Edmund Burke is one of the most difficult thinkers to write about. His philosophy defies easy summary. His career, while noble, was not glittering. Many details that he exhausted himself over — such as the impeachment of Warren Hastings — were arcana before he was dead. And hardest of all is that Burke’s prose style is among the best in the language.
Writing about Burke’s prose is like singing about Maria Callas’s voice. On each re-acquaintance with it you wonder why you don’t read Burke all the time. There was hardly a subject he tackled which he did not master, and not a register that he did not perfect. In A Letter to a Noble Lord he writes of one detractor:
The Duke of Bedford is the Leviathan among all the creatures of the Crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he, he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray.
Shortly afterwards, in the same work, he refers to the recent death of his own son, Richard:
I live in an inverted order. They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.
Hazlitt (himself no Burkean) wrote: ‘If there are greater prose-writers than Burke, they either lie out of my course of studyor are beyond my sphere of comprehension.’
Burke is even more tricky as a subject because the tradition he essentially founded is — and always has been — a neglected one. Perhaps that is why Jesse Norman has chosen to divide his book into two parts.
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