Question: Write a note on Burke’s prose style with special reference to his “Speech on Conciliation with America.”

Or, Point out the salient features of Burke’s prose style and discuss them with reference to his “Speech on Conciliation with America.”

Answer: 

“[Burke] unites every extreme and every variety of composition; the lowest and the meanest words and Fira descriptions with the highest. He exults in the display of power, in showing the extent, the force and intensity of his ideas; he is led on by the mere impulse and vehemence of his fancy, not by the affection of dazzling his readers by gaudy conceits or pompous images. He was completely carried oms away by his subject. He was no other object but to produce grins the strongest impression on his reader, and most forcible description of things, trusting to the power of his mind to mould them into grace and beauty. He did not produce a splendid effect by setting fires to the light vapours that float in the regions of fancy, as the chemists make fine colours with phosphorous but by the eagerness of his blows struck fire from the flint and melted the hardest substances in the furnace of his imagination.”

– William Hazlitt

Burke is a man of gifted genius. He is a great man with a great head and a great heart. He is in possession of a florid and vibrant imagination. His greatness is evident in all his writings. The amplitude of his comprehension, the richness of his imagination, the profundity of his scholarship and the vigour of his grasp of details are evident in his speeches and writings. His speeches are specimens of the great orations of a great rhetorician. His prose style is characterized by the extensive but natural use of rhetorical devices and figures.

Burke’s language is rich and florid, ornate and passionate as his thoughts are noble and generous, lofty and vigorous. Though his language often lacks the lucidity, precision and balance, which are marked qualities of good prose, it is energetic, vibrant and rich. His language is characterized by its concreteness. In the “Speech on Conciliation with America” we come across numerous facts and statistical figures based on which Burke derive his political principles.

Poetry is the life, the moving force of Burke’s speech. In fact, he is the poet in prose. Hazlitt says-

“Burke’s eloquence was that of the poet, of the man of high bran unbounded fancy; his wisdom was profound and contemplative.”

In his mingling of fact and fancy, philosophy, statistics, and his brilliant flights of the imagination to a degree never seen in English literature, Burke belongs to the new romantic school, while in style he is a model for the formal classicists. His metaphors are brilliant; his imageries are fanciful and pleasing. No writer of prose can be so opulent in imagery or lavish in colour as Burke is. The description of fishes of the colonies is a specimen of highly picturesque and poetical prose. Again, the description of how the surplus agricultural produces of colonies support England is brilliant and emotionally appealing:

“The scarcity which you have felt would have been a desolating famine, if this child of your old age, with a true filial piety, with a Roman charity, had not put the full breast of its youthful exuberance to the mouth of its exhausted parent.”

Burke possessed the gorgeous splendour of Romantic imagination and in his speech, there is a fusion of classical and imaginative, intelligence and emotion.

When Burke speaks of America’s whale industry, he becomes eloquent and reveals the panoramic beauty of the polar regions:

“Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice, and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits, whilst we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes, and engaged under the frozen Serpent of the south.”

The description, apart from its meaning, gives the audience physical delight.

As an orator, Burke adorns his speeches with rhetorical devices. The decoration of his speeches in a manner peculiarly of his own renders them infatuating qualities. In the “Speech on Conciliation with America” he manipulates all the powerful rhetorical tricks of rhythm, alliteration, assonance, consonance, repetition and so on. The lines in which Burke explicitly states his motto of deliberation are mostly rhythmic –

“It is simple peace; sought in its natural course, and in its ordinary haunts. It is peace sought in the spirit of peace, and laid in principles purely pacific.”

The word ‘peace’ is emphasized, and repeated. The alliteration of the ‘p’ sound makes the passages melodious and it helps attract the attention of the audience.

As an orator, following the tradition of parliamentary debate, Burke makes abundant but effective uses of the great devices of ironies and sarcasm. In fact, these are his favourite weapons which supply his deficiency in the lack of humour. He also uses antithesis to sharpen the edge of his arguments in the right place. Examples are “What nature has disjoined in one way, wisdom may unite in another”, “a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered” or “whilst the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends”.

Burke’s prose is marked by alteration of periods and short sentences. In his “Speech on Conciliation with America” the longest periods are both preceded by and followed by short sentences. Burke does this with purpose. His aim is to relieve the audience from monotony. It also creates a dramatic effect.

But Burke’s style is not flawless; it has defects. He is not sweet in the ordinary sense. He is not even easy. There is little humour in his prose. He is at times pungent and even bitterly ironic. Connected with the want of humour is also his lack of pathos. Gosse remarks in this regard:

“To be a perfect prose-writer, a man must sometime bank upon thrilling and soul-subduing instruments, but Burke never takes the trumpet from his lips. To those few who may think him humorous, I resign him in despair; and surely still fewer will be found to think him pathetic. The greatest of English prose-writers, we may be sure, would be found to have some command over laughter and tears but Burke has none.”

Burke the artist, and the rhetorician, always assails Burke the politician. Even though there are marks of political sagacity in the speeches that Burke made, as an orator, he is more remarkable for the artistic resourcefulness and brilliance that run through his speeches. The greatness of his oration lies in its worth as literature and in his unique capacity to rise above the immediate contest. To sum up, in the words of Morley:

“In all its varieties of his ornate style, it is noble, earnest, deep-flowing because his sentiment was lofty and fervid, and went with sincerity and ardent, disciplined travail of judgment. His driest pieces have the mark of greatness, grasp and comprehension. Burke had the style of his subjects, the weightiness, laboriousness and the grandeur proper to his great themes of Justice and Freedom”.