as a necessary softener for masculinity. If Burke is compelled, then, to figure the ideological crises of the late eighteenth century in ways which 'evoke Oedipal terms' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 109), such an insight, Kramnick contends, enables us to understand the passion of Burke's response to the Revolution, since he is forced to live out and resist its implications for Britain in his own psyche: The [potential] triumph of the dissenters represented the total victory in England and in Burke of the bourgeois principle, unchecked and unbalanced by the aristocratic principle. It was an unacceptable resolution of Burke's inner ambivalence and as such he was moved to right the balance

6

Introduction

again by vigorous defense of the aristocratic principle. {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 151) Yet the defence of the aristocracy which this energizes necessarily reveals the bourgeois sympathies which it seems to conceal. The Letter to a Noble Lord (1796) (in which Burke responds to the Duke of Bedford's criticism of him for taking the civil pension by dwelling on the less-than-honourable origins of the Duke's wealth and title) is an attack on the aristocracy which 'reads a close kin to much of the ideological writing [Burke] so despised' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 6). Kramnick claims that it was Burke's 'genius to recognize in this way the ideological dynamic that lay behind the great confrontation of his age between aristocratic values and bourgeois values' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 109). But although Kramnick usefully indicates the bourgeois, free-market strands in Burke's writings and shows how they come into conflict with his extravagant but equivocal defences of aristocracy, he is less interested in 'Burke's relationship to general ideological developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 164) than in Burke's personal psychodrama. In Kramnick's view, the attempt to understand the contradictory impulses in Burke's texts as arising from a crisis in what Engels sees as the essential achievement of 1688 - the balancing of aristocratic political power with capitalist economic power - suffers 'from what we now know about Burke' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. C. B. Macpherson's recent Marxist interpretation of Burke, on the other hand, takes for granted Engels's account of 1688 and Marx's identification of Burke as an 'out and out vulgar bourgeois'. In his introduction to Burke (1980), Macpherson rapidly dismisses earlier perceptions of 'The Burke problem' (including that which so preoccupies Kramnick) in order to redefine it in his own terms: 'the central Burke problem which is still of considerable interest in our own time is the question of the coherence of his two seemingly opposite positions: the defender of a hierarchical establishment, and the market liberal'.9 Putting aside 'psychohistorical' explanations, Macpherson claims that 'nowhere in the two-hundred-year see-saw of images of Burke is this problem adequately faced' {Burke, p. 4). Macpherson's 'resolution' of the Burke problem - and his reading falls in with the tradition of resolving Burke's 'inconsistencies' forms the central argument of his study:

Introduction

7

There is no doubt that in everything he wrote and did, he venerated the traditional order. But his traditional order was already a capitalist order. He saw that it was so, and wished it to be more freely so. He had no romantic yearning for a bygone feudal order and no respect for such remnants of it as still survived, notably in the royal household . . . Indeed, his most explicit statement of his economic assumptions came first in that full-dress defence of the old order, the Reflections . . . There is thus a prima facie case for seeking in Burke's political economy a resolution of this central problem of coherence. (Burke, p. 5)10

Macpherson therefore allows us to think of Burke's Reflections as attempting to develop a necessary ideological strategy in response to the implications of the French Revolution for the future of capitalism and the existing social formation in Britain. Yet, despite their explicit differences, Macpherson's and Kramnick's interpretations of Burke are compatible in many ways in that both find an explanation for the complexities of his texts in his bourgeois identity and aspirations. Kramnick's study remains useful in the way it draws attention to the ambivalences which run through all Burke's texts and for reminding us that 'Burke dealt with ascendent capitalism not triumphant capitalism' (Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 165). My own reading of'the Burke problem' takes off from Kramnick's and Macpherson's in order to trace the way Burke's discourse participates within a series of socio-economic crises in eighteenthcentury England. In seeking to go beyond Kramnick's and Macpherson's ground-breaking work, I make the basic assumption that the quirks and qualities of Burke's texts cannot be explained or contained by discovering their 'origins' in Burke's psyche, or in his politics, or even in the complex relation between his psyche and his politics. I move away from such author-centred models of reading and textual production in order to see Burke's texts as a weave of discourses which intersect with a range of interrelated writings in the eighteenth century. To read Burke's texts as discourse is to analyse how their rhetorical strategies function, how they engage in intertextual dialogue with other discourses, and how they intervene in and have effects on the way political events and texts are discursively constituted and read. Thus I am interested not in what lies 'behind' Burke's texts but in their texture and textile nature, in the patterns they weave, and in the unexpected designs which emerge by articulating them with larger discursive projects of the period. This allows me to suggest that there might be quite different relationships

8

Introduction

between, say, politics, aesthetics, and sexuality in Burke's texts than those which Kramnick assumes and quite different ways in which they ambiguously interact with radical discourse. I have assumed, therefore, that the Enquiry and the Reflections have to be read as carefully as possible, allowing their language to lead the argument into its own labyrinths, not in order finally to discover the origin or end of all the threads in a single meaning or answer, but in order to map out or produce the contradictions and sheer complexity of these texts. In doing this, I also assume that this reveals the complexity and contradictions of the ideological formations Burke is working within and attempting to refashion. One of the implicit assumptions of the present book is that the political meanings of any text do not exist apart from the 'texture' of its language, and that the formal and rhetorical features of a text are deeply implicated within the textuality of the historical moment in which it participates. Thus one of the interests of this book is to attend to the shaping metaphors and strategies of the Enquiry and the Reflections - asking what they do, describe, declare, conceal, and reveal, and how these effects might be

paradigmatic of more extended discursive networks. This approach is informed by the lesson in reading which Derrida offers us, particularly in the reading of Rousseau in Of Grammatology. If the modes of reading developed within the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines (politics, economics, history, literature, and so on) often appear inadequate to Burke's texts, Derrida feels that 'no model of reading seems . . . at the moment ready to measure up to [Rousseau's Confessions] - which I would like to read as a text and not as a document'.11 In reading Burke's works as texts, however, I also assume that such 'deconstructive' readings reveal or produce gaps and contradictions which are symptomatic of social, political, and ideological tensions which animate the struggles of the period and place in which the text was produced. Thus my reading strategies are also informed by Michel Foucault's conception of 'discourse',12 and by the attempts of figures such as Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson to 'politicize' and 'historicize' post-structuralist assumptions about textuality.13 In A Theory of Literary Production, Macherey speculates on the impossibility of distinguishing between a text's internal structure and its historical 'context': we can only describe, only remain within the work, if we also decide to go beyond it: to bring out, for example, what the work is compelled to say in

Introduction

9

order to say what it wants to say . . . Thus, it is not a question of introducing a historical explanation which is stuck on to the work from the outside. On the contrary, we must show a sort of splitting within the work: this division is its unconscious, in so far as it possesses one — the unconscious which is history, the play of history beyond its edges, encroaching on those edges: this is why it is possible to trace the path which leads from the haunted work to that which haunts it.14

This description of the way to read a 'haunted' text is a succinct account of the assumptions which inform my own attempt to trace the various spectres which 'haunt' Burke's texts. Macherey's axioms for reading text in context seems indispensable for any reading of Burke: We should question the work as to what it does not and cannot say, in those silences for which it has been made. The concealed order of the work is thus less significant than its real determinate disorder (its disarray). The order which it professes is merely an imagined order, projected onto disorder, the fictive resolution of ideological conflicts, a resolution so precarious that it is obvious in the very letter of the text where incoherence and incompleteness burst forth . . . This distance which separates the work from the ideology which it transforms is rediscovered in the very letter of the work: it is fissured, unmade even in its making. {Theory of Literary Production, p. 155)

My reading of Burke's Enquiry and Reflections reveals that the way these texts are 'fissured' 'in the very letter of the work', 'unmade even in their making', is organized according to a supplementary logic similar to that which Derrida discovers or produces in his reading of Rousseau. ^ Questions about the relationship between nature and culture are always political questions, deeply implicated within the ideological struggles of a period, and all the more political precisely because this relationship is necessarily undecidable.16 Derrida traces the way Rousseau's texts struggle to articulate the relation between art and the natural in a range of instances. On the one hand, when nature is held to be whole and wholesome, art is seen as a destructive artifice which threatens to displace or 'supplement' it. On the other hand, nature is sometimes seen to be incomplete or defective, and therefore in need of supplementation from wholesome artifice. This means that the notion of supplementation is distinguished into two quite different kinds: bad supplementation which damages or displaces nature, and good supplementation which harmlessly completes or adds to nature. But the problem with this is that if nature is

io

Introduction

found to be in need of supplementation, then it seems to be incomplete in itself. And because that which is brought in to supply nature's defect always threatens to supplant nature, the clear demarcation between good and bad supplementation begins to dissolve. If the 'second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first', Derrida traces a structuring anxiety and effort in Rousseau's texts (as I do in Burke's) to employ each in certain moments by strategically excluding the other: We shall constantly have to confirm that both [significations] operate within Rousseau's texts. But the inflexion varies from moment to moment. Each of the two significations is by turns effaced or becomes discreetly vague in the presence of the other. But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the supplement is exterior . . . alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it, must be other than it. (Of Grammatology, p. 145)

This is not simply a logical tangle which Rousseau gets himself into and from which he could easily extricate himself. Instead, this reveals the way Rousseau is struggling with the central philosophical and political problems which challenged eighteenth-century Europe. If Derrida shows that the strange economy of the supplement organizes Rousseau's discourse on politics, sexuality, education, culture, language, law, and nature itself, then we will see how a supplementary logic both shapes and unsettles Burke's discourse on a similar range of issues. Derrida's description of the relation between his reading of the supplement in Rousseau and Rousseau's own insight into the way supplementarity inhabits his texts might equally apply to the reading of Burke developed throughout the present book: The way in which he determines the concept and, in so doing, lets himself be determined by that very thing that he excludes from it, the direction in which he bends it, here as addition, there as substitute, now as the positivity and exteriority of evil, now as a happy auxiliary, all this conveys neither a passivity nor an activity, neither an unconsciousness nor a lucidity on the part of the author . . . [My reading] is certainly a production, because I do not simply duplicate what Rousseau thought of this relationship. The concept of the supplement is a sort of blind spot in Rousseau's text, the notseen that opens and limits visibility. (Of Grammatology, p. 163) My reading of Burke suggests that the strange effects of the supplement organize his various attempts in the Reflections urgently

Introduction

11

to differentiate between 'wholesome' and 'peccant5 forms of representation in order to establish inviolable differences between radical and constitutional thought. In the Reflections, in order to protect the hegemonic alliance in Britain between money and land, Burke habitually resorts to second nature, custom, manners, and so on, as 'happy auxiliaries' to nature or reason. Although he tries to ground his ideological claims in nature, he also stresses the necessity of supplementing nature with a custom and habit which will yet, as 'second nature', become apart of nature. The very energy with which Burke asserts the benevolent effects of his privileged supplements and contrasts them with the dangerous, artificial supplements employed in radical texts and practices attests to the political urgency of this project. Yet the distinctions Burke labours to make between these happy auxiliaries and the exterior evils resorted to by revolutionary thought are rendered unstable by the irrepressible mobility of his own rhetoric. Working to exclude revolutionary evil as exterior (to Britain, to his own text) through projecting it onto an 'other' variously identified as post-revolutionary France, the ancien regime, or British revolutionary factions, Burke remains blind to, and yet troubled by, the possibility that it might already be interior to, or an incurable aspect of, his own poetics and politics - that radicalism might represent an uncanny mirror image of his own Reflections. Thus the supplement turns out to be, for Burke as for Rousseau, 'a menacing aid, the critical response to a situation of distress' (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 144).

I have endeavoured throughout this book to rethink 'the Burke problem' not in terms of identifying and solving a particular 'inconsistency' in the man or in the writings, but by trying to ask what problems Burke's Enquiry and Reflections confronted. This has been to investigate the ways Burke's texts engage with discursive paradigms which play crucial ideological roles in specifically revolutionary contexts. We will see that what appear to be stable figurations with 'obvious' political meanings turn out, in such contexts, to be unstable precisely because the ideological load they bear has to lean in different directions at one and the same time. I show that a series of paradigms connects the various discourses I examine, and that a particular logic powers each one of them. Burke is caught (like his radical antagonists) between two desires or needs: he seeks to establish a 'natural' foundation (labour, physiology, land, etc.) for validating or stabilizing the new historical role of the middle

12

Introduction

class, but this opens up his thought to dangers which compel him to have recourse to a system of conventions (taste, custom, the law, and so on) which would seem to undermine the 'natural' ground of his position. Neither the 'natural' nor the 'conventional' is politically or philosophically stable in the revolutionary crises he confronts, yet a middle ground is impossible (even though he often claims to occupy a middle ground), since each is all or nothing (there is no half-way house between nature and custom). Burke is therefore forced again and again to switch his emphasis, bringing in nature to supplement custom, and custom to supplement nature; yet each recourse potentially supplants what it was supposed to support. Burke's principal attempt to resolve this undecidability is developed in the concept of 'second nature', but we will see that this formulation, by oscillating undecidably between nature and custom, presents the clearest symptom of Burke's problem. If this is to 'deconstruct' Burke - or to show how Burke's texts deconstruct themselves - this is not carried out in an anarchic spirit. The purpose is not to deploy deconstructive tools to try to prove the inadequacy of Burke's thought, nor is it to suggest that Burke inevitably gets into tangles because 'all language is like that anyway'. Although 'the primitive language of the law' which Burke endorses in the Reflections assumes an over-simplistic account of the relation between words and reality and claims that reading is simply a process of recognition and 'obedience', it is relatively easy to point out, from the theory which Burke himself develops in the Enquiry, that language and reading are not like that. While it might be a popular version of deconstruction, the claim that language is always unstable and that metaphors always undo themselves is not, in the end, particularly interesting. The instabilities I am interested in in Burke's texts are not due to the inevitable 'free floating of the signifier', but arise because Burke is strenuously engaged, in the Enquiry and in the Reflections, with intractable problems and structures which are intrinsic to the ideological struggles of the period. Burke constructs and is committed to an ideology which entails necessary contradictions, and his rhetoric is so fraught and energized because it recognizes and seeks to contain those contradictions without abandoning the ideology. Notwithstanding his antipathy towards it, however, the French Revolution was, in a number of ways, Edmund Burke's Revolution. Not only are its principles already embedded within his revolution-

Introduction

13

ary aesthetics of 1757-9, but those aesthetics provide a model through which radicalism came to represent the Revolution. Although Burke made the Revolution his own through producing its dominant representation, that representation both constrained and enabled subsequent radical narratives about France (including those of the Romantic poets). The Reflections is, in all senses, the representative text of its moment. It is at once dominant, caught up within the tumult of its textual context, and troubled by a set of internal incoherencies formed in struggle with discursive formations exemplified by Price's Discourse. If the Reflections derives its energy from its own ideological and rhetorical incoherencies, I suggest that they, in turn, enrage and enable the radical texts which respond to it. Thoroughly implicated within the Revolution, Burke's texts attempt both to exploit and contain instabilities in aesthetics, gender, economics, political representation, and language, which have become central issues in recent analyses of culture and politics. This is one reason why the Reflections can seem more modern, more 'revolutionary', than Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men or Paine's Rights of Man. Burke's discourse allows us to see the complex ways in which text and history intersect during the particularly crucial 'mutation' which the late eighteenth century represents. The problems Burke confronts contain the seeds of our own, and Burke's texts demand that we develop new ways of reading which challenge received categories and methodologies and open up hitherto closed-off relations between different kinds of discursive practice. This produces an understanding of Burke not as a quixotic figure defending anachronistic social forms or undergoing Oedipal convulsions, but as the producer of a set of texts which hover, amphibiously, on the very threshold of modernity.

PART

ONE

Aesthetics for a bourgeois revolution

CHAPTER I

A theory not to be revoked: CA Philosophical Enquiry

The first edition of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful appeared in 1757. Its

critical reception prompted Burke to publish a second and substantially revised text in 1759. In the introduction to his modern edition of the Enquiry, James T. Boulton informs us that although 'each critic acknowledged the newness of many of Burke's assertions, and praised his perspicuity and provocative method of presentation . . . none fully accepted his theory' (Boulton, p. xxiii).1 A good example of this is found in the most critical review which the first edition of the Enquiry received - that by Arthur Murphy in Johnson's Literary Magazine: Upon the whole, though we think the author of this piece mistaken in his fundamental principles, and also in his deductions from them; yet we must say, we have read his book with pleasure: He has certainly employed much thinking; there are many ingenious and elegant remarks, which tho' they do not enforce or prove his first position, yet considering them detached from his system, they are new and just .. . (quoted by Boulton, p. xxiii)

The second edition of the Enquiry included a new preface, an introductory essay 'On Taste', and a section on 'Power', as well as additions which meet attacks on the theory by dogmatically reiterating the initial argument.2 In the new preface, Burke explains that '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' (Enquiry, p. 3). That he goes on to reprimand critics for not having attended closely enough to the theory and for not realizing that it was the main point of his treatise, suggests that the 'fundamental principles' developed in the Enquiry are particularly important to Burke.

18

Edmund Burke's aesthetic ideology

In the preface to the first edition, Burke announces that one of the motives for publishing the Enquiry was that He observed that the ideas of the sublime and beautiful were frequently confounded; and that both were indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing, and sometimes of natures directly opposite. Even Longinus, in his incomparable discourse upon a part of this subject, has comprehended things extremely repugnant to each other, under one common name of the Sublime. The abuse of the word Beauty, has been still more general, and attended with still worse consequences. {Enquiry, p. i) The central task of the Enquiry, then, is to develop a set of theoretical principles which will demonstrate that the sublime and the beautiful are 'extremely repugnant to each other'. Burke works towards this by establishing a number of distinctions, some of which were common in the eighteenth century, some of them more innovative. The first of these, fundamental to all that follows, is the conventional distinction between pain and pleasure {Enquiry, pp. 33-5). This leads to a more important and controversial discrimination between pleasure and delight - the former being the enjoyment of some 'positive' stimulus of the senses, the latter (Burke claims) the previously undefined feeling 'which accompanies the removal of pain or danger' {Enquiry, pp. 35-7). Although there is no name for this latter sensation, Burke proposes to call it 'Delight* in order to differentiate it from 'Pleasure' {Enquiry, pp. 35-7). This distinction is supposedly grounded in differences that actually exist as positive entities rather than as 'mere relations', because that is the only way Burke could justify 'the least alteration in our words' {Enquiry, pp. 33, 36). These two sensations are in turn associated with another ubiquitous eighteenth-century distinction - that between the passions which accompany or promote self-preservation and those concerning social relations. While 'the passions . . . which are conversant about the preservation of the individual, turn chiefly on pain and danger, and . . . are the most powerful of all the passions', Burke writes, 'the society of the sexes' and 'general society' are accompanied by pleasure {Enquiry, pp. 38, 40-1). By means of this series of distinctions, Burke is able to define his aesthetic categories: The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger . . . they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances . . . Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.

A theory not to be revoked

19

beauty . . . 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 . . . {Enquiry, p. 51)

These definitions enable Burke to argue that the sublime and the beautiful are utterly opposed to each other: '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' (Enquiry, p. 124). Boulton claims that no matter what Burke took over from previous commentators on the sublime, his basic theory - grounded in the series of distinctions just outlined — 'had no precedent' (p. lvi). These theoretical assumptions were precisely what the reviewers found unacceptable. Oliver Goldsmsith, in the Monthly Review of May 1757, rejected Burke's claim that the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful was founded on the difference between pain and pleasure. He also objected to the distinction between positive pleasure and the delight experienced through the removal of pain, the idea that pain and danger are the most powerful sources of the sublime, and the identification of love as the characteristic effect of beauty.3 One of the aims of the first section of this book is to trace the ways in which Burke's theoretical account of the origins of the sublime and the beautiful in the pains and pleasures of the body point toward the political project of the Enquiry, articulating both its challenge and its central problem. This will involve a consideration of the ideological role and implications of Burke's theory - including the possibilities and difficulties raised by its grounding in a physiological, sensationist account of aesthetic experience supposedly verifiable by everyone.4 I will conclude by suggesting that Burke's assumptions about aesthetics are not particularly novel, but that what is innovative is the way the theoretical underpinning of his system draws on, and attempts to intervene within, an ideological struggle in eighteenthcentury Britain which came to a head in the war years of 1756-63. THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SUBLIME

The coincidental publication, in 1674, of Boileau's French translation of Longinus' Peri Hypsous and the twelve-book edition of Paradise

20

Edmund Burke''s aesthetic ideology

Lost conveniently marks the beginnings of what would become the eighteenth century's obsession with the sublimed Over the next hundred and fifty years or so, the sublime became the central topic in an explosion of publications about aesthetics.6 Formulations of the sublime typically celebrate the energetic, the obscure, the disruptive, the unlimited, the powerful, and the terrible as a new set of positive aesthetic terms. But although this encourages some critics to see the sublime as leading a revolt against neo-classical principles of order and balance which eventually feeds into Romanticism,7 Samuel Monk writes that It seems to me preferable not to regard the cult of the sublime as a revolutionary movement outside of and against neo-classical standards of taste (though eventually it certainly helped to overthrow those standards), but rather as the other, the constantly present but before the 1740s not always eagerly visited, pole on which the world of eighteenth-century art turned.8 This requires us to view the eighteenth century not as a homogeneous culture dominated by a single set of paradigms, but as a society shaped by a dynamic interplay between 'conservative' and 'revolutionary' impulses.9 But offsetting Monk's claim that the sublime 'pole' was not always eagerly visited early on in the century, a glance at Pope's Essay on Criticism (1709), for example, reveals an enthusiasm for Longinus rather than an anxiety that the sublime might overturn the rules of criticism: Thee, bold Longinusl all the Nine inspire, And Bless their Critick with a Poet's Fire.

An ardent Judge, who Zealous in his Trust, With Warmth gives Sentence, yet is always Just] Whose own Example strengthens all his Laws, And Is himself that great Sublime he draws.

(675-80)

This is not to say that the 'revolution' which would eventually contribute to Romanticism's theory of poetic creativity is not potential within Longinus, nor to overlook the possibility that Pope's response might be a containing one. But it is to suggest, with M. H. Abrams, that this revolution depended upon a series of reinterpretations of Peri Hypsous which gradually extracted and exploited its potential for a 'romantic' theory of poetry.10 But if the sublime eventually displaces neo-classicism, I am interested in the politics of this as well as the poetics. Thus I will argue that the crucial

A theory not to be revoked

21

impulse in the transformation of the sublime was its recruitment in the middle of the eighteenth century as a means of authenticating the political and economic project of the rising middle class. This implies that Romanticism's recourse to the sublime as a vehicle of transcendental individualism represents a reading of the sublime which partially represses and revalues its political history and meaning. Romanticism's interpretation of the sublime has been reiterated in standard histories of eighteenth-century aesthetics.11 According to Monk, the development of the sublime in the first half of the century pioneered the displacement of the authority of tradition by an emphasis on the authenticity of individual experience. As the century progresses, discussions of the sublime tend to abandon the questions of rhetorical style which were central in Longinus in order to stress psychological responses to nature in its irregular or vast aspects (Monk, The Sublime, pp. 63-83). These various transitions from rhetoric to nature, from tradition to individual psychology are said to find their most important formation (prior to Burke) in John Baillie's An Essay on the Sublime (1747). Baillie's analysis is influentially 'centred in the exploration of the subject rather than the description of the object', is freed 'from all rhetorical preconceptions, and attacks the problem through an analysis of the sublime in nature' (Monk, The Sublime, pp. 74, 73). Burke's Enquiry is said to represent the culmination and consolidation of this transformation in eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, and to have significantly influenced Wordsworth and Kant.12 In order to rethink this history of the sublime and Burke's seminal importance within it, I will look briefly at one of the most influential pioneering texts about the sublime -Joseph Addison's essays on 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' (1712). Although the main focus of this study is on Burke's texts, and although the context in which I want to set Burke's aesthetics is less a strictly aesthetic one than a discursive intersection between philosophy, politics, and economics, a discussion of Addison will nevertheless indicate that Burke's 'originality' lies less in what he says than in the theoretical principles which undergird what he says. It will also indicate aspects of Addison's discussion which anticipate Burke in unexpected ways and show how it was possible for the sublime to become a vehicle for the development of a theory which is about political economy as well as aesthetics. Addison's essays on 'The Pleasures of the Imagination', published

22

Edmund Burke*s aesthetic ideology

in the Spectator from 21 June to 3 July 1712, articulate three categories (the great, the uncommon, and the beautiful) which make a significant break with neo-classical aesthetic values. Addison, or his persona, lives this aesthetic revolution on his own pulses: 'I do not know whether I am singular in my opinion, but, for my own part, I would rather look upon a tree in all its luxuriancy and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is thus cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure.'^ Addison's stress on the luxuriancy of beauty rather than on proportion prefigures the implicit link between beauty and luxury in Burke's Enquiry, while his list of natural objects which exhibit greatness indicates that he is talking about the sublime by another name: the prospects of an open champaign country, a vast uncultivated desert, of huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices, or a wide expanse of waters, where we are not struck with the novelty or beauty of the sight, but with that rude kind of magnificence which appears in many of these stupendous works of nature. {Essays from the Spectator, p. 178) But more interesting than the kinds of prospects which are regarded as typifying the great, however, is the characteristic interaction between them and the perceiving mind: 'Our imagination loves to be filled with an object, or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity. We are flung into a pleasing astonishment at such unbounded views, and feel a delightful stillness and amazement in the soul at the apprehension of them' [Essays from the Spectator, p. 178). Thus the imagination seems to enjoy grappling with and trying to apprehend that which overwhelms it. Yet the mind is not simply engulfed by great objects or prospects but attempts to make an equation between itself and what it sees: The mind of man naturally hates everything that looks like a restraint upon it, and is apt to fancy itself under a sort of confinement, when the sight is pent up in a narrow compass . . . On the contrary, a spacious horizon is an image of liberty, where the eye has room to range abroad, to expiate at large on the immensity of its views, and to lose itself amidst the variety of objects that offer themselves to its observation. {Essays from the Spectator, p. 178) But despite the assurance of this, these passages run into ambiguities which are characteristic of discourse on the sublime in the first half of the eighteenth century. Addison's text oscillates between implying that the mind discovers in the wide prospect an image of its own

A theory not to be revoked

23

greatness which allows it to expand to its full extent, and suggesting that the mind is simply filled or overwhelmed by, or even lost within, the greatness which it encounters. Addison's speculations about the psychology of the sublime also raise questions about its political implications. Although 'liberty' here is naturalized or made over into private aesthetic experience, I want to argue that its political accent continues to have force.14 While it is too reductive to claim that the sublime is a kind of aesthetic correlative of political emancipation, Addison's discussion of'the great' represents it as a means of breaking free from 'restraint' and 'confinement'. At the same time, however, the way the individual mind redefines its bounds as the 'spacious Horison' indicates that the eighteenth-century sublime is perhaps as equally concerned with the reinstatement of limits.15 This double impulse is inscribed within the etymological structure of the term itself: although the sublime gestures towards the infinite, its prefix - from the Latin sub, meaning 'under, close to, up to, towards' - suggests that its effect depends upon a relation to the limen, the threshold or limit. We will see that the potential conflict between these different inflections of 'sublime' become central to Burke's Enquiry and the Reflections, where the political implications of liberty and restraint are as important as their aesthetic meanings. Addison anticipates Burke's controversial claim that terror can be a source of aesthetic delight by alluding to Aristotle: 'The two leading passions which the more serious parts of poetry endeavour to stir up in us, are terror and pity.'16 But a more interesting way in which Addison prefigures Burke is in speculating about the means through which terror might produce delight: 'But how comes it to pass, that we should take delight in being terrified or dejected by a description, when we find so much uneasiness in the fear or grief which we receive from any other occasion?' (Essays from the Spectator, p. 197). Addison's answer to this is strikingly Burkean. Such delight arises not from the way that the terrible object or event is being described, but from the reflection we make on ourselves at the time of reading it. When we look on such hideous objects, we are not a little pleased to think we are in no danger of them. We consider them at the same time, as dreadful and harmless; so that the more frightful appearance they make, the greater is the pleasure we receive from the sense of our own safety. (Essays from the Spectator, p. 198)

24

Edmund Burke's aesthetic ideology

Addison also develops a moral and therapeutic model of the benefits of imaginative activity which foreshadows Burke's account of the psychosomatic effects of the sublime. To avoid the criminality which often arises from idleness, a 'man' should develop innocent pleasures: Of this nature are those of the imagination, which do not require such a bent of thought as is necessary to our more serious employments, nor, at the same time, suffer the mind to sink into that negligence and remissness, which are apt to accompany our more sensual delights, but, like a gentle exercise to the faculties, awaken them from sloth and idleness, without putting them upon any labour or difficulty. (Essaysfrom the Spectator, p. 177)

We will see that Burke also stresses the importance of imaginative exercise as a crucial means of awakening the faculties from the sloth and idleness which result from the inimical pleasures of relaxation. But whereas Addison distinguishes the imagination's milder exertions from 'serious employments', Burke blurs the border between corporal and imaginative experience in order to equate this necessary exercise with physical labour and pain. For Burke, then, the sublime is far from being an innocent pastime but seems to be fundamentally related to the world of work. This will allow me to suggest that, whereas Addison is primarily interested in aesthetics, Burke's aesthetics participates in a political, economic, and philosophical project which contributes to what a recent historian has called the 'making of the English middle class'.17 PHYSIOLOGICAL SPECULATIONS

For Burke the experience of the sublime is one of simultaneous terror and delight — 'delightful horror' being 'the most genuine effect, and truest test of the sublime' (Enquiry, p. 73). The problem of how terror and delight might be experienced at one and the same time was a theme pursued by Burke's contemporary critics, who argued that fear and exultation were mutually exclusive feelings.18 But this is a question which Burke himself explores, and in doing so articulates his theory most fully: 'if the sublime is built on terror', he writes, 'or some passion like it, which has pain for its object; it is previously proper to enquire how any species of delight can be derived from a cause so apparently contrary to it' (Enquiry, p. 134). Burke stresses that there is a crucial difference between terror and

A theory not to be revoked

25

the sublime: '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' (Enquiry, p. 40). The 'removal of pain or danger' (Enquiry, p. 37) is therefore important in differentiating the sublime experience from unmitigated terror. The notion of 'removal' can imply that the danger is 'removed' (at a certain distance, or at one remove) and that delight may arise simultaneously with fear because the danger is not quite adjacent. 'Removal' can also imply that the delight succeeds the terror after the removal of the threat — the sublime experience thereby being akin to the great relief felt at the cessation of pain or the escape from danger. Finally, 'removal' can mean that the act of removal is itself the source of the delight which 'accompanies' it - the sublime therefore being the experience of the threatened self seeming to overcome or master danger through effort. The sublime may be read, then, as a moment or synchronic structure, a sequence of different states, or as a concerted action or movement. It is the last of these possibilities which is of most importance to Burke, for whom the sublime experience is an escape from fatal stasis through strenuous action. Thomas Weiskel describes the Kantian sublime as organized into three successive 'phases' or 'economic states' (though the temporality of this model 'is in the last analysis fictional or merely operative'). The first phase is the state of normal or habitual perception in which the relation between the mind and object or textual image is one of equilibrium. The second phase is a sudden crisis triggered by encountering 'a natural phenomenon [which] catches us unprepared and unable to grasp its scale' or a moment of text 'which exceeds comprehension'. The 'disconcerting disproportion between inner and outer' which this entails characteristically results in surprise or astonishment. The third phase is a defensive recuperation in which the mind identifies itself with or attributes to itself, through a 'metaphorical transposition', the qualities of that which had threatened to overwhelm it.*9 One of Burke's central rhetorical strategies is apparently to abandon the Longinian concern with rhetoric in order to focus on physiological responses to natural objects. Different stages in such responses can be read in terms of Weiskel's three-phase model of the Kantian sublime. The second stage in the Burkean narrative is the

26

Edmund Burke''s aesthetic ideology

subjection to pain or terror — whose effects Burke makes equivalent to each other through recourse to an eighteenth-century conception of the relation between body and mind: 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 [agree] . . . in producing a tension, contraction, or violent emotion of the nerves . . . (Enquiry, p. 132)20

This reciprocal interplay of body and mind allows Burke to claim that Tear or terror, which is an apprehension of pain or death, exhibits exactly the same effects [as those of a 'man who suffers under violent bodily pain'], approaching in violence to [them] in proportion to the nearness of the cause, and the weakness of the subject' (Enquiry, p. 131). At this point, we might be forgiven for assuming that pain and terror are to be avoided in favour of a life of ease and security. Yet Burke's purpose is to explain 'How pain can be a cause of delight', and to contrast the beneficial effect of this with that produced by 'positive pleasure'. The crucial thing in Burke's account is the way the subject responds to pain or fear — whether he or she remains immobilized in face of them or acts to overcome them and so experience delight and achieve sublimity. Pain or fear induces a physical incapacity which threatens to suspend the power of action: 'pain and fear consist in an unnatural tension of the nerves; that . . . is sometimes accompanied with an unnatural strength, which sometimes suddenly changes into an extraordinary weakness'. In a phrasing which anticipates his reactions to the French Revolution, Burke claims that 'these effects often come on alternately, and are sometimes mixed with each other. This is the nature of all convulsive agitations, especially in weaker subjects, which are the most liable to the severest impressions of pain and fear' (Enquiry, p. 132). In face of danger, then, 'weaker subjects' (or political states such as the ancien regime) may experience moments of convulsive strength, but they are also susceptible to extraordinary weakness or passivity. In other words, they are likely to remain transfixed at the overawed stage of the sublime without the strength or courage necessary to remove the pain or danger. To be fixated in Burke's second phase, is potentially to submit to a kind of madness marked by a repetition compulsion (Enquiry, p. 74).2I Although pain and fear are dangerous for the weak - those who

A theory not to be revoked

27

become trapped in the sublime's second phase - they may also work to tone up mind and body and so enable the subject to overcome pain and fear and thereby break through to the third, delightproducing phase of the sublime.22 Pain and fear need to be courted because they stimulate an active response - the eighteenth-century equivalent to a work-out — which both distinguishes the strong from the weak and enables the strong to display and exercise strength. In Longinus and Kant, the third phase of the sublime is a moment of vaunting joy in which the mind appropriates to itself the power of that towards which it had trembled. In Burke, this is achieved through a physical or psychological reaction which allows the subject to overcome or transcend its subjection, transforming potential annihilation into a sense of elevation. It would seem, then, that the sublime is an aesthetic only for the strong - those capable of reversing their subjection before the object, text, or other being. As Weiskel puts it — though in a reading of Kant and for different reasons: 'The best defence against fear is a strong superego, which the sublime both requires and nourishes' {Romantic Sublime, p. 94). Weakness or passivity is to be feared not only because it leaves the subject at the mercy of pain and fear, but also because it is in itself attended with potentially fatal consequences: 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 ... in this languid inactive state, the nerves are more liable to the most horrid convulsions, than when they are sufficiently braced and strengthened. Melancholy, dejection, despair, and often self-murder, is the consequence of the gloomy view we take of things in this relaxed state of body. (Enquiry, p. 135) This last comment indicates that Burke is addressing a network of fears which had become endemic in eighteenth-century England (a point which I will return to). Burke's prescription for this allows us to glimpse the import and orientation of his theoretical account of the sublime: '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 every thing but degree' (Enquiry, P- 135)By means of the analogy (however dubious or politically problematic) between 'the exercise of the finer parts of the system' and

28

Edmund Burke's aesthetic ideology

'common labour' (Enquiry, p. 136), Burke is able to describe the transition from the second to the third phase of the sublime in physiological terms. In doing so, he answers his critics by explaining how pain or terror can cause or be associated with delight: 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 incumbrance, 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. (Enquiry, p. 136)

Weiskel dismisses Burke's attempt to ground the sublime in physiology: 'His own explanation of how terror produces delight is cumbersome, not to say silly, and depends on an antiquated physiology. Pain and terror . . . function like physical exercise. It is a homeopathic therapy, a kind of physiological catharsis. It will hardly do' (Romantic Sublime, p. 88). But Weiskel's own Freudian interpretation hardly seems radically different from Burke's: 'Terror is the labour of the mind; the sublime, a purgative therapy of the "finer parts", of the imagination' (p. 97).23 In contrast to Weiskel, I want to abandon the suggestion that eighteenth-century discussions of the sublime represent early attempts to account for a human condition which Freud has finally allowed us to theorize properly. Instead, I am considering Burke's theorization of the sublime in the Enquiry as a discursive construct whose point of reference is not an ahistorical experience but a set of discursive issues which are particular to the eighteenth century. Thus it is important to dwell on Burke's metaphors for the clues they offer in helping us to situate his aesthetic theory within contemporary discursive networks. This will help to shape my argument that Burke's theory is constituted as a solution for problems intrinsic to the hegemonic struggle of the middle class in mid-eighteenthcentury Britain. That these metaphors also anticipate the way the Reflections would attempt to represent Britain as a body-politic whose preservation depends on resisting revolutionary contagion, and on expurgating it wherever it may have already infected the system, points towards the larger argument of this book. The third phase of the Burkean sublime, then, is the experience of clearing away or purging 'a dangerous and troublesome incum-

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brance' from 'the parts, whether fine, or gross'. It is an active response to an internal and/or external danger which has temporarily paralysed the organism and where passivity would be fatal. Today, we might call it a rush of adrenalin which energizes an extraordinary defensive response. The delight is that of the self, saved from pain or danger, but it also arises from the activity which accomplishes self-preservation (it is both an energy which empowers exertion, and an exertion which releases energy). As such, it is at once a sense of relief and a sense of mastery, of mastering danger through effort. Part of the ideological significance of this can be seen by comparing Burke with Kant. As Frances Ferguson notes: 'Whereas Kant will later insist on the importance of detaching the aesthetic object from any thought of the labor that went into its production, Burke sees the aesthetic object as valuable not for the labor that produced it but for the labor it will produce.?24 As she says elsewhere, 'All [the sublime's] strainings follow the dictates of the work ethic. '25 Yet the peculiar danger of the threat in Burke's account is that it cannot be unambiguously located — that it transgresses the threshold between inner and outer, subject and object, and might therefore be, disturbingly, already at work within the human (or political) body. What most threatens 'the person' is not an external danger but 'a dangerous and troublesome incumbrance' already internal to the system, while the most efficacious remedy for such a danger is something that is itself potentially 'noxious' if not suitably 'modified'. Moreover, the strength of the sublime subject is achieved or demonstrated by passing through a moment of weakness or passivity overcome only through an extraordinary effort. Given this, I will go on to argue that the 'weakness' which is most to be feared is not 'out there' — in the aristocracy, in the undisciplined poor, in women — but insidiously within the particular kind of self (or political state) which Burke is attempting to valorize. If the sublime's role is to reaffirm the sense of self as a kind of heroic labourer, purging itself of weakness through individual effort, the sublimity of the victorious subject is perhaps more an efficacious fiction than a genuine transcendence. Burke's analysis of the origins of the sublime often raises a suspicion that the sense of 'danger' necessary to the experience is 'something of a shell game' (Ferguson, 'Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 70). This is given substance by the fact that Burke reiterates, time and again, that delight is produced only when the source of terror is safely at one remove: 'When danger

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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' {Enquiry, p. 40). In his discussion of'How the Sublime is produced', Burke says that 'whatever is fitted to produce such a tension [of the nerves], must be productive of a passion similar to terror, and consequently must be a source of the sublime, though it should have no idea of danger connected with it' (Enquiry, p. 134). Burke's description of the sublime moment as capable of being produced by a passion 'similar to terror', or through a labour whose effects resemble pain, therefore relies upon a sleight of hand, removing the danger when it is seemingly most fearful.26 This also suggests that figurative processes (such as similitude) might be fundamental to the very genesis and structure of the sublime moment. The 'removal' which is a necessary condition for the sublime might therefore be a removal effected through metaphor — the removal that is etymologically the very modus operandi of metaphor. In Burke's Enquiry, despite his protests to the contrary, the response to 'natural' terror seems always already rhetorical.27 Despite the apparent problems with his project, however, Burke seems committed to his theory and its metaphors. Although we have seen that the sublime is less a moment of actual danger than an occasion when the self is convinced, or convinces itself, that it is endangered, Burke can say on at least two occasions that death is the 'king of terrors' (Enquiry, pp. 40, 59) and that the most 'delightful horror' properly 'belongs to self-preservation . . . [as] one of the strongest of all the passions' (Enquiry, pp. 136, 38). If the sublime is therefore a deception which the self passes upon itself, an autoaffective ruse powerful enough to suspend disbelief, we might ask why Burke, like many theorists of the eighteenth century, was so committed to it. I want to answer this by suggesting that the Burkean sublime functions as an aesthetic underpinning to the process of constructing a middle-class ideology in Britain in the first half of the eighteenth century, and that it takes the shape it does in response to the particular discursive issues which beset that process. The sublime occasions, and is occasioned by, an illusion of original creativity: the self's 'creation', and mastery, of what it has heard or seen, raises it in its own opinion and produces 'a sort of swelling and triumph'. The self responds to the perhaps already fictional threat with the creative

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labour of metaphor-making, a gesture which defends and reaffirms a sense of self, or perhaps constitutes a new understanding of the self as an originating subject. A new model of the self is 'born', then, through its own sublime labour or the labour of the sublime. (Burke's model of the interplay between body and mind indicates that we are to read this as a celebration of the labour of the subject as much as the labour of the subjected worker; though it celebrates labour, the sublime may also work to promote the division of labour between the mental and the manual.) The sublime thus operates as an indispensable trope through which the 'self-made man' (in philosophical and/or economic terms) is constituted. Although the sublime seems a mere dumb show, its denouement — the emergence of the individual ('Self begot, self raised / By our own quickening power' {Paradise Lost, v, 860-1)) - bears an important ideological load. Though he seeks to ground his argument in physiology, Burke can revealingly invoke the rhetorical tradition he is supposed to displace. Apart from where Burke mildly takes Longinus to task in the preface to the first edition of the Enquiry for having occasionally confounded the sublime and the beautiful, what follows is the only explicit reference that Burke makes to Longinus:28 Now whatever either on good or upon bad grounds 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 contemplates. Hence proceeds what Longinus has observed of that glorying and sense of inward greatness, that always fills the reader of such passages in poets and orators as are sublime . . . (Enquiry, pp. 50—1)

In William Smith's influential 1839 translation of Longinus, the passage Burke alludes to claims that: 'the Mind is naturally elevated by the true Sublime, and so sensibly affected with its lively Strokes, that it swells in Transport and an inward Pride, as if what was only heard had been the Product of its own Invention'. 29 In the Enquiry, then, the threat becomes, or is analogous to, the rhetorical 'terror' instilled in us by 'poets and orators' and therefore enables a fantasy of the creative, originating self. The above passage in the Enquiry contrasts the sublimity of

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'Ambition' with the more passive process of 'Imitation' (which, as 'one of the strongest links of society' (Enquiry, p. 49), is associated with the beautiful). This intersects with the attempt in the eighteenth century to displace reverence for tradition through emphasizing originality: 'the sublime of nature or of text', Weiskel comments, 'offers an occasion for the mind to establish its superiority or originality' (Romantic Sublime, p. 99). As in Harold Bloom, whose work underpins Weiskel's, the mind involved in this master—slave struggle is a 'masculine' one — a gendering which Longinus' and Burke's tumescent metaphors serve to underline. But the fact that this sense of originality relies upon appropriating a prior text (or natural feature) as a vehicle underlines once more the fictionality of the self-image or attitude which the sublime makes possible. At the same time, this sense of originality seems to be a necessaryfiction,one which the self needs to believe in. The eighteenth-century sublime can therefore be seen as articulating a solution, however problematic in itself, to a problem endemic to the modern condition - which, Weiskel suggests, is to be incurably ambivalent about authority, caught up in the unavoidable opposition 'between imitation, the traditional route to authentic identity, and originality, impossible but necessary' (Romantic Sublime, p. 8). Significantly enough, Burke's career seems to pivot between the two 'ancient adversaries' of authority and originality in reverse chronological order. For if the Enquiry both champions the aesthetics of originality and individual experience and is itself a strong bid for originality,30 in the Reflections thirty-three years later Burke notoriously reverts to arguments from authority, from precedent, and from the documents of the dead. One of the problems which faced the rising middle class in the eighteenth century was to make individual ambition appear both socially beneficial and natural. It also needed to articulate an ethos which promoted the kind of labour needed to achieve its ambitions and to justify the recruitment of labourers into agricultural and eventually industrial capitalism. My claim that the sublime plays a part in this project is given support in Weiskel's occasional asides about its ideological burden in the eighteenth century. He suggests that 'we hear in the background of the Romantic sublime the grand confidence of a heady imperialism, now superannuated as ethic or state of mind - a kind of spiritual capitalism, enjoining a pursuit of the infinitude of the private self (Romantic Sublime, p. 6). Robinson Crusoe and Milton's Mammon, 'preferring / Hard liberty before the

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easy yoke / Of servile pomp . . . [working] ease out of pain / Through labour and endurance' {Paradise Lost, n, 255-7; 261-2), are seen as exemplary forerunners of economic individualism who demonstrate that 'the founding gesture of the ego was becoming the requisite for success' [Romantic Sublime, pp. 9—10). Burleigh Taylor Wilkins attempts to find an underlying coherence to Burke's thought by positing that the theory of 'sympathy' developed in the Enquiry provides 'an important link between Burke's aesthetics and his political philosophy in that it is one of the mainsprings of human reactions regardless of whether they be in art or in polities'.31 But although Burke does argue that 'the three principal links in ['the great chain of society'] are sympathy, imitation, and ambition' [Enquiry, p. 44), a close reading of the text shows that sympathy and ambition function quite differently in the Enquiry. Having praised the social virtues of sympathy and imitation, Burke significantly adds that these alone would never lead to social improvement and would leave men at the level of 'brutes' [Enquiry, p. 50). Progress comes, rather, through individual ambition and the 'satisfaction [a man feels] arising from the contemplation of his excelling his fellows' [Enquiry, p. 50). As we have seen, Burke clinches his argument by suggesting that such a feeling is precisely that described by Longinus as the characteristic experience of the sublime — producing 'a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind' [Enquiry, p. 50). The sublime, then, is experienced not through sympathy with, but in competition against, and at the expense of, other human beings.32 This leads me to suggest that the implicit claim in Burke's discussion of ambition is that bourgeois processes of individuation are the only means by which social 'progress' could occur.33 Later in this section, I will give more substance to this argument by situating Burke's theory within a larger discursive network - the intersection between aesthetic and economic discourse through which the middle class sought to articulate and promote a new ideology in the face of traditional authority. This will allow me to argue that, although it may seem to threaten the self, the sublime actually arms the self against a literal threat (or perhaps the threat of the literal).34 That which is thought to literally threaten self or state in this period is 'luxury' — which the middle class, at this point, strenuously sought to distinguish itself from and repudiate. In this mind set, as we will see, the beautiful becomes associated with the luxury which was thought

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to threaten the emerging middle class not only from above and below - through the aristocracy and the labouring poor - but from a fatal tendency within its own ethos. The sublime can therefore be seen as an aesthetic means through which bourgeois thought establishes itself, in face of the charges of luxury brought against it by traditional writers, as the locus of individual effort and virtue. The labour which generates the sublime (or which the sublime generates) therefore provides the middle class with a self-image which denies any association with luxury and works rather as an antidote to the individual and collective luxury of the upper and lower classes. In order to work through this argument, we need to pay close attention to Burke's acount of the beautiful. THE

BEAUTIFUL

Ferguson points out that even critics influenced by structuralism and deconstruction tend to 'ignore the neat binarism of "the sublime and the beautiful" in their rush to the "real" subject, the sublime' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 69). Yet an attentive reading of the Enquiry shows that Burke's conception of the sublime can only be understood in terms of its interaction with his conception of the beautiful. Indeed, the most crucial and significant dynamic of the Enquiry is not its relation to neo-classical thought but the internal textual relation between its central aesthetic categories. Throughout the Enquiry, Burke describes the beautiful in ways which make it as incompatible with Renaissance, neo-classical, and Enlightenment values as is the sublime itself. It is important to register this, since it suggests that the beautiful is related to a set of issues quite different from those associated with the dominant aesthetic discourse which precedes the Enquiry. Beauty in Burke is defined not in terms of an object's abstract properties but through the sensation or effect the object produces on the observing subject: 'By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it' {Enquiry, p. 91 ).35 Although Burke is at great pains to distinguish between the 'love' associated with the beautiful, and desire, his conception of the beautiful is primarily an erotic one. Ruffling the sensibilities of his early reviewers,36 Burke first argues that beauty is not caused by proportion in the object: proportion is 'a creature of the understanding', while 'beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning'. After

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presenting Renaissance theories of ideal human proportion, Burke asks: 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. {Enquiry, p. 98) Burke goes on to assault other classical definitions of the beautiful. Considering the claim that the idea of fitness characterizes beauty, he argues that while an anatomist examines into and appreciates the fitness of the human body, its beauty is open to all and strikes us at first sight: 'how different is [the anatomist's interest] from the affection 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' (Enquiry, p. 108). Burke marshals similar arguments, with women's beauty as the clinching example in each case, against neo-classical notions that beauty is caused by perfection, by qualities of the mind, or by virtue (Enquiry, pp. 11011, 112). As well as being quite different from the concept of beauty which formed the aesthetic correlative of the Augustan neo-classical state, then, Burke's definition of the beautiful also contributes to his critique of rationalism: beauty demands no assistance from our reasoning and requires no investigation to be perceived - in fact, rational investigation destroys its effect. Important, too, is the fact that beauty is rigorously distinguished from custom and customary proportions: '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 (Enquiry, p. 103). But although both Burke's aesthetic categories in the Enquiry can therefore be seen as straying in significant ways from traditional aesthetics and ethics, the sublime and the beautiful are not equally rated in the Enquiry and appear to be associated with quite different ethical or political values. The image and point of view of the human subject being constituted in the Enquiry is clearly a masculine one. Although the beautiful is supposed to be associated with society in general (the pleasurable concourse with both men and women), the bulk of Burke's argument makes it plain that beauty is experienced most fully in men's sexual perception of women. A woman's particu-

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lar beauty is that which makes the difference between human procreation and the 'lust' which 'is evident in brutes, whose passions are more unmixed, and which pursue their purposes more directly than ours' (Enquiry, p. 42). Human sexual relationships differ from those of the 'brutes' in that the 'only distinction [animals] observe with regard to their mates, is that of sex' (Enquiry, p. 42). Beauty in women is a social quality because it 'direct[s] and heighten[s] the appetite which [man] has in common with all other animals' and so encourages a man to enter into a more permanent relation with a particular woman: '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' (Enquiry, p. 42). Transforming momentary and indiscriminate lust into love, beauty becomes that extra something which raises human beings (or should we read women here?) above the level of the 'brutes'. A consideration of the relation and the difference between male and female in the Enquiry is therefore especially revealing for an understanding of the sublime and beautiful. The quality that is most admired in men is quite different from that celebrated in women: 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 denomination 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. (Enquiry, p. 106) In fact, 'feminine' beauty becomes the very antithesis of'masculine' strength: 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 this, they are guided by nature. Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty. (Enquiry, p. no) Burke's treatise therefore reinvents and reinforces what it presents as natural gender divisions. These form, in fact, the most compelling instance of the difference between the sublime and the beautiful: 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

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admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered into compliance. {Enquiry, pp. 113—14) The sexual politics of these power relations of submission and being submitted to seems clear enough. If we love what submits to us, Burke suggest earlier in the Enquiry that 'love approaches much nearer to contempt than is commonly imagined' (Enquiry, p. 67). Thus beauty is closely related to deformity, weakness, imperfection, and sickness; it affects through counterfeit and flattery; and it induces a love which is very close to contempt. Burke's representation of beauty draws on figurations of the feminine as at once irresistibly alluring and physically and politically dangerous. When in the presence of'such objects as excite love and complacency', the observer is affected 'with an inward sense of melting and langour' (Enquiry, p. 149). Given this, Burke suggests that 'it is almost impossible not to conclude, that beauty acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system', and adduces as evidence 'that manner of expression so common in all times and in all countries, of being softened, relaxed, enervated, dissolved, melted away by pleasure' (Enquiry, pp. 149-50).37 But if we might be misled into thinking that Burke is celebrating the peculiar sensation that beauty produces, it is worth back-tracking for a moment in order to recall that the sublime is constituted as a corrective to weakness and relaxation, whose debilitating effects closely resemble those attributed here to the beautiful. Burke is therefore equating the effects of the beautiful (on observing subjects as well as on subjects who cultivate personal beauty) with the 'disorders' induced by 'indolence' (Enquiry, p. 134). The effects of the beautiful on the observing subject are indicated in one of the most famous passages on beauty in Burke's treatise: 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. (Enquiry, p. 115)

Encountering the 'most beautiful' part of a beautiful woman, the 'unsteady eye' (and the T ) becomes lost in a 'deceitful maze'. Sliding giddily, unable to tell 'whither it is carried', finding nowhere stable on which to fix itself or its gaze, the self is undone by the

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beautiful. Beauty offers no resistance, it seduces without arousing (or offering) force or opposition and so presents no friction against which the T' might test itself. Thus, as Ferguson argues, the beautiful in Burke actually poses a more dangerous threat to self and society than the sublime (for all its claim to turn on pain and danger): 'the beautiful . . . figures in the Enquiry not just as the domestic and social or as that which submits to us, it is also the deceptive par excellence. In the case of the sublime, Burke says, "we are forced", while with the beautiful, "we are flattered into compliance" ' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 75; see Enquiry, p. 113). The sublime's importance, then, is that it acts as a means of staving off the devastating effects of beauty - which needs to be resisted because it is at once the primary vehicle of civilization and that which perpetually threatens to undermine it.38 In the Enquiry the personal is also the political since Burke takes for granted the analogy between human body and political state. Thus the beautiful is capable of undermining nations as well as individuals: Tt may be observed', Burke writes, 'that Homer has given the Trojans, whose fate he has designed to excite our compassion, infinitely more of the amiable social virtues than he has distributed among his Greeks' [Enquiry, p. 158). Burke goes on to imply that the fall of Troy can be accounted for by the susceptibility of'Priam and the old men of his council' to what he refers to as Helen's 'fatal beauty' [Enquiry, p. 171). Helen's beauty is 'fatal' to the Trojans (who present an exemplary warning to all political states) not merely because her residence in Troy draws the avenging Greeks but, Ferguson argues, because 'the danger in beauty is that its appearance of weakness does not prevent its having an effect, which is always that of robbing us of our vigilance and recreating us in its own image' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 76). Homer's account of the Trojan War, then, illustrates 'beauty's disastrous consequences not only for the body but for the body politic as well', showing that 'death and defeat - loss of collective liberty - accompany the amiable virtues' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', pp. 75-6). Ferguson concludes that, After the beautiful has been joined with physical and political entropy issuing in death, the importance of the sublime in exciting the passions of self-preservation becomes apparent. For although the sublime inspires us with fear of our death, the beautiful leads us toward death without our awareness . . . ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 76)

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Yet one of the problems with this remedy is that if the beautiful is characterized as that which operates by arousing or offering no sense of difficulty or resistance (Enquiry, pp. 119—20), then the mind is left with no difficulties to 'surmount'. Beauty's most pernicious quality of all, therefore, is that it gives the sublime nothing upon which to exercise itself or labour. In its revolt against the beautiful, then, the sublime must invent its own tasks. In retreat from the 'feminine' - or from its own potential for 'effeminacy' — the 'masculine' bourgeois subject is repeatedly driven to labour in order repeatedly to redefine itself in its own terms. Yet, as we have seen, this process involves passing through a moment of 'feminized' weakness or passivity which is transcended through having recourse to an audacious ruse or metaphor. In this state, the subject's weakness resembles that of the beautiful in all but degree (beauty 'unmans' the subject in a more gentle yet equally effective manner). As we saw earlier, the sublimity of the victorious subject seems more of a fiction, a moment of theatre, than a genuine transcendence. Burke's strenuous efforts to differentiate the sublime from the beautiful by distinguishing between 'delight' and 'positive pleasure' might therefore mask and mark a more implicated, mutually constitutive relation between the sublime and the beautiful. Although Burke comes to champion beauty in the Reflections, it is clearly distrusted and repressed in the Enquiry. The meaning and consequences of this apparent turnaround have been debated by Burkean scholars — most interestingly by Isaac Kramnick, who suggests that the different historical conditions which obtain between the Enquiry and the Reflections might redistribute the relative values of the sublime and the beautiful in Burke's psychic economy: the question is whether Burke's response to the sublime thirty years later will be the same as in his essay of 1757. Will he be so partial to the masculine principle? Will he still experience a certain delight in the horror, a certain joy and pleasure in the terror? Will he approve then ... of masculine ambition unleashed and of awesome masculine terror inflicted on gentle and delicate beauties? . . . perhaps Burke would rethink his attitudes to the lesser virtues of grace and beauty of affect. . . represented by such as Marie Antoinette, the humiliated queen of the Reflections.39 In other words, there might be a dynamic complex which organizes Burke's aesthetic theory beyond the beck and call of a controlling consciousness. In my own discussion, I want to replace the idea that Burke is at the mercy of the collisions and collusions between history

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and the unconscious. Instead, I will argue that Burke's discourse wrestles in particularly urgent and insightful ways with political and cultural paradoxes and unstable paradigms within bourgeois thought in two of its most critical moments in the eighteenth century.

CHAPTER 2

Labour and luxury: aesthetics and the division of labour

The account of the sublime developed in the previous chapter suggests that it functions as a mode through which women and femininity are both defined and repressed in the discourse which ushers in the bourgeois capitalist epoch. This might enable an understanding of the way that patriarchal values were taken up by, and became implicated within, the new order's attempt to legitimize its quest for political power. It might also contribute new inflections to recent research into the growing sexual division of labour from the mid eighteenth century which defined 'the world of work as the prerogative of men'.1 But I want to argue that we need to read this gendering of aesthetic categories in this period in terms of class and national distinctions as well as sexual difference. This is based on the assumption that, as Cora Kaplan puts it, Masculinity and femininity do not appear in cultural discourse, any more than they do in mental life, as pure binary forms at play. They are always, already, ordered and broken up through other social and cultural terms, other categories of difference . . . To understand how gender and class - to take two categories only - are articulated together transforms our analysis of each of them.2

In England in the first half of the eighteenth century, questions of class difference became crucial as a consequence of the financial revolution which gathered momentum after 1688. This revolution entailed a hegemonic struggle over the moral and political nature and consequences of the new commercial class and its institutions. An examination of the way this struggle fused issues of class with those of gender, money, madness, labour, and luxury will allow us to perceive the ideological import of Burke's theoretical account of the origins of the sublime and the beautiful and of the absolute difference between them. If madness, luxury, and effeminacy become strongly 41

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associated with middle-class commercial enterprise in eighteenthcentury England, I want to argue that Burke's theory of the sublime responds to this by attempting to identify commercial endeavour with the supposed bracing effects of physical labour and with the independent virtue traditionally attributed to more 'barbarous' societies. This strategy, which anticipates nineteenth-century images of virtuous labour,3 is both a bold move and fraught with problems — partly because it remains ambivalent about commercialism, and partly because it leaves Burke potentially unable to exclude the 'barbarity' of the 'lower orders' from his version of the opportunity culture. An alternative response to this ideological problem — worked out by Hume and Smith — consisted in redefining luxury as that which inspires virtuous effort and refines the individual and society. This, too, is beset by problems, since, especially in Smith, it can never wholly exorcize the suspicion that true heroic virtue could only exist in the 'barbarous' conditions of precommercial society. THE ENGLISH MALADY! MONEY, MADNESS, LUXURY

Peter Earle argues that the period 1660-1730 witnessed the selfconscious 'making of the English middle class' - a metropolitan class which he does not hesitate to call 'bourgeois'. Earle's analysis is derived from tripartite descriptions of society made in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which distinguish between the gentry and aristocracy, 'the middling sort of people', and the 'mechanick part of mankind'.4 The nature of the relationship between the new commercial class and the existing ruling class has been the subject of much historical debate. Historians have begun to suggest that this relation was neither entirely conflictual nor perfectly harmonious. Roy Porter argues that the 'dynamic' socioeconomic developments of the period certainly did not destroy 'the ancien regime' and that, in fact, 'the aristocracy actually strengthened itself during the century, through managerial politics both centrally and locally, and through economic astuteness'. Thus these commercial transformations worked as 'powerful social catalysts' whose 'effect was to consolidate and modernise the ruling order, no less than to challenge it'. Using a strikingly Burkean metaphor, Porter suggests that the energy and ambition of the urban middle class strengthened the sinews of the body politic:

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London throbbed with an educated, go-ahead, money-making bourgeoisie well-equipped with financial, legal and other technical skills. Directly and indirectly, at Whitehall and in the City, the business services of many of these capable men were commandeered by the administration. Through such channels, social change positively strengthened the sinews of government.5

To complicate this, there is also a substantial body of research which examines the uneasy relation between these new commercial forces and the traditional ruling order.6 The transformation of England into a commercial society after the 'Glorious Revolution' was achieved not only by an increase of trade and commerce, but through the institution of a system of credit which facilitated the flow of capital. This was not accomplished without a protracted political struggle. As J. G. A. Pocock writes, 'the Whig political regime that credit supported had been created fairly rapidly and to the exclusion of many previously entrenched political groups, and the publicists of the eighteenth century engaged in a perpetual and bitter debate over the merits of its existence'.7 Crucially for my own argument, Pocock's description of the positions adopted for and against the new order indicate that they involved contending theories of history which implicitly adopted different sets of aesthetic assumptions and models of human subjectivity. 'The ideology of opposition', Pocock writes, 'was moral and neoclassicist', contrasting the corruptions of modern commerce with a conception of the individual, drawn from mythical images of Goths, Spartans, and early Romans, as an independent and virtuous citizen. In response to this, defenders of the new order (such as Defoe) argued that even if these ancient peoples had been made up of free and virtuous individuals, that very fact meant that they had no time to pursue 'profit, leisure, and cultivation' and so were 'neither enlightened nor polite' {Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 176).

Pocock describes this debate as a 'quarrel of the ancients and moderns'. For the ancients, 'it seemed that the rise of commerce had spelled the end of virtue'. For the moderns, the 'rise of commerce and culture had been worth the loss of virtue' since it made possible the development of 'new ethical systems which displayed how man's love of himself might be converted into love of his fellow social beings'. But to suggest that the moderns neatly displaced the traditional meaning of virtue would be too simplistic: 'the ancient image of virtue was never overthrown or abandoned, and in

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consequence it had to be recognized that the virtue of commercial and cultivated man was never complete, his freedom and independence never devoid of the elements of corruption' (Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 147). This allows me to argue that Burke's analysis of the condition of England in the eighteenth century (which is implicit in the Enquiry, explicit in the Reflections) seems to equivocate between that of the ancients and that of the moderns. Burke is certainly a modern in that he welcomes the social mobility made possible by the financial revolution, but he retains the ancients' sense that the modified organization of the body politic which this entailed is always susceptible to corruption from within. This, I suggest, is the narrow course which the Enquiry attempts to steer: Burke seeks to develop an aesthetic theory which will allow the man of ability without property to appear the epitome of virtue, yet he always retains the sense that commerce is potentially the very locus of corruption. Thus although I have claimed that the sublime functions as an aesthetic grounding or alibi for middle-class enterprise, I also suggest that it can be seen as a means through which middle-class thought responded to the potential costs of its own success. If, as Weiskel posits, 'the sublime appears as a remedy for the languid melancholy, the vague boredom that increased so astonishingly during the eighteenth century' {Romantic Sublime, p. 97), it can be read as the resort of the 'civilized' classes whose lives no longer involve the appropriate kinds of mental and physical exertion or variety to prevent their degeneration into corruption.8 The labour and pain which formed the daily experience of the majority provides the material ease which at once allows and makes it necessary that the rising middle class transforms labour and pain into aesthetic experience. It is therefore possible to argue that Burke's sublime functions as an antidote against, but also as a symptom of, a disease thought to be already internal to eighteenth-century bourgeois England. The uneasy relation between the sublime and the beautiful in Burke can thus be read not simply as an analogue of that between the middleclass and the aristocracy, as Kramnick claims, but as dramatizing different impulses or potentialities within the bourgeois ethos itself. Burke's contemporaries referred to this 'disease' as 'the English malady'. As Foucault shows, la maladie anglaise was an umbrella term for a range of 'diseases' which were thought to threaten members of the middle and upper classes in the eighteenth century. In the

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middle of the century a fear developed — 'formulated in medical terms but animated, basically, by a moral myth5 - that madness was an infection which could seep through the walls of the houses of confinement and penetrate 'bodies and hearts as easily as if they were passive and friable alkaline particles'.9 This madness was associated with and thought to induce weakness and effeminacy, and women were held to be especially susceptible to it (Madness, pp. 208-10, 218-19). The English were thought to be (and thought of themselves as being) particularly subject to madness and melancholia. George Cheyne, in The English Malady: or, a Treatise of Nervous

Diseases of All Kinds (1733) declared, Foucault notes, 'that wealth, refined food, the abundance all the inhabitants enjoyed, the life of pleasure and ease the richest society led, were at the origin of such nervous disorders' (Madness, p. 213). Foucault shows that this explanation was grounded in the assumption that 'man becomes more delicate in proportion as he perfects himself (Madness, p. 211). This evolved into a political and economic analysis which identified the origins of England's malady in its political liberty and commercial success. This allowed 'critics of the brave new world of the Whig hegemony, with its mad scramble for wealth, place and fashion, [to hurl] anathemas against "the dull, the proud, the wicked and the mad", as Pope phrased it in his Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot (Roy Porter, Mind-Forged Manacles, p. 90). Cures were elaborated which strikingly resemble Burke's conception of the sublime — Foucault describes them as based in 'a moral therapeutics of the body' which involved physical exercise intended to 'give the spirits or the fibres a vigor' (Madness, pp. 159-60, 172-7). As Porter notes, it was thought that while 'the nerves of fine-spirited people needed to be highly elastic and vibrant', there was nevertheless a danger 'that high living would clog the nerves; these therefore needed periodic cleaning or retuning' (Mind-Forg'd Manacles, p. 85).

One of the key terms in this debate was 'luxury'. John Sekora has shown that the notion of luxury was one of the essentially contested concepts of English political thought in the eighteenth century. Its meanings derived from the Old Testament, where it is developed as 'a theory of entropy that explains as it describes how men, singly or collectively, lose vitality and fall from grace. For individuals it bears a theory of ethics, for nations a theory of history.'10 For the eighteenth-century ruling class, the fate of the Roman republic was thought to be, or was represented as, historical evidence of the fate of

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any society which gave itself up to luxury. It therefore came in useful for resisting all political, economic, and social innovation: 'The upholders of traditional privilege sought first to remind England of the Law known from antiquity that set limits upon what most men may do by defining the limits of what they can do, and which condemned categorically all forms of luxury' (Luxury, p. 77). If the sublime functions to extend but also to redefine limits, then, 'luxury' can be thought of as that which threatens to transgress or dissolve all limits. Luxury was typically figured as feminine and associated with effeminacy. Sekora points out that early Jewish and Christian commentators stressed that Eve's fall and temptation of Adam was a sin of luxury, that writers such as Cato and Tertullian condemned the 'vice' and 'extravagance' of women, and that 'almost all personifications of luxury are feminine' (Luxury, pp. 24, 40, 49, 44). But although this indicates the strong association between luxury and lasciviousness, this tends to be down-played in eighteenthcentury discourse, which transforms luxury into a more general term for excessive consumption and expenditure which entailed questions of class and national character. For Sekora, the changes in the meaning of luxury through the eighteenth century 'represent nothing less than the movement from the classical world to the modern'. Much of the political struggle between England's traditional ruling class and the upwardly mobile commercial class in the first half of the century was conducted as a moral debate in which each attacked the other for its 'luxury'. But the fact that this was also an economic struggle allowed late-eighteenth-century bourgeois economists to construct the modern notion of luxury as a positive good by de-emphasizing 'morality in favour of economics, arguing in the main that luxury could increase and redistribute wealth and was therefore a laudable trait in a society' (Luxury, p. 113). Defenders of the traditional order exploited the historical resonances of luxury in order to condemn both the financial revolution which had been accelerated by the political reorganization of 1688 and the potential shift in political power associated with it. For such writers, 'the Revolution of 1688 was a Pandora's box setting loose a spirit of luxury the natural order could not contain' (Sekora, Luxury, p. 68). Against the grain of these traditional attacks on luxury, Bernard Mandeville notoriously argued, in 1723, that luxury was not only not harmful to society but necessary to its economic well-

Aesthetics and the division of labour being. A general indulgence in luxury provides the spur and the occasion for labour and for the healthy proliferation of different trades: such is the Calamitous Condition of Human Affairs that we stand in need of the Plagues and Monsters I named to have all the variety of Labour perform'd, which the Skill of Men is capable of inventing in order to procure an Honest Livelihood to the vast Multitudes of Working Poor . . . And it is folly to imagine that Great and Wealthy Nations can subsist, and be at once Powerful and Polite without.11 Provocatively, Mandeville claims that it is vice rather than virtue which generates labour and wealth - that the Reformation, for example, had been of less material benefit to mankind than 'the silly and capricious Invention of Hoop'd and Quilted Petticoats': it has from its first beginning to this Day not employ'd so many Hands, honest industrious labouring hands, as the abominable improvement on Female Luxury I named has done in Few Years. Religion is one thing and Trade is another. He that gives most Trouble to Thousands of his Neighbours, and invents the most operose Manufactures is right or wrong the greatest Friend to the Society. (Fable of the Bees, p. 358) For Mandeville, then, luxury is not inimical to labour but actually promotes troublesome and operose 'Manufactures'. Although Hume and Smith accepted at least the economic aspect of Mandeville's argument, the notion that luxury could generate labour would have been anathema to Burke, for whom the relaxations of luxury are antithetical to the nervous tensions produced by labour. Burke's Enquiry develops a theory which implicitly demonstrates that the economic individualism of the middle class is fundamentally incompatible with luxury. This position is pioneered by earlier Whiggish writers and advocates of the middle class. In Defoe, the received ethics of luxury are reshaped to serve the economic and political cause of the middle class: Luxury for Defoe is associated with idleness, and he is often uncertain who is more morally luxurious, the garishly rich or the dismally poor; neither meets his measure of necessity. About the middle orders, however, he admits no serious doubts, and his major nonfictional works of the 1720s are strenuous defenses of the commercial interests against the prevailing attack upon luxury . . . To landed men, tradesmen are mostly vile and mean wretches; to Defoe they are sturdy, vigorous men of sense and dignity. Most important, they are productive and industrious, not idle like the men of

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land. If they will avoid the luxuries that have sapped the old legislators, they will gain power and recognition proportionate to their merit. (Sekora, Luxury, p . 117)

My argument, then, is that Burke's Enquiry attempts to develop an aesthetic and philosophical theory which will reinforce arguments such as Defoe's. Burke's account of the sublime enables the endeavours of economic individualism to appear as the very apotheosis of sublimity by shunning a particular figuration of the beautiful which associates it with sloth and indolence.12 As a consequence, all social groups that are 'other' to the masculine, upwardly-mobile ethos — women, the aristocracy, the mad, and what the Reflections notoriously labels ca swinish multitude' - are implicitly identified in the Enquiry as the real source of the political ills brought on by luxury. Burke's Enquiry appeared in what proved to be the decisive phase of the struggle over luxury — the period immediately before and during the Seven Years War (1756—63). In this moment of national crisis (as many perceived it), the attack on the luxury of the commercial interest gained new fervour. A correspondent in the January issue of the London Magazine of 1756 claims that the increase of luxury 'threaten[s] the undermining of our constitution and the downfall of our state' (quoted by Sekora, Luxury, p. 65). In John Brown's Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757),

luxury is presented as a national disease whose symptoms are cowardice, hypochondria, and suicide. The generation and diffusion of wealth has infected the English people with 'superfluity, avarice, effeminate refinement, and loss of principle' (quoted by Sekora, Luxury, p. 93). Ironically anticipating Burke's later position when faced with another threat from France, Brown stresses that only a return to the traditional English values of honour, religion, and public spirit will enable Britain to resist the French. The theoretical assumptions of Burke's Enquiry are shaped by, and intervene within, this political context. *s Burke seems to accept traditional condemnations of luxury as leading to a dangerous and debilitating idleness, but locates luxury elsewhere than in economic individualism. At the same time, however, this strategy seems to be driven by an anxiety that the commercial interest might indeed be threatened by the luxurious dissolution which its detractors identified with it. The beautiful in Burke's Enquiry may therefore be read as representing the vitiating downside of the middle-class ethos itself as much as it stands for an external 'other' in the form of the

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aristocracy, women, the mad, or the lower orders. In other words, although the middle class does define itself against these social groupings, they also function as screen objects against which it projects those aspects or potential consequences of its own ideology which it secretly fears.14 In this way, the Enquiry acts out the theory it espouses by seeking to eliminate from its own system that which threatens it, or the ideology it promotes, from within. THE LABOUR OF PHILOSOPHY

I am suggesting that Burke's aesthetic theory seeks to recruit the sublime as a means for establishing a particular image of middleclass selfhood as a virtuous and heroic labourer. The way the sublime is supposed to achieve this is articulated most clearly in a text not usually associated with the sublime - Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Although Hegel's aesthetics gives short shrift to the Kantian sublime, his account of the accession to self-consciousness in the master-slave dialectic can be interpreted as a staging of the three phases of the Burkean sublime. ^ As in Burke, self-consciousness is achieved in Hegel through a life-or-death struggle since 'it is only through staking one's life that freedom is won' (Phenomenology, p. 114). Burke's first phase would be that which is experienced by consciousness before its encounter with another consciousness. The second phase is entered in the initial moment of confrontation when each trembles before the other - a rehearsal (or audition rather) which assigns the provisionl roles of lord and bondsman. While the lord's role is that of fall-guy,16 the bondsman's is more 'serious', for it is he who experiences the sublime in its third phase and thereby 'acquires a mind of his own' (Phenomenology, p. 119). But although such independent self-consciousness is achieved only through risking death, the Hegelian stage avoids tragedy through the comic ruse of the Aufhebung — that which negates and conserves in one and the same gesture. This is not, therefore, a 'real' death, which would do away with 'the truth which was supposed to issue from it', but 'the negation coming from consciousness, which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently survives its own supersession' (Phenomenology, pp. 114-15). Thus the labour of the Aufhebung conserves the self in the very moment it seems most imperilled; as in Burke, the brush with death is a necessary fiction or metaphor.17

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If Hegel's scene may be read as a 'revolutionary' moment in which the slave (or worker) overthrows the lord, the slave's experience of this strikingly echoes Burke's account of the physiological processes of the body or mind undergoing the sublime crisis. The slave achieves pure 'being-for-self because it/he/she has been fearful ... its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations . . . [and it has known] the absolute melting-away of everything stable . . . Furthermore, his consciousness is not this dissolution of everything stable merely in principle; in his service he actually brings this about. Through his service he rids himself of his attachment to natural existence in every single detail; and gets rid of it by working on it. . . . Through work . . . the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is. (Phenomenology', pp. 117—18) The 'unmanning' of Hegel's bondsman in face of the 'absolute Lord' (the trembling fibres, the 'melting-away of everything solid and stable') is particularly analogous to Burke's description of the experience of the soul contemplating the Deity: 'whilst we contemplate so vast an object', Burke writes, 'we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him' [Enquiry, p. 68). And yet, as in Hegel, the soul emerges even from this encounter with a new sense of self-awe: 'When the prophet David contemplated the wonders of wisdom and power, which are displayed in the oeconomy of man, he seems to be struck with a sort of divine horror, and cries out, fearfully and wonderfully am I made!" {Enquiry, pp. 68-9, misquoting Psalm 139). In Hegel, the lord's relation to the world is an aristocratic (or luxurious) one, achieving its satisfaction through the instantaneous fulfilment of desire which - like the 'momentary duration' which characterizes the pleasures attendant on Burkean beauty [Enquiry, p. 116) - is 'only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence'. In contrast, the work of the bondsman is desire held in check,fleetingnessstaved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence ... It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence. [Phenomenology, p. 118)

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Thus consciousness shapes and forms itself through work — through shaping and forming its object. It is only through a work which is driven by absolute dread that consciousness may overcome or purge its fear and so rise from subservience to independence: Without the formative activity, fear remains inward and mute, and consciousness does not become explicitly for itself If consciousness fashions the thing without that initial absolute fear, it is only an empty self-centred attitude ... If it has not experienced absolute fear but only some lesser dread, the negative being has remained for it something external, its substance has not been infected by it through and through. {Phenomenology, P- I l 9 )

Adam Smith's account of the difference between manufacturing labour and feudal service in The Wealth of Nations (1776) serves to indicate the economic grounds of Hegel's assumptions here. For Smith, the labour of the 'manufacturer' (which may refer both to the manufacturing capitalist and to the worker employed in manufacturing industry), fixes and realizes itself in some particular subject or vendible commodity, which lasts for some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion . . . The labour of the menial servant, on the contrary, does not fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them . . . (Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 330)

The difference Smith is articulating here could be read as that between capitalist and feudal labour relations in that the worker in the former centres on production (producing consumer durables), while the servant in the latter panders to aristocratic luxury. Equally important is the way Smith equates the servant and the sovereign: The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject, or vendible commodity . . . The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the publick, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. (Wealth of Nations, 1, pp. 330—1) In fact, it is possible to see these passages as working to establish a crucial difference (for 'progressive' economists in the eighteenth

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century) between the laudable manufacture and circulation of 'luxury goods' and the luxurious dissipation of aristocratic consumption. On the basis of this distinction, the discourse of capitalist economics groups together servants, kings, aristocracy, the military, slaves, and women by conceiving them all as unproductive 'parasites'. But an on-going and troublesome issue in the discourse which sought to promote the developing economic order in eighteenthcentury Britain was the question about what the 'springs' of human action and the desire to labour might be.18 Philosophers sought to demonstrate that labour offered a peculiar reward on its own account quite different from, and more beneficial than, that offered by avoiding labour altogether. The title of Jeremy Bentham's A Table of the Springs of Action (1817) alludes to and takes up a problem which Locke had made central to eighteenth-century discourse. The terms in which labour is thought about in the period are initially set in Locke's discussion 'Of Property' in the Second Treatise of Government (1690), where Locke argues that labour (rather than land or money) is the origin of economic value: 'it is labour indeed that puts the difference of value on everything'.^ Locke's attempt to promote the virtue of labour is based in biblical injunctions and in the axiom that to subdue (and thereby acquire a portion of) the earth is to exhibit rationality. To labour on spare land is to acquire property rights over it because labour is the inalienable property of the labourer. The foundation of property, then, is the labour of an individual who is 'master of himself, and proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it' {Second Treatise, p. 138). If individual labour is therefore the founding concept of Locke's political theory,20 his philosophical account of the development of human understanding lays great stress on the intellectual labour of the individual. Indeed, one of the central preoccupations of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) is to identify and discuss how human beings are 'excited' to 'Actions of thinking and motion'.21 Weiskel argues that the natural sublime may be read as 'a response to the darker implications of Locke's psychology' which had substituted anxiety and uneasiness in place of the will 'as the principle of individuation': Locke himself, in the revision of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, began to recognize how his evacuation of the soul had undermined the doctrine of the will. He withdrew his concurrence in the received view that

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the greatest good determines the will and founded his system of motivation on uneasiness. {Romantic Sublime, pp. 14, 18)

But although Locke does announce this revision in the fourth edition of the Essay (of 1700), his thesis that there are no innate principles or ideas is not an 'evacuation of the soul', and does not mean that there is nothing to the human mind prior to experience. On the contrary, human understanding is organized by a set of inbuilt faculties which comprise, as it were, the operating system or program which processes the sense data fed into it (see Essay, 1, iv, 12, and 11, vi—xii). A characteristic feature throughout Locke's discussion is the emphasis he puts on the active nature of these faculties, on the importance of their being exercised (see Essay, 1, iv, 12 and 15), and on 'the right use of those Powers Nature hath bestowed upon us' [Essay, 1, iv, 22).

Locke's description of the acquisition of knowledge through mental labour is analogous to his description in the Second Treatise of the foundation of property and value in physical labour. Only that knowledge gained by actively employing reason is 'real and true Knowledge', whereas the passive reception of the opinions of others is merely 'borrowed Wealth' {Essay, 1, iv, 23). Those who fail to exercise their mental faculties are slaves to tradition and custom. But precisely because it seems easier to abstain from work, of whatever kind, Locke needs to identify 'the spring of Action' {Essay, p. 252) of both manual labour and intellectual exertion (since they comprise the basis of economic prosperity and liberal politics respectively). Locke notes that in the first editions of the Enquiry he had argued along traditional lines that 'the spring of Action' was an abstract wish for 'the good' {Essay, p. 252). He replaces this motive in the fourth edition with one which partially anticipates Mandeville: 'upon a stricter enquiry, I am forced to conclude, that good, the greater good, though apprehended and acknowledged to be so, does not determine the will, until our desire, raised proportionably to it, makes us uneasy in the want of it' {Essay, p. 253). Thus although human beings have been endowed with a range of impressive faculties, those faculties can only be exercised and developed through being driven by unease and desire. In fact, virtually everyone is compelled to labour by a merciless succession of natural and acquired desires: The ordinary necessities of our lives, fill a great part of them with the uneasiness of Hunger, Thirst, Heat, Cold, Weariness with labour, and Sleepiness

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in their constant returns, etc. To which, if besides accidental harms, we add the fantastical uneasiness, (as itch after Honour, Power, or Riches, etc.) which acquir'd habits by Fashion, Example, and Education have settled in us, and a thousand other irregular desires, which custom has made natural to us, we shall find, that a very little part of our life is so vacant from these uneasinesses, as to leave us free to the attraction of remoter absent good. We are seldom at ease, and free enough from the sollicitation of our natural or adopted desires . . . no sooner is one action dispatch'd . . . but another uneasiness is ready to set us on work. (Essay, pp. 261-2)

This, then, is the treadmill which drives a commercial society - a perpetual cycle in which the desire for ease rarely leaves us at ease enough to consider anything other than immediate need. But if Locke might think that it is better, even inevitable, that the labouring poor — and perhaps even merchants and capitalists should be continually at the mercy of their passions, we might expect some loophole which would allow a select few to escape 'the human condition'. Indeed, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding can be

seen as precisely designed to stimulate its readers (who would require a considerable amount of free time to read it) to develop their understanding and so cast off the manacles of tradition and desire. This requisite degree of freedom from immediate need arises not simply from the accidents of individual prosperity but through the active cultivation of taste. Locke goes on to suggest that it is possible, by repeated contemplation, to so cultivate a relish for an absent good that we begin to feel an uneasiness from its absence: 'thus, by a due consideration and examining any good proposed, it is in our power, to raise our desires, in a due proportion to the value of that good' (Essay, p. 262). Taste can be developed because we have 'a power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire, as every one daily may Experiment in himself. This seems to me the source of all liberty . . . For during this suspension . . . we have opportunity to examine, view, and judge, of the good or evil of what we are going to do' (Essay, p. 263). This power of suspending the immediate satisfaction of desire opens up a space in which we may exhibit and exercise our capacity as free agents. But the fact that this requires some respite from the clamours of our needs and desires means that Locke differentiates, by sleight-of-hand, between those who live from hand to mouth and those who live from the labour of others and so have the time and ease to pursue more 'cultivated' desires. Locke is thus engaged in the process of constructing an image of

Aesthetics and the division of labour independent subjectivity by differentiating it from that of the labouring classes and by presenting the philosopher (the man of speculation in every sense) as the ideal model. The process of differentiating between human beings is thus centred around the question of taste. If the only thing to be taken into consideration when choosing which pleasure to pursue was immediate gratification, we might simply say that 'The Mind has a different relish, as well as the Palate5: Were all the Concerns of Man terminated in this Life, why one followed Study and Knowledge, and another Hawking and Hunting; why one chose Luxury and Debauchery, and another Sobriety and Riches, would not be, because every one of these did not aim at his own happiness; but because their Happiness was placed in different things. {Essay, pp. 268-9) From this viewpoint, there would be no point in disputing about taste since there would be no way of discriminating between different tastes. If, Locke argues, the only consequence of choosing this or that object were its immediate yield of pleasure or pain, no one could choose amiss. Yet the choice of every object carries with it deferred effects which are not immediately apparent. Rational choice therefore involves comparing and balancing present and future effects, and misjudgment occurs through not properly estimating the latter. Although 'Things in their present enjoyment are what they seem' {Essay, p. 272), we are often deceived as to future consequences by 'a near and tempting Object' which 'forces us, as it were, blindfold into its embraces' {Essay, p. 277). If it is not to be deceived, then, the judgment needs carefully to weigh present and future consequences. Revealingly enough, Locke figures this in terms of profit and loss, and his most compelling instance of this economy is drawn from Christian notions of the rewards of sin and virtue in the hereafter. From this perspective, future effects always outweigh present ones. To reason, then, is to defer present enjoyment in order to avoid future pain, or to endure present pain in order to enjoy future profits. Thus Locke develops a psychic economy of deferral which suits both Christian theology and capitalist economics. One of the causes of judging amiss is our propensity to shun what looks like present pain, and this often means that we neglect our future happiness. As we might expect, Locke wants to encourage individuals to prefer the pleasure which eventually results from

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present pain to the immediate pleasure which often leads to future pain. To this end, he argues that tastes can be modified: Men may and should correct their palates, and give a relish to what either has, or they suppose has none . . . 'tis a mistake to think, that Men cannot change the displeasingness, or indifferency, that is in actions, into pleasure and desire, if they will do but what is in their power. A due consideration will do it in some cases; and practice, application, and custom in most . . . Trials often reconcile us to that, which at a distance we looked on with aversion; and by repetition wears us into a liking, of what possibly, in the first essay, displeased us. {Essay, p. 280)

Present pain can not only lead to future happiness, then, but it can also be transformed into present pleasure; if we make the effort, we can train ourselves to enjoy effort for its own sake. To take pains to replace and correct our corrupted tastes is to behave as 'a rational Creature' {Essay, p. 281), and the cultivation of'natural' taste in this way becomes the measure of the elevation of one human being above another. This, I suggest, is precisely the psychic-cum-political economy which the Burkean sublime comes to promote — although Burke abandons Locke's faith in rationality and substitutes aesthetic experience as a more compelling spring of action. At the same time, however, Burke shares Locke's need to differentiate between different kinds of labour and labourer. Thus, in the following chapter, we will see him follow Locke in resorting to the notion of taste directed by rational judgment in order belatedly to limit the egalitarian potential of his own aesthetic theory. (We will also see that this move undermines the very basis of his project in that rationality is said to be incompatible with sublime experience.) The violent rejection of luxury that is implicit in the Enquiry was not the only strategy employed by writers concerned to promote the interests and values of the middle class. David Hume was already engaged in an attempt to revolutionize the traditional understanding of luxury in order to celebrate the benefits of expanding commercialism. In this respect, Burke's assumptions in the Enquiry about the beautiful and/or luxury often look anachronistic - though it was not until after the war that the revaluation of luxury could make any impact. Thus an equally important nodal point in the discursive network in which Burke's Enquiry participates is formed by Hume's engagement with these issues in a series of essays which

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appeared between 1741 and 1777. In 'Of Commerce' (1752), Hume takes up Mandeville's argument that luxury is the spur to industry. Rejecting traditional refutations of luxury (and the ways they were being used to condemn the development of commerce in early eighteenth-century Britain), Hume equates luxury with the products of 'industry and arts and trade', and claims that the circulation of these products contributes to the happiness of the people and the power of the state. Developing Locke's argument that labour is the origin of value, but in a direction which Locke might well have resisted, Hume suggests that 'Every thing in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labour.'22 Industry, arts, and trade generate luxury since they produce goods above and beyond those which can be derived from agriculture alone. In a society without 'manufactures and mechanic arts', the numerous workers of the land produce a superfluity, but they 'have no temptation . . . to increase their skill and industry; since they cannot exchange that superfluity for any commodities, which may serve either to their pleasure or vanity. A habit of indolence naturally prevails. The greater part of the land lies uncultivated' {Essays, pp. 260-1). Hume here introduces a third term into the discussion of the relation between labour and luxury: whereas luxury promotes industry, the absence of luxury as an incentive leads to indolence. Hume therefore reverses the traditional argument that luxury makes the people unfit for labour and the defence of the state. He also insists that the benefits of developing commercial prosperity ought to filter down to those whose labour helps to generate them. In 'Of Luxury' (1754), Hume attempts to 'correct both . . . extremes' in the prevailing attitude towards luxury in the period — i.e., the praise of 'vicious luxury' exemplified by Mandeville, and the pronouncements of those 'men of severe morals [who] blame even the most innocent luxury, and represent it as the source of all the corruptions, disorders, and factions, incident to civil government'.23 The distinction between luxury and indolence allows Hume to transfer all the negative effects conventionally associated with the former onto the latter. Although intervals of indolence might be 'agreeable for a moment', since they provide a necessary respite from the 'quick march of the spirits', too much indolence begets 'a langour and lethargy, that destroys all enjoyment'. Education, custom, and example ought to encourage a relish for activity (the benefits of which anticipate those of the Burkean sublime):

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In times when industry and the arts flourish, men are kept in perpetual occupation, and enjoy, as their reward, the occupation itself, as well as those pleasures which are the fruit of their labour. The mind acquires new vigour; enlarges its powers and faculties; and by an assiduity in honest industry, both satisfies its natural appetites, and prevents the growth of unnatural ones, which commonly spring up, when nourished by ease and idleness. (Essays, p. 270)

'On Luxury' becomes an implicit but confident celebration of the industrious, and hence luxurious, condition of Britain in the mid eighteenth century: The spirit of the age affects all the arts; and the minds of men, being once roused from their lethargy, and put into a fermentation, turn themselves on all sides, and carry improvements into every art and science. Profound ignorance is totally banished, and men enjoy the privilege of rational creatures, to think as well as to act, to cultivate the pleasures of the mind as well as those of the body. (Essays, p. 271)

Hume insists that luxury, commerce, and industry are promoted by, and promote, political liberty, and he therefore champions the role of the middle class in contemporary Britain: where luxury nourishes commerce and industry, the peasants, by a proper cultivation of the land, become rich and independent; while the tradesmen and merchants acquire a share of the property, and draw authority and consideration to that middling rank of men, who are the best and firmest basis of public liberty. These submit not to slavery, like the peasants, from poverty and meanness of spirit; and having no hopes of tyrannizing over others, like the barons, they are not tempted, for the sake of that gratification, to submit to the tyranny of their sovereign. They covet equal laws, which may secure their property, and preserve them from monarchical, as well as aristocratical tyranny. The lower house is the support of our popular government; and all the world acknowledges, that it owed its chief influence and consideration to the encrease of commerce, which threw such a balance of property into the hands of the commons. (Essays, pp. 277-8) In 'Of the Middle Station of Life' (1742), H u m e announces his intention 'to perswade such of my readers as are plac'd in the Middle Station to be satisfy'd with it, as the most eligible of all others' (Essays, p. 546). Readers in the middle station form the most numerous Rank of Men, that can be suppos'd susceptible of Philosophy; and therefore, all Discourses of Morality ought principally to

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be address'd to them. The Great are too much immers'd in Pleasure; and the Poor too much occupy'd in providing for the Necessities of Life, to harken to the calm Voice of Reason. (Essays, p. 546) The middle station is the best situation for 'a man' to acquire virtue, wisdom, and ability because it requires that these qualities be exercised: 'Every Thing appears in its natural Colours before him: he has more Leisure to form Observations; and has, beside, the Motive of Ambition to push him on in his Attainments; being certain that he can never rise to any Distinction or Eminence in the World, without his own Industry' (Essays, pp. 547-8). But although these essays solicit support for the rise of the middle class and develop a critique of the landed interest, it has to be stressed that Hume is not arguing that the middle class should accede to political power by displacing the nobility and gentry. In 'Of Parties in General' (1741), Hume notes that 'There has been an attempt in ENGLAND to divide the landed and trading part of the nation; but without success. The interests of these two bodies are not really distinct, and never will be so, till our public debts encrease to such a degree, as to be altogether oppressive and intolerable' (Essays, p. 60). Hume is therefore concerned to maintain the 'elastic' constitution organized in the Revolution of 1688—9 ~~ a n e v e n t of mighty consequence, and the firmest foundation of BRITISH liberty' ('Of the Parties of Great Britain' (1741), Essays, p. 70). Hume's Essays, then, work to create a middle-class commercial ideology which celebrates the economic and philosophical virtues of the middle rank of men within the balanced constitution of post1688 Britain. I suggest that this is precisely the ideological outlook which Burke seeks to promote through the aesthetic theory he develops in the Enquiry. Yet Burke differs from Hume on several important counts. Rather than conceding the argument that luxury promotes industriousness, Burke seems to accept traditional assumptions that luxury is dangerous to body and body politic alike. And whereas Hume distinguishes between luxury and effeminacy and between luxury and indolence, Burke equates all three. In this respect, given the direction in which Smith would take the argument in the Wealth of Nations, Burke's 'innovative' aesthetic treatise seems notably anachronistic. Burke also resists the egalitarian drift of Hume's arguments - though it may be that Hume awoke Burke from his philosophical slumbers concerning the egalitarian potential of his own aesthetic theory.

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Much of Adam Smith's economic philosophy arises out of the debates we are examining, and many of his principles originate in Hume. But Smith's, whilst it is a more thoroughgoing philosophy of commerce and industry than Hume's, is yet less confident that its effects are entirely beneficial or uniformly shared throughout the different ranks of society. Smith ruminates over the possibility that the division of labour has negative as well as positive effects in an advanced society in which new modes of production had begun to radically change the nature of work. In a discussion of the consequences of the state not providing education for working people, Smith suggests that The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable ofjudging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war . . . His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expence of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.2*

Thus the 'universal' experience which Burke claims as the basis of his aesthetics might not extend down to the working poor: their labour is not uplifting but degrading; its repetitious, habitual nature dulls their capacity to participate in the sublime. Burke seems to have recognized this: 'a long exercise of the mental powers induces a remarkable lassitude of the whole body; and on the other hand . .. great bodily labour, or pain, weakens, and sometimes actually destroys the mental faculties' (Enquiry, p. 135). While Smith implies that the division of labour is necessary for 'progress', his discussion of the debilitating effects of repetitious work leads to an argument for the education of the people in order to mitigate these effects. And yet, as John Barrell shows, eighteenthcentury bourgeois political economists remained ambivalent towards the idea of educating manufacturing workers:

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It may seem that by education 'the great body of the people' can be taught to 'see through' the 'interested complaints of faction and sedition' and so to arrive at a view of the balance of interests by which the unity of a modern state is necessarily composed; or, on the other hand, it may appear that to teach the ability to read, and especially to write, is to facilitate the communication of such 'interested complaints', as well as to relax the habit of industry necessary to economic progress . . . 'Ignorance', writes Ferguson, 'is the mother of industry as well as of superstition.'25

A major question which exercised 'men of speculation', therefore, was whether the needs of the newly emerging socio-economic order were best served by maintaining or relieving the ignorance of its work force. That both solutions were thought to introduce dangers as well as benefits points to inherent contradictions in capitalist relations of production and in the discursive constructions of 'the people' which they entail. In a ubiquitous comparison in the eighteenth century (which seems a nostalgic response to this set of problems), Smith suggests that exertion in more 'primitive' societies has quite opposite effects on the human constitution to labour in 'civilized' nations: It is otherwise in the barbarous societies, as they are commonly called, of hunters, of shepherds, and even of husbandmen . . . In such societies the varied occupations of every man oblige every man to exert his capacity, and to invent expedients for removing difficulties which are continually occurring. Invention is kept alive, and the mind is not suffered to fall into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people. {Wealth of Nations, II, pp. 782-3)

Such passages — which seem to yearn for a set of conditions in which the body of the people was capable of the exertion and invention involved in 'removing difficulties' - perhaps mark an ambivalence towards 'civilization' and the onset of manufacturing industry in their most subtle advocate. It is almost as if liberal capitalist thought is troubled from the outset by the impossibility of balancing the gains and losses involved in progress. If the sublime in mid-eighteenthcentury Britain represents an aesthetic category conducive to the bourgeois work ethic, it may also be an index of the middle class's apprehensions about the blunting effects of that ethos. But if the fantasy about 'barbarous societies' is peopled with sublime beings who present a damaging contrast with the body of the people in a manufacturing society, the latter society can yet,

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Smith claims, produce an elite whose members surpass the general attainments of the former. For although, in barbarous societies, every individual is capable of a variety of occupations, Smith continues, 'no man can well acquire that improved and refined understanding, which a few men sometimes possess in a more civilised state'. And although 'every man [in barbarous societies] has a considerable degree of knowledge, ingenuity, and invention . . . scarce any man has a great degree'. Smith concludes that In a civilised state . . . though there is little variety in the occupations of the greater part of individuals, there is an almost infinite variety in those of the whole society. These varied occupations present an almost infinite variety of objects to the contemplation of those few, who, being attached to no particular occupation themselves, have leisure and inclination to examine the occupations of other people. The contemplation of so great a variety of objects necessarily exercises their minds in endless comparisons and combinations, and renders their understandings, in an extraordinary degree, both acute and comprehensive. {Wealth of Nations, n, p. 783) At first, this passage seems about to argue that although bourgeois society has relinquished the conditions in which most individuals could attain a degree of sublimity it has nevertheless produced a system whose variety of activity and energetic momentum renders society itself sublime. Yet since this would be to abandon its stress on individualism (and its concern to maintain class difference), a select 'few' are presented as attaining a level of sublimity not thought of in pre-bourgeois societies. This elevation of a meritorious elect is acknowledged to be at the expense of the degradation of the many: 'Notwithstanding the great abilities of those few, all the nobler parts of the human character may be, in a great measure, obliterated and extinguished in the great body of the people' {Wealth of Nations, 11, pp. 783-4). Yet this enormous cost, in human and aesthetic terms, purchases only an ambiguous eminence for the few. In a society organized round the labour-capital relation, the majority are made unfit for intense aesthetic experience by the very nature of their daily labour. Only the philosopher or political economist is deemed able to escape from this and does so by an 'exercise' of the mind which contemplates the labour of others (while cultivating an ambivalent nostalgia for the more rugged and adventurous conditions experienced by barbarous societies). The philosopher, then, whose leisure is funded by the labour of others, contemplates or aestheticizes the labours of the

Aesthetics and the division of labour present and the past without being able to participate in them. Thus the bourgeois notion of 'progress' seems incurably haunted by a sense of loss; striding forward in the name of nature, it yet suspects that its progress is founded on the supplanting of nature itself. That these economic speculations are conducted in the same terms as Burke's Enquiry underlines the way eighteenth-century economics and aesthetics not only employ the same paradigms but are concerned with the same set of problems. In his 'Analytic of the Sublime' (1790), Kant succinctly articulates the sublime's sociopolitical import by presenting it as a means of toughening up a society grown lax through commercial prosperity. In such societies, even war can become a necessity: War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude. On the other hand, a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing selfinterest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of a nation. ('Analytic of the Sublime', pp. 112-13)

Significantly enough, then, the bourgeois enterprise is not inherently sublime. Although the great energy it displays in its rise to prominence might be initially awe inspiring, once established it becomes vulnerable to the same physiological and political entropy which it identifies in the regime it seeks variously to displace, join, or revitalize. As its philosophers realized, the very success of the middle class would render it less able to resist the revolutionary potential of the people it exploited (a fear acknowledged in its agonizing over whether its position would be strengthened or weakened by educating the work force). We will see that this complex of problems becomes especially critical in the Revolution controversy, where Smith's tentative suggestions about how to mitigate the effects of repetitious labour on the working poor are developed by radical writers such as Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft into a theory of political liberation. These writers produce a critique of the status quo in the 1790s which extrapolates from precisely the kind of assumptions which Burke makes in the Enquiry. Their stress on the revolutionary force of labour (as individual and collective effort) forms part of a calculated

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attack on, and alternative to, what they represent as the debilitated and debilitating institutions and culture of the ancien regime (while also underlining their own commitment to the capitalist work ethic). The political logic of Burke's aesthetic speculations is turned against him by these writers, who argue that it is those who do no labour at all - such as kings and aristocracy - who are most benumbed by civilization and so precisely unfit for political power (which can only be earned through merit, not inherited). Right exertion becomes a sublime remedy not only for the majority subjected to misery by the existing order of things, but also for those groups whose debilitating lifestyle perpetuates the suffering of the majority. Thus Burke's radical opponents attempt to appropriate and transform the Burkean sublime by making it (and revolution) a collective performative action effected by a whole nation in which the 'people' shift from passive to active, from being victims of rhetorical persuasion to performative speakers and political agents. In response to this, Burke stresses that Britain's danger lies precisely in the complacent inactivity of the upper and middle classes with regard to gathering radical energies at home as well as abroad. To echo Hume, the Reflections is written to startle 'all ranks of men' out of their 'strange supineness' in face of the Revolution. Burke is deeply troubled by the Revolution precisely because it seems to expose and draw upon political and social possibilities already latent in his early aesthetics. This is to suggest that a democratic revolution, threatening from within the social order he seeks to institute, is already implicit in Burke's aesthetic revolution as a kind of irrepressible internal momentum. As Ferguson suggests, Burke saw the Revolution as an instance 'of the sublime functioning in an unanticipated direction . . . The ungovernability of the mob turns out to represent rather too much sublimity for Burke's taste when that ungovernability ceases to contribute to the orderly functioning of a productive society.'26 This is indicated by the way Burke condemns the Revolution for its unbalanced understanding of the nature of political work. The threat which the Revolution poses is sometimes encapsulated by the vigorous and unceasing activity of its architects and sometimes by the negative example they set of shunning all exertion (and thus being all the more dangerous) :2? In England, we cannot work so hard as Frenchmen. Frequent relaxation is necessary to us. You are naturally more intense in your application ... At present, this your disposition to labour is rather encreased than lessened ...

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This continued unremitted effort of the members of your Assembly, I take to be one among the causes of the mischief they have done. They who always labour, can have no true judgment. You never give yourselves time to cool.28 Their purpose every where seems to have been to evade and slip aside from difficulty . . . Difficulty is a severe instructor, set over us by the supreme ordinance of a parental guardian and legislator . . . He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial. It is the want of nerves of understanding for such a talk; it is the degenerate fondness for tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities, that has in so many parts of the world created governments with arbitrary powers. They have created the late arbitrary monarchy of France. They have created the arbitrary republic of Paris . . . The difficulties which they rather had eluded than escaped, meet them again in their course; they multiply and thicken on them; they are involved, through a labyrinth of confused detail, in an industry without limit, and without direction; and, in conclusion, the whole of their work becomes feeble, vitious, and insecure. [Reflections; pp. 278—9) In the latter passage, the same terms are used to criticize France both before and after the Revolution: both aristocrat and revolutionary seem bent on avoiding labour and by doing so involve themselves in a labyrinth of confused detail which enfeebles both their work and themselves. At the same time their activity becomes 'an industry without limit' - exceeding all bounds and pre-empting 'true judgment'. Burke's reaction to this is as curious as it is necessary: confronted with an event which foregrounds those aspects of his theory which he attempts to contain in 1757-9, he tries to apply the ballast of custom grounded in aristocratic property and reinvents his aesthetics to meet the crisis he most feared (precisely because it seems an inevitable corollary to his own revolt against neo-classical and aristocratic values). This is why Burke cannot afford to concede the sublime to revolutionary radicalism and why he seeks to recruit it, in its more tempered degrees, as a mode of resistance against the Revolution. In attempting to manipulate the sublime's effective power, however, the Reflections seems unable to constrain its potentially radical impetus or govern its destabilizing effects.29 The Reflections thus becomes itself an ungovernable text having unpredictable effects in the already critically unstable context of Britain in the early 1790s.

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Burke's 'shift' between 1757-9 and 1790 therefore needs to be read in terms of the different impetus his aesthetic categories appear to have in radically different historical moments. If the Enquiry is produced to help propel an on-going bourgeois 'revolution', the Reflections is written to defend what has, in the intervening thirty years or so, become a new status quo against revolutionary threats 'from below'. While the Enquiry can be read as seeking to reverse, or at least resist, the master-slave relation, in the Reflections that reversal has become a new stability which is in turn threatened by history's (or the sublime's) inexorable logic. The terror which spurs Burke's later text is the possibility that, just as the aristocracy had relinquished its sublime role to the bourgeoisie, the 'people' might through sublime collective effort - overturn traditional/bourgeois institutions by seizing the opportunity presented by the bourgeoisie's very success. From refusing to relinquish his theory in 1759, Burke calls, in 1790, for a resistance to all theory as inevitably leading towards 'misrule and excess'.30 But before working through these arguments in a sustained reading of the Reflections, I want to suggest that Burke seems already aware, in 1759, of the possibility that his aesthetic theory was as problematic as it was necessary. The 'Essay on Taste' which Burke added to the Enquiry in 1759 seems designed to limit the egalitarian impetus inadvertently opened up by his formulation of the sublime. Burke resists Hume's suggestion that the labouring poor ought to share, materially if not politically, in the new order being created, and he does this by having recourse to a concept of taste which, as in Locke, works to distinguish along class lines the rational individual from the irrational majority. Yet this move is as dangerous as it is necessary to Burke's project, since it embroils the Enquiry in the contradictions and paradoxes of a supplementary logic. Having abandoned rationality in favour of aesthetics as the most effective way of governing a populace and inspiring them to labour, Burke reintroduces rationality in order to distinguish the man of taste from the common labourer. Yet in doing so, the man of taste becomes incapable of experiencing the sublimity which was originally meant to be the most effective way of achieving eminence. The man who cultivates his taste rises to the level of Smith's 'philosopher', yet in doing so, he loses touch with the sublime experience he seeks both to participate in and to regulate. We can therefore postulate that the

Aesthetics and the division of labour Enquiry is itself a necessary gamble, a high-risk strategy which Burke pulls back from in order to limit the (economic) windfall to a single class. Paradoxically, however, this attempt to limit the stake and fix the result puts his whole project at risk.

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CHAPTER 3

The political economy of taste: limiting the sublime

One of the apparent paradoxes of the sublime is that it became a fashionable taste in eighteenth-century Britain. As Ferguson points out, to make the sublime available as just one more consumer or tourist commodity would render it 'factitious' in its own terms since sublimity inevitably loses its impact with daily exposure. Thus, 'A major dilemma of the sublime is that of preserving its difference from the custom, habit, and fashion which are continually launching insidious assimilative forays upon it' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 71). Burke himself recognized this in formulating the sublime as that which, by definition, swerves away from the customary: 'Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little'; 'Custom reconciles us to everything' (Enquiry, pp. 61, 148). In order to maintain the sublime's novelty, Burke relies on the distinction, ubiquitous in English cultural history, between nature and custom or, as he puts it in a passage inserted in the Enquiry in 1759, between nature and 'second nature': 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 of 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 pleasure. But when we are thrown out of this state, or deprived of any thing 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. (Enquiry, p. 104) Although nature and second nature are partially analogous, second nature renders us indifferent (unable to respond) to pain or pleasure, whereas the 'absolute indifference' of the natural state is a condition 68

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of preparedness for pleasure or pain. If a particular sublime experience was resorted to habitually, then, it would become entirely unaffecting; the sublime is that which jolts us out of mediocrity and indifference. It is crucial to register the contrast between these assumptions and the values promoted in the Reflections, where second nature characterizes all that Burke defends and the means by which he attempts to defend it.1 In the Enquiry, Burke's aesthetics are irreconcilable with custom (and nature is incompatible with second nature) because of the physiological and sensationist theory he adopts (which cannot be revoked because it is fundamental to the treatise's implicit ideological project). Given this, that the Reflections should come to champion the politics of custom and habit is as striking as their denunciation in the Enquiry. I want to argue that the contrast between the aggression towards custom in 1757-9 and the appeal to custom in 1790 cannot be explained away by characterizing Burke as aesthetically radical and politically conservative, nor by simply claiming that he reversed his position. Instead, this shift demands that we recognize both a logical and an ideological contradiction within the very structure and context of both the aesthetics and the politics.2 For all his wariness about the blunting effects of custom, Burke gets himself into what Ferguson calls a 'critical impasse' in his account of the sublime. If part of the 'revolutionary' thrust of Burke's theory is its basis in individual physiology rather than the aesthetic conventions of tradition, the Enquiry also seeks to verify the sublime experience through insisting that it is repeatable and generally available: '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* (p. 40, my emphasis). If the sublime appears to encourage the individual to transgress the constraints of custom, its authenticity is guaranteed by an empirical sensationism which claims that 'the true standard of the arts is in every man's power' {Enquiry, p. 54). Although he turns away from custom, then, Burke introduces a new standard of conformity guaranteed by 'nature' (everyone has the same physiological constitution which responds in the same way to natural phenomena). Thus Burke's discussion of the sublime becomes paradoxical in its own terms, since it is both a unique moment of individuation and an everyday occurrence available to all.

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I want to suggest that this 'critical impasse' in the Enquiry points towards a central contradiction in the ideology which Burke is implicitly formulating. Burke's appeal to the everyday experience of every man is a rhetorical gesture. It is doubtful whether those people who actually faced pain and danger in their everyday lives in the eighteenth century gleaned any delight from their experience (indeed, Smith worries over the possibility that everyday labour blunts human capacity because it presents no challenges). By the same token, middle-class aesthetes would not be exposed to pain and danger on a daily basis. Burke is not making an empirical claim but is trying to reconcile two contradictory impulses which fracture the ideology he works within. On the one hand, he wants the sublime to be open to all since he wants cultural, social, economic, and political achievement to be similarly open; on the other hand, he wants to maintain distinctions between classes and between the meritorious and the mediocre. I suggest that it is this contradiction, and the possibility that the formulation of the sublime in the first edition might have left insufficient safeguards against egalitarian interpretations, which the 'Essay on Taste' wrestles with and ends up reinscribing in a new way. In the 'Essay on Taste', the apparently straightforward opposition between nature and second nature becomes complicated precisely because the very concept of taste is based on the supposition that what has become second nature to some is better than (more natural than) that which has become second nature to others. The cultural and ideological problems which beset the notion of taste in the eighteenth century are specific to its historical context, yet it shares a larger history with the notion of decorum which had functioned in a similar way since the Renaissance. Derek Attridge shows how the concepts of nature and art exist in the Renaissance in a kind of see-saw antithesis which can never be balanced: when one of the terms is held to represent the zenith of human activity, the other becomes its nadir; yet that inherently unstable condition will have cultural, political, and logical consequences which induce a reversal of these relative evaluations.3 Attridge demonstrates that attempts to escape from this oscillating system, by variously claiming that the best art is like nature, or that nature is the best art, introduce the problem of distinguishing between good nature and bad nature, good art and bad art. Thus a third term needs to be inserted into the system which will enable 'proper' distinctions to be

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made and maintained. In George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589), this third term is referred to in a variety of ways, of which 'decorum5 can serve as a generic term. Decorum is a kind of second nature which prevents the courtier and/or poet from straying into the evils of unnatural artifice or displaying the infirmities of nature. It is 'precisely that aspect of the poet's art which is not reducible to rule . . . [and as such] is usually called "natural" ' (Attridge, Peculiar Language, p. 30). In Puttenhan, as in the Renaissance generally, decorum played a political role: it 'is what comes "naturally" not to all humanity but to an elite . . . [while] [w]hat comes naturally to the majority, who are ignorant and inexperienced, is not truly natural' (Peculiar Language, pp. 33-4). In this way, decorum is simultaneously distinguished from artifice (it disguises its artifice and claims that it is natural anyway) and placed 'at a distant remove from universal human nature or instincts' (Peculiar Language, p. 34). Politically crucial to the maintenance of social distinctions in the period, decorum nevertheless carries with it a train of irresolvable contradictions for the courtier-poet which act out a supplementary logic: 'you need to supplement your own natural inadequacies by the exercise of decorum, that "natural" art, so that you may artificially rise to the status of perfect and self-sufficient nature' (Peculiar Language, p. 43).

Joseph Addison established the criteria for the discussion of taste in the early eighteenth century in an essay in the Spectator of 19 June 1712 which served as a prelude to his essays on the 'Pleasures of the Imagination'. Addison argues that the fact that the metaphor of 'taste' is 'so general in all tongues' indicates a 'great conformity between that mental taste, which is the subject of this paper, and that sensitive taste which gives us a relish of every different flavour that affects the palate'. 4 He defines mental taste as 'that faculty of the mind, which distinguishes all the most concealed faults and nicest perfections in writing' (Essays from the Spectator, p. 172), thus stressing from the outset that taste is a distinguishing faculty primarily concerned with writing and only figuratively related to sensory stimuli. Indeed, Addison begins by favourably quoting Gratian's recommendation of'fine taste' as 'the utmost perfection of an accomplished man' - thus spelling out the relationship between aesthetic discrimination and social distinction. The test of whether a person has taste or not is very simple: a reader has taste if he or she responds in the proper way to 'the celebrated authors of antiquity,

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which have stood the test of so many different ages and countries; or those works among the Moderns, which have the sanction of the politer part of our contemporaries' {Essays from the Spectator, p. 173). Thus the standard of taste is set by 'the politer part' of early eighteenth-century society and serves both to distinguish those who have taste from those who do not, and to differentiate 'great' from 'ordinary' writers. This is all par for the course. The crucial question is how people come to be 'possessed of this faculty', and here the politics of Addison's theory of taste becomes confused, since its acquisition is attributed both to nature and to nurture. Echoing the Renaissance discussion of decorum, Addison stresses that Tt is very difficult to lay down rules for the acquirement of such a taste as that I am here speaking of. The faculty must in some degree be born with us.' At the same time, however, Addison concedes that 'there are several methods for cultivating and improving' taste. These methods are at once 'natural' and made available through polite education and society (indeed, 'Mr Spectator' - Addison's and Steel's persona embodies the ideal in this respect): 'The most natural method for this purpose is to be conversant among the writings of the most polite authors' {Essays from the Spectator, p. 173). Avoiding the problems Burke gets into by claiming that familiarity breeds contempt, Addison claims that 'A man who has any relish for fine writing, either discovers new beauties, or receives stronger impressions from the masterly strokes of a great author every time he peruses him: besides that he naturally wears himself into the same manner of speaking and thinking.' In addition to this, the aspirant to taste ought to engage in 'Conversation with men of a polite genius' and be 'well versed in the works of the best critics'. The distinguishing mark of such critics is that they discuss not only 'the mechanical rules' (or the art) but also 'enter into the very spirit and soul of fine writing'. Such critics are rare: few besides Longinus have considered that 'more essential' (i.e., natural) aspect of writing which 'elevates and astonishes the fancy, and gives a greatness of mind to the reader' (Addison, Essays from the Spectator, p. 174). Thus taste is a 'faculty' which only some people are born with and which can only be improved and cultivated through properly directed effort within a particular social and cultural milieu. Through such a process (which is said to be natural), the reader learns to distinguish great literature and achieves cultural and social distinction.

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Burke's introduction of the notion of'taste' into the second edition of his Enquiry is both similar to and significantly different from the introduction of 'decorum' into the cultural politics of the Renaissance. Although Burke rhetorically mourns the passing of the age of chivalry in the Reflections, the Enquiry participates in a quite different political context than Puttenham's manual for poets. A society organized around the sublime would be a meritocracy (in which individuals might achieve eminence through self-effort) rather than an aristocracy (in which eminence is inherited, without effort or merit, through birth). Burke's aesthetic theory seeks to throw off the trammels of custom through which political and social hegemony had been traditionally maintained; it places authority in the immediate, sensory experience of the individual rather than in tradition; it promotes the notion of a universal human nature grounded in uniform physiological response; and it bases aesthetic experience not in refined activity but in the experience of pain and labour. It thus implies that the individual can 'make himself rather than relying on accidents of birth, and functions as an aesthetic correlative of the work ethic.5 In these ways, the sublime is open to all in a way which potentially cuts across social strata and leaves avenues for the rise of what Burke later refers to as the 'men of ability without property' — a category which Burke himself epitomized. Yet one of the disconcerting aspects of Burke's formulation of the sublime - which becomes even more troubling with the advent of the French Revolution — is that the very way it is constituted makes it a cultural and political vehicle perhaps more available to the 'mob' than to the upwardly mobile, opening up aesthetic experience to an extent which leaves no possibility of discriminating between different experiences, tastes, or people. This is especially paradoxical for an aesthetic category which is constituted as a mode of distinction - of the elevation of the individual in relation to nature, to past texts, or to other human beings. Thus Burke needs to be able to show how the sublime is at once available to all (through a notion of 'common nature') and yet also the means of establishing 'natural' hierarchical relations between human beings. This precarious project can therefore be read as an aesthetic correlative of the need in the eighteenth century to make social stratification appear both natural and flexible enough to allow the meritorious to achieve eminence. Burke's revisions of the Enquiry for the edition of 1759 seem attentive to these strains and contradictions. In the 'Introduction on

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Taste' Burke insists, perhaps even more than in the body of the text, on the commonality of human faculties as the basis of aesthetic experience and taste. If we once suffered ourselves to doubt — as Hume had seemed to in his essay 'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757) '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' (Enquiry, p. 13). But while Burke shuns such anarchic scepticism by insisting that all human beings share a uniform physiology, I want to trace the way he simultaneously develops a rhetorical mechanism which will allow cultural and social differences to be generated in what looks like a natural fashion. In his own terms, while stressing the priority of nature before second nature (since second nature threatens to impair nature), Burke is nonetheless compelled to have recourse to second nature in order to institute 'natural' cultural and social distinctions. Boulton comments that there is no obvious reason why the 'Essay on Taste' was delayed until the Enquiry's second edition, but suggests that it might have been 'initially provoked by the publication of Hume's Dissertation on Taste which, in January 1757, came too late for Burke to incorporate a response in his first edition' (Boulton, p. x). The new opening paragraphs of the Enquiry allude in several places to Hume's essay and reply to what Burke takes to be Hume's scepticism. Although people seem to differ in their reasonings and pleasures, Burke wants to argue that there are common principles underlying this apparent diversity: 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 ofjudgment 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. (Enquiry, p. n ) These opening sentences of the Enquiry suggest that there is more at stake here than the need to quibble with Hume over a detail of aesthetic theory. For Burke, aesthetics is not aloof from society but crucial to maintaining the social fabric. If there were no common standards of taste or reason, society would break down: no 'hold could . . . be taken' on the reason and passions of human beings, society could not hold or be held together, and no 'correspondence' (in any sense) could be maintained. Thus, Burke's figuration of the philosopher as a legislator is revealing:

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if Taste has nofixedprinciples, if the imagination is not affected according to some invariable and certain laws, our labour is like to be employed to very little purpose; as it must be judged an useless, if not an absurd undertaking, to lay down rules for caprice, and to set up for a legislator of whims and fancies. [Enquiry, p. 12) One of the problems Burke faces is that although, like Locke and Hume, he wants to give priority to experience rather than received authority, and to proceed by induction rather than deduction, a discourse about such a process risks obscuring its findings in a mass of detail. To begin with definitions, on the other hand, is to achieve clarity at the cost of limiting the subject from the outset: The term Taste, like all other figurative terms, is not extremely 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 . . . instead of extending our ideas to take in all that nature comprehends . . . We are limited in our enquiry by the strict laws to which we have submitted at our setting out. [Enquiry, p. 12) Although Burke is now talking about the 'laws' which govern the conduct of an enquiry, this distrust of laws as confining human experience needs to be set alongside the need expressed in the previous paragraph to be able to establish fixed laws. This oscillation can be seen as a micro-drama of the aesthetic and political problems the Enquiry is grappling with: how is it possible to write a clear, rational enquiry about an aesthetic experience which, by definition, escapes from or exceeds definition?6 To what extent, and with what consequences, can a rational enquiry about an aesthetic which is supposed to extend our ideas 'to take in all that nature comprehends' become itself an example of such an aesthetic?7 If any discussion of taste is 'liable to uncertainty and confusion' precisely because the term is metaphorical, how far is it possible or desirable to have recourse to definition, since although it is 'the celebrated remedy for the cure of this disorder', it is also a limitation on the discourse?8 And how far is such a remedy crucial in curing or preventing the social 'disorder' which would result if there were no standard of taste?9 Acting out rather than resolving these dilemmas, Burke terminates his comments about the constraints of a definition (which 'in the order of things, . . . seems rather to follow than to precede our

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enquiry, of which it ought to be considered as the result' (Enquiry, p. 12)), with a definition: '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 judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts' (Enquiry , p. 13). In order to prevent the disorder which he imagines would result from Hume's theory of taste, and despite recognizing that taste is a problematic metaphor for that faculty which is concerned with the works of imagination and the elegant arts, Burke seeks for a common standard of taste in the conformity of sensory perception in human beings: 'We do and we must suppose, that as the conformation 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' (Enquiry, p. 13). The examples Burke chooses to support this claim directly allude to a passage in Hume's essay which appears to say the opposite. Adopting Locke's argument that a sensory perception does not represent the essential substance of an object but only, as Hume puts it, 'marks a certain conformity or relation between the object and the organs or faculties of the mind which contemplates them', Hume presents a very un-Lockean conclusion: One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty . . . To seek the real beauty, or real deformity, is as fruitless an enquiry, as to pretend to ascertain the real sweet or real bitter. According to the disposition of the organs, the same object may be both sweet and bitter; and the proverb has justly determined it to be fruitless to dispute concerning tastes. It is very natural, and even quite necessary, to extend this axiom to mental, as well as bodily taste . . . (Essays, p. 230) Apparently in response to this, Burke asserts that 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 and 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. (Enquiry, p. 13)

In looking for a common standard of taste in physiological sensation, Burke may well have been, as Boulton suggests, 'the first writer on aesthetics to adopt such an uncompromising sensationist standpoint' (p. xii), but I want to suggest that he arrives at this through

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misreading Hume, and that he misreads Hume in order to engage with ideological problems which are internal to his own aesthetics. Hume makes it clear, in fact, that he is only rehearsing the sceptical argument as ca species of philosophy, which . . . represents the impossibility of ever attaining any standard of taste' (Essays, p. 229). Hume's 'Of the Standard of Taste' is written precisely in order to establish & standard of taste, and the way it achieves this is not substantially different from Burke's in the Enquiry. If anyone claimed to prefer John Ogilby above Milton, or Bunyan above Addison, we would not scruple, Hume asserts, to declare such a judgment 'absurd and ridiculous'. This inevitable response to such 'a palpable absurdity' indicates that 'The principle of the natural equality of tastes is then totally forgot' (Essays, p. 231). Far from endorsing it, then, Hume dismisses with contempt the sceptical doctrine that all tastes are right, and therefore equal. A democracy of tastes is rejected in favour of a cultural meritocracy composed of those authors whose greatness transcends historical and cultural change together with those critics who have agreed in recognizing their greatness despite the fluctuations of fashion. From this, Hume derives a conclusion which flatly rejects the sceptical position rehearsed earlier and almost runs parallel to Burke's argument in the first edition of the Enquiry published in the same year: It appears then, that, amidst all the variety and caprice of taste, there are certain general principles of approbation or blame, whose influence a careful eye may trace in all operations of the mind. Some particular forms or qualities, from the original structure of the internal fabric, are calculated to please, and others to displease; and if they fail of their effect in any particular instance, it is from some apparent defect or imperfection in the organ ... In each creature, there is a sound and a defective state; and the former alone can be supposed to afford us a true standard of taste and sentiment. (Essays, pp. 233-4) The basis of good taste, then, is a soundness in the organs of perception. If these organs are 'fine' and 'exact', we call this 'delicacy of taste, whether we employ these terms in the literal or metaphorical sense' (Essays, p. 235). But Hume does not scruple to insist that other qualifications are also necessary which can only be acquired through a polite education: though the principles of taste be universal, and nearly, if not entirely the same in all men; yet few are qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty . . . Strong sense,

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united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to be found, is the true standard of taste and beauty. (Essays, p. 241)

Thus, the standard of taste is set by the conformity of those critics who combine a healthy and acute sensibility with a liberal eighteenth-century education. Ultimately, the locus of taste is identified as the cultural elite of contemporary London (Essays, pp. 246—9). Burke is not so willing as Hume to admit this, since it runs counter to an aspect of the ideological and theoretical mythology he is trying to create.10 In place of what he takes to be, or represent as, Hume's anarchic egalitarianism in matters of taste, Burke strives to establish a basis for taste which will appear egalitarian yet allow a standard to be instituted. Burke therefore argues that the organic responses of human beings are uniform, and that they can never be alienated from this natural ground of taste. Taking the metaphor of 'taste' literally (thus naturalizing a cultural acquirement), Burke discusses the phenomenon that people can acquire a taste for some substances which they found repugnant at first. But even though 'custom, and some other causes, have made many deviations from the natural pleasures or pains which belong to these several Tastes . . . the power of distinguishing between the natural and the acquired relish remains to the very last' (Enquiry, p. 14). (We call anyone who loses this power of discrimination not wrong, says Burke, but 'absolutely mad' (Enquiry, p. 14).) This unerasable memory of the natural causes of pleasure and pain forms a 'standard' against which all feelings and opinions may be regulated, and allows Burke to claim that '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' (Enquiry, p. 16). Burke resists what he understands as Hume's scepticism about taste by returning to Locke's model of the different processes of the human mind. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke

suggests that human knowledge is made up of 'simple ideas' derived either from sensory impressions or from the mind's reflections upon its own internal operations (see Book 11, chapter i). These 'simple ideas' are processed by various mental faculties, the most basic of which are perception, retention, discerning, comparing, compounding, naming, and abstraction (see Book 11, chapters ix-xi). These are some of the operations which go into the active production

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of'complex ideas': 'when it has once got these simple Ideas, it is not confined barely to Observation, and what offers it self from without; it can, by its own power, put together those Ideas it has, and make new complex ones, which it never received so united' (Book 11, chapter xii, p. 164). For Burke, taste is composed of a complex of different faculties which derive from Locke's account of human understanding. Sensory experience forms the first element of taste and is supposed to be common to all. The second element, the imagination, is limited, as it is in Locke, to recombining and imitating those same sensory impressions: Besides the ideas, with their annexed pains and pleasures, which are presented by the sense; the mind of man possesses a sort of creative power of its own; either in representing 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. [Enquiry, p. 16) The processes and pleasures of the imagination are equally common to all in the same way as those of sensory impressions: since the imagination is only the representative 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. [Enquiry, p. 17)

An additional pleasure of the imagination arises 'from the resemblance, which the imitation has to the original', and both these functions of the imagination 'operate pretty uniformly upon all men, because they operate by principles in nature, and . . . are not derived from any particular habits or advantages' [Enquiry, pp. 16—17) At the end of Chapter 2 I suggested that Burke appended his essay on taste to the second edition of the Enquiry in order to limit the apparently egalitarian description of the sublime developed in the bulk of the text. Yet, thus far, Burke's theory of taste makes it as openly available as the sublime experience itself. We ought therefore to expect Burke to follow Addison and Hume by describing the third component of taste in such a way that it limits the full attainment of taste to a 'cultured' section of the upper and middle class. But at this point in the argument, Burke introduces a source of differences in taste which he claims is actually no difference at all:

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Now as the pleasure of resemblance is that which principally flatters the imagination, all men are nearly equal in this point, as far as their knowledge of the things represented or compared extends. The principle of this knowledge 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. [Enquiry, p. 18) Burke seeks to support this position by limiting art to the imitation of nature; the knowledge he is talking about here is not a knowledge of art but a knowledge of the natural objects it supposedly imitates. Thus taste, at this stage, is confined to tracing resemblances between art and nature rather than seeking for differences between works of art. The logic of this position leads Burke to suggest that there is no fundamental difference between Virgil and a popular adventure story (and we have seen what Hume's response to this would be): 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 different 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 Bellianis perhaps does not understand the refined language of the Eneid, who if it was degraded into the stile of the Pilgrim's Progress, might feel it in all its energy, on the same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis. (Enquiry, p. 20-1)

This allows Burke to claim that 'So far as Taste belongs to the imagination, its principle is the same in all men' (Enquiry, p. 21) At this point, then, Burke seems unable or unwilling to discriminate between cultural products or to distinguish between different kinds of readers (either in terms of class, education, or age). What distinguishes people is said to be 'accidental' and no real distinction at all, whereas what unites them is presented as fundamental. Burke seems committed to the universal, egalitarian aspect of his aesthetics to the extent that it avoids discrimination by birth and holds open the possibility for individuals to participate in what Addison calls 'the Commonwealth of Letters'.11 Yet without something which functions like the 'decorum' of the social order he seeks to transform, Burke relinquishes the possibility of discriminating the response of the learned from that of'the vulgar', verges on defining all literary

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works as adventure stories, and risks making human instincts the standard of aesthetic experience and of the social distinctions it underpins. Such a position would be as unthinkable for the bourgeois ethos as it was for aristocratic thought. Thus the egalitarian impetus of the sublime has to be limited in some way, otherwise there is no way of preventing the exaltation of those classes of people completely untrammelled by custom and rationality. I would like to suggest that Burke's dilemma here exemplifies a larger problem which eighteenth-century liberal thought encountered in its attempt to develop an aesthetics which would make its own particular ethos appear universal. Addison precedes Burke in making serious comparisons between popular literature and the poetry of the ancients. In the Spectator papers of 21 and 25 May 1711 (70 and 74) he attempts to show that the sentiments in ['Chevy Chase'] are extremely natural and poetical, and full of the majestic simplicity which we admire in the greatest of the ancient poets: for which reason I shall quote several passages of it, in which the thought is altogether the same with what we meet in several passages of the Aeneid; not that I would infer from thence, that the poet (whoever he was) proposed to himself any imitation of those passages, but that he was directed to them in general by the same kind of poetical genius, and by the same copyings after nature. (Essays from the Spectator, p. 41) Addison's theoretical basis for such a claim is similar to Burke's: 'Human nature is the same in all reasonable creatures' (Addison, p. 36). This allows him to claim that 'Homer, Virgil or Milton, so far as the language of their poems is understood, will please a reader of plain common sense', and that an ordinary song or ballad that is the delight of the common people, cannot fail to please all such readers as are not unqualified for the entertainment by their affectation or ignorance; and the reason is plain, because the same paintings of nature which recommend it to the most ordinary reader, will appear beautiful to the most refined. (Essays from the Spectator, p. 36) In fact, Addison is attempting to distinguish two kinds of taste (and hence of reader) according to whether they are natural or artificial: I know nothing which more shows the essential and inherent perfection of simplicity of thought, above that which I call the Gothic manner of writing, than this, that the first pleases all kinds of palates, and the latter only such

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as have formed to themselves a wrong artificial taste, upon little fanciful authors and writers of epigram. {Essays from the Spectator, p. 36) There is a politics to this distinction between tastes which is brought out most explicitly in Addison's attempt, earlier in the same month, to distinguish between true and false wit. In the paper of 11 May, Addison differentiates between the 'natural way of writing' and the false wit of those writers which he labels the 'Goths in poetry' (Addison, Essays from the Spectator, p. 19). The taste of most English writers and readers, he laments, 'is extremely Gothic', and supports this by quoting from Dryden (who alludes to Jean Regnauld de Segrais's dissertation on Virgil prefixed to his translation of the Aeneid and the Georgics): Segrais has distinguished the readers of poetry, according to their capacity ofjudging, into three classes . . . In the lowest form he places those whom he calls les petits esprits, such things as are our upper-gallery audience in a playhouse; who like nothing but the husk and rind of wit, prefer a quibble, a conceit, an epigram, before solid sense and elegant expression: these are mob-readers. If Virgil and Martial stood for Parliament-men, we know already who would carry it. But . . . they . . . have not lands of two pounds per annum in Parnassus, and therefore are not privileged to poll, (quoted by Addison, Essays from the Spectator, p. 20)

If, as Donald F. Bond has it, Addison sought to bring 'the reasonable discussion of literature within the range of the ordinary middle-class reader', and if this project participates within the neo-classical movement's 'reformation toward a poetry which is . . . universal in appeal' (Bond, Introduction, Essays from the Spectator, pp. xi and xvi), the definitions of the reasonable, the universal, and the natural are nevertheless sustained through exclusions which are at once aesthetic and political. The majority of readers are consigned to the third class as 'mob-readers', excluded from the commonwealth of letters by their inability to judge, and disenfranchised by their demonstrable lack of natural taste. In the 'Essay on Taste', Burke strives to make distinctions between human beings and their aesthetic responses without seeming to introduce fundamental differences, since he wants to maintain the principle that aesthetic experience, and hence individual development, is especially open to those uncorrupted by aristocratic culture. He is therefore led to argue that, although there are no differences in kind between people, there are differences in 'degree' which arise

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'from two causes principally; either from a greater degree of natural sensibility, or from a closer and longer attention to the object' (Enquiry, p. 21). That 'natural sensibility' might vary seems to compromise Burke's egalitarian claim that aesthetic experience is equally open to all. But his second 'cause' of differences between human beings is even more revealing. He goes on to say that in 'nice cases', where distinctions need to be finely discriminated, 'supposing the acuteness of the sense equal, the greater attention and habit in such things will have the advantage' (Enquiry, p. 22). This is so because 'Taste' (and here Burke partially abandons the link with sensory taste which enabled him to ground all distinctions in common nature) is a composite faculty 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' (Enquiry, p. 23). The conclusions of the reasoning faculty are arrived at through judgment, and there are no disagreements about taste, Burke claims, 'until we come to examine into the preeminence or difference of things, which brings us within the province of the judgment' (Enquiry, p. 22). Burke's understanding of judgment and its difference from the imagination, is derived from Locke. The discerning faculty operates, Locke claims, to 'distinguish one thing from another, where there is but the least difference', and in this 'consists, in a great measure, the exactness ofJudgment, and clearness of Reason, which is observed in one Man above another'. This distinguishing process is quite different from the imagination's search for similarities: And hence, perhaps, may be given some Reason of that common Observation, That Men who have a great deal of Wit, and prompt Memories, have not always the clearest Judgment, or deepest Reason. For Wit lying most in the assemblage of Ideas, and putting those together with quickness and variety, wherein can be found any resemblance or congruity, thereby to make up pleasant Pictures, and agreeable Visions in the Fancy: Judgment, on the contrary, lies quite on the other side, in separating carefully, one from another, Ideas, wherein can be found the least difference, thereby to avoid being misled by Similitude . . . This is a way of proceeding quite contrary to Metaphor and Allusion, wherein, for the most part, lies that entertainment and pleasantry of Wit, which strikes so lively on the Fancy, and therefore so acceptable to all People; because its Beauty appears at first sight, and there is required no labour of thought, to examine what Truth or Reason there is in it. (Essay, Book 11, chapter xi, P- 156)

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In this distinction between the imagination as a synthesizing activity and the analytic processes of reason or judgment, Locke is not only opposing creativity and criticism but also enabling Burke to make an important distinction between two facets of his conception of taste. Although both operations, as Burke points out, 'seem to result from different operations of the same faculty of comparing', Burke also suggests that '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' (Enquiry, p. 17). Burke goes on to claim that 'all men are nearly equal' in taking pleasure in making or perceiving resemblances and that 'The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences.' This enables Burke to account for the commonly-made observation that 'the most ignorant and barbarous nations have frequently excelled in similitudes, comparisons, metaphors, and allegories, who have been weak and backward in distinguishing and sorting their ideas' (Enquiry, p. 18). Virtually everyone takes pleasure in this imaginative process because, Locke and Burke suggest, it is easy. By contrast, the 'more severe and irksome' (Burke, Enquiry, p. 18) process of searching for differences involves what Locke calls a 'labour of thought'. It is precisely this mental labour of judgment which distinguishes the man of taste from mob-readers.12 And as Burke's comments indicate, it is also that faculty which differentiates between Georgian England's self-image and 'the most ignorant and barbarous nations'. This leads Burke to qualify his 'levelling' description of literary texts as mimetic representations of objects and impassioned action: as many of the works of imagination are not confined to the representation of sensible objects, nor to efforts upon the passions, but extend 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 improved by attention and by the habit of reasoning. (Enquiry, pp. 22-3). In fact, Burke goes on to assert that the acquired skills of judgment make up the most important part of taste because they attend to the most characteristic aspects of cultural texts: All these make a very considerable part of what are considered as the objects of Taste . . . Indeed it is for the most part in our skill in manners, and in the observances of time and place, and of decency in general, which is

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only to be learned in those schools to which Horace recommends us that what is called Taste by way of distinction, consists; and which is in reality no other than a more refined judgment. {Enquiry, p. 23)I3

Although the 'ground-work of Taste' may be common to all, then, the principal activity and function of taste — that of discriminative judgment - has to be learned. In fact, Burke moves from this to a statement which echoes Hume and seems to undo the whole aesthetic system he has constructed: 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. {Enquiry, pp. 23-4)

Thus habitual familiarity with aesthetic objects and products, together with knowledge and 'the reasoning faculty', comprise an element of taste which can be used to account for differences in aesthetic response. The difference this makes is all-important, not only for Burke's ideological project, but also because of the ways it complicates that project. Burke is now able to stress the importance of actually exercising the judgment in developing taste: 'The cause of a wrong Taste is a defect of judgment. And this may arise from a natural weakness of understanding . . . or, which is much more commonly the case, it may arise from a want of proper and welldirected exercise, which alone can make it strong and ready' {Enquiry, p. 24). Although this makes taste acquirable by effort rather than being a gift of birth,14 the facilities for such 'exercise' — made available in a 'liberal' education - are not common to all in the eighteenth century in the way that the nervous system obviously is. At the same time, however, and this is a measure of the contradictions of the ideology Burke is fashioning, the exercise which develops proper taste is precisely that which threatens to render the observer insensitive to sensory stimuli and incapable of imaginative activity. For if the judgment 'is improved by . . . the habit of reasoning' {Enquiry, p. 23), Burke repeatedly insists in the Enquiry as a whole that judgment, habit, and reason are actually antithetical to the experience of the sublime and the beautiful. The 'Introduction on Taste' admits as much:

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it frequently happens that a very poor judge, merely by force of a greater complexional sensibility, is more affected by a very poor piece, than the best judge by the most perfect; for as every thing 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 . . . the judgment [on the other hand] 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 . . . {Enquiry, p. 25) Thus the contradictory demands of Burke's treatise have brought him to an impasse in which the man ofjudgment is left experiencing an impoverished parody of the sublime sense of pride and superiority. No longer able to respond to the 'new, extraordinary, grand, or passionate', the seasoned judge is tied down 'to the disagreeable yoke of our reason'. The aesthetic experience Burke celebrates turns out to be incompatible with the notion of taste it compels him to develop. In this way, the exercise needed to acquire proper taste seems precisely to exclude the man of taste from the exercise induced by the sublime. Indeed, the kinship which Burke sought to identify between popular literature and the Aeneid now becomes impossible for the man ofjudgment to recognize. Thus, a social and cultural gulf opens up between the judge or legislator and his 'inferiors', since the former is utterly unable to share in or sympathize with the tastes and passions of the latter. The tension in Burke's text is indicated by a final twist in the argument which seems to undermine the 'egalitarian' groundwork he is at such pains to lay down at the outset of the 'Essay on Taste' and throughout the Enquiry. So far as the imagination and the passions are concerned, I believe it true, that the reason is little consulted; but where disposition, where decorum, where congruity are concerned, in short wherever the best Taste differs from the worst, I am convinced that the understanding operates and nothing else . . . [Enquiry, p. 26) Burke's notion of 'Taste' therefore functions as a necessary but troublesome supplement. Brought in as a standard with which to regulate a new set of social and cultural distinctions, it yet needs to appear different from the 'artificial' or 'arbitrary' measures employed in aristocratic societies. While it actually functions to

The political economy of taste reproduce a culturally determined meritocracy, taste is represented as a natural acquirement open to all willing to work for it. The difference between this kind of work and productive labour must therefore appear to be one of degree rather than kind. We have seen that the sublime is presented as being generated through a kind of labour which has at least a metaphorical relation to manual labour. Yet the labour involved in exercising taste seems to isolate the man of taste from the energizing and aggrandizing effects of the sublime. As the melancholy aspect of Burke's reflections at the end of the 'Essay on Taste' seems to indicate, 'taste', brought in to legislate the sublime to make sure that it functions in the way Burke wishes, renders the sublime unavailable to the 'best judges'. The irreducible contradiction of the Enquiry is acted out most acutely in the way it nurtures the myth of an uncorrupted childhood in which the senses were vitally alive to nature and the arts: In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every 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 judgement regards as trifling and contemptible. (Enquiry, p. 25) As Ferguson puts it, this elegiac passage suggests that 'Knowledge is purchased only by the loss of power and the loss of sublimity' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 72). This is not merely a personal sense of loss, but characteristic of a particular period, class, or nation: The most powerful effects of poetry and music have been displayed, 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 compositon. (Enquiry, pp. 25-6) These passages, which prefigure Smith's ambivalence towards the 'barbarism' of the past, underline the perplexity of a class attempting to constitute an aesthetic for itself which is distinguished at one and the same time from the polished artifice of the court and the 'rude' vigour of the child, the savage, or the lower orders. Wishing to

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retain 'natural sensibility', bourgeois thought nevertheless perceives its dangers and limitations; irrevocably committed to its own socalled 'natural' arts and critical skills, its nostalgia indicates that these arts and skills might impair precisely what it yearns for (but also fears) in the 'natural' state. 'Taste' therefore works to supplement the acute sensibility experienced by the 'rude' in the 'state of nature': it supplies the judgment and discrimination which they lack (which makes them dangerous), and yet it supplants those 'natural' qualities which make them enviable. This is not simply a logical tangle which Burke inadvertently gets himself into and from which he might easily extricate himself. Instead, I have suggested that it is an ideological problem which is endemic to the process of the making of the middle class throughout the eighteenth century. As we have seen, such ambivalences can be found in the texts of the most influential apologists for the embryonic capitalist system. Especially disturbing for bourgeois thought is the hint, which the Enquiry barely gives, that the lifestyle and the work patterns of the manufacturing classes might precisely unfit them for both the sublime experience and the cultivation of taste: 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 continuously in the agitation of gross and merely sensual pleasures, or so occupied in the low drudgery of avarice, or so heated in the chace of honours and distinction, that their minds," which had been used continuously to the storms of these violent and tempestuous passions, can hardly be put in motion by the delicate and refined play of the imagination. These men, though from a different cause, become as stupid and insensible as the former . . . (Enquiry, p. 24)

In this way, the 'chace' for 'distinction' or the 'low drudgery of avarice' (which can be thought of as the reduced counterparts of the Burkean sublime), or the over-indulgence in luxury (which may be seen as an 'unrefined' version of the beautiful), seem to blunt the capacity for experiencing the subtleties of aesthetic pleasure. The habits which result from an unremitting pursuit of the bourgeois ethic in its most worldly form become like second nature to bourgeois subjects, making them 'as stupid and insensible' as those whose feelings have been made 'blunt' by nature itself.

CHAPTER 4

The labour and profit of language

We have seen that standard accounts of the sublime in the eighteenth century suggest that it undergoes a significant transition — culminating in Burke's Enquiry - from rhetorical technique to psychological response in face of natural phenomena. We have also seen, however, that what is presented in Burke as an immediate response to nature in the raw turns out to involve a strategy which may be described as rhetorical. Given this continued, if covert, relation between the sublime and rhetoric, and given the fact that so much of the Revolution Controversy turns around issues of language, the present chapter devotes specific attention to the last section of the Enquiry which concentrates on language as a source of aesthetic affect. This discussion will pave the way for a subsequent analysis of the rhetorical strategies in the Reflections and of Burke's 'rage' against radical rhetoric. My argument about the Enquiry has been built upon a reading of the physiological, and therefore ideological, theory which governs the observations Burke makes about particular aesthetic instances and which he is so tenacious in defending against his critics. This theory argues that aesthetic affect is triggered by natural phenomena in one of two ways: either by generating psychological experiences (terror, love) which have corresponding effects on the body, or by inducing physical experiences (pain, pleasure) which affect the mind. Such processes are given authenticity through reference to Burke's observations about his own sensations and through the assumption that human responses are uniform. This empirical, experiential basis is central to the requirements of Burke's ideological project, but we have seen that it also needs to be framed by the supplementary notion of taste. Taste is articulated in a way which makes it appear to conform to the general aesthetic theory, yet it also supplements the theory by giving the last word to a 89

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faculty or intellectual mode — rational judgment — which, by definition, is neither uniform throughout a society nor compatible with the aesthetic experiences it is brought in to regulate. A second problem about the essay on taste is that the mechanism it develops for discriminating between people ultimately rests upon distinguishing between literary texts rather than responses to natural phenomena. Yet much of the essay disables itself from making this distinction by maintaining that there is no difference between, say, the Aeneid and popular literature in that both are basically adventure stories. The democratization of taste is thus bound up with the notion that literature is a representational medium. Yet Burke seeks to limit this democratic trend, while still holding to a mimetic theory, by arguing that 'many of the works of imagination are not confined to the representation of sensible objects, nor to efforts upon the passions, but extend themselves to the manners, the characters, the actions, and designs of men, their relations, their virtues and vices'. This enables him to claim that readers' responses to these aspects of texts can only be guided by, and developed through, judicious experience of culture and society. But although this allows judges to discriminate between texts and between readers, Burke's theory of literature, at this point, evades the possibility that there might be any difference between literature and reality or between reading texts and our sensory responses to the phenomenal world. Nor is there any explicit recognition that the Enquiry may be read as suggesting that perception itself might be organized in a rhetorical way rather than being an unmediated engagement with reality. To endorse the latter view, Burke invokes the authority of Locke (which is 'doubtless as great, as that of any man can be' [Enquiry, p. 143)) in asserting that 'the senses are the great originals of all our ideas' (Enquiry, p. 123).

These issues draw attention to the fact that the bulk of the Enquiry makes a large number of references to literary texts in order to substantiate arguments about physiological responses to nature. In noting how much the Enquiry relies on ordinary language and literature as evidence, Ferguson feels that 'It would . . . be rather churlish to observe that Burke's empiricism is undone by its dependence upon language . . . for the Enquiry has itself preceded us in this gesture' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 67). Yet the Enquiry does not (cannot) acknowledge the implications of this dependence because so much rests on the physiological basis of its aesthetic

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theory. It is important to register the contradictions of this text, which the text itself does not recognize or resolve, since they point to contradictions within the larger cultural and political formations we are examining. The use of quotation to give authority to an argument was, of course, de rigueur in the eighteenth century, though Burke represents himself as breaking out of the hermetic circle which this could result in: 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. {Enquiry, p. 54) Burke escapes such constraints, he would have us believe, by reinstating natural phenomena as the 'model' for literary texts and because the poets he chooses to illustrate his arguments are those who imitate nature rather than art. This claim is made possible because language itself offers faithful insights into the workings of nature and human physiology: several languages 'bear a strong testimony' to the links between terror and the sublime (Enquiry, p. 58), and 'most languages' demonstrate the natural affinity between smallness and love by the fact that 'the objects of love are spoken of under diminutive epithets' (Enquiry, p. 113). In the course of his argument, therefore, texts become evidence of 'natural' effects, and Burke modulates without apology between 'real' and literary examples. Milton's 'description of Death' in Book II of Paradise Lost is offered as a clinching illustration of the fact that 'in nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear and determinate' (Enquiry, p. 62). Burke's comments on the Milton passage indicate that the best poetry accurately reproduces natural effects in a way analogous to painting: 'it is astonishing 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' (Enquiry, p. 59). Burke develops a theory of art which combines mimetic and affective assumptions.1 Art works by imitating objects or actions and by arousing sympathy with the fortunes of the characters it depicts. Sympathy, Burke suggests, is an imaginative identification with

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another person's emotions which has a socializing function: it 'must be considered as a sort of substitution, by which we are put in the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected'. This may produce either sublime or beautiful affect according to the nature of the passions involved. The depiction of passion in art generates similar responses for the same reasons: 'It is by this principle chiefly that poetry, painting, and other affecting arts, transfer their passions from one breast to another.' Such assumptions lead Burke to criticize the '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' {Enquiry, p. 14). Burke argues instead that we glean a similar delight from both the reality and the dramatization of 'the feelings of our fellow creatures in circumstances of real distress'. This is supported, curiously enough, through claims about our responses to different kinds of texts: 'we . . . read the authentic histories of scenes of this nature with as much pleasure as romances or poems', and thus the ruin of empires 'touches us in history' as much as 'in fable' {Enquiry, p. 45). At this point in the argument, then, Burke maintains that texts affect us in ways which are indistinguishable from the impact of real events: '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' {Enquiry, p. 46).2 Yet Burke also embarks on a speculative account of imitation which suggests that there might not be a one-to-one translatability between imitation and imitated after all. Imitation can add its own peculiar effects to the reality being imitated: 'In imitated distresses the only difference [from 'real calamities'] is the pleasure resulting from the effects of imitation; for it is never so perfect, but we can perceive it is an imitation, and on that principle are somewhat pleased with it.' But Burke oscillates about the relative degrees and sources of pleasure involved here. On the one hand, he suggests that 'in some cases we derive as much or more pleasure from that source [i.e., our perception that it is an imitation] than from the thing itself; thus an imitation can produce a surplus of aesthetic pleasure through our recognition that it is an imitation. But Burke takes back with the other hand what he gives with the first: 'But then I imagine we shall be much mistaken if we attribute any considerable part of our satisfaction in tragedy to a consideration that tragedy is a deceit,

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and its representations no realities.' The more we are aware of a text's fictionality, Burke insists, the less pleasure we derive from it. This is because he wants to retain the notion that the real is the primary source of aesthetic affect: 'The nearer [a dramatic text or performance] approaches the reality, and the further it removes us from all idea of fiction, the more perfect is its power.' Yet although this can be understood as saying 'the better the deceit, the greater the power', Burke either refuses to recognize this, or refuses to let it be recognized: 'But be its power of what kind it will, it never approaches to what it represents' (Enquiry, p. 47). Burke is preparing the ground here for what he expects will be a convincing example or experiment: Chuse a day on which to represent the most sublime and affecting tragedy we have; appoint the most favorite 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 adjoining 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. (Enquiry, p. 47)

Burke therefore reverses conventional claims that we can derive pleasure from representations of actions which we would be horrified to see in reality. Qualifying this, however, Burke feels it necessary 'to lay down a rule' which will enable us to tell whether our pleasure in a poem or painting arises from the event imitated or the imitation itself: 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. . . But when the object of the painting or poem is such as we should run to see if real . . . 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 . . . (Enquiry, pp. 49—50)

Burke's discussion of the arts, then, oscillates between regarding them as authentic insofar as they imitate nature and as inauthentic precisely because they imitate nature. In discussing magnitude in buildings, however, Burke suggests that deceit is the only way art can work at all: 'A true artist should put a generous deceit on the spectators, and effect the noblest designs by easy methods . . . No work of art can be great, but as it deceives; to be otherwise is the

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prerogative of nature only' (Enquiry, p. 76). True and good art, then, is a deceit, but a deceit guided by 'the noblest designs' (in both senses). This concession to the artifice of art is anchored, conventionally enough, in the assertion that nature is authentic, yet it arises out of the admission that in some cases the sublime in nature is also produced through a kind of deceit: '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' (Enquiry, p. 73). If, as Burke says, we are 'deceived' by such trompe-Vmil effects, we might therefore conclude that the similarity between art and nature is not that the former produces deceitful copies of the latter, but that both generate sublime effects through deception. In addition to this, it emerges that language, having been resorted to as reliable testimony, can also bear false witness: 'People are not liable to be mistaken in their feelings, but they are frequently wrong in the names they give them' (Enquiry, p. 32).3 Yet it is precisely the capacity of language to deceive which gives it its affective power and which allows Burke to have recourse to poetry in order to illustrate the so-called natural sublime (in discussing the beautiful, by contrast, Burke rarely uses textual examples). Having attempted to corral the linguistic arts with the imitative arts (the theatre, painting), Burke proceeds to separate them out as operating through quite different principles.The basis on which he does this — the contrasting effects of obscurity and clarity - forms one of the central theses of the Enquiry. 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. (Enquiry, p. 60) In fact, Burke likens rhetoric to music rather than painting: so far is a clearness of imagery from being absolutely necessary to an influence upon the passions, that they may be considerably operated upon

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without presenting any image at all, by certain sounds adapted to that purpose; of which we have a sufficient proof in the acknowledged and powerful effects of instrumental music. (Enquiry, p. 60) Although this is meant to substantiate the claim Burke is making about obscurity, it undermines the assertion that poetry is a mimetic medium. Even the best verbal descriptions can only convey imperfect and obscure ideas of objects and cannot help, therefore, but affect us in sublime ways by supplementing nature or its image. Even potentially sublime objects, then, achieve their full sublimity not in the 'reality' but through verbal description. Burke presents a similar argument in the section on 'Power', where objects are not so much sublime in themselves but become sublime according to how they are perceived or described.4 The horse, for example, can be seen in 'two distinct lights'; as a 'useful beast' it has 'nothing of the sublime; but it is thus that we are affected with him, whose neck is cloathed with thunder, the glory of whose nostrils is terrible, who swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage . . . I n this d e s c r i p t i o n t h e useful

character of the horse entirely disappears, and the terrible and sublime blaze out together' (Enquiry, pp. 65—6, misquoting Job 39: 19-24). The sublime effects of language, then, are not at all related to the use-value of that which is being described (or the use-value of the description). Thus we are tracing two diverging arguments about language and the linguistic arts in the Enquiry, the second of which intimates that the sublime is pre-eminently an effect of language and that this is so because the sounds of language have an arbitrary, nonmimetic relation to what they are supposed to represent. The tension in this text between language and (human) nature is therefore complicated by the way the text floats incompatible theories of language without explicitly attending to their opposition. Burke wavers between implying that language is mimetic and therefore not substantially different to the 'real' world in the way it affects the passions, and suggesting that language works and affects the passions precisely because it is non-mimetic. Burke's attempt to assimilate both models of language to the Enquiry's empirical, experiential theory (the effects and meanings of language can be verified through having individuals monitor their responses to a passage in order to compare them with the findings of other people who make the same experiment) resolves neither set of tensions.5 I want to suggest that there are political implications to this

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uncertainty about the exact relation of language to reality, imitation to imitated. Imitation, like sympathy, is a social passion for Burke as well as an aesthetic mechanism. While sympathy 'makes us take a concern in whatever men feel, so [imitation] prompts us to copy whatever they do'. Thus there is a 'pleasure in imitating' which 'forms our manners, our opinions, our lives. It is one of the strongest links of society; it is a species of mutual compliance which all men yield to each other, without constraint to themselves, and which is extremely flattering to all.' This pleasure, which is clearly related to Burke's notion of the beautiful, is also one of the principal foundations of the power exerted by 'painting and many other agreeable arts' (Enquiry, p. 49). These comments, however, betray a certain confusion between imitation in art and in society which bears upon Burke's cultural politics as a whole. Burke slides imperceptibly between saying that there is a pleasure in imitating nature, in imitating others, and in imitating the artistic products of others. This is a revealing confusion, since we have seen that Burke regards the pleasurable imitation of others as confining human beings to the level of brutes and as hampering social 'improvement'. The sublime impulse of ambition is the only means of extrication from this 'eternal circle' (Enquiry, p. 50). This figure anticipates that of the 'narrow . . . circle' in which poets have been confined through imitating each other rather than nature (Enquiry, p. 54), though Burke's discussion of ambition implies that these imitative cycles are broken with not through imitating nature but through the transport which, we will remember, 'always fills the reader of such passages in poets and orators as are sublime' (Enquiry, p. 51). The impasse of imitation is escaped, then, through creative reading - through engaging with passages in texts whose sublimity is witnessed precisely by the way they allow or compel readers to believe that they participate in the creative process which produces the text. THE ARBITRARY POWER OF LANGUAGE

The account of the aesthetic effects of language and poetry which Burke develops in Part V of the Enquiry is concerned not with the individual alone with nature but with cultural meanings in society. Burke begins his investigation of language by distinguishing between natural objects and words on the basis that they generate affect in quite different ways. Natural objects are said to affect the human

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subject through 'the laws of that connexion, which Providence has established between certain motions and configurations of bodies, and certain consequent feelings in our minds'. Thus there are natural and motivated laws which mean that certain kinds of objects will necessarily affect human beings in characteristic ways. Painting and architecture are said to derive part of their impact from the same cause. But words, Burke argues, 'affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects, or by painting or architecture'. This manner allows words to 'have as considerable a share in exciting ideas of beauty and of the sublime [as nature, painting, or architecture], and sometimes a much greater than any of them' {Enquiry, p. 163). Words derive their force not through natural, motivated, or providential connections with what they are supposed to refer to or signify but through habitual (i.e., cultural) associations. In mounting his argument, Burke has recourse to, but also modifies, the dominant theory of language in the eighteenth century - that developed in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding.

Locke argues, against seventeenth-century versions of Adamic linguistics,6 that words have no relation at all to the essences of things in the world and that they function through conventional, hence arbitrary, associations with our ideas (i.e., mental images or concepts). Language works through signification rather than reference, since words are used as the Signs of. . . Ideas; not by any natural connexion, that there is between particular articulate Sounds and certain Ideas, for then there would be but one Language amongst all Men; but by a voluntary Imposition, whereby such a Word is made arbitrarily the Mark of such an Idea. The use then of Words, is to be sensible Marks of Ideas; and the Ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate Signification. (Essay, p. 405)

Words, then, become meaningful through the conventional relationships they have with ideas independently of the world of things: 'Words in their primary or immediate Signification, stand for nothing, but the

Ideas in the Mind of him that uses them, how imperfectly soever, or carelessly those Ideas are collected from the Things, which they are supposed to represent' (Essay, p. 405). People often suppose that their words 'stand also for the reality of Things', but this occurs because 'there comes by constant use, to be such a Connexion between certain sounds,

and the Ideas they stand for, that the Names heard, almost as readily

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excite certain Ideas, as if the Objects themselves . . . did actually affect the Senses' {Essay, p. 407). Locke's discussion of the conventional nature of language is primarily concerned to alert his readers to the problems it can cause and to warn them not to take signs for things.7 Language is developed for the communication of ideas, but the arbitrary relation between words and ideas both facilitates and threatens communication. Book III of the Essay concludes with chapters on 'the Imperfection of Words' (pp. 475-90), on 'the Abuse of Words' (pp. 490-508), and on 'the Remedies of the foregoing Imperfections and Abuses' (pp. 509-24). In moral questions, in the law, in theology, the obscurity and ambiguity of words leads to endless wrangles, generating interpretations of interpretations, commentaries on commentaries. The very nature of language embroils the enquirer in doubt since, 'like the Medium through which visible Objects pass, their Obscurity and Disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our Eyes, and impose upon our Understandings' {Essay, p. 488). Human beings are fortunate, however, that God has written revealed truths in the book of nature, inscribing the precepts of natural religion (which are equivalent to those of natural philosophy) in a way which is intelligible to all. Problems arise not only through the inbuilt imperfection of language, but through the deliberate abuse of words. In order to maintain their sway, sects of philosophy and religion have introduced words which do not stand for any distinct idea and which 'remain empty Sounds, with little or no signification' {Essay, pp. 490-1). The art of rhetoric has actually 'added much to the natural imperfection of Languages', and the Schoolmen 'found this a good Expedient to cover their Ignorance, with a curious and unexplicable Web of perplexed Words, and procure to themselves the admiration of others, by unintelligible Terms, the apter to produce wonder, because they could not be understood' {Essay, p. 494). It is very difficult to detect or escape from such abuses because words, 'by constant and familiar use . . . charm Men into Notions far remote from the Truth of things' {Essay, p. 499). It is crucial to resist this charm, however: 'This Abuse of taking Words upon Trust, has no where spread so far, nor with so ill effects, as amongst Men of Letters. The multiplication and obstinacy of Disputes, which has so laid waste the intellectual World, is owing to nothing more, than to this ill use of Words' {Essay, p. 504).

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Extending the suggestion that words have an almost fatal charm, Locke ruefully notes that 'Since Wit and Fancy finds easier entertainment in the World, than dry Truth and real Knowledge, figurative Speeches, and allusion in Language, will hardly be admitted, as an imperfection or abuse of it.' But if Locke grudgingly allows that these tropes might be appropriate in discourses aiming at pleasure and delight, they are 'wholly to be avoided' when we would speak 'of Things as they are' since they 'are perfect cheat'. Locke concludes by lamenting - through invoking a conventional metaphor which was perhaps once thought to be charming - that human beings prefer the deceptions of pleasure to the rigours of truth: 'Tis evident how much Men love to deceive, and be deceived, since Rhetorick, that powerful instrument of Error and Deceit, has its established Professors, is publickly taught, and has always been had in great Reputation: And, I doubt not, but it will be thought great boldness, if not brutality in me, to have said thus much against it. Eloquence, like the fair Sex, has too prevailing Beauties in it, to suffer it self ever to be spoken against. [Essay, p. 508) Burke begins from what ostensibly looks like a Lockean view of language in order to celebrate precisely what Locke would remedy.8 In Book III of the Essay (iv-vi) Locke classifies words into three types which correspond to the different kinds of ideas described in Book II (I shuffle the order in which Locke presents them to form a more logical sequence): the names of simple ideas (e.g., red, light), of substances (e.g., man, horse, gold), and of mixed modes (e.g., glory, gratitude, ambition). In order to sustain his criticism of the 'common notion' that 'the power of poetry and eloquence, as well as that of words in ordinary conversation' derives from 'raising . . . ideas of those things for which custom has appointed them to stand', Burke suggests that it will be requisite to divide words into three sorts (I shuffle their order to correspond with my rearrangement of Locke's categories): words which 'stand for one simple idea . . . as red, blue, round, square, and the like. These I call simple abstract words'; words which 'represent many simple ideas united by nature to form some one determinate composition, as man, horse, tree, castle, &c. These I call aggregate words'; and those words which 'are formed by an union, an arbitrary union of both the others, and of the various relations between them, in greater or lesser degrees of complexity; as virtue, honour, persuasion, magistrate, and the like. These I call compounded abstract words' (Enquiry, pp. 163-4).

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Beginning with 'compound abstracts, such as virtue, honour, persuasion, docility', Burke affirms 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.' (Burke seems to use 'idea' here to refer both to abstract ideas and to the pictorial images which might be expected to be 'excited' in the mind by the use of concrete terms.) No one on hearing a sound like 'liberty' conceives a precise notion of liberty or immediately perceives the array of more simple ideas which compose it. Such words may be analysed, with some effort, into their first principles, but 'when you have made such a discovery of the original ideas, the effect of the composition is utterly lost' [Enquiry•, p. 164).9 Such words, then, operate in a way analogous to Burke's notion of the aesthetic - whose effect is prior to, and destroyed by, rational enquiry. This fact about compound abstract words does not impair but enhances their communicative efficacy, since each of them stands as a substitute for a complex train of analytical thought. They operate not through raising clear ideas, but through their affective associations: Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil, or see others affected with good or evil; or which 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. [Enquiry, p. 165) By this process, such words eventually break loose from the particularity of their origins and become fully abstract and general: 'The sounds being often used without reference to any particular occasion, and carrying still their first impressions, they at last utterly lose their connection with the particular occasions that gave rise to them; yet the sound without any annexed notion continues to operate as before' [Enquiry, p. 165). The effects and meanings of these words are therefore generated and accrued through habitual usage, and have no natural or motivated relation to that which they are held to refer to or signify. Burke posits that words may have three possible effects in the

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mind of the hearer: the sound itself, the 'picture, or representation of the thing signified by the sound', and the 'affection of the soul produced by one or by both of the foregoing' {Enquiry, p. 166).10 Burke's account of compound abstract words suggests that they 'produce the first and the last of these effects, but not the second that is, their sounds have effects but do not generate any representations in the mind. By contrast, simple abstract terms (blue, hot, etc.) 'are capable of affecting all three of the purposes of words'. So too are aggregate words (man, castle, etc.) 'in a yet higher degree' {Enquiry, pp. 166-7). Yet Burke's theory of language is even more 'radical' than this suggests, since he goes on to assert that even simple abstract and aggregate words might work in the same way as compound abstract words: '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.' This can be demonstrated, Burke suggests, through a simple experiment. He presents a short account of the course of the Danube through Europe, and invites 'anybody [to] examine himself, and see whether he has had impressed on his imagination any pictures of a river, mountain, watery soil, Germany &c' {Enquiry, p. 167). Burke predicts a negative result, and claims that the same would hold true in other kinds of language use - such as the rapidity of everyday conversation. Burke is arguing, then, that language in general works independently of referents or concepts — that it is a non-representational medium: 'it is not only of those ideas which are commonly called abstract, and of which no image at all can be formed, but even of particular real beings, that we converse without having any idea of them excited in the imagination; as will certainly appear on a diligent examination of our own minds' {Enquiry, p. 170). Language is not emptied of power by being a non-imagistic medium, but derives power precisely from that circumstance. 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'. Words achieve this by influencing the passions in three different ways. They can induce sympathy with the speaker: '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' {Enquiry, p. 173). They can invent 'many things of a very affecting nature, which can seldom occur in the reality', or which 'have never been at all presented to the senses

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of any men' (Enquiry, pp. 173-4). And they have a plastic combinatory power which may 'give a new life and force to the simple object' above and beyond the way it occurs in nature or can be represented in painting (Enquiry, p. 174). As an instance of this, Burke quotes Milton's description of the fallen angels' journey 'through their dismal habitation': O'er many a dark and dreary vale They pass'd, 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. (Paradise Lost, 11, 618-22; misquoted) The greatest part of the effect of line 621, Burke suggests, stems from the fact that the rocks and caves and so on are 'of death'. The idea or effect caused by the addition of this one word, 'which nothing but a word could annex to the others, raises a very great degree of the sublime'. The sublimity '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' (Enquiry, p. 175). It is possible, then, to read the Enquiry as suggesting that the sublime arises as the surplus value which language generates above and beyond, or at the expense of, its representational function. If this is so, then the sublime is produced by the labour of language rather than of the psyche or the body. Indeed, Burke intimates that the imagination is set to work by the gaps and indeterminacies of art, rather than by its representational efficacy (see Enquiry, p. 77). Language is a powerful though dangerous resource. People can be worked upon, worked up, and set to work more effectively by poetry or rhetoric than by any other means: 'Among the common sort of people, I never could perceive that painting had much influence on their passions . . . But it is most certain, that their passions are very strongly roused by a fanatic preacher, or by the ballads of ChevyChase, or the children in the wood, and by other little popular poems and tales that are current in that rank of life.' This is because 'it is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration, and chiefly excites our passions. Knowledge and acquaintance make the most striking causes affect but little' (Enquiry, p. 61). The commonplace eighteenth-century conception of the 'poetic' nature of more 'primitive' people is therefore a double-edged one in the Enquiry. At

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once patronizing and nostalgic, it registers both fear of and admiration for 'the people'. If their 'ignorance' renders them more liable to 'admiration', then they are also more liable than the 'cultured classes' to rise as a sublime force and so become admirable. This ambivalence is especially politicized in the Revolution Controversy at the end of the century since the people's susceptibility to the sublime is at once the condition which enables their repression within the traditional order and, at the same time, that which makes them responsive to what I will call the 'republican' or 'radical' sublime employed in the discourse which celebrates the French Revolution. It is necessary for Burke that the people should be motivated and manipulated by power rather than knowledge, yet this is precisely what makes them dangerous. (We will see Burke profoundly discomforted by the people's potential susceptibility to a 'fanatic' preacher's enthusiasm for the Revolution.) There is, therefore, a sociology within Burke's account of the aesthetics of language which intersects with the discussion in the eighteenth century about the relative merits of modern civilization compared with more 'barbarous' peoples and periods. In my earlier analyses of this issue, I suggested that the sublime functions as a critique of the civilized if only through being tinged with nostalgia for the barbarous. The same is true in Burke's discussion of different kinds of language: It may be observed that very polished languages, and such as are praised for their superior 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. Uncultivated 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 passionate manner. {Enquiry, p. 176)

The ambivalence here towards both unpolished and polished peoples and languages is a measure of the unstable and ultimately undecidable political import of the sublime in Burke's treatise. 'Uncultivated people' are both more responsive to the sublime and more capable of sublime discourse and activity. In contrast to this, French polish might produce a beautiful clarity but it marks a deficiency in strength. In a later chapter we will see that it is precisely this deficiency which makes aristocratic France, in Burke's

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reading, unable to mount an effective defence against the sheer energy of the middle and lower classes acting in concert. Thus, while there might be a degree of kinship between the expression of uncultivated people and sublime poetry, we can expect Burke to install a mechanism that will ensure that a 'civilizing' sublimity is reserved for cultured members of the progressive class in the modern world. Burke therefore develops a theory of literature which locates mature sublimity in the texts of a poetic lineage from Homer to Milton. Such poetry becomes a medium for constituting the image of selfhood which I am suggesting Burke is seeking to celebrate. Earlier on I pointed out that there is an implicit link in the Enquiry between the imitative arts and social cohesion. But Burke also asserts that a society animated by imitation alone would never escape from a circular stasis and that linear progress may only be fostered by ambition and emulation. Thus Burke's insistence in the last section of the Enquiry that poetry is not strictly an imitative art prompts the speculation that poetry might function as a privileged site in which the impulses of individual ambition are played out and exercised (though also contained). Sublime poetry stimulates the reader to imaginatively appropriate the text being read and so emulate its creator - thus fostering a sense of self as possessive and productive. To be passive to such poetry is to be overwhelmed, 'unmanned'. Poetry exploits and supplements nature in order to generate the surplus value of the sublime ('descriptive poetry operates chiefly by substitution; by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of realities' (Enquiry, p. 173)). Poetry is innovative rather than imitative; it is not governed by or limited to the natural world, nor is it bound by the constraints of clarity, common sense, or pre-existing structures of ideas. In fact, Burke subjects poetry to only one of the four 'rules' which Locke laid down in order to limit the damage produced by the defects and abuses of language - i.e., poetry is required to deploy language according to the demands of linguistic propriety.11 Yet the propriety which makes possible the crucial distinction between the poetry reserved for 'educated' readers and the rhetoric which moves the people turns out to be problematic and fragile. Burke delivers another riposte to the Literary Magazine's reviewer, who had insisted that the best poet was the 'most picturesque',12 by insisting that 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

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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 images were always excited. {Enquiry, p. 170)

In order to illustrate this, Burke turns to perhaps the most 'grand and laboured passage' in the Aeneid - '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 under the hamnmer of the Cyclops. But what are the principles of this extraordinary composition?' To answer this question, and to demonstrate to his reviewer that 'the picturesque connection is not demanded' of sublime poetry, Burke quotes the passage (Aeneid, vm, 429-32) and then proceeds to analyse it into particular images: 'This seems to me admirably sublime; yet if we attend coolly to the kind of sensible image which a combination of ideas of this sort must form, the chimeras of madmen cannot appear more wild and absurd than such a picture' (Enquiry, p. 171). Once again, then, the Aeneid is used as an example of the importance, and the problem, of keeping up distinctions. Yet in attempting to demonstrate that rational enquiry and literal reading are inappropriate ways of approaching sublime poetry, Burke simultaneously reveals that propriety and consistency are as illusory as the sublime itself. A literal-minded, picturesque approach to poetry of this kind will drain it of energy, force, and propriety. The difference between Virgil and 'the chimeras of madmen' depends solely, it seems, upon different ways of reading. Revealing and revelling in its rhetorical status and effect, poetic language needs to defuse the literalizing drive of rational enquiry and depends upon the reader's suspension of disbelief. This is because the sublime, as that which 'anticipates' reason (Enquiry, p. 57), can also be deflated if reason gets there first: a 'literal' reading of sublime passages may make them seem 'ludicrous' (Enquiry, p. 63), 'ridiculous' (Enquiry, p. 64), or a product of madness. Burke shares Locke's anxiety about the abuses of language which exploit its arbitrary nature, but while Locke urges that discourse be stripped of figuration, ambiguity, and obscurity (see Essay, p. 512), Burke celebrates such devices and effects. Yet Burke still wants to be able to identify and guard against the employment of language for 'illegitimate' political and moral ends. Moral terms, such as 'Wise, valiant, generous, good and great, are open to abuse by their very nature

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and may mean different things to different people. There can be no remedy for this other than proper usage together with sense and experience in the listener or reader: These words, by having no application, ought to be unoperative; but when words commonly sacred to great occasions 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 stile is called bombast. And it requires in several cases much good sense and experience to be guarded against the force of such language . . . {Enquiry', p. 166)

The fact that words may be severed from their proper occasion without loss of effect means that they may be exploited in both 'appropriate' and 'inappropriate' ways. Burke's linguistic theory therefore requires that it be possible to distinguish 'bombast' from the aesthetic, false from true rhetoric, the language calculated to manipulate the reader improperly from the language of the heart. The guidelines Burke offers for making these distinctions do not involve reference to 'nature' but ask whether the purpose (or 'view') is a 'rational' one, and whether the words are used in ways which 'agree' with one another. This is not a question of distinguishing between good and bad mimesis but between different 'stiles' and ends. The ability to make such judgments is available only to those who possess 'much good sense and experience'. Without these safeguards, language threatens to overwhelm the listener or reader for improper purposes. But if, as we have seen, the aesthetic is antipathetic to reason, good sense, and experience, it might be that it is more difficult than Burke allows to discriminate between bombastic and aesthetic uses of language. To a 'rational' reading, the sublime is likely to seem an unco-ordinated series of inappropriate figures or emotions — 'a strange chaos of levity and ferocity' (as Burke would call the French Revolution). One person's sublime might well be another's hot air, depending solely on whether or not a 'rational' viewpoint is adopted; and what might appear a rational view from one perspective might be political persuasion from another. 'Propriety' therefore turns out to be a partial reading which refuses to rationally enquire into the rhetorical strategies which a discourse or a socio-political custom — employs. My reading of the account of language in the Enquiry therefore indicates that it acts out at a theoretical level a series of political

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contradictions. Its attempt to distinguish between the true and false sublime reveals that it is unable securely to legislate the way language might be used to motivate and manipulate people or to differentiate between 'proper' and 'improper' political aspirations. That there is a conventional relation between word and idea seems to leave no means, save through appeals to convention, by which one relation may be preferred over another. But if there are different or competing conventions within a culture, the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' rhetoric may only depend upon the political vantage point of the reader. Attempts to restrain linguistic meanings therefore begin to look like arbitrary political acts. In the Reflections, as we will see, Burke is compelled to forge a problematic distinction between the political and linguistic conventions of the traditional order and the merely 'arbitrary' political and rhetorical practices of the Revolution. The criterion he employs is to ask whether a usage has become 'naturalized' within a community, through a process analogous to prescription in property law, or whether it violates established conventions.13 While radical discourse becomes terrifying through violating custom and tradition, Burke attempts to represent custom and tradition as sublime exactly because they are customary and traditional. In the Enquiry, however, sublimity in language is produced through the fact that the habitual associations of words carry over their affect into novel situations and combinations. The sublime is therefore a 'revolutionary' aesthetic which depends for its very power on a particular relation to custom. In other words, the discourses of tradition and revolution become mirror images of one another to the extent that they exploit the same linguistic resource for different ends. The legislative devices which Burke variously employs to discriminate between proper and improper ends - taste, decorum, propriety, reason - turn out to reiterate the problems they are meant to resolve. Yet the very features of the theory of language which involve Burke in such problems are also crucial to the political theory which the Enquiry implicitly articulates. Burke admits that one of the reasons for his study of aesthetics in the Enquiry is precisely because 'a consideration of the rationale of our passions seems to me very necessary for all who would affect them upon solid and sure principles' [Enquiry, p. 53). But as well as offering a means of political persuasion, Burke's account of language allows poetry in particular to function as a vehicle for exercising and controlling a new kind of

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subjectivity conducive to his intervention into the discursive formations and debates generated in the aftermath of 1688. Thus, while Locke attempts to restrain the productivity of language by urging that it be emptied of metaphor and governed by a pictorial dictionary, Burke cautiously celebrates its power to generate an excess of affect over representation. My own metaphors for describing this excess have been drawn from economic theory: profit, surplus value, etc. This is because it is possible to trace, or generate, analogies between Burke's theory of language and the philosophical impact of what Pocock calls the 'momentous intellectual event' of the 'sudden and traumatic discovery of capital in the form of government stock' at the end of the seventeenth century (Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 108). In effect, 'a new form of property had arisen' largely independent of 'real' property - a 'mobile', 'imaginary', or 'speculative' property related to the 'problem of paper currency': for 'what one owned was promises' (Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 108, 112-13). This had political ramifications, too, since 'there is a clear relation between the problem of speculative politics and economics' (Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 113). In effect, politics had become speculation: Government stock is a promise to repay at a future date; from the inception and development of the National Debt, it is known that this date will in reality never be reached . . . Government is therefore maintained by the investor's imagination concerning a moment which will never exist in reality. The ability of merchant and landowner to raise the loans and mortgages they need is similarly dependent upon the investor's imagination. (Virtue, Commerce, and History, p . 112)

As Pocock demonstrates, this momentous transformation produced anxiety and resistance as well as profit. For the 'ancients', government and politics 'seemed to have been placed at the mercy of passion, fantasy and appetite, and these forces were known to feed on themselves and to be without moral limit'. One of the major tasks which faced progressive writers of the early eighteenth century was 'the stabilisation of this pathological condition' (Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 112, 113). Burke's inflationary theory of language is produced precisely at a moment (the period of the Seven Years War) when concerns about the political consequences of the escalating National Debt culminated in the fear that traditional class structures could not hold against runaway inflation and political unrest. A

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measure of the way the stabilizing devices which Burke employs in the Enquiry are overrun by the egalitarian momentum of the speculative theory he articulates is that by the end of the century he condemns speculative economics, politics, and language as symptomatic of all that is wrong with the French Revolution. Burke cannot relinquish his theory without abandoning his politics, yet the theory leaves the politics vulnerable to a 'pathological' version of itself. For Burke, the power of language is revealed by the fact 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' (Enquiry, p. 173). Chains of affective discourse may therefore be produced and opinions influenced without any reference to 'things', save via the influence and opinions of 'other men', which are themselves conveyed by discourse. We only find it difficult to understand how words can move the passions without raising distinct ideas, he posits, because 'we do not sufficiently distinguish, in our observations upon language, between a clear expression, and a strong expression . . . The former regards the understanding; the latter belongs to the passions. The one describes a thing as it is; the other describes it as it is felt.' This enables a speaker to have powerful effects on his or her audience: 'We yield to sympathy, what we refuse to description . . . by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another' (Enquiry, p. 175). It is this quality in language which makes it so important for Burke as a cohesive and animating force in society. Yet if society is held together and driven in this way, it seems susceptible to 'contagions' which might destroy rather than animate the body politic which Burke seeks to nourish. Thus it is revealing that Burke figures revolutionary discourse at the end of the century precisely as a dangerous 'contagion'. In the Reflections, as we will see in the following chapters, Burke was less concerned with what the Revolution actually was than with the feelings it might produce, less disturbed by the event itself than by the enthusiastic opinions concerning it being expressed by major parliamentary figures as well as radical writers. This discursive trend threatened to become contagious precisely by exploiting the kind of strategies which Burke's Enquiry makes possible. In order to intervene in this trend, the Reflections is compelled to adopt a hybrid discourse — one which can both deflate the revolutionary sublime through rational enquiry

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and maintain the sublimity and beauty of the institutions (such as the British constitution) which radicalism would pry into. In De Quincey's terms, Burke's text weaves a literature of power with a literature of knowledge in order to employ both emotive effects and epistemological clarity according to expediency.14 However, by the logic developed in the Enquiry, such a textual weave produces not a coherent but a clashing pattern whose contradictory effects seem quite beyond the 'intentions' we have been taught to ascribe to Burke. In his 'search for a structure beneath the vast epiphenomena of the sublime' [Romantic Sublime, p. 11), Weiskel contends that the 'breakdown' in representation which a theory of language such as Burke's entails, or the sudden confrontation with it, allows us to understand the characteristic features of the sublime in terms of a semiotic structure. The sublime is the moment and the mode in which the disruption between sound and sense ordinarily or habitually operative in language — which nevertheless rarely impedes its functional use — suddenly opens up as an abyss, confronting the reading or writing subject with the urgent task of making sense. The subject is unsituated in and by a language it thought itself master of and responds with a recuperative labour of the imagination. The sublime is therefore experienced in reaction to a crisis in representation which prompts the Romantic discovery, as Weiskel has it, of an 'excitement in the making of meaning [Romantic Sublime, p. 22). For

the Romantics, as for Burke in a different way, the solution and the terrifying delight of this moment is to metaphorize absence of signification into a new signifier, to figure terror as the sublime. Yet the making and unmaking power of language has consequences outside poetic texts. In the early eighteenth century, the political ramifications of the sublime's implicit semiotic structure prompted the work of the Tory satirists: In their conceptions of order and of signification, Pope and Swift appealed implicitly to a scheme older than what we have called the classical or Lockean semiotic. In the traditional rhetorical doctrine of the humanists from whom Pope and Swift descended, words did imitate or participate in things; the authority of language, as of social order, was not arbitrary but natural. To confound words was to confound reality and to disturb nature as well as the social order. (Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, p. 190) The sublime may tamper with 'natural' meanings by 'opening a gap between word and thing' or by violating the decorous, 'natural'

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order in which words are used {Romantic Sublime, p. 19). Burke's theory of language, while revelling in this gap, attempts to both exploit and constrain the violations of decorum which it makes possible. Burke's aesthetics and politics are therefore significantly different from Pope's and Swift's 'natural' conservatism, and partly associate him with those who threaten nature and the social order. To sever language from nature by suggesting that meanings are customary is, in one reading, to expose the possibility that other meanings, and other social orders, might be equally or even more valid than existing ones. Responding at the end of the century to a political rhetoric which seemed to take such possibilities seriously, Burke's 'conservatism' has no resistance to offer save appeals to decorum and propriety. This allows us to anticipate some of the contradictions Burke involves himself in when attacking the 'indecorous' or 'unnatural' language of radical discourse in the 1790s. For despite arguing, in his early work, that language is arbitrary rather than natural, Burke's attacks on the French Revolution precisely invoke the fear that revolutionary rhetoric violates reality, nature, and the social order.15 Ironically enough, as a cautionary model to Burke, Weiskel argues that Pope's crusade against the sublime's embracing the discontinuities in culture in the 'wrong' (i.e., revolutionary) way reinscribes 'the very discontinuities in the structure of significance whose illegitimate confusion it protests'. This is so because irony and the mock heroic are themselves modes which exploit discrepancies between language and reality: 'When irony falters', Weiskel observes, 'Pope is in danger of lapsing (or rising) to the evocative writing of the true sublime, as in the nightmare of the last lines of the Dunciad' {Romantic Sublime, pp. 19—20). We will see that Burke's strategy of attacking the discontinuities he sees as characteristic of revolutionary thought itself exploits shifting relations between language and reality, and that, like Pope, his discourse is continually in danger of lapsing or rising of opening himself to ridicule or of figuring the Revolution as truly sublime. These possibilities and problems are built into the theory of language developed in the last section of the Enquiry. As if in response to this, the closing sentences seem to withdraw everything Burke has maintained thus far in the face of adverse criticism. Burke's peroration begins with the disclaimer that it was not his 'design to enter into the criticism of the sublime and the beautiful in any art', but to

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'lay down' some basic theoretical principles which would allow critics to 'ascertain, to distinguish, and to form some sort of standard for' the sublime and the beautiful. This theory was based in 'an enquiry into the properties of such things in nature as raise love and astonishment in us; and by shewing in what manner they operated to produce these passions'. From the point of view of this project, 'Words were only so far to be considered, as to shew upon what principle they were 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' (Enquiry, pp. 176—7). At the last moment, then, Burke reverts to his physiological theory and relinquishes the theory of language which seems to undercut it. Refusing or retracting the possiblity that the sublime is a kind of excess product or profit generated by language, and that the natural sublime is always already rhetorical, words are realigned with their Adamic role as representatives of natural things. Even so, they inevitably exceed their representative function by sometimes affecting us much more strongly than the things they are supposed to speak for. Burke's aesthetic treatise, then, seems to display contradictions at every turn. Before going on to look at the internal contradictions of the Reflections and at the way the Enquiry and the Reflections seem to 'contradict' each other, it is important to reiterate that such contradictions are not being sought out for their own sake or to demonstrate Burke's feeble-mindedness. Instead, I am suggesting that the contradictions in Burke's texts arise from structural contradictions within Burke's (often unconscious) project and from the social, economic, and intellectual contradictions of the period. That these contradictions are acted out in particularly acute ways in Burke's texts is a testimony to the strength of his intellectual insights as he tries to forge an appropriate ideology for his class position in response to the rapidly shifting political parameters of eighteenthcentury Europe.

PART

TWO

Reflections on a radical revolution

CHAPTER 5

The genesis of the 'Reflections': resisting the irresistible voice of the multitude

In Burke's Enquiry, the causes of the sublime may be various — vastness, solitude, silence, obscurity, power — but its characteristic effect (in its highest degree) is an astonishment which pre-emptively disables reason: The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason upon 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 effects are admiration, reverence, and respect. [Enquiry, p. 57)

The sublime 'anticipates' our reasonings - at once prefiguring and pre-empting, looking forward to and forestalling, reason's powers and insights. This implicit, though perhaps ambivalent, attack on reason reinforces our sense that the Burkean sublime is constituted in resistance to the Enlightenment.1 But in suspending reason, it seems that the sublime might have contradictory social effects: if, in its highest degree, the sublime induces an astonishment which 'hurries us on by an irresistible force', then it might unleash potentially disruptive, unpredictable energies; on the other hand, its inferior effects, such as admiration, reverence, and respect, apparently promise and promote social stability. One particular cause of the sublime in Burke's treatise is 'the shouting of multitudes' which, 'by the sole strength of the sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forebear being borne down, and joining in the common cry, and common

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resolution of the croud' (Enquiry, p. 82). Accruing affect by echoing the apocalyptic 'voice of a great multitude' announcing the last things in Revelation, this usurpation of sense by sound foregrounds the sublime's potentially democratic impulse. This description of the 'democratic' or 'radical' sublime is nevertheless an ambiguous one in that the staggering, hurrying movement of the mind, blending with or borne down by the crowd's surge, represents a loss of individual power. In this analysis of crowd psychology, the power of the multitude is gained at the expense of individual will, and the individual is perhaps more diminished than exalted. The crowd becomes an irresistible force, but at the cost of its reverence and respect for institutional edifices (Boulton speculates that this passage might be 'an allusion to [Burke's] experiences during a student attack on the Black Dog prison which provoked the constable of the Castle of Newgate gaol to fire his cannon' (Boulton, p. xvii)). Burke's ambivalence here may be measured by contrasting an apparently similar passage in Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres

(1783), where 'the burst of thunder or of cannon, the roaring of winds, the shouting of multitudes, the sound of vast cataracts of water, are all incontestable grand objects'.2 In the present chapter, I would like to explore how Burke comes to figure the French Revolution (and the way it was being represented by admirers in Britain) as potentially producing 'the effect of the sublime in its highest degree'. But while astonishment is (perhaps ambivalently) celebrated in the Enquiry, Burke appears profoundly disturbed in the Reflections by the possibility that the Revolution might forestall attempts to reason upon it and so irresistibly 'hurry' its British observers to join with and emulate 'the common cry and common resolution'. The Revolution's 'contagion-effect' therefore makes it particularly dangerous to what Burke represented as the 'natural' alliance between landed and commercial interests in Britain.3 At the same time, Burke cannot concede the sublime ground to radicalism. Although the 'shouting of multitudes' leads to an irreverence towards political edifices akin to that which drove the storming of the Bastille, it yet has the potential, in its 'subordinate degrees', to foster 'awe, reverence, and respect'. Thus, in the Reflections, the British constitution is endowed with sublime qualities that arm it against radical enquiry: 'Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an aweful gravity'

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(Reflections, p. 121). By dispelling such 'aweful' illusions, Burke implies, revolutionary radicalism would abandon a crucial means of tempering the spirit of freedom's inevitable momentum towards 'misrule and excess'. Yet in attempting to exploit a distinction between the dangers of the sublime in its highest degree and the benefits which might be derived from its inferior effects, Burke becomes embroiled in a series of ineradicable contradictions which may, perhaps, account for his 'rage' against the Revolution. Between the Seven Years War and the Revolution Controversy of the early 1790s, the theory and function both of the sublime and of luxury underwent significant transitions. Yet I want to argue that a version of the dynamic interplay between these concepts continues to inform political debate at the end of the century. On 4 November 1789 the dissenting minister Richard Price delivered a sermon, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, which was to transform Burke's

perception of the French Revolution. In the text of the sermon, which Burke read in early 1790, Price's representation of the Revolution and of the condition of Britain draws on the same paradigms which shape Burke's Enquiry in order to urge that the French example be copied in Britain. In this way, the democratic revolution which Price claims was initiated in 1688 could be brought to completion. This has become urgent because Britain suffers under 'the inadequateness of our representation' and so lacks the institutional means to correct the state's imminent dissolution: the state of [Britain] is such as renders it an object of concern and anxiety. It wants . . . the grand security of public liberty. Increasing luxury has multiplied abuses in it. A monstrous weight of debt is crippling it. Vice and venality are bringing down upon it God's displeasure.4 Price urges the people to 'do [their] utmost to save [their country] from the dangers that threaten it', and stresses 'the favourableness of the present times to all exertions in the cause of public liberty'. The climactic call on the people to take action invokes a range of sublime imagery: What an eventful period is this! I am thankful that I have lived to it; and 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 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, indignant and resolute, spurning at slavery, and demanding liberty with an

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irresistible voice; their king led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects . . . And now, methinks, I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading . . . Be encouraged, all ye friends of freedom, and writers in its defence! The times are auspicious . . . Behold, the light you have struck out, after setting AMERICA free, reflected to FRANCE, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates EUROPE! Tremble all ye oppressors of the world! . . . Call no more (absurdly and wickedly) REFORMATION, innovation. You cannot now hold the world in darkness . . . Restore to mankind their rights; and consent to the correction of abuses, before they and you are destroyed together. [Discourse on the Love of Our Country, pp. 49—51)

The Enlightenment — which Burke calls 'this new-conquering empire of light and reason3 (Reflections, p. 171) — is figured here as fire and light, consuming the old order and illuminating the new with a momentum which gathers exponentially. Light becomes a liberating sublime, driving out the false, oppressive sublime of darkness and obscurity through which kings terrorize the people.5 Price interpellates 'the people' as a new historical subject called upon, through collective 'exertions', to complete the revolution begun in 1688. The people are figured as becoming active, overthrowing their own slavery through the strength of a collective voice able to reverse the power relation between subjects and arbitrary monarch.6 Thus it is the oppressors' turn to tremble to the very core of their being at the rise of the people as an irresistible political force. The Revolution is actively performed by the unified voice of the people - a performative act that is at once democratic and sublime.7 In representing himself and the peoples of Europe as fervently aroused by, and caught up in, a spirit of emulation of what Wordsworth would call the 'verity' of 'a whole nation crying with one voice' (Prelude (1805), x, 211-12), Price's sermon seems calculated, according to Burke's own theory, to likewise stimulate his congregation, and his readers, to participate in, or emulate, that revolutionary cry. In this apocalyptic passage, Price hijacks the 'radical sublime' already potential in the Burkean category in order to turn it against the very socio-economic system whose hegemony Burke's aesthetic theory originally promoted. Price indicts the current political order in England for its economic and moral luxury in much the same way that traditional writers had attacked the post-1688 commercial revolution (though Price is urging that the developments which he perceives in 1688 be taken to their logical conclusion rather than

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reversed). Thus Price turns the tables on Burke by identifying revolutionary radicalism as the sublime antidote for the dangerously luxurious alliance between landed power and the commercial interest. What is more, this takes place in a text which criticizes the English constitution, stresses the servitude of the English people, and offers the example of the French Revolution as the remedy for England's ills. In response to this, Burke seeks to reinterpret the Revolution as a false sublime, or as an example of the way the sublime in its highest degree can run out of control. But in order to do this, Burke has to limit the ideological possibilities of his own aesthetic category. In the Enquiry, although the sublime is deeply implicated in politics, it is not reducible to any single ideological position. At one moment, the sublime is presented as potentially a mode of tyranny: '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' {Enquiry, p. 59).8 Yet the strategies of 'legitimate' and 'illegitimate' government become difficult to tell apart: 'The power which arises from institution in kings and commanders, has the same connection with terror [as other forms of power, such as the 'natural' power of certain animals]. Sovereigns are frequently addressed with the title of dread majesty {Enquiry, p. 67). The sublime cannot, therefore, be unproblematically resorted to as a way of distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic political power, nor can it be easily divided into the 'true' sublime and its 'perversion'. To complicate further Burke's attempt, in 1790, to recruit and constrain the sublime as a means of upholding a coherent conservative politics, there are passages in the Enquiry which seem to celebrate an overtly revolutionary sublime. One such moment comes in an analysis of Satan as Milton's sublime hero in which Burke quotes from the description of Satan immediately prior to his 'revolutionary' speech to the fallen angels: He above the rest In shape and gesture proudly eniment Stood like a tower; his form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruin'd, and th' excess Of glory obscured: as when the sun new ris'n Looks through the horizontal misty air

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'Here is a very noble picture', Burke writes, '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.' Burke is using this passage to illustrate the way sublime obscurity pre-empts rational enquiry, but its political connotations were not lost on Milton's contemporaries. In his edition of Paradise Lost, Alastair Fowler notes that The comparison [made in 1, 596-99] is ironically double-edged; for the ominous solar eclipse presages not only disaster for creation, but also the doom of the Godlike ruler for whom the sun was a traditional symbol. (Thus Charles IPs Licenser for the Press is said by Toland . . . to have regarded these lines as politically subversive.)9 Burke therefore anticipates Blake in suggesting that Satan is an attractive and powerful figure, both poetically and politically. But although the ruin of monarchs and the revolution of kingdoms were potentially sublime images in 1757-9, m r 79° Burke goes to great lengths to prove that they are a perversion of the sublime. A provisional account of the way the sublime can be employed for opposite political ends might be sought in an analysis of the different phases of the sublime in terms of their ideological potential and implications. It would be possible to read the fearful and vaunting moments of the sublime respectively as 'radical' and 'reactionary' phases: by exposing structures of power, the moment of fear and trembling might be potentially revolutionary; the moment of recovery through identification would then constitute a counter-revolutionary rapprochement. This reading could be reversed, however: the abjection before power or authority would then be a reactionary relation, while to brave out that adversary in the name of individual freedom would constitute a revolutionary response. In an intriguing and complex way, then, the sublime seems potentially reactionary and revolutionary at one and the same time. Although the sublime is always in reaction, it is not always reactionary; it may even be the revolutionary moment par excellence. This is far from claiming, as Weiskel does, that the sublime can, in ideological terms, ' "mean"

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just about anything' {Romantic Sublime, p. 28). Although its structure might be ungovernably unstable, the meaning of that instability always depends upon the contours of specific historical contexts. The sublime's potentially mobile ideological value carries over into Burke's attempt to employ it in the Reflections. He often presents himself there as the representative figure of the English state, yet there are suggestions that he too, even as one of the 'best established tempers', might have been particularly susceptible to the 'irresistible voice' of the Revolution but for the implications it had for his lifetime's work of shoring up the English constitution as 're-established' in 1688. Mary Wollstonecraft, in one of the first and most insightful responses to the Reflections, addresses Burke directly on this: 'had you been a Frenchman, you would have been, in spite of your respect for rank and antiquity, a violent revolutionist . . . Your imagination would have taken fire.' Or, she continues, sketching a different scenario, 'had the English in general reprobated the French revolution, you would have stood forth alone, and been the avowed Goliah of liberty'.10 Wollstonecraft attributes Burke's condemnation of the Revolution to 'envy' of Dr Price's sermon, and to the fact that, since so many had already hailed the Revolution and partaken of its fame, Burke could not have gained sufficient distinction by simply following the general trend. Wollstonecraft therefore suggests that Burke's reaction to the Revolution needs to be understood as a bid for personal sublimity. Although this might seem an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Reflections, Wollstonecraft is often an acute reader of Burke. Her comments become revealing if the sublime is analysed not in terms of personal aggrandizement but as involving anxieties produced through discontinuities in the ideological position around which Burke's various discourses are organized. This is to see the Reflections as structured, and deconstructed, through the unpredictable interplay between an historical moment in which social formations fashioned over the previous century appeared on the verge of an unprecedented crisis and a set of discursive paradigms drawn from Burke's aesthetic treatise which are themselves deeply informed by an earlier version of this crisis. His own aesthetic theory had primed Burke to recognize that Price's image of an irresistible voice of thirty millions storming the feudal edifice could be expected to compel others to join the Revolution. When Burke writes that 'we yield to sympathy, what we refuse to description' {Enquiry, p. 175) he points to the subtle power

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rhetoric has over the individual or collective will. This is developed in a way which seems uncannily apt for an understanding of Burke's response to Price: 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. {Enquiry, pp. 175-6) Price's impassioned use of the sublime is therefore precisely calculated to induce the people of England not only to admire but also to emulate the French example. This transforms the Revolution from an aesthetic spectacle at a safe distance across the English Channel into a political threat to England's socio-economic order, a 'contagion' active within the country's body politic. Thus the metaphors which articulate Burke's response to this in the Reflections are symptomatic: Formerly your affairs were your own concern only. We felt for them as men; but we kept aloof from them, because we were not citizens of France. But when we see the model held up to ourselves, we must feel as Englishmen, and feeling, we must provide as Englishmen. Your affairs, in spite of us, are made a part of our interest; so far at least as to keep at a distance your panacea, or your plague. If it be a panacea, we do not want it. We know the consequences of unnecessary physic. If it be a plague; it is such a plague, that the precautions of the most severe quarantine ought to be established against it. [Reflections, p. 285) Both panacea and plague are resisted as equally dangerous here. In refusing the Revolution's offer of a cure-all dose of 'physic' (Burke considers England's constitution to be healthy enough not to need a radical cure) Burke exploits the familiar analogy between human body and body politic.11 Such medical metaphors — 'contagion', 'plague', 'panacea', 'physic', 'quarantine' — operate throughout Burke's texts on the French Revolution.12 These figures become overdetermined in Burke when we remember that, in the Enquiry, the sublime's reactive, 'therapeutic' phase is constituted as an antidote to the debilitating effects of the beautiful and/or the 'noxious' possibilities of actual terror. The complex dynamics of Burke's dilemma at this point can be theorized through a brief glance at Derrida's reading of the 'phar-

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makon* in Plato. iPharmakori> is usually translated as 'remedy', but to do so is to limit the 'textuality' of Plato's texts, where it functions, unpredictably, as remedy and as poison (much as our own concept of'drug' is variously seen as a great boon or ineradicable vice): when the textual centre-stage of the word pharmakon, even while it means remedyp, cites, recites, and makes legible that which in the same word signifies, in another spot and on a different level of the stage, poison (for example, since that is not the only other thing pharmakon means), the choice of only one of these renditions by the translator has as its first effect the neutralization of the citational play . . . and . . . of the very textuality of the translated text.J3

To articulate the Reflections with the Enquiry, and to produce the 'citational play' which emerges between them, is to see the sublime as at once a source of pain and a relief from that pain, a plague and a necessary panacea, the healthy habit of the English constitution and the dangerous disease of revolutionary radicalism, the threat of revolution and its preventative. In both the Enquiry and the Reflections, plague and panacea, disease and antidote are often hard to tell apart and both texts are beset by the need securely to differentiate between them. This becomes crucially necessary in Burke's attempt to mobilize resistance to the Revolution's contagious doctrines, whether they be too sublime for their own good, or dangerously luxurious. We can therefore begin to see how Burke's discourse about apparently discrete domains of the human sciences — physiology, language, politics, economics, aesthetics - turns out to be organized around and by a common set of paradigms and anxieties. Burke seeks to immunize England by preventing the importation of radical ideas — thus he emphasizes the importance of English 'customs' (both habitualized practices and economic barriers at a state's borders). But Burke's fear of (England) catching the revolutionary plague is haunted by symptoms (such as Price's sermon) which indicate that the disease might already have taken effect - that his proposed quarantine against ideas crossing the Channel might be wisdom after the event. Burke's cathartic response to the Revolution implies that the danger it represents has ready infiltrated the English body politic, infecting it through and through. Burke's purgative resistance might therefore figure as the 'heroic' action of the sublime's third phase offered as an exemplary model to England's ruling class. Burke represents himself as standing aloof from, or rising to the

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challenge of, Price's sublime rhetoric — in particular contrast to the 'common sort of people' who, in Burke's theory, are thought especially susceptible to such 'fanatic preachers'. Burke does this by attempting to transvalue the Revolution into a wholly terrible and/ or ridiculous event in order to produce either recoil or ironic distance in his more 'sophisticated' readers. To deflect or deflate his readers' tendency to admire the Revolution, Burke would reduce it from the sublime to the ridiculous, from a 'high' to a 'low' dramatic genre. He does this, for example, by representing the National Assembly as acting out 'the farce of deliberation' before the people like 'the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience' (Reflections, p. 161). But we have seen that the sublime and the ridiculous may be different readings of the same rather than clear-cut opposites; thus the need to ridicule might be precisely a measure of an adversary's sublimity. GAZING WITH ASTONISHMENT AT A FRENCH STRUGGLE FOR LIBERTY

Burke's response to the Revolution undergoes a dramatic transformation under the impact of its discursive production in Price's Discourse.1* Prior to encountering Price's sermon in January 1790, Burke typically represents the French Revolution as a dramatic spectacle characterized in terms drawn from his Enquiry. Burke's earliest known reference to the Revolution comes almost three months before Price's sermon in a letter to Lord Charlemont, dated 9 August 1789: As to us here our thoughts of every thing at home are suspended, by our astonishment at the wonderful Spectacle which is exhibited in a Neighbouring and rival Country - what Spectators, and what actors! England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud! The thing indeed, though I thought I saw something like it in progress for several years, has still something in it paradoxical and Mysterious. The spirit it is impossible not to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner . . . What will be the Event it is hard I think still to say. To form a solid constitution requires Wisdom as well as spirit, and whether the French have wise heads among them, or if they possess such whether they have authority equal to their wisdom, is to be seen; In the mean time the progress of this whole affair is one of the most curious matters of Speculation that ever was exhibited.^ The Revolution is presented here as a sublime event with characteristic features and effects: the thoughts of those who gaze upon it

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are 'suspended5 by 'astonishment'; it is paradoxical and mysterious, a moment of theatre or 'Spectacle', a matter 'exhibited' for 'Speculation' which leaves its spectators not knowing whether to blame or applaud. Burke seems to adopt a double role, simultaneously gazing with astonishment and taking up the stance of a man of taste, speculating on the outcome of this 'curious matter' and attempting to distinguish between what is admirable and what 'shocking'. There are many parallels between the images and strategies of this letter and those of the famous passage in the Reflections which it seems to anticipate.16 Yet before moving on to that passage, I want to stress that, in representing it as 'impossible not to admire', and as suspending 'thoughts of everything at home', Burke's letter constructs the Revolution in ways which he would soon present as its principal danger. In the letter, 'England' and 'us here' are figured as astonished spectators hesitating whether to blame or applaud, whereas in the Reflections we will see that Burke fears that English spectators might become active participants in an English revolution while the ruling classes stand by bemused. While the early response is at once admiring and speculative, the later reaction refuses to admire or speculate and seems calculated to alert England's ruling classes to actively resist the spectacle's dangerous power. Such a shift from passive admiration to active resistance (rather than active participation) is vital if revolutionary impulses originating from either side of the Channel are to be successfully resisted. In this new scenario, Burke will represent hesitation as fatal. I want to show that this shift in Burke's attitude is precipitated not by the course of revolutionary events in France, but by the way the Revolution is represented not only in radical discourse but even in the House of Commons itself. We will see that Burke's desperate remedy is that of attempting to divide the sublime into remedial and poisonous aspects utterly opposed to one another. The personification of the 'nation' as an individual 'gazing with astonishment' at France's travails translates the sublime's individuating function into nationalist terms. Reinforcing a notion of Englishness in the coming crisis involves, or will involve, not only keeping the Revolution's plague or panacea at bay, but excluding or disenfranchizing internal dissenting voices. I therefore suggest that Burke's successive representations of the Revolution increasingly work to (re)constitute a consciousness of bourgeois nationhood (on

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the model of the bourgeois self) through the process of gazing on the dramatic spectacle of a neighbouring nation in crisis. The nearer the Revolution presses (through being admired in the House of Commons as well as by English radicals), and the more England participates in that crisis, the more urgent such individuation becomes (since what functions as an impetus to individuation can destroy the individual if it presses too close). If, as I have argued, the eighteenth-century sublime is both the means through which the bourgeois self is ambiguously reassured and one of the precarious agencies through which its political structures are sustained, the approach of the French Revolution precipitates a crisis in bourgeois politics and aesthetics which might yet, by the paradoxical logic of the sublime, be exploited to rejuvenate the alliance between land and money which was held to be the saving achievement of Britain in the eighteenth century. In December 1789 — well after the incident at Versailles which would become the central scene of horror in the Reflections - Burke seems able to think of the French Revolution as a distraction from the more painful situation within England. In a letter to Phillip Francis he writes that 'perhaps the follies of France, by which we are not yet affected may employ ones curiosity more pleasantly, and as usefully, as the depravity of England which is more calculated to give us pain'.17 At this point, then, Burke appears to regard the French Revolution as an aesthetic spectacle which might serve to divert attention from political unrest in England, rather than as posing any immediate danger. Thus the condition of England, rather than France, seems to be Burke's main source of anxiety through this period — as, indeed, it would be in the 'crisis' itself. For Conor Cruise O'Brien, the transition between this letter to Francis and the Reflections is registered in a letter to an unknown correspondent (who, according to the editors of the Correspondence, might have been Paine) which was probably written in the latter half of January 1790. In other words, the letter's composition may well have been interrupted by Burke's reading of Price's Discourse on the night he came up to London for the meeting of Parliament on 21 January. 18 Tn that letter', O'Brien writes, although 'he is more philosophical, or teleological, about the situation in France than he is ever to be again', it ends on 'a new note of concern': *9 'I see some people here are willing that we should become [Voltaire's and Rousseau's] scholars and reform our state on the French model.

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They have begun; and it is high time for those who wish to preserve morem majorum, to look about them' (Correspondence, vi, p. 81). The

new note of concern, then, arises because 'some people here' have begun to spread revolutionary principles in England itself, threatening the manners and customs inherited from the past. Those who would preserve this inheritance ought therefore to be on the alert, to hestitate no longer. Burke's first public stance against the French Revolution came in the parliamentary debate on the Army Estimates on 9 February. His warnings are made all the more urgent because prominent and influential Whigs and Tories alike had admired or expressed hope in Parliament for the Revolution - Fox saying that he 'exulted in it from feelings and from principle', and Pitt that he looked forward to the new France 'as one of the most brilliant powers in Europe'.20 The contagion begins to break out, then, not only in the Revolution Society (which included Members of Parliament in its numbers), but even in the House of Commons. In his speech Burke therefore warns the House, in a flood of adjectives, that the danger 'is one of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy'. He asks the members to consider 'how they would like to have their mansions pulled down and pillaged, their persons abused, insulted, and destroyed; their title deeds brought out and burned before their faces'.21 This is more like the Reflections. The risk for England has become one of admiring the Revolution too uncritically — which would be dangerous on two counts: either that spectators might be so carried along by the Revolution that they begin to think of imitating it in England; or that their admiration of events across the Channel might distract attention from similar revolutionary movements nearer to home - i.e., that their 'thoughts of every thing at home [might be] suspended'. The members of the House are therefore 'brought to their senses' by having the Revolution figuratively and graphically introduced into their own homes as a threat to both their property and their 'persons'. From finding it 'impossible not to admire' the spirit of the Revolution in the letter to Lord Charlemont in August, Burke now warns against 'an admiration of successful fraud and violence'; from treating the Revolution as a distraction from thoughts at home, he now attempts to make his audience aware precisely of the dangers

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the Revolution represents to the Englishman's 'home'. The Revolution, until now a sublime event because kept at one remove, is suddenly treated as if it presses too close; becoming variously sheer terror or a perversion of the sublime, it is no longer delightful but noxious. From this point onwards Burke figures the Revolution in ways that seem intended to achieve certain effects, yet his texts appear to be affected and infected by the discursive representations they seek to refute. The problem that this 'infectious' influence poses, I suggest, is that it transgresses the boundaries between political bodies and between scene and spectator, stage and house (both the audience of a theatre and the House of Commons), revealing that the danger is within the 'house' or 'body' itself — that it is both heimlich and unheimlich at one and the same time.22 This anxiety about the precise location or origin of the revolutionary impulse - whether it can be kept at a comfortable distance or whether it already infects the body politic — is presented even more 'histrionically' in the First Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796): 'I certainly should dread more from a wild cat in my bed-chamber, than from all the lions that roar in the deserts behind Algiers. But in this parallel it is the cat that is at a distance, and the lions and tygers that are in our ante-chambers and our lobbies.'23 REFLECTIONS IN A CRISIS

Burke spends most of the first third of the Reflections - culminating in his account of 5-6 October - wrangling, directly or indirectly, with Price's sermon. In contrast to Price and the Revolution Society, Burke would suspend his congratulations to the National Assembly, claiming that he needs to consider France not in 'the nakedness . . . of metaphysical abstraction' but in its actual circumstances {Reflections^ pp. 89—90). Although liberty might be a good thing in the abstract, there are many instances (such as the liberation of madmen or murderers) where it might be an evil in actual affairs. He goes on to claim that events have enabled more circumspect observers 'to discern, with tolerable exactness, the true nature of the object held up to our imitation' (Reflections, p. 92). This is the cue for the wellknown attack on the Revolution: It looks 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

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happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing 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 opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror. (Reflections, pp. 92-3)

The effect of Price's transformation of the discursive context in which the Revolution was being perceived can be measured by comparing this perhaps over-familiar passage with the aforementioned letter to Lord Charlemont. In that letter, 'astonishment' is triggered by the 'wonderful Spectacle' of 'a French struggle for liberty'; in the Reflections, the Revolution is astonishing because it exhibits a 'monstrous tragi-comic scene', a 'strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies'. It is astonishing because 'wonderful things' are brought about — in a disruption of political and aesthetic order — by 'means', 'modes', and 'instruments' that are 'absurd', 'ridiculous', and 'contemptible'. Such a mismatch between cause and effect suggests that these relations, rather than being naturally motivated, are not only conventional but appallingly arbitrary. This is more than a philosophical crisis because it challenges and overturns established social hierarchies by demonstrating that representative figures are not always 'naturally' fitted to represent a country and that people from a class traditionally considered unfit to participate in political processes are capable of having significant effects on the state. If the 'mob', however contemptible, has revealed itself as capable of overthrowing political states, this might be 'out of nature' but it is precisely immanent within Burke's theory of the sublime. The fact that the 'mob' has become mobile, and that it has effected 'the most wonderful things', makes the Revolution a source of 'horror' and 'astonishment' and therefore disturbingly akin to the genuine sublime. This is perhaps why Burke writes that 'it looks to me as if/were in a great crisis, not of the affairs of France alone, but of all Europe, perhaps of more than Europe' (my emphasis). Burke presents himself as horrified by the enactment on the political stage of the most extreme of the possible denouements of his own political and aesthetic plot. He would have his 'cultured' readers perceive the

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enormity and the absurdity of this and so presents the Revolution as a chaotic jumble of the terrible and the ridiculous — a scene to recoil from or laugh at, but certainly not one to admire, imitate, or emulate. Without precedent, at once monstrous and tragi-comic, perpetrated by a 'mob' of actors not properly fitted for their roles, the Revolution violates Aristotle's generic categories and theory of dramatic propriety. Burke thus condemns the Revolution as an illconceived moment of theatre which necessarily has chaotic and unpredictable effects on nations and individuals alike. Aristotle argues that although fear and pity 'may be excited by means of spectacle', it is more 'artistic' to achieve these effects through the plot alone; he goes on to assert that 'those who employ spectacle to produce an effect, not of fear, but of something merely monstrous, have nothing to do with tragedy, for not every kind of pleasure should be demanded of tragedy, but only that which is proper to it'.24 In presenting the Revolution as 'monstrous', then, Burke seeks to score an aesthetic point. But it could be argued that it is Burke himself who breaches propriety here by constructing a spectacle of something merely monstrous and deploying it to achieve certain effects. Yet both Burke's and Aristotle's attempts to differentiate between the tragic and the monstrous rely, in the end, on a notion of 'propriety' which resists formulation. Producing a succession of 'opposite' passions (contempt, laughter, and scorn alternating with indignation, tears, and horror) which 'sometimes mix' but are not suspended in ambivalence and do not cohere, the Revolution apparently fails to produce the 'delightful horror' which characterizes the Burkean sublime. And yet Weiskel's description of the sublime, via Kant, as 'a rapidly alternating repulsion and attraction produced by one and the same Object' (Romantic Sublime, p. 105) is remarkably akin to Burke's attempt here to identify the Revolution as a perversion of the sublime. And if the Revolution opens up an appalling rift between cause and effect, appearance and reality, then we have seen that the sublime's 'semiotic' structure is, precisely, the conventional nature of such relations. Given this - and given Burke's own argument that 'if we attend coolly to the kind of sensible image' produced by the most sublime passages in literature, 'the chimeras of madmen cannot appear more wild and absurd than such a picture' (Enquiry, p. 171) — it seems impossible, in the sublime's own terms, to distinguish the unimaginable from the nonsensical save by a recourse to questions of

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propriety which are themselves problematized by the aesthetic category they are brought in to constrain. It has long been a critical donnee that the Revolution presented itself in theatrical terms.25 Burke's strategy is to rewrite it as tragicomic farce in order to deflate any attempt to restage it in England. Burke's whole project depends, therefore, on the possibility of distinguishing between political forms in terms of good and bad drama.26 Burke himself takes on the role of script writer, director, and principal protagonist against this infectious revolution. According to Peter Hughes, he thereby becomes 'the embodiment of his own notion of the sublime, a dynamic performer we are meant to respond to with fear and wonder. He becomes the chief actor in a drama that he has also staged and written.'27 Yet Burke seems compelled to participate in this 'great crisis' rather than entering it voluntarily, and it becomes impossible to decide whether he is acting or not. The distinction between 'actors' and 'spectators' posited in the letter to Lord Charlemont seems no longer possible. Perhaps no one can remain immune from the Revolution, whether it be infection or inspiration. Nevertheless, Burke also assumes the role of drama critic. As a critical spectator, he represents this jumble of crime and madness as if he were an aloof judge. Yet in doing so he adopts the part of the man of taste whose experience and habit of reasoning precisely prevent him from knowing whether what he views is truly sublime or mere madness (though the very attempt to hold it at one remove indicates the Revolution's affective power). Since a 'rational' view cannot differentiate between Virgil and the hybrid monsters imagined by the mad, Burke is left unable to know whether the Revolution, or his own production of it, is the most sublime or most insane revolution that has hitherto happened. Burke's position in this passage is therefore unstable and contradictory. He presents his description as that of a circumspect observer, yet then stresses that he finds himself'in a great crisis'. He reasons upon the 'most astonishing [revolution] that has hitherto happened in the world',28 yet in the Enquiry tells us that 'astonishment is that state of the soul, in which . . . the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason upon that object which employs it'. If Burke becomes the chief actor in this drama, then he writes and stages it not with complete artistic freedom, but at the behest of the

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double play of his own sublime category. Although, in the Enquiry, that aesthetic category is constituted as being at one and the same time the noxious threat and the defensive reaction, Burke is forced by historical circumstances to try to separate those moments into villain and hero, plague and panacea. As such, his textual discourse is directed and produced by a paradoxical pharmacology. Burke emerges as directed by the textual play of his own text in its interplay with its historical moment; his attempt to limit this play is precisely symptomatic of the possibility that his text is infected through and through by, in Derrida's metaphor, the 'citational play' of the pharmakon. However centre-stage he tries to make the good sublime, its own logic means that it 'cites, re-cites, and makes legible that which in the same word signifies, in another spot and on a different level of the stage, poison' (Derrida, Dissemination, p. 99). I would therefore argue that in presenting the Revolution in this way Burke's risk is precisely that the Revolution might emerge as a sublime movement, an on-going process which threatens, against Burke's best intentions, to mobilize what he notoriously refers to as 'a swinish multitude' (Reflections, p. 173). And yet Burke cannot help but take this risk; he is forced to contest the sublime ground, even though it threatens his whole project. Burke therefore needs to establish a means by which an apparently unequivocal distinction can be made between the sublime and its perversion, the cure and the disease, the counter-revolution and the revolution itself. He does so by the introduction of custom - a third term or supplement which is supposed to guarantee these differences by fusing the sublime and the beautiful with traditional forms and practices in order to ward off the sublime's democratic momentum. But, as my earlier reading of the Enquiry might lead us to expect, we will see that the introduction of this term compounds the problems it is meant to resolve. IMMUNIZING THE SYSTEM AGAINST THE DEMOCRATIC SUBLIME

The most obvious and influential examples of the 'democratic sublime' which appeared in response to the Reflections are to be found in Paine's Rights of Man (1791/2). Paine reads the Reflections as both an expression of personal fear and an attempt to instill that fear into as many influential readers as possible in order to energize a

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defensive counter-revolution. Thus terror becomes both a subjective emotional reaction and a rhetorical device calculated to achieve a certain effect. Paine's suggestion that 'certain . . . persons . . . dread the example of the French Revolution in England' seems particularly acute, as does his description of the Reflections as 'Mr Burke's tribute of fear' {Rights of Man, p. 68). To contest this, Paine attempts to transvalue the Revolution's political and aesthetic status by stressing that, while it is a terror to courts and courtiers, it is a blessing to people in general.29 Thus Paine would distribute the terror and the delight of the Revolution's sublimity between different class positions or political interests. In this textual encounter, then, the sublime is apparently split, however problematically, into its radical and reactionary aspects - each aspect being constituted through viewing the other as a perverted version of itself. Yet to pay attention to the text of Paine's representation of the Revolution in sublime terms is to unsettle the distinction he makes between the Revolution and Burke's false representation of it, and to problematize the opposition between the radical and the reactionary sublime: In the declaratory exordium which prefaces the Declaration of Rights, we see the solemn and majestic spectacle of a Nation opening its commission, under the auspices of its Creator, to establish a Government; a scene so new, and so transcendently unequalled by anything in the European world, that the name of a Revolution is diminutive of its character, and it rises into a Regeneration of man. (Rights of Man, p. 136) The Revolution - or the scene of its writing - is a moment in which a nation raises itself to sublime stature, a moment in which revolution transforms itself into regeneration. But this attempt to displace Burke's 'reactionary' representation of the Revolution seems precisely to repeat many of Burke's crucial terms. Paine's emphasis, for example, on the unprecedented nature of the Revolution as one of the conditions of its sublimity already has its precedent in the Reflections. The emphasis, too, on the Revolution as a 'spectacle' or 'scene' shows how Paine shares Burke's conception of it as a dramatic moment. That he repeats precisely what he repudiates Burke for shows how Paine works within the same paradigms as his adversary - especially when he tries to construe the Revolution as good rather than bad drama. In other words, the democratic or radical sublime seems to be caught up within the same perplexing logic as Burke's; to differentiate between the 'true' sublime of the Revolution and the

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'false' sublime (the arbitrary terror) of traditional governments is to reiterate Burke's central dilemma. Such problems beset Burke's own attempts to puncture Price's use of the democratic sublime. Having sought to establish how 'monstrous' the Revolution is, Burke attacks those who would represent it as genuinely sublime: 'It cannot however be denied, that to some this strange scene appeared in quite another point of view. Into them it inspired no other sentiments than those of exultation and rapture' {Reflections, p. 93). In attempting to neutralize the effects of Price's 'very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon' (Reflections, p. 93), Burke accuses the dissenting minister of affecting himself with his own rhetoric — of passing an emotive fiction upon himself. Burke quotes part of the passage from Price's sermon quoted above in order to describe it as both an outbreak of 'rapture', and a 'stage effect' calculated to arouse the imagination of the preacher 'grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years security' (Reflections, pp. 156— 7). Yet we have seen that to criticize a text for employing stageeffects cannot be used to discredit its aspirations towards the sublime. And Burke's description of Price's Discourse as an autoaffective practice intended to 'tone up' its author's lethargic imaginative fibres makes the effects of Price's sermon exactly like those of the sublime in the Enquiry. In mocking Price's Discourse in these terms, Burke's comments seem an equally apt critique of his own sublime aesthetic as formulated in 1757-9 a n d of his attempt to exploit it in 1790. It is impossible to tell, however, whether Burke's criticism of Price operates to devalue the 'radical' sublime as a mere counterfeit of the 'authentic' sublime, or whether it marks a rejection of the sublime per se. This is partly because Burke seems, at various points, to do both these things, and partly because the problem of distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic sublimity is precisely inherent within the discourse of the sublime. Although Burke says that 'Englishmen' will have nothing to do with revolutionary doctrine whether it be panacea or plague, his text nevertheless incorporates or grafts portions of that doctrine into its own 'body' in order to strengthen its argument (or fortify its constitution). By quoting Price's text, perhaps as a controlled dose of that which it both fears and would become immune to, Burke introduces into the textual body (and the body politic) the very contagion he is trying to expel. Burke is compelled to employ this rhetorical strategy in order to neutralize Dr Price's dangerous

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physic, but thereby thus runs the risk which inoculation was thought to entail in the eighteenth century.30 The potential 'pay-ofF is precisely the therapeutic 'clearing of the parts' promised by the sublime, whose efficacious fiction is to project and then introject an 'external' danger in order to overcome an 'internal' infection. Yet we have seen that the sublime undoes the easy demarcation between inside and outside,31 while the existence of Price's sermon makes it impossible to distinguish what is 'outside' from what has already infiltrated the national body. It is not, then, that Burke 'chooses' to represent the Revolution as sublime (or as a false sublime), but that its discursive production in Britain necessarily precipitates the sublime's distinctive, disturbing, and deconstructive momentum. This is not a chance inclusion of that which Burke would exclude, since the revolutionary impulse is always already within Burke's text. In this way, Burke's problematic attempt to repress and control 'Price' can be read as a response to insurrections at work within the Reflections itself as well as within English society.32 The effects of the textual manoeuvres in the Reflections are potentially opposite to what are generally assumed to be Burke's intentions. Burke counters the delight and admiration which might be stimulated by the radical use of his own aesthetic category by figuring the Revolution as variously a savage terror or a ridiculous fraud. Terror would be expected to stimulate readers' anxiety, keeping the Revolution at one remove, and repressing the revolutionary spirit within England itself, while ridicule would help maintain a certain ironic distance. To deny the Revolution's sublimity, to make it sheer terror because it will not keep its 'distance', might spur Burke's readers to 'recoil' and work to remove it. Yet if the recoil from terror is equivalent to the self-defensive action of the sublime, there is a danger for Burke that his text might generate sublime reading effects - that he will provoke admiration for the Revolution rather than terror. One of the dilemmas which Burke faces, then, is how to impress his readers, and provoke admiration for the Reflections, while deflating his subject matter.33 This is perhaps why Burke's representation of the Revolution often reads like the 'true' sublime. If Burke fails if he 'carries his hearer . . . not to persuasion but to ecstasy',34 the sublime makes it difficult to tell the difference between such effects. The textual instability induced by Burke's confrontation with Price makes it impossible to predict the outcome of any rhetorical strategy. Burke's text seems caught up in

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an inescapable double-bind in which ecstasy and persuasion have contrary effects to those 'intended', each of which seems implicated within and makes urgent the other. The Reflections can therefore be read as if caught up in the same repetitive cycle it would attribute to the Revolution, alternating confusedly between terror and the sublime, delight and ridicule, each immediately compelling its opposite. Forced by Price's text to figure the Revolution in its own aesthetic terms, Burke has to respect a precarious threshold: playing with terror is dangerous precisely because it may always produce delight. DISSEMINATING CONTAGION

In terms of his own theory of language, Burke has learnt to fear the power of words because they can be used for any political end or effect. But in attempting to control the effects of emerging radical discourse, Burke's own text turns out to be a part of that effect, drawing attention to it and fanning the conflagration. The immediate paradoxical impact of the Reflections was to become, as Chandler puts it, 'the occasion of [the English Jacobin movement's] greatest flowering' {Wordsworth's Second Nature, p. 17). The positive stimulus of the Reflections is referred to by many contemporary radical writers, who suggest that it enabled them to perceive the rhetorical strategies of reactionary politics for the first time. Olivia Smith notes, for example, that John Thelwall 'claimed that he did not consciously hold a political position until he read the Reflections'.^ In saying that Burke had written 'the most raving and fantastical, sublime and scurrilous, paltry and magnificent, and in every way most astonishing book ever sent into the world', Thelwall appropriates Burke's own formulations about the Revolution and makes the Reflections itself that astonishing event which produces 'the most opposite passions'.36 In this way the Reflections is made analogous to the Revolution — or to Burke's own representation of it through their common paradoxical effects: both are guilty of impropriety, both violate the proper confines of genre. Burke's rhetoric is turned back upon itself; the effect of his text is said to parallel the effect Burke claims the Revolution had on him. These effects inevitably run beyond Burke's control - for, as Thelwall goes on to claim, the Reflections 'made more democrats, among the thinking part of mankind, than all the works ever written in answer to it'.37

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Thelwall's response to the Reflections was repeated by many radical readers, including the Norwich Society, a radical club whose members praised Burke for initiating the debate 'by which he has opened unto us the dawn of a glorious day'.38 For its radical readers, then, however ironically, the Reflections may even be equated with the French Revolution itself, since both have a common liberating effect. Employing his own theory that it is politically more effective to evoke feelings than to invite reason, Burke loses control of that effect and only amplifies, at least at first, the feelings he would deflate. In setting out to have the last word on what English people feel about the French Revolution and the English constitution, Burke actually opens and energizes a dialogic struggle that would only be repressed by terror in France and terror at home. That Burke's representation of the Revolution does have these unexpected effects is not a matter of chance but of radical readers responding to ideological tensions already inscribed within the Reflections. The contradictions implicit within the aesthetics of the Enquiry are repeated in the Reflections even as Burke attempts to contain them according to the demands of the historical moment. But the ungovernable, multi-accentual logic of the sublime as it is formulated in the Enquiry renders attempts to repress or make it univocal especially problematic - particularly in times of revolutionary crisis.39 Burke emerges as at once the great director of the way the Revolution came to be figured in dominant discourse, and its most astonished spectator drawn into the midst of what he would merely observe. In the following chapter, I want to analyse the central 'scene' of Burke's dramatization of the Revolution in order to begin investigating the ways in which the Reflections might be more 'revolutionary' than at first appears and so able to make more democrats than any of the works written in answer to it.

CHAPTER 6

Stripping the queen: Edmund Burke3s magic lantern show

We have seen that Burke's hostility towards the French Revolution was primarily aroused not by the events of the Revolution themselves but by reading Price's sermon in January 1790.1 Burke's response to the events at Versailles on 5-6 October 1789, which forms the central scene in the Reflections, was therefore a belated one. It was primarily triggered, I suggest, not by the events themselves but by the way Price appeared to represent them as the heroic climax of the people's struggle for liberty in which they led their king 'in triumph'. In order to facilitate the following discussion of Burke's version of the events at Versailles, I quote from Alfred Cobban's vivid account of them: On 5 October women gathered before the Hotel de Ville demanding bread: this was quite normal. Getting no satisfaction the cry was raised - by whom? — that they should make their way to Versailles to appeal to the king. Several thousands set out, gathering numbers as they w e n t . . . At four o'clock in the afternoon the Municipal Council authorized La Fayette to move off with the National Guard, and now there appeared for the first time a definite objective: the king was to be brought back to Paris. With a mixed body of National Guards and others La Fayette set out . . . That evening the main body of the Parisians arrived, settled down for the night as best they could or ranged about the streets of Versailles and the courts of the palace. At early dawn on the next day a few hundred of the demonstrators found a way into the palace, slaughtered some of the royal bodyguard whom they encountered and penetrated nearly to the queen's apartments before they were repulsed. Morning saw serried masses in the courtyard before the palace, now with one cry, 'To Paris!' . . . In the afternoon of 6 October the triumphal procession set out on the muddy march back to Paris - National Guards armed and royal bodyguard disarmed, wagons laden with corn and flour lumbering, market men and women straggling along . . . La Fayette riding alongside the carriage bearing the royal family, also beside them the heads of two of the Royal Guards on pikes . . . and trudging along in the rapidly 138

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falling twilight the dark shapes of thousands of nameless Parisians. At ten o'clock . . . the royal family ... at last reached the Tuileries . . . and camped down in hurriedly cleared rooms as best they could for the night.2 Although some critics have argued that undue emphasis on Burke's treatment of the Versailles episode can lead to misreadings of the Reflections $ and although it takes up only twenty pages in O'Brien's edition (but it is curiously difficult to say where it begins and ends), I am interested in these passages precisely because they have so obsessively preoccupied Burke's readers from Wollstonecraft to the late twentieth century. I want to suggest, in fact, that the account of 5—6 October employs a range of figurative strategies which are characteristic of, as well as eccentric to, the Reflections as a whole. These passages constitute that moment in the Reflections when the interdependence between politics and aesthetics is critical in every sense. The discursive shape which the French Revolution was beginning to assume forces Burke to eulogize a traditional order in France which seems the very embodiment of the beautiful and to condemn a revolution which could be seen as the sublime antidote to the ancien regime's institutionalized luxury. One of the reasons why Burke needs to discredit Price's sermon, then, is that it rearticulates his own assumptions in the Enquiry in order to encourage a political movement which threatened Britain's socio-economic order. In looking at his sustained attempt to deflate Price's 'triumph' I want to concentrate partly on the way Burke seeks to exploit images of threatened female beauty for rhetorical effect and partly on the way his text replicates the rhetorical strategies it repudiates. A close reading of the way the Versailles episode in the Reflections brings the ancien regime and the Revolution into their most intimate confrontation suggests that the strategies of containment which it deploys paradoxically liberate and energize revolutionary impulses which are already at work within Burke's text. Burke's attempt to repress the Revolution is driven by and necessarily reiterates the inescapable contradictions of his historical, ideological, and discursive dilemma. In attempting to neutralize Price's sermon Burke returns again and again to his own version of the events at Versailles, repeating, reinventing, and elaborating upon the atrocities he seeks to contain. Although he admits that the royal couple would probably like to forget these outrages, he records and restages them with an urgency which perhaps bears witness to the way the compromise formation he conjures into existence is

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already fundamentally compromised. By obsessively returning to the scene of that which it seeks to repress, the difference between Burke's text and the 'criminal' text it works to condemn threatens to collapse. Burke attempts to frame his parodies of Price and his terrifying depictions of revolutionary violence through a series of 'injokes' shared with his 'well-born' readers. And yet his subtle use of irony and allusion turns out to mirror the rhetorical ploys which he finds Price guilty of. Contrary to our received wisdom about irony, its use here betrays the fact that Burke can find no way of putting any distance between himself and the Revolution or between himself and Price. As Paul de Man puts it, 'irony is not a figure of selfconsciousness. It's a break, an interruption, a disruption. It is a moment of loss of control, and not just for the author but for the reader as well.'4 Burke's use of ironic finesse in these passages is not a sign of control over the Revolution, over his own text, but precisely the moment when he loses it. The following reading of the Reflections shows how Burke strives to make a partial understanding of political events and processes appear natural (and therefore universal and true). Yet in doing so, Burke deploys the artifices of persuasion in an extraordinarily open way. Thus his discourse seems already possessed by the rhetorical or ideological profanities he ritualistically exorcizes. This precipitates a 'deconstruction' of Burke's text which suggests that its repressions, elisions, contradictions, and figurative lapses, indicate the possibility that the 'disease' which Burke seeks to isolate in Price or in the Revolution is actually endemic to the ideology he works to protect. Thus each of the binary oppositions which shape Burke's thought and which are supposed to differentiate his position from discursive celebrations of the Revolution (male/female, civilized/savage, English/French, canonical/demonic, nature/artifice, good nature/bad nature, liberty/licence, history/theatre, dramatic/theatric, constitutional/revolutionary, and so on) become curiously difficult to maintain. It becomes impossible securely to differentiate the Revolution from Burke's 'reflections' of it/upon it - to know whether the Revolution is 'out there' or 'in here'. This is the uncanny moment and movement of deconstruction. It is also the condition and the effect of the sublime.

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SETTING THE SCENE! BURKE's TRIUMPH OVER RICHARD PRICE

In order to understand why achieving a dominant representation of the Versailles affair was so important to Burke, we need to look again at Price's sermon. While regarding England as one of the few countries which enjoy even a relative degree of freedom, Price suggests that the example of the French Revolution shows that England should not rest on its laurels but continue to improve upon the basis established in 1688. To be worthy of being loved, a country must be one in which truth, virtue, and liberty are continually improving (Discourse, pp. 11—20), and Price insists that this is no longer the case in England. This is demonstrated by the way the people had recently addressed 'the King, on his recovery from the severe illness with which God has been pleased to afflict him' as if they were 'a herd crawling at the feet of a master' (Discourse, p. 22).5 Instead of this they ought to remember that 'a King is no more than the first servant of the public', from whom he derives his 'majesty' (Discourse, pp. 23-4). Rejecting the servile language of the late address, Price would have honoured George III 'as almost the only lawful King in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people' (Discourse, p. 25). This choice derives, Price argues, from the Revolution of 1688, which introduced an 'aera of light and liberty . . . among us, by which we have been made an example to other kingdoms' (Discourse, p.32). But Price suggests that if the people of England are not to forfeit the advantages gained in 1688, they must maintain its principles and extend and improve the blessings it bestowed. He then lists what he considers the chief of those principles: First; The right to liberty of conscience in religious matters. Secondly; The right to resist power when abused. And, Thirdly; The right to chuse our own governors; to cashier them for misconduct; and to frame a government for ourselves. (Discourse, p. 34) Surveying the contemporary state of political life in England, Price is apprehensive that the gains of 1688 are in the process of being lost, primarily because of 'the INEQUALITY OF OUR REPRESENTATION' (Discourse, p. 39). This is why the example of France, with its promise of a 'pure and equal representation' (Discourse, p. 41), is so timely, and why he concludes with the declamation in which, having lived

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to see the French king 'led in triumph, and an arbitrary monarch surrendering himself to his subjects', he feels that he could almost say 'Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation' [Discourse, p. 49).

Price's sermon therefore develops a radical interpretation of 1688 which suggests that the French Revolution is not only like the 'Glorious Revolution' but an improved version of it. Price interprets 1688 as conforming to and confirming Locke's argument that society is a compact which the people can dissolve if any facet of government appears to have broken its part in the compact.6 This interpretation is completely at odds with that which the Whigs elaborated through the eighteenth century, and Burke therefore attacks Price's sermon because 'his doctrines affect our constitution in its vital parts' [Reflections, p. 96). Price's assertion that 'his majesty' is 'the only lawful king in the world, because the only one who owes his crown to the choice of his people' (quoted by Burke, Reflections, p. 96), is said to be 'either . . . nonsense, and therefore neither true nor false, or it affirms a most unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional position' [Reflections, p. 97). This is because English monarchs inherit their crown 'not by election, but by the law' [Reflections, p. 108). Quoting the three principles which Price suggests originated in 1688, Burke refers to them as a 'new, and hitherto unheard-of bill of rights', and claims to speak for 'the body of the people of England' in saying that 'they utterly disclaim it' [Reflections, p. 99). Burke then works to establish the 'correct' interpretation of 1688 by referring to and quoting from parliamentary documents and statute law at some length - 'referring', in Paine's words, 'to musty records and mouldy parchments to prove that the rights of the living are lost, "renounced and abdicated for ever," by those who are now no more' [Rights of Man, p. 67). But although he thus exposes himself to caricature, Burke constructs an image of himself as a knowledgeable and experienced statesman able, in contrast to Price, to discourse about matters not fully discernible to men of other professions. I will examine the paradoxes and perplexities of Burke's forays into these ancient texts (which turn out to be more textual than he might have wished) in a later chapter. At the moment, I wish to concentrate on Burke's engagement with Price. To reinforce the principles he has sought to establish in his legal researches ('to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason'), he figures the threatened English constitution in sublime terms:

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Always acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers, the spirit of freedom, leading in itself to misrule and excess, is tempered with an aweful gravity . . . By this means our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. {Reflections, p . 121).

Having been, in the Enquiry, an aesthetic category in revolt against tradition and authority, with a theoretical ground in the everyday experience of pain and labour, the sublime is now associated with tradition itself. Developing the implications of the Enquiry's linguistic theory, Burke exploits the accumulated associations of history to give the notion of English liberty an aspect it is almost impossible to enquire into or contest. Liberty is no longer experienced through bursting the confines of custom but is embodied and 'tempered' by custom itself. Rather than straining against aristocratic tradition, the sublime finds its concrete emblem in an aristocratic mansion complete with portraits, library, and monuments. Thus aristocratic liberty becomes precisely that which is threatened by radicalism's 'monstrous fiction' {Reflections, p. 124) about liberty and equality. And yet the fact that English liberty is also construed as tempering the 'spirit of freedom' with 'an aweful gravity' perhaps indicates an uneasy compromise. One aspect of the sublime impulse of 1757-9 is yoked with another kind of grandeur in order to moderate or tone down its tendency towards misrule and excess. But if traditional liberty exhibits a tension between misrule and rule, excess and its curb, there is, perhaps, always the possibility that tradition can never fully contain liberty's unruly impulse. Burke's construction of English liberty seems unable to erase the imprint of its oxymoronic ideological burden. Burke's intimation that democratic doctrine might threaten the English constitution in 'its vital parts', and that it has instituted in France a 'confusion [which], like a palsy, has attacked the fountain of life itself {Reflections, p. 137), allows us to understand why Burke is so preoccupied with Price's sermon. Burke engages Price in discursive combat in order to secure the future well-being of the English constitution. To this end, he employs a range of rhetorical strategies designed to identify revolutionary thought as an evil force which erodes nature and the natural. While English liberty is maintained through 'acting as if in the presence of canonized forefathers',

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democratic processes such as those in France are a 'fond election of evil' (Reflections, p. 127). By levelling society, the radicals combat not 'prejudice' but 'nature' and 'pervert the natural order of things'. Revolutionary thought, even though it refers to 'natural' rights and equality, is 'an usurpation on the prerogatives of nature' (Reflections, p. 138). Against Price's image of 'thirty millions of people . . . demanding liberty with a single voice', the National Assembly is presented as a 'profane burlesque and abominable perversion' (Reflections, p. 161) of what ought to be the 'aweful image . . . of the virtue and wisdom of a whole people collected into a focus' (Reflections, p. 127). Burke enters into a theological-cum-political contest with Price, striving to identify him as a false prophet. He 'visibly triumphs' over the dissenting minister (as O'Brien puts it) by exposing parallels between him and the Reverend Hugh Peter, who had ridden, Burke tells us, 'triumphing' before Charles I in 1648, and had said, 'after the commencement of the king's trial . . . " . . . now I may say with old Simeon, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have

seen thy salvation" ' (Reflections, p. 158).7 That Peter was subsequently executed at the restoration for his part in concerting the King's death indicates the message Burke conveys in finding Price - 'a preacher of the gospel' - guilty of prophaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation, commonly called lnunc 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 perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. (Reflections, p. 159) Admonishing Price for the misuse of Simeon's pious prayer on seeing the child Jesus at the Temple (Luke 2: 25-30), and for straying from his trade by introducing politics into the pulpit, Burke implies that the dissenting minister does not even know his own trade and sets out to correct him. Yet although he criticizes Price's 'prophanation' of a sacred text, Burke's presentation of it as exploiting the affective connotations of one context by applying them to another is curiously similar to his own account in the Enquiry of how 'compounded abstract' words may be used to powerful effect: 'These words, by having no application, ought to be unoperative; but when words commonly sacred to great occasions are used, we are affected by them even without the occasions' (Enquiry, p. 166). Burke's early

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aesthetics therefore makes the discrimination between appropriate uses of sacred texts awkwardly problematic. And yet the only recourse open to the Reflections is to invoke notions of propriety. Burke needs to show that Price errs in 'applying' sacred words to the wrong place, because in so doing he reveals himself as unfit to be a preacher of the gospel - unfit because by profaning the most sacred of texts he declares himself outside the temple, 'not initiated into the religious rites or sacred mysteries' (OED). In this struggle, Burke is not averse to employing the same tactics (the application of images commonly sacred to great occasions for ideological effect) for which he condemns Price. Burke seeks to discredit Price's representation of the people's 'triumph' at the leading of their monarch by ostensibly presenting what really happened: After they had been made to taste, drop by drop, more than the bitterness of death, in the slow torture of a journey 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 Bastille for kings. (Reflections,

P- l6 5)

Yet the emotive impact of this arises, Hughes argues, through the way it transforms 'the incidents at Versailles and during the return to Paris into a parodied allusion, but a sacred parody, of Christ's via dolorosa, of the Way of the Cross'.8 If this is so, the technique used to elicit sympathy for the monarchs' suffering is only distinguishable from Price's 'triumph' over them in that the former is supposed to be sacred, while the latter is supposed to be profane. Earlier in the Reflections, Price's sermon is said to be a witch's brew - 'a very extraordinary miscellaneous sermon, in which there are some good moral and religious sentiments . . . 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' (Reflections, p. 93). This prepares the ground for Burke's depiction of the Revolution itself as a demonic ritual celebrated by a profane preacher. Leading the procession from Versailles, Burke has the heads of 'two gentlemen . . . stuck upon spears', and the whole train 'slowly [moving] 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

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women' (Reflections, p. 165).9 Thus the nunc dimittis is shown to have been applied to a scene which re-enacted pagan orgies: Is this a triumph to be consecrated at altars? to be commemorated with grateful thanksgiving? to be offered to the divine humanity with fervent prayer and enthusiastick ejaculation? - The 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 . . . (Reflections, p. 165)

The very energy with which Burke repeatedly returns to this scene in order to dictate the tasteful or 'English' response to it is striking: 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 stupified and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages . . . 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 ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation . . . (Reflections, p. 159)

Burke works, then, to deflate Price's 'triumph' by replacing his false similes with ones which indicate what it more nearly resembled. In doing so, he seeks to equate the radical sublime with savage terror which is driven home by the exemplary responses of the several 'English' scripted into the audience. Burke is also, of course, appealing to a class interest: the 'well-born', blessed with 'moral taste', are shown what 'the people' are capable of if they were given their liberty. Compounding the horror is an 'unnatural' blurring of gender - we will meet these 'savage' women, indistinguishable from savage men, again. The 'correct' response to this 'triumph', then, depends upon the assumption of an 'authentic' subjectivity - male rather than female, civilized rather than savage, Christian rather than profane, well-born rather than of the lower orders, English rather than French. But apart from the problem of distinguishing a 'stupified and indignant' response from that produced by or appropriate to the 'genuine' sublime, this passage relies upon a potentially fragile demarcation between a 'savage' procession and 'the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation'. That this triumph must shock the well-born mind, reminds us that the eighteenth-century sublime,

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though it may seem to hark back to the rigours and dangers of precivilized life, is pre-eminently an aesthetic of highly 'civilized' societies and of the leisured classes within them. While being in one sense nostalgic for the 'savage', the sublime is a mode by which bourgeois society defines itself through the exclusion of the 'barbarous' past. Yet the sublime can also be read as the return of that which polite commerce represses within itself and which structures its own ethos. If the Revolution represents a return to barbarity, it seems simply to foreground that which is already latent within the ideological formation it overturns. And if the terror of 'civilized' war is, as Kant suggests, an ultimate necessity for civilized societies if they are not to degenerate through the softening effects of civilization itself, then civilization can only maintain itself through ways which are awkwardly akin to 'savagery'. If, in later texts on France, Burke preaches 'total' war against the revolutionary republic — which, as O'Brien puts it, 'will be more cruel than any past warfare' (O'Brien, p. 61) - he justifies this because, 'having destroyed . . . all the other manners and principles which have hitherto civilized Europe, [the Revolution] will destroy also the mode of civilized war, which, more than any thing else, has distinguished the Christian world'.10 In a curious and revealing way, then, Burke becomes a prophet and advocate of a mode of warfare associated with the savage and the revolutionary. Only 'manners' distinguish the Christian world and its way of making war from savagery. In defining the civilized subject's reaction to this 'triumph', Burke not only dictates the fitting response of English men and women to the Revolution, but also that of the National Assembly. Burke 'must believe' that the members 'must' feel as he does, and that they had no part in directing the authors and actors of these events: This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe that, as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and 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 ... {Reflections, p. 159)

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. {Reflections, pp. 161-2)

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If the Revolution Society is supposed to represent the extreme French spirit within England, the moderate members of the National Assembly to whom Burke appeals represented an 'English' tendency within revolutionary France. One of the disturbing aspects of the October insurrection is therefore that, in George Rude's analysis, it destroyed 'the influence of [this] conservative "English Party" within the Assembly'.11 For Burke, then, the events of 5-6 October rehearse in a particularly pointed fashion the outcome of such a revolutionary movement in England. The National Assembly, impotent to control or even properly investigate such outrages as those of 5-6 October, emerges as the 'captive' of a 'monstrous' portion of the public rather than as a representative assembly of the French nation. Its members, being 'under the terror of the bayonet, and the lamp-post. . . are obliged to adopt all the crude and desperate measures suggested by clubs composed of a monstrous medley of all conditions, tongues, and nations' (Reflections, p. 160). Subjected to the same popular terror as the king and queen, the National Assembly is thus not governing but governed. In these Babel-like clubs all proper distinctions between ranks, languages, and national boundaries are monstrously subverted. This leads, in Burke's text, not to better government but to the terror of the crowd and to radical disorders in political and discursive representation. Given such a situation, where a certain section of the populace have illegitimately usurped power, the Assembly's role can only be a theatrical one (in the derogatory sense of the term): The Assembly, their organ, acts before [the people] 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. (Reflections, p. 161)

All the conventional codes of politics and theatre are 'inverted' here: the electorate direct the elective body, the audience take their seats upon the political stage and subvert the customary relation between gallery and house. His very need to present this as farce, however, suggests how disturbing such disruptions of the 'proper' relations between representative bodies and 'the people' might be for Burke.

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Yet the only recourse open to him is the precarious one of relying on an absolute distinction between proper and improper theatre. Although he represents himself as having been initially 'at a loss to account for [Price's] fit of unguarded transport', Burke claims that by taking 'one circumstance' into 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 Tor all the BISHOPS to be hanged on the lampposts', might well have brought forth a burst of enthusiasm on the foreseen consequences of this happy day ... I allow this prophet to break forth into hymns of joy and thanksgiving on an event which appears like the precursor of the Millenium, and the projected fifth monarchy, in the destruction of all church establishments. {Reflections, pp. 165-6) Thus, for the second time in a few pages, Burke draws on English memories of the fusion of political radicalism and unorthodox religious sects in order ironically to deflate his adversary (the Fifth Monarchists, by attempting to overturn Cromwell's parliament and so reduce England to anarchy, had sought to induce the longawaited Second Coming).12 Exploiting the emotive power of yet more religious allusions, Burke suggests that Price's congregation, 'in the midst of this joy', have something 'to try the long-suffering of their faith' (in waiting for Christ's second appearance): 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 ejaculations, was also wanting. A groupe of regicide and sacriligious 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. {Reflections, p. 166) In this passage Burke ironically reverses the story of Herod by suggesting that what was lacking from the events at Versailles was the final sign of the Second Coming - that is, the murder of the king by the populace. By deploying the affective connotations of sacred texts in this way, Burke seems therefore to participate once again in the rhetorical 'perversions' and 'prophanities' he condemns. That his representation of Price's sacrilegious techniques is also an accurate description of his own rhetorical theory and practice suggests how crucial yet precarious Burke's critique of Price is. Burke's recourse to notions

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of religious decorum suggests that he can differentiate his own textual processes from Price's only through an appeal to custom. And yet if custom itself is arbitrary, this distinction becomes not one of spiritual substance (if there could be such a thing) but a question of ideological hegemony. Burke is struggling to defend a particular set of customs as practised in an historically specific socio-religious system, and does so by presenting them as both natural and sacred. Yet his own text suggests that the canonical and the evil, the pious and the sacrilegious, the constitutional and the revolutionary, exist not as opposites but as aspects of one another whose values are arbitrarily assigned by authority rather than according to some essential quality. Precisely because of this, however, the constitutional position needs aggressively to define itself by repudiating its 'other' — especially in times of revolutionary crisis. Burke's text, then, seems both energized and compromised by the opposing tendencies of the terms it is compelled to wield in this battle of books. Burke supports his account of the 'Io Paean' by referring to 'a letter written upon this subject by an eyewitness' (Reflections, p. 166), but for Paine this mention of the call to hang the bishops is the concluding evidence that Burke's account is spectacle rather than history: 'Mr Burke brings forward his bishops and his lantern like figures in a magic lantern, and raises his scenes by contrast instead of connexion' (Rights of Man, p. 86). Burke's veracity is further called into question, however, in that Price subsequently claimed, in prefatory remarks added to later editions of the sermon, to have been referring not to the events of 6 October but to the quite different 'escorted' journey from Versailles to Paris in July. 13 Burke never changed his attack on Price, perhaps because he did not accept Price's disclaimer. But whatever the truth of the matter, any celebration, after 5-6 October, of the French people's 'triumph' over their king could not help but refer to the terrifying scenes at Versailles. This was a weakness in Price's position, and Burke was not averse to capitalizing upon it. He seems not to have been concerned with historical accuracy but with establishing a dominant representation of the Revolution, and such attention to detail finds no place in his own aesthetic theory of how language may be used most effectively to influence opinion. The Reflections, then, emerges as a representation of the Revolution which abandons the 'reflection' theory of representation, relinquishing any direct relation between representation and 'object' or 'event' represented. As Paine puts it,

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'it suits his purpose to exhibit the consequences without their causes. It is one of the arts of the drama to do so' {Rights of Man, p. 82). That Burke never withdrew or qualified his attack on Price indicates how important it was for him to 'triumph' over the dissenting minister and so win the struggle for English opinion. In the Reflections - which makes little mention of the fall of the Bastille the events of 5-6 October are the Revolution, and Burke's case succeeds or falls according to his success or otherwise in persuading the English public to accept his representation of them rather than Price's. To withdraw his attack on Price would have involved withdrawing the Reflections itself because the whole text pivots around this central scene. Everything else in the Reflections depends upon the effective power of this attack on the Revolution and on the Revolution Society's enthusiasm for it. THE RISE AND FALL OF MARIE ANTOINETTE

Although Burke's eulogy of Marie Antoinette in the Reflections consists of only a couple of paragraphs, its place and role in Burke's attack on the French Revolution is crucial.1* Out of context, the apostrophe can appear as a quixotic vignette in praise of a figure regarded by most of'the world' as a 'fallen woman'.^ Indeed, the passage was one of those most frequently reprinted in contemporary newspapers and became the butt of many caricatures.16 In its context, however, the eulogy functions as the emotional and political climax of Burke's version of the events at Versailles. By allowing Burke to expose the civilized but vulnerable beauty of the ancien regime to the 'barbarity' of democratic terror, the eulogy serves to condemn as criminal any suggestion that the Revolution might be imitated in England in order to protect or extend its 'liberty'. At the same time, however, this encounter underlines the paradoxical importance Burke ascribes to aristocratic beauty, since we will see that it is both the most fragile aspect of the ancien regime and - in the form of a set of 'pleasing illusions' - a potential defence against revolution. Burke's representation of these events, then, presses into service the affective power of the beautiful as well as the sublime. Having established the savagery of the triumphal procession to Paris, Burke switches attention to the preceding events at Versailles, where, according to his account, the king and queen had been 'forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world,

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which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcases' (Reflections, p. 164).J7 Although 'the king of France will probably endeavour to forget' these events, 'history, who keeps a durable record of all our acts . . . will not forget, either those events, or the aera of this liberal refinement in the intercourse of mankind' (Reflections, pp. 163—4). 'History will record', and Burke is compelled to relate, that the queen of France was 'startled' from her sleep on the morning of 6 October 1789, by the voice of the centinel 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 an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, from whence this persecuted woman had but just time toflyalmost naked ... to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of his own life for a moment. (Reflections, p. 164) In fact, 'history' has not had much more to go on than Burke or Paine when they produced their rival accounts. George Rude suggests that the Chatelet inquiry, published March 1790, 'far from throwing a bright light into dark corners . . . served effectively as a smoke-screen to divert attention from the real authors of the October "days" '. Although 'fresh light' has been brought to the episode by recent historians it remains 'in some respects . . . more shrouded in mystery than any other similar event of the Revolution'.18 Several of the key images of Burke's account remain controversial: Kramnick cites the eyewitness account of Madame de la Tour du Pin which is at variance with several of the most emotive details of Burke's passage; Pocock notes that Burke's son actually met the 'dead' centinel 'at Coblentz among the emigres in 1791 and wrote in some amusement to his father'; Cobban's account of the incident implies that none of the demonstrators penetrated beyond the queen's antechamber; and Paulson says that there is 'no evidence of Marie Antoinette's fleeing "almost naked" '.J9 Drawing on Kramnick's psychobiographical reading of Burke, Paulson argues that Burke produces this scene through a horror of the event's Oedipal connotations which map directly onto his ideological concerns: 'we see Burke opposing a vigorous ("active"), unprincipled, rootless masculine sexuality, unleashed and irrepressible, against a gentle aristocratic family, patriarchal and based on

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the bonds of love' {Representations of Revolution, p. 62).2O But what Kramnick misses, Paulson argues, is that this psycho-ideological motive force is combined, as we have seen, with a use of 'extremely conventional literary elements . . . which derive from the polemics of the English Civil War and its aftermath, in which religious enthusiasm leads to the unleashing of sexual drives and/or the overturning of government' {Representations of Revolution, p. 65). Exactly what the relation might be between psychological trauma and conventional literary elements is left as a problem to be investigated, while Oedipal connotations are more easily discerned: 'when you strip the queen, you expose the principle of equality, but you also prove your masculinity in relation to the king (the "father" of his people . . .). You pierce the queen's bed "with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards" as a surrogate for the queen herself {Representations of Revolution, p. 61). Burke therefore exposes his terror here — but also his delight — in this re-enactment of a primal scene. But this is perhaps a too beguilingly 'obvious' reading. For if the 'brutal sensuality of the ragged mob derives, of course, from memories of the sexual license traditionally detected under the idealistic claims as the real motivating force of the radical Protestant sects' {Representations of Revolution, p. 61), whose 'memories' are referred to? — and how are they constructed? If this is a 'traditional' notion, 'generally' held at least by particular sectors of English society, how can we distinguish between Burke's 'trauma', the influence on his rhetoric of certain ideological cliches, and his own exploitation of those cliches? Burke did not, of course, entirely invent the scene, Hughes reveals how Burke's account of 5—6 October draws on the report in the Gazette Nationale ou Le Moniteur Universel of 12 October (though the

Moniteur had suggested that it was the royalists who had orgiastically denied the palace). Hughes does claim, though, that Burke's 'most brilliant and theatrical touches, the phallic thrusts into the queen's bed and her near naked and hair's breadth escape', are his own inventions ('Originality and Allusion', p. 39). This is not entirely the case, however; like any dramatist of the period, Burke bases his 'inventions' on a number of prior 'sources'. The Times of 13 October presents Burke with a ready-made reactionary account of the incident at Versailles, reporting that 'in the dead of the night a party of the troops and mob forced their way into the Palace to the Antichamber of the QUEEN'S apartment: the noise was so sudden, that her Majesty ran trembling to the KING'S apartment with only

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her shift on'. In its report the day before, the Times informed its readers that 'At this moment, the fate of Europe depends on the actions - of A BARBAROUS and UNRESTRAINED MOB! - a mob which has shown itself so licentious, that the country which claims it, blushes at its cruelties. The MURDER of the QUEEN has been attempted in the dead of night.'21 While Burke was still coolly observing the Revolution and reasoning about its outcome, then, the Times was preparing the materials for and drafting his 'primal' scene. When he does come to represent the Revolution negatively in the Reflections, Burke simply exaggerates and dramatizes, for the most part, these already histrionic counter-revolutionary reports: the queen 'in her shift' becomes 'almost naked', while the assassins get beyond the antechamber and penetrate to the queen's bed chamber the structure of Burke's sentence giving the illusion that she is still in her bed as they begin to pierce it with 'an hundred strokes' of their weapons. The Reflections reworks not the event itself but a prior representation of that event; rather than undergoing a psychic convulsion, Burke refashions a discursive construction of 5-6 October which is already cast in Oedipal figures. Burke's 'historical record' emerges, then, as a theatrical production based on a set of discursive interpretations and designed to deflate the impact of a rival production. Burke's distinction between his own historical veracity and the theatricality of revolutionary rhetoric - a distinction vital to his ideological project - thus threatens to collapse in its most critical moment. But Burke's dramatization of this day's events, and of his own reactions to them, seems peculiarly compelled and unsettled by its own figurations (especially the multiple 'rape' of the queen's bed). He claims in one moment that 'I knew, indeed, that the sufferings of monarchs make a delicious repast to some sort of palates', but that there 'were reflexions which might serve to keep this appetite within some bounds of temperance' {Reflections, p. 165). Yet his text oversteps these bounds in the very moment when it sets them, whetting the 'appetite' he condemns. Far from desisting, Burke represents himself as unable to resist 'confessing' that the intensity of his response to the queen's experiences (as he represents them) derives from her sex and social rank: 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

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particularly the sex, the beauty, and the amiable qualities [of the French queen] . . . instead of being a subject of exultation, adds not a little to my sensibility on that most melancholy occasion. (Reflections, p. 168) Burke's comic irony here should not be allowed to mask the ways this reponse draws on his aesthetic treatise. In refusing to exult over the fall of the exalted — the slave's triumph over the master or mistress — Burke appears to refuse the sublimity of revolution and take refuge in sensibility. In the apostrophe which this confession announces, Burke writes that he rejoices to hear that the great lady . . . has borne that day (one is interested that beings made for suffering should suffer well) . . . 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 . . . 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 ignoble hand. (Reflections, p. 169)

If Burke's inborn feelings 'naturally' present Marie Antoinette's situation in conventional stage images, he presumably relies on readers' own inborn feelings to distinguish these images from the Revolution's travesty of the dramatic arts. Yet the language's very decorum (rape is 'the last disgrace') plays upon the possibility of the queen's rape in the moment it pays court to her.22 Burke's effect depends upon a shared set of social customs whose violation is calculated, here, to produce universal horror. Yet, as Burke admits, such conventions may be 'shared' in radically different ways — to the 'lower orders' such an account of the queen's demise might prove a delightful 'repast'. In addition, Burke's exploitation of the emotive possibilities of rape is perhaps symptomatic of an implicit aggression towards (aristocratic) women operating within this 'chivalric' text and within decorum itself. After all, it is Burke's text, rather than the revolutionary 'mob', which exposes the queen to 'the last disgrace' in order to activate its rhetorical resonance. The apostrophe reaches its climax with Burke recalling his personal experience of meeting Marie Antoinette as an eighteenyear-old Dauphine at Versailles in 1773:23 It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely 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

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joy. Oh! What a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! (Reflections, p. 169) This image of Marie Antoinette works both to exemplify the proper response to royal female beauty (allowing Burke to appear as an exemplary subject) and to present an image of beauty in distress and so underline the barbarity of the Revolution. Boulton points out that, by dwelling on the effect of Marie Antoinette's beauty rather than attempting to describe it, Burke follows his own advice in the Enquiry about the best way to affect readers. Burke's exemplary instance of this is Homer's presentation of Helen of Troy's beauty through the impact it has on those who observe it (Enquiry, pp. 171— 2) — though if the passage in the Iliad is an example of the beautiful at its most intense, we should also remember that Burke refers to Helen's beauty as 'fatal' to the body politic. 'Oh! What a revolution!' Burke laments, referring to the political revolution embodied in the overthrow of the queen, but also allowing the planetary dauphine her own celestial change. Burke's pun therefore emphasizes how the revolutionaries' treatment of Marie Antoinette represents the subversion of natural, cyclical patterns of change by violent overthrow or fall - a revolution which the term 'revolution' itself underwent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.24 In his eulogy of Marie Antoinette, then, Burke seems intent on pointing up the contrast between the beauties of celestial cycles and the apocalyptic terrors of the French Revolution. Dramatizing his own response, Burke exclaims 'what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!' having the queen literally 'fall' from her 'elevation' above the horizon or floor. Yet the reference to that 'fall' leads back again to the ambiguous images of rape and suicide ('if she will fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand') taken from the Roman, Shakespearean, and chivalric stage: 'Little did I dream . . . 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' (Reflections, pp. 169-70). Burke fantasizes that the queen carries her own 'sharp antidote' against the Revolution's threatened breach of decorum — a weapon concealed, suggestively, in 'that bosom'. The 'disasters' that threaten her develop both the cosmological and the sexual imagery, yet such 'disas-

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ters' were thought to have already 'fallen' upon the queen at the hands of the French court - Marie Antoinette being rumoured, by some of those 'men of honour', to have taken lovers from among those 'gallant men'.25 Thus these textual tensions in the Reflections need to be seen in relation to those discourses of the period in which Marie Antoinette's sexuality was constructed. The Reflections decorously excludes these constructions, perhaps because they would complicate the clear-cut distinctions Burke seeks to delineate between revolutionary terror and aristocratic beauty. And yet that exclusion leaves its traces and produces its own tensions. Phillip Francis (who was allowed to see the Reflections as it progressed in manuscript) reminds Burke that the 'opinion of the world [about the French queen's virtue] is not lately but has been many years decided' (Francis to Burke, Correspondence vi, p. 87). The queen was therefore thought to have already 'fallen' at her own hand long before the Revolution. It is not, then, that the Revolution comes to despoil a chivalric reality but a 'dream' of chivalry. Burke's text - like Don Quixote - seems only able to maintain that dream by excluding the sexual intrigue and the implicit fear of women which structures the chivalric code. And yet this intrigue and fear seem to return uncontrollably within the language of Burke's most chivalric passage, since the courtly apostrophe, couched in the language of decorum, is precisely that moment in the Reflections in which Burke's language - through the play of double entendre and innuendo — most explicitly exploits, and is exposed to, the radical disjunction between language and 'event' or 'object'. Burke's language reveals itself as an 'inflated' or bombastic prose whose index is precisely the disjunction between the figure he celebrates and the earth she floats above.26 In advising Burke, Francis's main apprehension was that the apostrophe to Marie Antoinette might endanger the principal object of the Reflections — which he saw as undertaking 'to correct and instruct another Nation, and . . . appeal in effect to all Europe' (Correspondence, vn, p. 86). (In this Francis failed to see that Burke's appeal was not to France or to Europe but to England, and that the apostrophe was central to that appeal; his apprehensions allow us to see, however, how Burke's text at once depends upon and is endangered by the eulogy to the French queen.) Because of the high seriousness of this end, Burke ought not to leave himself vulnerable to attacks from 'Doctor Price':

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Let every thing you say be grave, direct and serious ... all manner of insinuation is improper, all jibe and nickname prohibited. In my opinion all that you say of the Queen is pure foppery. If she be a perfect female character you ought to take your ground upon her virtues. If she be the reverse it is ridiculous in any but a Lover, to place her personal charms in opposition to her crimes . . . On this subject, however, you cannot but know that the opinion of the world is not lately but has been many years decided . . . are you such a determined Champion of Beauty as to draw your Sword in defense of any jade upon Earth provided she be handsome? . . . The mischief you are going to do to yourself is, to my apprehension, palpalable. It is visible. It will be audible. I snuff it in the wind. I taste it already. (Francis to Burke, Correspondence, vi, pp. 86—7) Burke responds to Francis by saying that he is 'astonish'd' that he could have thought that Marie Antoinette's beauty, by then 'I suppose pretty much faded', was his only reason for condemning her treatment at Versailles: 'What, are not high Rank, great Splendour of descent, great personal Elegance and outward accomplishments ingredients of moment in forming the interest we take in the Misfortunes of Men?5 (Burke to Francis, Correspondence, vi, pp. 89-90). As to the queen's reputation, Burke chivalrously says that he cannot suspend his 'Natural Sympathies . . . until the Tales and all the anecdotes of the Coffeehouses of Paris and of the dissenting meeting houses of London are scoured of all the slander' {Correspondence, vi, pp. 89—90). His main object had been 'to excite an horrour against midnight assassins at back stairs, and their more wicked abetters in Pulpits', and to 'expose them to the hatred, ridicule, and contempt of the whole world' (Correspondence, vi, pp. 90, 92). In order to achieve this he had endeavoured to interest others in the suffering of the king and queen in the same way that he had himself given way to the sentiments Euripides had wished to excite in the readers of the tragedy of Hecuba (Correspondence, vi, p. 90). In answer to Hamlet's question about why the Player can be so passionate over Hecuba's death (Hamlet, 11, ii, 569-70), Burke responds rhetorically: Why because she was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, the Wife of Priam, and suffered in the close of Life a thousand Calamities. I felt too for Hecuba when I read the fine Tragedy of Euripides upon her Story: and I never enquired into the Anecdotes of the Court or City of Troy before I gave way to the Sentiments which the author wished to inspire; nor do I remember that he ever said one word of her Virtues. (Correspondence, vi, p. 90)

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In effect, Burke is suggesting that sympathy and compassion ought to be aroused not by a consideration of the person's character, nor by the fact that they share the human condition, but by their social and political position, by their 'high Rank, great Splendour of descent, great personal Elegance and outward accomplishments'. These considerations not only outweigh all others, but preclude any enquiry into character or virtue. His unquestioning admiration of and sympathy for the queen of France is therefore emblematic of the attitude he is trying to foster towards political institutions - which should also be venerated and loved without the kind of enquiry which might strip them of their splendour and discover their 'defects'. And yet Burke's rejoinder to Hamlet is particularly apposite and revealing. If Burke says that 'the minds of those who do not feel' as he feels 'are not even Dramatically right' (Correspondence, vi, p. 90), Shakespeare uses the tragedy of Hecuba in order to analyse the emotive power of drama. In Hamlet's assessment, Hecuba can mean 'nothing' to the Player; and the fact that the Player can work himself up into a passion is a 'monstrous' witness (Hamlet, 11, ii, 561) of the power of dramatic language to affect human passions in an arbitrary fashion. Hamlet, on the other hand, who has a genuine 'motive and . . . cue for passion' (571), can find no 'authentic' means of expressing them because language is always already theatrically prostituted (597-8). While Burke wants to suggest that there is a direct correspondence between our response to suffering in the theatre and in reality, the passage which he refers to in Hamlet suggests that there need be no relation at all. To ask that his readers respond to the suffering of Marie Antoinette as if she were a dramatic character is consistent with Burke's theory of the theatrical nature of political figures and institutions, but the particular example he chooses to justify this challenges his argument that there is a correspondence between responses to 'proper' theatre and reactions to events in 'real life'. More serious still for Burke, however, is that Hamlet's insight into the arbitrary yet powerful effects of words is precisely Burke's own theory about language in the Enquiry. If Burke allowed himself to dwell upon the consequences of this for his own ideological position he would become as perplexed as Hamlet himself in trying to untangle authentic from inauthentic theatre, constitutional from revolutionary rhetoric. That is perhaps why, unlike Hamlet, Burke's Reflections judiciously avoids and deflects attempts to enquire into the 'natural order of things'.

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Since, according to the Enquiry, the most effective way of evoking a woman's beauty and of moving a reader is to represent one's own emotions towards it (no matter that the emotion and the beauty were those of sixteen or seventeen years previously), Burke can answer Francis's criticism of the passage in the Reflections as follows: I tell you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the Queen of France in the year 1774 and the contrast between that brilliancy, Splendour, and beauty, with the prostrate Homage of a Nation to her, compared with the abominable Scene of 1789 which I was describing did draw Tears from me and wetted my Paper. These Tears came again into my Eyes almost as often as I lookd at the description. They may again. You do not believe this fact, or that these are my real feelings, but that the whole is affected, or as you express it, 'downright Foppery'. (Correspondence, vi, P- 90 If Burke claims that he is repeatedly affected to tears by his apostrophe to the queen, O'Brien informs us that 'a correspondent of Burke's later reported to him that the passage had been brought to the attention of Marie Antoinette in her captivity: "who before she had read half the Lines she Burst into a Flood of Tears and was a long Time before she was sufficiently composed to peruse the remainder" '.2? If we accept these statements - and Burke gains no public advantage by lying to Francis - then we are presented with the curious phenomenon that reading the apostrophe moved both its author and its central protagonist to tears (perhaps because, like the Player, they momentarily identified with the 'part' rather than the 'reality'). This says nothing, however, about Burke's feelings for Marie Antoinette outside the writing and reading of the apostrophe. In fact, it seems that Burke is moved by his own rhetoric to sentiments quite at odds with those of other discursive moments. For instance, the editors of Burke's Correspondence point out that not all of his letters adopt the attitude towards the queen which he displays in the Reflections and defends in his letter to Francis: One effect of Burke's contact with the emigres was to intensify his private criticism, which did not appear in his published works, of the unhappy King and Queen of France. His correspondence shows that his public eulogies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were far from representing his true opinion . . . Burke's distrust of Marie Antoinette, despite the rhapsody in the Reflections, was profound. He had been touched to know that when the

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famous passage about her was read to the Queen she burst into afloodof tears, but he shared the [emigres'] prejudices . . . against her. (Cobban and Smith, Introduction, Correspondence, vi, p. xvi) But whatever his 'true opinion' or feelings were, Burke interestingly emerges here as a sentimental victim of his own dramatic spectacle; for, despite his attempt to answer Hamlet's question, we may still ask what is Marie Antoinette to Burke, or he to Marie Antoinette, that he should weep for her? Like Wordsworth attempting to feel and touch the dread of the September Massacres after the event, Burke seems to have 'wrought upon' himself through the labour of a rhetoric 'conjured up from tragic fictions' (Prelude (1805), x, 38-82). This, indeed, is the opinion of Burke's first critics; for Paine (echoing Burke's criticism of Price), the Reflections is a series of'tragic paintings by which Mr Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his reader' (Rights of Man, p. 71). In the Reflections, Burke rhetorically asks (in order to answer) why he responds so differently than Dr Price to these events: For this plain reason - because it is natural that 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 tremendous uncertainty of human greatness . . . because in events like these our passions instruct our reason; because when kings are hurl'd from their thrones by the Supreme Director of this great drama ... we behold such disasters in the moral, as we should behold a miracle in the physical order of things. We are alarmed into reflexion; our minds (as it has long since been observed) are purified by terror and pity; our weak unthinking pride is humbled . . . (Reflections, p. 175)

Burke invokes the authority of Aristotle's theory of tragic drama here, but he is equally drawing on his own theory of the sublime developed in the Enquiry. Since the aesthetic experience of the sublime is supposedly based in physiology, we necessarily respond to the fate of the French monarchs in the same way Burke does because that is how we are made. Such terror ought therefore to inspire us with fear for our own mortality and 'purify' our minds; our passions instruct (or anticipate) our reason, and we are alarmed into reflection. Thus it seems that the overwhelming effect of the sublime's second phase is now employed for moral instruction and purification - there is no third phase here, no proud flight but rather a humbling of our pride. But to point to Burke's dramatic metaphors in order to suggest

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that he is talking about art not nature is to be anticipated by Burke himself. For Burke, there is, or ought to be, no difference between our response to theatre and to reality: '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' (Reflections, p. 175). The difference between theatre and real life is collapsed in the text's very language: Indeed the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches, where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets, who have to deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavelian policy, whether applied to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would reject them on the modern, as they once did on the antient stage . . . No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne, in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day; a principle actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors . . . (Reflections, p. 176)

Burke, then, attempts to ground the proper response to theatre in nature - in 'the moral constitution of the heart' and in our 'natural impulses'. In a suggestive way, however, the theatre becomes one of the best schools 'of moral sentiments'; the moral constitution of the heart knows how to respond to the theatre because it has been schooled there, rather than in the 'school of the rights of men'. If this is so, the human constitution which causes us to respond with melancholy sentiments to the 'real tragedy' of political events turns out to be made in the theatre rather than by nature. The difference between good and bad drama, then, can only be decided in theatrical terms rather than by appealing to nature (in fact, the appeal to 'nature' turns out to be an appeal to one school of theatre rather than another). The distinction between nature and artifice (which is meant to correspond to a fundamental difference between Burke's politics and French radicalism) therefore reveals itself as an unstable distinction between proper theatre and superficial theatricality. In fact, Burke's aesthetic theory offers little comfort for his political dilemma here. In the Enquiry, the sublime - however much Burke tries to ground it in the physical properties of the object and

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the physiological make-up of the nervous system — always reads like a moment of theatre. Indeed, the sublime is a drama that needs to suspend disbelief or it may collapse into comedy or madness. In addition, the natural object in Burke's treatise attains its greatest sublimity when presented through particular kinds of verbal description. Thus the criteria of sublimity are not physiological but theatrical and rhetorical. And since the sublime resources of language derive from its arbitrary relation to ideas and/or reality, the only way of discriminating between genuine and false sublimity is through convention, propriety, decorum. But since these are themselves arbitrary — the constructions of a particular class (social group and/or mode of schooling) used to promote an historically specific hegemony as 'natural' - then Burke's attempt to distinguish between his own and Price's dramatization of the events of 5—6 October reduces to the question of who controls the criteria. The ironic aspect of this is that Burke cannot control the effects of his own theatrical account of 5-6 October. Variously producing admiration, irritation, ridicule, laughter, and tears, the effects of Burke's apostrophe - supposedly the centrepiece of the Reflections and of his political philosophy and aesthetic theory - thus come to resemble his own representation of the French Revolution's contradictory and incongruous effects. Attempting to deflect the revolutionary urge by contrasting the queen's beauty with the unlicensed terror of the revolutionary mob, Burke's text turns out to be unexpectedly complicit with the exposure of that beauty to that terror. At the same time, Burke exposes himself, or is exposed, as a ridiculous lover of a queen and ideology that are themselves exposed to ridicule through his equivocal overtures.

CHAPTER 7

A revolution in manners: chivalry and political economy

Cora Kaplan argues that instabilities of class and gender, opened up by republican and liberal political philosophy at the end of the eighteenth century, became the central concern of a range of bourgeois discourses in the nineteenth century. In the novel, for example, The language of class . . . Obsessively inscribes a class system whose divisions and boundaries are at once absolute and impregnable and in constant danger of dissolution. Often in these narratives it is a woman whose class identity is at risk or problematic; the woman and her sexuality are a condensed and displaced representation of the dangerous instabilities of class and gender identity for both sexes. A notion of'true womanhood' had therefore to be constructed which was differentiated both from masculinity and from subordinated races and classes: 'The difference between men and women in the ruling class had to be written so that a slippage into categories reserved for lesser humanities could be averted.' At the same time, however, the subordination of women through ascribing to them a 'primitive' propensity for passion, means that 'The line between the primitive and the degraded feminine is a thin one.'1 Women of the ruling class are therefore assigned an incoherent place and meaning: they at once epitomize the distinctive quality of their class and represent its vulnerability to internal subversion. In the present chapter I want to qualify Kaplan's suggestion that such instabilities were opened up by radical and liberal thought in the 1790s by showing how they already trouble Burke's attempt to shore up the 'natural' alliance between bourgeois capitalism and the landed aristocracy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Burke's liberal and radical antagonists simply recapitulate in a new form the instabilities inherent in his attempt to coordinate images of 164

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class, gender, and economics into a coherent ideological defence of the status quo. THE SUBLIME AS A RISQUE JOKE

One of the most curious aspects of Burke's account of Marie Antoinette's fate at Versailles is the suggestion that a woman bereft of clothes displays something bestial: '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' (p. 171). The disrobing intrusions of revolutionary thought reveal for Burke not simply an anatomical equality between ranks but a frightening difference between the sexes. Revolution leaves the king a man, but the queen's Tall' - from queen to woman, to animal, to animal not of the highest order - is much more precipitous and disturbing. Burke's unspoken assumption seems to be that clothes make the woman. Indeed, her attire raises aristocratic woman from beneath to beyond the human. Yet this inevitably reveals the fragility of a social order which depends upon defining women's 'proper' meaning and behaviour. But although Marie Antoinette's 'fall' is clearly a figure for that of the ancien regime, it is not immediately clear why the removal of her clothes should transform her from more to less than human. In terms drawn from Burke's Enquiry, the exposure of the queen instantaneously reduces her from the most elevated example of those particulars of personal beauty which inspire love, to a body which displays those generalities of sexual anatomy which rouse a lust akin to that of the brutes. This 'fall' is precipitated within and by Burke's text - for if she is stripped within the Reflections, it is there too that she is at once eulogized as the epitome of beauty and made into a kind of beast. We have seen that one of the ways in which recent criticism has tried to account for the ambiguities and contradictions which surface in Burke's text in the passages we are examining is to suggest that they are symptomatic of a partially unresolved Oedipus complex in the author. But while it is difficult to know how one could confirm or deny such claims about the origins of these passages, such readings might be used to stimulate an analysis of the structure of Burke's treatment of the Versailles episode in terms of the way images of the usurpation of a king and the rape of a queen might be expected to

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produce terror. Kramnik proposes that it may also be read as an obscene joke shared by male protagonists over the abused sexuality of a woman: When the Jacobins uncover the particular nakedness of the queen, they discover the principle of equality . . . Contemplating the naked queen is to penetrate all the mystery of the aristocratic principle. In discovering that in her nakedness Marie is but a mere woman, Burke joins Jacobin ideology to the crudity of an obscene joke. '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.' {Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 153)

It might be, though, that Burke joins with Jacobin ideology in the telling of this 'obscene joke'. 2 If to strip the queen is to 'discover the principle of equality' as well as to prove one's 'masculinity in relation to the king', the revolutionary urge combines the transgression of sexual and social boundaries. But since it is Burke's text, and not the revolutionary 'mob', which disrobes the queen (and makes a 'joke' about it), then this passage in fact enacts the revolutionary impulse it claims simply to describe. The text which seems to recoil in horror from the Revolution actually lingers voyeuristically over the woman it strips and actively engages in the penetration of those mysteries which maintain aristocratic distinction (piercing her bed 'with an hundred strokes').3 The celebration of Marie Antoinette therefore contains at least one strand which threatens to unravel the delicate fabric of'pleasing illusions' (Reflections, p. 171) which Burke weaves. Eulogy disturbingly takes on structural features which relate it to Freud's description of the dynamics of the 'dirty joke' - which typically involves obscenity and aggression towards a woman made unavailable through social constraints.4 But if the effect of such a joke (which characteristically seeks to expose the woman's sexuality) depends, as Samuel Weber puts it, upon a 'voyeuristically inclined third person, "corrupted" (bestochen) by the promised "gift" of pleasure', then we might speculate on the way Burke's text positions its reader as that third person. The inhibited seduction of the woman is therefore redirected as an attempt to produce laughter in the reader - who becomes, as Weber puts it, the 'other man' who 'embodies the moral code and its interdictions'. The rivalry between the first and third person is therefore 'replaced by a kind of complicity in which the aggressive tendency is displaced onto "the female", who remains inaccessible'.^

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Burke's text may therefore work to establish a kind of pact with his radical readers through a shared aggression towards the female emblem of aristocratic society — a complicity which suggests that Burke somehow participates in the supposed actions of the revolutionary 'mob'. The reactionary position, in its treatment of women, therefore turns out to be curiously similar to its own representation of revolutionary transgression. For Weber, this shift from rivalry to complicity 'is also the structural "resolution" of the Oedipus complex'. But, as he says, 'whether this implies that the dirty joke is Oedipal in structure, or conversely, that the Oedipus complex is a "dirty joke", is a question that will hardly permit a univocal response' (Legend of Freud, p. 108). But who laughs at the Oedipus complex? Certainly not the father (who, in Weber's analogy, is the 'third person' who embodies the moral code), and certainly not the king in Burke's anecdote - for the joke is 'on' the king (as Burke repeatedly stresses): 'I hear that the august person, who was the principle object of our preacher's triumph . . . felt much on that shameful occasion' (Reflections, p. 168). I have suggested that if anyone might laugh it is the reader, but it may be that the reader's reaction - whether laughter, tears, or anger - might be unforeseeable, since Freud suggests that the teller of a joke always takes a certain risk that it might fail and that the burst of laughter which a joke aims to produce might not arise (see Jokes, p. 204). In the present case, the opposite might occur: a tale intended to produce terror may unexpectedly work as a joke and so produce laughter, pleasure, or delight. Burke's text thus runs a double risk: terror might always have the potential to induce the sublime, while the sublime always involves the risk of operating or being received as a joke. For if, as Weber argues, the success or failure of a joke depends on momentarily breaching a set of shared social inhibitions and conventions, the joke is situated (like the sublime itself) in an ambiguous relation towards 'custom'.6 At once dependent upon and disruptive of tradition - simultaneously and unpredictably radical and conservative — the joke shares the political ambiguities of the 'carnival'.7 'In producing laughter', Weber writes, 'the joke thus represents a collective if temporary transgression of shared prohibitions. Jokes therefore are always specific to certain groups, which may be more or less extensive, but which are never simply universal' (Legend of Freud, p. 110).

If Burke's joke thus allows and represents a temporary transgres-

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sion of shared prohibitions, this transgression will nevertheless have different meanings to different social groups. The form and content of Burke's 'Oedipal scene' may work to horrify some readers, but it may also provoke a revolutionary delight in the exposure of the queen and humiliation of the king. And that delight depends precisely on the social and political inhibitions which Burke defends and which the bulk of his anecdote plays upon. For, as we have seen, it is the institutional majesty of the royal couple, and the consequent untouchable beauty of the queen, which form the particular social 'set' of this narrative: such customs and pleasing illusions condition both the reactionary horror and the 'revolutionary' delight. This is not, however, to speculate upon Burke's 'real' or 'covert' intentions; the present analysis suggests that it is this scene's structure and effects which are contradictory and unpredictable, regardless of what Burke was actually trying to do. Burke's scene may be read as at once reactionary and revolutionary - as both a tale of horror calculated to arouse indignation, and as a tendentious joke potentially arousing laughter. For, while neither effect can be calculated in advance, the forms and social conditions are the same for both. Burke's ambiguous lamentation over the fate of Marie Antoinette may also be read as a joke which rouses not laughter but indignation. Weber asks an important question about 'obscene' jokes which has intriguing consequences for the way we might read Wollstonecraft's response to these passages in the Reflections: 'In what way does he [the third person, the addressee of the joke] participate in the Schaulust [the desire to see], and to what extent is he exposed to, or by, the joke? And what if this "he" were a "she"?' {Legend of Freud, p. 111). This allows me to suggest that Wollstonecraft's Rights of Men may be read, not as participating in Burke's Schaulust, but as an indignant response to the way the Reflections exploits and instantiates customary assumptions about gender and female sexuality in the passages we are reading. As a 'third person feminine', Wollstonecraft deflates Burke's joke by taking it literally, agreeing with it, and turning it back upon its teller: 'On this scheme of things', she quotes, noting Burke's irony but adding her own emphasis, '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'. However, for Wollstonecraft, women's potential animality stems not from anatomy but from 'high' culture: this is 'all true, Sir', she counters, 'if she is not more attentive to the duties of humanity than queens and fashionable

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ladies in general are' (Rights of Men, p. 54). Whereas for Burke, women need customs and costumes to conceal their animality, Wollstonecraft asserts that it is fashionable manners themselves which, by displacing morals, reduce women to animals. The joke thus rebounds back on Burke and his politics (the teller is exposed by his own aesthetics): 'fashionable ladies' — ladies constituted through fashion and emblematic of Burke's 'beautiful' ideology - are indeed, she suggests, animals 'not of the highest order'. Thus although Wollstonecraft's reading recognizes the 'non-sense' of Burke's rhetoric, it takes seriously its historical moment and political implications. Her response is to ridicule Burke, but her very passion — 'I glow with indignation' (Rights of Men, p. 9) - seems to indicate that her text is in fact deeply affected by the Reflections. Burke's narrative of the events at Versailles seems, then, to combine the tendentiousness of the dirty joke with the paradoxically enabling effects of the 'shaggy-dog story' — one of which is to coerce the addressee to channel the indignation it produces 'by resolving to become a story-teller' in turn.8 Wollstonecraft is therefore spurred to tell a different story, one which aggressively rewrites Burke's, wrestles with his politics, exposes his manipulations of his own aesthetic categories, and radically reworks those categories for an alternative politics. These various imperatives are neatly concentrated in a joke at Burke's expense: 'Judgement is sublime, wit beautiful; and, according to your own theory, they cannot exist together without impairing each other's power. The predominancy of the latter, in your endless Reflections, should lead hasty readers to suspect that it may, in a great degree, exclude the former' (Rights of Men, p. 142). Burke, then, unwittingly provides the formula for his later condemnation by suggesting that 'a perfect union of wit and judgement is one of the rarest things in the world' (Enquiry, p. 17). GROSS-DRESSING AND DISROBING! UNDOING DIFFERENCES

As in many other versions of the Versailles episode, women play an active part in Burke's narrative. The implications of the queen's 'fall' are most powerfully realized by juxtaposing Burke's account of it with the other references to women which cluster around his description of 5-6 October. Two very different ranks of women are given roles in this scene - the 'celestial' queen of France and a mob of women variously represented as the squaws of 'American savages'

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(Reflections, p. 159), as 'women lost to shame' (Reflections, p. 161), and as 'the furies of hell' (Reflections, p. 165). Burke presents a series of vivid images which illustrate how the Revolution has broken loose from civilizing constraints. In each of these images women are depicted as having abandoned their femininity and modesty, and to have thereby blurred the distinctions between themselves and the savage or the inhuman. Burke implies that such violations of'proper' gender roles and behavioural patterns are both endemic to and emblematic of a general breakdown of political order. If the chivalric code necessarily refers only to the ladies it constitutes, it is therefore based on the exclusion of those women who, through reasons of class, race, manners, or appearance, do not fit the code. There is no place, in Burke's aesthetics and politics, for the disturbingly 'masculine' women who led the queen and king in 'triumph' from Versailles. If, as Paulson suggests, these women 'in effect are the Revolution' (Representations of Revolution, p. 81), they

would seem the very antitype, politically and aesthetically, of Marie Antoinette. Yet I want to show that this exclusion depends upon the occlusion of that within the 'lady' which precisely relates her to those other women and so cuts across the differences in rank which Burke seeks to maintain. This possibility can be explored by re-examining Burke's account of the Versailles incident precisely in terms of the way it engages with contemporary textual productions of that event which stress instabilities of gender and dress. George Rude's modern discussion of the episode shows that in the days leading up to the march to Versailles 'it was [the women] rather than the men that played the leading role in the movement'. Quoting Sebastien Hardy's contemporary account, Rude tells us that 'As they set out, in the early afternoon, they . . . compelled every sort and condition of woman that they met - "meme des femmes a chapeau" - to join them' (Crowd, pp. 69, 75). The detail of dress is important because it signals that there were aristocratic women — or at least women dressed like aristocrats (prostitutes also dressed in high fashion) taking part in the march. The revolutionary movement therefore involves, undecidably, either a real collusion between women of different classes or a transgression of the differences between them through the exploitation of sartorial conventions. Contemporary reports also hint at other kinds of transgression. The Times of 10 October 1789 reports that the women of Paris, under fear of famine, 'have even taken up arms, some with bludgeons, some with firelocks,

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and are hourly joined by large numbers of their sex'. It further reports (on 12 October) that most of the crowd that marched to Versailles were 'chiefly Fisherwomen', although many of those who forced their way into the palace were guards 'habited in women's dresses'. Although Natalie Z. Davis writes that such a disguise was 'surprisingly frequent' in riots and rebellions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, her account of its advantages makes its frequency not at all surprising. Such a disguise served the practical purpose of concealment, released men from full responsibility, and exploited 'the sexual power and energy of the unruly woman and . . . her license (which they had long assumed at carnival and games) . . . to tell the truth about unjust rule'.9 The contemporary meaning of such cross-dressing in the eighteenth century can be gleaned from Sekora's discussion of the political and cultural importance that has been accorded to sartorial conventions in hierarchical societies. He points out the crucial role which fashion played in cities, where the obvious badges of farm labor would be missing or cunningly disguised, and subversive persons - artisans, mechanics, servants, women, and young people - might congregate in numbers. Hence the gravity of laws defining status and costume in Athens and Rome and later in Genoa, Venice, Paris and London. (Luxury, p. 56) Later in his study, Sekora quotes from Samuel Fawconer's Essay on Modern Luxury of 1765: The custom of all civilized countries, hath regulated some general standard of dress, as most convenient to discriminate one from another in point of sex, age, and quality. The propriety and necessity of such a regulation, is evident from the mischiefs that could ensue from the want or neglect of it. For on whatever levelling principle the reasonable distinction of merit and degree is confounded, the order of government is broken in upon and destroyed, (quoted in Luxury, p. 100) Burke is therefore eager to exclude these revolutionary 'women' from legitimate political activity precisely because their social and sexual transvestism threatens to break in upon and destroy the order of government. This is brought out in his reference to those 'women lost to shame' who 'direct, control, applaud, [and] explode' the members of the National Assembly 'and sometimes mix and take their seats amongst them' (Reflections, p. 161). These unrepresentable and

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unrepresented women (women did not have the vote in revolutionary France) shamelessly invade traditionally male territory and transgress the proper distinction between the people and their representative assembly. By not keeping to their place - to any of the places assigned to them — they emblematically unsettle representative structures per se. In the Reflections, however, there are more radical subversions of differences in this intriguing moment. For Burke refers not simply to 'masculine' women, but to 'furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women' (my emphasis). It is not just that men may have assumed the garb of women, or even that women have taken on the attributes of men, but that it becomes no longer possible to tell the difference - no longer possible to assign a fixed gender to either of the revolutionary sexes. These fiendish beings might be women with an 'abused' shape brought on by 'unfeminine' labour or 'masculine' behaviour, but they might equally be men making use of- and thus 'abusing' - women's 'shape' for disguise. There is no telling what one would find if these 'furies from hell' were stripped of their garb. What seems to disturb Burke is not only that these 'women' do not adopt the pleasing illusions with which aristocratic ladies clothe and paint themselves, but that the garb they do wear, and their behavioural habits and mannerisms, have neither a natural nor a conventional relation to their sexual anatomy. The revolutionary mob thus disrupts both the neat hierarchy between men and women and the stability of social signs in one and the same moment. Burke, of course, makes great efforts to distinguish Marie Antoinette - his embodiment of aristocratic ideology, aesthetics, and womanhood - from what even Wollstonecraft calls 'the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown off the virtues of one sex without having power to assume more than the vices of the other'.10 That the virtues and vices characteristic of each gender and class may be thrown off or assumed in this way suggests that they function more like clothes than natural properties. Burke shares this view: when Marie Antoinette is stripped of the clothes that might be supposed simply to mark her essential distinction she turns out to be 'but a woman', and therefore, in Burke's book, 'an animal not of the highest order'. In some uncanny way, then, she turns out to be horrifyingly akin to those yelling, screaming furies in the shape of'the vilest of women' - as well as to those 'women lost to shame' who domineer over the National Assembly, and to those American

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Indian women cas ferocious' as their 'savage' men 'after some of their murders called victories'. The social and cultural distinctions crucial to the maintenance of political order — those between classes and those between savagery and the epitome of civilization — are suddenly and terrifyingly undercut in the revolutionary moment. Not only is the natural motivation of social signs shown to be disturbingly arbitrary at the lower end of the scale, but so too is that of the sign par excellence of aristocratic and monarchic order. The difference between the queen and the 'vilest of women' turns out to be merely a matter of dress and manners, and the system of social and sexual deference threatens to collapse. But it is important to reiterate the fact that Burke's text does not stand outside this process and simply watch or record it in horror, since it is precisely the Reflections which brings together those kinds of women it endeavours to distinguish.11 As the agent of those violations (of women, of class and gender distinctions) it would have its readers recoil from, Burke's text again emerges as uncannily revolutionary in its most reactionary passages. The revolutionary impulse is not 'outside' Burke's text, but uncontrollably repeated and foregrounded in the very gesture of its recoil. The slippage of the conventional signs of gender and class which Burke's account of the Versailles incident sets in motion may be seen as the quintessential revolutionary paradigm for Burke because it unsettles what Ferguson reads as the unifying analogical ground of his aesthetics and politics. For if much of the Enquiry tries to account for aesthetic responses in terms of'the properties of external objects', Ferguson posits, political legitimacy is derived, in the Reflections, 'from its basis in property''. Property produces legitimate government for him, just as the properties of aesthetic objects command responses to their beauty or sublimity. The difficulty that appears with the French Revolution, however, is that the very possibility of a drastic change registers the unnaturalness of nature by laying bare the fact that the properties of things, as well as the property belonging to any particular group in power, do not necessarily compel assent. ('Legislating the Sublime', pp. 137-8) Given this, I would suggest that if women's 'properties' (their appearance, dress, manners) are found to bear no necessary relation to their 'true nature', then a dizzying chasm opens up at the centre of Burke's aesthetic ideology. That women's properties seem arbitrary

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might imply that men's property over them — and consequently the 'legitimacy' of their own titles and title deeds - can never be authentically grounded. And yet this possibility is not antithetical to Burke's thought, as Ferguson implies, but already potential within it. As we have seen, the Enquiry not only explores the aesthetic effects of natural objects but also of words - which 'affect us in a manner very different from that in which we are affected by natural objects' (Enquiry, p. 163). In Burke's theory of language, words have no essential or natural properties: their power derives entirely from conventional associations which become 'legitimate' through long usage. In a later chapter, we will see that this process has its political equivalent in the Reflections, where Burke establishes the right to property and the legitimacy of any form of government though the notion of'prescription' - a legal concept which attempts to justify the ownership of property, however it was attained, through longevity of possession. In other words, despite his protestations to the contrary, Burke's texts suggest that political, linguistic, and aesthetic power can arise solely through convention and have no necessary basis in natural properties or property. Thus Marie Antoinette emerges, precisely, as a conventional sign of aristocratic authority, the instabilities of which are not accidental but intrinsic to Burke's ideology. The disturbing thing about her fall is that it exposes for all to see the principle that political power is grounded not in landed property itself but in a set of conventional codes whose force depends solely on the fact that they are conventional. This problem becomes urgent in an historical moment in which political power is in the process of shifting from an economic basis in agrarian production to a more modern capitalist practice in which the arbitrary status of wealth is not only more prominent but intrinsic to its system (in that it is based on mobile capital rather than in land). This is a 'defect' which cannot be removed, although Burke strives to conceal it so that the people might continue to regard the signs and codes of political power as natural. THE ECONOMY OF THE SUPPLEMENT

The fact that Marie Antoinette could be treated as Burke tells us she was in a nation which once tutored all Europe in manners is proof for Burke that

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the age of chivalry is gone. — That of sophisters, oeconomists, 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 obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. (Reflections, p. 170) This is a well-known passage and can be used to present Burke as hopelessly anachronistic in wishing to resist the advance of capitalism through a return to ancient chivalry. Yet I want to argue that it establishes the ground for Burke's attempt to press into service a whole series of supplementary devices meant to support a traditional order which, Macpherson claims, had been a capitalist one since 1688. It should also be remembered, Macpherson points out, that 'when in one of his flights of rhetoric he inveighed against the age of "sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators" . . . [Burke] allowed himself to forget his own quite valid claims as a political economist'.12 Rather than being a moment of 'forgetfulness', however, this apparently quixotic moment in the Reflections may be read as crucially contributing to the socio-economic project which Macpherson sees Burke involved in. I want to suggest that 'chivalry' in the Reflections represents not a retreat from the political, social, and economic problems raised by the Revolution, but a last-ditch compromise formation which seeks to protect and promote capitalism against the 'dragons' of radical thought. In following this through, however, we will see that the sheer complexity of the problem Burke is faced with is recapitulated in the way his text lays bare the internal defects of the ideology he attempts to uphold. In Hegel, servitude to the lord is the route to freedom, though this remains unconvincing in an aristocratic context where structures of subordination are rigidly institutionalized. In the Reflections, the 'generous loyalty to rank and sex' is said to have once been 'the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise', and to have 'inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity' (Reflections, p. 170). Yet while it is perhaps possible to interpret the oxymoronic tensions of 'proud submission' and 'dignified obedience' as registering the ambiguities of the sublime as played out in the sphere of social rank, Burke is endorsing freedom in servitude as contributing to the maintenance of social structures rather than potentially challenging them. But the dynamic involved in the 'subordination of the heart' - the chivalrous submission of the male to the female - operates on a quite different

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axis. Although servitude to women might form part of the chivalric code, it is completely at odds with the sexual politics of the Enquiry, which suggests that 'we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us' (Enquiry, p. 113). In Burke's early aesthetics, submission to 'the sex' would be dangerous folly since the love which women are supposed to inspire has debilitating effects on the masculine physical, psychic, and political economy. The recommendation that the powerful submit to the lovely therefore reverses what the early aesthetics presents as both crucial and inevitable power relations. Chivalry apparently reconciles (in a precarious conflation) two aesthetic impulses which were considered incompatible in 1757— 9 — where, in the presence of the sublime, 'the qualities of beauty [lie] either dead and unoperative; or at most exerted to mollify the rigour and sternness of the terror' (Enquiry, p. 157).I3 By discarding the system of manners which 'had its origin in the antient chivalry', the Revolution has abandoned a code which formed 'the unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations' (Reflections, p. 170). Burke therefore emphasizes how chivalry is both outside the realm of economists and calculators (it is an 'unbought grace') and, as a 'cheap defence', a bargain they ought not to discard. Distinguishing the character of modern Europe from that of Asia and the antique world, It was this, which, without confounding ranks, had produced a noble equality, 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 elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws,1* to be subdued by manners. (Reflections, pp. 170-1)

Like beauty in the Enquiry, chivalry (if it is not 'slain' by the sublime) may work to mollify the stern rigour of otherwise terrible political institutions.15 While serving as a defence against the killing of the king and the rape of the queen, chivalry also presents an alternative to the 'unnatural' levelling of revolutionary radicalism. Chivalry is offered as a 'noble' egalitarian code which nevertheless maintains distinctions of rank. This is, at first sight, an unabashed attempt to disguise traditional social hierarchies in order to maintain repressive power structures without inconvenient unpleasantness (preventing the 'slave' from recognizing his/her own subservience to the sover-

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eign and so rising to revolutionary self-awareness). The 'beauty' of such power relations may, then, gloss over their political barbarity and ward off potential outbursts of the democratic sublime. Yet although conflicting material, social, or political interests are supposedly repressed in favour of a well-mannered harmony, such tensions seem to resurface in discordant formulations such as 'noble equality', 'proud submission', and 'dignified obedience'. The 'strategies of containment'16 which the Reflections brings into play here paradoxically empower a radical critique of the aristocratic system. The passages we are examining stress, for example, that the extra something which constitutes beauty, fosters love, and promotes society has been exposed (by the revolutionaries? by Burke's text?) as a set of 'pleasing illusions' susceptible to being dissolved or torn away: All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized 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 super-added 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 estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (Reflections, p. 171) Burke concedes that his socio-political system functions through employing a set of 'super-added ideas', without which our 'defects' are exposed for all to see. The events of 5-6 October have exhibited Rousseau's 'nature' in the raw, and demonstrate the necessity of building up and maintaining a wardrobe of customs and costumes (furnished with a set of habits that are both acquired responses and religious garments). These pleasing illusions are presented as simply the outward attire of an authentic moral order, resorted to whenever nature presses too close or when radical principles threaten the political body from without or from within (clothes conceal the body from itself as well as from prying eyes). But although these supplements form an indispensable means of defence against revolutionary thought, they are also particularly vulnerable to a mode of enquiry which undermines the structures of traditional belief and so actually exposes society to the impulses of our naked nature. Following Rousseau, who claimed to have 'demolished the petty lies of

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mankind; [and to have] dared to strip man's nature naked',17 radical discourse of the 1790s makes the unveiling of institutional defects into a political imperative. Habitual manners and customs therefore take on a paradoxical status for Burke: they constitute an aspect of traditional society which is particularly threatened by radicalism, yet they are also highly valued because they form one of the most effective means of pre-empting rational enquiry. The stripping of the queen and the stripping of aristocratic society thus become analogues of one another, and 'the defects of our naked shivering nature' are at once figurative and literal.18 Burke has the Revolution disrobe Marie Antoinette because her fate, as the representative figure of the ancien regime (she is the aristocratic beauty), graphically illustrates the implications of the Revolution for all the institutions and customs which maintain, and are maintained by, traditional society. This analogy between the French queen and the body politic allows Burke to counter Price's Discourse on the Love of Our Country by suggesting that 'to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely' (Reflections, p. 172). Yet 'lovely' describes an appearance which is not necessarily related to the quality of being 'lovable', and Burke explicitly reveals that to endow a state with 'loveliness' is a requisite strategy: 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 supplements, sometimes as correctives, always as aids to law. (Reflections, p. 172)

The Revolution is figured as terrible, then, because it threatens the beautiful appearance of a country, and Burke seeks to employ images of revolutionary terror in order to alarm readers into the realization that pleasing illusions are essential to political and private life. The Revolution thus features in the Reflections as a kind of costume drama for the instruction and benefit of English spectators. Burke therefore draws attention to the ideological trope which has been found serviceable to the support of the state: institutions ought to be 'embodied' in 'persons' in order that they may affect the public in a range of ways theorized in his aesthetic treatise (they work best if they can be made to seem beautiful or sublime). But if such figures stand for the nation as the focus of emotional attachment, they also

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stand in the place of, or supplant that which is supposed to be loved. This negative notion of supplementation is repressed in the relation described between these public affections and the law - the law is never actually displaced by public affections, only 'aided". Yet this passage admits that the law in itself, without the super-added illusions which foster 'public affections', is inadequate. The 'defects' which the Revolution would expose might therefore turn out to be those of the law itself, which manifestly cannot justify existing social arrangements without calling in the aid of chivalric manners. Since, as the Enquiry suggests, there is a mutually antagonistic relation between aesthetics and reason, rational enquiry is fatal to Burke's concept of the state. Although radical reason demonstrates its devastating ability to 'banish' the public affections and manners which function as necessary 'supplements' to the law and establish love and reverence for public institutions, it is said to be unable to supply their place. Reason therefore works in the opposite way to manners by supplanting the very means which have been found necessary to supplement the law. In the brave new world of the Revolution, Burke's fear is that society will be deprived of this necessary resource, leaving 'laws . . . to be supported only by their own terrors' (Reflections, p. 171). Such is the inevitable result of allowing 'mechanic' reason to go unchecked by nature, since mankind thrives not only by arranging its 'artificial' institutions 'after the pattern of nature', but 'by calling in the aid of her unerring and powerful instincts, to fortify the fallible and feeble contrivances of our reason' (Reflections, pp. 120, 21). Thus nature becomes the ultimate resource, the supplement of art and society. In Burke's view, although radicalism proceeds in the name of nature, it does so towards what he regards as unnatural ends rendering traditional supplements ineffective through an unremitting use of supplementary artifice. Burke is therefore involved not in a simple struggle between second nature and naked nature but between an artifice which has become second nature and an artifice which will destroy second nature. The nature which Burke resorts to is an 'image' of nature (Reflections, p. 120) whose task is to heal the flaw in 'primary' nature. At the same time, of course, Burke cannot actually admit that this supplementary nature is not the same as primary nature - otherwise it might be indistinguishable from the 'bad' supplement. This conundrum reveals the way Burke's text, and the discursive system it seeks to fortify, verges on the edge of an

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irremediable crisis: as in Derrida's reading of Rousseau, the moment when nature itself is called in as a supplement 'is the moment when evil seems incurable' (Of Grammatology, p. 147). Burke seeks to impress on his readers that the 'atrocities' enacted at Versailles represent a revolution not only in politics but in manners: this is the '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'. This is why Burke begs to be excused for having 'dwelt too long on the atrocious spectacle of the sixth of October 1789' (Reflections, p. 175). Thus we need to investigate further why manners are so important to Burke. In the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796—7) Burke treats manners as supplements to nature which, at their best, become like nature itself and fortify it, but which at their worst represent the greatest possible threat to both nature and society: Manners are what vex or sooth, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and colour to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them. Of this the new French Legislators were aware; therefore . . . they settled a system of manners, the most licentious, prostitute, and abandoned, that ever has been known, and at the same time the most coarse, rude, savage, and ferocious.^

Manners may therefore operate in various senses of the Derridean supplement (as an aid, as a supplier of wants, or as a destroyer), and they do so through subtle rhetorical strategies which seek to disguise their artifice and allow them to appear natural (manners infiltrate the constitution Hike . . . the air we breathe in', and affect us by an 'insensible operation'). It is this which allows manners to have their beneficial effect, but it is also one of their most dangerous qualities since they may affect (or infect) us without our awareness. The role and mode of functioning which Burke assigns to manners here suggests that he is formulating a concept which we now call ideology (in the sense that ideology is that which goes without saying).20 In his writings on the Revolution, then, Burke attempts to distinguish between two different ideologies (two sets of habits, customs, and manners) in ways which accord with the different inflections of the supplement. In the Reflections, the distinction between benevolent and malign manners is illustrated by contrasting 'the common feelings of men' (Reflections, p. 175) with the

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uncommon and unnatural behaviour displayed at Versailles. The distinction is also made along national and political lines since 'benevolent' supplementation typically characterizes English culture, while the 'dangerous' supplement is assigned to France (both before and after the Revolution). In effect, Burke pioneers a method of analysing ideology in order simultaneously to criticize the new French ideology and to revitalize the aristocratic/capitalist merger by identifying it with 'Englishness'. That this reductive scheme is politically necessary for the Reflections, and that the logic of the supplement 'deconstructs' Burke's strategy, is part of the argument of this book. So too is the claim that Burke gets himself into this tight corner not out of stupidity, nor through an inept use of language, but because he is engaging with a set of problems which are endemic to the discourse of political economy in eighteenth-century Britain and which have been made especially critical by the Revolution. CAPITALIZING ON TRADITION

As we have seen, C. B. Macpherson argues that the traditional order Burke defends in Britain in 1790 is already a capitalist order. But, if this is so, Macpherson himself asks the crucial question: Why should [Burke] have opposed [the French Revolution] so vehemently, since in the view of most nineteenth-century historians, liberal as well as Marxist, it was essentially a bourgeois revolution, intent on clearing away feudal and absolutist impediments to the emergence of a capitalist order? (Burke, p. 63)"

For Macpherson, 'the short answer is that Burke was not a nineteenth-century historian'. From his perspective in 1790, the members of the National Assembly 'were not the haute bourgeoisie who in England, easily intermarrying with the aristocracy, dominated the House of Commons: they were a petite bourgeoisie, who could not be relied on to uphold established property' (Burke, p. 64).22 In this reading, Burke sees the upheaval in France as bungling the bourgeois cause through stripping away feudal institutions without having anything to replace them with. Burke perceived that capitalism depended on the continuation of class distinctions 'which rested on nothing more than habit and tradition . . . With no more solid basis than that, it could easily be undermined' (Burke, p. 69). Recognizing capitalism's vulnerability to the 'egalitarian propa-

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ganda of the French Revolutionists and their English supporters', Burke is driven to disguise its politics by utilizing 'old [social and political] forms', and by putting 'a new bourgeois content into Natural Law': Burke needed the natural and divine law because he had to show not only that the capitalist order was just but also that it was naturally acceptable to the working class. The whole structure of society, Burke insisted, depended on their submissiveness. And he estimated that they would remain submissive if they were protected from the 'rights of man' principles by a counterbarrage of Christian Natural Law principles. (Burke, pp. 61, 69-70, 62)

Burke's attack on revolutionary doctrine can therefore be traced to two related reasons: if the theory of equality and the 'rights of man' were widely accepted in England they would disturb that 'natural' subordination of the working classes necessary for capitalist production; and since the transfer of power in France was not to a substantial or respectable bourgeois order, it 'might well be as damaging to commerce and industry as he expected it would be to the civilized arts and learning' (Burke, p. 66). Burke's text is therefore focused on two potentially incompatible projects: on the one hand, it seeks to uphold a capitalist order in England by making it appear a traditional order; on the other, it works to defend a traditional order in France which is antipathetic towards capitalism precisely because it is a traditional order (whose aesthetic correlative undermines the work ethic and enfeebles the sinews of the state). But Burke cannot praise the efforts of the potentially sublime Revolution which might appear to be the best remedy for the 'feminine tyranny' of the ancien regime because that would, in turn, pose a threat to the English capitalist order by seeming to endorse 'the rights of man'. Yet in being constrained to champion the 'beautiful' ideology and aesthetics of aristocratic France, the Reflections seems to underline the need for, and possibilities of, a revolutionary antidote. Burke's fear of the Revolution, then, was that it threatened to cast off the forms and traditions which had beautified and sustained the capitalist project thus far in Britain and send capitalism naked into the world. The lament over the age of chivalry would therefore be a lament for the probable fate of commerce in a society where notions about the rights of man have rooted out all principles of subordination. Burke seeks to costume capitalism in traditional dress because otherwise it has no defences against those radical doctrines which

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would irresponsibly expose its 'defects'. This is why Burke's attacks on the Revolution, with an obvious change of emphasis, often read like Marx's description of the bourgeoisie: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.^ Certain passages in the Reflections, where Burke explores the ramifications of the events at Versailles, both support and complicate this argument. It is striking to read - shortly after the lament that the age of chivalry has been displaced by that of 'sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators' - that Even commerce, and trade, and manufacture, the gods of our oeconomical politicians, are themselves perhaps but creatures; are themselves but effects, which, as first causes, we choose to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning flourished [i.e., under the nobility and the clergy]. 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 commerce 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 barbarians, destitute of religion, honour, or manly pride, possessing nothing at present, and hoping for nothing hereafter? (Reflections, p. 174)

Bereft of aristocratic and Christian sentiment, 'unaccommodated' capitalism will reduce all human beings to the level of those who stormed Versailles or to the condition in which they left Marie Antoinette. These passages suggest that Burke would have rejected Marxism's base-superstructure model: the 'old fundamental principles' of society are to be found in 'the spirit of nobility and religion', and economic well-being is but their 'creature' or 'effect'.24 The unbridled commerce let loose by the Revolution threatens to sup-

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plant nobility and religion, whereas if trade and manufacture were wanting in a society, 'sentiment' is strangely said to be able to 'supply' their place. This makes bad economic sense, but it seems to epitomize the strange economy of supplementarity which structures and deconstructs Burke's text.2^ Pocock argues that these passages in the Reflections are 'both emotionally extravagant and historically sophisticated', since the conception of manners which Burke invokes alludes to the attempt to justify the commercial revolution in the early eighteenth century. The philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment ('our oeconomical politicians') countered traditional attacks on commercial 'luxury' by arguing that the 'virtuous' man of antiquity was in fact a barbarian. In place of primitive, asocial virtue, writers such as Smith and Hume articulated a concept of commercial civilization shaped and facilitated by manners - hence Paul Langford's description of the English in the eighteenth century as a 'polite and commercial people'.26 In this version of English history, then, manners were held to be the vehicle and the sign of commercial society. Yet manners, and the socio-economic formation they were associated with, were thought to be permanently endangered by corruption: 'these were seen as resting upon a complex historical process, leading men from savagery to civilisation, and there was no guarantee that this could not be corrupted or destroyed. The luxury and effeminacy of the rich, the barbarity and desperation of the underclass, were threats to the progress of civilisation' (Pocock, Introduction, Reflections, p. xxi). The Scottish historian William Robertson had identified the rise of chivalry as an important moment in the transition from the barbarity of the Middle Ages to the polite commerce of the eighteenth century: 'there was an association in Robertson's mind between chivalry, courtly love, and the opening up of commerce in Europe after the Crusades' (Pocock, Introduction, Reflections, p. xxxii). This allows Pocock to argue that 'A chivalrous nobility and a learned and charitable clergy belonged to the same historical process as the enlightened townsmen of the age of commerce. It was the decline of all three that Burke was lamenting when he described chivalry crumbling under the impact of revolution' (Pocock, Introduction, Reflections, p. xxxiii).

This is a useful contextualization of Burke's otherwise eccentriclooking recourse to manners. Yet it doesn't sufficiently emphasize the internal instabilities of this ideological strategy. The example of

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France, where economic speculation (unsound capitalism) appears to have displaced all other principles and thus to have undermined the very traditions necessary for its own survival, inevitably underlines the importance, but also the precariousness, of accommodating capitalism within traditional forms and institutions. If, in the Enquiry, the bourgeois ethic is sustained through a mythology in which mind and body need to be toned up and ever ready to resist an external aggressor or to avoid the internal dangers of relaxation, the Reflections intimates that the body politic should be continually on watch against the inroads of energetic capitalism. The failure of the ruling class in France in this respect was one reason for the success of the Revolution: A foolish imitation [by the French nobility] of the worst part of the manners of England, which impaired their natural character without substituting in its place what perhaps they meant to copy, has certainly rendered them worse than formerly they were. Habitual dissoluteness of manners continued beyond the pardonable period of life, was more common amongst them than it is with us; and it reigned with the less hope of remedy, though possibly with something of less mischief, by being covered with more exterior decorum. (Reflections, p. 244) The idea that 'exterior decorum' might mitigate the 'mischief of the French nobility's corrupt manners - which accords with Burke's notion that under chivalry 'vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness' (Reflections, p. 170) — is complicated by the possibility that such 'decorum' might also prevent the 'remedy'. Good customs limit but also uphold bad ones. A second error which led to the Revolution was the way the rulers of France 'countenanced too much of that licentious philosophy which has helped to bring on their ruin'. More important, however, was the failure to accommodate the young and upwardly-mobile energies of the new monied class: There was another error amongst them more fatal. Those of the commons, who approached to or exceeded many of the nobility in point of wealth, were not fully admitted to the rank and estimation which wealth, in reason and good policy, ought to bestow in every country; though I think not equally with that of other nobility. (Reflections, p. 244) To prevent revolution, the lesson suggests, the landed interest ought to 'admit' the commercial interest - though not quite on an equal

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footing. Without such precautions, the speculative nature of the new money will drift into fatal alliance with the unsound speculation of 'licentious philosophy'. (In a later chapter, we will see Burke attempt to divide and defuse what he saw as a dangerous compact between unaccommodated capitalism and a new kind of transgressive literature.) That the ancien regime proved unable to ward off or accommodate an unprecedented alliance between radical thought and ungrounded commerce indicates that although its greatest danger might be from capitalism itself, the traditional order is almost equally imperilled by its own corrosive manners. In becoming habitually dissolute, the French nobility have perverted the chivalrous manners which, Burke wants to insist, are the only means by which capitalism might be civilized. But what is especially disturbing is that this is said to have occurred partly through imitating certain aspects of English manners. That the Revolution may have gained ground through the French nobility mimicking the manners of their English counterparts (and Burke can also say that France had once provided the model of manners for England) raises the question of who imitates who in the strange and proximate relation between the two nations. England and France seem less opposites than mutually constitutive — or mutually subversive — models for each other, each potentially repairing and impairing the other's 'natural character'. Britain's constitution is thus particularly vulnerable to the epidemic flourishing on the other side of the narrow English Channel. Just as in the Enquiry the self needs to invent a threat in order to tone itself up against the real danger posed by its own tendency towards fatal relaxation, it is possible to see the Reflections as opportunistically dramatizing events in France in order to provoke a reaction that will strengthen the 'sinews' of the bourgeois state in Britain. This becomes perplexing for Burke because radicalism also criticizes traditional manners as corrupt. Burke concedes that the ancien regime may have corrupted good manners, but stresses that the actual principles of good manners remain basically sound. The manners which helped bring on the Revolution are a 'foolish imitation of the worst part' of English manners. This had 'impaired their natural character without substituting in its place what perhaps they meant to copy. A bad copy of English manners produced fatal effects because it had not managed to import and impart their inimitable essence.

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And yet Burke continually struggles to distinguish this corrupt version (or perversion) of English manners (characteristic, in different ways, of both the ancien regime and the Revolution) from those good manners which are crucial to the socio-economic formation he defends. That which is meant to conceal the 'defects' of aristocratic society becomes discomfortingly similar to its most pernicious characteristic. In Burke's analysis, then, the danger of the Revolution is that, rather than accommodating itself to that which already exists (adapting, compromising, supplying what is requisite), it promises to substitute a bourgeois order in the place of traditional structures. To do this under the banner of'the rights of man' would not only destroy the old order but render the new unworkable by striking at its very roots (the capital-labour relation). Burke responds to this challenge by suggesting that Britain's constitution should be protected against revolution by inoculating or grafting capitalism into its system and thereby strengthening, rather than destroying, the nature of the original organism, supplying its wants rather than supplanting it. Burke's text therefore traverses a precipitous path. Its whole attention is focused on preventing the French Revolution from upsetting the 'complementary' balance, crucial for stability and prosperity, between capitalism and aristocracy in Britain. And yet this structure contains within itself the principle of its own dissolution, since the sublime and the beautiful work uneasily together and tend to interrelate less in complementary ways than as supplements to one another. This leads me to argue, in passing, that Burke understood the Revolution better than Paine did. Both saw its implications for Britain's constitutional order, and both sought to promote versions of Smith's liberal economics. But although the strain in Burke's text is to accommodate new economics in old clothes, that implicit in Paine's arises between the freedom of man on the one hand and free trade on the other. For, as Henry Collins notes, neither in the Crisis articles he wrote in America on the eve of the Revolution there, 'nor later did Paine see any cause for antagonism between capital and labour' (Introduction to Rights of Man, p. 22). That the Reflections might be read as simultaneously promoting capitalism in a more insightful way than Paine and defending English traditions against the encroachments of capitalism, indicates the audacious balancing act called forth by an historical moment in which both aristocracy

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and radicalism are potentially inimical to capitalism's prosperous development. Throughout the 1790s Burke remains committed to a laissez-faire economic theory akin to Smith's, with the proviso that the new capitalist practice be accommodated to and ballasted by the landed interest. Indeed, the example of the French Revolution leads him to insist still more emphatically on the primacy of economic 'laws' over interventionist policies in the name of 'humanity'.2? Yet because the Revolution confronts him with a movement and a rhetoric that, according to his own aesthetic ideology, will prove disastrous to his cause, he is driven to yoke together and defend a class (the aristocracy), an ideology (custom), and an aesthetic category (the beautiful), each of which is anathema to his earlier thought. Yet Burke cannot afford to entirely concede the sublime's rhetorical power to revolutionary radicalism, nor overlook the Enquiry's identification of the beautiful and/or luxury as the most insidious threat to political states. Burke attempts to resolve this dilemma by differentiating those tendencies in the bourgeois ethos which lead towards the destruction of the state from those which are necessary for its well-being. While concurring with Macpherson's Marxist description of Burke's project, then, my reading of Burke's dramatization of the Versailles affair suggests that the use of aristocratic dress as a cover for the transformation of the body politic into a bourgeois system, although it might be historically necessary, introduces its own dangers. In representing revolutionary action as an attempt to strip away the array of supplements with which the old order sustains its hegemony, Burke acutely diagnoses radicalism's threat not only to the aristocratic order but to the bourgeois system he seeks to introduce under an aristocratic garb. Yet if Burke's defence of the French queen actually conceals, and thus upholds, capitalist interests, the 'drapery' he employs (to dress the queen as well as to hide his 'true' motives) turns out to act as a set of'poisoned vestments' which work as a 'counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve'.28 If his use of the sublime in the Reflections embroils him in an impossible double bind, the beautiful presents a similar but less tangible danger. It is not, then, that Burke's text is merely split between its capitalist object and its decorous homage (the more-or-less conscious difference between 'surface' gestures and 'deep' intentions), but that the

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decorous homage itself involves Burke's text in radical internal differences which cannot become 'conscious' but whose effects at once provide its motive power and threaten dissolution. Indeed, it is almost as if Burke's text - and the drapery it arranges in order to veil its 'real' object - is torn in different directions in ways which inevitably expose its defects for all to see. As V. N. Volosinov puts it, although a revolutionary crisis makes more urgent a dominant ideology's need to make yesterday's truth appear today's, it also makes it all the more difficult, since it is precisely then that the internal differences of the sign 'come out fully in the open'.*9 WOLLSTONEGRAFT'S C R I T I Q U E

Without regarding the Enquiry as a benchmark against which to measure the way the Reflections 'deviates' from it (we have seen that the Enquiry is itself riven with contradictions), it is usually revealing to notice the way the later text typically draws on the emotive power of the sublime and the beautiful for ends which in the earlier text would be theoretically and politically incompatible. The difference between 1757-9 and 1790 might be summarized as follows: in the Enquiry, Burke pits the 'natural' sublime (and sometimes the beautiful) against the encrustations of 'second nature' (habit and custom) which bolster a reactionary society; in the Reflections, on the other hand, he pits 'naturalized' habits and customs (as the 'true' sublime and beautiful) against the naked nature (the 'false' sublime) of revolutionary radicalism.30 But Burke's fusion of habit and custom with the beautiful in order to form the supplement par excellence of civilized society conveniently 'forgets' the desensitizing effects of habit and custom which are so meticulously mapped in the Enquiry where 'the effect of constant use is to make all things of whatever kind entirely unaffecting', and where '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' (Enquiry, pp. 104, 103). What was a state of staleness in 1757—9 becomes revalued in the Reflections as the mark of civilization. While the Enquiry suggests that the exposed neck and breasts of a 'beautiful' woman constitute the epitome of beauty (Enquiry, p. 115), the Reflections celebrates the beautiful as that which drapes the (female) body in order to disguise the basic equality of human beings. We have seen that there is an implicit distrust and disgust within

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Burke's early delineation of the beautiful which is only apparently absent in the Reflections. Yet if the pleasing illusions Burke recommends in 1790 function by working through an 'insensible operation3 and by subduing 'without force or opposition . . . the fierceness of pride and power' (Reflections, p. 170), we need to recall that this is precisely the most pernicious characteristic of the beautiful in 1757— 9. If this makes the beautiful the 'deceptive par excellence* (Ferguson, 'Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 75), it seems an apt device for ideological manipulation, though it may also deceive those who seek to employ it. Ferguson speculates that the Enquiry already associates the beautiful with chivalry: to Burke it must have seemed no accident that Satan's initial sublime overstatement aroused Eve's suspicions as his later chivalrous politesse did not. For in the terms of Burke's account, a paradigmatic instance of the beautiful must certainly be Genesis 3:4: 'And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die', in which the mere ordonnance of the words converts an outright lie into the kind of polite deceit upon which Burke's version of social discourse sustains itself. ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', P- 77) Burke therefore raises the deceitful into the necessary habit of the political system he seeks to defend. Indeed, this both plays on the supposed susceptibility of women to the seductions of beauty (of their own image as well as the pretty lies of the arch deceiver), and implicitly transforms Burke himself into a chivalrous satanic figure whose attempt to seduce the people through the 'mere ordonnance' of his words threatens to initiate a second disastrous 'fall'. Thus Burke's appeal to an array of pleasing illusions draws on aspects of the beautiful in the Enquiry which makes it both serviceable for his project in 1790 and potentially disruptive of it. Given that Burke had articulated the political danger of the beautiful in 1757—9, the fact that he both employs and defends it in the Reflections - where Paris and Marie Antoinette seem contemporary equivalents of Homer's Troy and Helen - is a measure of the risk Burke is forced to take in this complex historical moment. Wollstonecraft was one of the first radical thinkers to reply to the Reflections, and she does so precisely by pointing out the mismatch between the sexual politics of Burke's aesthetics and the ideological stance he takes in 1790. One of the remarkable things about her critique of the interplay between aesthetics, gender, and politics in the Reflections is not simply that she draws on Burke's Enquiry in order

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to point out his 'inconsistencies', but that she finds in the aesthetics a powerful articulation of her own political philosophy. Wollstonecraft accepts the Enquiry's basic assumptions about the virtues of 'manly' exertion and the dangers of 'feminine' luxury, but she brings to the fore the Enquiry's covert politics by employing these assumptions to develop an explicitly bourgeois feminism (by drawing on the fact that the Burkean sublime is more appropriate to bourgeois enterprise than to the heroisms of the chivalric quest). In doing so, she attacks Burke for having apparently abandoned his earlier 'liberal' politics, yet she fails to allow that Burke's political conservatism in the Reflections might act as a 'front' for a free-market economics. When Paulson alerts us to the fact that Wollstonecraft's 'favorite terms are exercise and exert [Representations of Revolution, p. 85), we can

begin to see how she attacks Burke on (and in) his own terms in order to articulate a moral and aesthetic rationale for the capitalist ethos. Her central strategy is to identify the feminine with the ancien regime and the masculine with bourgeois radicalism. She thus challenges conventional assumptions about the relation between gender characteristics and sexual anatomy by insisting that the 'manly' and the 'feminine' are, at best, unnatural exaggerations of physiological differences between the sexes. This challenge is announced, with ironic humour, in the 'Author's Introduction' to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): I am aware of an obvious inference. From every quarter have I heard exclamations against masculine women, but where are they to be found? If by this appellation men mean to inveigh against their ardour in hunting, shooting, and gaming, I shall most cordially join in the cry; but if it be against the imitation of manly virtues, or, more properly speaking, the attainment of those talents and virtues, the exercise of which ennobles the human character, and which raises females in the scale of animal being . . . all those who view them with a philosophic eye must. . . wish with me, that they may every day grow more and more masculine.31 By exhorting women to attain 'talents and virtues', and by assuming that their 'exercise' might 'ennoble' women (raising them 'in the scale of animal being'), Wollstonecraft adopts the basic assumptions of bourgeois radicalism in order to extend them to women.32 In doing so, she underlines the way that Burke's defence of the ancien regime runs counter to some of the fundamental insights of the Enquiry. She also forces us to ponder the fact that her revolutionary

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politics often seem more consistent with Burke's Enquiry than are the politics of the Reflections. In The Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft identifies Burke's pleasing illusions, which blind citizens to a country's defects, as 'gothic notions of beauty' - an 'ivy' which, although it might be 'beautiful', parasitically undermines what it adorns: 'when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up?' {Rights of Men, p. 10). Wollstonecraft suggests that the manners and habitual, unthinking affections towards traditional institutions which Burke recommends in the Reflections are the very things which are most inimical to human and political constitutions: truth should be demonstrated by reason, 'and not determined by arbitrary authority and dark traditions, lest a dangerous supineness should take place' {Rights of Men, p. 37). It is not blind habit which raises us above the brutes, but the exercise of reason, which can only be acquired through exertion {Rights of Men, pp. 70-1, 77).33 In fact, the debilitating effects of the system Burke apparently wishes to perpetuate are already to be seen in 'the noble families which form one of the pillars of our state', in the sexual behaviour of husbands and wives, and in the language of contemporary discourse {Rights of Men, pp. 51-2, 52-3, 64-6). Such a system produces 'young men of fashion' who are 'finical [men] of taste', and 'has an equally pernicious effect on female morals', producing 'women of fashion [who] take husbands that they may have it in their power to coquet, the grand business of genteel life . . . without . . . being of any use to society' {Rights of Men, pp. 92, 47-8). Although Wollstonecraft criticizes such 'women of fashion' for not producing anything of use value, she makes it clear that this is not owing to an intrinsically 'feminine' nature but to the way they have been fashioned, like their male counterparts, by the aristocratic fashion system. On the basis of these passages, Paulson claims that 'The underlying insight of Wollstonecraft's writings on the French Revolution is that the beautiful is no longer a viable aesthetic category' {Representations of Revolution, p. 86). After all, Wollstonecraft does say that 'if we really wish to render men more virtuous, we must endeavour to banish all enervating modifications of beauty from civil society' {Rights of Men, p. 115). But Paulson's conclusion can only be sustained through partial quotation. Wollstonecraft does more than expose the aesthetic and ideological implications of this beauty in order symbolically to strip Marie Antoinette for different ends than

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Burke. She also offers an alternative understanding of beauty — one which transforms the classical and neo-classical models which Burke's treatise rejects in order to deploy them for an egalitarian politics whose very ground is the equality of the sexes and the reconciliation of the sublime and the beautiful.34 Wollstonecraft sets out to rewrite Burke's aesthetic categories for a new ethics and ideology from the opening pages of her critique: 'truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and, in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful' (Rights of Men, p. 2). She rejects what she describes as a 'beauty [which] relaxes the solids of the soul as well as the body' and posits that, in a society in which liberty and equality flourished, 'experience [might] prove that there is a beauty in virtue, a charm in order, which necessarily implies exertion' (Rights of Men, pp. 115—16). She therefore turns Burke's aesthetic theory against his later defence of an enervated political system, but she also reconstitutes the beautiful as a radical aesthetic mode synonymous with virtue and equally attainable by men and women. Wollstonecraft thus contributes to radicalism's attempt in the eighteenth century to develop an alternative aesthetics divested of the deceptive conventions which characterize aesthetic modes in aristocratic societies.35 This enables her to turn the tables on Burke by ironically pointing out the 'defects' of his 'theatrical attitudes' and 'sentimental exclamations' which 'cover a multitude of vices' (Rights of Men, p. 5). Addressing Burke directly, Wollstonecraft claims to 'shew you to yourself, stripped of the gorgeous drapery in which you have enwrapped your tyrannic principles' (Rights of Men, p. 88). Wollstonecraft's aesthetics anticipate the political changes promised by the Revolution, rather than hark back to a mythologized past: 'Liberty, in [its] simple, unsophisticated sense, I acknowledge, is a fair idea that has never yet received a form in the various governments that have been established on our beauteous globe' (Rights of Men, p. 8). Should this ever occur, and she looks forward with optimism to the achievements of the National Assembly, 'a depraved sensual taste may give way to a more manly - and melting feelings to rational satisfactions'. 'Such a glorious change', she continues, 'can only be produced by liberty. Inequality of rank must ever impede the growth of virtue, by vitiating the mind that submits or domineers' (Rights of Men, p. 116). Thus her politics and ethics admit of neither lordship nor servitude and can only flourish in a

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society based on equality in gender and class. In fact, 'society' in Wollstonecraft is only possible where such hierarchies have been levelled: 'Among unequals there can be no society; - giving a manly meaning to the term' (Rights of Men, p. 92). It follows from this that the radical ideal of equality between men cannot be achieved unless the inequality between men and women which underlies the old order is also erased. Wollstonecraft shows that the two forms of inequality are inextricably symptomatic of each other and that political reform necessarily implies reform in those aesthetics, manners, and rhetorical practices which help maintain the inequality between men and women as well as between classes. She therefore looks to the French revolutionaries to see if they 'can produce a crisis' which will usher in the change. Only in the National Assembly is government guided by 'unsophisticated reason' and promoted by 'exertions that [are] not relaxed by a fastidious respect for the beauty of rank' (Rights of Men, p. 117). In the Rights of Woman two years later, Wollstonecraft turns her critique against radicalism for its failure to grasp her basic insight in the Rights of Man. She criticizes Rousseau's negative account of women in Emile since it had apparently infiltrated radical thought, and she confronts the National Assembly for drafting a constitution which excluded women from participating in the 'rights of men'. The Revolution was therefore developing in a way which would frustrate its own aspirations by perpetuating the very 'flaw' which she had identified as the origin of corruption in the ancien regime: if women are to be excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they want reason, else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever show that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant, and tyranny, in whatever part of society it rears its brazen front, will ever undermine morality. (Rights of Woman, p. 88)

In an intriguing twist, then, Wollstonecraft uses the insights gained from her reading of Burke in an attempt to intervene in the National Assembly's deliberations by exposing the fatal defect of its new constitution. We have seen that Burke had once offered the bracing effects of labour as an antidote to the debilitating effects of the beautiful, and that the Reflections laments the fact that the events of 5-6 October have initiated a 'revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions' (Reflections, p. 175). Wollstonecraft turns the

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earlier theory against the later formulation in order to stress to her radical readers that 'It is time to effect a revolution in female manners . . . and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world' (Rights of Woman, p. 132). Kaplan's suggestion that Wollstonecraft's bourgeois feminism has to be understood as a complex and contradictory response to Rousseau needs therefore to be modified by recognizing that Burke is an equally powerful interlocutor whose texts paradoxically empower her thought even as she seeks to refute them. THE MEDICINE OF TODAY BECOMES THE POISON OF TOMORROW

Wollstonecraft's immediate and insightful response to the Reflections, then, was to point out that Burke's recourse to a customary beauty in order to ward off the revolutionary plague was, in terms of his own aesthetic treatise, perhaps the most dangerous remedy he could have chosen. But since Burke wishes to fend off rational enquiry into traditional social structures, his aesthetics also indicate that there could be no more apt prescription than a mixture of custom and beauty, each of which dampens and disarms both reason and the sublime. What had been the antidote in 1757-9 becomes the infection in 1790, while the earlier disease now becomes a crucial remedy. But Burke would not have been unduly ruffled by having this apparently illogical reversal pointed out to him. One of his central tenets is that it is impossible to predict the efficacy of political measures independently of'circumstances'. In the Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), Burke argues that this is precisely the error which led to the French Revolution: What a number of faults have led to this multitude of misfortunes, and almost all from this one source, that of considering certain general maxims, without attending to circumstances . . . If we do not attend scrupulously to . . . these, the medicine of to-day becomes the poison of to-morrow . . . see the consequences of not attending to critical moments, of not regarding the symptoms which discriminate diseases, and which distinguish constitutions, complexions and humours . . . Thus the potion which was given to strengthen the constitution, to heal divisions, and to compose the minds of men, became the source of debility, phrensy, discord, and utter dissolution^6 The failure of the state physicians of France to take circumstances into account has thus produced a set of circumstances directly

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contrary to those in which Burke once offered the sublime as an antidote to the luxury (of whatever social class) which threatened the healthy development of capitalism in Britain. Burke therefore offers his diagnosis of the revolutionary crisis and his prescription of the pleasing illusions of life as the recommendations of an experienced and circumspect physician of the state. The sublime and the beautiful may each operate differently at different critical moments, depending on the variable parameters of diseases and constitutions; each may work both as a state's best defence or its worst enemy, and only a practicing politician can know whether one or the other will kill or cure in any given situation. Yet this appeal to 'circumstances' means that the effect of political 'measures' may always be unpredictable. Caught in a characteristic bind by the turn given to the Revolution in the discursive constructions of 5-6 October 1789, Burke tries to dissociate the Janus-faced effects of both the sublime and the beautiful into benevolent and dangerous aspects. The difference between such aspects is at once absolute and contingent, discernible only to those fully versed in the diagnosis of circumstances. But his own treatise warns that the 'side-effects' of the beautiful (the pharmakon dictated by circumstances in 1790) might always undermine the constitution it is meant to protect, and that it may do so because its influxes are impossible to detect. The medicine of today may easily become the poison of tomorrow.

CHAPTER 8

Reform and revolution

My reading of the Reflections thus far has been largely confined to a limited number of paragraphs and passages (whose complexity has demanded the extensive reading they have been given). Much the greater part of Burke's text is taken up not with confronting the French queen with the revolutionary mob but with discussions of British history, comparisons between British and French economics, and reflections on the relative merits of the systems of political representation on either side of the English Channel. Yet I want to show that the patterns, paradigms, and problems that have emerged in my articulation of the Enquiry and the Reflections shape Burke's discussions of economics, the law, political representation, and language as well as his emotive response to the events at Versailles. Regardless of Burke's manner or topic, the crisis he identifies himself as facing affects every facet of the socio-economic formation he defends and each discursive manner he attempts to defend it with. The Reflections worries at a series of issues, each of which can be understood as paradigmatic of a general crisis in representation: the question of whether a king or a parliament may legitimately represent a nation; the concern that paper currency ought to be convertible into 'real' money; and the desire that language's representative power might not be perverted or undermined in any way. (It is significant that Paine responds to Burke on all these fronts, reproducing each of his anxieties yet locating proper and improper representation in quite different textual and political places.) In each case, Burke articulates the Revolution's dangerous abuse of proper representation as a pernicious supplementarity, while each of his attempts to fend off this danger has recourse to a 'healthy' supplement. In this way, Burke's remedies can seem disconcertingly similar to the diseases they are meant to cure. This is not to say that Burke explicitly identifies or theorizes the concept of

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the supplement, but that its contradictory logic structures and deconstructs his attempts to demarcate good from bad representation. This possibility will be explored by showing how Paine's reading of Burke in the Rights of Man discovers 'deleterious' supplementary expedients within Burke's text and social order and argues that 'wholesome5 forms can only be located in revolutionary social structures and discourse. This suggests that the relation between Burke and Paine is less straightforwardly oppositional than either would allow. Paine's revolutionary text turns out to be as equally shaped and undone by the strange logic of these supplements as the text usually considered to be one of conservatism's most eloquent defences. To this extent, Burke and Paine are in collusion in the sense that although they seem to be struggling for different goals, they are playing the same game. In fact, both Burke and Paine work to establish a capitalist economic system that will recognize and reward individual merit. The difference between them pivots on the question of how such social, political, and economic innovation ought to relate to what already exists. Burke seeks to recruit merit in the service of the traditional social order, while Paine calls for a meritocracy which will sweep away existing institutions; Burke works to augment and revitalize the old order by 'ingrafting' upand-coming capitalist energies, while Paine attempts to uproot the old and so clear the ground for new social and economic structures. Burke distinguishes these different approaches by identifying one as 'reform' and the other as 'revolution'. But this difference might reduce to the fact that while Burke wants capitalism in aristocratic dress, Paine seeks to strip the ancien regime in order to expose its defects and thereby justify its replacement with a bourgeois order. THE NECESSARY RESOURCE OF SUPERSTITION

In the wake of the Versailles passages in the Reflections, Burke obsessively discusses the expediency of resorting to custom, habit, and tradition to ward off the apparently incurable evil revealed in those events. An instance of the way such expedients are forced on Burke by the peculiarities of the historical moment can be found in his attempt to defend the Catholic Church in France. The manner in which the logic of this defence unfolds and undoes itself can serve as a paradigmatic example of the perplexities which beset Burke's vari-

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ous expedients. Arguing for the necessity of religion, Burke writes that 'there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety' {Reflections•, p. 187).1 To throw off the Christian religion would be to 'uncover our nakedness', and perhaps our lack of'natural' piety for God or his hypostases; it would even, since 'the mind will not endure a void', expose us to 'some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition, [which] might take place of it' (Reflections, pp. 187, 188). Thus the superstition which in the course of time has come to support religion is preferable to the pernicious superstition which would undermine it: 'We shall never be such fools as to call in an enemy to the substance of any system to remove its corruptions, to supply its defects, or to perfect its construction' (Reflections, p. 187). And yet 'rust' is a curious figure to use for something which is supposed to defend some essential substance, since although it might appear to cover ferrous metals with a protective crust, it actually marks a gradual 'corruption'. Thus, while Burke is led to make absolute distinctions between one kind of superstition and another, the very logic of supplementarity seems to resist such a distinction: whatever is resorted to as a defence of the state seems also to endanger, or expose the defects of, its various embodiments. Addressing Depont on the Revolution's treatment of the Catholic Church, Burke admits that 'the institutions savour of superstition in their very principle . . . but this ought not to hinder you from deriving from superstition itself any resources which may hence be furnished for the public advantage' (Reflections, pp. 268-9). In order to do this, superstition needs to be distinguished into advantageous and disadvantageous kinds or degrees: But is superstition the greatest of all possible vices? In its possible excess I think it becomes a very great evil. It is, however, a moral subject; and of course admits of all degrees and all modifications. Superstition is the religion of feeble minds; and they must be tolerated in an intermixture of it, in some trifling or some enthusiastic shape or other, else you will deprive weak minds of a resource found necessary to the strongest. The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the sovereign of the world; in a confidence in his declarations; and an imitation of his perfections. The rest is our own. It may be prejudicial to the great end; it may be auxiliary ... a prudent man . . . perhaps . . . would think the superstition which builds, to be more tolerable than that which demolishes

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- that which adorns a country, than that which deforms it - that which endows, than that which plunders . . . Such, I think, is very nearly the state of the question between the ancient founders of monkish superstition, and the superstition of the pretended philosophers of the hour. [Reflections, pp. 269-70)

This is an odd passage. Burke defines the 'body of all true religion' as proper faith in and obedience to 'the will of the sovereign of the world'. What we add to this, in the way of particular kinds of superstition, may be either auxiliary or prejudicial to the 'body'. Yet superstition is also said to be both the religion of feeble minds and a 'resource found necessary to the strongest'. Thus superstition operates as a supplement to religion: it is both added to religion and, for 'feeble minds' at least, constitutes the substance of religion itself.2 Burke seems unable and unwilling to opt out of the supplementary bind. He seeks to impress on his readers the belief that the state and/ or the human mind is ever in need of some kind of superstition or supplement. He will not strip man's nature naked (though he seems obsessed by the possibility of women being disrobed), and rather than discarding the dangerous supplement he is concerned to limit its 'possible excess' in order to exploit it for 'the public advantage' (perhaps an advantage over the public). This concedes that the beneficial superstition of Catholicism and the veneficial superstition of revolutionary thought are not utterly different from each other but variants which may be either 'auxiliary' or 'prejudicial', may either 'build' or 'demolish', 'adorn' or 'deform', 'endow' or 'plunder'. Burke's recourse to 'superstition' in the Reflections is shaped by an historical context in which radical 'enthusiasm' was in the process of destroying the political and religious forms and traditions which had become part of the fabric of the ancien regime. The realization that there is a public advantage to be derived from superstition (even in 'some enthusiastic shape') arises out of the history of English radicalism. Burke's attack on Price is particularly concerned with the way the dissenting minister's text reactivates the historical and rhetorical link between political radicalism and unorthodox protestantism. In this context, it is significant that Burke articulates a largely secular theory in the Enquiry which unhinges the sublime from its associations with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious discourse (though the figure of Milton is ever-present in Burke's text). Yet Hume's distinction in 1741 between superstition

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and enthusiasm allows us to glimpse the religious and political subtext of Burke's aesthetics. Hume defines superstition in terms which relate it to Burke's account of the impact of the beautiful or the effect of the sublime on weak minds: 'weakness, fear, melancholy, together with ignorance, are . . . the true sources of SUPERSTITION'. Enthusiasm, by contrast, can be seen as the sublime's effect on strong minds: c an unaccountable elevation and presumption, arising from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from a bold and confident disposition. In such a state of mind, the imagination swells with great, but confused conceptions.'3 The assumptions which govern Hume's distinction between these contrary 'corruptions of true religion' anticipate both Burke's attack on radical 'superstition' (which begins to sound more like enthusiasm) and the radical critique of the repressive 'superstition' employed by the established political order. Hume posits that 'superstition is favourable to priestly power, and enthusiasm not less or rather more contrary to it, than sound reason and philosophy\ Whereas superstition

is most typically characterized by Catholicism, with its priests, rites, and ceremonies, enthusiasts such as Quakers and Presbyterians have a 'contempt of forms, ceremonies, and traditions' {Essays, p. 75). Enthusiastic religions are usually 'furious and violent' at first but eventually become gentle and moderate, whereas superstition 'steels in gradually and insensibly; renders men tame and submissive; is acceptable to the magistrate, and seems inoffensive to the people'. Enthusiasm is 'founded on strong spirits, and a presumptuous coldness of character' and 'produces the most cruel disorders in human society', yet its fury is quickly exhausted and, without the support of rites and ceremonies, soon sinks into oblivion. Superstition, by contrast, begins 'smoothly' enough, but eventually 'the priest, having firmly established his authority, becomes the tyrant and disturber of human society, by his endless contentions, persecutions, and religious wars'. This indicates that 'superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to if (Essays, pp. 76—8).

Enthusiasm, then, endows individuals with a sense of power and potential, while superstition renders them weak and dependent on powerful religious and political institutions. Thus it is revealing that while Burke fashioned his theory of the sublime in 1757-9 in order to resist or overcome weakness, melancholy, and fear, in 1790 the needs of the moment force him to endorse superstition as a way of resisting revolutionary enthusiasm.

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THE ENGLISH HERITAGE! MUSTY RECORDS AND MOULDY PARCHMENTS

One of the consequences of Price's 'seditious, unconstitutional doctrine' {Reflections, p. n o ) is to force Burke to establish the lawfulness of the English monarchy. In doing so, Burke draws on an analogy which operates throughout the eighteenth century between the (unwritten) English constitution and the English language 'properly so-called', in which defence of the one entails and is promoted by defence of the other.* Thus he asserts that The law, which knows neither to flatter nor to insult, calls this high magistrate, not our servant, as this humble Divine [Richard Price] 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. {Reflections, p. 115)

This insult works in a compacted way. By associating radical thought and the Revolution with Babylon, Burke implicitly condemns its luxury and dissipation. There is also the suggestion that rather than overthrowing the 'whore of Babylon', radicalism is merely the same thing in a different guise (as the Hebrew for Babylon, 'Babel' can refer both to the capital of the Chaldee Empire and the Babylon of the Apocalypse; it thus combines the visionary scheme that was Babel with the 'whore of Babylon' which became associated with the papal power. )5 Thus although we have seen Burke strive to differentiate between radicalism and Catholicism as two contrary superstitions, the paradoxical demands of his ideological struggle with the Revolution can also lead him virtually to equate them when he needs to defend the 'natural' rites and customs of the English state and church. More crucially, by equating the fall of language at Babel with the 'confused jargon' of revolutionary rhetoric, Burke has the English constitution defend itself against revolution and/or fallen language through recourse to its own pre-Babylonian writing — the discourse of English law apparently having escaped that second fall. This conventional reading of the Babel myth allows Burke to at once belittle radical aspirations and claim that the British constitution preserves and is preserved by an unfallen language.6 But this masks what for Burke would be a more disturbing analogy between Babel and revolutionary Paris, for the confusion of languages at Babel comes as a defence of heaven against Babel's threat to 'the LORD' -

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who perceives that if the people act as 'one' and with one language, 'nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do' (Genesis 11: 6—7). The division of people by language can therefore be seen as God's intervention against a united social and linguistic community which threatens to usurp his authority and role as creator. Burke's defence of a constitution perhaps similarly threatened, together with the fiction of a primitive language prior to linguistic and sexual fall, is maintained by a certain reticence of interpretation: 'I never desire . . . to read in the declaration 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' (Reflections, p. 104). Prelapsarian discourse is thus authoritative, univocal, and not to be contended with; its 'penetrating' style and stylus engraves the words and spirit of immortal law 'in our hearts'. It is therefore quite different from the seditiously productive language of revolution which the Babel myth at once announces and confounds. Yet Burke's comic dismissal of revolutionary language may reveal an anxiety about that which it mocks — i.e., an unrestrained people empowered by a language which seems capable of instituting whatever they imagine to do. The preservation of the monarchical line becomes intimately bound up with that of ritualistic forms of language and calls for proper readers and readings. Burke asserts that the monarchy's legitimacy is derived not from the choice of the people (nor from divine right) but through a 'fixed rule of succession, according to the laws of this country' (Reflections, p. 98). These laws are authorized by reference to the written records of the legislature - particularly to 'the statute called the Declaration of Right' (Reflections, p. 100).7 Burke stresses the way the language of the 'Declaration of Right' selfconsciously conforms to historical precedents: The legislature plainly had in view the act of recognition of the first of Queen Elizabeth, Chap. 3rd, and of that ofJames the First, Chap. 1st, both acts strongly declaratory 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. (Reflections, p. 102)

The legitimacy of the English succession is therefore guaranteed by the succession of language itself, 'repeating as from a rubric the language of the preceding acts of Elizabeth and James' (Reflections,

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p. 103). Burke interprets this statute as a 'solemn . . . renunciation' of any suggestion that the Revolution might grant the English people the right to choose and cashier their own governors in the future. To this end he quotes from its address to William and Mary: ' "The lords spiritual and temporal, and commons, do, in the name of all the people aforesaid, most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities for ever"'

{Reflections, pp. 103-4). 8 Burke

therefore warns his correspondent (and his readers) against Price's interpretation of 1688: If you are desirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution, and the policy which predominated 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. {Reflections, p. 117) Thus the struggle for a dominant reading of 1688 - and therefore of 1789 - takes place through the confrontation of one language, set of texts, and readings with another, and Burke leaves his readers in no doubt as to which is the more authentic and authoritative. Burke, then, adopts the role of representative reader, never presuming 'to understand the principles of the ['Glorious'] Revolution better than those by whom it was brought about' {Reflections, p. 104). In order to establish 1688 as a moment of continuity in English history, Burke has recourse to a set of metaphors that have a long pedigree themselves: in 1688, 'the crown was carried somewhat out of the line in which it had before moved; but the new line was derived from the same stock' {Reflections, p. 106). Such figures allow Burke to assert that nothing alien has been added to the crown's line of succession and that even foreign scions are of the original stock: 'The Princess Sophia was named', he writes, 'for a stock and root of inheritance to our kings' {Reflections, p. 109). In a later reworking of the metaphor, Burke claims that The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough tofillus 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 inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate any cyon alien to the nature of the original plant. {Reflections, p. 117) Whenever any reform has been necessary for the preservation of the state, care has been taken not to graft from alien plants or inoculate

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substances which might imperil the system.9 That Burke draws metaphors from horticulture and medicine shows that he is not simply contrasting revolutionary 'artifice' with 'nature', but distinguishing between natural and unnatural (health-inducing and disease-provoking) artifice. But although Shakespeare, who also wrote extensive reflections on the nature of the English monarchy, has Polixenes assert that the 'art' of grafting is 'itself . . . Nature' (Winter's Tale, IV, iv, 97), the relation between art and nature is more complex than this. Grafting introduces something from the outside, something alien, in order to propagate or protect an otherwise barren or endangered organism.10 The danger for Burke — as physician or gardener of the state - is that, in grafting these figures into his discourse, he reveals how the monarchy he defends, and the language he defends it with, relies upon an artifice which may perhaps be only problematically distinguishable from his description of revolutionary artifice. Burke's defence of the English constitution is explicitly based upon a rhetorical strategy which is itself figured as natural. The 'privileges, franchises, and liberties' enjoyed by the English are said to be 'an entailed inheritance' of the people as a whole rather than of a privileged few: they are 'an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference to any other more general or prior right' (Refections, p. 119). But if this figure rhetorically absorbs the people into an extended aristocratic family, this supposedly demonstrates 'a conformity to nature in our artificial institutions', placing 'our political system . . . in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world' (Reflections, pp. 121,120). This is achieved 'by the spirit of philosophic analogy' (or what Pocock calls 'the most superb of all legal fictions'):11 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 ... In this choice of inheritance we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections . . . (Reflections, p. 120) Michael Freeman claims that the extension of this analogy to the way in which we transmit 'our lives' makes 'this appeal to nature . . . not vacuous' since that manner 'is biological, not traditional'. 12 But

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this endorsement fails to consider either the validity or the ideological import of this strategy — especially given the distribution of wealth and political rights in Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. Burke's claim needs to be read as a rhetorical and ideological ploy - giving 'to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood', and 'adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of the family affections' (a figure which curiously unsettles the emphasis on genetic relationship). Although these passages suggest that 'nature' is an a priori 'pattern' which artificial institutions simply conform to, they also indicate that this conformity is established through a figurative strategy which has particular consequences: 'we have derived several other, and those no small benefits, from considering our liberties in the light of an inheritance' {Reflections, p. 121). This is not the only instance of the way the Reflections actually foregrounds the ideological manipulations it was apparently meant to disguise and perpetuate. Picking up on this, Paine claims that 'had any one purposed the overthrow of Mr Burke's positions, he would have proceeded as Mr Burke has done. He would have magnified the authorities, on purpose to have called the right of them into question' (Rights of Man, p. 66). Yet although this makes it relatively easy to show how Burke's rhetoric in these passages continually undermines or exceeds what we construct as his ideological project, I want to suggest that his (on the face of it) impolitic attention to the details and anomalies raised by the 'Glorious Revolution' might serve as a red herring to draw attention from a more troublesome problem in English history. WRITING PRESCRIPTIONS FOR THE BODY POLITIC! IO66 AND ALL THAT

Paine produces links between political systems and rhetorical styles in ways which compare with and reverse those in Burke.J3 Contrasting the 'free, bold, and manly' language of the National Assembly with the language and manners of the English Parliament, he finds the latter 'evidently of the vassalage class', showing nothing 'of the style of English manners, which border somewhat on bluntness' (Rights of Man, pp. 112-13). This is so because those who make up the English ruling class are not of native stock and therefore govern by imposition: 'Since they are neither of foreign extraction, nor naturally of English production, their origin must be sought for

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elsewhere, and that origin is the Norman Conquest' {Rights of Man, p. 113). The language of 1688 reveals it to be continuous with, rather than a revolution against, the servitude imposed in 1066: 'That this vassalage idea and style of speaking was not got rid of even at the Revolution of 1688, is evident from the declaration of Parliament to William and Mary, in these words: "We do most humbly and faithfully submit ourselves, our heirs and posterities, for ever"' (Rights of Man, p. 113). That the monarchy originates in invasion and usurpation is, for Paine, one of the 'shibboleths' which Burke cannot pronounce but which haunts his text: a monarchical reasoner never traces government to its source, or from its source ... A certain something forbids him to look back to a beginning, lest some robber or some Robin Hood should rise from the long obscurity of time, and say, / am the origin! Hard as Mr Burke laboured the Regency Bill and Hereditary Succession two years ago, and much as he dived for precedents, he still had not boldness enough to bring up William of Normandy, and say, There is the head of the list! there is the fountain of honour! the son of a prostitute,

and the plunderer of the English nation. (Rights of Man, p. 140) Burke does mention the conquest in the Reflections, but only in order to refer to a complex legal argument about the principles of hereditary descent which arose 'some time after the conquest' (Reflections, p. 106). Putting legal intricacies aside, he asserts that 'whoever came in, or however he came in, whether he obtained the crown by law, or by force, the hereditary succession was either continued or adopted' (Reflections, p. 107). Burke therefore asserts a continuity in the law which spans the invasion without actually confronting the problems it would seem to raise. In radicalism's own mythology, 1066 marked a decisive break in English history between Anglo-Saxon 'liberty' and the 'Norman Yoke'.14 The radical version of the ancient constitution claimed that it was based on rational principles which could be referred to and reasserted as the basis of reforming any political arrangements which could be shown to have strayed from them. In 1782, Burke wrote a speech for the House of Commons which refuted this principle by articulating a quite different version of the ancient constitution. Rather than being accessible to rational analysis and reform or grounded in abstract principles of natural right, Burke argues, Our constitution is a prescriptive constitution; it is a constitution whose sole authority is that it has existed time out of mind . . . Prescription is the most

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solid of all titles, not only to property, but which is to secure that property, to government ... It is accompanied with another ground of authority in the construction of the human mind - presumption. It is a presumption in favour of any settled scheme of government against any untried project, that a nation has long existed and flourished under it. It is a better presumption even of the choice of a nation, far better than any sudden and temporary arrangement by actual election. '5 The OED defines prescription as the process by which an 'uninterrupted use or possession [of a property] from time immemorial, or for a fixed period by law [gives] a title or right'. By extending this to include political institutions, Burke attempted to argue that longevity alone is sufficient to legitimize established systems of government regardless of how they arose. Paine's history of the English monarchy thus challenges one of Burke's central assumptions - that prescription might mellow into legality political institutions and distributions of property whose origins might be dubious. Paul Lucas points out, however, that Burke's particular use of prescription was, paradoxically, a new departure in English legal thought which 'revolutionized the meaning of prescription' by abandoning the generally held assumption that it could only operate if possession had begun in good faith: Only once, early in his career, in 1772, did Burke clearly concede that 'prescription can only attach on a supposed bonajide possession'. Even then, he qualified his concession out of existence, and the principles of good faith and just title as the basis of prescription never again appeared in Burke's writings, except to deny the good faith of the French revolutionists. With respect to property, Burke wrote: 'Prescription . . . gives right and title. It is possible that many estates were obtained by arms . . . but it is old violence; and that which might be wrong in the beginning is consecrated by time and becomes lawful.'16 In modifying the concept of prescription in this way, Burke seeks to establish a continuity between common law and statute law between customs practised 'time out of mind' and legal innovations instituted in response to specific historical exigencies. This allows the state to be both rooted in immemorial custom and flexible enough to meet changing historical circumstances. In this way, necessary reform will always conform, to the state's original, unformulated principles. But this celebrated statement of conservatism contains (in every sense) an internal contradiction. As Lucas points out, 'at

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common law, custom is a group and territorial right existing since time immemorial; prescription is an individual and personal privilege arising in time' ('On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription', p. 58). Burke seeks to conflate custom and prescription, Lucas argues, because the custom of the common lawyers was unable to accommodate the facts of English history, and was too static a concept to allow for political and economic transformation: 'Burke had to call the constitution a prescriptive instead of a customary one; for prescription was essentially a dynamic, historical conception of new rights arising in time and, as Burke stressed, both preserving an inherited antiquity and allowing growth and future acquisitions' ('On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription', p. 59).I7 Prescription would therefore seem to be an apt instrument both for neutralizing the eighteenth-century radical critique of the origins of the English monarchy and aristocracy in the Norman Conquest, and for grafting capitalist principles into the old order. Yet if prescription provided an unanswerable argument in favour of constitutional arrangements which had their origin in 1066, the onset of the French Revolution would seem to entangle Burke's strategy in an irreducible contradiction. If prescription could legitimize any historical fact which began in violence and bad faith through the wholesome passage of time, then it could equally go to work on the new political order being put in place in revolutionary France. This is perhaps why the Norman Conquest is so thoroughly disremembered in the histories which the Reflections generates that there is no direct effort at all to justify it through prescription. That the investiture of William and Mary drew on and reiterated the rites and rubrics of documents leading back into time immemorial is proffered in support of 1688, not 1066. Burke's emphasis on the 'slight deviation' in the line of succession in 1688 may therefore serve to distract attention from the 'old violence' of 1066. Burke thus seeks to avoid the potential scandal that England's constitution originates not in an unbroken line which recedes into the mists of the past but in an historical discontinuity as radical as the French Revolution itself. He therefore strives to maintain an absolute and salient difference between English history and recent events in France. To this end he introduces a new condition to be met before prescription can begin its work — i.e., it needs to be clear that the new system was a 'necessary substitute' for an irredeemably corrupt system:

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If they had set up this new experimental government as a necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny, mankind would anticipate the time of prescription, which, through long usage, mellows into legality governments that were violent in their commencement. All those who have affections which lead them to the conservation of civil order would recognize, even in its cradle, the child as legitimate, which had been produced from those principles of cogent expediency to which all just governments owe their birth, and on which they justify their continuance. But they will be late and reluctant in giving any sort of countenance to the operations of a power, which has derived its birth from no law and no necessity; but which on the contrary has had its origin in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed. (Reflections', p. 276) Had the French Revolution provided a 'necessary substitute for an expelled tyranny', the conservation of civil order would demand that 'mankind' ought to recognize such a 'child' as legitimate 'even in its cradle'. Yet these metaphors inevitably allude to Paine's assertions in Common Sense (1776) as well as in the Rights of Man - that the Norman Conquest placed a monarch on the throne of England whose 'illegitimate' birth provides an apt figure for arguing that England's own royal line began precisely 'in those vices and sinister practices by which the social union is often disturbed and sometimes destroyed'.18 This suggests that 1066 cannot be repressed or accommodated by the ideological and rhetorical strategies which Burke mobilizes. In fact, the uncanny thing about these strategies is that the more energetically they strive to repress the constitution's dubious lineage, the more they serve to draw attention to it. Even attacks on the French Revolution return home with a vengeance. While he finds the British constitution basically sound, Burke diagnoses a peccancy in the fundamental principles by which radical thought and practice disestablished the ancien regime. By instructing the people 'that almost the whole system of landed property in its origin is feudal; that it is the distribution of the possessions of the original proprietors, made by a barbarous conqueror to his barbarous instruments', Burke warns that the Revolution has armed the people with a doctrine which can and will be turned against it when it tries to implement any measures, such as the collection of rents and taxes, which the people might wish to resist. The political insight given to the people of France will render them intractable: they find that men are equal . . . They find, that by the laws of nature the occupant and subduer of the soil is the true proprietor; that there is no

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prescription against nature; and that the agreements (where any there are) which have been made with their landlords, during the time of slavery, are only the effects of duresse and force . . . They will tell you that they see no difference between an idler with a hat and a national cockade, and an idler in a cowl or in a rochet. (Reflections, p. 346) Paradoxically, Burke's ironic iteration of the radical argument that prescription cannot ratify any distribution of property which originated in 'duress and force' makes it more faithful than his own usage to the traditional understanding of prescription.^ Yet if'there is no prescription against nature', and if 'there can be no prescription' against 'the rights of men' (Reflections, p. 148), Burke points to the absolute danger the Revolution represents, not only to its own efforts to reconstruct France but to any social system grounded in prescription. By exposing prescriptive property and institutions to nature and the rights of man, the Revolution has destroyed not only the ancien regime but the very means by which the institutions it creates and the property it distributes might have mellowed into legality. More disturbing, however, is that the Revolution has therefore exposed those 'vices and sinister practices' at the origin of the political system which Burke defends. Burke is left with no alternative but to conceal these 'vices' in the mists of time or to make them 'legitimate' through invoking a 'revolutionary' version of prescription (even though he suggests that there is no prescription against radical disease). REFLECTIONS UPON REVOLUTION AND REFORM

The previous discussion indicates that political innovation can take two apparently quite different forms - a benevolent supplementation in which the new is grafted onto the old, and a destructive supplementation in which the new displaces the old. This is why Burke strives throughout the Reflections to establish a clear demarcation between 1688 and 1789 as wholly different kinds of revolution:20 These gentlemen of the Old Jewry, in all their reasonings on the Revolution of 1688, have a revolution which happened 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 together. It is necessary that we should separate what they confound. (Reflections, pp. 99-100)

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'The Revolution', writes Burke, referring to the events of 1688-9, 'was made to preserve our antient indisputable laws and liberties, and that antient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty' [Reflections', p. 117). 1688 thus becomes an exemplary model of the action to be taken '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 peccant part only; to the part which produced the necessary deviation; and even then it is to be effected without a decomposition of the whole civil and political mass, for the purposes of originating a new civil order out of the first elements of society. [Reflections, pp. 105-6) Burke seeks to avoid radical revolution (or surgery) at all costs never uprooting the plant, always grafting and clipping. Horrified by the idea of a complete new beginning, he clings to the idea that the peccant (the sinning, morbid, disease-inducing) part might be removed without affecting the whole. Burke's figuration of society as an organism therefore resists its own logic, since it evades the possibility that a disease might be systemic to the state and so infect all its parts from within. To admit such a possibility would allow in theory for cases in which the whole plant had to be destroyed and the ground prepared for replanting. Political 'disease' comes from the outside and affects only the 'extremities' of the state; the remedy likewise is grafted in from elsewhere without significantly altering the stock or fruit. Revolution in the English sense preserves and reforms, whereas 'the arbitrary assembly of France . . . commence their schemes of reform with abolition and total destruction' [Reflections, p. 279). These different kinds of reform also relate to the way Burke's aesthetics differentiates between wholesome work and dissolute activity. To destroy, Burke warns, is all to easy: Your mob can do this as well at least as your assemblies . . . Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years. The errors and defects of old establishments are visible and palpable. It calls for little ability to point them out; and where absolute power is given, it requires but a word wholly to abolish the vice and the establishment together. The same lazy but restless disposition . . . directs these politicians, when they come to work, for supplying the place of what they have destroyed. To make every thing the reverse of what they have seen is quite as easy as to destroy. [Reflections, pp. 279-80)

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In pointing to the fragility (the visible errors and defects) of 'old establishments', Burke makes them seem both vulnerable and venerable (and perhaps draws attention away from their concealed defects). Given the absolute power which has fallen into the hands of the National Assembly, it requires little ability or energy ('but a word') to supplant the ancien regime's traditions and institutions, while to supply their place requires the work of 'prudence, deliberation, and foresight' over long periods of time. The French Revolution recklessly substitutes old establishments with arbitrary institutions, destroying the body of the state along with its vices: it may supplant, but it cannot supply the goods. By contrast, the kind of reform which at once preserves and improves calls for steadfast effort and skill: At once to preserve and to reform is quite another thing. When the useful parts of an old establishment are kept, and what is superadded is to be fitted to what is retained, a vigorous mind . . . and the resources of an understanding fruitful in expedients are to be exercised . . . in a continued conflict with the combined force of opposite vices; with the obstinacy that rejects all improvement, and the levity that is fatigued and disgusted with every thing of which it is in possession. (Reflections, p. 280)

Burke implicitly presents himself as an heroic reformer in continued conflict with two groups at the opposite ends of the political spectrum — those who resist all innovation and those who seek absolute innovation — who are in fact in unwitting collusion. The state has continuously to be shored up against the inevitable ruin which either or both these 'vices' would entail. The only beneficial political activity is the expedient use of expedients, the continual 'fitting' of carefully chosen supplements to preserve 'the useful parts' of the 'old establishments'. Burke presents this as the masculine labour of 'vigorous' minds ever on the alert against the debilitating 'obstinacy' and 'levity' of those who would avoid all constructive effort and so destroy the state though self-satisfied mediocrity or envious malignity. It is therefore of the utmost importance to differentiate that reform which is good for the business of the state from that which is destructive of all political economy. Adapting Derrida, sound reform 'adds itself . . . [as a] surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude', and so participates in an ongoing 'cumulating' activity, while unsound reform 'intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills,

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it is as if one fills a void' (Of Grammatology, pp. 144-5). The task of Burke's text is utterly to distinguish between reform and revolution, or between preserving and destroying revolution, precisely in these terms. This anticipates Macaulay's suggestion that the first kind of revolution protects the state against the second: 'because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century . . . we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth'.21 But while there are political and economic motivations behind Burke's distinction, the terms in which he is compelled to make them help us understand the peculiar contradictions of his text. If Derrida argues that, in Rousseau's texts, the 'second signification of the supplement cannot be separated from the first' (OfGrammatology, p. 145), it is possible to trace the way both significations operate within each of Burke's models of revolution. Revolution and reform become 'inflexions' of each other and confound Burke's attempt to divide the 'preserving' from the 'destroying' concept of revolution by the 'slender dyke of about twenty-four miles' which separates England from France (Reflections, p. 180).

Paine reads the relation between these two kinds of revolution in a similar way to Burke, but from a different stance. Far from being a radical break with the past, the French Revolution is a counterrevolution which recovers those rights lost in the revolutionary conquests which established aristocratic governments. Increasingly in Paine's discourse, it is government itself which supplements natural society, undermining and debilitating that which it claims to uphold. This is because human beings are innately social creatures and society is a natural organization composed of reciprocal wants and interests — a self-regulating organism usually harmed by the unnecessary addition of government: But how often is the natural propensity to society disturbed or destroyed by the operations of government! When the latter, instead of being ingrafted on the principles of the former, assumes to exist for itself, and acts by partialities of favour and oppression, it becomes the cause of the mischiefs it ought to prevent. (Rights of Man, p. 187) While Burke claims that the British state is patterned after nature, Paine asserts that monarchy 'in a mode of government that counteracts nature. It turns the progress of the human faculties upside down. It subjects age to be governed by children, and wisdom by folly.' Radical revolution, on the other hand, is a return to conform-

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ity with nature: 'On the contrary, the representative system is always parallel with the order and immutable laws of nature' {Rights of Man, pp. 204-5). What is at stake here is an ideological struggle between different concepts of revolution (and of government). Paulson refers to Napoleon's frustration at what he saw as the failure of the English ever clearly to distinguish between reform and revolution, since they continued to see revolution as 'a mere reform of abuses', rather than constituting 'all in itself, a complete social rebirth'.22 Yet the organizing anxiety of both the Reflections and the Rights of Man is to make clear distinctions between reform and revolution - or between preserving and destroying revolution — precisely in these terms. For Paine, to reform is to disguise and reinforce a system that is already a revolutionary usurpation of the rights of men, while true revolution is a counter-revolution which replaces the old order with something 'original' (that which originally existed and/or something entirely new). For Burke, good revolution reforms and preserves, while bad revolution destroys that which sustains society and replaces it with forms and practices inimical to the social fabric. Both assume that the different inflections of the term 'revolution' can be isolated from each other and that there can be a wholesome revolution without the violence of tyrannical revolution. This is to yearn for, or speak in the name of, a politics which is natural, which adds itself to nature and can be distinguished from that which supplants and displaces nature. One of the most suggestive aspects of this struggle is that it should take place over the term 'revolution'. Not only is 'revolution' in the political sense itself a metaphor, but its different inflections can serve as models for different ways of conceiving metaphor per se.2$ If 'trope', coming from the Greek tropos, is figuratively 'to turn', then an implicit analogy exists between 'trope' and 'revolution'. For Burke, both revolution and radical rhetoric overturn the benevolent artifice that has become 'second nature' in traditional societies and return society to a pre-civilized state of nature. For Paine, both monarchy and metaphor are 'improper' impositions upon society, turning it against nature. The 'conservative' model of metaphor assumes that it is simply a 'detour to truth', preserving meaning in a new form or presenting 'what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed'. A more 'radical' understanding of metaphor is that it defers or overturns the very possibility of the literal (on the basis that

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'there is no pure language that is free from metaphor').24 The difference between these two models of rhetoric is therefore equivalent to that between a preserving and a destroying revolution. But the distinction between proper and improper rhetoric is an on-going problem in theories of language rather than a reliable opposition. If a trope is 'a figure of speech which consists in the use of a word or phrase in a sense other than that which is proper to it' (OED), then the very notion of proper rhetoric comes into question - and with it the related concepts of property and propriety.2^ I f - as in Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages — the figurative might precede and establish the possibility of the literal, then the struggle between Burke and Paine over the nature of language in revolution leads both of them to the brink of the Romantic revolution in language.26 Neither Burke nor Paine would wholly subscribe to this revolution: neither abandons the notion of proper meanings, and neither wishes to confront the possibility that society cannot be arranged in a 'natural' manner. Both strive to eliminate such dark thoughts from their own system by locating them in the text of the other. In this sense, both texts remain 'conservative' in that they appear to shun the possibility of a radical disjunction between language and nature or that 'nature' might be the product of language rather than its ground. Burke's attempts to isolate language from illegitimate seditious impulses, and Paine's to preserve it from monarchic corruption, therefore reveal an unexpected theoretical correspondence between these political opponents. There is no space here to undertake an extended exegesis of the interrelation of political and rhetorical structures in the Rights of Man or to examine how Paine's employment of 'natural' metaphors undercuts his attack on the deceptive uses of metaphor in monarchical societies.27 Where Burke becomes more interesting than Paine is that while both, of necessity, continue to employ metaphors in order to shape their readers' political perceptions of contemporary events, Burke has already theorized, in the Enquiry, a Romantic-cumrevolutionary model of language. Burke's recourse in the Reflections to the 'primitive language of the law' seems to abandon his earlier linguistic theory since it seeks to equate the lawful and the natural, and sees the relation between words and things or ideas as fixed. Yet although the 'primitive' meanings of the past are supposedly inherited whole and entire by each succeeding generation (whose duty is to conform to and preserve them for posterity), the primitive

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language of the law gains power and authority through exploiting associations accumulated through history. The properties of words connotations accrued from ritual or customary usages — are effective because they may be transferred to places and occasions quite alien to their 'original' context. Thus the linguistic 'property' of a nation is inherited according to principles which are apparently quite different from the laws of property inheritance. The power of words is made possible because their properties are, in Patricia Parker's formulation, more akin to theatrical properties than to 'real property'.28 But if this suggests that the language of power - language at its most powerful - functions in an entirely different way than the power of the land, and may be employed independently of it, it should be remembered that Burke's attempt to legitimize the fluctuations of land ownership and political power through prescription is based upon principles similar to his linguistic theory. Like sublime language, prescription relies for its effectiveness on the deflection of rational enquiry through sentiment, imagination, and associations accumulated through time. In fact, Burke is driven to exploit the mobile power of language, and the model of representation it entails, throughout his defence of landed power. The power of language resides not in imitating things but in generating ideas and combinations of ideas which exist only in language. The most powerful poetry and polity, then, confounds reason and runs counter to the natural world. But this model of representation in language and politics leads to a peculiarly complex situation in Burke's writings on the Revolution, since it seems disconcertingly similar to his characterization of the 'illegitimate' radical rhetoric and polity he would deport as alien to British soil and to his own textual strategies. Burke seeks utterly to differentiate between the rhetorical practices he employs and defends and those which characterize radical discourse by stressing the difference between 'true' and 'false' art - a difference which guarantees existing political and social distinctions: All this violent cry against the nobility I take to be a mere work of art . . . The strong struggle in every individual to preserve possession of what he has found to belong to him and to distinguish him, is one of the securities against injustice and despotism implanted in our nature . . . What is there to shock in this? Nobility is a graceful ornament to the civil order . . . He feels no ennobling principle in his own heart who wishes to level all the artificial institutions which have been adopted for giving a body to opinion, and

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permanence to fugitive esteem. It is a sour, malignant, envious disposition, without taste for the reality, or for any image or representation of virtue, that sees with joy the unmerited fall of what had long flourished in splendour and in honour. I do not like to see any thing destroyed; any void produced in society; any ruin on the face of the land. (Reflections, p. 245) One notes both the passivity with which the nobility simply find that something belongs to them, and the 'ennobling' of those excluded from aristocratic ownership who nonetheless dutifully shun the levelling principle. Different political attitudes to the state and status quo are said to correspond to quite different models of art and cultural understanding. The faction which plots to 'level all the artificial institutions' employs a rhetoric which is a 'mere work of art'; it has no appreciation of virtue either in the 'reality' or in 'any image or representation', and fails to recognize that nobility is 'a graceful ornament to the civil order'. In this way, Burke's whole project is founded on an aesthetic nuance - on the possibility of discriminating between an art which ornaments, embodies, and images existing institutions and virtues, and that 'mere art' which not only disdains 'reality', but threatens to return the earth to the 'void' which existed before God's creative fiat or to the 'ruin' produced by the Flood (compare Genesis 1: 1-4, and 7: 21-4). Part of the persuasive effect of Burke's prose therefore depends on its creating an illusion of 'artlessness'. Couched in the form of a letter, the Reflections readily modulates between 'rational' enquiry into history, politics, or economics and what it presents as its author's spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings (whose authenticity is guaranteed because his nervous system remains in 'a healthful state of association').29 Although Burke's text and political system explicitly employs figurative strategies to give 'a body to opinion', or to 'embody' institutions in 'persons' in order to promote the public advantage, they are given authority through traditional usage. Burke introduces such figures with decorous hesitation - begging leave to 'use the expression' (Reflections, p. 172) — in order to dissociate them from any sense of rhetorical or political abuse. He therefore attempts to exemplify in his own discursive practice the contrast between the natural artifice of the traditional state and the 'mere work of art' of revolutionary thought. Burke risks everything on the supposition that his distinctions are grounded in salient differences — that the supplementation of nature with 'second nature' by which the British constitution and constitutional rhetoric

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gains its power is palpably different from the supplementary expedients employed by the French republic and republican language. This is a high-risk strategy which involves the possibility that, however hard he strives, his necessary resources cannot be made to appear sufficiently different from those he needs to condemn. Burke strives to differentiate between 'preserving' and 'destroying' aspects of revolution, superstition, art, or nature precisely in order to employ the former against the latter. He meets his crisis by attempting to 'bend' each of these concepts to suit his own ends by determining the 'proper' moment when each accent ought to be foregrounded (through actively 'forgetting' the other). In this way, however, such necessary expedients potentially open his text to the revolutionary crisis it seeks to deflect.

CHAPTER 9

Imaginary constitutions and economies

According to J. G. A. Pocock, the term 'political economy' in the eighteenth century encompasses commentary on the administration of public revenue, 'the emerging science of "the wealth of nations" ', and 'a more complex, and more ideological, enterprise aimed at establishing the moral, political, cultural and economic conditions of life in advancing commercial societies'.1 I wish to show that Burke's criticism of radical thought, and especially of the Revolution's financial policy, is driven by the apprehension that it threatens to annihilate the very conditions of political economy in all these senses. Indeed, Pocock can argue that 'it is not possible to read Burke's Reflections with both eyes open and doubt that it presents [the Assembly's creation of assignats on the basis of confiscated church property] - and not assaulting the bedchamber of Marie Antoinette - as the central, the absolute and the unforgivable crime of the Revolutionaries' {Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 197). But if the Revolution is therefore inimical to the Whig order in Britain (which was for Burke the only possible model of a successful commercial society), its challenge disconcertingly arose, as Pocock puts it, 'within the conditions that order made possible'. In responding to this challenge, Burke inevitably used a language which 'revealed tensions within Whig society and its ideology' (Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 194-5). If Burke's aesthetics are shaped by economic and political paradigms, his politics and economics are endowed with affect through what we might call an 'aesthetic ideology'. In order to prepare for an analysis of Burke's treatment of money as a representational system whose 'poetics' incorporates subjects (or creditors) into the state through imaginative identification, I want to read Burke's account of the 'poetics' of political representation. This will produce or reveal implicit equations in the Reflections between politics, economics, and 220

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poetry which constitute each system as an organic complexity not amenable to rational analysis. But while this may work to disarm domestic criticism of each facet of the British state, it also entails differentiating between Britain's constitution and economy and their deceitful simulacra in revolutionary France. Burke suggests that a proper representative system and a shared currency are two of the main 'cementing principles' of a nation state {Reflections, pp. 313-15). These adhesives work through the imagination of the public (a phrase whose ambiguity reveals what is involved here) in order to create what Benedict Anderson would call an imagined community.2 Thus Burke's distinction between Britain and revolutionary France depends upon indicting the latter's political organization and fiscal policies as deceptive imaginings which will fail to unify the various parts of the state into a coherent whole. Burke's ideological gambit therefore assumes that it is possible to differentiate between true and false representations, fictions, or acts of imagination — between that which earns credit and that which ought not to be credited. My analysis of this gambit will dwell on those moments of rhetorical finesse and slippage which indicate that Burke's attack on the Revolution's representative system or monetary policy may be read as striving to eliminate contradictions within Britain's own political economy which threaten the union between land and commerce which supposedly constituted its most characteristic achievement. THE POETIC LICENCE OF POLITICAL REPRESENTATION

In contrast to the complex, mixed constitution in England which works to safeguard ancient liberties, Burke suggests that by proceeding as if there were nothing worth retaining from the ancien regime the National Assembly has 'set up . . . trade without a capital' {Reflections, p. 122). This metaphor establishes an analogy between sound capitalist practice and the making of constitutions whose ramifications I explore in the present chapter. If they had built upon what was good in the old system, or had imitated the English constitution, the revolutionaries could have created a healthy economy and a mixed society in which each rank and profession would know and value its place. Above all, France would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in

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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 obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and imbitter that real inequality, which it can never 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. [Reflections, p. 124)

One of the principal aims, therefore, in fashioning any political system is that it should produce conditions under which the people will be content, obedient, and willing to labour. One way of promoting this is to teach them that the only equality which is either possible or valuable is a 'moral equality' achieved through virtue, and that material or social elevation does not entail an increase in happiness. The majority are 'destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life', and the inequality between them and more 'exalted' ranks can never be removed. From this perspective the promise of social or economic equality can be rejected as a 'monstrous fiction'. Yet although these material inequalities are said to be real, inevitable, and predestined, Burke simultaneously suggests that they are established by 'the order of civil life' for the 'benefit' of both ranks. This implies that class difference is instituted and maintained through ideological means, rather than being based in essential differences. Thus the distinction between the constitution established in Britain and that envisaged in revolutionary France may arise through different ways of conceiving or imagining the social order, rather than being based on an absolute opposition between reality and fiction. This undecidable or flexible relation between nature and nurture provides a rationale for, but also unsettles, Burke's various attempts to shore up the social difference which qualifies a minority to act as representatives for the majority. An analysis of the make-up of the National Assembly reveals a mixed medley of professions and occupations, including 'men formed to be instruments, not controls'. Refusing to flatter such men and so 'give the lye to nature', Burke concedes that these people 'are good and useful in the composition; they must be mischievous if they preponderate so as virtually to become the whole' [Reflections, pp. 132-3). By elevating tailors, carpenters, hair-dressers, tallow-chandlers, and so on, into positions of political power, the Revolution inverts and perverts the natural

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order of things: 'In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature' {Reflections', p. 138). Yet in insisting that 'no name, no power, no function, no artificial institution whatsoever, can make the men of whom any system of authority is composed, any other than God, and nature, and education, and their habits of life have made of them' (Reflections, p. 128), Burke precisely reveals that artificial institutions such as education do contribute to the fashioning of human beings. Burke needs to concede this because his own meritocratic politics relies upon such assumptions: 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 . . . 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. (Reflections, p. J 39) According to Burke, then, there is a crucial distinction between the difference of merit and the indifference of egalitarianism: 'Every thing ought to be open; but not indifferently to every man' (p. 139). The representation of the whole by a subordinate part is, of course, the structure of synecdoche. It is not, however, that Burke distrusts synecdoche per se, but the particular synecdoche which has been instituted in France. While he criticizes the Revolution for allowing the wrong part to represent the whole, he endorses the British system where the landed interest dominates the representation: 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 property 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 protected. The characteristic essence of property, formed out of the combined principles of its acquisition and conservation, is to be unequal. (Reflections, p. 140) For Burke, then, property has to predominate in the representation if it is to resist 'the invasions of ability'. This invocation of the fear of 'invasion' associates ability with the Revolution across the Channel (which threatens to export its doctrine and system), but it also alludes to the danger of'invasion' from the potentially revolutionary energies already active within Britain. But notice that Burke would

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not repress ability: 'Nothing is a due and adequate representation of a state, that does not represent its ability, as well as its property.' Burke is not attempting to exclude the innovative forces of capitalist enterprise. Instead, the ideology developed in the Reflections is meant to maintain the conditions necessary for the market-driven agrarian capitalism which Burke more explicitly espouses in Thoughts and Details on Scarcity (1795).3 Burke follows Hume in seeking to encourage capitalist 'ability' and 'energy' in such a way that it reforms and stimulates the traditional order rather than being allowed to destroy it. Thus although the enterprise culture ought to be represented, its vigour needs to be counter-balanced by the landed interest 'in great masses of accumulation'.4 Burke does not regard the bogus motivation of his privileged synecdoche as a 'defect' of Britain's representative system but as precisely its strength. But because any form of representation might be seen as one part standing for the whole (which makes it possible to develop analogies between different structures of political representation and different kinds of tropes), there is an onus on competing ideologies to stress the advantages of one kind of representation over another. Burke responded to this challenge throughout the second half of the eighteenth century by developing an account of political representation which is comparable with his theory of how poetic power is generated. We have seen that, for Burke, poetic language is not constrained by a mimetic imperative since it 'operates chiefly by substitution; by the means of sounds, which by custom have the effect of realities' (Enquiry, p. 173). Burke's conception of political representation reveals a similar 'poetics'. In his 'Speech to the Electors of Bristol on Being Elected' (1774), Burke argues that it is 'a fundamental mistake [i.e., misunderstanding] of the whole order and tenor of our constitution' to suppose that a Member of Parliament is elected to convey the opinions of his constituents or to obey their instructions: Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the

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general reason of the whole. You chuse a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not a member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliaments

The British system of representation is not designed to reflect local differences but to unify the nation as a single organism at a higher level. The moment of election apparently severs any direct connection between representative and electors in order to promote a mysterious communication between the Commons and a nation considered as whole and indivisible. This is effectively to give both parliament and 'nation' an aura which will preclude enquiry into what they are and what relation they have to each other. This is crucial, because 'when you open [the Constitution] . . . to enquiry in one part, where will the enquiry stop?'6 Burke's notion of political representation needs to be placed within a larger context of conflicting theories of representation. Burke can promote the representative system in Britain (despite the limited franchise and the 'rotten' boroughs) because his understanding of it is based in the eighteenth-century concept of 'virtual' representation, which claimed that the whole population was represented in essence or effect whether or not they had the vote.7 In fact, this is precisely why a Member of Parliament should remain aloof from the particular demands of the local electorate. Raymond Williams shows how the term 'represent', after its appearance in the fourteenth century, 'quickly acquired a range of senses of making present: in the physical sense of presenting oneself or another, often to some person of authority; but also in the sense of making present in the mind'. A 'crucial extension' of these meanings was the early sense of 'standing for something that is not present' (Keywords, pp. 266, 267). Burke's account of political representation develops this sense into something more akin to aesthetic symbolism: we find Burke making a notorious distinction between a representative and a delegate, which in part relied on the symbolic sense of representative (standing for others, but in his own terms) rather than on the political sense (making present, representing, the opinions of those who elected him). (Keywords, p. 268) But Burke's account of political representation both disguises and draws attention to problems endemic in the concept of representation not only in the specific historical circumstances of Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, but on a more general theoretical

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level. The idea that a representative (whether regarded as a delegate, as a typical member of the group, or as a kind of embodiment or symbol) stands for a group of people or a nation can always be read as standing in-the-place-of- as displacing that which is supposed to be made present. In this way, political representation (like representation in art) works through a process which Derrida describes as differance - which may illusionistically seem to make present the thing itself while actually differing from and deferring it. While Burke seeks to obscure these problems through aestheticizing the English constitution, radical critics held that its system of representation was a travesty of representation. Burke meets radicalism's challenge by ironically repeating its claim that the country is governed by 'an house of lords not representing anyone but themselves; and by an house of commons exactly such as the present, that is, as they term it, by a mere "shadow and mockery" of representation' (Reflections, p. 147). Burke was not, of course, unaware of the anomalies of the distribution of seats in Britain, the limitations of the franchise, and the abuses at elections. Yet, in an audacious move, he claims that the inequality in the British system is precisely that which produces equality: When did you hear in Great Britain of any province suffering from the inequality of its representation; what district from having no representation at all? Not only our monarchy and our peerage secure the equality on which our unity depends, but it is the spirit of the house of commons itself. The very inequality of representation, which is so foolishly complained of, is perhaps the very thing which prevents us from thinking or acting as members for districts. Cornwall elects as many members as all Scotland. But is Cornwall better taken care of than Scotland? (Reflections, pp. 303-4)

By contrast, the very attempt in France to produce an equal representation severs any possible link between representative and represented: Your new constitution is the very reverse of ours in its principle; and I am astonished how any persons could dream of holding out any thing done in it as an example for Great Britain. With you there is little, or rather no, connection between the last representative and the first constituent. The member who goes to the national assembly is not chosen by the people, nor accountable to them . . . two sets of magistracy intervene between him and the primary assembly, so as to render him, as I have said, an ambassador of a state, and not the representative of the people within a state. (Reflections, p. 304)

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In concluding a critique of the three ways in which the number of 'deputies' for each 'canton' is computed in the French republic,8 Burke asserts that In this whole contrivance of the three bases ... I do not see a variety of objects, reconciled in one consistent whole, but several contradictory principles reluctantly and irreconcileably brought and held together by your philosophers, like wild beasts shut up in a cage, to claw and bite each other to their mutual destruction. (Reflections, p. 296) Thus the political reorganization of France fails to reconcile differences into a consistent whole; it remains a contrivance whose contradictory and irreconcilable principles threaten mutual destruction. The British state, of course, offers an exemplary contrast: We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition. (Reflections, pp. 281-2) Although a state's 'excellence in composition' can only be achieved over long periods, and through the interaction of mind with mind, Burke nevertheless stresses that individual members of a legislature (and in this he finds the lawgivers of the National Assembly wanting) should have qualities of mind which qualify them for their role: 'to form a free government', that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind' (Reflections, p. 374). The work of such statesmen is explicitly likened to the construction of poems: 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, dulcia sunto ['It is not enough for poems to be fine; they must charm']. 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. (Reflections, p. 172)9 In order to prevent dissidence and disaffection, then, a country ought to be 'lovely', ought to 'charm' its citizens as poems (or women) do in Burke's Enquiry. Thus a complex society, in which capitalist energies are carefully reconciled to the landed interest, is sustained through being endowed with aesthetic qualities which induce uncritical love. Indeed, the equation between poetic text and

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constitution defined as a complex, self-regulating organism which is by definition outside the critical scope of reason reappears in each domain of the political economy (in the largest sense invoked at the outset of the present chapter) which Burke articulates and defends. Burke's conception of state and statesman clearly anticipates Coleridge's account of the organic poem and/or the processes of poetic genius or imagination developed in the Biographia Literaria (1817).10 As Jerome Christensen recognizes, 'In the Biographia, the equivalent of Burke's ancient constitution, that which grounds and entails all our reflections, is . . . " . . . the constitution of the mind itself".'11 A good example of the way Coleridge's organicist thought transposes Burke's into an apparently different key is his definition of the 'tautegorical symbol' in The Statesman's Manual (1816) as a figure which 'always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as the living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative'.12 Coleridge's most famous distinction, between fancy and the imagination, is made with a political urgency which is derived from Burkean assumptions. Coleridge stresses that 'in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymise those words originally of the same meaning'. Coleridge's account, in a footnote, of how his crucial distinction becomes established is strikingly Burkean: through usage and the passage of time, the distinction becomes 'so naturalized and of such general currency that the language does as it were think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense\l$ The imagination is crucial because it supposedly shapes and modifies perception into Art, while the fancy is palpable artifice — an accumulative process that adds one capricious and distorting image to another without a unifying principle. The need for a language which makes such distinctions seem like second nature is therefore urgently necessary for the conservation of both the state and the self. FUNDING THE REVOLUTION! PROMISES, PROMISES

One of the most urgent problems facing the National Assembly was finance, since it inherited the economic crisis which contributed to the downfall of the ancien regime. On 10 October 1789 Tallyrand declared that the sale of church lands would raise two thousand million livres, and that, although the state would then be responsible

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for the maintenance of the clergy, this could be done at a cost of only a hundred million a year. This proposition seemed to offer a way out of the crisis: Backed by the proceeds of the sale of Church lands, paper money, in the form of assignats, was issued. It was to be bought in and destroyed as money returned to the Treasury from the sales, and thus the fear of inflation, which had haunted France since the time of John Law, was dissipated. With the aid of the assignats . . . a breathing space [could be] ensured in which the Assembly could bring into operation a new and reformed fiscal system. (Cobban, History of Modern France, pp. 172-3) 14

In fact, although calling in the 'aid' of the assignats did provide two years' breathing space, the Assembly had unknowingly 'primed the pump of continued revolution. Inflation was to be the root cause which perpetuated economic distress and so provided the raw material for future upheavals' (Cobban, History of Modern Francei, P- 173)-

This economic strategy of the National Assembly forms one of the principal targets of Burke's assault on the Revolution. I want, however, to suggest that his 'prescience' in fervently delineating its consequences owes as much to his keen awareness of Britain's own ambivalent experience of funding and paper money as it does to insights about events and trends in France. Thus I will argue that the assignat crisis presents Burke with an occasion for reflecting on a problem internal to Britain or to the commercial ideology itself. This is indicated by the way his attack on the assignats reiterates traditionalist attacks on the post-1688 financial revolution which he held to be Britain's most precious (and precarious) achievement. If this comes dangerously close to revealing unexpected parallels between the French Revolution and the commercial order in Britain, Burke seeks to deflect this through condemning the assignats as government funding by another name and celebrating Britain's 'healthy' use of paper money issued by banks. This follows Smith's clear demarcation between 'the circulating notes of banks and bankers' (which boost the economy when properly conducted) and 'the ruinous expedient of perpetual funding'.^ Yet I want to show that Burke's efforts skirt the issue of Britain's continued dependence on government funding and the periodic crises in its own use of paper money. We have seen that Burke condemns the Revolution for being unnecessary - for being a rebellion against 'a mild and lawful

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monarch'. One of the main consequences of this original sin is an economic crisis which displays a supplementary logic: every thing human and divine [has been] 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 discredited paper securities of impoverished fraud, and beggared rapine, held out as a currency for the support of an empire, in lieu of the two great recognized species that represent the lasting conventional credit of mankind, which disappeared and hid themselves in the earth from whence they came, when the principle of property, whose creatures and representatives they are, was systematically subverted. {Reflections, p. 126) If the doctrine of the rights of man is a monstrous fiction, then its economic correlative can be found in the idolatry of'public credit'. The assignats are 'discredited' from their first appearance, and they come 'in lieu of and banish gold and silver coin. Gold and silver specie, by contrast, authentically represent 'conventional credit' because they are created by, and represent, landed property (the ultimate origin of credit). Like Coleridge's tautegorical symbol, these precious metals partake of the nature and substance of that which they represent: they are found in the earth, and they have retreated back into 'the earth from whence they came'. Yet if this acknowledges that credit is conventional, and that gold and silver are representatives rather than wealth itself,16 Burke also stresses that 'real estate' too has a market rather than an absolute value. He points out that to bring all the church property 'at once into market, was obviously to defeat the profits proposed by the confiscation, by depreciating the value of those lands, and indeed of all the landed estates throughout France' (Reflections, p. 223). This reveals that even agrarian economies are intrinsically liable to seismic cataclysms in which the 'ground' of all value may be undermined by a slippage from one representational form to another that can never be halted by 'real' wealth. If 'credit' means a belief or trust that real wealth exists somewhere or that it can eventually be made to appear, then modern economic systems turn out to require the tacit belief of 'creditors' if they are to operate at all. While the assignats are condemned as false representations, then, the general questions about economics which they raise seem to problematize in advance any attempt to contrast them with 'honest' money. As an 'outrage upon credit' (Reflections, p. 226), assignats undermine not only a financial system based in the trust that the state can pay at some

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future time, but also reflect upon the larger socio-economic formation which employs and depends upon a general credulity in the stories it produces about itself. Burke's discussion of the 'fictitious wealth' of the French Republic presents it as a kind of bankrupt writing.1? The inscriptions on the assignats are false promises analogous to the promise of equality held out by speculations about the rights of man. Yet paper currency of all kinds consists in promissory notes whose effectiveness depends upon the confidence of the public that they are translatable into gold and silver upon demand.18 Burke therefore exploits or exhibits fears about fiduciary economics which, Foucault shows, became endemic in Europe after 'the great crisis of monetary signs . . . that began fairly early in the seventeenth century'. *9 Locke, for example, had warned that money is 'a Pledge, which Writing cannot supply the place of... because a Law cannot give to Bills that intrinsic Value, which the universal Consent of Mankind has annexed to Silver and Gold'.20 Because money was, as Foucault puts it, 'a pure fiction', it depended upon the willing suspension of disbelief amongst all users. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries paper and metal money had been found to revive trade, but it also made the economy vulnerable to inflationary spirals in which the fictional status of money became all too apparent. Burke's criticism of the Revolution's recourse to funding therefore reiterates anxieties which had beleaguered Britain's own financial revolution at least since the founding of the Bank of England in 1694. If paper money had always been seen as a double-edged resource in Britain's commercial boom, I want to trace the way Burke seeks to relieve this anxiety by attempting to reserve paper money's trustworthy effects for Britain's economy while claiming that its deleterious effects can be discerned solely in revolutionary France. Burke argues that the interdependence between the issue of assignats and the auction of church lands is a particularly destructive one because it has initiated 'a process of continual transmutation of paper into land, and land into paper'. This policy therefore undermines and unsettles what is for Burke the very foundation of society and transfers political and economic power from country to city, from aristocracy to a money interest loosed from the land: By this means the spirit of money-jobbing and speculation goes into the mass of land itself, and incorporates with it. By this kind of operation, that species of property becomes (as it were) volatilized; it assumes an unnatural

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and monstrous activity, and thereby throws into the hands of the several managers, principal and subordinate, Parisian and provincial, all the representatives of money, and perhaps a full tenth part of all the land in France, which has now acquired the worst and most pernicious part of the evil of a paper circulation, the greatest possible uncertainty in its value. They have reversed the Latonian kindness to the landed property of Delos. [Reflections, p. 308) 21

Thus the National Assembly's remedy for its financial problems turns out to be the most 'evil' resource that could have been chosen. Rather than land stabilizing capital, speculation in capital has been allowed to volatize land. A perverse transubstantiation, not of base metal into gold but of land into paper, results when capitalism undermines its own ultimate resource. The ground upon and out of which all other wealth arises in agrarian economics, the ultimate referent or heart of its circulatory system, is reduced to being just one more kind of token in a spiral of speculative exchange. In thus floating or setting adrift the land itself through incorporating speculation into its very being, the legislators of France have transcended all precedent; they are the very first who have founded a commonwealth upon gaming, and infused this spirit into it as its vital breath. The great object in these politics is to metamorphose France, from a great kingdom into one great playtable; to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters; to make speculation as extensive as life; to mix it with all its concerns . . . They loudly proclaim their opinion, that this their present system of a republic cannot possibly exist without this kind of gaming fund; and that the very thread of its life is spun out of the staple of these speculations. [Reflections, pp. 309-10) If the turns and chances of the play-table have become the most apt and damaging image of the Revolution itself, this is because the National Assembly's speculative financial policies threaten to undermine the value of labour as well as land: But where the law, which in most circumstances forbids, and in none countenances gaming, is itself debauched, so as to reverse its nature and policy ... a more dreadful epidemic distemper of that kind is spread than yet has appeared in the world. With you a man can neither earn nor buy his dinner, without a speculation. What he receives in the morning will not have the same value at night . . . Who will labour without knowing the amount of his pay? [Reflections, pp. 310-11) In identifying this unprecedented and 'dreadful epidemic distemper5 - which infuses itself into the 'vital breath' of all social values and

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relations and strikes at law, land, and labour - Burke may at last have diagnosed for us the nature of the disease he warns against throughout the Reflections. As in the twentieth century, capitalism's greatest fear (or bugbear) from the outset is uncontrollable and unpredictable inflation. For Burke, this would ultimately undermine labour - for who would work if it was impossible to predict the buying power of their wages at the end of the day?22 The inflation which results from and exemplifies radicalism therefore undermines the fundamental basis of capitalism.23 The Revolution thus presents an exemplary instance of the political consequences of breaking the 'natural' link between capitalism and the landed interest: Those whose operations can take from, or add ten percent to, the possessions of every man in France, must be the masters of every man in France. The whole of the power obtained by this revolution will settle in the towns among the burghers, and the monied directors who lead them. The landed gentleman, the yeoman, and the peasant have, none of them, habits or inclinations, or experience, which can lead them to any share in this the sole source of power and influence now left in France. {Reflections, pp. 3ii~^)

Those who own and those who work upon the land have no defences against unbridled speculation, and there can be no prescription against this distemper if it is allowed to attack the immunity system itself. All political and economic power in France will be lodged with a set of monied men without any vested interest in the traditional order and without the checks and balances operative in Britain's mixed constitution: All these considerations leave no doubt on my mind, that if this monster of a constitution can continue, France will be wholly governed by the agitators in corporations, by societies in the towns formed of directors of assignats, and trustees for the sale of church lands, attornies, agents, money-jobbers, speculators, and adventurers, composing an ignoble oligarchy founded on the destruction of the crown, the church, the nobility, and the people. Here end all the deceitful dreams and visions of the equality and rights of men. In 'the Serbonian bog' of this base oligarchy they are all absorbed, sunk, and lost for ever. (Reflections, p. 313)

Pocock argues that Burke's attack on the Revolution is not aimed at the rise of bourgeois capitalism in France: 'There is no indication here that the revolutionary men of wealth are a class seeking to

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maximize the profits of capital invested in commerce and manufacture.'24 Instead, Burke is attacking speculators in money whose activities threaten the political economy of capitalism itself. Yet Burke's emphatic rejection of gaming, jobbing, and speculation as emblematic of the Revolution inevitably recalls the terms and tone in which England's own financial revolution was attacked by traditionalist critics throughout the eighteenth century (and it is crucial to remember that Burke was a 'modern' in this debate).2^ An examination of the way this 'revolution' was understood and represented by these critics suggests that the very system which Burke defends in Britain was founded upon and funded by a 'gaming' process uncomfortably similar to that which he rails against in France.26 In his influential study of England's 'financial revolution', P. G. M. Dickson argues that the system of public borrowing developed in this period funded England's commercial and imperial ascendancy by enabling the government 'to spend on war out of all proportion to its tax revenue'.27 But despite the fact that public faith was a precondition for the successful management of the public debt in England, Dickson shows that only a minority of commentators actually had any confidence in funding. Thomas Mortimer still felt it necessary in 1769 to promote England's public credit as a 'standing miracle in politics, which at once astonishes and over-awes the states of Europe'. 28 The majority are said to have regarded the National Debt as a political trick designed to cultivate a monied interest at the expense of the gentry. Anticipating Burke's critique of the French Revolution by a century, John Briscoe asserted that the new practice of funding was 'like a Canker, which will eat up the Gentlemen's Estates in Land, and beggar the Trading Part of the Nation, and bring all the Subjects in England to be the Monied Men's Vassals'.29 And while Dickson suggests that speculation in public stock - 'stockjobbing' - was of great political and economic utility, public opinion was united in mistrusting it. Even Defoe, one of the principal champions of the new order, condemned stock-jobbing as a trade which was 'manag'd with the greatest Intriegue, Artifice, and Trick, that ever any thing that appear'd with a face of Honesty could be handl'd with'.3° Pocock claims that 'Neither David Hume, Adam Smith, nor . . . Edmund Burke, was free of the nightmare that multiplying paper credit might end by destroying the value and even the meaning of property.' In a note to this, Pocock posits that

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'An exception must be entered to Macaulay's observation . . . that only Burke was 'Tree of the general delusion" that the debt would destroy society. He did not fear it in England, but did in France' {Virtue, Commerce, and History', p. 196).

But Pocock's distinction here overlooks the way Burke's Tears' about France's economy can be read as projecting and deflecting anxieties about Britain's own economy. I suggest that the revolutionary crisis of 1790 allows and compels Burke to distinguish between those tendencies in the capitalist ethos which lead towards the destruction of the state and those which are necessary for its 'progress'. While Burke represents (epitomizes and speaks for) the new order in the second half of the eighteenth century, his attack on the French Revolution repeatedly condemns, using the very rhetoric that was originally turned against the English bourgeoisie, the unbridled luxury and speculation of the petit-bourgeoisie whom he identifies as the Revolution's chief beneficiary. This indicates that bourgeois enterprise is potentially divided against itself, and that the Revolution is so critical for Burke precisely because it dramatizes the fundamental antipathy between the radical aspect of the bourgeoisie and traditional institutions. If the logic of Burke's early aesthetics works to relocate the dangers attributed to the commercial ideology 'otherwhere' (in the aristocracy, in women, in the lower orders), the Reflections reactivates that strategy in a different historical context by projecting those same 'diseases' onto revolutionary France. This is done through differentiating between the wholesome imaginative process which is implicit in and binds together all aspects of the British constitution and the delusive imaginative leaps of the Revolution, whose fictions tend to dissolve rather than cement together the complex network of adherences which constitute a state. Yet the fact that this can only be done by redeploying the very language developed by the most trenchant of Britain's own traditionalist critics, suggests that the two states and their attendant ideologies are more complicit than either would want to recognize. In fact, the only difference which Burke insists upon is that funding in the Revolution is established through force rather than confidence. Thus although Burke's reflections on the Revolution present an opportunity to reiterate his faith in Britain's healthy constitution, it also reveals what Paul Hamilton calls 'the unspoken complicity between economic systems in France and England which were increasingly founded on sheer confidence'.31

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It is important to realize that Burke does not reject paper money in itself. Indeed, he needs to argue that paper money can be advantageous since it was a crucial factor in Britain's own economy. Drawing on Smith's discussion of the benefits of paper money in the Wealth of Nations', Burke claims that 'it might be easily shewn, that our paper wealth, instead of lessening the real coin, has a tendency to increase it; instead of being a substitute for money, it only facilitates its entry, its exit, and its circulation; that is the symbol of prosperity, and not the badge of distress' (Reflections, pp. 357—8; compare Wealth of Nations, 1, pp. 320—1). In contrast to this, the National Assembly has undermined what Burke presents as a once healthy economy in France by forcing ca currency of their own fiction in the place of that which is real, and recognized by the law of nations' (Reflections, p. 261). Thus while paper money is a ruinous, inflationary, and 'dangerous' supplement in France, where it is 'a badge of distress' which simultaneously indicates a 'want' and supplants 'real' wealth, in England it is a benevolent 'symbol of prosperity', having 'a tendency to increase' - or supplement - 'real coin'. This is therefore yet another version of Burke's distinction between the British state in which art and nature are blended and the French republic where artifice systematically destroys and exposes nature. Yet the struggle against radical practices - or what Burke figures as radical practices — comes to seem driven by an internal struggle within the Reflections to distinguish and exclude from its own system 'radical' forms which have come to seem dangerous to its own project. This struggle seems unresolvable, however, in that both 'sound' and 'unsound' capitalism operate by definition through supplementing 'real' wealth. Given their own impoverished condition, the French inevitably misunderstand the cause of England's prosperity: When so little within or without is now found but paper, the representative not of opulence but of want, the creature not of credit but of power, they imagine that our flourishing state in England is owing to that bank-paper, and not the bank-paper to the flourishing condition of our commerce, to the solidity of our credit, and to the total exclusion of all idea of power from any part of the transaction. They forget that, in England, not one shilling of paper money of any description is received but of choice; that the whole has had its origin in cash actually deposited; and that it is convertible, at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss, into cash again. (Reflections, p. 357)3*

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The French cannot have read their Adam Smith, whose tenets on the relation between paper money and 'cash' Burke reproduces here. Smith argues that a proper use of paper money could boost a prosperous but sluggish economy: 'the judicious operations of banking, by substituting paper in the room of a great part of [the gold and silver which would otherwise have to be kept always at hand], enables the country to convert a great part of this dead stock into active and productive stock' {Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 321). Burke proposes that this works effectively in Britain not only because paper money is backed by an original opulence, but because it is instituted through faith rather than force. The people willingly become the state's creditors - they credit and give credit to its ability to pay. They are thus interpellated into an imaginary relation with the state which is also a material interdependence which binds society together, theoretically, in a network of relations of mutual trust. This conforms to Smith's emphasis that the effectiveness of paper money depends on the 'confidence' people have in the banker's ability to exchange 'his promissory notes' for gold and silver money {Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 292). But there is a significant difference between Burke's assertion about paper money in Britain and Smith's explanation of how it actually operates. Burke claims that the whole of the paper money in circulation has its 'origin in cash actually deposited' and can be instantly and fully converted into cash again upon demand. Yet Smith explains that one of the reasons why paper money can boost an economy is that it releases a nation's gold and silver for foreign trade; paper money is effective, therefore, precisely because most of the gold and silver which it represents is actually absent (from the bank and from the country). Yet this renders paper money vulnerable whenever banks stray from the principle that 'the whole paper money of every kind which can easily circulate in any country never can exceed the value of the gold and silver, of which it supplies the place, or which (the commerce being supposed the same) would circulate there, if there was no paper money' {Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 300). Should paper money ever be issued in excess of this, Smith warns, the excess will 'immediately return upon the banks to be exchanged for gold and silver'. If the banks 'showed any difficulty or backwardness in payment . . . the alarm which this would occasion, [would] necessarily increase the run [upon the banks]' {Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 301). Any difference at the point of exchange between paper money and the amount of precious metal it

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is supposed to represent, or any deferral of payment, would therefore undermine public confidence. Whenever this occurs or is anticipated, everyone attempts to exchange paper for gold and silver 'immediately'. But since the banks only hold gold and silver to the value of a certain portion of the paper money they circulate (enough to cover the ordinary transactions of everyday business), only a fraction of the paper money in circulation could be exchanged into 'real' coin instantly and without mediation. While this is usually sufficient to maintain public confidence it reveals that even a properly conducted paper currency depends upon an act of imagination sustained solely by confidence in the bank's or the economy's credit.

Thus although Smith writes enthusiastically about the stimulating effects of paper money on Britain's economy and industry, he also reveals that it is intrinsically susceptible to crises similar to that which Burke describes in revolutionary France.33 Periodic gluts of 'superfluous paper' do occur in Britain because, Smith argues, 'every particular banking company has not always understood or attended to its own particular interest'. Even the Bank of England has been driven to inflationary measures: 'By issuing too great a quantity of paper, of which the excess was continually returning, in order to be exchanged for gold and silver, the Bank of England was for many years together obliged to coin gold to the extent of between eight hundred thousand pounds and a million a year' (Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 302). This imprudence entailed a loss for the Bank which was augmented by 'the much greater imprudence of almost all the Scotch banks' {Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 304): The Scotch banks, in consequence of an excess of the same kind, were all obliged to employ constantly agents at London to collect money for them, at an expence which was seldom below one and a half or two per cent . .. Those agents were not always able to replenish the coffers of their employers so fast as they were emptied. In this case the resource of the banks was, to draw upon their correspondents in London bills of exchange . . . When those correspondents afterwards drew upon them for the payment of this sum, together with the interest and a commission, some of those banks, from the distress into which their excessive circulation had thrown them, had sometimes no other means of satisfying this draught but by drawing a second sett of bills either upon the same, or upon some other correspondents in London; and the same sum, or rather bills for the same sum, would in this manner make sometimes more than two or three journies; the debtor bank, paying always the interest and commission upon

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the whole accumulated sum. Even those Scotch banks which never distinguished themselves by their extreme imprudence, were sometimes obliged to employ this ruinous resource. {Wealth of Nations, i, p. 303) This 'ruinous resource' (a paradoxical formulation which echoes Rousseau's description of the supplement as a 'menacing aid') was forced upon banks by unsound speculation: 'The over-trading of some bold projectors in both parts of the united kingdom was the original cause of this excessive circulation of paper money' (Wealth of Nations', 1, p. 304). Smith therefore reveals that Britain's economy was itself subject to the same inflationary spirals as those Burke locates in France, and that it had resorted to similar ruinous resources. Burke's dismissive criticism of the Revolution's economy may therefore mark the apprehension that France's economic crisis might mirror those moments in Britain's own periodically 'revolutionary' economy in which bills of exchange circulate the body politic in an inflationary spiral or 'epidemic distemper'.34 Paine's response to the discussion of paper money in the Reflections revealingly repeats Burke's own terms and anxieties. Paine stresses that the funding system 'is not money; neither is it, properly speaking, credit. It in effect creates upon paper the sum which it appears to borrow, and lays on a tax to keep the imaginary capital alive by the payment of interest, and sends the annuity to market, to be sold for paper money already in circulation' (Rights of Man, p. 154). Thus Paine produces an insightful analysis of the imaginary element in the funding system and strives to exclude it from his own version of the healthy capitalist economy. His comparison between England and France is conducted entirely in terms of the gold and silver to be found in each: the prejudices of some, and the imposition of others, have always represented France as a nation possessing but little money - whereas the quantity is not only more than four times what the quantity is in England, but is considerably greater on a proportion of numbers. To account for this deficiency on the part of England, some reference should be had to the English system of funding. It operates to multiply paper, and to substitute it in the room of money, in various shapes; and the more paper is multiplied, the more opportunities are afforded to export the specie; and it admits of a possibility (by extending it to small notes) of increasing paper till there is no money left. (Rights of Man, p. 155, my emphases)

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If Burke draws on Smith's critique of funding to condemn the Revolution and on his account of paper money to contrast England's finances with France's, then Paine uses Smith precisely to reverse the charges.35 While France's coffers are full of money, England's system of funding has littered its economy with worthless paper which serves merely to disguise the disappearance of its real money. Although Collins points out that when Paine contrasted England's economic condition unfavourably with that of France he 'was indulging, for the most part, in wishful thinking' (Introduction to Rights of Man, p. 29), I am less concerned here with whether Burke or Paine was right than with the way their disagreements turn out to replicate each other. But to note that Burke and Paine share paradigms and pursue analogous labours is not to suggest that they are in 'collusion' in the usual sense of the word.36 Both vie with each other to be the spokesman of the 'liberal' interest, and both promote versions of Smith's capitalist economics. But the struggle between them is so animated precisely because the French Revolution has sent these once fellow travellers down quite different roads toward quite different political, economic, and social versions of capitalism. In fact, Paine emerges as a more 'conservative' champion of capitalism than Burke. He appears to reject the possibility that paper money or funding might stimulate the production of wealth (its creations are imaginary fictions) and sees it as an entirely ruinous resource.37 In addition, he appears to believe that intermediary representations can and ought to be eliminated from economic transactions by reverting to gold and silver in every facet of the economy. Thus Paine rejects both the disadvantages and the advantages of paper money's supplementary operation in favour of 'real' and 'natural' wealth. He fails to consider whether gold and silver are themselves conventional representations of wealth, nor does he answer Burke's criticism of the assignats. Burke, on the other hand, shares Smith's conviction about the benefits of a properly conducted paper currency based on the confidence of the people. In England, that confidence is nurtured by the fact that its paper money is accepted by 'choice' rather than through coercion, and by the conviction that it is backed by 'cash actually deposited' and can therefore be converted 'at pleasure, in an instant, and without the smallest loss' {Reflections, p. 357). This ignores Smith's recognition that even the healthiest paper money involves a confidence trick,

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and refuses to countenance its intrinsic liability to periodic inflationary crises. Burke's brilliant rhetoric, then, represses the possibility that England's economy is not so different from the National Assembly's operations and that the resource which appears to uphold an economy may suddenly transform itself into a dreadful epidemic distemper. The fact that Burke is driven repeatedly to dissociate one inflection of a supplementary form from its 'other' (by locating and castigating the negative in the 'evil' republic across the Channel) is perhaps the clearest indication that he is struggling with the contradictions of Britain's own supplementary economy in a way which involves its own hazards. If, in Derrida's reading of Rousseau, neither signification of 'supplement' can fully slough off the other (the supplement adds only to supplant or to underline the original lack which summoned it), it is fascinating to see Burke imitate Rousseau in striving to dissociate this double-edged logic into wholly distinct domains. If Burke conceives the English Channel as the line of demarcation between the different operations of the supplement, he is continually troubled by the possibility that fraudulent speculation may be illicitly smuggled across this divide.s8 As Derrida might have put it, it seems that there is less an impermeable frontier between England and France than an economic distribution. Rousseau, indeed, offers a revealing role-model for Burke, exhausting himself 'in trying to separate, as two exterior and heterogeneous forces, a positive and a negative principle'. That is, like Rousseau, Burke risks his constitution in order to save it.39 Burke's attempt in the Reflections to identify revolutionary economics as a corrupt or merely imaginative system can therefore be read as projecting a negative aspect of Britain's own financial revolution which had haunted it from the beginning onto a radical 'other' across the Channel. Thus the difference within the British economy is redistributed as a difference between Britain and France. And yet this disguises the fact that the British economy is successful, as well as vulnerable, precisely because of its own imaginative element. This means that the question of false and true imagination (or false and true representation) is urgently repoliticized in the Reflections (and in radical responses which seek to eliminate the imagination altogether) . Yet the distinction between sound and corrupt imagination (or between imagination and fancy) remains a problem internal to Britain's political economy and the texts which defend it. This

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irreducible problem constitutes, I suggest, the politicized discursive network within which English Romanticism's obsession with the imagination and its distinction from other, more dangerous, modes of thought and composition needs to be theorized.40

CHAPTER

10

Speculation and the republic of letters

According to Foucault, one of the problems which faced physiocratic economic thought in the second half of the eighteenth century concerned the creation of value. While all commodities could be said to originate in the land, they only assume the status of wealth through being exchanged. Wealth, then, is construed out of those goods which exceed the agricultural capitalist's immediate needs. This excess has to be derived from a source which will not be depleted by the process of continually yielding a profit. In Foucault's analysis of physiocratic thought, neither trade nor industry is capable of providing 'this necessary supplement' - on the contrary, entrepreneurial activity creates wealth only at the expense of others, and the value it creates 'arises only where goods have disappeared' [Order of Things, pp. 193—4). Foucault's use of the term 'necessary supplement', in the year before the publication of Derrida's Of Grammatology, seems unaware of its contradictory possibilities, yet we can see how these reassert themselves in Foucault's analysis. While manufacturing capitalism creates profit by depleting 'natural' wealth, agricultural capitalism derives its surplus from a nature regarded as 'an inexhaustible source of the goods that exchange transforms into values' (Order of Things, p. 195). Nature is inexhaustible because it is backed by what Mirabeau calls 'the Author of nature, the Producer of all goods and all wealth'.1 As Foucault suggests, the agricultural labourer or farmer enters into partnership in this productivity, becoming a 'Co-Author' in an agrariancum-literary economy (Order of Things, p. 194). In this way, agriculture shares the general paradigm of creativity developed in the Renaissance, which held that 'man' (especially the poet) might imitate God's creation and so in some way participate in God's creativity.2 At the same time, however, the second half of the eighteenth 243

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century is the scene, for Foucault, of an epistemological mutation which, in economics, displaces the physiocratic concentration on representations of the 'real' good 'which exists prior to the system of wealth5 {Order of Things, p. 195) in order to focus, in Smith, on representations of labour. Exchanges are no longer organized by needs, but 'by the units of labour that have been invested in the objects in question' {Order of Things, p. 224). By including labour in the equation, Smith's analysis 'represents an essential hiatus', since he 'formulates a principle . . . that is irreducible to the analysis of representation' {Order of Things, pp. 224, 225). Smith anticipates 'the possibility of a political economy whose object would no longer be the exchange of wealth (and the interplay of representations which is its basis), but its real production: forms of labour and capital' {Order of Things, p. 225).

If, in what Foucault calls the Classical period, linguistic signs and monetary tokens function in analogous ways in that both are thought to signify or designate real objects or needs, the break with representation in which Smith figures has parallels in contemporary theories of language in which words no longer gain their meaning through representing objects, but are endowed with representational possibilities through the language system itself {Order of Things, pp. 202—3, 232—43). I would like to explore, in this concluding chapter, the ways in which Smith's economics are inextricably bound up with a practice as well as a theory of language whose break with classical notions of representation is both enabling and peculiarly unnerving for Smith. The Janus-faced nature of this epistemic mutation can also be seen to organize Burke's attempts to differentiate radical and conservative capitalism and their associated politics and rhetorics. The new possibilities which the paradigm shift opens up in economics and language are crucial to Burke's linguistic and economic theories and practices, yet they are also disturbingly akin to those he wishes to identify with revolutionary radicalism. Burke, too, forms a transitional figure whose physiocratic economics shares Smith's analysis of labour and the market, and whose rhetorical theory both invokes the primitive language of the law and perceives that the power of language arises from its non-representational status. In a sense, then, Burke tries to limit rhetorical 'profit' - which certain uses of language might yield over and above 'the thing itself - to a particular class and to the promotion of certain socio-economic ends. It is this concern which shapes Burke's repeated attempts to dis-

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tinguish between natural art and mere artifice. Although he develops and exploits a modern poetics which informs his thought about representation in language, politics, and money, the majority in any society are to be encouraged in the 'primitive' belief that language conforms to what Burke presents as natural laws, the transgression of which produces monstrous and sacrilegious fictions. Raymond Williams reminds us that, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the terms 'create' and 'creation' acquired their modern senses of artistic and imaginative activity which stress human innovation rather than mere imitation.3 Briefly (and hence reductively), literature begins to be conceived not as the imitation of God's creation but as exemplifying human creativity, and the author seeks to dissolve the partnership with the author of nature by emulating and displacing Him (a possibility that had always been potential within Renaissance theories). The notion of literature undergoes a shift through this period from the sense of 'letters' (which worked to underpin social divisions) towards a model of individual imaginative expression which was bound up with a developing 'self-consciousness of the profession of authorship, in the period of transition from patronage to the bookselling market'.4 This means that literature begins to break its traditional ties with landed power in order to become implicated within, and identified with, the emerging capitalist economy (even if it rejects such an identification). This shift in the conditions of literary production from patronage to the market place endows literature itself with exchange value rather than intrinsic worth. Equally important, here, is the contemporary apprehension that this was a kind of prostitution which indicated a feminization of literary production (made explicit by the rise of middle-class women as readers and authors).5 Burke, I suggest, both resists and attempts to exploit the anxieties and implicit values in this shifting perception of literary activity by identifying the 'feminine' and the commercial with revolutionary writing. In doing so, he reserves 'manliness' for that political writing (such as his own) which emerges from and works to reform the existing political order. Thus the new writing produced by the new men of letters is involved within a network of negative associations of the feminine — enthusiasm, madness, false speculation, and speculative economics. We will see that this allows Burke to suggest that a fatal conspiratorial link exists, almost inevitably, between speculative, imaginative writing and a capitalism not properly grounded in

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or ballasted by the landed interest. Burke therefore seeks to limit capitalism and literature at one and the same time - both in the sense of constraining their impulse and limiting them to a specific social order or political system. Yet I want to show that Burke's literary and economic ideology seems always already 'contaminated' with that which it would purge from itself and from the world, and that his own theory of language and textual practices are precisely susceptible to the kind of critique he brings to bear on radical 'speculation'. It is possible, then, to extend the analysis of Burke's and Paine's 'exchange' on money matters in the previous chapter to include the way they contest issues concerning language and literature. This will reveal how language and literature can be thought of as being analogous to monetary forms and how collusive alliances might develop between certain kinds of wealth and certain kinds of literature. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith develops an implicit relationship between the new economics and a productive rhetorical practice and theory, yet he worries that they might undermine as well as augment 'real' wealth and meaning. We will see that this set of problems forms one of the major sites of struggle between Burke and Paine at a critical juncture in the transition from agrarian to bourgeois capitalism. In this way, the Revolution Controversy reiterates and reinflects the history of an analogy between money and language which Marc Shell has shown is as old as the history of philosophy itself.6 At the beginning of the period relevant to this book, Hobbes argued that 'words are wise mens counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the mony of fooles'.? It is Rousseau, however, who established the terms of the debate for the second half of the eighteenth century. In fact, Burke reproduces (or exploits) Rousseau's concerns about deceitful representation in politics, language, and money more closely, and with more insight, than the radicals who were Rousseau's ostensible disciples.8 TAKING TO THE AIR ON PAPER WINGS

I have suggested that Adam Smith attempts to steer a narrow course between celebrating the positive effects of paper money and warning against its integral risks. This complex perspective is figured in a memorable image:

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The gold and silver money which circulates in any country may very properly be compared to a highway, which, while it circulates and carries to market all the grass and corn of the country, produces itself not a single pile of either. The judicious operations of banking, by providing, if I may be allowed so violent a metaphor, a sort of waggon-way through the air; enable the country to convert, as it were, a great part of its highways into good pastures and corn fields, and thereby to increase very considerably the annual produce of its land and labour. The commerce and industry of the country, however, it must be acknowledged, though they may be somewhat augmented, cannot be altogether so secure, when they are thus, as it were, suspended upon the Daedalian wings of paper money, as when they travel about upon the solid ground of gold and silver. (Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 321)

This is a fascinating passage in that the two kinds of economic practice it refers to are figured precisely in terms of their relative degree of contact with the land. Gold and silver are 'highways' which, though they are solid enough, produce nothing themselves and take up some of the land which could otherwise produce food and wealth. The wise use of paper money, however, increases the overall produce of the land by allowing those 'highways' to be converted 'into good pastures and cornfields'. But although such a 'judicious' use of paper money does augment commerce and industry, it also makes them less secure; it is a somewhat dangerous augmentation precisely because it becomes detached from 'the solid ground of gold and silver'. Thus although Smith seems to reject Pope's satirical celebration of paper credit as a supplement which 'lends Corruption lighter wings to fly!'9 he nevertheless figures the 'wings' of paper money as 'Daedalian'.10 What particularly interests me in this passage are the implicit relationships it develops between different kinds of economic and rhetorical practices and theories, and the different attitudes Smith reveals towards them. When on the 'solid ground' of gold and silver, Smith feels secure with his 'proper' comparisons; but suspended upon the 'Daedalian wings of paper money' he is at once more bold and more anxious with his 'violent metaphor' of'a sort of waggonway through the air'. The two economic systems are thus linked through analogy and in practice with different kinds of rhetoric. While the economics of 'real' money (and 'real' property) is associated with 'proper' language use, even the 'judicious' use of paper money is implicitly likened to a more violent and imaginative linguistic practice — one less grounded in solid reality yet at the same time more 'productive'. This mutual implication of economics and

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language in Smith, together with the way the passage hovers ambiguously between two wholly different kinds of paradigm, enables the suggestion that Smith's economics — in making a decisive though tentative 'leap' towards a new understanding of the nature of money — is in some way equivalent to the contemporaneous transition in language which comes to fruition in Romantic poetry and poetics. As we have seen in Locke, metaphor was distrusted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an abuse of language and attempts were made to confine it to an ornamental function. In 1667, Thomas Sprat praised the Royal Society for exacting from its members 'a close, naked, natural way of speaking', and for its 'constant Resolution, to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style: to return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men delivered so many things, almost in an equal number of words'.11 Wollstonecraft's and Paine's attacks on Burke's style are clearly influenced by the rhetorical economy of this tradition - as is Burke's critique of radical rhetoric. But even though Wollstonecraft claims to be 'employed about things, not words' [Rights of Woman, p. 82), and Paine mocks Burke's 'gay and flowery' language (Rights of Man, p. 71), Burke's radical critics do not eschew metaphor as such but distinguish between metaphor as ornamentation and as the embodiment of genuine feeling. If the texts of the Revolution Controversy seem therefore to constitute part of the discursive network which Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads participates within, Smith's economic discourse articulates the epistemic principle of this network. While Romanticism can be seen as theorizing and celebrating the creative possibilities of figurative language, Smith's embarkations upon 'a sort of waggon-way through the air' in order to 'augment' commerce and industry seem to pioneer that cultural possibility (while nevertheless recognizing its inherent dangers). SPECULATION IN THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS! EXPLODING UPSTART THEORY12

Burke's obsessive deflation of radicalism's 'inflated' language - in what for Paine and Wollstonecraft is itself an inflated rhetoric perhaps indicates that it concerns him more intimately than might be imagined. Precisely because he fears the potential effects of radical

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language, Burke presents a vision of revolutionary France in which its language has become as ineffectual as its paper money. The leaders of the National Assembly, faced with the insurrection of the Revolutionary army and having heard that the soldiers pay no heed to the proclamations and oaths previously sent by the Assembly, 'propose what? More oaths. They renew decrees and proclamations as they experience their insufficiency, and they multiply oaths in proportion as they weaken, in the minds of men, the sanctions of religion' (Reflections, p. 335). Such an inflationary glut of language only serves, for Burke, to mark its devaluation. His description of revolutionary language here closely resembles his account of revolutionary economics in the crisis of its own making: Is there a debt which presses them - Issue assignats. - Are compensations to be made ... — Assignats. Is a fleet to be fitted out — Assignats. If sixteen millions sterling of these assignats . . . leave the wants of the state as urgent as ever - issue, says one, thirty millions sterling of assignats - says another, issue four-score millions more of assignats . . . They are all professors of assignats. Even those, whose natural good sense and knowledge of commerce, not obliterated by philosophy, furnish decisive arguments against this delusion, conclude their arguments, by proposing the emission of assignats. I suppose they must talk of assignats, as no other language would be understood. (Reflections, pp. 359-60)

Revolutionary language, therefore, is the language of assignats — an inflationary language/money which displaces meaning and value in proportion to the 'amount' issued. Yet, since we have seen Burke both celebrate and be suspicious of the possibility that language (and perhaps money) is not necessarily 'grounded' in the natural or the real, his comic dismissal of revolutionary rhetoric and economics might mask the anxiety that, although they might be meaningless in one sense, they threaten to destroy the delicate web of values which Burke seeks to defend. Belying his own most characteristic rhetorical strategies, Burke urgently contrasts the primitive language of the law, and his own 'plain speaking', with those 'writings and sermons [which] have filled the populace with a black and savage atrocity of mind, which supersedes in them the common feelings of nature, as well as all sentiments of morality and religion' (Reflections, p. 262). This attempt to deflate the rhetorical and superstitious nature of revolutionary language seems to attest to its power — a power which, through its supplementary effects, haunts Burke's Reflections precisely

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because it is so close to his own theories of language, culture, and political representation. By figuring assignats as 'symbols of their speculations' (Reflections, p. 261), Burke emphasizes their association with the kind of economic speculation which undermines the value even of land itself. He also makes an analogy between the financial speculations of the new economic order in France and the speculative writings that are supposed to have prefigured the Revolution: 'although 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' (Reflections, p. 141). In his critique of radical speculation, Burke draws together and exploits a complex weave of negative associations in eighteenthcentury thought. One of these is the belief that there was a mutually constitutive relation between speculation and madness. According to Foucault, this assumption held that 'abstract speculations, the perpetual agitation of the mind without the exercise of the body, can have the most disastrous effects . . . The more abstract or complex knowledge becomes, the greater the risk of madness.'13 As we have already seen, European commentators considered such speculative madness as a peculiarly English disease, brought on by England's runaway economic enterprise: 'The English are a nation of merchants; a mind always occupied with speculations is continually agitated by fear and hope' (Foucault, Madness, p. 214, quoting Spurzheim). Since madness and melancholia were understood as 'astonishing revolutions in weak minds' (Foucault, Madness, p. 215, quoting the Encyclopedie), Burke's theoretical account of the sublime can be understood as an attempt to develop an antidote to Ha maladie anglaise", while his later writings on the French Revolution may be seen as a continuation of that effort to immunize minds and states against internal revolutions. Burke's attacks on revolutionary philosophy and finance reverse the European perspective, discovering evidence of unsound philosphy, political economy, language, and minds in the proceedings of the National Assembly and identifying England as the site of all things sound. Thus Burke seeks to steer a careful course between the debilitating milieu of a complacent aristocratic society, and the frantic madness of unbridled commercial speculation. Burke stresses that one of the causes of the Revolution in France

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was the failure properly to incorporate and recognize the monied interest: 'ancient usages . . . had kept the landed and monied interests more separated in France, less miscible, and the owners of the two distinct species of property not so well disposed to each other as they are in this country' (Reflections, pp. 209-10). Wealth without 'connections' has a 'natural' tendency towards political innovation: The monied interest is in its nature more ready for any adventure; and its possessors more disposed to new enterprizes of any kind. Being of a recent acquisiton, it falls in more naturally with any novelties. It is therefore the kind of wealth which will be resorted to by all who wish for change. (Reflections,

p . 211)

In Burke's narrative of the origins of the Revolution, the shift in the distribution of wealth and power from landed property to a more free-floating economy is accompanied by the rise of a new kind of writing: 'Along with the monied interest', Burke writes, 'a new description of men had grown up, with whom that interest soon formed a close and marked union; I mean the political Men of Letters' (Reflections, p. 211). An inevitable correspondence develops between such men of letters and the monied interest, since these 'Men of Letters, fond of distinguishing themselves, are rarely averse to innovation' (Reflections, p. 211). The contrast between these semi-detached writers bent on innovation at any cost and the traditional role of the writer would have been salient to Burke's readers. John Barrell shows that to enter the ranks of 'men of letters' in eighteenth-century England was more difficult than qualifying for the vote. To become 'authorized' users of the language, it was thought that men (women were generally disqualified) had to reside in 'London, the Universities, or at Court' in order 'to preserve their language from provincial vulgarity', and to have 'a private income substantial enough to free them from the need to work for a living, so that their vocabulary could be protected from contamination from the terms of particular arts and occupations' (An Equal, Wide Survey, pp. 133-4).14 In this way, Barrell argues, if it was any longer possible to have a detached overview of society and thereby speak for the whole, that prerogative had shifted from the gentleman to the writer. The writer and the gentleman still, of course, overlap to a great extent, since the qualifications for both were virtually the same. This means that for traditional eighteenthcentury society, letters and land remain - or ought to remain deeply implicated with one another.

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Throughout the eighteenth century, however, a new kind of writer (epitomized by Rousseau) began to hold sway independently of traditional social qualifications. Burke develops an historical analysis of the rise of these new men of letters in France. Since literature was not encouraged by the French court after the decline of'Lewis the XlVth', writers joined 'a sort of corporation of their own' which produced the Encyclopedic and became a 'literary cabal', monopolizing 'all the avenues to literary fame' (Reflections, pp. 211— 12). Because their 'narrow, exclusive spirit [was] not . . . less prejudicial to literature and to taste, than to morals and true philosophy', Burke stresses that 'nothing was wanted but the power of carrying the intolerance of the tongue and the pen into a persecution which would strike at property, liberty, and life' (Reflections, p. 212). Writers acquired that power by producing ideological propaganda for the new monied interest: Writers, especially when they act in a body, and with one direction, have great influence on the publick mind; the allegiance therefore of these writers with the monied interest had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor, and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood. They became a sort of demagogues. They served as a link to unite, in favour of one object, obnoxious wealth to restless and desperate poverty. (Reflections, pp. 213-14) Writing is thus given over to political persuasion, propagating false and novel opinion; its zeal for the poor is a pretence, its portrait of courts, nobility, and priesthood a politically motivated exaggeration. Pretending to offer an alternative reality, the literary imagination, like the new money, is scandously loosed from the earth and made radically independent of the proper grounds of landed property, value, and meaning. ^ In the Second Letter on a Regicide Peace (1796), the 'correspondence' between the men of letters and the new monied class - united through the power of the press — is seen as the prime mover of the Revolution: The middle classes had swelled far beyond their former proportion. Like whatever is the most effectively rich and great in society, these classes became the seat of all the active politicks; and the prepondering weight to decide on them. There were all the energies by which fortune is acquired; there the consequence of their success. There were all the talents which

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assert their pretensions, and are impatient of the place which settled society prescribes to them . . . The correspondence of the monied and the mercantile world, the literary intercourse of academies; but, above all, the press, of which they had in a manner, entire possession, made a kind of electrick communication every where.16 Burke's misgivings about the up-and-coming men of letters may be understood more clearly through reading Paine's celebration of this phenomenon. Paine favourably compares 'the republic of letters' with hereditary society: As the republic of letters brings forward the best literary productions, by giving to genius a fair and universal chance; so the representative system of government is calculated to produce the wisest laws, by collecting wisdom from where it can be found. I smile to myself when I contemplate the ridiculous insignificance into which literature and all the sciences would sink, were they made hereditary; and I carry the same idea into governments. An hereditary governor is as inconsistent as an hereditary author. (Rights of Man, p. 198)

Like Burke, but with significant changes of emphasis, Paine promotes a model of society based on merit rather than birth. Neither writing, politics, nor economic and scientific enterprise would flourish if they were organized by an hereditary system. Writing cannot be monopolized by the aristocracy - it is by 'nature' a republican activity not merely analogously related to the ability of the upwardly mobile manufacturers and capitalists. In a long footnote, Paine points out that 'it is chiefly the dissenters who have carried English manufactures to the height they are now at, and the same men have it in their power to carry them away' - i.e., to France or America, where they would enjoy all the rights of citizenship (Rights of Man, p. 1 io).1? In another footnote, Paine writes that In England the improvements in agriculture, useful arts, manufactures, and commerce, have been made in opposition to the genius of its government, which is that of following precedents. It is from the enterprise and industry of the individuals, and their numerous associations, in which tritely speaking, government is neither pillow nor bolster, that these improvements have proceeded. No man thought about the government, or who was in, or who was out, when he was planning or executing those things; and all he had to hope, with respect to government, was, that it would let him alone. Three or four very silly ministerial newspapers are continually offending against the spirit of national improvement, by ascribing it to a minister. They may with as much truth ascribe this book to a minister. (Rights of Man, p. 219)

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In other words, and this is Burke's anxiety, any alliance between aristocracy and bourgeois capitalism would be much more inherently unstable than that between aristocracy and agrarian capitalism. Manufacturing capitalism is inevitably less dependent upon landed power, and is even, for Paine at least, pioneered by those classes and religious denominations who form the most radical and marginalized elements of English society. A few pages later, Paine writes his own 'biographia literaria' precisely to demonstrate how 'this book' (the Rights of Man) was produced entirely independently of the established world of letters: Speaking for myself, my parents were not able to give me a shilling, beyond what they gave me in education; and to do this they distressed themselves: yet, I possess more of what is called consequence in the world, than anyone in Mr Burke's catalogue of aristocrats. (Rights of Man, p. 251) I have not only contributed to raise a new empire in the world, founded on a new system of government, but I have arrived at an eminence in political literature, the most difficult of all lines to succeed and excel in, which aristocracy, with all its aids, has not been able to reach or to rival. (Rights of Man, p. 241) Another long footnote here describes how he formed a scheme while in America of entering England 'without being known', and of getting out a publication that would 'open the eyes of the country with respect to the madness and stupidity of its government' (Rights of Man, p. 243). Writing thus becomes unabashed subversion, silently and anonymously undermining established governments from within. Revolution, indeed, is the most advantageous milieu for new talents in politics, business, and letters: 'It appears to general observation', Paine writes, 'that revolutions create genius and talents; but those events do no more than bring them forward' (Rights of Man, p. 198). Paine therefore offers himself- a 'self-made' author brought forward by the Revolution - as the representative man of the new republic of letters. We have seen that much of Burke's effort in the Reflections is directed at shoring up England's institutions against the ruin threatened by the revolutionary thought and activity of English radicalism. One of the principal sources of danger lay in the flirtation of certain sections of the ruling class with republicanism. Discussing 'the high-bred republicans' of his own time, most of whom became 'the most decided, thorough-paced courtiers' when they realized the difficulties of reform, and left 'the business of...

Speculation and the republic of letters practical resistance to those of us whom, in the pride and intoxication of their theories, they have slighted, as not much better than tones', Burke proposes that radical speculation is easy precisely because it is severed from the realities of everyday politics: Hypocrisy, of course, delights in the most sublime speculations; for, never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent . . . Some indeed are 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 connections. (Reflections, pp. 154—5)

Produced without effort, costing nothing, the insubstantial economy of these 'sublime speculations' is utterly distinguished from the Burkean sublime, which is produced by, and produces, mental and/ or physical labour.18 Indeed, in its effortless production of theoretical systems, and in its threat to sound statesmanship, this kind of speculation more nearly resembles Burke's conception of the beautiful than the sublime. Generating magnificent imaginary edifices founded on nothing, the speculative projections of these 'eager politicians out of parliament' are associated with madness and enthusiasm. The 'Men of Letters' whom Burke castigates are therefore political writers without any representative responsibility or commitment to actual everyday politics. They are like those men of ability without property who have no stake (or, rather, only a speculative stake) in the way things are. Consequently, their language, like speculation, has no necessary relation to fact and their literature flourishes independently of established government. In condemning radical men of letters for divorcing political theory from the restraints of practical politics and so opening it to unbridled speculation and madness, Burke implicitly feminizes them (sensibility has been defined as 'the substitution of visionary feeling for practical duties',J9 and women were thought to be particularly susceptible to it). By reducing or subjecting politics to fantasy, then, these men of letters have transformed political discourse into sentimental literature. Distinguishing himself from such men of letters, Burke represents his own reformist writings as an on-going 'manly' intervention in British politics which, while often critical, nevertheless issues from within the existing political culture which it seeks to uphold. Burke stresses that he writes from a representative and accountable position: he is a Member of Parliament as well as a

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political writer, and his texts are, for the most part, written upon specific, practical problems. Yet for all this, Burke's position was not so different from that of the writers he criticizes. Burke's own 'ability' was, of course, precisely the ability to mobilize language for political ends, and he is all too aware of the power of propaganda precisely because he was something of a propagandist himself, a man of letters who made his way in the world through writing in support of the Whig regime. In the Reflections, Burke himself becomes a man of letters attempting to exploit the marvellous in extraordinary situations in order to promote a particular ideological position. Attacking 'the kind of anniversary sermons, to which a great part of what I write refers', Burke confesses to his correspondent that I never liked this continual talk of resistance and revolution, or the practice of making the extreme medicine of the constitution its daily bread. It renders the habit of society dangerously valetudinary: it is taking periodical doses of mercury sublimate, and swallowing down repeated provocatives 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. (Reflections, p. 154) Thus revolution is identified as a 'distempter of remedy', a pharmakon whose deleterious effects Burke stresses in order to differentiate them from the healthy habits which shore up the British constitution against revolution. Though revolution might be resorted to as a medicine for the most extreme cases it becomes wearisome, or worn out, like the sublime itself, if habitually resorted to. But if this exhibits a logic whose self-deconstructive impetus we have come to recognize, what interests me more particularly here arises from Peter Hughes's suggestion that although 'the venereal allusions here may no longer be so clear to us (cantharides is, for example, the pharmaceutical name for Spanish Fly) . . . they would have been both plain and startling to their first reader'. If Hughes emphasizes the shock value of Burke's allusions to venereal disease in a discourse about political states, his interpretation of such strategies develops an account of Burke's text which is remarkably similar to Burke's own description of revolutionary discourse: What Burke produces through his unrestrained use of allusion is a form of originality we have since come to recognize as a demagogic tradition; it is

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the freedom of the imagination to create out of shifting structures and events an esthetic effect that then becomes an actual cause of future events. This can easily come about when the imagination is applied to politics. 'For in the imagination', as one of Burke's contemporaries put it, 'everything loses its natural shape, and everything is altered, and within it we create liberties as our eyes create shapes in the clouds' - words addressed by SaintJust to the Convention in 1793.20 In this battle of books, then, both sets of antagonists make virtually identical assumptions about the relation between imaginative discourse and reality: while each relies on the persuasive power of visionary rhetoric, each condemns the other for doing so. By the 1790s, in fact, sensibility was held to be destructive by radicals and conservatives alike.21 While Wollstonecraft is said to have become ' "the first of a new genus", a woman who is a professional writer',22 she nonetheless epitomizes the new profession's rejection of the feminine in favour of'masculine' writing and reason. Paine and Wollstonecraft celebrate reason and 'manly' feeling, and their counter-attack on Burke identifies the Reflections as a sentimental fiction in which Burke figures as a feminized man of feeling whose exquisite sensibility works to deflect attention from the defects of established political systems. Paine famously condemns Burke for being 'not affected by the reality of distress touching his heart, but by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird' (Rights of Man, p. 73) .23 The fact that Paine and Wollstonecraft were able to turn Burke's feminization of the men of letters back against his own writings suggests that the difference Burke seeks to maintain between his own writing and radical speculation is less stable than he would wish. It also indicates their sense of how Burke had seemingly reversed his earlier aesthetic ideology and abandoned his own class interest. In Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft suggests that Burke was exceptional in Britain rather than an example of the achievements possible for any man of ability without property: he was a man who had 'raised [himself] by the exertions of abilities, and thrown the automatons of rank into the back ground' (Rights of Men, p. 107). But although Burke rose from a middle-class Irish family to become a Member of Parliament and came to own a landed estate, he was never allowed full entry into Britain's ruling elite and he never held the high office which his talents clearly qualified him for. His recommendation that France ought to have imitated England in accommodating men of ability to

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the existing order may also be read, then, as an attempt to urge that this model be followed more fully at home. One of the ironies which unsettles any easy distinction between revolutionary and traditional literature and economics, then, is that Burke himself is both a man of letters and an advocate of capitalist enterprise. Paine differentiates himself from Burke only by repressing the meritocratic facets of Burke's complex thought. Burke's perplexed affinity with radicalism is compounded in that, as we have seen in the Enquiry, he is not at all, at a theoretical level at least, an adherent of the view that literature should keep faith with things as they are: 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 . . . there are many things of a very affecting nature, which can seldom occur in the reality, but the words which 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 passions. (Enquiry, PP- r73"4) This passage develops a complex concept of representation: although Burke suggests earlier that words are representations, this clearly does not mean that they imitate the concrete world. On the contrary, words constitute ideas (about objects or events - or even about that which does not exist at all). Words are independent of, more effective than, and so displace, nature and reality. Burke's theory of language therefore turns out to celebrate similar supplementary effects to those which the Reflections ostensibly condemns in radical language, economics, and political forms. For Burke, the difference between England and France is that extra-parliamentary 'men of theory' (Reflections, p. 128) have been allowed into positions of political responsibility in the National Assembly. They are the 'philosophers' who have, Burke claims, misread the philosophes by attempting to apply their speculative theories to real life; in doing so, they reveal that they misunderstand the relation between art and reality: the paradoxes of eloquent writers, brought forth purely as a sport of fancy, to try their talents, to rouze attention, and excite surprize, are taken up by

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these gentlemen, not in the spirit of the original authors, as means of cultivating their taste and improving their style. These paradoxes become with them serious grounds of action, upon which they proceed in regulating the most important concerns of the state . . . Mr Hume told me, that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric, observer had perceived, that to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced . . . [and] that now nothing was left to a writer but . . . the marvellous in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals. I believe, that were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical phrenzy of his scholars, who in their paradoxes are servile imitators . . . (Reflections, pp. 283-4)

Rousseau's writing is being characterized here as a sublime poetics whose principles of composition might have been taken from Burke's own Enquiry. But the danger lies not in Rousseau's 'new and unlooked-for strokes', but in the attempt by 'servile imitators' to put them into political practice. Republican 'theorists' therefore take 'an unjustifiable poetic licence' in attempting to translate the 'metaphysically true, [but in proportion] . . . morally and politically false' rights of men into the actual politics of the state (Reflections, pp. 153— 4). The consequence of this is that such speculative, imaginative literature has had an effect on the world - has precipitated a revolution and made 'the world move'.*4 In the Enquiry, servile imitation was held to lead to individual and political atrophy, while progress could only take place through sublime ambition or the imaginative exercise induced by sublime poetry. In the Reflections, the servile imitation of poetic imaginings leads to political innovations which threaten to destroy the very conditions which sustain the political economy built up through the eighteenth century. One measure of this unexpected turn of the screw is that imaginative linguistic play is redeployed in the Reflections in order to maintain the status quo by showing how capitalism needs to respect the 'solidity' of landed money and recognize that aristocratic social relations offer the most secure basis for its success. The discursive complexities of the historical moment therefore compel Burke clearly to differentiate between two different kinds of speculation. We have seen that, in criticizing the National Assembly for acting as if the ancien regime had bequeathed nothing to France, Burke figures the state as a trading corporation: 'you chose to act as if you had never been moulded into civil society, and had every thing to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising every thing that belonged to you. You set up trade without a capital'

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{Reflections, p. 122). In England, philosophical speculation is pursued for a different end, and proceeds upon a different economic model: We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice, and to leave nothing but the naked reason . . . Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. {Reflections, p. 183)

Each individual, therefore, has a limited stock of reason. But instead of entering into company with others and pooling their collective reason, each speculative subject - to guard against emergency ought rather to supplement individual reason with the general bank and capital of prejudice and precedent.25 English speculation reinforces precedent, English reason does not cast away the coat of prejudice but is 'involved' in it, and English custom insinuates itself into human nature. Proper speculative writing does not overturn the old order but reinforces it - it therefore proceeds as capitalism does (or as Burke would have it do) in England, not as it does (or as Burke claims it does) in France. 'Good' prejudices, rather than being prejudicial to the state or the mind, offer ramparts against sudden emergency (the revolution of mind or state). 'Just prejudice' becomes a 'coat' which protects, and protects against, an otherwise naked reason; it is of 'ready application in the emergency'; and it fosters habits which condition the mind to act in decisive moments when reason might inhibit action. In other words, it works both as a supplement and as a kind of habitual sublime. In contrast, radical 'reason' is a misleading rhetorical mask whose pernicious effects are in fact prejudicial to self and society, driving out good prejudices and leaving body, mind, and state without defence. SANCTIFYING SURPLUS! HOT AIR

In attempting to justify a culture which his radical opponents reject as exploitative of an impoverished majority, and in seeking to

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discredit the cultural practices of the Revolution, Burke self-consciously engages in what we would now call hegemonic struggle. Drawing on Pope's advice to the Earl of Burlington in 1731,26 Burke presents an image of a properly grounded capitalism which is meant to contrast vividly with the economic situation in revolutionary France: In every prosperous community something more is produced than goes to the immediate support of the producer. This surplus forms the income of the landed capitalist. It will be spent by a proprietor who does not labour. But this idleness is itself the spring of labour; this repose the spur to industry. (Reflections, p. 270)

In this passage Burke implicitly rejects the claims about moral virtue made in the Enquiry in order to promote an account of the springs of action which more nearly resemble Hume's or even Mandeville's. The landed capitalist does not labour; instead, his luxury prompts labour in others. Burke does not seek to disguise the suffering upon which this excess is founded - 'the innumerable servile, degrading, unseemly, unmanly, and often most unwholesome and pestiferous occupations, to which by the social oeconomy so many wretches are inevitably doomed'. Instead, he presents it as 'the natural course of things' which it is 'generally pernicious to disturb' (Reflections, p. 271). The material surplus produced by landed capitalism is, however, supposedly channelled into cultural surplus: Why should the expenditure of a great landed property, which is a dispersion of the surplus product of the soil, appear intolerable to you or to me, when it takes its course through the accumulation of vast libraries . . . through great collections of antient records, medals, and coins, which attest and explain laws and customs; through paintings and statues, that, by imitating nature, seem to extend the limits of creation . . . through collections of the specimens of nature, which become a representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world. (Reflections, p. 272) There could be no clearer testimony that 'culture' depends upon the exploitation and exclusion of those classes whose labour makes it possible.27 Yet there is an attempt here to reconcile the excluded. In pointed contrast to the National Assembly, the expenditure of great landed property supposedly produces a true 'representative assembly of all the classes and families of the world'. In its primary sense, this refers to the project of eighteenth-century natural history comprehensively to classify and tabulate the natural world.28 Yet the

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fact that Burke's conception of a Member of Parliament's representative role is equivalent to the persona he adopts in the Reflections - he is not a delegate, but typical of the English mind (see Reflections, pp. 180—3) ~ allows us to posit that, for Burke, the 'typical' is the most authentically representative form. Thus Burke wants to suggest that the collections amassed by the cultural activity of landed property represent all the world's 'classes and families' (of nature and of society), and that the impoverished majority are somehow included within the culture amassed by landed capitalism. Furthermore, in contrast to the excesses of the French republic, the surplus produced by landed capitalism becomes a paradigm of representation - an 'imitation' of nature that seems 'to extend the limits of creation'. Culture poses as natural by adopting the metaphors of horticulture, while nature itself — as 'creation' — becomes a divine art which proper capitalism, in the production of surplus, piously conforms to. Yet if the culture which arises out of landed property claims authentically to imitate nature, it is also said to 'extend the limits of creation'. This suggests that the surplus produced by the culture of the soil is transformed into a cultural surplus that seeks to differentiate itself from and supplement its origins. We have repeatedly seen that Burke's irresolvably ambiguous relations to both the new and the old order force him to have recourse to a range of supplementary devices and to distribute their good and bad effects on either side of the stretch of water which both divides and serves as a means of communication between Britain and France. We have also seen, however, that Burke's own distinctions and figures fissure his text and undermine his own premises (in every sense). Although he mocks radical rhetoric for its emptiness, he is nevertheless anxious about its potential effect on the people of England: 'The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds' (Reflections, p. 372). This familiar opposition between art and nature is intimately woven in with another, equally familiar opposition in British history — that between different classes. For Burke goes on to make it clear that 'natural subordination' is essential if the people are to 'respect that property of which they cannot partake' and to 'labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained' (Reflections, p. 372). The capitallabour relation can only flourish through adopting, and calling natural, artificial distinctions developed in feudal society. Yet the 'laws' of grammar and syntax themselves point to the contradictions

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and exclusions which the Reflections relies upon. In the above quotation, 'art' may be the agent of'rooted' - as Burke seems to have intended - but it might equally be that of'natural subordination'. In other words, the syntax allows 'natural subordination' to be (radically) 'rooted out' 'by art', but it also allows 'natural subordination' to be effected by art - 'natural subordination by art'. The laws of language, in other words, do not always comply with the law of the land. I would argue that this is more than a chance of language - or rather that chance in language is more meaningful than we often allow. For this passage seems to encapsulate the textual strategies and contradictions we have seen at work throughout the Reflections. Prior to the French Revolution it was at least possible to authenticate the old order through 'nature', but the revolutionary analysis claims that it is itself grounded in 'nature' and purports to expose the artifice of tradition. It thus becomes expedient for traditionalists at once to reaffirm the naturalness of the old order and to attack radicalism's conception of nature. Burke's text therefore needs to develop and deploy different models of nature — the false and defective nature of radicalism, deleterious to human nature, and the second nature of natural subordination which both shores up and displaces the naked shivering nature exposed by radicalism. 'Artifice' itself gets split into that which strips our nature naked and that which chivalrously utilizes second nature to defend, and defend against, nature in the raw. This is why Burke can openly celebrate the rhetorical ploys through which traditional culture maintains its hegemony: He who gave our nature to be perfected by our virtue, willed also the necessary means of its perfection — He willed therefore the state . . . [The] oblation of the state itself, as a worthy offering on the high alter of universal praise, should [therefore] be performed as all publick solemn acts are performed, in buildings, in musick, in decoration, in speech, in the dignity of persons, according to the customs of mankind, taught by their nature . . . It is the publick ornament. It is the publick consolation. It nourishes the publick hope. The poorest man finds his own importance and dignity in it ... It is for the man in humble life, and to raise his nature, and to put him in mind of a state in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature, and may be more than equal by virtue, that this portion of the general wealth of his country is employed and sanctified. [Reflections, pp. 196—7)

This passage provides yet another instance of the curious way that Burke's most powerful ideological statements seem to propagate

264

Edmund Burke3s aesthetic ideology

mirror images of the positions they are meant to exclude and reprove. Anne Marion Osborn points out that Burke's suggestion that the state is the means through which individual virtue may be perfected is 'the fundamental tenet not only of his own political thought, but of Rousseau's as welP.2^ In addition, the motives and effects of these 'publick solemn acts' can only problematically be distinguished from those of the revolutionary festivals which were inaugurated in France for similar ends.30 The fact that 'to sanctify' may mean 'to impart real or apparent sacredness to . . . to give a colour of morality or innocence to', as well as 'to consecrate (a thing); to set apart as holy or sacred' (OED), emphasizes the suggestion in this passage that 'the publick ornament' is constructed out of a set of stage properties which give a cloak of sanctity to — which sanction — existing structures of subordination. Against Burke's expressed intentions, his language undercuts the distinction he strives to make between natural and artificial art, between supplements which console and nourish and those which distract and destroy, between the ceremonies and symbols of public life in England which 'raise' the 'humble' and those superficial 'ribbons, and laces, and national cockades' (Reflections, p. 273) employed by the Revolution which deceive but for a moment and raze all distinctions to the ground. Burke's own theory of the mobility of metaphor from context to context, and his exploitation of this theory in the Reflections, seems repeatedly to undermine his own project despite O'Brien's claim that Burke had a 'superb command over the resources of the language'.31 Once metaphors are mobilized in politically critical contexts it seems that, like the people Burke claims to speak for, they prove difficult to govern: they have their own resources, their own 'mobility'.32 What neither Burke (invoking the primitive language of the law) nor Paine (claiming to 'speak an open and disinterested language' (Rights of Man, p. 250)) seem willing openly to admit (though both their texts rely upon it) is that language might always be constitutive of the real or of the way the real is perceived. One exchange, in which each accuses the other of an inflated politics and language, recalls the metaphors in Smith's account of the differences between new and traditional economics, and allows us to see ways in which Burke and Paine might be fellow travellers: 'Let us imitate', Burke concludes, '[our forefathers'] caution . . . Let us add, if we please, but let us preserve what they have left; and standing on the firm ground

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of the British constitution, let us be satisfied to admire rather than attempt to follow in their desperate flights the aeronauts of France' (Reflections, p. 376).33 'Even his genius is without a constitution', Paine counters; 'It is a genius at random, and not a genius constituted. But he must say something — He has therefore mounted in the air like a balloon, to draw the eyes of the multitude from the ground they stand upon' (Rights of Man, p. 97). The very effort of each to deflate the 'inflationary' rhetoric of the other seems symptomatic precisely of its power; both share the same anxiety that a discourse not anchored to the 'ground' might yet make the earth move - in revolutionary or in counter-revolutionary ways. The difference between them is that Burke is all too aware that language constitutes perceptual and political 'reality' and is therefore anxious that it be employed in ways conducive to his own political position, whereas Paine, aware that language can be used to distort, still holds that it might be authentically representative in a new political and economic order. If radical economics threatens to displace the old order, Burke would defend it by prescribing a more cautious supplementation, adding in order to preserve. An enthusiast for the new economics, Burke yet seems to feel that the only way to maintain the conditions necessary for its success is to introduce it in a form ballasted by landed property in great masses of accumulation. Burke's text, unlike Smith's, would efface the violence of its metaphors and appear to anchor itself to the earth. In representing the British constitution as 'firm ground', his metaphor seems to naturalize a constitution biased towards the landed interest, while French experimentation, since 1783, with hot-air balloons, seems to justify figuring the Revolution as an unproven aeronautics - to be admired, perhaps, but not to be imitated.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. This formula refers to the interrelation between aesthetics and ideology which Paul de Man made the object of his enquiry - see Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (New York and London: Routledge, 1988). 2. Jacques Derrida, 'Some Questions and Responses', in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature, ed. Nigel Fabb et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 252—64 (262). 3. For a good introduction to the Revolution Controversy and its texts, see Burke, Paine, Godwin, and the Revolution Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 4. James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), P. l95. There has in fact been considerable interest in the question about possible interconnections between Burke's aesthetics and politics — see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963); Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, The Problem of Burke's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 119-51; Gerald W. Chapman, Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1969); and R. T. Allen, 'The State and Civil Society as Objects of Aesthetic Appreciation', British Journal of Aesthetics, 16, iii (1976), pp. 237—42. More challenging work has recently appeared in Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), and in Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, I99O)6. Neal Wood, 'The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke's Political Thought', Journal of British Studies, 4, i (1964), p p . 4 1 - 6 4 (41). 7. Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 4. F. P. Lock regards Kramnick's study as 'surely the most perverse interpretation of Burke to date' {Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Allen and 266

Notes to pages 6-g

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

267

Unwin, 1985), p. 198). This is to shift the charge of'perversity' from Burke to his 'psycho-biographer'. Kramnick is referring to Frederick Engels, 'On Historical Materialism', in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. Lewid Feur (New York: Doubleday, 1959), pp. 88-109. C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, Toronto, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 7. Lock is as equally dismissive of Macpherson's 'anachronistic' reading of Burke as he is of Kramnick's 'perverse' one. The only valid reading of Burke, Lock suggests, is to see him as he presented himself and as George III saw him — as a defender of the 'cause of the Gentlemen' (Burke's Reflections, p. 199). Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 149. The most important of Foucault's works for the present book are The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), tr. unspeci-

fied (London: Tavistock, 1970), and Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961), tr. Richard Howard (London: Tavistock, 1967). 13. This is not to concede, however, that post-structuralist readings are in need of being politicized. For discussions which argue that poststructuralism was always already political, see Post-Structuralism and the Question of History, ed. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and

New York: Routledge, 1990). 14. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (1966), tr. Geoffrey Wall (London, Henley, and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 94. Such formulations clearly provide the starting point for Fredric Jameson's

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially

Symbolic Act (London: Methuen; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 15. Given Rousseau's evident influence on the Revolution and on Burke's English antagonists, it is intriguing to see Burke's and Rousseau's texts (usually thought of as paradigms of reactionary and radical discourses) revealing unexpected parallels. For an interesting but more conventional account of the convergencies between Burke and Rousseau which suggests that Burke 'was entirely unaware of the fact that his sovereign principles were in accord with Rousseau's', see Anne Marion Osborn, Rousseau and Burke, A Study of the Idea of Liberty in Eighteenth-

Century Political Thought (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. vii. 16. On the politics of the nature—culture relation, see Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce

268

Notes to pages 17-20

(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), especially 'The Politics of Nature', pp. 33-40. On the politics of undecidability, see Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987, 1989). I A THEORY NOT TO BE REVOKED: A PHILOSOPHICAL ENQLJ1RY

1. For a discussion of the composition and publication of the Enquiry, see Boulton, pp. xv—xxvi. 2. See Boulton, p. xxv. Herbert A. Wichelns suggests that Burke's revisions in the second edition reveal that he was 'so keenly sensitive to the public reception of his work as to regard almost every objection raised against him as a challenge to defend his position' ('Burke's Essay on the Sublime and Its Reviewers', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 21 (1921), pp. 645-61 (661)). 3. See Wichelns, 'Burke's Essay on the Sublime', pp. 648-50. 4. Terry Eagleton claims that the whole history of aesthetic theory from Baumgarten to post-modernism is a bourgeois project founded in, and made problematic by, the body (see The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990)). 5. Boulton points out that the first English translation of Longinus appeared in 1652, but that 'Boileau undoubtedly played a major part in establishing the popularity of Peri Hupsous, both in England and France' (pp. xliv-xlv). 6. Peter De Bolla cites a bibliography assembled by Andrew Ashfield which contains more than 6,000 publications on aesthetics in the eighteenth century — see The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 29n. 7. See Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom, Studies in Order and Energy from Dry den to Blake (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 361-70, and Boulton, pp. lvii-lx. Boulton claims that, while each of these qualities had been treated before Burke, 'never before had they been brought together in a coherent and unified theory, and elaborated with such disregard for established aesthetic presuppositions'. In the way he emphasizes these qualities, Burke 'is in open revolt against neo-classic principles' (Boulton, p. lvii). 8. Samuel H . Monk, The Sublime, A Study of Critical Theories in XIH-Century England (Modern Language Association: 1935; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, i960), p. iii. 9. Recent histories of eighteenth-century Britain concur in interpreting it as an age of conflicting interests rather than a tranquil neo-classical interim between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. See Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982); H . T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1977); E. P.

Notes to pages 20—24

269

Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Allen Lane, 1975); Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in EighteenthCentury England, ed. Douglas Hay et al. (London: Allen Lane, 1975). 10. See M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 72-8. 11. These standard histories have been modified or displaced by more recent critical work on the sublime. See the special editions of New Literary History (Winter, 1985) and Studies in Romanticism, 26, ii (Summer, 1987). Also see, De Bolla, Discourse of the Sublime] Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic] Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Jean-Franc, ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Francis Ferguson's work on the sublime (cited below) is a crucial intervention; at the time of writing, I have not been able to benefit from her forthcoming Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (London and New York: Routledge, November 1992). 12. See Boulton, Enquiry, pp. xcix—cii, cxxv—cxxvii. 13. Joseph Addison, The Spectator (412), 23 June 1712, in 'Critical Essays from The Spectator', ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 178—81 (185—6). All quotations from The Spectator are from this selection, hereafter referred to as Addison, Essays from the Spectator. 14. Compare Wordsworth's use of 'liberty' in the opening lines of The Prelude. 15. Implicit in its impressive bursting of neo-classicism's confining aesthetics in the name of individual liberty, is the problem of co-opting the sublime for a social or ethical programme. Monk notes that Baillie regards as sublime not only 'heroism, power, desire for fame, universal benevolence, and patriotism', but also 'desire for honour, and the wholly immoral "ravaging conqueror" . . . so long as the object aimed at is vast and great' {The Sublime, p. 76). 16. See Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, chapter 14, in 'Classical Literary Criticism', tr. and intr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), pp. 29—95. By the end of the seventeenth century Longinus had been influential in the development of an entire aesthetic outlook based on terror. John Dennis had written home from Italy in 1688 about the 'terrible Joy' and 'delightful Horrour' of Alpine scenery (see Boulton, 1987, p. xviii, and D. A. Russell's introduction to his translation of *Longinus' on the Sublime (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), p. xlvi). 17. See Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (London: Methuen, 1989).

270

Notes to pages 24—30

18. These critics included Payne Knight and Dugald Stewart (Boulton, pp. lxxxviii—xc). 19. Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, pp. 23-5. 20. Compare Locke: 'By Pleasure and Pain, I must be understood to mean of Body or Mind, as they are commonly distinguished; though in truth, they be only different Constitutions of the Mind, sometimes occasioned by disorder in the Body, sometimes by Thoughts of the Mind' (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1790), ed. Peter H.

Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 229). 21. This point is made by Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, p. 97. 22. I am prompted to anticipate my argument somewhat by quoting a passage from Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization which indicates the socio-cultural milieu which I take the sublime to be intervening within. Foucault calls one of the curative programmes for madness developed in the eighteenth-century 'consolidation'. This assumed that 'There exists in madness, even in its most agitated forms, an element of weakness . . . Beneath the apparent violence of madness, which sometimes seems to multiply the strength of maniacs to considerable proportions, there is always a secret weakness, an essential lack of resistance; the madman's frenzies, in fact, are only a passive violence. What is wanted, then, is a cure that will give the spirits or the fibres a vigor, but a calm vigor, a strength no disorder can mobilize' {Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. Richard

23.

24. 25. 26.

Howard (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 159—60). I suggest that one of the roles of the Burkean sublime is precisely to induce the kind of exercise which will give such a vigour to the nervous fibres. Weiskel is primarily concerned to recast the Burkean sublime in a Freudian mould and wants to read Burke as unconsciously stumbling upon a 'truth' about the way the mind might cope with the guilt at the root of melancholy. In fact, Freud's attempt to ground psychoanalytical theory (especially the 'repetition compulsion') in a biological model is intriguingly analogous to Burke's 'sensationist' account of the nervous mechanisms of aesthetic experience. Burke's polarized distinctions between tension and relaxation, self-preservation and sexual reproduction, and perhaps the sublime and the beautiful, seem to anticipate many of Freud's own binary oppositions. Such parallels between Burke and Freud are noted by Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, p. 92, and discussed by Pamela Kaufman, 'Burke, Freud, and the Gothic', Studies in Burke and His Time, 13 (1972), pp. 2179-92. Frances Ferguson, 'Legislating the Sublime', in Studies in EighteenthCentury British Art and Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (California: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 128—47 (134). Frances Ferguson, 'Sublime of Edmund Burke, Or the Bathos of Experience', Glyph, Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 8 (1981), pp. 62-78 (76). The metaphor of Burke's 'sleight of hand' here is taken from Weiskel

Notes to pages 30—38

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

2 71

{Romantic Sublime, p. 87). Weiskel points out that Kant also 'emphasizes as a precondition of the sublime experience that we not be in physical danger. He postulates a defensive reaction of the mind which will give us "courage" when there is no danger' {Romantic Sublime', p. 84; see Immanuel Kant, 'Analytic of the Sublime', The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790), in 'The Critique of Judgement', tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), pp. 109-14). Ferguson also argues, though in different ways to my own discussion, for the 'rhetoricity' of Burke's natural sublime ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', pp. 67—9). Burke also makes two references to Homer which he may have taken from Longinus (see Enquiry, pp. 64, 143). Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime, translated with notes and observations by William Smith (London: 1739), p. 14. For discussions of the Enquiry as a bid for originality, see Boulton, pp. lv-lx, and Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, pp. 8 and 85-6. Burleigh Taylor Wilkins, The Problem of Burke's Political Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 145. Wilkins himself is forced to concede the peculiar stress on self in the Enquiry: 'In none of his other works is there so great an emphasis upon self-preservation or so sharp a contrast between the passions of selfpreservation and those of society' {Problem of Burke's Political Philosophy, p. 148). For the historical development of the notion of'progress', see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 243-5. In Weiskel's reading, the sublime is characterized as, and produced through, the operation and effect of metaphor: in its 'largest perspective, it was a major analogy, a massive transposition of transcendence into a naturalistic key; in short, a stunning metaphor'. The literal and the sublime seem antithetical, for 'we cannot conceive of a literal sublime' {Romantic Sublime, p. 4). For Goldsmith's criticism of Burke's claim that beauty is the cause of love, see Wichelns, 'Burke's Essay on the Sublime', p. 654. See Wichelns, 'Burke's Essay on the Sublime', pp. 656—8. Burke's reviewers resisted him here. Goldsmith insisted that 'the sublime is often caused by a relaxation of the muscles as well as by a tension' (quoted by Wichelns, 'Burke's Essay on the Sublime', p. 654). Wichelns points out that the anonymous reviewer in the Critical Review of April 1757 attacked 'Burke's central position, that the sublime is caused by a mode of pain, as some tension or labour of the physical organism, or by ideas associated with pain, and that pleasure is caused by a relaxation of the nerves or by related ideas' (Wichelns, p. 658). Citing Martin Price's claim that the sublime marked 'a revolt against the tyranny of beauty' {To the Palace of Wisdom, p. 362), Ferguson

272

Notes to pages 39—42

suggests that 'the question we must ask of Burke's Enquiry is what is tyrannical about the beautiful, or, why must it be resisted? For we cannot understand the force of the sublime unless we understand what it is an alternative to' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 69). Ferguson's claim that Burke's sublime is constituted in resistance to his own representation of the beautiful enables her to articulate an account of the relation between the sublime and the beautiful in the Enquiry itself which constitutes a revealing reading of the internal dynamics of Burke's aesthetic system. 39. Kramnick, p. 98. 2 LABOUR AND LUXURY! AESTHETICS AND THE DIVISION OF LABOUR

1. See Roy Porter, 'English Society in the Eighteenth Century Revisited', in British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt IJ4.2-1789, ed. Jeremy Black (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 29—52 (43—7). For more extended studies, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), S. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), Peter Earle, The Making of the Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (London: Methuen, 1989), pp. 158-74, and Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 109-16, 600-7. 2. Cora Kaplan, 'Pandora's box: subjectivity, class and sexuality in socialist feminist criticism', in Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. Gayle Greene and Coppelia Kahn (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 146—76 (148), reprinted in Cora Kaplan, Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 147—76. 3. J. G. A. Pocock writes that 'Economic man as masculine conquering hero is a fantasy of nineteenth-century industrialisation (the Communist Manifesto is of course one classic example). His eighteenth-century predecessor was seen as on the whole a feminized, even an effeminate being' (Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 114). But although this is the way traditional writers sought to represent 'economic man', writers such as Defoe responded by figuring 'him' in ways which anticipate the nineteenthcentury image. Indeed, that image was perhaps influenced by the way writers such as Paine adapted the kind of assumptions Burke develops in the Enquiry to create an image of 'manly' middle-class radicalism. 4. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class, p. 3. Pocock resists the use of bourgeois in accounts of this period, asking us to reflect on the fact that there is no adjective, and no collective or abstract noun in English which derives from 'borough' (Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 181).

Notes to pages 43-49

273

5. Porter, 'English Society in the Eighteenth Century Revisited', pp. 32, 33. Porter is arguing against Clark's revisionist accounts of eighteenthcentury England as articulated in English Society, 1688—1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6. See, for example, H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), and Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment^ ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 7. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 175. 8. Thomas Warton's The Pleasures of Melancholy (London: 1747) would have been a more crucial contemporary reference for Burke than R o b e r t B u r t o n ' s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1721). 9. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. unspecified (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 202—3. 10. John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), especially pp. 63-131 (25-6). 11. Bernard Mandeville, 'A Search into the Nature of Society' (1723), in The Fable of the Bees, ed. Phillip Harth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), pp. 327-71 (357-8). 12. Neal Wood argues that Burke's concept of the sublime draws on Plato's notion ofaidos — a 'fear of intemperate pleasures' necessary for the wellbeing of the social fabric ('The Aesthetic Dimension of Burke's Political Thought', Journal of British Aesthetics, 4, i (1964), pp. 41-64 (58-9); Wood quotes from Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture, tr. Gilbert Highet, 3 vols. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943-5), m> P- I 2 2 13. De Bolla also regards the period of the Seven Years War as crucial in understanding the eighteenth-century sublime — though for different reasons. He juxtaposes the discourse on the sublime produced in the period with the voluminous discourse on the National Debt generated during the war years. Both sets of discourse can be read as simultaneously requiring and producing 'the autonomous subject, a conceptualization of human subjectivity based on the self-determination of every individual' (The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 6). 14. For a discussion of a similar process, in which European imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used the orient as an 'other', see John Barrell, The Infection of Thomas De Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), especially p. 8.

274

Notes to pages 49-52

15. All quotations from the Phenomenology are taken from G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977). Hegel's principal response to Kant's aesthetics appears in his lectures on art, in which he pays scant attention to the sublime — see G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, tr. T. M. Knox, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), especially 'Symbolism of the Sublime', 1, pp. 362-77. Boulton informs us that the Enquiry made an 'immediate and forceful impact' in Germany, where a German translation (1773) influenced Kant and Lessing (pp. cxx-cxxvii). My suggestion that the master-slave dialectic might be read in terms of the sublime encounter seems not to have been investigated, at least by Burke scholars. For the beginnings of a discussion of the way Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as a reaction to Kant's aesthetics, and the way both contribute to the elaboration of a bourgeois ideology, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990) pp. 120-52. 16. In Derrida's reading, Hegel's lord is a paper lord whose demise risks provoking laughter — see 'From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve', in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 251-77 (255)17. For Derrida, this reveals that 'To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when one looks directly at it - such is the servile condition of mastery and of the entire history it makes possible.' To risk literal death, 'death pure and simple', would be to risk 'losing the effect and profit of meaning which were the very stakes one hoped to win' (Derrida, 'From Restricted to General Economy', p. 255). Thus both Burke and Hegel try to constrain their speculations by fixing the odds - by having their protagonist only seem to confront death in order to experience the delight of self-preservation and aggrandizement. 18. For a useful introduction to the way writers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain examined questions about work and the 'springs of action', see the extracts collected in Nature and Industrialization, ed. Alasdair Clayre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 179-204 and 241-68. 19. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, introduced by W. S. Carpenter (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1924), pp. 129-41 (133, 136). 20. Locke has occasionally been criticized as an apologist for the 'state of nature' rather than the post-1688 commercial world - see Pocock, 'Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price', in Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 157-91. But C. B. Macpherson argues that Locke 'justifies, as natural, a class differential in rights and rationality, and by doing so provides a positive moral basis for capitalist society' (The Political

Notes to pages $2-6g

2 75

Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York: C l a r e n d o n Press, 1962; Oxford University Press, 1964), p . 221). 21. J o h n Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H .

Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 11, vii, 3 (p. 129). 22. David Hume, 'Of Commerce', in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), pp. 253-67 (261). 23. In 1760, Hume changed the title of'Of Luxury' to 'Of Refinement in the Arts' {Essays, pp. 268-80 (269)). 24. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 11, p. 782. 25. John Barrell, An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 29-30. 26. Frances Ferguson, 'Legislating the Sublime', in Studies in EighteenthCentury British Art and Aesthetics, ed. Ralph Cohen (California: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 128-47 (136). 27. For Raymond Williams, Burke identifies the danger of revolutionary thought in its avoidance of difficulty {Culture and Society, IJ8O— ig$o (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), pp. 25-6), while Ronald Paulson suggests that Burke fears the revolutionaries for their uncontainable entrepreneurial and sexual energy {Representations of Revolution (iy8g—

1820) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 64). 28. Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1792), Writings and Speeches, vm, p. 334. 29. Ferguson records the apparent 'paradox' of the fact that the sublime in Burke is both 'of particular social utility' and 'clearly represents what is humanly ungovernable' ('Legislating the Sublime', p. 133). 30. In doing so, Burke gives a powerful new impetus to a British — or, more accurately, English - resistance to French theory which continues to the present day, whether it be in the form of 'deconstructionism' or the 'socialist' policy of the European community. 3 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF TASTE: LIMITING THE SUBLIME

1. Although I disagree with James K. Chandler's reading of this passage in the Enquiry as directly transferable into the Reflections, his reading of the later text in terms of second nature is admirable (see Wordsworth''s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London:

University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 76—7 and 64—74). My major difference with Ferguson's readings of the Enquiry is that she conflates the beautiful with custom and is therefore unable to register the implications of Burke's doing just that in the Reflections. 2. For a discussion of the political meanings of custom during the eighteenth century, see Barrell, An Equal, Wide Survey, pp. 110-75.

276

Notes to pages 70-85

3. See Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 17-21. 4. Joseph Addison, The Spectator (409), 19 June 1712, reprinted in 'Critical Essays from The Spectator', ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), pp. 172-5 (172). All quotations from The Spectator are from this collection, hereafter cited as Addison, Essays from the Spectator. 5. Reading the discussion of 'Power' in the Enquiry', Frances Ferguson suggests that 'power is . . . conceived as awesome but also as a guarantor of society, because it fosters the work ethic . . . the sublime contributes to our productivity in society, and . . . is preferable to the beautiful inasmuch as it represents a labor theory of aesthetic value' ('Legislating the Sublime', p. 134). 6. Eagleton regards this question as central to the relationship between reason and the aesthetic, rationalism and empiricism in eighteenthcentury Britain - see Ideology of the Aesthetic, especially p. 33. 7. For De Bolla, a discourse on the sublime is always liable to mutate into a discourse of the sublime — see The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 27—102. 8. In the introduction to his edition of Burke's Enquiry, Adam Phillips suggests that 'The Enquiry announces, in a sense, Burke's anxiety about theory, his lifelong fear about where it might end, or that there may be no end to it . . . In the equivocal text of the Enquiry, packed as it is with images of constraint and release, Burke asks the characteristic questions of his age' {A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. xii). De Bolla argues, without convincing me, that Burke repeatedly pulls back from allowing the Enquiry to become an example of the sublimity it theorizes (see Discourse of the Sublime, pp. 68, 72). 9. Eagleton comments on the interdependence between the uniformity of taste and the stability of the social fabric in Burke's Enquiry, yet inexplicably suggests that Burke is 'quite confident' that taste is really uniform [Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 52). 10. I use mythology here in the sense in which Roland Barthes uses it in Mythologies, selected and translated from the French by Annette Lavers (London: Granada, 1973). 11. The Spectator (58), 7 May 1711, in Addison,'Essaysfrom the Spectator', p. 2. 12. The judgment also establishes the difference between poetry and madness in the eighteenth century. For a brief account of judgment as 'that faculty vital both to Locke's theory of cognition and to Augustan poetics', see Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), pp. 101-4. 13. For the 'schools' which Burke is alluding to in Horace, see Classical Literary Criticism, p. 90.

Notes to pages 85-gg

277

14. As Ferguson puts it, Burke allows that taste can be acquired 'in exactly the same way that muscles can - by exercise' ('Legislating the Sublime', p. 132). 4 THE LABOUR AND PROFIT OF LANGUAGE

1. These orientations are, of course, to be expected in the eighteenth century - see M. H. Abrams, 'Introduction: Orientation of Critical Theories', and 'Imitation and the Mirror', in The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

Press, 1953), pp. 3-29, 30-46. What is more interesting is the way Burke's discussion eventually goes beyond these eighteenth-century commonplaces. This is not so callous as it sounds: Burke is arguing that God has designed us so that the delight we experience in witnessing the suffering of others prevents us from shunning them and so enables us to relieve their distress. As Frances Ferguson puts it, 'We find ourselves confronted with a strange version of the Cretan liar paradox here, for what has Burke told us in these passages except that language bears both true and false witness. . .?' ('Sublime of Edmund Burke, Or the Bathos of Experience', Glyph, Johns Hopkins Textual Studies, 8 (1981), p. 67). This point is derived from Ferguson, 'Sublime of Edmund Burke', p. 68. Experiment and experience were used interchangeably in the eighteenth century. For an account of the intellectual context in which Locke's theory of language intervenes, see Hans Aarsleff, 'Leibniz on Locke on Language', in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and

Intellectual History (London: Athlone, 1982), pp. 42-83. 7. Locke's discussion of language is clearly anticipated by Hobbes's chapter 'Of Speech' in Leviathan (1651). 8. For Burke's use of Locke, see Boulton, Enquiry, pp. lxxix, 163-4. Drxon Wecter speculates that Burke's innovations on Locke might have been influenced by reading George Berkeley ('Burke's Theory Concerning Words, Images, and Emotion', PMLA 55 (1940), pp. 167-81). Burleigh T. Wilkins follows Wecter in showing how the Enquiry draws upon Locke in order to make a 'distinctly unLockean' celebration of obscurity ('Burke on Words', Studies in Burke and His Time, 11 (1969), pp. 1305-9). Thomas Weiskel argues that 'We properly associate the divorce of res and verba with the program of the scientific moderns, to which Locke is responsive, but this divorce lies at the base of the sublime too. Scientific thinking and the aesthetic of the sublime are correlative expressions of an episteme in which order is arbitrary, a matter of hypothesis, or as Burke says, of custom' (The Romantic Sublime:

278

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

Notes to pages

100-111

Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 16). A logical consequence of Burke's theory of compound abstract words, then, might be that 'liberty' can never refer to an actual state of affairs but conjures up an unanalysable emotive state; revolutionary radicalism can therefore be made to seem grossly in error when it tries to institute a political structure which would make 'liberty' a concrete political 'reality'. This anticipates Saussure's description of the arbitrary relation between signifier (sound image) and signified (concept), but by considering the affective capacity of words, Burke points towards a politics of language only latent in Saussure (see Ferdinand De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 65-70. For Locke's four rules (use no word without a signification, use only words with clear, distinct, or determinate ideas, follow propriety of speech, declare the meaning of any doubtful words), see Essay, PP- 512-15. See Enquiry, p. I7on. Paul Lucas suggests that there is a link between Burke's early associationist theory of language and his later attempt to justify existing institutions on the grounds of their accumulated associations ('On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; Or an Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers', The Historical Journal, xi (1968), pp. 35-63 (60)). See Thomas De Quincey, 'Letters to a Young Man Whose Education H a d Been Neglected', Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1889—90), x, pp. 33-52 (46-52). De Quincey says that the distinction was arrived at through 'many years' conversation with Mr Wordsworth' (p. 48), but we can see that Burke anticipates the idea by more than fifty years. De Quincey also develops the distinction in ways that rework Burke's thought in 'The Poetry of Pope', extract in Confessions of an English Opium Eater and Other Writings, ed. Aileen Ward (New York: Signet, 1966), pp. 329-34 (330-2). Steven Blakemore's Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover and London: Brown University Press/ University Press of New England, 1988) is the most insightful analysis of the way the Reflections attacks radical rhetoric as perverting the proper relations between language, nature, and social reality. Burke is animated, Blakemore shows, precisely because he is aware 'of the power of the written word, the power of human language to change and affect human lives' (pp. 93-4). But although Blakemore implicitly recognizes that the Burkean view of language is not substantially different from the one Burke identifies with radicalism, he is too much

Notes to pages 113-118

279

of a Burkean himself to allow this to unravel the argument of the Reflections. Surprisingly, Blakemore omits any sustained discussion of Burke's theory of language in the Enquiry. 5 THE GENESIS OF THE REFLECTIONS'. RESISTING THE IRRESISTIBLE VOICE OF THE MULTITUDE

1. Kant, by contrast, seeks to reconcile reason and the sublime (see 'Analytic of the Sublime', The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement (1790), in 'The Critique of Judgement', tr. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952) pp. 101-9). 2. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (London: 1783), p. 31, quoted by Boulton, p. lxxxviii (my emphasis). 3. Pocock's introduction to his edition of the Reflections stresses that the 'cardinal belief of Whig Britain, and thus of Edmund Burke, 'was in the natural harmony between landed and commercial wealth', but he also identifies the anxieties about the instability of commercial wealth which, I suggest, the 'belief in 'natural harmony' sought to quell {Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J . G. A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pp. xviii-xxii (xix-xx)). 4. Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (London: Cadell, 1789), pp. 41,,46-7. 5. Price is only slightly twisting Burke's own speculations here: 'such a light as that of the sun', Burke writes in the Enquiry, 'immediately exerted on the eye, as it overpowers the sense, is a very great idea'. At the same time, however, in what might provide provisional distinctions between 'radical' and 'reactionary' sublimes, Burke finds that 'darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light'. In an image he might easily have made ironic use of in the Reflections, Burke goes on to suggest that 'extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, so as in its effect exactly to resemble darkness' (Enquiry, p. 80). 6. The University of East Anglia English Studies Group, on the other hand, argues that the 'underlying passivity of the "People" is evident [in this passage]; they are joined to no concrete verbs of action' ('Strategies for Representing Revolution', in iy8g: Reading Writing Revolution, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Chelmsford: University of Essex, 1982), pp. 81—95)). But to deny the concrete political nature of linguistic acts is to overlook the politicization of language which recent studies have shown to be especially characteristic of this period (see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, iygi-i8ig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984)). 7. For a discussion of the way Romantic texts typically figured the Revolution in terms of a collective performative utterance, see Graham Pechey, '1789 and After: Mutations of "Romantic" Discourse', in Reading Writing Revolution, p p . 52—66 (59).

280

Notes to pages iig-125

8. Paine, in criticizing the English state and church for using obscurity and mystery to repress the people, attempts to expose its tyranny as a manipulative use of the sublime in precisely this way (see Rights of Man (1791/2), ed. and intr. Henry Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, X 6 9 9)> PP- 9J-2> 204-6). 9. Alastair Fowler, ed., Paradise Lost (London: Longman, 1968), p. 79n. 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), intr. Eleanor Louise Nicholes (Gainesville: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, i960), pp. 109-10. 11. For a discussion of Burke's figuration of the state as a body, see Walter D. Love, 'Edmund Burke's Idea of the Body Corporate: A Study in Imagery', The Review of Politics, 27, ii (1965), pp. 184-97; Burke is said to be wary of the implications of the metaphor since it introduces the possibility of the 'death and destruction' of political states (p. 193). 12. According to Gary Kelly, one of the Revolution's principal dangers in the Reflections is that it 'makes its admirers resemble itself; Burke's obsessive figuration of the Revolution as criminal insanity can be seen primarily as an ideological ploy for 'putting it in a kind of intellectual quarantine' (Kelly, 'Revolution, Crime, and Madness: Edmund Burke and the Defense of the Gentry', Eighteenth-Century Life, 9, i (1984), pp. 16-32 (24, 27)). 13. Jacques Derrida, 'Plato's Pharmacy', in Dissemination, tr. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Athlone, 1981), pp. 61-171 (98). 14. The importance of Price's sermon for Burke's decision to write the Reflections is stressed by Frederick Dreyer, 'The Genesis of Burke's Reflections', Journal of Modern History, 50, iii (1977), pp. 462-79 (462-3).

Albert Goodwin argues that Burke was concerned with the effect of Price's reading of 1688 since it undermined the true principles of the settlement which were the foundation of Whig thought. The Reflections is intended, therefore, as 'a salutary warning to the Whig magnates against the dangers of imitating the political example set by the French Liberal aristocracy' ('The Political Genesis of Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 50

(1968), pp. 336-64 (349-51, 360)). The standard account of the 'making' of the Reflections can be found in F. P. Lock, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 31-61. 15. Burke to Charlemont, 9 August 1789, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland et al., 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958— 78), vi, ed. Alfred Cobban and Robert A. Smith (1967), p. 10 (hereafter cited as Correspondence). 16. On the same day that Price delivered his sermon, Charles-JeanFranc,ois Depont, a French correspondent of Burke's, wrote to Burke

Notes to pages 126-131

17. 18.

19. 20.

281

asking for his views concerning the Revolution, fully expecting an enthusiastic response. In its early paragraphs, Burke seems to rehearse once more the 'astonishment' he would exhibit in the Reflections. But in this letter to a Frenchman active within the Revolution the sublime metaphors are transposed into the decorous language of polite correspondence: 'You may easily believe, that I have had my Eyes turned with great Curiosity to the astonishing scene now displayed in France . . . Things indeed have already happen'd so much beyond the scope of all speculation, that persons of infinitely more sagacity than I am ought to be ashamed of any thing like confidence in their reasoning upon the operation of any principle' (Correspondence, vi, p. 41). Burke to Francis, Correspondence, vi, p. 55. See Correspondence, vi, p. 55 n. 2 and p. 81. Cobban and Smith suggest that the passages which make up this letter 'may not all have been from a single letter, or even addressed to a single correspondent, [but that] it is worth noting that the first passage [of the letter] reads like an answer to the closing paragraphs of Paine's letter of 17 January' (Correspondence, vi, p. 78). O'Brien, p. 17. Quoted by O'Brien, p. 17; see Parliamentary History of England (1816), XXVIII.

21. Quoted by James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in the Age of Wilkes and Burke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 77; see Parliamentary History, xxvm, pp. 35iff. 22. For Freud's discussion of this paradoxical structure, see 'The Uncanny', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1953—73), x v n 23. Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, Writings and Speeches, ix, p. 259. These revolutionary predators reappear in Wordsworth's attempt to conjure up dread in himself at the scene of the September massacres — which becomes 'a place of fear . . . / Defenceless as a wood where tigers roam' (Prelude, 1805, x, 80-2). Feline predators also appear in Goya's 'The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters' which forms one of the Caprichos series, 1796-8. 24. Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry, in 'Classical Literary Criticism', tr. and intr. T. S. Dorsch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 49. 25. Theatrical imagery was characteristic of the Revolution's own selfdramatization (see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California, 1984), and Noel Parker, Portrayals of Revolution: Images, Debates and Patterns of Thought on the French Revolution (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990)). Marx's description of the Revolution's adoption of theatrical costume in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is well known (see Surveys from Exile, ed. and intr. David Fernbach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 146-9). Burke's treatment of the French Revolution as a

282

Notes to pages

IJI—IJJ

moment of theatre was perceived by his first radical readers: Paine wrote that 'I cannot consider Mr Burke's book in scarcely any other light than a dramatic performance' (Rights of Man, p. 81). For a good discussion of Burke's theatricality, see Peter Hughes, 'Originality and Allusion in the Writings of Edmund Burke', Centrum, 4, i (1976), pp. 32-43. Mary Jacobus, in ' "That Great Stage Where Senators Perform": Macbeth and the Politics of Romantic Theatre', Studies in Romanticism, 22, iii (1983), pp. 353-87, posits that Burke 'hesitates . . . between the excesses of the Revolution and the excesses of his own rhetoric, uncertain whether he prefers the rhetorical to the revolutionary sublime; the threat to the poetry. That uncertainty is the common point of instability on which his discussion of the theatre and his representation of revolution both rest' (p. 374). 26. For the fullest discussion of Burke's dramatic conception of politics, see Paul Hindson and T i m Gray, Burke's Dramatic Theory of Politics

(Aldershot: Avebury, 1988). 27. Hughes, 'Originality and Allusion', p. 41. 28. Marilyn Butler argues that Burke is not so astonished that he fails to recognize what category this event belongs to (Marilyn Butler, 'Revolving in Deep Time: The French Revolution as Narrative', in Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley

and Raman Selden (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf; New York: St Martin's Press, 1990), p. 1. 29. See Rights of Man, pp. 160-1. 30. For an account of the theory and practice of inoculation in the eighteenth century, see Peter Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth Century Britain

(Sussex: Caliban Books, 1977). For a meditation on the implications and effects of grafting 'scions' from previous texts into a textual 'stock', see Derrida, 'Grafts, a Return to Overcasting', in Dissemination, PP- 355-831. The 'deconstruction' of the opposition between within and without is the very structure of the sublime moment: 'This ambiguity of participation in an ideal which is greater than the psyche - beyond and at the same time within - may be met on every page of Kant's account' (Weiskel, Romantic Sublime, p. 93). 32. Burke's full title, Reflections on the Revolution in France, and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event, indicates how his text is

as much concerned to engage with such 'proceedings' as with the French Revolution itself. In October of 1790, while the Reflections was in press, Burke could write of it to a French counter-revolutionary as 'the little Book which I have written on the Revolution Society' (Correspondence, vi, p. 141). 33. Ronald Paulson analyses the strange double movement of Burke's rhetoric by suggesting that 'Burke could come to terms with the

Notes to pages 133—141

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

283

Revolution by distancing it as a sublime experience, even while denying its sublimity and realizing that it might not keep its "distance" ' (Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 67). Paulson, Representations of Revolution, p. 71, alluding to Longinus. Smith, Politics of Language, 1791-1819, p. 36. John Thelwall, The Tribune (1795-96), 11, p. 220, quoted by Smith, Politics of Language, p. 36. Thelwall, Tribune, p. 220, quoted by Smith, Politics of Language, p. 36. 'Resolutions of the United Constitutional Societies of Norwich', cited during the trial of Thomas Hardy, in Complete Collection of State Trials, xxiv, p. 292, quoted by Smith, Politics of Language, pp. 36-7. Compare Wordsworth, Prelude (1805), x, 692-3. For a discussion of the way political crises tend to foreground repressed semantic contradictions in a culture, see V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London: Seminar Press, 1973).

STRIPPING THE QUEEN: EDMUND BURKE S MAGIC LANTERN SHOW

[. While Goodwin argues that 'Burke's rejection of the new French model of liberty stemmed partly from his emotional response to the violent excesses of the Paris mobs during the transference of the French court from Versailles to the capital in the October days' ('Political Genesis of Burke's Reflections', p. 345), Carl B. Cone notes that 'into November, 1789, Burke neither hated nor feared the Revolution' {Burke and the Nature of Politics: The Age of the French Revolution (Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1964), p. 296). i. Alfred Cobban, A History of Modern France, Volume I: 1715-1799 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957), pp. 161—2. 3. O'Brien argues in his introduction to the Reflections that the 'Gothic and pathetic' manner of these passages, 'which many have been taught to think of as typical Burke', is only one of three fundamentally different styles employed in the Reflections (p. 43). Gerald Chapman even argues that a too exclusive concentration on the Versailles passage has caused critics to misread Burke's overall position {Edmund Burke: The Practical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 194-6). j,. Paul de Man, interviewed in Robert Moynihan, A Recent Imagining: Interviews with Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, and Paul de Man (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1986), p. 137, quoted by Barbara Johnson in the preface to the paperback edition of A World of Difference (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins, 1987, 1989), p. xii. ). Price is referring to George Ill's recovery from the illness which had precipitated the 'Regency Crisis' of October 1788-February 1789.

284

Notes to pages 142-151

6. See Locke's 'An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government', Two Treatises of Government (London and Melbourne: Dent, 1924), pp. 224-42. 7. O'Brien, Reflections, p. 384, n. 50. 'Hugh Peters (1598—1660), independent minister, and chaplain in the Parliamentary army; at the restoration executed on a charge of concerting the king's death' (O'Brien, p. 379, n. 8). Pocock points out in the introduction to his edition of the Reflections that the radical clergyman's name is more usually spelt 'Peter' (p. in). 8. Peter Hughes, 'Originality and Allusion', p. 39. 9. For Paine, Burke's 'account of the expedition to Versailles' employs all the devices of the theatre to produce 'a stage effect' {Rights of Man, p. 81); in place of'Mr Burke's drama' (p. 86), Paine offers 'the sober style of history' (p. 83), and claims, with some exaggeration, that 'not less than three hundred thousand persons arranged themselves in the procession from Versailles to Paris, and not an act of molestation was committed during the whole march' (p. 86). 10. B u r k e , Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791), Writings and Speeches, vm, p. 320. 11. George Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 61); for a detailed account of the episode of 5-6 October 1789, see pp. 61-79. 12. For a brief discussion of the Fifth Monarchists, see Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603-1714 (London: Nelson, 1961), pp. 168-9. 13. Boulton writes that 'It is of interest to remember Price's rejection of Burke's charge, since it may prove Burke guilty of calculated misrepresentation. Price claimed that his use of the Nunc Dimittis referred to the events of 14 July and not 6 October 1789: "I am indeed surprised that Mr Burke could want candour so much as to suppose that I had other events in view." The protest becomes more damning when Price continues: "The letters quoted by [Burke in supporting his attack] . . . were dated in July 1789, and might have shewn him that he was injuring both me and the writer of those letters" ' (Boulton, Language of Politics, p. 128, n. 2; Boulton quotes from the preface to the sixth edition of Price's Discourse (p. vi)). For Burke's use of the letters in support of his attack on Price see Reflections, p. i57n and p. i82n. It should be noted that the first 'triumph' or escorted journey occurred not on 14 July, as Boulton has it, but on 17 July (see George Rude, Revolutionary Europe 1783-1815 (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1964), p. 98). 14. Boulton claims that 'The apostrophe is central to the work as a whole. At the risk of being censured by some for excessive emotionalism, Burke provides a memorable centrepiece which, in symbolic terms, focuses the philosophical significance of all that goes before it and acts as a seminal passage for what follows . . . after the apostrophe [although] Burke is more and more concerned with the detail of governmental

Notes to pages 151—160

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

285

organisation . . . this passage remains in the mind by its imaginative force and persuasive suggestiveness' (Language of Politics, pp. 132-3). Desmond Seward, in Marie Antoinette (London: Constable, 1981), shows that the French queen's reputation for sexual licence was invented by political intrigue in the French court (see Seward's account of the Diamond Necklace Affair, pp. 87-107). For an account of such responses, see F. P. Lock, Burke''s Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 138—43. For a textual source of these images and incidents, see The Times, 13 and 14 October 1789. Rude, Crowd in the French Revolution, pp. 61-3. For Paine's version of these events, see Rights of Man, pp. 81—6. Kramnick, p. 152, referring to Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, ed. and tr. Felice Harcourt (London: Harvill Press, 1970), pp. 131-7; Pocock, Introduction to Reflections, p. liii n. 71; Cobban, A History of Modern France, 1, pp. 161-2; Paulson, Representations of Revolution, p. 60. Although Christopher Hibbet's recent history of the French Revolution more or less supports Burke's version of this episode, it does so in a melodramatic way which seems to repeat Burke's manner and to rely on the same sources (see Christopher Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980; New York: Morrow Quill, 1981), pp. 100-5). See Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), pp. 151—7. For a useful selection of The Times's reports of the Revolution, see The Times Reports the French Revolution, ed. Neal Ascherson (London: Times Books, 1975). Pocock implies that Burke is implicitly comparing Marie Antoinette to Lucretia here (Pocock, Reflections, p. 223n). See Stanley Ayling, Edmund Burke: His Life and Opinions (London: John Murray, 1988), p. 57. See Paulson, Representations of Revolution, pp. 49—50, and Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London, Fontana, 1976), pp. 271-2. See Seward, Marie Antoinette, pp. 87-107. Burke's presentation of Marie Antoinette can be understood in terms of rococo art. In Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's Madonna del Carmelo, the Virgin is 'borne aloft, tall and calm in the heart of the agitation . . . effortlessly [holding] . . . the Child — weightless, equally aerial . . . This concept of woman, which can be disconcerting in religious work, found perfect expression in Tiepolo's profane decorations, where every woman becomes a queen, and queens themselves acquire a new aura' (Michael Levey, Rococo to Revolution, Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), p. 95). O'Brien, Reflections, p. 385; see Edward Jerningham to Burke, ante 18

286

Notes to pages 164-173

January 1791, Correspondence, vi, pp. 203-4 (O'Brien refers to the correspondent as 'Jeringham'). 7 A REVOLUTION IN MANNERS! CHIVALRY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

1. Cora Kaplan, 'Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class and Sexuality in Socialist Feminist Criticism', in Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 147-76 (164-7). 2. Burke's obsession with Marie Antoinette's sexuality is not simply the mirror image of that of the Jacobins, since both derive from slanders originally circulated by certain factions of the French court (see Seward, Marie Antoinette, pp. 12 and 87-107). 3. The exposure of women becomes a paradigmatic moment of revolution in France, mobilizing equivocal political, psychic, and sexual connotations - see Neil Hertz, 'Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure', in The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 161-93, and Catherine Gallagher's 'Response', End of the Line, pp. 194—6. 4. For Freud's account of what he calls the 'obscene joke', see Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), tr. James Strachey and ed. Angela Richards (Harmondsworth: Penguin, i960, 1976), pp. 140-5. 5. Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 102, 104. 6. For Freud's discussion of the relation between jokes and social conventions, see Jokes, pp. 191-211. 7. For a discussion of the political and literary features of the carnival, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevskfs Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 122—37. 8. Weber, Legend of Freud, p. 114, quoting Freud, Jokes, p. 190. 9. Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (California: Stanford, 1975), pp. i47"5 0 10. Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (1794), intr. Janet Todd (Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), p. 426. For Wollstonecraft's full account of the events of 5-6 October, see pp. 420-69. 11. Craig Howes discusses Burke's account of 5-6 October precisely as an attempt to dissociate elements which it (paradoxically) brings together: 'the bedchamber scene from the Reflections . . . sharply contrasts the mob's Satanic, violating power with the helpless, half-dressed, fleeing figure of the beautiful Marie Antoinette. When power does erupt in women, as in the march to Versailles, they become possessed harpies, desexed and foul' ('Burke, Poe, and "Usher": The Sublime and Rising Woman', ESQj A Journal of the American Renaissance, 31, iii (1985), pp. 173-89 (184)).

Motes to pages 175-181

287

12. C. B. Macpherson, Burke (Oxford, Toronto, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 5. 13. Steven Blakemore accepts Burke's characterization of chivalry as harmonizing the sublime and the beautiful without noting that this would be a nonsense in the Enquiry and that this compromise formation serves to disguise the inequities of the existing political system (Burke and the Fall ofLanguage; p. 71). See n. 34. 14. The last phrase here is a puzzling one: Pocock adds a comma between 'domination' and 'vanquisher' in order to make 'vanquisher of laws' a qualifying parenthesis to 'domination' — thus letting 'domination' be 'subdued by manners' (Pocock, Reflections, p. 67); the editor of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, however, punctuates it as O'Brien does (see vm, The French Revolution, iygo-iyg4, p. 127). 15. Kramnick argues, for example, that Burke's theory of party politics can be seen as an attempt to substitute 'the beautiful virtues' of party government for 'the sublime virtues of Pitt's leadership, or of George Ill's for that matter' (Rage of Edmund Burke, p. 114). 16. This concept is borrowed from Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). 17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (1781, posthumous), tr. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), p. 362; Rousseau is referring to his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). 18. For a discussion of Burke's admonishment of the government in his Speech on American Taxation (given 1774, published 1775) for allowing Britain's American 'children' to see 'the shameful parts of our Constitution', see Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language, pp. 35-6. 19. Burke, First Letter on a Regicide Peace, in Writings and Speeches, ix, p. 242. 20. David Musselwhite, in a provocative and often quixotic essay on Burke, proposes that 'The Reflections cries out again and again for the notion of "ideology" which, alas for Burke, did not come into the language until six years after the Reflections were published' (Musselwhite, 'Reflections on Burke's Reflections, 1790-1990', in The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, ed. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 142-62 (159)). For Burke's attempt to develop a notion of hegemony and to employ what Lyotard would call a bourgeois narrative of the 'spirit' against Paine's bourgeois narrative of'emancipation', see pp. 160—2. 21. For an overview of the shifting fortunes of the various kinds of historical interpretation which have been brought to bear on the French Revolution over the last two centuries, together with an endorsement of more recent and sophisticated Marxist analyses, see Noel Parker, Portrayals of Revolution, pp. 115-228. 22. In the introduction to his edition of the Reflections, Pocock makes much of the fact that, rather than using the word bourgeoisie, 'Burke says that

288

Notes to pages

i8j-i8g

the outcome of the Revolution will be the political dominance of the towns and the "burgers" who live there' (p. xxx). Pocock's claim that 'Burke was a typical thinker of his age in his firm belief in the natural harmony of land and money' (p. xxxi) occludes the possibility that land and money were associated with different class interests, or had different relationships with the state - though Pocock's own work shows that the relation between land and money was an on-going problem in the eighteenth century. For an account of the historical complexity of the term 'bourgeois', see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), pp. 45—8. 23. Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, in 'Selected Writings', ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 223. 24. Pocock shows that Burke is also turning on its head the analysis of the 'Scottish school': 'Hume, Robertson, Smith, Miller — we may add Gibbon - had all isolated the growth of exchange, production, and diversified labour as the motor force which created the growth of manners, culture and enlightenment. Burke characteristically regards this as preposterous, as mistaking the effect for the cause' (Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the

25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 193-212 (199)). David Musselwhite responds to the supplementary logic at work in this and other passages: 'Burke knew . . . just how precarious, how insubstantial, how unbacked, was this massive bluff of "sentiment" . . . "Sentiment," "superstition," "prejudice" never have specific roots (or references, recalling here Burke's theory of language) and are ever in a state of perpetual supplementarity . . . Burke awaits his Derrida' ('Reflections on Burke's Reflections', p. 159). Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Burke's most polemical formulation of physiocratic, laissez-faire economics comes in his Thoughts and Details on Scarcity of 1795 — i.e., five years after the Reflections (see Writings and Speeches, ix, pp. 119-45). This is Wordsworth's way of describing the effects of words which are not 'an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it' (Essays upon Epitaphs, III, in 'William Wordsworth: Selected Prose', ed. John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), p. 361). V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London, Seminar Press, I 973)> P- 2 3 . For Chandler, Burke's emphasis on habit and custom as 'second nature' is paradigmatic of Burke's conservatism and the clue to reading Wordsworth's own 'conservative' poetics and politics (Wordsworth's Second Nature, pp. 69-92). But although this is an accurate description of the Reflections, it overlooks the actual shift in the valuation

Notes to pages igi-igg

31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

289

of habit and custom which takes place between the Enquiry and the Reflections. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), ed. Miriam Brody Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 80. For a thorough account of the assumptions of bourgeois radicalism at the end of the eighteenth century, see Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990). For his account of how Wollstonecraft extends bourgeois radical ideas to women, see p. 12. Wollstonecraft's analysis leads her to reverse Burke's assessment of manners: 'like every custom that an arbitrary point of honour has established, [the civilization of Europe] refines the manners at the expence of morals' (Rights of Men, p. 11). At the same time, in a revealing comment, she notes that 'the cultivation of reason is an arduous task . . . happy is it for [the indolent] . . . that some virtuous habits, with which the reason of others shackled them, supplies its place' (p. 71). This curiously repeats Burke's formula, and suggests that the supplementary tangles of Burke's texts are not peculiar to them but endemic to the terms in which eighteenth-century discourse conceived and confronted its political and aesthetic problems. In an often stimulating chapter on 'Burke and Patriarchy', Steven Blakemore makes some odd comments about the sexual politics of Wollstonecraft's intervention. In suggesting that she seeks to show that 'the feminine is also sublime' (Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (Hanover and London: Brown University Press/University Press of New England, 1988) p. 54), he either misreads Wollstonecraft's project or conflates the 'feminine' with the 'female' — which is precisely what she is trying to resist. William Godwin's emphasis throughout Political Justice, from the vantage point of 1793, is slightly different; in stressing the value of gradual progress rather than the violent discontinuities of revolution, his system may be said to advocate a politics of radical beauty rather than of the radical sublime (see Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness (1793), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)). Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in 'Writings and Speeches', vm, pp. 328-9. 8 REFORM AND REVOLUTION

1. David Musselwhite recalls 'that odd phrase "the rust of superstition" ', and suggests that 'There is always something corrosive and doubleedged about Burke's prose even while it is being adamant and brilliant . . . There is, in fact, little comfort to be found for the ancien regime in the

2go

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

Notes to pages 200-205 Reflections if it is read with anything like proper attention' ('Reflections on Burke's Reflections', pp. 159-60). The fact that 'superstitious' could mean 'excessive' or 'superfluous' in the seventeenth century, and that the prefix 'super' means 'in addition', reveals an etymological underpinning to its association with supplementarity. And since 'superstition' is defined by the OED as an 'unreasoning awe or fear of something unknown, mysterious, or imaginary', and 'a tenet, scruple, habit, etc. founded on fear or ignorance', it is possible to form equations between superstition, the supplement, and the sublime. David Hume, 'Of Superstition and Enthusiasm' (1741), in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985) pp. 73-9 (73-4). For a discussion of the comparison and interrelation between language and constitution in eighteenth-century Britain, see John Barrell, An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983), pp. 112-14. OED. See Genesis 11; Revelation 17. For a groundbreaking discussion of Burke's use of the Babel myth in his writings on the French Revolution, see Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language. O'Brien explains that 'the term Declaration of Right is more usually applied to the instrument by which William and Mary were declared King and Queen in February of 1689, which was, as Macaulay has pointed out, strictly speaking a revolutionary document, the Convention by which it was drafted and adopted being an extra-legal body and the Declaration itself never having received royal sanction. Its provisions were subsequently embodied in the Bill of Rights and became law at the end of the year. It is clear from the context that Burke is here referring to the statute' (Introduction, Reflections, p. 380, n. 15). Paine concedes that the Parliament of 1688 may have had the right by delegation to set up William and Mary on the throne, but he also represents himself as 'contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away, and controlled and contracted for, by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead' (Rights of Man, p. 64). The documents which Burke refers to are dismissed as 'musty records and mouldy parchments' (p. 67). By the second half of the eighteenth century inoculation meant both budding or grafting part of a plant into another for propagation, and impregnating a person or animal with the virus or germs of a disease in order to render the subject immune (see Peter Razzell, The Conquest of Smallpox: The Impact of Inoculation on Smallpox Mortality in Eighteenth

Century Britain (Sussex: Caliban Books, 1977)). 10. In fact, as Cobbett pointed out, the nature of the fruit obtained from a graft is wholly determined by the nature of the graft and the stock

Notes to pages 205-213

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

291

simply provides ca suitable quantity of wood' (William Cobbett, The English Gardener (1829), m t r - Antony Huxley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 139-54 (I43-4))Pocock, Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971; London: Methuen, 1972), p. 212. Michael Freeman, Edmund Burke and the Critique of Political Radicalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), pp. 19, 20. For a discussion of the political struggles over language in the period 1791-1819, see Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, iygi-i8ig (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); for a more extensive account of the politics of language in the eighteenth century, see Barrell, An Equal, Wide Survey, pp. 110—75. For an account of the 'Norman Yoke', see Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1958; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 58-125. Burke, 'On a Motion Made in the House of Commons . . . for a Committee to Enquire into the State of the Representation of the Commons in Parliament' (1782), quoted in Pocock, Politics, Language and Time, p. 26. Paul Lucas, 'On Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription; Or an Appeal from the New to the Old Lawyers', Historical Journal, xi (1968), PP- 35~^3 (36> 4°)- Lucas quotes from Burke's speech on the Church Nullum Tempus bill and from a private letter. Pocock stresses, however, that the notion of custom 'need not - though it often did - imply a static and unchanging content. A second implication, of no less importance than the first, was that custom was constantly being subjected to the test of experience, so that if immemorial it was, equally, always up to date' {Politics, Language and Time, p. 213)See Tom Paine, Common Sense (1776), ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 77-81. This point is derived from Lucas, 'Edmund Burke's Doctrine of Prescription', pp. 36, 47. At this historical juncture the term 'revolution' allows two contrary significations at one and the same time: the return of or to a point in time, and an irrevocable overturning of that which currently exists. These different meanings are drawn into a hegemonic struggle which involves different readings of English history (see Williams, Keywords, pp. 270-4; also pp. 262-4). Macaulay, quoted by Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, first publ. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, J 983)> P- J 33Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (ij8g—i82o) (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 51, quoting The Mind of Napoleon, A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words, ed. and tr. J.

292

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

Notes to pages 215—220 Christopher Herold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955), pp. 251-6. Melvin J. Lasky examines the interrelation between revolution and metaphor: 'Revolution was born in metaphor, and the literary marks of its birth have been ineradicable. Indeed, its whole political evolution as one of mankind's architypal concepts and mythological symbols has . . . been dominated by what we might think of as a metaphorical imperative' (Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 243). Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 11, 297-8; Spivak, Introduction, Of Grammatology, p. lxxiv. For discussions of the interrelations between proper language, propriety, and property, see Terence Hawkes, Metaphor (London and New York: Methuen, 1972), pp. 6-33; Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, tr. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 17-19; and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London and New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 36-42. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, tr. John H. Moran, in 'On the Origin of Language' (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 12-13. Isobel Armstrong argues that the Romantics' revolution 'turned Enlightenment priorities back to front by saying that everything begins with metaphor and we move from the metaphorical to the literal, not from the literal to the metaphorical' ('The Transformation of Metaphor' (transcript of inaugural lecture, University of Southampton, 1981), p. 13). See Tom Furniss, 'Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine's Critique of Burke', in Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf; New York: St Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 23-48. Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, pp. 36-8. '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' (Burke, Reflections, p. 92). For a discussion of the ways in which the Reflections constructs the sense of an informal persona, see F. P. Lock, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 114-20. My allusion to Wordsworth's 'Preface to the Lyrical Ballads' is meant to point towards some of the ways Wordsworth's text draws on Burkean assumptions. 9 IMAGINARY CONSTITUTIONS AND ECONOMIES

1. See J. G. A. Pocock, 'The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution', in Virtue, Commerce, and History, pp. 193—212 (194).

Notes to pages 221—22g

293

2. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 3. Adam Smith is supposed to have said of Burke 'that he was the only man who, without communication, thought on [economic reform] . . . exactly as he [Adam Smith] did' (quoted by Macpherson, Burke, pp. 21-2).

4. For a perceptive discussion of property in Burke's writings on the Revolution, see George Fasel, ' "The Soul that Animated": The Role of Property in Burke's Thought', Studies in Burke and His Time, 17 (1976), pp. 27-41. 5. Burke, 'Speech to the Electors of Bristol at the Conclusion of the Poll', The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 16 vols. (London: Rivington, 1815-27), in, pp. 19-20. 6. Burke, Observations on a Late Publication Intitled the Present State of the Nation (1769), Works, 11, p. 136, quoted by Macpherson, Burke, p. 22. 7. See OED, and John Barrell, An Equal, Wide Survey (London: Hutchinson,

1983)

pp.

IIO-II.

8. A 'canton' was a division of the new political map of France and contained 'four square leagues' {Reflections, p. 294). 9. The quotation comes from Horace, De Arte Poetica, 99. 10. For Coleridge's 'organic' conception of poetic genius and poetic text, see Biographia Literaria (1817), ed. George Watson (London: Dent, J 975)> PP- x73-411. Jerome Christensen, '"Like a Guilty Thing Surprised": Deconstruction, Coleridge, and the Apostasy of Criticism', Critical Inquiry, 12 (Summer 1986), pp. 769-87 (777). 12. Coleridge, The Statesman's Manual, in Lay Sermons, ed. R. J . White (1972), 'The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge', general ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols. (Princeton: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969-), vi, p. 30. 13. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, pp. 50 and 52, n. 3 continued from p. 51. For a discussion of the political implications of Coleridge's adoption of a Burkean organicism see David Aers, 'Coleridge and the Egg that Burke Laid: Ideological Collusion and Opposition in the 1790s', Literature and History: A New Journal for the Humanities, 9, ii (1983), pp. 152-63 (61). 14. A comprehensive discussion of the assignats can be found in S. E. Harris, The Assignats (London and Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1930; New York: 1969). John Law was a Scot called in after the death of Louis XIV by the Duke of Orleans in order to solve a financial crisis not unlike that which precipitated the Revolution at the end of the century. Law advised, in Cobban's words, that 'the issue by a royal bank of paper money, guaranteed on the king's credit, could remedy [the] deficiency [of currency]' (Cobban, History of Modern France, pp. 22-3). To back the paper money, a trading venture was undertaken in

294

15.

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21.

Notes to pages 22g-2j2

Louisiana accompanied by talk of a 'new Eldorado'. Shares in the company rose to forty times their face value, only to crash when the public lost confidence. The system became bankrupt in October 1720 and Law fled to London (Cobban, History of Modern France, pp. 24-6). A searching analysis of the implications of Law's venture can be found in Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966), tr. unspecified (London: Tavistock, 1970) pp. 180-3. Burke insists that Law's scheme involved 'generous delusions' in comparison to the outrageous fraud perpetrated by the National Assembly (Reflections, pp. 368-9). Wealth of Nations, 1, p. 292, 11, p. 921. For Smith's full discussions of paper money and funding respectively, see 1, pp. 286-329, and 11, pp. 907-47. For an account of the complex function of fine metal in mercantile economics, which shows that gold and silver were thought of not as wealth in themselves but as peculiarly apt representations of wealth, see Order of Things, pp. 174—7. For an illuminating discussion of the metaphorical interchange between economics and language in English Romanticism, see Mary Jacobus, 'The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writing of the Past', in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 215-46 (225-6); this essay is especially good on Burke's impact on the major Romantic essayists. Armstrong, in 'The Transformation of Metaphor', attends to the shifts in the metaphorical relationship between language and money from the eighteenth century to Ezra Pound. An extensive analysis of the analogic relation between money and language can be found in Foucault, Order of Things, pp. 166-211. See Wealth of Nations, 1, p p . 298-303; Harrap's French-English Dictionary defines assignat as a 'promissory note (as issued by the Revolutionary French Government, 1790-96)'. Foucault, Order of Things, pp. 180—3. John Locke, 'Some Considerations of the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest and Raising the Value of Money' (1691), in Several Papers Relating to Money, Interest and Trade, &c (London: 1696), p. 32, quoted by Paul Hamilton, 'Keats and Critique', in Majorie Levinson, et al., Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings in Romantic History (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 108-42 (128). Hamilton's essay develops a fascinating analogy between the speculative economics of paper money and Romantic poetics. For a full-length study of the changing history of the interplay between money, language, and imagination, see Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982). 'Delos . . . had been a floating island until Latona there gave birth to

Notes to pages 233-239

295

Apollo and Diana, and Jupiter made the island fast' (O'Brien, p. 395, n. 152). 22. This question marks a point of divergence between the capitalism Burke seeks to promote and the Christianity he espouses in its support. In Matthew 20, Christ's parable about the labourers in the vineyard stresses that they should have faith that they will receive 'whatsoever is right'. Capitalism, in other words, operates a quite different credo from Christianity. 23. For Burke's account of the way the value of labour ought to be regulated in accord with capitalist principles, see Thoughts and Details on Scarcity~, in 'Writings and Speeches', xi, pp. 119—45. 24. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 200. 25. In fact, Pocock recognizes that 'Burke is employing, here . . . a language first created to attack the foundations of the Whig order he is

concerned to defend' [Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 200). 26. Pocock suggests that eighteenth-century Britain was a 'speculative society [which] maintain [ed] and govern [ed] itself by perpetually gambling' [Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 99). 27. P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1J56 (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press, 1967), pp. 9, 11, 12-14. 28. Thomas Mortimer, Every Man His Own Broker (7th edn., 1769), p. 156, quoted in Dickson, The Financial Revolution, p. 16. 29. John Briscoe, A Discourse on the Late Funds of the Million-Act (1694), p. viii, quoted in Dickson, ibid., p. 24. 30. Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (1697), pp. 29-30, quoted by Dickson, ibid., p. 33. 31. Hamilton, 'Keats and Critique', n. 33. 32. E. J. Hobsbawm informs us that paper money remained relatively stable in Britain through the 1790s, though in 1797 the Bank of England suspended 'gold payments to private clients . . . and the inconvertible banknote became, de facto, the effective currency: the £1 note was one result' [The Age of Revolution: Europe 1J8Q-1848 (London: Sphere, 1977), p. 121). 33. For Smith's discussion of the advantages and dangers of paper money, see Book II, chapter ii of the Wealth of Nations, 1, pp. 286-329. 34. If this term draws on an available figure for disorder in the body politic (Lilly refers in 1647 to 'Civill Distempers'), the medieval assumption that distemper was a physical or mental disturbance which arose from an excess or disproportion in the humours makes the figure peculiarly apt for Burke's diagnosis. And since the theory of fluid humours already implied an idea of internal flows, William Harvey's publication of his theory about the circulation of the blood in 1628 invited an analogy between the circulation of the blood and the circulation of money in the body politic. Thus if Floyer suggests in 1707 that fevers are found

296

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

Notes to pages 240-243 when 'the physic runs too quick', then an economic distemper occurs when paper money circulates too quickly, or at too high a pressure, in a self-perpetuating spiral which never coincides with real wealth or money (see the OED's entries under 'distemper' and 'circulation'). Kramnick's introduction to Common Sense (pp. 39—40) shows that Paine arrived at his liberal economics and politics independently of Smith (Common Sense and Wealth of Nations were both published in 1776). In their perceptive discussion of the 'collusions of discourse' between Burke and Paine, the University of East Anglia English Studies Group suggests that this 'species of collusion' 'does not imply self-conscious conspiracy or simple identity', but is based on 'shared paradigms, basic systems of representation' ('Strategies for Representing Revolution', iy8g: Reading Writing Revolution, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Chelmsford: University of Essex, 1982) pp. 85, 90, 91). To a certain extent, however, this insight leads the group to obfuscate the fact that Burke and Paine actually struggle with these paradigms for significantly different political ends. For a development of the argument about the 'collusion' of Burke and Paine by one of the UEA group, see Aers, 'Coleridge and the Egg that Burke Laid', pp. 152-63. For an earlier example of Paine's condemnation of paper money issued by the state in favour of gold, silver, and bank notes, see 'Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper Money' (1786), in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 167-200. Referring to the publications of the Revolution Society (such as Price's Discourse and the letter of congratulation to the National Assembly), Burke stresses that '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, 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' (Reflections, pp. 110-11). See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), pp. 155, 212, 177. For the relation between this and English Romanticism's concern with the imagination, see Hamilton, 'Keats and Critique', pp. 127-37. 10 SPECULATION AND THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

1. Mirabeau, Philosophie rurale, quoted in Foucault, Order of Things, p. 194. 2. See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), p. 82. 3. See Williams, Keywords, pp. 82-3.

Notes to pages 245-253

297

4. Williams, Keywords, pp. 184—5. 5. See Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (London and New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 17-21; and Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 13-17. 6. See Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially pp. 1-62. 7. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 106, quoted by Shell, Economy of Literature, p. 7. 8. For Rousseau's concerns about representation in politics, language, and money, see Shell, Economy of Literature, pp. 113-28. In a later study of these questions, Shell traces the impact on intellectual thought of the various stages of the increasing abstraction of money from 'the electrum money of ancient Lydia . . . [to] the electric money of contemporary America'. This process is not only a subject of discourse, but informs and transforms the nature of discourse itself: 'the new forms of metaphorization or exchanges of meaning that accompanied the new forms of economic symbolization and production were changing the meaning of meaning itself (Shell, Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philosophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 1, 4)9. Alexander Pope, 'Epistle III. To Allen Lord Bathurst' (1733), 69-70. 10. The association between paper money and flight has a long history: Marco Polo tried to 'explain Chinese financial institutions, which his European audience did not believe to exist, in terms of alchemy and flight' (Shell, Money, Language and Thought, p. 99). 11. Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London (London: 1667). 12. This is how Wordsworth characterizes Burke's project in the forty or so lines in praise of his former enemy inserted into the Prelude between 1820 and 1828 {Prelude (1850), vn, 512-43); for a revealing discussion of this passage, see James K. Chandler, Wordsworth's Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), pp. 25-30. 13. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, tr. unspecified (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. 217. 14. For a discussion of the ways the Reflections breaks with received notions of refined discourse precisely by exploiting terms from a range of 'vulgar' occupations, see Smith, Politics of Language, pp. 36-9. 15. When Coleridge urged aspiring authors 'Be not merely a man of letters!' (Biographia Literaria, p. 132), he was, of course, warning his readers not to follow his own example (for a discussion of the rise of the 'man of letters', with Coleridge as the representative figure, see Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. 69-93). 16. Burke, Second Letter on a Regicide Peace, in e Writings and Speeches', ix, pp.

298

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

Notes to pages 291—2. For William Hazlitt's account of the political role of the press and the division of the world of letters after the French Revolution into radical and conservative factions, see Life of Napoleon, I, in ' The Complete Works of William Hazlitf, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930-4), XII, pp. 38-42; 'The Times Newspaper', Complete Works, vn, p. 145; and 'Character of Mr Burke', Complete Works, vn, p. 229. It was the dissenters who, via academies and pulpits and through such figures as Price and Joseph Priestley, challenged the established cultural hegemony in England by constructing an alternative intellectual tradition (mainly in science, politics, religion, and letters) - see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 28-9 and 55-8. Shell reads Longinus as differentiating between the uneconomic excesses of the 'dispensing sublime poet' and the 'disposing economic poet' on the basis that the poetry of the latter is produced and understood through work, while that of the former is effortless and uncontainable: 'The sublime is that which we feel we ourselves have created or produced effortlessly' (Economy of Literature, pp. 103-4). This allows us to measure the extent to which Burke's theory of the sublime as that which is produced by and produces labour represents a significant transformation of this aesthetic tradition in the service of a new ethic. Todd, Sensibility, p. 134. Peter Hughes, 'Originality and Allusion in the Writings of Edmund Burke', Centrum, 4, i (1976), p. 34. The Revolution Controversy therefore paves the way for Romanticism's rejection of sensibility - though as recent feminist readings of the self-constructions of the Romantic self in the poetry of male Romantic poets suggest, their attempts to reassert its masculine nature can be read as an uneasy response to the increasing commercialization and feminization of literary production and consumption. See Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and Sonia Hofkosh, 'The Writer's Ravishment: Women and the Romantic Author - The Example of Byron', in Romanticism and Feminism, ed. Anne K. Mellor (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 93-114. Miriam Brody Kramnick, Introduction, Rights of Woman, p. 14, quoting Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (London: H. S. King and Co., 1876), p. 191. In his cartoon 'New Morality', James Gilray turns the table on this by portraying 'the figure of Sensibility weeping over a dead bird, with the works of Rousseau in one hand; a foot rests on the unregarded head of Louis XVI' (Todd, Sensibility, p. 130). 'The scandal is that the sign, the image, or the representer, become forces and make "the world move" ' (Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 147, quoting Rousseau).

Notes to pages 260-265

299

25. Contrast Paine's account of how he came to write Common Sense: T neither read books, nor studied other people's opinions. I thought for myself {Rights of Man, p. 241). 26. See Pope, 'On the Use of Riches', Moral Essays, 'Epistle iv', 169-204. 27. 'There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism' (Walter Benjamin, 'Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian', in One-Way Street and Other Writings, tr. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), p. 359). 28. See Foucault, Order of Things, pp. 125-65. 29. Anne Marion Osborn, Rousseau and Burke, A Study of the Idea of Liberty in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. vii. 30. For accounts of the revolutionary festivals, see Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution; Parker, Portrayals of Revolution; and Margaret Iversen, 'Imagining the Republic: The Sign and Sexual Politics in France', in The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, pp. 121-39. 31. O'Brien, p. 49. 32. ' "Mobility" was a term proudly adopted by nineteenth-century Radicals and Chartists for their peaceable and well-conducted demonstrations' (Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 78-9). 33. Burke is not, of course, responding to Paine's as yet unwritten text but to the practices of the National Assembly; at the same time, it is productive to see Burke as participating in a dialogic struggle with Paine, constituting the issues and the language of his most searching critic.

Index

Aarsleff, Hans 277 n.6 Abrams, M. H. 20, 26911.10, 277 n.i Addison, Joseph 71-2, 80, 81-2; 'The Pleasures of the Imagination' 21-4, 269 n. 13 Aers, David 293 n. 13, 296 n.36 aesthetic ideology 2-4, 173, 188, 220, 257, 266 n. 1 aestheticising the state, as lovely 227; as a poem 227-8; as living organism 228, passim; as public ornament 263 aesthetics and politics 1-8, n - 1 3 aesthetics as a bourgeois project 268 n.4 aesthetics in the eighteenth century 19-24, 268 n.4 Allen, R. T. 266 n.5 alliance, bourgeois capitalism and landed aristocracy 2, 59, 116, 119, 126, 165, 184-7, 22I > 233> 2 5 X ' 254> 2 79 n -3? a s a compromise formation 3, 139-40 ambition 32, 33, 96, 104 Amussen, S. 272 n.i Anderson, Benedict 221, 293 n.2 Antoinette, Marie 39, 170-4, 178, 183, 190, 285 n. 15, 286 n.2; Burke's apostrophe to 151-61; as beauty and beast 165-6; as emblem of aristocratic society 165, 167, 172, 174, 178 aristocratic and bourgeois 2, 5-6, 41, 42, 46 Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry 23, 130, 161, 269 n. 16 Armstrong, Isobel 292 n.26, 294 n.i7 art and artifice 9-10, 217-19, 228; Burke's dependence on the distinction between 218 art and nature 9-10, 70-1, 91-5, 205, 262-3 Ascherson, Neal 285 n.21 Ashfield, Andrew 268 n.6

assignats 220, 228-33, 2 93 n.i4; as language 2 49 astonishment 115-16, 129, 136, 281 n.i6 Attridge, Derek 70-1, 267 n.13, 267-8 n.16 Ayling, Stanley 285 n.23 Babel 148, 202-3, 290 n.6 Baillie, John, An Essay on the Sublime 21, 269 n. 15 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 286 n.7 barbarism 42, 54, 147, 151, 154, 183, 299 n.27; barbarous nations, societies and periods 61-3, 84, 87, 103, 210 Barrell, John 60-1, 251, 273 n. 14, 275 n.2, 290 n.4, 291 n. 13 Barthes, Roland 276 n. 10 beautiful 19, 34-40, 176-8; dangers of 37-9, 189-95; a n d custom 35, 189; and barbarity 156; as vulnerable to and defence against revolutionary terror 151-3, 155-63; as pleasing illusions 177-8; Wollstonecraft's critique of 192-5. Benjamin, Walter 299 n.27 Bentham, Jeremy 52 binary oppositions 18-19, 34, 140, 150, 228 Black, Jeremy 272 n. 1 Blair, Hugh, Lectures on Rhetoric 116, 279 n.2 Blakemore, Steven 278-9 n.15, 287 ml.13, 18, 289 n.34, 290 n.6 body politic 28, 29, 38, 42-3, 122, 134, 178; as aesthetic object 187, 205-6 Bond, Donald F. 82, 269n.i3 Boulton, James T. 17, 74, 76, 116, 266 n.5, 268 nn.1, 2, 5, 7, 269 n.12, 274^15, 284 n. 13, 284-5 n. 14 bourgeois and bourgeoisie 2, 4-7, 39, 42-4, 60-3, 88, 181-3, 185, 287-8 n.22; contradictory ideology of 87-8 Briggs, Asa 291 n.21 Briscoe, John 234

300

Index British constitution 226; see English constitution brutes, lust of 33, 35-6 Burke, Edmund: as champion of beauty 158; analysis of condition of England 44; as fellow traveller with Paine 240, 264; as man of letters 57-8, 256; as physician to the state 195-6; as using same rhetorical strategies as Price 145-50; bid for originality 271 n.30; 'Burke problem' 3-7, 11; concept of taste based on Locke 78-9; defence of superstition 198—200; distinction between sublime and beautiful 17-19, 36-9; history of English monarchy 203-5; labour theory of aesthetic value 29, 276 n.5; laissez-faire economics 188, 288 n.27; misreading of Hume 76—7; misreading of Price 284 n.13; on art and literature 80, 84-8, 90-6, 102, 104-5, 217-18,251-9, 261-4; on language 99-112; resistance to theory 66, 275 n.30, 276 n.8; response to French Revolution prior to Reflections 124-8, 283 n.i; response to reviewers 17, 104-5, 268 n.2; revolt against neo-classic principles 35, 268 n.7; shift between Enquiry and Reflections-65-6, 69, 189-91, 195; theoretical principles 17-19; theory of party politics 287 n.15; 'On a Motion . . . for a Committee to Enquire into the State of the Representation' 291 n.15; 'Speech on the Army Estimates' 127; 'Speech to the Electors of Bristol' 224-5, 293 n.5; First Letter on a Regicide Peace 128, 180, 281 n.23; Letter to a Member of the National Assembly 64—5, 195, 284 n. 10; Letter to a Noble Lord 6; letter to Lord Charlemont 124-5; Observations on a Late Publication Intitled the Present State of the Nation 293 n.6; Philosophical Enquiry 1-2,

17-19, 24-40, 48-9, 68-70, 73-116, 119-22, 144, 258, 279 n.5, and passim; Reflections 64-6, 122, 124, 128, 134-7, 142-57, 161-3, 165-265, 296 n.38, and passim; Reflections as reversing the Enquiry's aesthetic ideology 189-91; Second Letter on a Regicide Peace 252-3, 297 n.16; Speech on American Taxation 287 n. 18; Thoughts and

Details on Scarcity 224, 288 n.27, 295 n.23 Butler, Marilyn 266 n.3, 282 n.28, 297 n.15 capital and capitalism 6-7, 32, 43, 108, 174-5, I^I~3> I 86~7, 198, 224, 233-4, 236, 240, 243, 253-4, 261; capitalist credo 295 n.22; capitalist work ethic 64;

301

capital as metaphor for national inheritance 221; capital-labour relation 181-8, 262 carnival 167, 171, 286 n.7 Chandler, James K. 4, 136, 266 n.4, 275 n. 1, 288-9 n.30, 297 n. 12 Chapman, Gerald W. 266 n.5, 283 n.3 Cheyne, George 45 chivalry 157, 175-7, r^4~5> r 9° Christensen, Jerome 293 n. 11 circumstances 128, 195-6 civilization as problematic 85-7, 147 Clayre, Alasdair 274 n. 18 clothing, as metaphor or supplement 177—89, 193; as revolutionary disguise 170-3 Cobban, Alfred 138-9, 152, 229, 280 n.15, 281 n.18, 283 n.2, 293 n.14 Cobbett, William 290-1 n.io Coleridge, S. T . Biographia Literaria 228, 293 n . i o ; Statesman's Manual 228,

293 n.12; as man of letters 297 n.15; adoption of Burkean organicism 293 n.13 Collins, Henry 187, 240, 280 n.8 collusion of Burke and Paine 198, 240, 296 n.36; theoretical correspondence 216 commerce 2, 41-4, 48, 58, 60-3, 184-6 commonality of human faculties 69-74; in physiology 76, 78, 81, 89, 161 Cone, Carl B. 283 n.i conservative sublime 116-17, 143 contagion 109, 116, 122, 134 Copeland, Thomas W. 280 n.i5 credit 43, 221, 230-1, 234-8 Cretan liar paradox 277 n.3 crisis 128—31; in representation 197 cross dressing 169-74 crowd psychology 116 custom 12, 35, 68-9, 107, 123, 132, 150, 167, 177-8, 189, 195, 208-9, 275 n.2, 277 n.8, 288-9 n.30, 2 9 : n-17 danger 18-19, 25, 29-30, 63, 69, 271 n.6 Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall 272 n.i Davis, Natalie Z. 171, 286 n.9 De Bolla, Peter 266 n.5, 268 n.6, 269 n.i 1, 273 n.13, 2 76 nn-7> 8 Declaration of Right 203, 290 n.7 deconstruction 8, 12, 140, 181, 256, 282 n.31 decorum 70-1, 86, i n , 153, 157, 185 Defoe, Daniel 43, 47-8, 234 delight 18-19, 23> 24> 28—30, 69, 92, 167-8; delightful horror 24, 28, 269 n. 16

Index demagogic imagination 257 De Man, Paul 140, 266 n.i, 283 n.4 Dennis, John 269 n. 16 Depont, Charles-Jean Francois 199, 280-1 n. 16 De Quincey, Thomas n o , 278 n. 14 Derrida, Jacques 2, 8, 9-10, 122-3, X32> 180, 213-14, 226, 241, 266 n.2, 267 n.11, 274 nn. 16-17, 280 n.13, 282 n.30, 298 n.24 Dickinson, H. T. 268 n.9, 273 n.6 Dickson, P. G. M. 234-5, 295 n.27 discourse 7-8, 28, 33, 121, 123 dissenters 253, 298 n. 17 division of labour 60, according to sex 41 drama 151, 159-63, 282 n.25, 284 n.9 Dreyer, Frederick 280 n. 14 Eagleton, Terry 266 n.5, 268 n.4, 274 n. 15, 276 nn.6, 9, 297 n.5 Earle, Peter 42, 269 n. 17, 272 nn. 1,4 economic individualism 33, 48 education 60-1 egalitarian aspect of Burke's aesthetics 68-81 Engels, Frederick 6, 267 n.8 English constitution 116-19, I4I~3» 2O2> 204-9, 22I > 224~7> 2 ^7 n. 18; as aesthetic object 225-6 English Revolution (1688) 2, 6, 41, 46, 59, 117-18, 141-2, 203-4, 207, 290 nn.7-8; as exemplary contrast to French Revolution 212-14 Englishness 48, 122, 124-6, 146, 148, 181, 206-7 epidemic distemper, in the body and body politic 232, 239, 241, 295 n.34 exercise 24, 27-8, 45, 53, 59, 62, 85-6, 191, 27711.14 experience and experiment 69, 73-5, 89, 93, 95, 101, 277 n. 5 Fabb, Nigel 266 n.2 Fasel, George 293 n.4 Fawconer, Samuel 171 femininity, masculinity, and effeminacy 2, 5, 35-9, 4i> 44-6, 63, 153, 172, 175-6, 184, 191-5; see also gender feminist readings of Romanticism 298 n.21 Ferguson, Frances 29, 34, 38, 64, 68, 87, 173, 190, 269 n. 11, 270 nn.24-5, 271 n.27, 271-2 n.38, 275 n.29, 275 n.1, 276 n.5, 277 n.14, 277 n.3

Fifth Monarchists 149, 284 n. 12 financial revolution 41, 43-4, 46, 229, 2 34~5 Foucault, Michel 8, 44-5, 231, 243-4, 25°>

267 n.12, 270 n.22, 273 n.9, 294 nn. 14, 16, 17

Fowler, Alastair 120, 280 n.9 Fox, Charles James 127 France as England's other 11, 48, 181, 186, 221-2, 229-42

Francis, Phillip 126, 157-60 Freeman, Michael 205-6, 291 n.12 French Revolution, as bourgeois revolution 181-3; see also revolution Freud, Sigmund 166-8, 270 n.23, 281 n.22; and the obscene joke 165-9, 2 86nn.4, 7 Furniss, Tom 292 n.27 Gallagher, Catherine 286 n.3 gaming, economic systems in Britain and France 232-4, 295 n.26 gender and gendering, of aesthetics 5, 32, 35-9, 41; of economic activity 272 n.3; of the republic of letters 55-7; of literary production 245, 255, 257; of revolution 152-3; see also femininity, masculinity, and effeminacy Gilray, James 298 n.23 Godwin, William 289 n.35 Goldsmith, Oliver 19, 271 n.37 Goodwin,. Albert 280 n.14, 283 n.i Goya, Caprichos 281 n.23 grafting 134, 187, 204-5, 212, 214, 282 n.30, 290-1 n. 10 Hamilton, Paul 235, 294 n.20, 296 n.40 Hamlet 158-9 Hardy, Sebastien 170 Harris, S. E. 293 n.14 Harvey, William, circulation of the blood 2 95 n -34 Hawkes, Terence 292 n.25 Hay, Douglas 269 n.9 Hazlitt, William 298 n.i6 Hecuba 158-9 Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit

49-51, 274 nn. 15-16, Lectures on Fine Art 274^15 hegemonic struggle 28, 41-2, 150, 261, 287 n.20 Helen's fatal beauty 38, 156 Hertz, Neil 269 n. 11, 286 n.3 Hibbert, Christopher 285 n.i9 Hill, Christopher 284 n.i2, 291 n.14 Hindson, Paul and Tim Gray 282 n.26 histories of the French Revolution 181, 287 n.21 Hobbes, Thomas on language 246, 277 n.7, 297 n.7

Index Hobsbawm, E. J. 295 n.32 Hont, Istvan and Michael Ignatieff 273 n.6 Howes, Craig 286 n. 11 Hughes, Peter 131, 145, 153, 256-7, 282 n.25 Hume, David 56-9, 74-8, 200-1; 'Of Commerce' 57; 'Of Luxury' 57-8; 'Of the Middle Station in Life' 58-9; 'Of Parties in General' 59; 'Of the Parties of Great Britain' 59; 'Of the Standard of Taste', 74, 76-8; 'Of Superstition and Enthusiasm' 200—1, 290 n.3; Essays Moral, Political, and Literary 275 n.22

Hunt, Lynn 281 n.25, 2 99 n -3° ideology 7, 9, 12, 180-1, 287 n.20; ideological conflict 9; ideological formations 8; ideological contradiction 8-9, J 37 imagination 79-80, 108, n o , 235, 237-8, 239, 245, 247, 252, 257, 259, 296n.4o; politicization of 22, 228, 241-2 imagined community 221 imitation 32, 33, 70-80, 91-4, 96, 104, 185-6, 245, 259; eternal circle of 91, 96 individuation 33 indolence 37, 48, 57 inoculation 135, 187, 204-5, 282 n.30, 290 n.9 irony i n , 135, 140, 155, 168-9 Iversen, Margaret 299 n.30

3°3

Lasky, MelvinJ. 292 n.23 Law, John 229, 293-4 n. 14 Levey, Michael 285 n.26 literary production and capitalism 245-6 literature of power and literature of knowledge n o , 278 n.i4 Lock, F. P. 266-7 n.7, 267 n. 10, 280 n.i4, 285 n. 16, 292 n.29 Locke, John 90, 231, 274 n.20, 277 n.8, 294 n. 20; Second Treatise of Government 52, 142, 274 n. 19; Essay Concerning

Human Understanding 52-6, 78-9, 83-4, 97-9, 105, 231, 270 n.20, 275 n.21, 278 n.i 1 Longinus 18, 19-21, 31, 72, 268 n.5, 271 nn.28-9 love 2, 34-7, 176, 227 Love, Walter D. 280 n. 11 Lucas, Paul 208-9, 278 n.i3, 291 n. 16 luxury 33-4, 45-9, 51-2, 57-9, 117, 184 Lyotard Jean-Francois 269 n. 11, 287 n.20 Macaulay, Thomas 214, 235 Macherey, Pierre 8-9, 267 n.i4 Macpherson, C. B. 6-7, 175, 181-2, 267 n.9, 274-5 n.20, 293 n.3 madness 26, 41, 44-5, 78, 105, 130, 250, 270 n.22; as astonishing revolution of weak minds 250, 255 maladie anglaise 44—5, 250

Jacobus, Mary 282 n.25, 29411.17 Jameson, Frederic 8, 177, 267 n. 14, 287 n. 16 Johnson, Barbara 268 n. 16, 280 n. 13, 283 n.4 judgement 65, 76, 83-8; as means of distinguishing poetry and madness in eighteenth century 276 n. 12 Kant, Immanuel 'Analytic of the Sublime' 25, 29, 63, 271 n.26, 274 n.15, 279 n.1, 282 n.31; three-phase sublime 25 Kaplan, Cora 41, 164, 272 n.2, 286 n.i Kaufman, Pamela 270 n.23 Kelly, Gary 280 n. 12 Kramnick, Isaac 4-7, 39, 152, 166, 266 n.7, 287 n.15, 289 n.32, 296 n.35 Kramnick, Miriam Brody 298 n.22 labour 24, 27-8, 29, 31, 32-3, 39, 42, 44, 47> 51-"6* 57-9. 60-3, 63-5, 84, 87, 195, 222, 232, 244, 255, 261 Langford, Paul, 184, 272 n.i language 12, 90-112, 204-5; arbitrary power of 90-112, 144, 174, 202-4, 206-7, 224, 258; and economics in Romanticism 294 ml. 17, 20; sublime effects of 95

Mandeville, Bernard 46-7, 273 n.i 1 manners 147, 168-9, 176-81, 184-7, 195, 289 n.33; English manners 206 Marx, Karl 6, 281 n.25; Communist Manifesto 183, 288n.23 masculine women 170, 191 master-slave dialectic 49-51, 66, 274 n. 15; mastery 30, 274 n.i7 medical metaphors 27-8, 45, 48, 108-9, 122-3, r 32, i34~5> J95-6> 232, 239, 256, 295-6 n.34; see also contagion, Harvey, inoculation, madness, maladie anglaise, nervous disorder, pain, panacea, pharmakon, poison, quarantine, relaxation, weakness Mellor, Anne K. 298 n.21 men of ability without property 73, 255 men of letters 98, 255; and the monied interest 251-4 metaphor 30-1, 49, 84, n o , 215-16, 247-8, 264, 271 n.34, 292 n.23, 294 nn.25-6 middle class 2, 11-12, 21, 24, 28, 33-4, 42, 44, 56, 58-9, 88, 252; ethos 47-9, 58-9, 61; model of subjectivity 49; ideology 33, 112; middle station 58-9

3°4

Index

Milton, John Paradise Lost 19-20, 31, 32-3, 91, 102, 119-20, 280 n.9 money and language as analogous forms 231, 244, 246, 249, 294 nn. 17, 20; see also paper money, assignats monied interest 231-4, 251-3 Monk, Samuel H. 20-1, 268 n.8 monstrous fiction 143, 222 Mortimer, Thomas 234 Musselwhite, David 287 n.20, 288 n.25, 289-90 n. 1 Napoleon 215 National Assembly 147-8, 181, 194, 206, 221-3, 249 National Debt 108, 234, 273 n.13 Natural Law 182 nature 22, 68-71, 144, 177, 170-80, 205-6, 243; radical and conservative 179, 214-15, 263; and culture 9—11; natural order 144 neo-classicism 20, 34-5 nervous tension, disorder and fibres 25-7, 3°> 37> 45> 5O

Norman Conquest 207—10 Norman Yoke 207, 291 n.14 Norris, Christopher 266 n. 1 Norwich Society 137, 283 n.38 Nunc Dimittis 117, 142, 144, 146, 284 n. 13 O'Brien, Conor Cruise 126, 144, 147, 160, 264, 283 n.3, 284 n.7, 290 n.7, 294-5 n.21 obscene joke 165-9, 286 nn.4, 7 obscurity and clarity 91, 94-5, 98, 109, 120 Oedipal crisis 5; Oedipal strategies 5-6, 152-4; Oedipal structure 165-8 originality 30—2, 271 n.30 Osborne, Anne Marion 264, 267 n.15 othering 11, 48-9, 150, 235, 241, 273 n.14; see also France as England's other pain 18-19, 25-8, 33, 44, 55-6, 69, 126 Paine, Thomas 187; on banking 296 n.37;

Paulson, Ronald 152-3, 170, 191-2, 275 n.27, 282-3 n.33 Pechey, Graham 279 n.7 people, the 61, 66, 102-3, ll&> X42> 2O5> 279 n.6 Peter, Reverend Hugh 144, 284 n.7 pharmakon 122-3, :32> X9^» 2 5 ^ Phillips, Adam 276 n.8 philosophic analogy 205 physiocratic economics 243 Pitt, William 127, 287 n.15 pleasing illusions 166, 177 pleasure 18-19, 37, 45, 55-6, 59 Pocock, J. G. A. 43, 108, 152, 184, 205, 220, 233-5, 272 nn.3, 4, 274 n.20, 279 n.3, 284 n.7, 285 n.22, 287 n.14, 287-8 n.22, 288 n.24, 291 n.17, 295 n.25-6 poetry as a means of constituting subjectivity 104; as sublime supplement 104 poison and antidote 195-6 political economy 108, 220, 234, 244, 259 political imagination, wholesome and diseased 235 political labour 212-13 Poovey, Mary 298 n.21 Pope, Alexander 20, 45, 110-11, 247, 261, 299 n.26 Porter, Roy 42, 45, 268 n.9, 272 n.i, 273 n.5, 276 n.12 prejudice 200, 260 prescription 207-11, 217 Price, Martin 268 n.7, 271 n.38 Price, Richard, Discourse on the love of our

country 117-19, 134-5, 141-52, 178, 279 n.4, 284 n. 13 primitive language of the law 202, 216-17 progress 33, 63 property and properties 173-4, 208, 217, 223, 293 n.4; and propriety 104-6, 130-1, 145, 216, 292 n.25; linguistic property, 217

Common Sense 210, 291 n.18; Rights of

Man, 132-3, 142, 150-1, 161, 206-7, 214-15, 239-40, 248, 253-4, 257, 265, 280 n.8, 282 n.25, 284 n.9, 285 n. 18, 290 n.8, 299 n.25 panacea and plague 122 paper money 108, 228-42, 246-8, 295 n.32; as supplementation 230, 236-42; as language 249; as flight 247, 297 n. 10; and Romantic poetics 294 n.20 Parker, Noel 281 n.25, 2 ^7 n - 2 1 Parker, Patricia 217, 292 n.25

quarantine 122, 280 n.12 radical or democratic sublime 64-6, 103, 116-19, 132-4, 146 radical writings as counterfeit wares 296 n.8 rape 155-6, 165 rationality 52-6; incompatible with sublime 66, 75-6, 85-6, 90, 100, 105-6, 115, 131, 179, 279 n. 1; incompatible with beauty 34-5, 178-9 Razzell, Peter 282 n.30

Index Regency crisis 141, 207, 283 n.5 relaxation, dangers of 24, 27, 37; necessity of 64-5 religion 50, 117-20, 141-50, 198-201 removal 25; as metaphor 30, 135; of difficulty 27, 60-1, 65 representation, political 117, 141, 171-2, 222-7; in language 94-112, 224, 244, 258; in money 230-42, 244 republic of letters 251-60 revolution, and metaphor 215-16, 292 n.23; as an unproven aeronautics 265; as apocalyptic terror 156; as celestial change 156; as collective performative utterance 115-19, 279 n.7; as costume drama 178; as demonic spectacle 144-5; a s disrobing intrusion 138-89; as necessary substitute 210; as radical or conservative supplementation 212-14; as sublime event 115-37; a s t n e extreme remedy of the constitution 256; as theatre 124-6, 129-32, 133-4, 148-9, 281-2 n.25; in manners 180; in female manners 195; as terror 144-55; a s farce 148-9; as Oedipal event 152-4; contradictory meanings in the period 291 n.20; difference from reform 211—15 Revolution Controversy 3, 89, 103, 246, 248, 266 n.3 Revolution Society 127, 282 n.32, 296 n.38 rhetoric, effect on 'the people' 102-3 Ricoeur, Paul 292 n.25 Robertson, William 184 rococo art 285 n.26 Romantic sublime 32 Romanticism 20—1; and figurative language n o , 248; revolution in language 216; and money 294 ml. 17, 20, 296 n.40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 10, 117-18, 126-7, 177-8, 194, 246, 252, 259, 287 n.17, 298 n.24; Essay on the Origin of Languages

216, 292 n.26; as sublime speculator, 258-9; as role model for Burke 241, 264, 267 n. 15 Rude, George 148, 152, 170, 284nn.11, 13 Satan 190; as sublime revolutionary hero 119-20

Saussure, Ferdinand de 278 n. 10 Scottish Enlightenment 184, 288 n.24 second nature n - 1 2 , 68-70, 74, 179, 275 n.i, 288-9 n.30 Sekora, John 45-8, 171, 273 n. 10 selfhood and subjectivity 2, 29, 30-1, 32, 39, 43> 49-51, 54-5, 73, 104, 146, 156; as

3O5

heroic labourer 29, 31-3; self-creation 49-51; self-made man 2, 31; selfpreservation 18, 27-30, 38, 271 n.32 Seven Years War 48, 108, 273 n. 13 Seward, Desmond 285 n. 15 Shell, Marc 246, 294 n.20, 297 n.6-8, 298 n. 18 Smith, Adam, 283 n.3; The Wealth of Nations 51-2, 60-3, 236-9, 243-4, 2 75 n - 2 4> 294 n.15; on the benefits and dangers of paper money 229, 246-8, 295 n.33; paper money as flight 247; on barbarous nations 61-2; concern about effects of commerce and division of labour 60-3 Smith, Olivia 136, 279 n.6, 283 n.36-7, 291 n.13, 297 n.14 Smith, William 31, 271 n.29 speculation 108, 231-3, 250, 255, 259-60 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 267 n.i 1 Sprat, Thomas 248, 297 n.i 1 springs of action 52-9, 261, 274 n. 18 strength 26-7, 36 sublime 18, 19-34, 143, 162-3, 255^ a s surplus value 102; as obscene joke 167; as antidote to the beautiful 38-9, 272 n.38; as metaphor 271 n.34; as revolutionary aesthetic category 20-1, 107; politics and ideology of 23, 30-4, 73; contradictory politics and ideology of 61, 73, 115—17, 119-21; three phases of 25-9, 49-51, 120, 161; through power of language 95, 258 superstition 198-201, 289-90 n.i, 290 n.2; as necessary supplement to religion 198-200 supplement and supplementarity 9-10, 70-1, 86-90, 175, 177-81, 183-7, T ^9, 197-200, 211, 212-15, 218-19, 230, 236-40, 241-2, 288 n.25, 289 n.33 surplus value 102, 108; material and cultural 261-2 swelling, tumescent effects of sublime 30—2 synecdoche 223 taste 54-6, 68-88, contradictory politics of 82-8 tautegorical symbol 228, 230 terror/horror 23, 24-8, 49-51, 119, 133, 135-7, 146, 161, 167-8, 179 theatre, theatric, and theatricality 154, 159, 162 Thelwall, John 136-7, 283 n.36-7 Thompson, E. P. 269 n.9, 298 n.i7, 299 n.32 Times 153-4, ll°~l-> 2&5 n - 17 Todd, Janet 297 n.5, 298 n.23

306

Index

Winter's Tale 205 Wollstonecraft, Mary 121, 190-5, 257, 289 n.34; An Historical View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution 172, Versailles episode (5-6 October 1789) as 286 n. 10; critique of sublime and 138-9, 144-57; as via dolorosa 145-9; beautiful 192-4; critique of the Reflections demonic ritual 145; as perpetrated by savage, inhuman women 145-8, 169-73 190-3; debt to and critique of Burke 191-5; development of feminist aesthetic Virgil, the Aeneid 80, 81, 82, 105 ideology 191-5; extension of bourgeois virtue 42-4, 47, 59, 158-9, 184, 193; and radical ideals to women 191, 289 n.32; merit 223 Rights of Men 168-9, :92~4> 24-8> 257, Volosinov, V. N. 189, 283 n.39 280 n. 10, 289 n.33; Rights of Woman 191, 194-5, 289 n.31 war, as sublime antidote to commercial effeminacy 63; savage and civilized 147 Wood, Neal 4, 266 n.6, 273 n. 12 Warton, Thomas, The Pleasures of Melancholy women, and revolution 169-74; beauty of 35-9 and passim; clothing and nudity of 273 n.8 37, 152-4, 165-6, 170-4, 189-90; weakness 25-7, 29, 36-7, 45, 201 exposure in revolution 286 n.3; sexuality Weber, Samuel 166-8, 286 n.5 of 34-9, 152-61, 164-74, 286 nn.3, 11; Wecter, Dixon 277 n.8 unstable class position of 164-74; and Weiskel, Thomas 25, 27, 28, 32-3, 44, 52-3, animality 36, 165-74, 191; susceptible to I I O - I I , 120-1, 130, 269n.11, 27onn.i9, madness 45; as luxurious 46 21, 23, 270-1 n.26, 271 n.34, 277 n.8, Wordsworth, William Essays upon Epitaphs 282 n.31 188, 288 n.28; 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads' Whig regime and ideology 43, 45, 47, 220, 248, 292 n.29; Prelude 118, 161, 269 n. 14, 256 281 n.23, 297 n.12 Wichelns, Herbert A. 268 nn. 1-2, work 24, 29, 50-1; work ethic 29, 64, 271 nn.35-7 276 n.5; wholesome work of political Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor 33, 266 n.5, reform 212-13; work-out 27 271 n.32, 277 n.8 Williams, Raymond 225, 245, 271 n.33, Young, Robert 267 n.13 275 n.27, 288 n.22, 291 n.20 University of East Anglia Studies Group 279 n.6, 296 n.36