| Title: | McMahon Glynn, Patrick to Glynn, Joseph, 1892 |
|---|---|
| ID | 4415 |
| Collection | Patrick McMahon Glynn: Letters to his family (1874-1927) [Gerald Glynn O'Collins] |
| File | glynn/67 |
| Year | 1892 |
| Sender | McMahon Glynn, Patrick |
| Sender Gender | male |
| Sender Occupation | lawyer |
| Sender Religion | unknown |
| Origin | Adelaide, South Australia, Australia |
| Destination | Gort, Co. Galway, Ireland |
| Recipient | Glynn, Joseph |
| Recipient Gender | male |
| Relationship | siblings |
| Source | |
| Archive | |
| Doc. No. | |
| Date | |
| Partial Date | |
| Doc. Type | |
| Log | unknown |
| Word Count | 2069 |
| Genre | text commentary, literature, |
| Note | |
| Transcript | Pine St. Adelaide 6 March 1892 My dear Joseph Though addressing as above, I write from some where else. However, it is Sunday morning, I have an [hour] or two to spare, and have just read your Prize Essay on Burke. You asked me for an opinion of it. Though my memory of the subject is not quite as recent as yours, it is fresh enough to enable me to recognise the justice of your estimate of Burke, and your possession of that historic sympathy without which one is in danger of reading an author in the light of his own prejudices. The apparent truth of your interpretation of Burke's relations to the various questions with which he dealt as a writer or speaker, must have helped to influence the decision of the Judges in your favor. The arrangement of the different branches of the subject is excellent and I need scarcely say that in this respect there are, in the case of an author who dealt with some many matters of human interest, many difficulties to be faced. Sequence and proportion have to be attained, and it is by no means easy to attain them, and preserve some freedom of style, within the limits of 30 pages of print. I am glad to find that you have not made the mistake of many, especially young, writers of taking everything that a favorite author says as ex cathedra and becoming his eulogist and apologist under all circumstances. Burke was always great, but by no means always right. His style, like Carlyle's, is, if the legalism be permitted, Sid generis, most attractive when sustained by the sincerities of the original, but dangerous as a model. I fancy I said something roughly upon this point in a short lecture on Shakespeare, which may have reached you, so now need merely suggest. Newman's is the style for the imitator; not that he is to be emulated, but good only can come from his literary influence. People don't yet properly understand what English literature lost through Newman's having wasted his energies among the barren subtleties of theology, and through the fact that the mother had so much to do with his makeup. By the way, in respect of style, have I not in the sentence before last committed the common error of participial construction? My instinct, and I fancy my practice, is against the thing, but all slips are excusable in a letter not written to a sweetheart. Well, to continue in the netherlands of the school master, and to be, as you wish me, candid, let me point to the one or two debatable matters of construction in your essay. Page 4, sentence 2, "Discussing the matter I", is an instance of participial construction. I am my own lawmaker in these matters and to me it seems that no part of a sentence ought to commit the bull of leaning for support upon itself, or be allowed to be the cause of a verbal non sequitur in the whole. Again, to continue to be whimsical and like all good dogmatists a violator of my own precepts, the second paragraph on page 6, is probably not exactly as you would write it again. I half feel that I am wrong in thinking that "not idly", in the context, is more suggestive of a method of posturing at a particular time and place, than of general political activity, and that "as being", though in common use with the best writers, is a little out of place in the sentence and rather hard to be parsed—or, as I believe they say nowadays, analysed—or defended from the point of view of logical lucidity. Please excuse the alliteration. To continue Jerry-Broughamising—I plumed myself with the discovery that there was a minus quantity of some sort in the definition of party, as quoted, but find on referring to the "Present Discontents" that the elision is only of the word particular, so I need not have been so particular. However, these matters are, as I said, more than debatable and but the mosquitos from whose attacks no attractive body can hope for an immunity. The subject is so tempting, that I might be induced to ramble you out of all patience. But, like the Pius Aneas [sic], when he was trying to bamboozle Mrs. Dido, summa sequar, with my clumsy clogs of swiftness, jastigia rerum, on page 7, you tell us that the democratic feeling of the present day seems conclusive on the point, that the representative is bound by the mandate he holds from the elections. The fact is as you state it, but so much the worse for the community. It indicates that the true definition of a modern politician is an animal that lies, and that that lumbering thinking machine, the mob, is now anxious to try its own hand at personal rule. Neither Burke nor Turgot was altogether right when the one referred to the "swinish multitude", and the other said that everything should be for, and nothing by the people. But like the joke of a Caledonian, or a teameeting preacher, there's something in it if it could only be discovered. I think I am in sympathy with your opinion of Burke's relations to America. The great Edmund was at his best when he championed the cause of the colonists. He was wiser than his hearers, and more liberal than his clients. The people of England then, and subsequently in the Anglo-American war of 1811-12, were "blinded by unreasoning prejudice." But is it true of the colonists that what they had ever been willing to grant on request, they resolutely refused to give on command? The fact of the matter is, the colonists would neither tax themselves for their own defence nor allow England to do so. The Colonial and East-Indian Wars had largely increased the responsibilities of England, and England very properly asked the Americans to bear some portion of the cost of defending the territory, chiefly against Indian incursions; but the colonials would not stump up, or depart from .their general practice of loafing. Washington was a great patriot, and the reputation of his greatness is increased by a sense of the difficulties against which he had to contend. The American element in his army was mean and insubordinate, very different from the poor Irish immigrants who bore the brunt of the hunger, cold, and fighting, and a considerable part of the expense. I believe about half the Continental rebel army was Irish. Washington had to disband one army in 1775 (?) for lack of funds to pay them, and after the Declaration of Independence the different states refused to pay the interest on their debts. It was the absence, under the Confederation Arrangement, of an Executive capable of compelling the States to send in their contributions, that showed the statesmen of the Revolution the utter impossibility of getting on without complete Federation. We can get little of the sentiment of patriotism out of their action of the colonists, who, as Lecky, in his 18th Century, in words which I cannot recall, says, acted simply from selfish considerations, not under the impulse of the patriotic spirit that braced the peoples of older countries "to the act of their own deliverance." If ever there was a case—and I don't say that there was—for the exercise by the Imperial Parliament of the disputed right to tax—against constitutional usuage and expediency—one of its dependencies, it was the case of America just before the Revolution. Burke was right, but we must not, and I don't see that you do, impute to the colonists a spirit that they never possessed. Wilkes was as big a humbug as ever figured in patriotic politics, but his services to popular liberty cannot well be overestimated. I am not sure whether Burke, while denying the expediency of its exercise acknowledged the existence of the Right to tax. Johnson, under instructions, argued for both the Right and the expediency. Pitt, I think, took the correct view, which is, that taxation, being, as distinguished from legislation, a matter of popular grant, is not constitutionally Right without representation. The people can only give directly, or through their representatives. There is no such thing as compulsory supply. The essay is such an excellent synopsis of Burke, written in a solid style so well suited to the subject and the conditions of an essay, that even a comparatively old hand at journalistic criticism has the misfortune of finding nothing to object to, and little, if anything to qualify. But let me, for the mere devilment of the thing, say, that Sheridan's great speech about the Begums (or Bedads) was anything but "the finest speech of the age." It was, as you mentioned, pronounced to be such, but with all due deference to Edmund's condescending urbanity to the brilliant supporter of a cause his heart was set on, I am inclined to think that Sheridan was a bit of an oratorical quack, and, with De Quincey, that the Begumiad reads like a connundrum. There was more true oratory in any of the mighty Miltonic movements and serpentine windings (Goldsmith said he wound into his subject like a serpent) of Burke than in all the theatric flash and pantomimic caperings of Sheridan. Burke was a titan; or, as the music started in the next room suggests to me, a Beethoven in his intellectual loftiness and philosophic depth, scaling the clouds and revelling in the elements; while Sheridan is meretricious as Verdi when he caters for sentimentalists with the cheap pathos of the minor key. There goes La Ci darem. To me there is an infinite distance about Mozart's Melodies, a sense of the inevitable in Carlyle's everlastings—but there is no expression for these feelings. When in "Facts, dreams & Shams", I spoke of the world-melodies of Mozart, and referred in the Shakespearean lecture to "the crystal morning beauty of Marianna's tender love song", I meant something that perhaps the words failed to express. We are never quite sure that we are understood. Monday 7th 10 p.m. I would like to say something to you about the French Revolution, which forms the part of your subject, but that is next to impossible. My day's work has extended from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and I will be fully occupied until Thursday, when I leave for Broken Hill to attend the Courts as a N.S.W. barrister, and lecturer for the Public Library. Perhaps I may send you some rough notes made some time ago, when the idea of a lecture on Burke and the Revolution was agitating me. It was, in fact, for Broken Hill, but time to think the matter out was not available. Your account of the Reflections1 is well worthy for the subject, and with it in the main I agree. That Burke's pathos is genuine, I more than doubt. No doubt he felt as he told Sir P. Francis when he apostrophised Marie Antoinette, but there is a good deal of rhetorical and political sympathy in this world. In true pathos and poetry, give me, with all its disjointed sincerities, the last lone letter of a poor girl who has jumped the great unknown. There is a little too much rhetoric about Burke for true pathos. How simple the response is when pity is felt. You see this where Cordelia hears of Lear's sufferings in the closing scenes of the same play, where Bardolph says, of Falstaff, "Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, whether in Heaven or Hell", but when he talks of "pity, like a new born babe, striding the blast", we are inclined to swear at such fashion as beneath him. What Burke did for the principle of ordered growth was invaluable, but had I been alive in those days and in France I would have stood by Dan ton and his crew; when we read of Marie Antoinette and her rakish frivolities and think of what Arthur Young saw, we find a good deal to object to in the application of the philosophy of the Reflections. But my paper is run out, and my time is up. Asking you to accept my congratulations and apologies for this discursive and lengthy letter, I am Your affectionate Brother P. McM. Glynn Joseph Glynn Esq. B.A. |
