rated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society." Note that Burke did not deny the truth of the assertion that "a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,—and an animal not of the highest order." He denied only that it was safe to dispense with the "pleasing illusion" that things were otherwise. According to the "mechanical philosophy" of the Enlightenment,

all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded, as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Burke capped his defense of prejudice with the same figure. To "cast away the coat of prejudice," he argued, would "leave nothing but the naked reason."

Burke's defense of prejudice, together with his insistence on the need for "decent drapery," illustrates the distinction between memory and custom and exposes the mistake of associating tradition too closely with the latter. The concept of tradition "stands in need of clarification," writes Bruce James Smith in Politics and Remembrance, a study based in part on an analysis of Burke. Smith maintains that tradition owes more to memory than to custom. Custom concerns the ordinary and unexceptional; memory, the extraordinary and unexpected. Custom surrounds itself with silence, a hushed air of veneration; memory, with oratory, disputation, dialectic. Societies that set a high value on custom take little interest in their own origins, whereas societies unified (and divided) by memories cultivate a founding myth that remains a point of moral reference and recalls men and women to an awareness of their civic obligations.

If we accept these distinctions, we should see Burke not as a traditionalist, strictly speaking, but as the sociologist of oblivion. Smith contrasts him with Machiavelli, whose political thought originated precisely in a fear of oblivion, according to Smith. Machiavelli preferred a republic to a hereditary monarchy because it inspired men with a longing to be remembered for their glorious actions. Memory conferred a vicarious im

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