Imagination under Pressure, 1789~1832:
Aesthetics, Politics, and Utility

The 'comprehensive connected view' now becomes, in the manner of English landscape aesthetics, a case of 'see[ing] the whole together'^[32] or 'a view of the whole';^[33] and this is precisely what Burke finds lacking in the newly conceived French constitution. Burke cannot find in the French model of government anything which reveals 'the work of a comprehensive and disposing mind',^[34] that is to say 'a variety of objects, reconciled in one consistent whole'.^[35]

Once again there is a strong sense of reciprocation in which the reification of a structure or object is mitigated or softened by the presence of 'mind', the mark of humanity. As Burke puts it at the end of the Reflections: 'to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind'.^[36] The imprint of this mind in the act of perception is, one feels, at least as important as the structure itself.

This celebration of the whole which is susceptible to perception only by the most powerful of minds can make Burke appear like a proto- Romantic hovering on the brink of the idea of organic unity of the kind most famously celebrated by Coleridge, especially when Burke seems to take the idea of dynamic combination to its limit.^[37] With historical hindsight the following passage looks dangerously like a Coleridgean precursor right down to its appropriation of the scientific neologism 'plastic':

We see, that the parts of the system do not clash . . . We compensate, we reconcile, we balance. We are enabled to unite into a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are found in the minds and affairs of men. From hence arises, not an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition . . . It is from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government; a power like that which some of the philosophers have called a plastic nature; and having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards to its own operation. (Reflections, pp. 281-2 [217-18])

I would suggest that Burke's difference from a Romantic aesthetics is confirmed by his belief in reform rather than absolute change or innovation. His subscription to gradual modification rather than wholesale creative transformation suggests that Burke's aesthetic is really one of dynamic combination rather than one of either organic unity or the symbolic. This is also the case with his celebration of 'principles'. Consistency to principles was, as critics such as David Simpson have pointed out, the very thing which Coleridge praised and identified with in Burke's political philosophy and career. In his attempt at a theory of method in The Friend Coleridge struggles to systematize the idea of Burkean principle into a methodological bulwark against the threat of utilitarianism.^[38]

In Terry Eagleton's account of the law of the heart in The Ideology of the Aesthetic Burke is described as an aestheticiser rather than an aesthete.^[39] Eagleton is characteristically alert to Burke's capacity to use aesthetics not simply as an alternative to the epistemic dominance of reason but also in the service of hegemony. This ideological capacity of Burke's aestheticising confirms the strategic nature of his texts. And at the same it highlights the extent to which this process both exploits and celebrates the aesthetic as that which is unrepresentable, that which is not susceptible to philosophical reason. From this point of view, to see the continuity between Burke and Coleridge in terms of the latter's rigorous philosophising of the former's idea of 'principles' is perhaps to miss an important difference and discontinuity between the two writers. This difference is perhaps central in any consideration of Burke in relation to Romanticism and in particular of this more precise claim of his being a pre- or proto-Romantic. The importance Burke attaches to 'prudence' as opposed to philosophical definition is important in assessing his approximation to Coleridgean ideas of the organic when defining the nature of the British constitution in various texts from the 1790s. In his An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), for example, Burke makes the following declaration against the very idea of a mathematical, philosophical, or systematic theory of principle ^[40] when defining the need for prudence in matters of morality and state:

Nothing universal can be rationally affirmed on any moral or any political subject. Pure metaphysical abstraction does not belong to these matters. The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand modifications. These exceptions and modifications are not made by the process of logic, but by the rules of prudence. Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director, the regulator, the standard of them all. Metaphysics cannot live without definition; but Prudence is cautious how she defines.^[41]

Burke comes very close to articulating a Coleridgean concept of the organically unified nature of the state in the following statement from his Speech on Moving the Resolutions for Conciliation with the Colonies (1775) where his concern is 'freedom' in relation to the American colonies:

This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true act of navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the Colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond, which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire. Do not entertain so weak an imagination, as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution, which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies, every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.^[42]

The pragmatic and compromised deployment of principles in conjunction with 'circumstances' is evident in the following extract from Burke's 1792 speech on religious opinions. One might even go so far as to suggest that it is the complex, infinite, potentially sublime nature of 'circumstances' which surprisingly possesses a more dynamic and originating power in this passage:

I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals. I do not put abstract ideas wholly out of any question; because I well know that under that name I should dismiss principles, and that, without the guide and light of sound, well-understood principles, all reasonings in politics, as in everything else, would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details, without the means of drawing out any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion. A statesman differs from a professor in an university: the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas, and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are infinitely combined; are variable and transient: he who does not take them into consideration, is not erroneous, but stark mad; dat operam ut cum ratione insaniat; he is metaphysically mad. A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment, he may ruin his country for ever.^[43]

Burke's idea of composition produced from combination and resulting in 'equipoise' stops short of the creative category shift implied in Coleridge's deployment of primary and secondary imaginations. And because the same kind of creative transformation is projected here it assigns a place for the aesthetic which is also correspondingly different. This is apparent in Burke's famous claim for 'a marked distinction between change and reformation'. According to Burke,

The former alters the substance of the objects themselves; and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of . . . It cannot at this time be too often repeated; line upon line; precept upon precept; until it comes into the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform.^[44]

There remains in Burke's aesthetic apprehension of the object of the constitution, and of our second nature more generally, a sense of the aesthetic as ornament, supplement, and surplus. We are still working with the notion of the super-added rather than a high Romantic indissoluble union of spirit, Burkean necessity rather than the Coleridgean organic. And outside of the privileged minds deemed capable of enlarged and liberal understandings and ex-tended views, of course, there remains a strong sense of the aesthetic's capacity to operate as ideological distraction and political recompense. The afterlife of the plastic principle of the constitution also, it seems, has the capacity to generate its own culture, its own self-conscious exhibition. In Burke's description, what Hazlitt would later refer to as the gew-gaws of imagination operate as a museum of legitimacy:

our liberty becomes a noble freedom. It carries an imposing and majestic aspect. It has a pedigree and illustrating ancestors. It has its bearings and its ensigns armorial. It has its gallery of portraits; its monumental inscriptions; its records, evidences, and titles. (Reflections, p. 121[85])

In addition to the intrinsically beautiful articulation of the constitution and the concomitant glory of the working principles of the state and the achievements of its statesmen, Burke considers the historically accumulated culture produced within the state. There is thus a powerful reciprocity between the beauty of liberty and the beauty which has been produced in a state of liberty. In both cases this beauty serves to consolidate and retain the status quo by being susceptible to the visualisation of an appropriately subservient imagination. According to Burke, such beauty produces an awed and reverential response which serves as a check to change or political critique. From this perspective, members of Dr Price's Revolution Society and the French revolutionaries across the Channel have both been seen to have travestied the very idea of 'beauty' and are, as a result, only capable of indulging in a perverted form of burlesque.