No Trousers

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 2 · 24 January 1991

From Frank Kermode

Reading Claude Rawson’s powerful essay on Burke (LRB, 20 December 1990), and in particular what he had to say about ‘Burke’s purplest passage’, I was reminded of an ancient discontent with the sentence in that passage that begins ‘Without force, or opposition’ and ends: ‘[This mixed system of opinion and sentiment] compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.’ It would be surprising if so famous a passage contained an undetected corruption, but ‘a domination’ is very odd. I have heard ‘dominating’ conjectured, but my own guess is that Burke wrote ‘a Domitian, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued …’

I write in the hope that people learned in Burke will wish to comment on the plausibility of this reading, propose alternatives, or defend the received text.

Frank Kermode
Cambridge

Vol. 13 No. 3 · 7 February 1991

From D.L. Macdonald

Readers of Claude Rawson’s fascinating review of some recent editions of Burke (LRB, 20 December 1990) may be interested to know that the accusation of sansculottisme was once turned against Burke himself – significantly, after the Revolution. Richard Payne Knight’s Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (1805) includes a critique of Burke’s psychologistic aesthetics, and particularly of his analysis of the experience of the sublime as a combination of astonishment and terror. If, Knight argues, Burke ‘had walked up St James’s Street without his breeches, it would have occasioned great and universal astonishment; and if he had, at the same time, carried a loaded blunderbuss in his hands, the astonishment would have been mixed with no small portion of terror: but I do not believe that the united effects of these two powerful passions would have produced any sentiment or sensation approaching to sublime.’ Like Kant, Knight believed that the sublime was partly ethical: Burke, he argued, had demonstrated it in his attempt to defend the Indians against the depredations of the imperial government even if he had failed to define it in the Philosophical Enquiry.

D.L. Macdonald
University of British Columbia

Vol. 13 No. 4 · 21 February 1991

From Anita Kermode

I have read with interest Frank Kermode’s letter of tribute (24 January) to Claude Rawson’s essay on Burke (LRB, 20 December 1990), which has reminded Sir Frank of his ‘ancient discontent’ with respect to Burke’s most famous passage. He proposes an alternative to a possibly undetected corruption in the concluding sentence of Burke’s meditation on the influence of the ‘antient chivalry’: ‘Without force or opposition, it subdued the fierceness of pride and power; it obliged sovereigns to submit to the soft collar of social esteem, compelled stern authority to submit to elegance, and gave a domination vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners.’ Remarking that he has heard ‘dominating’ conjectured, Sir Frank guesses however that ‘Domitian’ rather than ‘domination’ was the original intent.

His letter reminds me of my own discontent with that sentence, which I first stumbled over during a Practical Criticism class I gave at Cambridge a decade or so ago. (When later I brought it to your contributor’s attention, thinking that ‘domination’ might erroneously have replaced ‘dominating’ somewhere along the line, he was indeed surprised that the awkwardness had not before been noticed; but since ‘dominating’ didn’t upon reflection seem right, he hit upon ‘Domitian’ as a good possibility. We agreed to delve deeper into the problem, but still it lay unresolved.) Rawson’s splendid commentary upon the discourse of ‘nakedness’ and ‘drapery’ has at the same time revived for me the context of my stumble. In the Practical Criticism course, I’d submitted to my students, for analysis and comparison, a lengthy passage from the Reflections (including Rawson’s ‘purple’ paragraph) together with one from Sartor Resartus (Carlyle’s fantastic development of the Transparent Clothing metaphor). This followed a similar exercise involving texts from Swift and Mandeville: that famous passage from A Tale of a Tub in which the ambush is sprung by Swift’s tremendous perversion of the ‘nakedness’ trope (‘Last Week I saw a Woman flay’d, and you will hardly believe, how much it altered her Person for the worse’); a passage from The Fable of the Bees which, if with less finesse and dizzying thoroughness, also achieves an ironic destabilising of normative oppositions between outside and inside, Rhetoric and Nature, through strategies of drastic reduction and divestment (‘and I am clearly of the opinion, that the malice and most severe strokes of fortune can do no more injury to a mind thus stripped of all fears, wishes and inclinations, than a blind horse can do in an empty barn’). These exercises were linked with several involving the poetry of Yeats, Stevens and Robert Lowell – lyrics all turning on that inexhaustible struggle between the seductions of metaphor and the no less seductive prospects of, in Lowell’s phrase, a ‘threadbare art’. My hope was to arouse my students to the apparently obvious but in fact very difficult perception that literary texts, as well as talk about them, are made out of words, and to do this by exploring the crucial debate that Rawson takes up – above all the consequences of playing the figure of a linguistic nakedness against that of a linguistic drapery, a polarity the more apt to get disturbingly out of hand the more consciously it is being exploited. My one reservation about Rawson’s essay concerns its implicit suggestion that Burke and Swift were firmly in command of their own side of the argument, once their figural polemics had been set in motion. That their side required belief in the possibility of linguistic mastery, I do not doubt.

As for Burke’s perhaps corrupted sentence, I did examine several of the early editions, all of which reproduce the text given in the first. I noticed, by the way, that ‘domination’ is there, and subsequently, broken at the end of the line, after the first syllable, and it has even occurred to me that an entire line of text might have been dropped in printing. Perhaps some agent docile or dolorous, in conjunction with some abomination, had been the original intention, and the awkward ‘domination’ had become accepted under the influence of ‘oblige’, ‘submit’ and ‘compel’ – an instance of how our expectation of syntactic good manners may be subdued by a more compelling desire for signs of mastery. But I dismissed that as a whimsy. (Nevertheless, the double but asymmetric appearance of ‘subdued’ in Burke’s sentence is another oddity; it too lacks elegance, and may have some relevance to the problem at hand.)

In response to Sir Frank’s request for comment on his emendation, I must now doubt that Burke in fact wrote ‘and gave a Domitian, vanquisher of laws, to be subdued by manners’; and this for several reasons. The first is rhetorical: the sentence in question concludes a paragraph which relies on the power of generalisation to overwhelm resistance. ‘Modern Europe’ from its origins to the present day is Burke’s subject here, under ‘all its forms of government’, and through ‘all the gradations of social life’ (italics mine); not some kings but ‘kings’, in their totality, are evoked; and, finally, not even sovereigns as they embody or wield authority, but ‘stern authority’ itself. Could Burke, who was aware of the effects of bringing into an argument ‘abstraction and personification’ (a rhetorical turn he discusses elsewhere), have dished, at this point, his own effect by introducing any limiting particular, let alone a name associated with ‘the antique world’ which he has already distinguished from the case of ‘modern Europe’? It is the less likely given that – from his spectacular impersonation of the Queen of France down to the carefully restrained chiasmus ‘To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely’ – Burke’s performance here, turn by turn, has depended not only on an unabashed manipulation of rhetorical ‘drapery’ but on the crucial point he makes almost explicit at the end, that thus to understand and use language is the mark of ‘a wise man’. Principles governing the ‘construction of poems’ apply equally to ‘states’; rhetorical and political systems are one and the same; genuine wisdom consists in exploiting, rather than resisting, this truth.

Moreover, in a passage preparing for his denunciation of that ‘barbarous philosophy’ which justifies a regicide as no worse than ‘a common homicide’, is it likely that Burke would have singled out, as an instance of overly stern authority successfully chastened, a sovereign who met his end at the hands of an assassin? The Emperor Domitian, stabbed to death in his bedroom, was not subdued by elegance or manners. He was subdued as the result of a conspiracy led, tradition has it, by his own wife, who had reason to believe that he was going to have her murdered. Again, although Domitian’s name was for centuries blackened by the highly-wrought vilifications of his senatorial enemies Pliny and Tacitus, who fixed on him a reputation for terrorism and tyranny which recent historians have done much to correct, he was never charged, so far as I can tell, with being ‘a vanquisher of laws’. Suetonius, while believing him excessively cruel and arrogant, nevertheless credits him with industry and precision in administering justice; and he has even been praised for his legislative achievements, however severe many of them were.

Therefore I would question the plausibility of Sir Frank’s emendation, but never having hunted up the Burke MS or other detections of the suspected corruption, I, too, would welcome learned clarification of what is perhaps only a mote in my own eye.

Anita Kermode
London WC1

From Albert Jordan

Could it be that the corruption apprehended by Sir Frank in Burke’s famous passage is nothing more than a structural Gallicism used by Burke to sustain a passage worthy of Bossuet? The structure itself – a noun (‘domination’) qualified by a noun group (‘vanquisher of laws’) functioning as an epithet – is familiar enough in French Classical oratory. The verb ‘gave’ is clearly a variation on ‘subdued’, ‘obliged’ and ‘compelled’. My modern gloss would be: ‘caused a domination capable of overturning the laws to be subdued by manners’. The sentiment expressed is the echo of a commonplace in the tenets of French royal absolutism. The king is above the law (ex legibus solutus) in theory, but in practice his natural graciousness restrains him from using his domination to the detriment of his subjects. This may seem a slender argument on which to base a check to the otherwise unfettered power of the monarch (and it was duly if discreetly ridiculed by Montesquieu) but it played its part in that potent ‘mixture of opinion and sentiment’ that determined how educated conservative Frenchmen saw their country and their government. The mixture also, as Burke rightly points out, had a long history. From Estienne Pasquier’s Pourparler du Prince (1561): ‘our Kings, with their customary graciousness [débonnaireté], never undertook anything in France on the basis of their absolute power, but always preserving the Three Estates in their liberties and privileges they almost invariably, in matters of great moment, acted on their advice.’ The graciousness of the monarch is not necessarily a personal attribute (though inevitably claimed as such) but is the result of dialogue between the king and his public servants concerning laws for the good governance of the kingdom. The presence of this dialogue constitutes the ‘manners’ evoked by Burke, and thus prevents domination from degenerating into its pathological state, which is despotism the vanquisher of laws.

Albert Jordan
Racine, Quebec