A Skeptical Tory

...But upon the common platform of the conservative conviction, Greene says, "there are those like Burke, with whom Bolingbroke, Coleridge, Disraeli, and T. S. Eliot may be classed, whose conservatism can be described as idealistic or even Romantic—as Nisbet points out, it was after the French Revolution that it began to flourish vigorously (though it had precursors) ; and certainly one of its most characteristic (and most appealing) figures was the arch-Romantic Sir Walter Scott...

...Greene is at last prepared to admit that the main tendency of Johnson's influence is to be found in: "All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage . . . 'Change.' says Hooker, 'is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better.' There is in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction...

...One suspects the scholarly author of this 18th-century study of some such intention with regard to the word "conservative...

...In the last 30 years we have seen intellectual attempts to take Communism away from the Communists, Marx from the Marxists, Freud from the Freudians, Nietzsche from the Nietzscheans...

...On the contrary, they form the very heart of his political thinking...

...Greene writes as if he had himself taken to heart Johnson's observation that "distrust is a necessary qualification of a student of history...

...These reflections turn out, on examination, to depend upon an elementary distinction which, by some neglect on the part of the expositors of conservatism, seems not to have been widely noticed, though its presence has doubtless made itself felt in a certain uneasiness among some of those who have followed these discussions with any interest...

...He was against every variety of cant, "yet he makes it clear that a scholarly skepticism is not the same as indiscriminate incredulity...

...It romanticizes the relation of governor and governed, and in its extreme form regards submission to authority as so far from a 'necessary evil' as to erect it into a source of positive pleasure...

...It is attracted by metaphysics...

...Author, "The Crippled Giant" IT IS PROBABLY a sign of the times that interest should be developing in the definition of the term "conservative" and that a distinction should be discerned between different kinds of conservatives...

...To discover the extent and fervency of Johnson's humanitarianism, one need only glance through the Rambler and the Idler, with their pleas for the mitigation of the criminal law, for charity toward the lot of the prostitute, their attacks on capital punishment, the imprisonment of debtors, the barbarity of war, the tyranny of brutal country squires over their tenants and neighbors, the experimental mutilation of animals...

...The distinction is between an idealistic "or even Romantic" conservatism on the one hand and a "rational or skeptical" conservatism on the other...

...The earlier and by far the largest part of the book is devoted to demolition of the conventional picture of Johnson as perhaps the last great Tory...

...On the other hand, says Greene, there are the skeptical conservatives of whom Johnson, Hobbes, Hume and Gibbon are outstanding examples...

...His original speculation is to be found in a chapter well-hidden in the back of the book and camouflaged under the disarming title: "A Recapitulation and Some Reflections...

...Very surprising, too, is Greene's demonstration that not only in Johnson himself was humanitarianism allied to conservatism of political temper but that in his century generally humanitarianism ( as expressed in the evangelical movement with which Johnson enjoyed numerous associations) was allied to conservatism...

...All those who have any legitimate claim to the designation of conservative share the feeling which Johnson expressed in the words: "All change is of itself an evil, which ought not to be hazarded but for evident advantage...

...Greene shows us that unless we have made a close study of the 13th century we have very little notion of what the term Tory signified then...

...What the dangers of this last tendency are can be discerned from observing the careers of some of the spiritual heirs of Hegel in the twentieth century...

...This is a highly rational, not an irrational attitude...

...I am not qualified to judge this book as an 18th century specialist, but as a general reader I found it interesting and valuable...

...But this is in the latter part of the book...

...If it was impossible to avoid having either one of the two current political labels attached to him, one can see why Johnson, the independent commentator on men and manners, should have preferred that of Tory...

...It has a tendency to idealize history . . . and to project those idealizations into the present and future...

...On the basis of experience [the skeptical conservative finds] the probability is that the confusion arising from an upheaval in the familiar ways of doing things, absurd as they may be, will produce a greater total of unhappiness than will be balanced by the amount of happiness to be produced by the proposed reform...

...First, for example, the idea of being a party man was not generally in good repute—an attitude that perhaps survives in George Washington's warning to his countrymen against the evils of party rule...

...Having unearthed the evidence from a hundred sources, scrutinized it and submitted it to the light of some fresh thinking...

...Johnson: "Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things...

...for that state from which all escape as soon as they can, and to which none return after they have left it, must be less happy...

...That they were less happy seems plain...

...and this is the case with the state of dependence on a chief or great man.' " The objection of skeptical conservatives ''to proposals by would-be reformers for the rational reconstruction of an imperfect society is not the Burkean conservative's, that the proposals are rational, and that an irrational institution that has existed for a long time is to be cherished...

...Their objection is rather that on analysis the proposed reforms are at least as irrational as the institutions they are designed to replace: 'Boswell: "So, Sir, you laugh at schemes of political improvement...

...An intellectual like Johnson was, then, something very like what we would call an "independent" in politics today...

...Secondly, Greene presents us with a convincing psychological analysis to show that if Johnson professed sympathy for the Tories it was, as much as for any other reason, because he generally opposed the tyranny of fashion and because the Tories throughout most of the 18th century were the political "outs" or underdogs: "The simple fact [is] that the label of Tory was unfashionable in intellectual circles and . . . Johnson was always a rebel against tyranny of intellectual fashion, insofar as there was a Tory 'line' in the political contests of the century, it was that of rebellion, of protest, of independence, of refusal to be bound by dogma or by allegiance to the interest of a group of professional politicians...

...On the subject of subordination, the difference between the attitudes of the romantic conservative and the skeptical one may be illustrated by this passage from Boswell: "I said, I believed mankind were happier in the ancient feudal state of subordination, than they are in the modern state of independency.— "Johnson: 'To be sure, the Chief was: but we must think of the number of individuals...

...These attitudes, together with Johnson's hatred of Negro slavery, are not to be regarded as unexpected or anomalous in him...

...Johnson is his hero, one feels, because he was opposed to stereotyped thinking and the mechanical attitudes that result from it...

...Their opposite numbers, it might be remarked, are those who are intoxicated with change and who derive both pleasure and profit from it...

...In the same vein Greene tells us that "Johnson is a defender of the Stuarts because an unthinking contempt for the Stuarts is fashionable, and because all his life he has fought against the abdication of human reason and observation to the power of intellectual fashion, as to authoritarianism in any other guise...