The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography and Commented Anthology of Edmund Burke.

The Great Melody: A Themarie Biography and Commented Anthob ogy of Edmund Burke, by Conor Cruise O'Brien (Chicago, 692 pp., $34.95)

CONOR Cruise O'Brien set out, some twenty years ago, to write a conventional biography of Edmund Burke, only to give it up as a fruitless undertaking. As he studied the secondary literature (dominated as it was by the anti-Burkean writings of Sir Lewis Namier and his disciples), his subject appeared to shrink in significance, and the part of Burke that interested O'Brien, his "mind and heart," seemed to grow "further and further away." But he continued to be haunted by a pair of lines from Yeats ("American colonies, Ireland, France and India / Harried, and Burke's great melody against it"), which at first he resisted and did not fully understand, beyond its suggestion that Burke's positions on those four great public issues were entirely consistent, one with another. Then he realized, or thought he realized, the principle that informed and lent unity to all Burke's writings and speeches: opposition to the abuse of power in its varying forms. Around that principle O'Brien organized the present book, composed in roughly equal parts of biography, anthology, and commentary and analysis.

O'Brien makes a fascinating and persuasive case. Clearly, Burke's stand in regard to America, along with that of the other Rockingham Whigs, was part of a larger opposition to the excessive and corruptly obtained power of George III, which threatened to destroy the equilibrium of the English constitution. Support of the repeal of the Penal Laws in Ireland, as obviously, was meant to right centuries of abuses of power by the English and by Irish Protestants. The campaign against Warren Hastings and the East India Company was aimed at similar abuses. And Burke perceived the French Revolution as perhaps the greatest abuse of power known to man, because it substituted worship of reason for the worship of God and prescribed the deadly doctrines of liberte, egalitd, fraternite.

Along the way, O'Brien develops another fascinating theme. Biographers have generally assumed that Burke's father, "a Protestant lawyer," exercised a prevailing influence upon the son and that Edmund grew to be thoroughly Anglicized. Yet his mother's family and his wife were Catholics, and O'Brien believes that Burke was more Irish and more nearly Catholic than he could afford to admit and still have a career in English politics. Indeed, O'Brien argues convincingly that Burke was deeply guilt-ridden for having forsaken his heritage to advance his career.

There are, however, problems. Some are of the nitpicky variety. O'Brien often repeats himself, sometimes contradicts himself, and periodically lapses into using the present tense for no apparent reason. He is occasionally careless with details. His knowledge of America during the period is superficial, yet he advances some bold (and indefensible) generalizations.

On a more substantive level, although he does not appear to notice it, O'Brien offers quotations that seem to indicate that Burke was not quite so consistent as O'Brien's interpretive schema would have him be. Thus, for example, in speaking of India, Burke holds that "the rights of men, that is to say, the natural rights of mankind, are indeed sacred things"; whereas in talking of the effects of the French Revolution he declares that "wherever the rights of man were preached," the outcome was "toil and trouble, discord and blood."

The apparent inconsistencies are readily reconciled if one perceives of Burke not as an enemy to the abuse of power but as a conservative--however, this O'Brien steadfastly refuses to do. To O'Brien, Burke is a "pluralist," a "liberal and counter-revolutionary," not a conservative. He airily dismisses Russell Kirk's studies of Burke as the work of a "polemical and propagandist" cold warrior, but it seems obvious to me that Kirk's interpretation is much closer to a common-sense reading of Burke. One illustration: O'Brien quotes a long passage that ends, "The situation of man is the preceptor of his duty." That encapsulates the essence of conservatism, but O'Brien regards it merely as "a good example of the Burkean aphorism."

Bruce Frohnen, in a remarkable first book called Virtue and the Promise of Conservatism, sees Burke more clearly. His opening two chapters, devoted to an analysis of the nature of Burke's conservatism, are consonant with Kirk's understanding. Frohnen, however, while regarding Burke as enduringly sound in principle, finds him not entirely relevant for the modern world, since the egalitarianism and democracy that Burke loathed and dreaded have become inescapable facts of life.

For further guidance, Frohnen therefore turns to Tocqueville, to whom he also devotes two chapters. He sees Tocqueville's principles as being wholly compatible with Burke's, but adapted to democracy: Tocqueville points out democracy's virtues (mainly the freedom it promises every man to live a meaningfully virtuous life) as well as its dangers (mainly the breakdown of public spirit through an excess of individualism and materialism and the tyranny of the majority).

Though the chapters on Burke and Tocqueville comprise roughly half the book, they are but a necessary background to Frohnen's main concern, "the dilemma of contemporary conservatism." From both Burke and Tocqueville he concludes that it is God's will that man accept, lovingly, the society which he inherits from the past, and that the virtuous man finds fulfillment by seeking to conserve it through prudential means, including prudential change. But "Man can conserve only what he can defend, and he can defend only what he believes, in his heart, to be good"; whereas modern society has increasingly abandoned the "pursuit of the good life in favor of a pursuit of the comfortable life."

Having posed the problem, Frohnen turns to three modern conservatives of different stripes--Michael Oakeshott, Irving Kristol, and Russell Kirk--to see how they address it. He applauds Oakeshott for his recognition of the limits of human reason and his rejection of rationalism. "Reason," he paraphrases Oakeshott as saying, "must be supplemented by habit (the following of modes) and, what is not the same thing, unquestioning acceptance [of historically prescribed habit] if it is to serve its most basic function of allowing us to act rationally." Burke and Tocqueville had "emphasized the habitual nature of much human action, ... But in Oakeshott's work existing circumstances and practices become themselves the arbiters of right action rather than the embodiments of any transcendent moral truth." For that reason--because Oakeshott sees religion as only a useful myth Frohnen finds his philosophy unacceptable.

Kristol appeals to Frohnen for his belief in small units of government and intermediate associations, and for his devastating attacks upon utopian philosophical systems (what Burke called the rejection of experience for a "mere theory") but finds in Kristol even less reason for hope than in Oakeshott. "The society that Kristol would conserve and defend is in fact in need of salvation and not merely preservation. By his own reckoning, Kristol's good society is not good"--just "the least of possible evils." Though Kristol longs for a society in which the good life is possible, he "has abandoned even the attempt to formulate fully a conception" of what that might be.

It should be evident by now that Frohnen is most closely attuned to Russell Kirk and Kirk's concern for "the permanent things." He does fault Kirk somewhat for his "almost exclusive emphasis on the printed page" and for his "failure to restate the traditional conservative emphasis on habit in the formation of proper character." But his summing up is one that Kirk would accept: "What is needed in all political philosophy--today more than ever is the humility to admit man's need for transcendent, objective moral truth. Courage is also needed if we are to submit to the rigors involved."

Frohnen offers no formulas for salvation: that would be a profoundly unconservative thing to do. But he has written a thoughtful, provocative, important book--which should be widely read and seriously discussed.