Edmund Burke the Political Quixote: Romance, Chivalry, and ...

Edmund Burke the Political Quixote: Romance, Chivalry, and

the Political Imagination

Frans De Bruyn

In the rhapsody of his imagination, [Burke] has discovered a world of wind-mills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixotes to attack them.-Thomas Paine

"But the age of chivalry is gone."-Ay, thank heaven and Cervantes!1

For Edmund Burke, the Gordon Riots of 1780 were one of those defining moments that fix a politician's reputation and

personality in the popular imagination. Instigated by Lord George Gordon, head of the anti-Catholic Protestant Association, the riots broke out on 2 June 1780 after a large gathering of Gordon's supporters marched upon the Houses of Parliament to present a petition urging the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, a measure dear to Burke's heart. Burke's behaviour on this occasion was courageous, if not foolhardy. Despite indications that his person and property were in danger, he refused to let the mob intimidate him. He reported afterwards in a letter to his long-time friend Richard Shackleton, "My Wife being safely lodged, I spent part of the next day [6 June] in the street amidst this wild assembly into whose

1 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution (London, 1791), p. 22; Anon., Strictures on the Letter of the Right Hon. Mr. Burke, on the Revolution in France (London, 1791), p. 99. The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which facilitated the research that contributed to this article.

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hands I delivered myself informing them who I was.,,2 Convinced that his cause wasjust, he argued and remonstrated with the rioters. In a telling instance, recorded by Lord Polwarth, an apparently innocent man was swept up in the high tide of his indignation. F.P. Lock recounts the story in his biography of Burke:

Walking about in search of adventure, "he spied a Hackney Coach, whose driver had one of these horrid Badges in his Hat [the blue cockade of the Protestant Association]." Assuming that the passengers must also be sympathizers, "in a Paroxysm of rage and Eloquence" Burke chastised "a poor country parson who had come on a visit to Town," unaware of what the ribbon meant, or even that his driver was wearing one. Great therefore was his surprise "to be attacked as a Contemner of Religion and Morality, a sower of sedition, a persecutor and God knows what, by a man he had never seen, & who to all appearance was out of his senses. ,,3

Lord Polwarth's words give this anecdote a slyiy ironic inflection-as if to project the disorder and irrationality of the crowd onto its most prominent and vigorous opponent. Especially interesting, in the present context, is the way in which the anecdote constructs the madness it imputes to Burke as distinctly quixotic in its manifestation. In Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' celebrated hero is repeatedly described as "a most wise Personage, and most Honest" in all respects, save one: "he was only besotted, when he touched upon his Chivalry, and in the rest of his Talk he shewed a clear and current Apprehension: so that every foot his Works bewrayed his Judgment, and his Judgment his Works.,,4 Quixote's is a paradoxical, intermittent insanity, and so, apparently, is Burke's, which expresses itself in Polwarth's account simultaneously as "rage" and "Eloquence." When caught up in his chivalric obsession, Quixote compels the appearances of this world, however innocuous, to underwrite his view of reality. His overheated imagination apprehends windmills as giants,

2 Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958-78), 4:246.

3 F.P. Lock, Edmund Burke: Volume 1, 1730-1784 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 468. Lock cites as his source "Lord Polwarth to Hugh Scott, 17 July 1780, Scottish Record Office, GD 157/2914/13." For other vivid accounts of Burke among the rioters, see John Paul de Castro, The Gordon Riots (London: Humphrey Milford, 1926), pp. 64-65, and Burke, Correspondence, 4:246n2.

4 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of the Valorous and Witty Knight-ETTantDon Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton, 4vols. (London, 1740), 4:7. This is the edition of Don Quixote that Burke had in his library.

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flocks of sheep as opposing armies, and milkmaids and shepherdesses as chaste, courtly ladies. Burke similarly concludes that the "poor country parson" he encounters must be a rabid Protestant bigot, and without stopping to inquire he springs to the attack.

Lock suggests that the popular image of Burke as quixotic, unstable, and a little deranged can be dated from this point in his career, though such representations were to reach their apogee much later, in the polemical controversy triggered by the publication of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).5 "Hitherto," he notes, Burke "had been pilloried as an Irishman, an adventurer, astoc19obber, aJesuit; to these was now added the character of a madman.,,6 However unfair the insinuation, the reason it dogged him for the rest of his life (and has endured, arguably, to the present day) is not difficult to explain.7

Several prominent aspects of his character and conduct lent themselves to this sort of invidious interpretation: his fiery temper and emotional volatility, his sometimes questionable judgment, his reputation for embracing lost causes, and his hyperbolic eloquence, bordering on enthusiastic zeal, in support of such causes. Even his fiiendssometimes shook their heads in dismay at his excessiveness. In one instance when Burke, as paymaster-general, insisted on defending to the last ditch two subordinates charged on clear evidence with financial misappropriation, James Boswell reported to Samuel Johnson that Burke's opponents were representing him as "actually mad." To this Johnson's tart response was, "Sir, if a man will appear extravagant, as he does, and cry, can he wonder that he is represented as mad?,,8

This charge of "madness" can be fairly dismissed as a malicious invention of Burke's political enemies. The characterization of him as a latter-day Don Quixote, however, is a shrewd assessment, a

5 For a handy compendium of caricatures from the 1790s depicting Burke as Don Quixote, see Nicholas K. Robinson, Edmund Burke: A Life in Caricature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 139-47. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) , vol. 8 of The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, 9 vols. [in progress], (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981-). References are to this edition.

6 Lock, p. 468. 7 See Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: A Portrait of an Ambivalent Conseroative (New

York: Basic Books, 1977). Kramnick portrays Burke as a deeply conflicted individual, prone to depression and outbursts of paranoia. He concludes, however, that "Burke was no madman" (p. 181). See especially pp. 180-89.

8 James Boswell, Boswell: The Applause of the Jury 1782-85 Oournal entry, 29 May 1783) (London: Heinemann, 1981), p. 153 . Boswell raised the subject \vitbJohnson in connection with the suicide of John Powell, one of the two men underinvestigation. The other was Charles Bembridge.


diagnosis, as it were, that pronounces a deeply cultural, rather than narrowly clinical, truth. The identification is one that Burke, in some respects, came to accept and even actively to embrace. This is not to say that his detractors meant in any way to compliment him by caricaturing him as a knight-errant. The critical conception of Quixote they invoke is purely burlesque, farcical, and anti-heroic, very much in the tradition of Samuel Butler's Hudibras, whose extravagant behaviour impugns the false ideals he so vehemently embraces. Such, indeed, was the prevalent understanding of Cervantes' protagonist in seventeenth-century and early eighteenth-century England. The earliest English readers of Don Quixote tended to regard the book as simply another specimen of chivalric romance, as an instance of the very genre Cervantes had set out to parody, and they dismissed it, accordingly, as a "fruitlesse" invention "moulded onely for delight without profite.,,9 Royalist polemicists in mid-century politicized this burlesque view, caricaturing the rulers of the English Commonwealth as tilting at the windmills of their own imaginations. Oliver Cromwell and the radical Puritan divine Hugh Peter were singled out specifically for attack in this manner. Thus, as early as the 1650s, Don Quixote had entered the lexicon of English political invective. As an early translator of the novel remarked, "What Quixotes dos [sic] not every Age produce in Politics and Religion?"l0

By Burke's time, the reputation of Don Quixote was undergoing a historic transformation that culminated in the Romantic period idealization of the knight of La Mancha as a hero "more stately, more romantic, and at the same time more real to the imagination than any other hero on record."ll Signs of this revaluation can be found in the

9 This is the judgment of Richard Brathwayte in The SclwUers Medley, or, an IntermixtDiscourse upon HistoricaU and PoeticaU Relations (London, 1614), p. 99. The early reception of Don Quixote in England is traced in Edwin B. Knowles,Jr, Four Articles on ''Don Quixote" in England (New York: n.p., 1941); Johannes Hartau, "Don Quixote in Broadsheets of the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries," Journal oJthe Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 48 (1985), 234-38; and Gustav Ungerer, "Recovering Unrecorded Quixote Allusions in Ephemeral English Publications of the Late 1650s," Bodleian Library Record 17 (2000), 65-69. In "Don Quixote as a Funny Book," Modem Language Review 64 (1969),312-26, P.E. Russell offers a reconstruction of how readers before the Romantic period understood Don Quixote.

10 "The Translator's Preface," The History oj the Renown 'd Don Quixote de la Mancha written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra; translated Jrom the anginal by several hands; and publish'd by Peter Motteux, 4vols. (London, 1712), 1:A5'.

11 William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers, in The Complete Works oJWilliamHazlitt, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols. (London and Toronto: Dent, 1931),6:108. For accounts of the eighteenthcentury reception history, see Susan Staves, "Don Quixote in Eighteenth-Century England," ComparativeLiterature24:3 (1972),193-215; and Heinz-joachim Milllenbrock, "Don Quixoteand


respectful imitations that Cervantes inspired in eighteenth-century Britain, from Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1741) and Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) to Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and Richard Graves's The Spiritual Quixote (1773). In the context of this changing assessment of Cervantes' doleful knight, the link between Burke and Quixote is a complex and ambiguous one. The name "Quixote" was intended as a term of derision, but it could also be worn as a badge of honour. To call Burke a "political Quixote" turns out to mean a good deal more than his critics wished, yet it also gives point to some of their more searching reservations about his political convictions.

To get at some of that complexity, it is important to understand how literary transformations (in this case, the historically decisive revaluation of Cervantes' masterpiece) are connected with other manifestations of cultural and historical change. The new ways of reading Don Quixote that emerged in the eighteenth century appear linked to a critical rehabilitation of the genre of chivalric romance, a rehabilitation made possible by the historicizing analyses of Jean Chapelain, Pierre Daniel Huet, andJean Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye in France and those of Thomas Warton, Richard Hurd,James Beattie, and others in Britain.12 As the literary genre that Cervantes had parodied emerged from historical obscurity and regained a measure of literary lustre, so too the very novel that had reputedly buried the chivalric romance grew in stature. These changes, in turn, can be related to broader developments in eighteenth-century historiography, which increasingly acknowledged the Gothic, medieval past of Europe as an important formative period in its political and cultural history and not simply as a time of barbaric darkness. A crystallizing element in these critical and historical revisions was the new prominence they accorded the institution of chivalry, which was identified as the defining moment of high medievalism. Chivalry was no longer dismissed as an unaccountable, arcane, and obsolete

Eighteenth-Century English Literature," InterculturalEncO'lmters-Studies in English Literature: Essays Presented to RUdifjfff Ahrens an the Occasion if His Sixtieth Birtlufay, Anglistische Forschungen Band 265 (Heidelberg: Universitiitsverlag C. Winter, 1999), pp. 197-209. See also Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to "Dan Qpixote": A Critical History of the Romantic Traditian in "Qpixote" Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). In his introductory chapter, Close discusses the reception of the novel before 1800, and he goes on to argue that the main lines of the Romantic approach to Don Qpixoteare fundamentally misguided (pp. 1-28).

12 See Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground: The Study of Medieval Romance in the Eighteenth Century (London: Athlone, 1964).


tradition, but was recognized as a vital, progressive system of manners that had shaped modern Europe. As is well known, Burke was himself deeply committed to a historical understanding of political and constitutional development that traced European progress back to the rise of chivalry and beyond. I propose to explore some of the implications of these historical convergences. How do they sharpen our understanding of Burke's political thought, and how do they enrich our knowledge of Don Quixote and the history of its critical reception?

Before turning to these questions, however, I will address a related aspect of Burke's political quixotism, namely, the formative influence of romance in general, and Don Quixote in particular, on the lifelong process of his political self-fashioning. The political personality or persona he assumed in public life (and, seemingly, internalized as an aspect of his identity) is founded in no small part upon his deep imaginative engagement with the literature of romance that captivated his youth. This biographical turn is not intended as a digression but as a way of framing a more fundamental methodological issue underlying the discussion as a whole. Put briefly, an enduring point of tension in Burke scholarship has been the question of the discursive unfolding of his arguments, whether or not his ideas can be abstracted from the rhetorical manner in which they are presented. Can what Burke says be understood in isolation from how he says it? The premise of this article is that the "what" and the "how" in his writings and speeches cannot be separated. It becomes clear, in the present instance, that Burke's view of history is emotionally coloured by his imaginative commitment to the narrative truth of romance and that romance, in turn, contains for him a fund of historical knowledge too important to be dismissed as fiction or fantasy. His simultaneous engagement with history and with romance is a paradigmatic instance of his habitual pattern of thought. In the end, his theory of politics draws on both these sources inextricably, and therein lies its power and originality. This point was not lost on the keenest of his critics in the 1790s-William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Reading Romance, Shaping the Political Personality

Burke's childhood and youth attest amply to his early love of chivalric romance. "Palmerin of England, Don Bellianis of Greece, and other books of that romantic nature," he later revealed in a parliamentary speech, were narratives "he had formerly lost much of his time in


reading.,,13 Interestingly, the two titles Burke cites are among the few chivalric volumes that survive the auto-dafo to which the priest and the barber sentence the contents of Quixote's library in Don Quixote, part 1, chapter 6. What we know of the contents of Burke's library shows that this taste for romance persisted throughout his life. Allusions in his writings and speeches also attest to his detailed knowledge of the text of Don Quixote. 14 A strong testimonial to his fondness for the genre can be found in a humorous letter addressed to his close friend Richard Shackleton (summer 1744), during Burke's student days at Trinity College, Dublin. In a previous letter to Burke, Shackleton had confessed to a mild infatuation with his friend's sister,Juliana. Burke responded to Shackleton's admission in a tone of high-spirited burlesque: "My sister, alias your Dulcinea, protests she will not have the least compassion on your sufferings, or favour you in any sort, unless you act the true knight-errant, and obey these few commands which she desires me to give you." Juliana'S "commands," which Burke goes on to particularize, take the form of a scenario that might have been lifted from Don Bellianis itself. Among the obstacles Shackleton must overcome in his quest are a "giant ... 70 thousand Cubits high," "fifty thousand Brazen Doors, lockd with inexorable Bolts," "800,000 millions of valiant soldiers," and "60 millions ofEnchanters.,,15

Burke's sportive outline of the heroic deeds for his friend to perform exaggerates exponentially the already outsized proportions of Don Bellianis and other such tales. Clearly, he was never in any

13 Speech of 5 December 1787 in Burke, The Parliamentary History oJ England, ed. William Cobbett, 36 vols. (London: T.C. Hansard, 1816), 26:1276. For this and several other references to Burke's youthful taste for romance, I am indebted to Arthur P.I. Samuels, The Early Life, Correspondence, and Writings oJ the Ri. Hon. Edmund Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), pp. 45-48.

14 The sale catalogue of Burke's library includes (with the book lot numbers in parentheses): "Ariosto, Opere, 4 vols. Ven. 1760" (13); "Cervantes's Don Quixote by Shelton, 4 vol. cuts, 1740" (75); "Plutarch's Amorous and Tragicall Tales by Sanford, with the Historie of Cariclea and Theagenes, extremely rare, Bynneman, 1567" (515); "Tasso's Godfrey ofBulloigne by Fairfax, Dublin, 1726" (507); "Tasso'sjerusalem Delivered by Fairfax, 1749" (506); and "Tasso, La Gerusalemme, plates Genov. 1617" (653); the catalogue also lists two editions of Spenser's Faerie Q}leene (500, 555). See Catalngue oJtlle Library oJ the Late Ri. Hon. Edmund Burke (London, 1833), reprinted in Sale Catalogues oJLibraries oJEminentPersons, ed. AN.L. Munby, vol. 8 Politicians, ed. Seamus Deane (London: Mansell/Sotheby, 1973), 179-241. Burke's allusions to Don Quixote in his speeches are often intended for humorous effect See, for example, Writings and Speeches, 3:344; and Horace Walpole, TIle LastJ01lmaTs oJHorace Walpole during the Reign oJGeorgem Jram 1771-1783, ed.A Francis Steuart, 2 vols. (London and NewYork:john Lane, 1910), 1:55. See also Burke, Reflections on tIle Revolution inFrance, Writings and Speeches, 8:58; and Burke, Letters on, a Regicide Peace, Writings and Speeches, 9:50.

15 Burke, letter dated 5 july 1744, Correspondence, 1 :25-26.


danger, even in his tender youth, of confusing the miraculous contingencies of romance with everyday reality. The very parliamentary speech in which he confessed to his erstwhile reading of chivalric narratives draws a sharp narrative distinction between romance and history. The speech is a critique of the King's address (on 27 November 1787) opening the new session of Parliament, an address Burke dismisses as a pleasant fiction: "If any man was to make it and the facts it contained the grounds of historical narrative he would certainly risque a good deal of ridicule. Instead of grave history it partook more of the nature of an epic poem, rather resembling an agreeable allegory or a romance in the style of ancient chivalry.,,16 Here Burke appears to suggest that romance is not, after all, a genre to be taken all that seriously. If the form is so obviously deficient in probability and in its conformity to "factual" reality, then its access to historical truth must be highly problematic.

To this objection Burke himself ventures, elsewhere, several answers. First, he argues that the extravagances of romance are to be understood as reflecting underlying social and political realities. In his Abridgment of English History, for instance, he presents the reign of Stephen in the mid twelfth century as a time of "war, rapine, burning, and desolation." Barons preyed upon "merchants and travellers," whom "they forced into their castles ... and tortured ... with a thousand cruel inventions to extort a discovery of their hidden wealth." Romance is simply a mirror, albeit a distorted one, of this state of anarchy: "The lamentable representation, given by history of those barbarous times, justifies the pictures in the old romances of the castles of giants and magicians" (1:495). This critical view won wide acceptance in the second half of the eighteenth century. "We hear much of Knights-errant encountering Giants, and quelling Savages, in books of Chivalry," states Richard Hurd in Letters on Chivalry and Romance.

These Giants were oppressive feudal Lords; and every Lord was to be met with, like the Giant, in his strong hold, or castle. Their dependants of a lower form ... were the Savages of Romance .... All this is shadowed out in the Gothic tales, and sometimes expressed in plain words.17

16 Burke, Parliamentary History, 26: 1276. 17 Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues; with Letters on Chivalry and Rnmance, 3 vols., 3rd

ed. (London, 1765), 3:226-27. The Letters on Chivalry and Rnmance appeared originally in 1762 as a separate work but was intended to supplement the discussion of the Elizabethan age in the third moral and political dialogue (1:141-204). This edition of Hurd's Letters is listed in the catalogue of Burke's library (see n14).


Approaching romance, in this way, as "social allegory," EJ. Clery notes, "made the literature of the past at once comprehensible and palatable for the enlightened reader.,,18 The implications of such a reading prove to be of considerable consequence for Burke's political thought, but for the moment I wish simply to emphasize how it authenticates the reader's partiality for romance as a rational and respectable taste.

A second and more original argument for romance can be found in Burke's Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime

. and Beautiful. In his introductory essay "On Taste," added to the second edition of the Enquiry in 1759, Burke stresses that aesthetic perception and response are fundamentally uniform across the human species. They are grounded in sense experience, which is common to all, and are regulated by the imagination, which operates on the uniform principle of "tracing resemblances" among objects presented to the senses (1 :202). He illustrates his point with the "well known" story of "the ancient painter and the shoemaker." The shoemaker, he relates, objected that the painter had failed to render correctly the detail of a shoe in his picture. Similarly, Burke further imagines, an anatomist "may observe the swell of some muscle not quite just in the peculiar action of the figure" (1:203). Yet, despite their apparent disagreement, the responses of all three-painter, shoemaker, and anatomist-are governed by underlYing laws of human nature invariable in their operation. These include "the pleasure arising from a natural object, so far as each perceives it justly imitated; the satisfaction in seeing an agreeable figure; [and] the sympathy proceeding from a striking and affecting incident" (1 :204). The differences in opinion among the perceivers arise simply from the "different kinds and degrees" of knowledge they bring to their individual acts of perception and not from any rejection of the essential criterion of "resemblance."

The "same parity," Burke goes on to argue, can be observed in readers of imaginative literature:

It is true, that one man is charmed with Don BeIlianis, and reads Virgil coldly; whilst another is transported with the Eneid, and leaves Don BeIlianis to

18 EJ. Clery, intro., Horace Walpole, The Gastl£ of Otranto: A Gothic Story, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. xxv. On this point, see also William C. Dowling, "Burke and the Age of Chivalry," Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982), 113.


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 offortune. The admirer of Don Bellianis perhaps does not understand the fine language of the Eneid, who if it was degraded into the style of the Pilgrim's Progress, might feel it in all its energy, on the same principle which made him an admirer of Don Bellianis. (1:204)

Burke articulates here a critical position he was to maintain throughout his life, one that permits a rapprochement between works of fiction and history or between popular narratives and artistically ambitious ones. Certain actions, virtues, and emotions, because they are universal in human experience, excite a powerful sympathy in the beholder. This sympathy is to be understood as an extension of the principle of resemblance that governs the imagination. The perceiver traces resemblances between the lives of others and his or her own: "we are put into the place of another man, and affected in many respects as he is affected" (1:221). Burke asks,

Do we not read the authentic histories of scenes of [distress and misfortune] with as much pleasure as romances or poems, where the incidents are fictitious? The prosperity of no empire, nor the grandeur of no king, can so agreeably affect in the reading, as the ruin of the state of Macedon, and the distress of its unhappy prince. Such a catastrophe touches us in history as much as the destruction of Troy does in fable. (1:221-22)

History and fable tell the same kinds of stories and affect their audiences in identical ways. In this passage, Burke is laying the groundwork for a theory of tragedy that was to give a decisive shape to his later writings on the French Revolution.

Burke's conviction that our sympathy is greatly heightened "if the sufferer be some excellent person who sinks under an unworthy fortune" (1:222) prompted him years later to place the humiliations visited upon Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at the narrative centre of his Reflections on the Revolution in France. When Philip Francis tried to dissuade Burke from dwelling so forcefully on the plight of the French queen, Burke responded,

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? ... "Whats Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba


that he should weep for her?" Why because she was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, the Wife of Priam, and sufferd in the close of Life a thousand Calamities.19

The same fundamental dynamic of response that Burke attributes to tragedy can be seen at work in romance, except that in the latter case the sympathetic emotions aroused are admiration, emulation, and desire, rather than terror and pity. These responses arise from the essential elements of the story, not from the "fine language" in which it may be told. In the case of chivalric romance, the naive reader "is not shocked with the continual breaches of probability, the confusion of times, the offences against manners, the trampling upon geography; for he knows nothing of geography and chronology, and he has never examined the grounds of probability" (1:204). This reader's ignorance of the absurdities in the story's circumstances is, finally, "no reflection on the natural good Taste of the person here supposed" (1:204).

To reverse the comparison Burke makes between admirers of Don Bellianis and the Aeneid, readers of Virgil might well appreciate the former narrative if it were presented with the same attention to language, structure, and historical probability as displayed in the latter work. The difference in response is a matter of education and acculturation only. In his writings on the French Revolution, Burke makes a similar argument about the apparent indifference of the people of Fran,ce to the suffering of their royal family. It is not that tragedy no longer has any power over their minds, but that their "natural feelings" of sympathy have been vitiated by what Burke regards as the false propaganda of equality and the rights of man disseminated by the French philosophes. The revolutionary insistence that "a king is but a man" and "a queen is but a woman" and that the "murder of a king, or a queen" is therefore "only common homicide" (8:128) drains the traditional tragic scenario of its special symbolic and affective significance.

Burke's psychological theory of the means by which literary representations affect readers helps explain how an improbable narrative such as Don Bellianis can nonetheless exercise a salutary moral influence. In the case of Don Quixote, his gullibility about the factual reality of the fantastic events recounted in romance does not vitiate the ethical lessons and sympathetic identification he derives from his reading. Thus, he attempts in his own adventures to emulate

19 Burke, letter dated 20 February 1790, Correspondence, 6:90.


the virtues of honour, courage, tenacity, and magnanimity inculcated by his beloved writers of romance. Burke similarly fashions for himself a model of political conduct, marked by resolution, perseverance, and fortitude, that his imaginative involvement with romance powerfully reinforced. Nowhere is this aspect of his political identity more apparent than in his conduct during the long years of his prosecution of Warren Hastings, who was impeached in 1788 on allegations of malfeasance during his tenure as Governor-General ofIndia. Six years later, with defeat looming as the lengthy trial of Hastings before the House of Lords came to a close, Burke reiterated without the slightest concession to his opponents his belief in the righteousness of his cause. Especially revealing is the opening of his nine-day Speech in General Reply, in which he characterizes himself and the Commons he represents as actuated by a spirit of sacred vengeance:

This sympathetic revenge ... is so far from being a vice that it is the greatest of all possible virtues; a virtue which the uncorrupted judgment of mankind has in all ages exalted to the rank of heroism. To give up all the repose and pleasures of life, to pass sleepless nights and laborious days, and, what is ten times more irksome to an ingenuous mind, to offer oneself to calumny and all its herd of hissing tongues and poisoned fangs, in order to free the world from fraudulent prevaricators, from cruel oppressors, from robbers and tyrants, has, I say, the test of heroic virtue, and well deserves such a distinction. The Commons, despairing to attain the heights of this virtue, never lose sight of it for a moment ... Could they have done this [persisted in their quest], if they had not been actuated by some strong, some vehement, some perennial passion, which, burning like the vestal fire, chaste and eternal, never suffers generous sympathy to grow cold in maintaining the rights of the injured, or in denouncing the crimes of the oppressor?20

In this passage Burke presents himself as a questing hero of chivalric romance, beset by hissing monsters and charged with the holy calling to "free the world" of "oppressors ... robbers and tyrants." More importantly, he strives to universalize his conduct, not only by identifYing the entire House of Commons as a brotherhood of knights errant,

20 Speech in GrmeralReply: Day One (28 May 1794), The Works of the Right Honmlrable Edmund Burke, 8 vols. (London: Hemy G. Bohn, (1857-89),7:471-72. I cite here the version of Burke's speech prepared for publication after his death by John Bowen, under the direction of Walker King, editor of Burke's collected works. The text of this same speech in The Writing:5 and Speeches reproduces Joseph Gurney's original shorthand transcript of the proceedings (7:245-46). Bowen and King's revisions have the effect of sharpening Burke's heroic self-characterization and attest to the importance he attached to that self-characterization as a means of "posthumous vindication" (6:265). For a discussion of the textual problems posed by Burke's speeches in Hastings's impeachment, see Writing:5 and Speeches, 6:264-66.


but also by enlisting the House of Lords in the same chivalric vocation: "We call upon your Lordships to join us; and we have no doubt that you will feel the same sympathy that we feel." He hopes that the imagination of his hearers will instinctively awaken to the "perennial passion" of heroic virtue, embracing the cause of the weak and helpless against the forces of rapacity and violence. Even as he asserts the universality of human sympathy, however, in creeps a note of uncertainty. He claims the alternative is inconceivable-"what I cannot persuade my soul to think, or my mouth to utter" -yet he goes on to suppose that the Lords may choose to acquit Hastings and to be "identified with the criminal whose crimes you excuse, and rolled with him in all the pollution of Indian guilt from generation to generation." In that case, Burke declares, "Let those who feel with me upon this occasion join with me in this vow; if they will not, I have it all to myself. ,,21

This last statement completes Burke's identification of his political destiny, his "vow," with the fidelity of Don Quixote to a seemingly hopeless and risible ideal. He has already endured the consequences of this choice. Like his fictional counterpart, he has become a target of satirical ridicule, of "calumny and all its herd of hissing tongues."22 By the 1790s, satirical dismissals of Burke as a mad Quixote had become routine in the productions of political pamphleteers and caricaturists. But his conception of the quixotic role to which he has seemingly sentenced himself reflects the growing sophistication of late eighteenth-century critical readings of Cervantes. While continuing to perceive a burlesque element in Cervantes' characterization of the Don, these readings also acknowledge a nobility in the knight's idealism and recognize that the reader's satirical laughter at Quixote reflects ironically on his or her own worldiness and compromising self-interest.

Henry Fielding's Parson Adams in joseph Andrews, a character explicitly modelled on Don Quixote, exemplifies this dual perspective. Fielding describes Adams in such a way, Susan Staves observes, "that in order to see how ridiculous he is the reader is forced to incriminate himself and blush at his own lack of innocence.,,23 In this light, it is easy to understand how the identification of Burke with Quixote becomes simultaneously a weapon of attack wielded by his enemies and a powerful mode of self-

21 Warks of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 7:472. 22 Warks of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 7:472. 23 Staves, p. 207.


vindication. As Burke sees it, by ridiculing him as a champion of hopelessly unrealistic or outmoded political ideals, his attackers expose the venality of their own realpolitik and the shallowness of their political understanding. Writers who satirized Burke as a foolish Quixote risked entangling themselves in ironies intended to ensnare him. David Duff cites the example of one response to the Reflections, in which the writer seeks to mock the extravagance of Burke's lament for the death of chivalry:

This sublime and beautiful exclamation would not have done discredit to the mirror of knighthood, that valorous champion whose admirable achievements are famed in history by Cervantes. Its effect was so powerful, that we almost expected to find our author avowing an intention of sallying forth in armour upon another Rosinante, to punish the corruption of manners, the degeneracy of virtue, the contempt of honour, the absence of humanity, the shameful inattention to beauty,-in a word, to correct the enormous depravity of the times, by restoring to a grateful and admiring world, the blessings of chivalry.24

Though the writer's intention is to call Burke's judgment into question, this passage succeeds only in reinforcing the idealism of the quixotic project. For by what logic is it deemed madness to punish corruption and to defend virtue, honour, humanity, and beauty? As Duff observes, to dismiss Burke's "chivalric idealization of the ancien regimewas to run the risk of dismissing the chivalric ideals themselves, some of which (generosity and justice, for example) would clearly merit a place in any theory of private or public virtue.,,25 Those satirists who ridiculed Burke as a Quixote wielded a two-edged sword with which they risked injury to themselves.

Romance as History

Self-vindication, however, is only one element in Burke's "quixotic" engagement with romance, and by no means the most important. In order to grasp fully the significance of romance, for him, as a form of political discourse, we must work out his sense of the relation between romance and history. His theory of imaginative sympathy in A Philosophical Enquiry offers an initial clue. It explains how he himself,

24 Anon., Temperate Comments upon Intemperate Refoctions: or, A Review of Mr. Burke's Letter (London, 1791), pp. 35-36.

25 David Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 31.


as a naive reader, might have read Don Bellianis as a form of history. The unschooled reader's ignorance of geography, chronology, and probability forestalls a preemptive dismissal of the narrative as fantasy or as the mere product of barbaric superstition, permitting an unimpeded sympathetic participation and a belief in the narrative's historical veracity.

The version of Don Bellianis available to Burke was compiled by Francis Kirkman in the 1670s and was later reissued in paraphrased form by John Shirley. Kirkman expanded the original story to include a book of adventures in England and Ireland. He assures the reader, "I have taken more than ordinary pains in describing the ancient Kingdom of Ireland, and many principal Cities and Towns long since ruined."26 The Irish narrative opens with the landing of the Knight of Cupid or Don Clarineo near the Port of Dublin, "then called Ballicleagh, or the Town of Hurdles; it being, as most of that Country is, built upon Hurdles laid upon a Bog. The whole Country ofIreland was at that time governed by one Monarch, who kept his chief residence at Dublin; but it was divided into four small Kingdoms ... and over these there were several Kings, Earls, or Governors." The narrator then identifies these rulers by name and concludes,

this Kingdom '" was as ancient as any in the World; for it was first formed into a Monarchy by King Gaelus, Son to Pharaoh King of Egypt, in the Time of the Patriarch Abraham, which was two thousand years before the Incarnation of our blessed Lord and Savior; and it continues in the same way of Government to this day, never admitting of any but a Kingly Government.27

This account is an interesting mixture of fact and fiction. It reflects a debate in Irish historiography about the origins of the Irish people that persisted into the eighteenth century. Burke's youthful imagination might well have been fired by the exotic and alluring possibility that the Ireland of his day was rooted in a fabled biblical past: a heroic, romantic story indeed and a considerably more respectful view of his native land than was countenanced by most of

26 Francis Kirkman, The Famolls and Delectable History of Don BeUianis of Greece, or, the Honollr of Chivalry (London, 1673), part 3: "To the Reader," n.p. [founded on Geronimo Fernandez, Don Belianis (1547-79) 1.John Shirley's version, originally published in 1683, was reprinted in Dublin, circa 1720. On the tide page of this edition appears the following note: "Printed by and for Luke Dillon, at the Bible in High-street. Where Merchants and others may be furnish'd with all Sorts of School books and Histories at reasonable Rates."

27 Kirkman, part 3:55-56.


his English contemporaries. As an adult he was much more circumspect. In the 1780s, he was drawn unwittingly into a controversy over a hypothesis championed by Colonel Charles Vallancey that accorded early Irish civilization an illustrious place in human his tory. 28 Against those who traced the Irish back to the Celts and to Viking invaders, Vallancey maintained that the island had been settled by the Phoenicians and other Middle Eastern peoples. Burke had earlier offered some cautious comments and polite, but noncommittal, encouragement in a letter to Vallancey, which the latter took to be an endorsement of his views. What Burke actually urged was a more scientific project of historicai exploration involving the critical study and publication of early Irish chronicles in verse and prose. "Until something of this kind is done," he wrote, "that ancient period ofIrish history, which precedes official records, cannot be said to stand upon any proper authority."29

Ancient chronicles could not be relied upon as sources for factual information about persons, dates, ,and events, yet they were by no means without historical value. The same was held to be true of early chivalric romances. Though King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, Merlin, and Sir Lancelot might be historically suppositious individuals, the stories told about them yield a rich fund of information about the societies In which these tales flourished. This view of the chivalric tales had been pioneered by seventeenth-century French critics and historians (Jean Chapelain, Andre Favin, Auguste Galland, and J ean Ie Laboureur), to whom eighteenth-century British students of romance and the Middle Ages owed a large debt. Laboureur maintained, as Susannah Dobson reports in her preface to Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry (a translation of Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de Saint-Palaye's Memmres sur l'ancienne chevalerie) ,

The truth is recorded in these ancient romances, nor is aught exaggerated in them ... They are in fact a portrait of the old times; and are to be regarded as

28 See Charles Vallancey, A Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland (Dublin, 1786). 29 Burke, letter dated 15 August i 783, Correspondence 5:1.09-10; see also a second letter to

Vallancey, dated 29 November 1786, Cmrespondence5: 290-93, in which Burke argues again for the need to publish ancient Irish manuscripts and "Historical Monuments," accompanied by Latin or English translations, as a preliminary ,to systematic scholarly evaluation. Two ofVallencey's books, including his Vindication of the Ancient History of Ireland (1786), were in Burke's library. See Sale Catalogue, lots 517, 521. On Burke's peripheral involvement in this historiographical debate, see Walter D. Love, "Edmund Burke and an Irish Historiographical Controversy," History and Theory 2 (1962),180-98.


we do the remains of sculpture, the perfections of which we admire, without being offended at the want of drapery ... from their copious fund of observation, the geographer, the chronologer, antiquarian, and professor of heraldry, may draw the most curious and important details.30

John BowIe, a pioneering figure in the history of Cervantes criticism, complains of the "toil" and "drudgery" he endured in perusing the "Libros de Cavallerias," but he, too, acknowledges that his reading rewarded him with "faithful and exact descriptions of the times in which they were wrote":

Tho~h the facts related were in themselves as fabulous as the heroes of whom they were told, yet similar events frequently occurred: In this respect, they deserve some esteem as histories, because these latter enumerate several facts similar to those they particularly mention. Thus for example, the watching of arms in some church or chapel, previous to the receiving the order of Knighthood, with its various ceremonies of creation, the hearing mass, and confession before the day of battle, with other religious circumstances, are to be found both in history, and romance, though perhaps more frequently and more copiously in the latter. And here, when the same fact occurs in almost every writer, we may safely infer that such practice was universa1.31

The implication of Bowles's argument is that Don Quixote is not altogether wrongheaded in esteeming chivalric romances. They are indeed historical documents, though not in the literal sense Quixote takes them to be. Sir Walter Scott makes the point more explicitly: "In Spain, ere the ideas of chivalry were extinct amongst that nation of romantic Hidalgos, the turn of Don Quixote's frenzy seems not altogether extravagant, and the armour which he assumed was still the ordinary garb of battle.,,32 Other critics of romance make the same point, which suggests that a connection should be made between the new historicized understanding of romance and the increasingly respectful, serious readings of Cervantes' novel. 33

30 Translator's preface to Jean Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Memoirs of Ancient Chillalry: To Which Are Added, the Anecdotes of the Times, from the Romance Writers and Historians of Those Ages (London, 1784), pp. xiv-xvi. Dobson is summarizing Saint-Palaye's "Memoire Concernant la lecture des anciens Romans de Chevalerie," Memoires sur l'Ancienne Chcualerie, 3 vols. (Paris, 1759), 2:111-37.

31 John BowIe, A Letter to the ReuerendDr. Percy, Concerning aNew and ClnssicalEdition of 'Historia del Valeroso Cavallero Don Q}1ixote de la Mancha, '(London, 1773), pp. 3-4. On the eighteenthcentury view of romances as historical documents, see Johnston, pp. 24-27.

32 Sir Walter Scott, "Memoir of Tobias Smollett," The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, 28 vols: (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1827), 3:150.

33 See James Beattie, Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783), pp. 548-49; and Hurd, 3:237.


By the late eighteenth century, the literary achievement of chivalric romance had come to be understood to reflect the dynamism and progressiveness of chivalry itself as a social and political institution. Mentioning the words "chivalry" and "progress" in the same breath has an air of paradox, but precisely this seeming paradox animates the Reflections. If chivalry can be perceived as contributing positively to European historical development, then Burke's "romantic" evocation of the age of chivalry is not so easily dismissed as reactionary, antiquarian nostalgia or the obsession of a latter-day Quixote. Nor should we be surprised to find that in the polemical controversy ignited by the publication of the Reflections, the meaning of the phrase "age of chivalry" was one of the most contested issues in the debate. The significance of Burke's seemingly quixotic stand was perfectly obvious to Thomas Goold, who explains in his Vindication of ... the Reflections,

The ridicule Dr. Price wishes to throw on Mr. Burke, for lamenting that the age of chivalry is gone, is perhaps as ill founded, as the rest of his assertions. Dr. Robertson (a name of no contemptible authority) ascribes the change of manners in the middle ages, which were so ferocious, in a great measure to the spirit of chivalry.-This he proves; first, from its ingredients, which were truth, honor, punctuality, generosity, and humanity: secondly, from its objects; which were to succour the distressed, to protect the defenceless, to avenge the innocent. This institution Dr. Robertson calls honorable in its origin, and beneficial in its effects. If to it, is to be attributed the change from ferocious to polished manners, and of course the glory of Europe ... where is the absurdity in supposing that when the cause is destroyed, the effect may also be destroyed?34

In citing the Scottish historian William Robertson, Goold enlists a prestigious school of enlightenment historiography on the side of Burke in the interpretive war over the meaning of the French Revolution. There is, indeed, good evidence to suggest that in writing of chivalry, Burke had the views of Scottish thinkers squarely in mind. Their historical analyses of social progress supplied a discursive framework for the fierce debate occasioned by the Reflections.

What, then, was the view of chivalry that enabled Robertson and his compatriots to see it as a progressive moment in European history? In the context of a historical narrative that sought to trace "the Progress of Society in Europe" from rudeness and agricultural subsistence to politeness and commerce, chivalry represented a great advance over the anarchy that preceded it. The establishment of feudalism imposed

34 Thomas Goold, A Vindication of the Right Hon. EdmllndBllrke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France, " in Answer to All His Opponents (Dublin, 1791), pp. 28-29.


some degree of order and regularity in Europe, but feudalism was a flawed political system that diffused power too widely among competing barons and chieftains: "The opulent proprietors ofland, disdaining submission to regular government, lived in the constant exercise of predatory incursions upon their neighbours; and every separate family ... was under the necessity of providing for its own defence. "35 Where monarchies existed, kings lacked centralizing power to impose their royal will throughout their lands. Robertson shows the long-term consequences of the problem that political power posed in the feudal system: "The power of the sovereign was too limited to prevent ... wrongs; and the administration of justice too feeble to redress them. There was scarcely any protection against violence and oppression, but what the valour and generosity of private persons afforded. ,,36

In the absence of effective law and order, then, chivalry emerged as a creative response to anarchy. Its genius was to convert private virtues of courage, military prowess, and passion for adventure-qualities that could easily serve selfish, destructive ends-into a force for public good. "To check the insolence of overgrown oppressors; to succour the distressed; to rescue the helpless from captivity; to protect, or to avenge women, orphans, and ecclesiastics, who could not bear arms in their own defence; to redress wrongs, and to remove grievances" came to be deemed "acts of the highest prowess and merit." In the process, private virtues were transformed into public ones. "Valour, humanity, courtesy, justice, honour," states Robertson, "were the characteristic qualities of chivalry.,,37 Or as Burke puts it in the Reflections, chivalry "inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity" (8:127). This transformation of virtues was driven by the increasingly powerful social influence of Christianity. The "mild spirit of Christianity," in Adam Ferguson's phrase, mixed "the characters of the hero and the saint.,,38 This happy fusion united two principles that Burke insists are the very foundation of European civilization: "the spirit ofa gentleman, and the spirit of religion" (8:130).

35 John Millar, The Origin oJ the Distinction oJRanks; or an Inquiry into the Circumstances Which Give Rise to Influence and Authority, in the Different Members oJ Society (London, 1779), pp. 86-87.

36 William Robertson, The History of the Reign oJ the Emperor Charles V. with a View oJ the Progress oJ Society in Europe, Jrom the Subversion oJ the Roman Empire, to the Beginning oJ the Sixteenth Century, 4 vols. (London, 1772), 1:82.

37 Robertson, 1:82. See also Beattie, p. 543. 38 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History oJ Civil Society (London, 1768), p. 309.


As vengeance and vendetta, those primary characteristics of Germanic tribal culture, were harnessed to public ends, the ground was prepared for the growth of modem European institutions of public justice. Burke himself alludes to this development in his Speech in General Reply when, as we have seen, he characterizes the British Parliament as a chivalric brotherhood. As the guardian of the rule of law in Britain, Parliament is the historical successor to the institution of chivalry, with a sacred duty to avenge wrong. "Instinct tells a man that he ought to revenge an injury," Burke asserts, "reason tells him that he ought not to be ajudge in his own cause. From that moment revenge passes from the private to the public hand ... It is transferred as a sacred trust to be exercised for the injured. ,,39 Public justice is a productive scion grafted onto the durable rootstock of revenge. As the graft takes, the stock's "harsh quality becomes changed, it submits to culture, and, laying aside its savage nature it bears fruits and flowers, sweet to the world ... The fruit of this wild stock is revenge regulated, but not extinguished; revenge transferred from the suffering party to the communion and sympathy of mankind." Viewed as a political institution, chivalry is only a step, though an essential one, in this historic transformation. Viewed as a system of manners, however, which encourages "good men ... to give the loosest possible rein to their resentment and indignation, whenever ... their brethren of the common family of humanity are injured," chivalry's influence remains indispensable, because there is always a danger that the "delegate of vengeance"-the prosecutor or judge of wrongdoing-"may be cold and languid in the performance of his sacred duty. ,,40

Chivalry conferred several other progressive political benefits. As a code of conduct binding on all honourable individuals, it checked the monarch's ambition for unlimited power. In fact, according to Robertson, "knighthood was deemed a distinction superior to royalty; and monarchs were proud to receive it from the hands of private gentlemen.,,41 Millar states that "the dignity of knighthood" was an honour "which even the greatest potentates were ambitious of acquiring." Kings moderated their conduct in order to attain this honour.42 Burke's analysis in the Reflections echoes Millar's view. Chivalry "mitigated kings into companions, and raised private men to

39 Burke, Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 7:470. 40 Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 7:471, 470-71. 41 Robertson, 1:83. 42 Millar, pp. 91-92.


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" (8:127). Chivalry's ameliorative force is also seen in the rules of warfare it bequeathed to modern Europe. Ferguson notes that

We have improved on the laws of war and on the lenitives which have been devised to soften its rigours; we have mingled politeness with the use of the sword; we have learned to make war under the stipulations of treaties and cartels, and trust to the faith of an enemy whose ruin we meditate. Glory is more successfully obtained by saving and protecting, than by destroying the vanquished.43

What Ferguson finds striking about these "laws of war," an innovation, he claims, that has earned Europe "the epithets of civilized or polished," is that they represent a distinct advance of modern over classical culture. He notes that an evolution of rules of warfare "did not accompany the progress of arts among the Greeks, nor keep pace with the advancement of policy, literature, and philosophy" in ancient times. These rules are the product, remarkably, of "early periods of our history, and '" ages otherwise rude and undisciplined." "It may be difficult," he states, comparing Homeric Greece with medieval Europe, "to assign, among nations equally rude, equally addicted to war, and equally fond of military glory, the origin of apprehensions on the point of honour, so different, and so opposite." This contrast in historical outcomes may be puzzling, but it has important consequences for modern European civilization. Ferguson concludes,

whatever was the origin of notions, often so lofty and so ridiculous, we cannot doubt their lasting effects on our manners ... chivalry, uniting with the genius of our policy, has probably suggested those peculiarities in the law of nations, by which modern states are distinguished from the ancient. And if our rule in measuring degrees of politeness and civilization is to be taken from hence, or from the advancement of commercial arts, we shall be found to have greatly excelled any of the celebrated nations of antiquity.44

Two elements of Fer gus on's discussion of chivalry are underscored in Burke's analysis. He insists, even more emphatically than Ferguson, that chivalry is the defining characteristic of modern Europe: "It is this which has distinguished it under all its forms of government, and

43 Ferguson, p. 306. 44 Ferguson, pp. 306-7, 308, 311.


distinguished it to its advantage, from the states of Asia, and possibly from those states which flourished in the most brilliant periods of the antique world" (8: 127). Though he is a little cautious about asserting chivalry's superiority to classical systems of manners, he claims strikingly that Europe has in this regard surpassed modern Asia (which effectively means, in his terms, the rest of the "civilized" world). The fruit of that distinctiveness, for both Burke and Ferguson, is the highly developed state of commerce Europe enjoys: a ceaseless circulation of goods, services, ideas, and culture made possible by increasingly humane modes of conduct and social intercourse, which trace their origins to the practices of chivalry.

In view of the notorious reputation the chivalry passage in the Reflections has sustained, well-nigh from the moment of its conception, it is instructive to consider the extent to which Burke's argument here can be construed as optimistic and progressive, as displaying features more usually identified with the views of his Enlightenment contemporaries, against whom he is sometimes positioned as engaging in a "revolt against the eighteenth century."45 He shares with them the conviction that modern Europe is in a more "flourishing condition" than perhaps at any previous moment in its history. He agrees that this enviable state of affuirs is connected with the growth of modern letters and cOIhmerce, and that feudal chivalry and clerical learning were preconditions of eighteenth-century modernity. But here, as J.G.A. Pocock shows, he parts company with his Scottish colleagues (or the school of "oeconomical politicians"), and he does so with a highly characteristic tum to history. He writes, "If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing to own to antient manners, so do other interests which we value full as much as they are worth. Even commerce, 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. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles" (8:130).

45 The phrase is originally Alfred Cobban's, butJ.GA Pocock cites it in his important essay on Burke and the French Revolution. My discussion in this and the following paragraph is essentially a summary of Pocock's analysis. See Pocock, "The Political Economy of Burke's Analysis of the French Revolution," Virtue, C(J1llmerce, and Histmy: Essays on Political Thought and Histmy, Chiefly in theEighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 210.


For the Scottish school, the emphasis lay squarely with commerce as the causal force. Once established, commerce encouraged the growth of manners, letters, and culture, which, in turn, fostered commerce further in a self-sustaining virtuous cycle. Burke, by contrast, is convinced that commercial society cannot survive without the continued protection of manners, which are the expression of the "spirit of religion and nobility." Commerce cannot kick away the historical scaffolding on which it stands: to argue otherwise is to mistake historical effects for causes. In Pocock's phrase, Burke's view "anchored commerce in history, rather than presenting it as the triumph over history." Burke is not arguing for a return to the middle ages and its religious and social values, but he is insisting that "to destroy the historical structure built up by older social forms must lead to the destruction of society in its modern character. ,,46 Historical causes continue to ramifY and to give direction and character to the future far longer than one might expect, a circumstance that gives a radical edge to Burke's historicism. In this view, history is like a flywheel on the motor of change: it regulates fluctuations in momentum and acts as a brake on the pace of change.

Recognizing the implications of this position, Catharine Macaulay countered Burke's argument by imposing a kind of statute of limitations on historical causality and reducing the scope of historical necessity:

I have always regarded the necessity which gave birth to the orders of chivalry, as a mark of disgrace to the times in which they were formed. They were indeed a proper remedy to the evils arising from ferocity, slavery, barbarism, and ignorance, but now, when the causes no longer exist which rendered them useful, we should rather think of freeing society of all the evils inherent in those false notions of honour which they have given rise to, than endeavour to call back their spirit in its full force. 47

James Mackintosh argues similarly that historical changes supplant pre-existing circumstances, rather than building upon them, layer by dependent layer. He accepts the historical importance of chivalry, which "contributed to polish and soften Europe" and made possible a "diffusion of knowledge and extension of commerce," but he insists, contra Burke, that commerce has, in more recent times, displaced

46 Pocock, pp. 197-99, 210. 47 Catharine Macaulay Graham, Obseroations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on

the Reuolution in France, in a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope (London, 1790), p. 54.


chivalry as the moulding force of European manners:

Society is inevitably progressive.-In Government, commerce has overthrown that "feudal and chivalrous system" under whose shade it first grew .... The sentiments peculiar to [ chivalry] could only be preserved by the situation which gave them birth. They were, therefore, enfeebled in the progress from ferocity and turbulence, and almost obliterated by tranquillity and refinement,48

Mackintosh underscores the difference between the two men's views of historical progress. Whereas Burke "forebodes the most fatal consequences to literature from events, which he supposes to have given a mortal blow to the spirit of chivalry," Mackintosh optimistically proclaims that "diffused knowledge immortalizes itself." Burke's view of progress is suffused with his sense of its fragility, of its hard-won character, and with his perception of the almost infinite complexity of historical causality. Burke sees a close and lasting concatenation of cause and effect in human life. Mackintosh, by contrast, is confident that the achievements of progress can transcend historical circumstance and become self-perpetuating. Modern modes of communication and education have spread knowledge so widely that time, chance, and even resurgent barbarism stand little chance of destroying it: "A literature which is confined to a few, may be destroyed by the massacre of scholars and the conflagration of libraries; but the diffused knowledge of the present day could only be annihilated by the extirpation of the civilized part of mankind. ,,49

Gendering Chivalry and Romance

The responses of Goold, Macaulay, and Mackintosh to the Reflections indicate Burke's readers were well aware of the intellectual context that makes intelligible his lament for the passing of the age of chivalry. But does such contextual knowledge explain the passage satisfactorily or sufficiently? Does it account for the hyperbole of "ten thousand swords" leaping "from their scabbards," a phrase profligate in its rhetorical construction, or Burke's memory of Marie Antoinette "glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy" (8:126)? Pocock suggests that it does and that when modern-day commentators are driven "to Freudian and Marxist extremes in the

48 James Mackintosh, Vindiciae GaUicae: Defence of the French Revolution and Its English Admirers against the Accusations of the Right Hm. Edmund Burke (London, 1791), p. 197.

49 Mackintosh, p. 199.


attempt to discover what Burke was going on about," they are failing to read on "to the end of the paragraph," where all is summed up with a perfectly sober analysis.50

Granting Pocock's point that Burke's rhetoric has a sober underlying rationale, its intensity does invite further consideration. One way to account for that intensity is to recognize that, for Burke, gender is the crucial point of connection between history and romance. Women played a central role in the rituals of chivalry, a historical reality that accounts for their corresponding prominence in narratives of romance. An exploration of these links illuminates considerably larger stretches of Burke's political writing than just the much-discussed account of the storming of the queen's bedchamber. An important strategy in his speeches on India, for example, is to represent that country as a helpless damsel exposed to the pitiless rapacity of Warren Hastings and his henchmen, a representation giving rise to passages every bit as sensational as anything in the Reflections. Yet here too the emotional appeals are shaped by an underlying historical conception that provides a rationale for the rhetorical and generic appeals to romance.

Summing up several generations of scholarship, Scott declared in "An Essay on Chivalry" that women played a defining role in the development of chivalry and its practices: "The defence of the female sex in general, the regard due to their honour, the subservience paid to their commands, the reverent awe and courtesy, which ... forbear all unseemly words and actions, were so blended with the institution of Chivalry, as to form its very essence. ,,51 This link between chivalry and gender, it was argued, could be traced back to its "Gothic" or Germanic origins. A noteworthy feature of that originary moment was the interaction between men and women in Germanic society. Nothing so distinguished the German tribes from their neighbours, James Beattie explains, as "their attention to their women":

With us, the two sexes associate together, and mutually improve and polish one another: but in Rome and Greece they lived separate; and the condition of the female was little better than slavery; as it still is, and has been from very early times, in many parts of Asia, and in European and Mrican Turkey. But the

50 Pocock, p. 197. 51 Scott, "An Essay on Chivalry," The Miscellanemts Prose Works, 6:28. Originally published as

"Chivalry," Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1824), 3:115-44.


Gothick warriors were in all their expeditions attended by their wives; whom they regarded as friends and faithful counsellors, and frequently as sacred persons, by whom the gods were pleased to communicate their will to mankind. This in part accounts for the reverence wherewith the female sex were always treated by those conquerors: and, as Europe still retains many of their customs, and much of their policy, this may be given as one reason of that polite gallantry, which distinguishes our manners, and has extended itself through every part of the world that is subject to European government.52

These accounts, as Thomas Warton and others noted, take their cue from the Roman historian Tacitus, whose ethnographic account of the German people had introduced several influential propositions about the regard paid to women in Germanic society. In the first place, Tacitus was understood to emphasize their role in public life. They assisted the men in battle, tending their wounds and ministering to the combatants with "food and exhortation." Their presence on the battlefield incited the men to greater feats of valour: "here are the witnesses who are in each man's eyes most precious; here the praise he covets most." Their voices were heeded, moreover, in public deliberation, for they were believed to be endowed with a certain "uncanny and prophetic sense." In an ironic glance at the corrupt manners of imperial Rome, Tacitus stresses that the Germans reverence women as oracles without engaging in flattery, "nor as if they were making goddesses." By contrast, he implies, the Roman practice of deification, far from honouring women, reduces them hypocritically to instruments of policy. 53

The second theme Tacitus inspired in subsequent commentators was that the elaborate courtesy accorded women in the rituals of chivalry had originated in the strict regulation of sexual conduct among the Germans. Drawing on Tacitus's favourable report of Germanic sexual mores, Thomas Warton argues, for example, that "the deference paid to the fair sex, which produced the spirit of gallantry, is chiefly to be sought for in those strong and exaggerated ideas of female chastity which prevailed among the northern nations."54 Tacitus comments admiringly on Germanic marriage

52 Beattie, pp. 525-27. Compare Thomas Warton, "Of the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe," The History of English Poetry, 3 vols., 2nd ed.(London, 1775), ilv-i2'; and Ferguson, p.309.

53 Publius Cornelius Tacitus, Germania, trans. M. Hutton and E.H. Warmington, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 141-43.

54 Warton, i2'.


practices: "you will find nothing in their character to praise more highly." The men were monogamous, and faithfulness in marriage was strictly enjoined. He sums up the married life of women as one of "fenced-in chastity." Once again, a comparison with Rome is invited, unfavourable to the latter: "There is no arena [in Germany] with its seductions, no dinner-tables with their provocations to corrupt them. Of the exchange of secret letters men and women alike are innocent; adulteries are few for the number of the people."55

Tacitus also mentions approvingly the sexual continence of the German youth: "Love comes late to the young men, and their first manhood is not enfeebled."56 His observation was elaborated by eighteenth-century commentators into a theory that sexual abstinence in the young men had promoted a more exalted and respectful view of women. This admiration for women was formalized over time into the prescriptions of chivalric courtesy. Scott traces this development at some length:

With the young man imagination and sentiment combined to heighten his ideas of a pleasure which nature instructed him to seek, and which the wise laws of his country prevented him from prematurely aspiring to share. To a youth so situated, the maiden on whom he placed his affections became an object of awe as well as of affection; the passion which he indulged for her was of a nature as timid and pure as engrossing and powerful. ... We have traced the ideas of the Gothic tribes on this important point the more at length, because they show, that the character of veneration, sanctity, and inviolability, attached to the female character, together with the important part assigned to them in society ... had existence long before the chivalrous institutions in which they make so remarkable a feature. They easily became amalgamated in a system so well fitted to adopt whatever was romantic and enthusiastic in manners or sentiment.57

Tacitus points to many other distinguishing customs of the Germanic people, yet what the eighteenth-century historians of chivalry and critics of romance clearly fastened upon in his account was his delineation of gender relations. By a kind of synecdoche, this part of his discussion came to stand for the whole. In like manner, conduct towards women became the primary signifier of what was understood by the term "chivalry," rather than, as one might expect, the rules of combat and warfare it prescribed or its infusion of martial prowess with religious sanctity.

55 Tacitus, p. 159. 56 Tacitus, p. 163. 57 Scott, "An Essay on Chivalry," TheMiscelJaneousProse Works, 6:23-26. Scott's analysis in these

pages draws heavily on Tacitus.


When writers asserted that chivalry represented a decisive advance by the moderns over the ancients, they cited the improved relations between the sexes as the most persuasive evidence in support of their case. Millar writes, for example, that the

great respect and veneration for the ladies, which prevailed in a former period, has still a considerable influence upon our behaviour towards them, and has occasioned their being treated with a degree of politeness, delicacy, and attention, that was unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and perhaps to all the nations of antiquity.

He declares this change in manners "a valuable improvement," attributable to "Gothic institutions and manners."58 Warton argues similarly that

no peculiarity ... more strongly discriminates the manners of the Greeks and Romans from those of modern times, than that small degree of attention and respect with which those nations treated the fair sex, and that inconsiderable share which they were permitted to take in conversation, and the general commerce of life .... One is surprised that barbarians should be greater masters of complaisance than the most polished people that ever existed.59

This cultural transformation proved historically decisive for modern literature as well, making possible the triumph of the novel as the dominant fictional form of the eighteenth century. Millar notes, "those serious novels which, in France and England, are still the favourite entertainment ... represent, in a more moderate degree, the sentiments of military honour, as well as the love and gallantry which prevailed in the writings of a former period. ,,60

That the authority of Tacitus should be invoked to support views such as these is a circumstance not without irony. An ancient is cited in an argument purporting to show that modern political and social mores outshine those of his own time. This reading is advanced with little overt acknowledgment that Tacitus idealizes elements of his description, probably deliberately so. His praise of the Germans is blended with ironic reflections on the corresponding manners of Rome, which have lost their erstwhile purity and austerity. Another motive for extolling the Germans as he does is to stress the seriousness of the threat they pose to the empire. But these complexities are

58 Millar, p. 104. 59 Warton, il'. 60 Millar, p. 104.


overlooked or ignored by eighteenth-century readers in the desire to construct a progressive narrative that shows modern, commercial Europe to be more "civilized" and "polished" than classical civilization and, indeed, any contemporary rivals, such as Islamic and Asian societies.

The prominent place of women in eighteenth-century accounts of chivalry is mirrored in Burke's own historical view of the institution and in his rhetorical use of tropes of chivalry and knighthood.51 Thus, it is significant that his most extended analysis of chivalry follows directly from his dramatic account in the Reflections of the revolutionaries' assault upon Marie Antoinette in her bedchamber, an analysis clearly intended as a gloss upon that scene. The paradigmatic instance that proves "the age of chivalry is gone" centres on misconduct towards a woman. But expressions of these views in Burke's writings in fact antedate the Reflections, as several of the replies to his polemic noted. Ralph Broome, the author of a series of satires on Burke's involvement in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, recognized immediately the parallels between Burke's portrayal of Marie Antoinette in the Reflections and his earlier accounts of the mistreatment suffered by the Begams of Oudh in India. Though not so well known to posterity, the allegations about Hastings's misconduct towards these two (and other) high-ranking women, together with even more sensational and horrifying charges of sexual atrocities committed against Indian women in Rangpur, were every bit as powerful in their impact on Burke's contemporaries as his narrative in the Reflections. 62

The two Begams, mother and grandmother of the Wazir of Oudh, had under their control a hoard of jewels and specie, and they derived a large income from land grants. Under pressure from Hastings, the Wazir extracted a large sum from them (some £550,000), which he in tum applied to debts he owed the East India Company.63 In striking ways, Burke's account of this confiscation anticipates his later report of Marie Antoinette's distress, and its narrative importance in the

61 On this point, William C. Dowling's discussion is illuminating. See p. 112. 62 See Burke, Speech on Opening of Impeachment (18 February 1788), Writing.5 and Speeches,

6:413-22. 63 For detailed accounts of Hastings's involvement with the Begams ofOudh, see P J. Marshall,

The Impeachment ojWarritn Hasting.5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 112-29; and Frederick G. Whelan, Edmund Burke in India: Political Morality and Empire (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), pp. 177-87.


prosecution of Hastings bears comparison with the elect:rifYing effect of the Queen's story upon readers of the Reflections. A report of a speech he made in the House of Commons on 30 July 1784 gives a summary version of the narrative:

The tale which the history of these ladies, the mother and grandmother of the Vizier of Gude, disclosed to Europe and to posterity, was enough to make children yet unborn blush for the rapacity and brutality of their fathers .... Were not the nearest relations of these illustrious women tempted to betray and ruin them? Were they not stripped of their all, and reduced, from the first situations which the country afforded, to a state of penury and beggary? ... They were bereaved even of their jewels: their toilets, those altars of beauty, were sacrilegiously invaded, and the very ornaments of the sex foully purloined I No place, no presence, not even that of Majesty, was proof against the severe inquisition of the mercenary and the merciless.64

The parallels between this "tale" and the account of the "cruel ruffians and assassins" who invade the "chamber of the queen" and pierce her bed with "an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards" are unmistakable. Uppermost in the two narratives is a sense of horror at the profanation of sacred royalty, at the brutal violation of privacy, and at the sexual, depravity of the assaults, which amount almost literally to rape. The accounts are both structured, as I have argued elsewhere, by familiar conventions of Gothic fiction. 65 In short, nothing is sui generis about the Reflections: the imaginative virtuosity of that work is simply a new variation on already fully developed rhetorical and political themes.66

Broome's response to the Reflections, which he rushed into print scarcely ten days after its appearance, makes clear the antecedent of Burke's lament for Marie Antoinette and emphasizes its quixotic, chivalric inflection:

64 Burke, "Speech on Almas Ali Khan," Writing. and Speeches, 5:465. The Begams of Oudh also feature in Burke's Speech on Fox's India Bill (1 December 1783), Writings and Speeches, 5:410-12; in the Articles oj Impeachment, in Writing. and Speeches, 6:147-55; and in Speech in Reply (7 June 1794), Writings and Speeches, 7:450-75. In his most celebrated oration, delivered before the House of Commons on 7 February 1787, Richard Brinsley Sheridan outlined the case against Hastings regarding the Begams.

65 See Frans De Bruyn, "Edmund Burke's Gothic Romance: The Portrayal of Warren Hastings in His Writings and Speeches on India," Criticism29 (1987),415-38.

66 For a detailed discussion of this point, see ReginaJanes, "Edmund Burke's Flying Leap from India to France," History oj European Ideas 7 (1986), 509-27. Janes argues, "The crusade relative to India accounts for the rapidity, the intensity, and many of the categories of Burke's negative reading of the revolution in the Reflections," (p. 509). On the connection between Burke's portrayal of the Begams and Marie Antoinette, see especiallypp. 522-24.


You have read how Don Quixote selected a dame; How he languish'd, and lov'd, and resounded her fame! For he knew that Knight Errantry could not exist, Unless Beauty were plac'd at the head of the list; In like manner Don Edmund once solemnly vow'd He would still be the Knight of the Begum of Gude: He fought all her battles, as bound by his duty, And said all he could in defence of her beauty;

But as lovers too frequently wander and range, Don Edmund has suddenly taken a change. Now leaving the Begum-behold him advance, And brandish his pen, in the room of a lance, In defence of the present Queen Consort of France!67

Nor was Broome the only reader of the Reflections to observe a broad continuity with Burke's earlier writings and speeches. The anonymous author of Short Observations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke's Reflections pointed out that "Mr. Burke had long been occupied in painting the crimes ofIndia; and it was easy for a heated imagination to substitute Europe; it was but altering the names of places and part of the landscape was completed to his hand. "68 The rhetorical parallels in the portrayals ofIndia and France bespeak an underlying intellectual coherence in his approach to both political crises. Burke's indignation against Hastings blows especially hot because his historical account of chivalry's ameliorative influence on European manners, in contrast to those of Asia, implies that Hastings ought to have known and acted better than he did. Ironically, the manners of the Indian upper classes, though they display nothing of the "politeness" of modem Europe, are superior, in Burke's view, to those of Hastings. The latter's contemptuous treatment of women marks him as the real oriental despot.69

Such continuities must have seemed evident to Broome because he attended much more closely than most of his contemporaries to Burke's speeches on Hastings. He had in fact called attention well before the French Revolution to Burke's self-identification as a political Quixote and to his quixotic preoccupation with "Damsels distress'd."

67 Anon. [Ralph Broome], "Letter LXIII" (11 November 1790), The Letters from Simkin the Second Poetic Recorder of aU the Proceedings, upon the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq. in Westminster Hall (London, 1791), p. 348.

68 Anon., Short Obseroations on the Right Hon. Edmund Burke's Reflections (London, 1790), p. 10. 69 The complexities of Burke's ideas about chivalry and Europe's Gothic past in the context

of his writings on India are explored by Whelan, pp. 163-68.


In February 1788, he observed satirically how Philip Francis was able to manipulate these very imaginative susceptibilities in order to enlist Burke in the struggle against Hastings:

But when from himself [Francis] an abusive Oration Could produce no effect on a sensible Nation, His attention was turn'd to the Quixote-like Burke, Who is fond of engaging in Quixote-like Work; He told him long Stories "of Damsels distress'd, Of extirpated Nations, of Rajahs oppress'd;" Of Hastings's having compell'd the Nabob, His kindred, his mother, grandmother, to rob.

The effect of this appeal, we are assured, was irresistible, for how could "the eloquent Burke ... / The rights of old damsels refuse to defend?,,70 As Broome himself shrewdly noted (in the earlier-cited passage, above), "Knight Errantry" cannot exist without "Beauty ... at the head of the list." The power and attractiveness of chivalric idealization lay in its emotional focus, its attachment to objects of desire and emulation, and eighteenth-century analyses of chivalry placed women at the heart of this emotional economy. Prowess, gallantry, loyalty, friendship, magnanimity-all these ideals were cultivated in the name of an object of devotion. Hard-headed historical analysis might reveal, as Hurd theorized, that chivalric gallantry towards women was originally motivated by their possessing a right of "succession into fiefs," making it a matter "of mighty consequence who should obtain the grace of a rich heiress," but such debunking, which exposes a property nexus beneath the emotional attraction of chivalry, appeared to have little effect, least of all on Hurd himselfY David Duff argues that the romance of chivalry possesses an "inherent attraction," and he shows in his study of romance and revolution that radical writers, even as they attempted to discredit Burke's views, retained a fascination for the idiom of chivalry and strove to reclaim it for the radical cause.72

One writer who clearly recognized the deficiencies of this emotional economy and argued, consequently, that reason will "gain" by the "extinction" of the "spirit of romance and chivalry" was Mary

70 Anon. [Broome], "Letter III" (23 February 1788), Letters/rom Simkin, p. 21. 71 Hurd, 3:242, 240. 72 Duff, Romance and Revolution, p. 30.


Wollstonecraft.73 She decried the specious "gallantry" and "knigbtly fealty" that substitute for "love" in courtship.74 Even if it were conceded that chivalry fosters political and social virtue, the role of women in this process would appear to be nothing more than to incite men in their quest. Women remain the passive objects of male gallantry and courtesy: they are not encouraged to pursue virtue on their own behalf. In fact, the "hollow respect" they are accorded actively discourages them from the pursuit of rationality, and the rituals of chivalry degenerate into a cynical charade: "I lament that women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions, which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, they are insultingly supporting their own superiority.,,75 By contrast, the women in Cervantes' novel tend to reject the roles that Quixote attempts to impose on them, responding to his fantasies with lively assertions of their own subjectivity. Similarly, Wollstonecraft refuses to accept the place women are accorded in the historical theories of her male contemporaries, however flattering and respectful their views might appear to be.

In a larger sense, of course, Burke feminized India as a whole, thus making British imperial interests there an object worthy of his chivalric solicitude. Hannah Arendt has commented perceptively on what she calls the "imperialist legend," centred upon "a tradition of dragon-slayers" who sally forth "into far and curious lands" to protect and defend "strange and naive peoples." She writes,

these quixotic protectors of the weak who played their role behind the scenes of official British rule were not so much the product of a primitive people's naive imagination as of dreams which contained the best of European and Christian traditions, even when they had already deteriorated into the futility of boyhood ideals.76

She is thinking here chiefly of the British Empire in its late nineteenth-century incarnation and of a mindset she attributes to Rudyard Kipling. Yet her observation is not without point in Burke's

73 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1997), p. 61.

74 Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, p. 55. 75 Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of tIll! Rights of Woman, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A

Vindication of the Rights of Woman, pp. 171-72. 76 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen and Unwin,

1958), pp. 209-11.


case. Though his views on empire are of an entirely different order from infantilized visions of "boyhood noblesse," it is possible to see in his self-conceptualization as a chivalric champion of oppressed India the seeds of later romantic rationalizations of empire. Arendt captures in her remarks the imaginative power and appeal of a romantic paternalism that expresses itself through heroic action, and she recognizes the paradox at the heart of this dream, which has its roots in "the best of European and Christian traditions."

Reading Quixote, Reading Burke

This article has traced the formative influence of Burke the reader of romance on Burke the political thinker. The genre of romance gives narrative shape to many of his political utterances, and his chivalric, quixotic conception of his political self personifies and gives representational life to an abstract ideal of civic political virtue. This assimilation of the literary and the political shows Burke at his most characteristic. His grasp of the literary culture of his time was remarkable, and he deployed this formidable cultural knowledge as a weapon in the political struggles that engaged him. His use of Don Quixote typifies his practice ofliterary appropriation. But great literary texts have a way of eluding such interpretive control, and Burke's opponents readily found ways to read Cervantes' novel for their own political purposes. The late eighteenth century was, as we have seen, a time when rich new interpretive possibilities were opening to readers of Don Quixote. This critical ferment is fully reflected in the complex and conflicting ways political writers of the 1790s used the quixotic narrative as a touchstone in their polemics. An interesting correlation emerges between the variety of critical responses to Quixote and the diversity of ideological responses to the French Revolution.

The range of political possibilities readers saw in Quixote is illustrated in Hurd's political dialogue "On the Age of Queen Elizabeth," which appeared some years before the Revolution. On one side stands] oseph Addison, the voice of progressive Whiggism, in whose mind the ruin of a Tudor castle "awakens an indignation against the prosperous tyranny of those wretched times, and creates a generous pleasure in reflecting on the happiness we enjoy under a juster and more equal government." Where, he asks, in an ironic Whiggish ubi sunt, "are the tilts and tournaments, the princely shews and sports which were once so proudly celebrated within these walls?


where are the pageants? ... What now is become of the revelry of feasting? of the minstrelsy, that took the ear so delightfully?" He lauds "the admirable Cervantes, whose ridicule hath brought eternal dishonour on the profession of knight-errantry." His interlocutor, Dr Arbuthnot, argues that the decay of chivalric manners has entailed significant losses as well as gains: a loss of community, social solidarity, and private and public standards of virtue. Cervantes meant to satirize only "the abuses of chivalry," yet even this has led to unintended, deleterious consequences for the people of Spain: "little obligation his countrymen have to your Cervantes for laughing away the remains of that prowess, which was the best support of the Spanish monarchy."77

With one notable exception, polemical writers on both sides in the 1790s political debate tended to use Don Quixote in reductive ways. The exception is Godwin, whose novel Caleb Williams is both a rejoinder to Burke and a critical reading of Don Quixote. In his preface, Godwin signals his determination to refute those, like Burke, who extol "in the warmest terms the existing constitution of society. ,,78 At the same time, his contemporaries noted that his novel could also be read as a rewriting of Cervantes. The editor of an early French translation of Caleb Williams called it the "Don Quichotte de Godwin," and William Hazlitt recognized in the dynamic between Falkland and Caleb a recreation of the relationship between Quixote and Sancho Panza in "the immortal satire of Cervantes."79 The passage that introduces Falkland as a youngman captures both these aspects of the novel. It is a thinly disguised character sketch of Burke himself, yet it also clearly patterns Falkland's motivation on Cervantes' great original:

Among the favourite authors of [Falkland's] early years were the heroic poets of ltaly. From them he imbibed the love of chivalry and romance. He had too much good sense to regret the times of Charlemagne and Arthur. But, while his imagination was purged by a certain infusion of philosophy, he conceived that there was in the manners depicted by these celebrated poets, something to

77 Hurd, 1:153, 148-49, 182, 182-83, respectively. 78 William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (1794; Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1970), p. 1. For studies of Caleb Williams as a response to Burke, see James T. Boulton, The Language of Politics in t/wAgrlOfWifkes andButke (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), pp. 226-32; David McCracken, "God\vin's Caleb Williams: A Fictional Rebuttal ofBurke," Studies in Burke and His Time 11 (1970), 1142-52; and Marilyn Butler, "Godffin, Burke, and Caleb Williams," Essays in Criticism 32 (1982), 237-57.

79 "Avertissement de I'editeur," in Godffin, Les Avantures de Caleb Williams, ouies choses camme elles sont, trans. Germain Garnier (Paris, L'an IV de la Republique [1795 or 96]), p. xiv; William Hazlitt, The Spirit of the Age (London, 1825), p. 200. I am indebted to Daniel E. White for these two citations.


imitate, as well as something to avoid. He believed that nothing was so well calculated to make men delicate, gallant, and humane, as a temperament perpetually alive to the sentiments of birth and honour. The opinions he entertained upon these topics were illustrated in his conduct, which was assiduously conformed to the model of heroism that his fancy suggested.so

This portrait acquires extra point when read in light of the evidence of Burke's habits as a reader: his early love of romance and his ownership of copies of Ariosto and Tasso, the very poets favoured by Falkland. Unlike Quixote, Falkland reads these romances with some degree of critical distance: his mind, like Burke's, is "purged by a certain infusion of philosophy."

Yet, the Italian roma,nces shape in Falkland's mind a "model of heroism" that exerts a malign influence on his conduct. Here Godwin subtly reworks Cervantes' diagnosis of his hero's obsession. Though Quixote wildly confuses appearance and reality, detecting exotic adventures and dangers where everyone else observes only a world of everyday occurrences, he believes implicitly in his chivalric delusions and acts on them in all sincerity. For this reason, his actions, despite the mayhem they provoke, seem never to lead to lasting disaster or truly tragic consequences. Godwin presents Falkland, by contrast, as acting fundamentally in bad faith. Though he is consumed "with all the rhapsodies of visionary honour," he is blessed with sufficient critical intellect to distinguish what is "visionary" and factitious from what is reasonable and natural. He has the capacity to resist the madness that consumes him. Moreover, when he acts to defend his honour, it is merely the hollow shell of reputation, the appearance of honour, that concerns him. "I was the fool of fame," he cries. "My virtue, my honesty, my everlasting peace of mind were cheap sacrifices to be made at the shrine of this divinity."81 Even more culpably, he has offered at this same shrine of "fame" a much more costly sacrifice, the lives of three men, two of them altogether blameless.

Godwin's Quixote no longer inhabits the world of high burlesque, literary parody, and bittersweet comedy that gave him birth but rather an opposing realm of darkness and tragedy, as the French translator of Caleb Williams perceptively remarks:

Cervantes by no means attacked the chivalry of his time; what he attempted to turn to ridicule was nothing but a genre of literature; he waged war on books

80 Godwin, Caleb Williams, p. 10. 81 Godwin, Caleb Williams, p. 135.


and not on vices, and his novel [roman] is a work of criticism, rather than of morality. Yet the chivalry of our time and that which he ridiculed are but different attacks of the same insanity seen in remote eras; and the former is all the more insolent and barbarous for showing a milder appearance. This madness, so burlesque in the portrayal of the hero of La Mancha, how terrible it is under the tragic and bloody armour of the Don Quixote of Godwin!82

Godwin's novel, as this passage intimates, is an ironic inversion of the comic premises of Don Quixote. An apt illustration of this is the apparent frustration Falkland experiences in his desire for redress after having been humiliated publicly by Tyrrel:

He was too deeply pervaded with the idle and groundless romances of chivalry ever to forget the situation, humiliating and dishonourable according to his ideas, in which he had been placed upon this occasion ... To be knocked down, cuffed, kicked, dragged along the floor! sacred heaven, the memory of such a treatment was not to be endured! No future lustration could ever remove the stain: and, what was perhaps still worse in the present case, the offender having ceased to exist, the lustration which the laws of knight -errantry prescribe was rendered impossible.83

This episode echoes numerous occasions in Cervantes' novel when Don Quixote deems it impossible to seek redress for an insult, perhaps because his opponent is socially unworthy or because some arcane prerequisite of the chivalric code has not been met. These retreats are often shown to be comically strategic, permitting the Don to extricate himself from situations that would otherwise go badly for him. What is comic in Don Quixote, however, becomes savagely ironic in Caleb Williams: Falkland is precluded from seeking honourable satisfaction because, as the reader later learns, he has already murdered Tyrrel under cover of darkness. This act, a flagrant violation of chivalric norms, is undoubtedly dishonourable, but what must surely trouble the reader much more deeply is its wickedness. The code of chivalry, in the empty formalism of its standards of conduct, is shown to be

82 "Avertissement de I'editeur," Les Avantures de Caleb Williams, pp. xiii-xiv (my translation). The original reads, "Cervantes n'a point attaque la chevalerie de son terns [sic]; ce qu'iJ a entrepris de tourner en ridicule n'etait plus qu'un genre de Iitterature; iJ a fait la guerre a des livres et non pas a des vices, et son roman est un ouvrage de critique, plutot que de morale. Cependant la chevalerie de nosjours, et celie qu'iJ a baffouee, ne sont que des acces differens d'une meme demence vue a des epoques eloignees; et la premiere pour se montrer sous des formes plus benignes, n'en est que plus insolente et plus barbare. Cette folie si burlesque sous les traits du heros de la Manche, qu'elle est terrible sous I'armure tragique et sanglante du Don Quichotte de Godwin!'

83 Godwin, Caleb Williams, p. 97.


fundamentally at odds with the reader's sense of right and wrong. By tapping into the tragic potential of Don Quixote, Godwin avoids

the trap of being seen to sneer at the ideals of chivalric virtue, even as he exposes the pernicious political and social effects of chivalry. His portrayal of Falkland's quixotic obsession with chivalric honour and reputation highlights its attractive, as well as its destructive, aspects. The young Falkland is an admirable man of great accomplishment, the very flower of the civilization into which he was born. At the end of the novel, Caleb pays tribute to the man he once sought to emulate: "A nobler spirit lived not among the sons of men. Thy intellectual powers were truly sublime, and thy bosom burned with a godlike ambition." But here Godwin turns the tables, for the same soil that produced this fine flower has also blighted it: "Ofwhat use are talents and sentiments in the corrupt wilderness of human society? It is a rank and rotten soil from which every finer shrub draws poison as it grows. All that in a happier field and a purer air would expand into virtue and germinate into general usefulness, is thus converted into henbane and deadly nightshade."84 Chivalric virtues turn out to be virtues in name only. Chivalry is no rational system of ethics and moral conduct but the product of a social order founded upon oppression and inequality.

Caleb's concluding tribute to Falkland echoes, asJames T. Boulton has shown, Godwin's regretful remarks on Burke in Political Justice, published a year before Caleb Williams:

Our hearts bleed to see such gallantry, talents and virtue employed in perpetuating the calamities of mankind. We recollect with grief that, when the lustre of your merits shall fill distant generations with astonishment, they will not be less astonished, that you could be made the dupes of prejudice, and deliberately surrender the larger portion of the good you might have achieved.85

Mter Burke's death in 1797, Godwin expanded this assessment in a footnote that establishes an even closer parallel with Falkland's tragic downfall:

No impartial man can recal [sic] Burke to his mind, without confessing the grandeur and integrity of his feelings of morality .... [But he] has unfortunately left us with a memorable example, of the power of a corrupt system of

84 Godwin, Caleb WiUiams, pp. 325-26. 85 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning PoliticalJustice, ed. F.E.L. Priestley, 3 vols. (Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 1946), 2:545. See Boulton, pp. 227-29.


government, to undermine and divert from their genuine purposes, the noblest faculties that have yet been exhibited to the observation of the world.86

Though the resemblances between Falkland and Burke are striking, Caleb Williams is much more than a simple roman a clef Godwin aims to engage with Burke imaginatively, as well as intellectually, and he moves beyond the tit-for-tat polemicizing of the 1790s by reconceiving in his novel the quixotic identity that Burke had made his own. As a self-proclaimed protector of the oppressed, the persecuted, and the weak, Burke declared himself the successor of the knight of La Mancha, a declaration that is itself a revisionist reading of Cervantes' text. If this is madness, Burke seems to say, so be it: "the foolishness of God is wiser than men.,,87 Godwin recognizes he cannot fight Burke on this ground, so he returns to the figure of Quixote and rediagnoses the knight's madness. It is not overly credulous reading that drives astray the mind of Godwin's Quixote, but the corrupt state of "things as they are." In a more just and rational society, the romantic fantasies imbibed by Falkland in his youth would have withered with the onset of maturity, but in a hierarchical social order that gives to those on top despotic means to maintain their hegemony, these fantasies serve to rationalize his sense of right and wrong in terms of his self-interest. The state of society is the real catalyst that operates "to hurry [him] into madness."88 Uniquely among the many responses to Burke's Reflections, Godwin's novel meets Burke on his own imaginative ground; the result is not only a shrewd portrayal of Burke as a figure of tragedy but also a powerful "misreading," as Harold Bloom would put it, of Don Quixoteitself.

University of Ottawa

86 Godwin, Political justice, 2:546n. 87 1 Cor. 1:25. 88 Godwin, Caleb Williams, p. 326.

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