READING - or viewing - this admirable and handsomely produced a little unsettling. Its vivid images connect and merge so as to create a macabre animated film made up of malign fairy tales, peopled by late 18th century public figures.
Mr Robinson exhaustively charts the gripping engagement between Burke and contemporary caricaturists. Burke's earlcatural image sets early and immutably. Even Burke's impassioned opposition to the French Revolution does not produce any discernible softening in his marvellously inventive denigration at the hand of James Gill ray.
The motifs constantly recur: Burke as a scheming and emaciated Jesuit; Burke as an eccentrically bespectacled Don Quixote; Burke as the over excited orator and man of letters, consigned to Bedlam; Burke as the arriviste adventurer, renegade and opportunist.
Graphic references to Burke's Irishness are more sparse than might have been expected, largely because the taunt of Irishness is subsumed in the imputation to Burke of Catholic sympathies. The potato does feature in the iconography of Burke, and in the dialogue attributed to him "arrah" and "by Jasus" are favoured expletives.
The late 18th century was an era of robust scurrility (the depiction of a politician as a gombeen man would have been considered unwontedly mild). It is exceedingly difficult to assess the degree or nature of the actual malice and prejudices the caricatures reflected and sought to exploit. Gillray's dyspeptic patriotism does not equate to late 19th century chauvinistic nationalism. Moreover, the images assigned to individual politicians are highly ritualised, like masks in a political commedia dell arte, and are in that respect almost impersonal.
Mr Robinson suggests, plausibly, that Burke, who in 1796 wrote of "the hunt of obloquy, which ever has pursued me with full cry through life", was more wounded than the more frequently caricatured Charles James Fox, whose place in the social and political establishment was far more secure.
What may have been most infuriating for Burke was that he was depicted above all as what, in modern parlance, would be termed an intellectual (a term which was first used a century later, in the Dreyfus affair). An intellectual was precisely what Burke did not wish to be considered a indeed, he attributed the debacle of the French Revolution in large part to the role of intellectuals. This depiction of Burke further emphasised that Burke remained in important respects an outsider. This work is thus in one aspect a chapter in the pre history of the modern idea of the intellectual.
To have written a treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful was to fling down the gauntlet to any self respecting caricaturist. It is picked up again and again in the caricatures here reproduced. "The Sublime and Beautiful" becomes a trade name derisively assigned to Burke. Burke's only defence lay in the suppleness of his language. He responded by heightening the graphic elements of his rhetoric. When the Duke of Bedford, whose family had been the recipient of royal favours on a colossal scale, denounced the grant of a relatively modest pension to him, Burke retorted:
The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst `he lies floating many a rood', he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin and covers me with the spray, everything of him and about him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dispensation of the royal favour?
Even on disadvantageous terrain, Burke remained a supremely resourceful combatant.