its moments of eruption, and
poured them forth pell-mell with the vituperations and the exaltations.

No logical dissection can reach the inner truth of Burke. Every
statement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured by
the occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it is
addressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by the
subversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the French
Revolution. It was in the process of "diffusing the Terror" that most of
his philosophical _obiter dicta_ were uttered. The real nerve of the
thinking of a mind so vehement, so passionate, so essentially dramatic
is to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise of his
syllogisms, but in some pervading emotion. Fanny Burney said of him that
when he spoke of the Revolution his face immediately assumed "the
expression of a man who is going to defend himself against murderers."
That is exactly the tone of all his later utterances. His mission was to
spread panic because he felt it. By no other reading can one explain or
excuse the rage of his denunciation of the excellent Dr. Price.

If his was philosophy it was philosophy seeing red. He predicted the
Terror before it occurred, and by his work in stirring Europe to the
coalition against France, he did much to realise his own forebodings.
But, to do Burke justice, his was a disinterested fear, and it would be
fairer to call it a hatred of cruelty. Burke was not a man to take fire
because he thought a principle false. His was rather the practical logic
which found a principle false because it led to evil; and the evil which
caused his mind to blaze was nearly always cruelty. He hated the French
philosophers because in the groves of their Academy "at the end of every
vista you see nothing but the gallows." He pursued Rousseau and Dr.
Price because their teaching, on his reading of cause and effect, had
set the tumbrils rolling and weighted the guillotine for Marie
Antoinette. It was precisely the same impulse which had caused him to
pursue Warren Hastings for his cruelties towards the Begums of Oude. The
spring of all this speculation was a nerve which twitched with a
maddening sensitiveness at the sight of suffering.

To rouse Burke's genius to its noblest utterance, there must needs be a
suffering which he could personify and dramatise. He saw nothing of the
dull peasant misery which in truth explained the Revolution.