CRITICAL MISCELLANIES by JOHN MORLEY VOL. I. ESSAY 4: MACAULAY LondonMacMillan and Co. , LimitedNew York: The MacMillan Company1904 MACAULAY. The Life of Macaulay 253 Macaulay's vast popularity 254 He and Mill, the two masters of the modern journalist 256 His marked quality 259 Set his stamp on style 260 His genius for narration 262 His copiousness of illustration 264 Macaulay's, the style of literary knowledge 266 His use of generous commonplace 267 Perfect accord with his audience 271 Dislike of analysis 272 Not meditative 273 Macaulay's is the prose of spoken deliverance 276 Character of his geniality 278 Metallic hardness and brightness 279 Compared with Carlyle 281 Harsh modulations and shallow cadences 283 Compared with Burke 283 Or with Southey 285 Faults of intellectual conscience 286 Vulgarity of thought 289 Conclusion 290 MACAULAY. 'After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, ' saysGibbon, 'I suspended the perusal till I had finished the task ofself-examination, till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knewor believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of someparticular chapter; I was then qualified to discern how much the authoradded to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by theagreement, I was sometimes warned by the opposition of our ideas. ' It isalso told of Strafford that before reading any book for the first time, he would call for a sheet of paper, and then proceed to write down uponit some sketch of the ideas that he already had upon the subject of thebook, and of the questions that he expected to find answered. No one whohas been at the pains to try the experiment, will doubt the usefulnessof this practice: it gives to our acquisitions from books clearness andreality, a right place and an independent shape. At this moment we areall looking for the biography of an illustrious man of letters, writtenby a near kinsman, who is himself naturally endowed with keen literaryinterests, and who has invigorated his academic cultivation bypractical engagement in considerable affairs of public business. Beforetaking up Mr. Trevelyan's two volumes, it is perhaps worth while, onStrafford's plan, to ask ourselves shortly what kind of significance orvalue belongs to Lord Macaulay's achievements, and to what place he hasa claim among the forces of English literature. It is seventeen yearssince he died, and those of us who never knew him nor ever saw him, maynow think about his work with that perfect detachment which isimpossible in the case of actual contemporaries. [1] [Footnote 1: Since the following piece was written, Mr. Trevelyan'sbiography of Lord Macaulay has appeared, and has enjoyed the greatpopularity to which its careful execution, its brightness of style, itsgood taste, its sound judgment, so richly entitle it. If Mr. Trevelyan'scourse in politics were not so useful as it is, one might be tempted toregret that he had not chosen literature for the main field of hiscareer. The portrait which he draws of Lord Macaulay is so irresistiblyattractive in many ways, that a critic may be glad to have delivered hissoul before his judgment was subject to a dangerous bias, by the pictureof Macaulay's personal character--its domestic amiability, itsbenevolence to unlucky followers of letters, its manliness, its highpublic spirit and generous patriotism. On reading my criticism overagain, I am well pleased to find that not an epithet needs to bealtered, --so independent is opinion as to this strong man's work, of ouresteem for his loyal and upright character. ] That Macaulay comes in the very front rank in the mind of the ordinarybookbuyer of our day is quite certain. It is an amusement with somepeople to put an imaginary case of banishment to a desert island, withthe privilege of choosing the works of one author, and no more than one, to furnish literary companionship and refreshment for the rest of alifetime. Whom would one select for this momentous post? Clearly theauthor must be voluminous, for days on desert islands are many and long;he must be varied in his moods, his topics, and his interests; he musthave a great deal to say, and must have a power of saying it that shallarrest a depressed and dolorous spirit. Englishmen, of course, wouldwith mechanical unanimity call for Shakespeare; Germans could hardlyhesitate about Goethe; and a sensible Frenchman would pack up the ninetyvolumes of Voltaire. It would be at least as interesting to know theobject of a second choice, supposing the tyrant in his clemency to giveus two authors. In the case of Englishmen there is some evidence as to apopular preference. A recent traveller in Australia informs us that thethree books which he found on every squatter's shelf, and which at lasthe knew before he crossed the threshold that he should be sure to find, were Shakespeare, the Bible, and Macaulay's Essays. This is only anillustration of a feeling about Macaulay that has been almost universalamong the English-speaking peoples. We may safely say that no man obtains and keeps for a great many yearssuch a position as this, unless he is possessed of some veryextraordinary qualities, or else of common qualities in a very uncommonand extraordinary degree. The world, says Goethe, is more willing toendure the Incongruous than to be patient under the Insignificant. Eventhose who set least value on what Macaulay does for his readers, maystill feel bound to distinguish the elements that have given him hisvast popularity. The inquiry is not a piece of merely literarycriticism, for it is impossible that the work of so imposing a writershould have passed through the hands of every man and woman of his timewho has even the humblest pretensions to cultivation, without leaving avery decided mark on their habits both of thought and expression. As aplain matter of observation, it is impossible to take up a newspaper ora review, for instance, without perceiving Macaulay's influence both inthe style and the temper of modern journalism, and journalism in itsturn acts upon the style and temper of its enormous uncounted public. The man who now succeeds in catching the ear of the writers of leadingarticles, is in the position that used to be held by the head of somegreat theological school, whence disciples swarmed forth to reproduce inten thousand pulpits the arguments, the opinions, the images, thetricks, the postures, and the mannerisms of a single master. Two men of very different kinds have thoroughly impressed thejournalists of our time, Macaulay and Mr. Mill. Mr. Carlyle we do notadd to them; he is, as the Germans call Jean Paul, _der Einzige_. And heis a poet, while the other two are in their degrees serious andargumentative writers, dealing in different ways with the great topicsthat constitute the matter and business of daily discussion. They areboth of them practical enough to interest men handling real affairs, andyet they are general or theoretical enough to supply such men with thelarge and ready commonplaces which are so useful to a profession thathas to produce literary graces and philosophical decorations at anhour's notice. It might perhaps be said of these two distinguished menthat our public writers owe most of their virtues to the one, and mostof their vices to the other. If Mill taught some of them to reason, Macaulay tempted more of them to declaim: if Mill set an example ofpatience, tolerance, and fair examination of hostile opinions, Macaulaydid much to encourage oracular arrogance, and a rather too thrasonicalcomplacency; if Mill sowed ideas of the great economic, political, andmoral bearings of the forces of society, Macaulay trained a taste forsuperficial particularities, trivial circumstantialities of localcolour, and all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-picturesque. Of course nothing so obviously untrue is meant as that this is anaccount of Macaulay's own quality. What is empty pretension in theleading article, was often a warranted self-assertion in Macaulay; whatin it is little more than testiness, is in him often a generousindignation. What became and still remain in those who have made himtheir model, substantive and organic vices, the foundation of literarycharacter and intellectual temper, were in him the incidental defectsof a vigorous genius. And we have to take a man of his power and vigourwith all his drawbacks, for the one are wrapped up in the other. CharlesFox used to apply to Burke a passage that Quintilian wrote about Ovid. 'Si animi sui affectibus temperare quam indulgere maluisset, ' quotedFox, 'quid vir iste præstare non potuerit!' But this is really not atall certain either of Ovid, or Burke, or any one else. It suitsmoralists to tell us that excellence lies in the happy mean and nicebalance of our faculties and impulses, and perhaps in so far as our owncontentment and an easy passage through life are involved, what theytell us is true. But for making a mark in the world, for rising tosupremacy in art or thought or affairs--whatever those aims may beworth--a man possibly does better to indulge, rather than to chide orgrudge, his genius, and to pay the penalties for his weakness, ratherthan run any risk of mutilating those strong faculties of which theyhappen to be an inseparable accident. Versatility is not a universalgift among the able men of the world; not many of them have so manygifts of the spirit, as to be free to choose by what pass they willclimb 'the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar. ' If Macaulay hadapplied himself to the cultivation of a balanced judgment, of temperedphrases, and of relative propositions, he would probably have sunk intoan impotent tameness. A great pugilist has sometimes been converted fromthe error of his ways, and been led zealously to cherish gospel graces, but the hero's discourses have seldom had the notes of unction andedification. Macaulay, divested of all the exorbitancies of his spiritand his style, would have been a Samson shorn of the locks of hisstrength. Although, however, a writer of marked quality may do well to let hisgenius develop its spontaneous forces without too assiduous or vigilantrepression, trusting to other writers of equal strength in otherdirections, and to the general fitness of things and operation of time, to redress the balance, still it is the task of criticism in counting upthe contributions of one of these strong men to examine the mischiefs noless than the benefits incident to their work. There is no puny carpingnor cavilling in the process. It is because such men are strong thatthey are able to do harm; they may injure the taste and judgment of awhole generation, just because they are never mediocre. That is impliedin strength. Macaulay is not to be measured now merely as if he were theauthor of a new book. His influence has been a distinct literary force, and in an age of reading, this is to be a distinct force in deciding thetemper, the process, the breadth, of men's opinions, no less than themanner of expressing them. It is no new observation that the influenceof an author becomes in time something apart from his books: a certaingeneralised or abstract personality impresses itself on our minds, longafter we have forgotten the details of his opinions, the arguments bywhich he enforced them, and even, what are usually the last to escapeus, the images by which he illustrated them. Phrases and sentences are amask: but we detect the features of the man behind the mask. Thispersonality of a favourite author is a real and powerful agency. Unconsciously we are infected with his humours; we apply his methods; wefind ourselves copying the rhythm and measure of his periods; we wonderhow he would have acted, or thought, or spoken in our circumstances. Usually a strong writer leaves a special mark in some particular regionof mental activity: the final product of him is to fix some persistentreligious mood, or some decisive intellectual bias, or else some trickof the tongue. Now Macaulay has contributed no philosophic ideas to thespeculative stock, nor has he developed any one great historic or socialtruth. His work is always full of a high spirit of manliness, probity, and honour; but he is not of that small band to whom we may applyMackintosh's thrice and four times enviable panegyric on the eloquenceof Dugald Stewart, that its peculiar glory consisted in having 'breathedthe love of virtue into whole generations of pupils. ' He has paintedmany striking pictures, and imparted a certain reality to our conceptionof many great scenes of the past. He did good service in banishing oncefor all those sentimental Jacobite leanings and prejudices which hadbeen kept alive by the sophistry of the most popular of historians, andthe imagination of the most popular of romance writers. But where he sethis stamp has been upon style; style in its widest sense, not merely onthe grammar and mechanism of writing, but on what De Quincey describedas its _organology_; style, that is to say, in its relation to ideas andfeelings, its commerce with thought, and its reaction on what one maycall the temper or conscience of the intellect. Let no man suppose that it matters little whether the most universallypopular of the serious authors of a generation--and Macaulay was nothingless than this--affects _style coupé_ or _style soutenu_. The critic ofstyle is not the dancing-master, declaiming on the deep ineffable thingsthat lie in a minuet. He is not the virtuoso of supines and gerundives. The morality of style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose. ' When Comtetook pains to prevent any sentence from exceeding two lines of hismanuscript or five of print; to restrict every paragraph to sevensentences; to exclude every hiatus between two sentences, or evenbetween two paragraphs; and never to reproduce any word, except theauxiliary monosyllables, in two consecutive sentences; he justified hisliterary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart andintelligence of submission to artificial institutions. He felt, after hehad once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the sourceof continual and unforeseeable improvements even in thought, and heperceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literaryperfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number ofrigorous forms. We may add that verse itself is perfected, in the handsof men of poetic genius, in proportion to the severity of thismechanical regulation. Where Pope or Racine had one rule of metre, Victor Hugo has twenty, and he observes them as rigorously as analgebraist or an astronomer observes the rules of calculation ordemonstration. One, then, who touches the style of a generation acquiresno trifling authority over its thought and temper, as well as over thelength of its sentences. * * * * * The first and most obvious secret of Macaulay's place on popularbookshelves is that he has a true genius for narration, and narrationwill always in the eyes, not only of our squatters in the Australianbush, but of the many all over the world, stand first among literarygifts. The common run of plain men, as has been noticed since thebeginning of the world, are as eager as children for a story, and likechildren they will embrace the man who will tell them a story, withabundance of details and plenty of colour, and a realistic assurancethat it is no mere make-believe. Macaulay never stops to brood over anincident or a character, with an inner eye intent on penetrating to thelowest depth of motive and cause, to the furthest complexity of impulse, calculation, and subtle incentive. The spirit of analysis is not in him, and the divine spirit of meditation is not in him. His whole mind runsin action and movement; it busies itself with eager interest in allobjective particulars. He is seized by the external and the superficial, and revels in every detail that appeals to the five senses. 'Thebrilliant Macaulay, ' said Emerson, with slight exaggeration, 'whoexpresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that _good_ means good to eat, good to wear, materialcommodity. ' So ready a faculty of exultation in the exceeding greatglories of taste and touch, of loud sound and glittering spectacle, is agift of the utmost service to the narrator who craves immense audiences. Let it be said that if Macaulay exults in the details that go to ourfive senses, his sensuousness is always clean, manly, and fit for honestdaylight and the summer sun. There is none of that curious odour ofautumnal decay that clings to the passion of a more modern school forcolour and flavour and the enumerated treasures of subtle indulgence. Mere picturesqueness, however, is a minor qualification compared withanother quality which everybody assumes himself to have, but which is inreality extremely uncommon; the quality, I mean, of telling a taledirectly and in straightforward order. In speaking of Hallam, Macaulaycomplained that Gibbon had brought into fashion an unpleasant trick oftelling a story by implication and allusion. This provoking obliquityhas certainly increased rather than declined since Hallam's day. Mr. Froude, it is true, whatever may be his shortcomings on the side ofsound moral and political judgment, has admirable gifts in the way ofstraightforward narration, and Mr. Freeman, when he does not press toohotly after emphasis, and abstains from overloading his account withsuper-abundance of detail, is usually excellent in the way of directdescription. Still, it is not merely because these two writers are aliveand Macaulay is not, that most people would say of him that he isunequalled in our time in his mastery of the art of letting us know inan express and unmistakable way exactly what it was that happened;though it is quite true that in many portions of his too elaboratedHistory of William the Third he describes a large number of events aboutwhich, I think, no sensible man can in the least care either how theyhappened, or whether indeed they happened at all or not. Another reason why people have sought Macaulay is, that he has in oneway or another something to tell them about many of the most strikingpersonages and interesting events in the history of mankind. And he doesreally tell them something. If any one will be at the trouble to countup the number of those names that belong to the world and time, aboutwhich Macaulay has found not merely something, but something definiteand pointed to say, he will be astonished to see how large a portion ofthe wide historic realm is traversed in that ample flight of reference, allusion, and illustration, and what unsparing copiousness of knowledgegives substance, meaning, and attraction to that resplendent blaze ofrhetoric. Macaulay came upon the world of letters just as the middle classes wereexpanding into enormous prosperity, were vastly increasing in numbers, and were becoming more alive than they had ever been before to literaryinterests. His Essays are as good as a library: they make anincomparable manual and vade-mecum for a busy uneducated man, who hascuriosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know a little about thegreat lives and great thoughts, the shining words and many-colouredcomplexities of action, that have marked the journey of man through theages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance both with the imaginativeliterature and the history of Greece and Rome, with the literature andthe history of modern Italy, of France, and of England. Whatever hisspecial subject, he contrives to pour into it with singular dexterity astream of rich, graphic, and telling illustrations from all these widelydiversified sources. Figures from history, ancient and modern, sacredand secular; characters from plays and novels from Plautus down toWalter Scott and Jane Austen; images and similes from poets of every ageand every nation, 'pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical;' shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise saws fromsages, pleasantries caustic or pathetic from humorists; all these throngMacaulay's pages with the bustle and variety and animation of someglittering masque and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men. Hence, though Macaulay was in mental constitution one of the very leastShakesperean writers that ever lived, yet he has the Shakespereanquality of taking his reader through an immense gallery of interestingcharacters and striking situations. No writer can now expect to attainthe widest popularity as a man of letters unless he gives to the world_multa_ as well as _multum_. Sainte-Beuve, the most eminent man ofletters in France in our generation, wrote no less than twenty-sevenvolumes of his incomparable _Causeries_. Mr. Carlyle, the most eminentman of letters in England in our generation, has taught us that silenceis golden in thirty volumes. Macaulay was not so exuberantly copious asthese two illustrious writers, but he had the art of being as variouswithout being so voluminous. There has been a great deal of deliberate and systematic imitation ofMacaulay's style, often by clever men who might well have trusted totheir own resources. Its most conspicuous vices are very easy toimitate, but it is impossible for any one who is less familiar withliterature than Macaulay was, to reproduce his style effectively, forthe reason that it is before all else the style of great literaryknowledge. Nor is that all. Macaulay's knowledge was not only very wide;it was both thoroughly accurate and instantly ready. For this stream ofapt illustrations he was indebted to his extraordinary memory, and hisrapid eye for contrasts and analogies. They come to the end of his penas he writes; they are not laboriously hunted out in indexes, and thenadded by way of afterthought and extraneous interpolation. Hencequotations and references that in a writer even of equal knowledge, butwith his wits less promptly about him, would seem mechanical andawkward, find their place in a page of Macaulay as if by a delightfulprocess of complete assimilation and spontaneous fusion. * * * * * We may be sure that no author could have achieved Macaulay's boundlesspopularity among his contemporaries, unless his work had abounded inwhat is substantially Commonplace. Addison puts fine writing insentiments that are natural without being obvious, and this is a trueaccount of the 'law' of the exquisite literature of the Queen Anne men. We may perhaps add to Addison's definition, that the great secret of thebest kind of popularity is always the noble or imaginative handling ofCommonplace. Shakespeare may at first seem an example to the contrary;and indeed is it not a standing marvel that the greatest writer of anation that is distinguished among all nations for the pharisaism, puritanism, and unimaginative narrowness of its judgments on conduct andtype of character, should be paramount over all writers for the breadth, maturity, fulness, subtlety, and infinite variousness of his conceptionof human life and nature? One possible answer to the perplexity is thatthe puritanism does not go below the surface in us, and that Englishmenare not really limited in their view by the too strait formulas that aresupposed to contain their explanations of the moral universe. On thistheory the popular appreciation of Shakespeare is the irrepressibleresponse of the hearty inner man to a voice, in which he recognises thefull note of human nature, and those wonders of the world which are notdreamt of in his professed philosophy. A more obvious answer than thisis that Shakespeare's popularity with the many is not due to those finerglimpses that are the very essence of all poetic delight to the few, butto his thousand other magnificent attractions, and above all, after hisskill as a pure dramatist and master of scenic interest and situation, to the lofty or pathetic setting with which he vivifies, not thesubtleties or refinements, but the commonest and most elementary traitsof the commonest and most elementary human moods. The few with mindstouched by nature or right cultivation to the finer issues, admire thesupreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale, with its coarse plotand gross personages, and shooting it through with threads of variegatedmeditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative reflection and highpensive suggestion as to the deepest things and most secret parts of thelife of men. But to the general these finer threads are indiscernible. What touches them in the Shakesperean poetry, and most rightly touchesthem and us all, are topics eternally old, yet of eternal freshness, theperennial truisms of the grave and the bride-chamber, of shiftingfortune, of the surprises of destiny, and the emptiness of the answeredvow. This is the region in which the poet wins his widest if not hishardest triumphs, the region of the noble Commonplace. A writer dealing with such matters as principally occupied Macaulay, has not the privilege of resort to these great poetic inspirations. Yethistory, too, has its generous commonplaces, its plausibilities ofemotion, and no one has ever delighted more than Macaulay did, to appealto the fine truisms that cluster round love of freedom and love ofnative land. The high rhetorical topics of liberty and patriotism arehis readiest instruments for kindling a glowing reflection of thesemagnanimous passions in the breasts of his readers. That Englishman ishardly to be envied who can read without a glow such passages as that inthe History, about Turenne being startled by the shout of sternexultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, andexpressing the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it wasever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when theybeheld the enemy; while even the banished cavaliers felt an emotion ofnational pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumberedby foes and abandoned by friends, drive before it in headlong rout thefinest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp whichhad just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals ofFrance. Such prose as this is not less thrilling to a man who loves hiscountry, than the spirited verse of the Lays of Ancient Rome. And thecommonplaces of patriotism and freedom would never have been so powerfulin Macaulay's hands, if they had not been inspired by a sincere andhearty faith in them in the soul of the writer. His unanalytical turnof mind kept him free of any temptation to think of love of country as aprejudice, or a passion for freedom as an illusion. The cosmopolitan orinternational idea which such teachers as Cobden have tried to impresson our stubborn islanders, would have found in Macaulay not lukewarm orsceptical adherence, but point-blank opposition and denial. He believedas stoutly in the supremacy of Great Britain in the history of the goodcauses of Europe, as M. Thiers believes in the supremacy of France, orMazzini believed in that of Italy. The thought of the prodigiousindustry, the inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free government, the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate islandand its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, andtenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangiblepossessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostilecomer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, likethat which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves in the great poetof France, or sight of the dear city of the Violet Crown moved in anAthenian of old. Thus habitually, with all sincerity of heart, to offerto one of the greater popular prepossessions the incense due to anyother idol of superstition, sacred and of indisputable authority, and tolet this adoration be seen shining in every page, is one of the keysthat every man must find, who would make a quick and sure way into thetemple of contemporary fame. It is one of the first things to be said about Macaulay, that he was inexact accord with the common average sentiment of his day on everysubject on which he spoke. His superiority was not of that highest kindwhich leads a man to march in thought on the outside margin of thecrowd, watching them, sympathising with them, hoping for them, butapart. Macaulay was one of the middle-class crowd in his heart, and onlyrose above it by splendid attainments and extraordinary gifts ofexpression. He had none of that ambition which inflames some hardy men, to make new beliefs and new passions enter the minds of theirneighbours; his ascendency is due to literary pomp, not to fecundity ofspirit. No one has ever surpassed him in the art of combining resoluteand ostentatious common sense of a slightly coarse sort in choosing hispoint of view, with so considerable an appearance of dignity andelevation in setting it forth and impressing it upon others. Theelaborateness of his style is very likely to mislead people intoimagining for him a corresponding elaborateness of thought andsentiment. On the contrary, Macaulay's mind was really very simple, strait, and with as few notes in its register, to borrow a phrase fromthe language of vocal compass, as there are few notes, though they arevery loud, in the register of his written prose. When we look moreclosely into it, what at first wore the air of dignity and elevation, intruth rather disagreeably resembles the narrow assurance of a man whoknows that he has with him the great battalions of public opinion. Weare always quite sure that if Macaulay had been an Athenian citizentowards the ninety-fifth Olympiad, he would have taken sides with Anytusand Meletus in the impeachment of Socrates. A popular author must, in athorough-going way, take the accepted maxims for granted. He mustsuppress any whimsical fancy for applying the Socratic elenchus, or anyother engine of criticism, scepticism, or verification, to thosesentiments or current precepts of morals, which may in truth be veryequivocal and may be much neglected in practice, but which the publicopinion of his time requires to be treated in theory and in literatureas if they had been cherished and held sacred _semper, ubique, et abomnibus_. This is just what Macaulay does, and it is commonly supposed to be noheavy fault in him or any other writer for the common public. Man cannotlive by analysis alone, nor nourish himself on the secret delights ofirony. And if Macaulay had only reflected the more generous of theprejudices of mankind, it would have been well enough. Burke, forinstance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of a modern society asdeeply as Macaulay did; he believed society to be founded on prejudicesand held compact by them. Yet what size there is in Burke, what fineperspective, what momentum, what edification! It may be pleaded thatthere is the literature of edification, and there is the literature ofknowledge, and that the qualities proper to the one cannot lawfully beexpected from the other, and would only be very much out of place ifthey should happen to be found there. But there are two answers to this. First, Macaulay in the course of his varied writings discusses all sortsof ethical and other matters, and is not simply a chronicler of partyand intrigue, of dynasties and campaigns. Second, and more than this, even if he had never travelled beyond the composition of historicalrecord, he could still have sown his pages, as does every truly greatwriter, no matter what his subject may be, with those significant imagesor far-reaching suggestions, which suddenly light up a whole range ofdistant thoughts and sympathies within us; which in an instant affectthe sensibilities of men with a something new and unforeseen; and whichawaken, if only for a passing moment, the faculty and response of thediviner mind. Tacitus does all this, and Burke does it, and that is whymen who care nothing for Roman despots or for Jacobin despots, willstill perpetually turn to those writers almost as if they were on thelevel of great poets or very excellent spiritual teachers. One secret is that they, and all such men as they were, had that ofwhich Macaulay can hardly have had the rudimentary germ, the faculty ofdeep abstract meditation and surrender to the fruitful 'leisures of thespirit. ' We can picture Macaulay talking, or making a speech in theHouse of Commons, or buried in a book, or scouring his library forreferences, or covering his blue foolscap with dashing periods, oraccentuating his sentences and barbing his phrases; but can anybodythink of him as meditating, as modestly pondering and wondering, aspossessed for so much as ten minutes by that spirit of inwardness, whichhas never been wholly wanting in any of those kings and princes ofliterature, with whom it is good for men to sit in counsel? He seeksTruth, not as she should be sought, devoutly, tentatively, and with theair of one touching the hem of a sacred garment, but clutching her bythe hair of the head and dragging her after him in a kind of boisteroustriumph, a prisoner of war and not a goddess. All this finds itself reflected, as the inner temper of a man always isreflected, in his style of written prose. The merits of Macaulay's proseare obvious enough. It naturally reproduces the good qualities I of hisunderstanding, its strength, manliness, and directness. That exultationin material goods and glories of which we have already spoken, makes hispages rich in colour, and gives them the effect of a sumptuousgala-suit. Certainly the brocade is too brand-new, and has none of thedelicate charm that comes to such finery when it is a little faded. Again, nobody can have any excuse for not knowing exactly what it isthat Macaulay means. We may assuredly say of his prose what Boileau saysof his own poetry--'Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelquechose. ' This is a prodigious merit, when we reflect with what fatalalacrity human language lends itself in the hands of so many performersupon the pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity, ambiguity, disguise, and pretentious mystification. Scaliger is supposed to haveremarked of the Basques and their desperate tongue: ''Tis said theBasques understand one another; for my part, I will never believe it. 'The same pungent doubt might apply to loftier members of the hierarchyof speech than that forlorn dialect, but never to English as handled byMacaulay. He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life, and this mayseem a small merit, until we remember of how few writers we could saythe same. Macaulay is of those who think prose as susceptible of polished anddefinite form as verse, and he was, we should suppose, of those also whohold the type and mould of all written language to be spoken language. There are more reasons for demurring to the soundness of the latterdoctrine, than can conveniently be made to fill a digression here. Forone thing, spoken language necessarily implies one or more listeners, whereas written language may often have to express meditative moods andtrains of inward reflection that move through the mind without trace ofexternal reference, and that would lose their special traits by theintroduction of any suspicion that they were to be overheard. Again, even granting that all composition must be supposed to be meant, by thefact of its existence, to be addressed to a body of readers, it stillremains to be shown that indirect address to the inner ear should followthe same method and rhythm as address directly through impressions onthe outer organ. The attitude of the recipient mind is different, andthere is the symbolism of a new medium between it and the speaker. Thewriter, being cut off from all those effects which are producible by thephysical intonations of the voice, has to find substitutes for them byother means, by subtler cadences, by a more varied modulation, by firmernotes, by more complex circuits, than suffice for the utmost perfectionof spoken language, which has all the potent and manifold aids ofpersonality. In writing, whether it be prose or verse, you are free toproduce effects whose peculiarity one can only define vaguely, by sayingthat the senses have one part less in them than in any other of theforms and effects of art, and the imaginary voice one part more. But thequestion need not be laboured here, because there can be no dispute asto the quality of Macaulay's prose. Its measures are emphatically themeasures of spoken deliverance. Those who have made the experiment, pronounce him to be one of the authors whose works are most admirablyfitted for reading aloud. His firmness and directness of statement, hisspiritedness, his art of selecting salient and highly coloured detail, and all his other merits as a narrator, keep the listener's attention, and make him the easiest of writers to follow. Although, however, clearness, directness, and positiveness are masterqualities and the indispensable foundations of all good style, yet doesthe matter plainly by no means end with them. And it is even possibleto have these virtues so unhappily proportioned and inauspiciously mixedwith other turns and casts of mind, as to end in work with little graceor harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening purpose andvehement will. And it is overweeningness and self-confident will thatare the chief notes of Macaulay's style. It has no benignity. Energy isdoubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's energy is perhapsenergy without momentum, and he impresses us more by a strong volubilitythan by volume. It is the energy of interests and intuitions, whichthough they are profoundly sincere if ever they were sincere in any man, are yet in the relations which they comprehend, essentially superficial. Still, trenchancy whether in speaker or writer is a most effective tonefor a large public. It gives them confidence in their man, and preventstediousness--except to those who reflect how delicate is the poise oftruth, and what steeps and pits encompass the dealer in unqualifiedpropositions. To such persons, a writer who is trenchant in everysentence of every page, who never lapses for a line into the contingent, who marches through the intricacies of things in a blaze of certainty, is not only a writer to be distrusted, but the owner of a doubtful anddispleasing style. It is a great test of style to watch how an authordisposes of the qualifications, limitations, and exceptions that clogthe wings of his main proposition. The grave and conscientious men ofthe seventeenth century insisted on packing them all honestly along withthe main proposition itself, within the bounds of a single period. Burke arranges them in tolerably close order in the paragraph. Dr. Newmann, that winning writer, disperses them lightly over his page. OfMacaulay it is hardly unfair to say that he despatches allqualifications into outer space before he begins to write, or if hemagnanimously admits one or two here and there, it is only to bring themthe more imposingly to the same murderous end. We have spoken of Macaulay's interests and intuitions wearing a certainair of superficiality; there is a feeling of the same kind about hisattempts to be genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandonmentin it. It has no deep root in moral humour, and is merely a literaryform, resembling nothing so much as the hard geniality of some clevercollege tutor of stiff manners, entertaining undergraduates at anofficial breakfast-party. This is not because his tone is bookish; onthe contrary, his tone and level are distinctly those of the man of theworld. But one always seems to find that neither a wide range ofcultivation, nor familiar access to the best Whig circles, had quiteremoved the stiffness and self-conscious precision of the Clapham Sect. We would give much for a little more flexibility, and would welcome everso slight a consciousness of infirmity. As has been said, the onlypeople whom men cannot pardon are the perfect. Macaulay is like themilitary king who never suffered himself to be seen, even by theattendants in his bed-chamber, until he had had time to put on hisuniform and jack-boots. His severity of eye is very wholesome; it makeshis writing firm, and firmness is certainly one of the first qualitiesthat good writing must have. But there is such a thing as soft andconsiderate precision, as well as hard and scolding precision. Thosemost interesting English critics of the generation slightly anterior toMacaulay, --Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt, --were fully his equalsin precision, and yet they knew how to be clear, acute, and definite, without that edginess and inelasticity which is so conspicuous inMacaulay's criticisms, alike in their matter and their form. To borrow the figure of an old writer, Macaulay's prose is not like aflowing vestment to his thought, but like a suit of armour. It is oftensplendid and glittering, and the movement of the opening pages of hisHistory is superb in its dignity. But that movement is exceptional. As arule there is the hardness, if there is also often the sheen, ofhighly-wrought metal. Or, to change our figure, his pages are composedas a handsome edifice is reared, not as a fine statue or a frieze 'withbossy sculptures graven' grows up in the imaginative mind of thestatuary. There is no liquid continuity, such as indicates a writerpossessed by his subject and not merely possessing it. The periods aremarshalled in due order of procession, bright and high-stepping; theynever escape under an impulse of emotion into the full current of abrimming stream. What is curious is that though Macaulay seems ever tobe brandishing a two-edged gleaming sword, and though he steeps us in anatmosphere of belligerency, yet we are never conscious of inwardagitation in him, and perhaps this alone would debar him from a placeamong the greatest writers. For they, under that reserve, suppression, or management, which is an indispensable condition of the finestrhetorical art, even when aiming at the most passionate effects, stillsucceed in conveying to their readers a thrilling sense of the strongfires that are glowing underneath. Now when Macaulay advances with hishectoring sentences and his rough pistolling ways, we feel all the timethat his pulse is as steady as that of the most practised duellist whoever ate fire. He is too cool to be betrayed into a single phrase ofhappy improvisation. His pictures glare, but are seldom warm. Thosestrokes of minute circumstantiality which he loved so dearly, show thateven in moments when his imagination might seem to be moving bothspontaneously and ardently, it was really only a literary instrument, afashioning tool and not a melting flame. Let us take a single example. He is describing the trial of Warren Hastings. 'Every step in theproceedings, ' he says, 'carried the mind either backward through manytroubled centuries to the days when the foundations of our constitutionwere laid; or far away over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nationsliving under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writingstrange characters from right to left. The odd triviality of the lastdetail, its unworthiness of the sentiment of the passage, leaves thereader checked, what sets out as a fine stroke of imagination dwindlesdown to a sort of literary conceit. And this puerile twist, by the way, is all the poorer, when it is considered that the native writing isreally from left to right, and only takes the other direction in aforeign, that is to say, a Persian alphabet. And so in other places, even where the writer is most deservedly admired for gorgeouspicturesque effect, we feel that it is only the literary picturesque, akind of infinitely glorified newspaper-reporting. Compare, for instance, the most imaginative piece to be found in any part of Macaulay'swritings with that sudden and lovely apostrophe in Carlyle, afterdescribing the bloody horrors that followed the fall of the Bastille in1789:--'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slanton reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning incottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on balls at the Orangerieat Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the Palace are even nowdancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaringHell-porch of a Hôtel de Ville!' Who does not feel in this the breath ofpoetic inspiration, and how different it is from the mere composite ofthe rhetorician's imagination, assiduously working to order? This remark is no disparagement of Macaulay's genius, but aclassification of it. We are interrogating our own impressions, andasking ourselves among what kind of writers he ought to be placed. Rhetoric is a good and worthy art, and rhetorical authors are often moreuseful, more instructive, more really respectable than poetical authors. But it is to be said that Macaulay as a rhetorician will hardly beplaced in the first rank, by those who have studied both him and thegreat masters. Once more, no amount of embellishment or emphasis orbrilliant figure suffices to produce this intense effect of agitationrigorously restrained; nor can any beauty of decoration be in the leasta substitute for that touching and penetrative music, which is made inprose by the repressed trouble of grave and high souls. There is acertain music, we do not deny, in Macaulay, but it is the music of a maneverlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a silver trumpet, never theswelling diapasons of the organ, and never the deep ecstasies of thefour magic strings. That so sensible a man as Macaulay should keep clearof the modern abomination of dithyrambic prose, that rank and sprawlingweed of speech, was natural enough; but then the effects which we missin him, and which, considering how strong the literary faculty in himreally was, we are almost astonished to miss, are not produced bydithyramb but by repression. Of course the answer has been alreadygiven; Macaulay, powerful and vigorous as he was, had no agitation, nowonder, no tumult of spirit to repress. The world was spread out clearbefore him; he read it as plainly and as certainly as he read his books;life was all an affair of direct categoricals. This was at least one secret of those hard modulations and shallowcadences. How poor is the rhythm of Macaulay's prose we only realise bygoing with his periods fresh in our ear to some true master of harmony. It is not worth while to quote passages from an author who is ineverybody's library, and Macaulay is always so much like himself thatalmost any one page will serve for an illustration exactly as well asany other. Let any one turn to his character of Somers, for whom he hadso much admiration, and then turn to Clarendon's character ofFalkland;--'a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowingand obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitivesimplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand uponthis odious and accursed civil war than that single loss, it must bemost infamous and execrable to all posterity. ' Now Clarendon is not agreat writer, not even a good writer, for he is prolix and involved, yetwe see that even Clarendon, when he comes to a matter in which his heartis engaged, becomes sweet and harmonious in his rhythm. If we turn to aprose-writer of the very first place, we are instantly conscious of astill greater difference. How flashy and shallow Macaulay's periodsseem, as we listen to the fine ground-base that rolls in the melody ofthe following passage of Burke's, and it is taken from one of the leastornate of all his pieces:-- You will not, we trust, believe that, born in a civilised country, formed to gentle manners, trained in a merciful religion, and living in enlightened and polished times, where even foreign hostility is softened from its original sternness, we could have thought of letting loose upon you, our late beloved brethren, these fierce tribes of savages and cannibals, in whom the traces of human nature are effaced by ignorance and barbarity. We rather wished to have joined with you in bringing gradually that unhappy part of mankind into civility, order, piety, and virtuous discipline, than to have confirmed their evil habits and increased their natural ferocity by fleshing them in the slaughter of you, whom our wiser and better ancestors had sent into the wilderness with the express view of introducing, along with our holy religion, its humane and charitable manners. We do not hold that all things are lawful in war. We should think every barbarity, in fire, in wasting, in murders, in tortures, and other cruelties, too horrible and too full of turpitude for Christian mouths to utter or ears to hear, if done at our instigation, by those who we know will make war thus if they make it at all, to be, to all intents and purposes, as if done by ourselves. We clear ourselves to you our brethren, to the present age, and to future generations, to our king and our country, and to Europe, which as a spectator, beholds this tragic scene, of every part or share in adding this last and worst of evils to the inevitable mischiefs of a civil war. We do not call you rebels and traitors. We do not call for the vengeance of the crown against you. We do not know how to qualify millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly revere the principles on which you act, though we lament some of their effects. Armed as you are, we embrace you, as our friends and as our brethren by the best and dearest ties of relation. It may be said that there is a patent injustice in comparing the proseof a historian criticising or describing great events at second hand, with the prose of a statesman taking active part in great events, firedby the passion of a present conflict, and stimulated by the vividinterest of undetermined issues. If this be a well-grounded plea, and itmay be so, then of course it excludes a contrast not only with Burke, but also with Bolingbroke, whose fine manners and polished gaiety giveus a keen sense of the grievous garishness of Macaulay. If we may notinstitute a comparison between Macaulay and great actors on the stage ofaffairs, at least there can be no objection to the introduction ofSouthey as a standard of comparison. Southey was a man of letters pureand simple, and it is worth remarking that Macaulay himself admittedthat he found so great a charm in Southey's style, as nearly always toread it with pleasure, even when Southey was talking nonsense. Now, takeany page of the Life of Nelson or the Life of Wesley; consider how easy, smooth, natural, and winning is the diction and the rise and fall of thesentence, and yet how varied the rhythm and how nervous the phrases; andthen turn to a page of Macaulay, and wince under its stamping emphasis, its over-coloured tropes, its exaggerated expressions, its unlovelystaccato. Southey's History of the Peninsular War is now dead, but ifany of my readers has a copy on his highest shelves, I would venture toask him to take down the third volume, and read the concluding pages, of which Coleridge used to say that they were the finest specimen ofhistoric eulogy he had ever read in English, adding with forgivablehyperbole, that they were more to the Duke's fame and glory than acampaign. 'Foresight and enterprise with our commander went hand inhand; he never advanced but so as to be sure of his retreat; and neverretreated but in such an attitude as to impose upon a superior enemy, 'and so on through the sum of Wellington's achievements. 'There wassomething more precious than these, more to be desired than the high andenduring fame which he had secured by his military achievements, thesatisfaction of thinking to what end those achievements had beendirected; that they were for the deliverance of two most injured andgrievously oppressed nations; for the safety, honour, and welfare of hisown country; and for the general interests of Europe and of thecivilised world. His campaigns were sanctified by the cause; they weresullied by no cruelties, no crimes; the chariot-wheels of his triumphshave been followed by no curses; his laurels are entwined with theamaranths of righteousness, and upon his death-bed he might remember hisvictories among his good works. ' What is worse than want of depth and fineness of intonation in a period, is all gross excess of colour, because excess of colour is connectedwith graver faults in the region of the intellectual conscience. Macaulay is a constant sinner in this respect. The wine of truth is inhis cup a brandied draught, a hundred degrees above proof, and he toooften replenishes the lamp of knowledge with naphtha instead of fineoil. It is not that he has a spontaneous passion for exuberantdecoration, which he would have shared with more than one of thegreatest names in literature. On the contrary, we feel that theexaggerated words and dashing sentences are the fruit of deliberatetravail, and the petulance or the irony of his speech is mostly due to adriving predilection for strong effects. His memory, his directness, hisaptitude for forcing things into firm outline, and giving them a sharplydefined edge, --these and other singular talents of his all lentthemselves to this intrepid and indefatigable pursuit of effect. And themost disagreeable feature is that Macaulay was so often content with aneffect of an essentially vulgar kind, offensive to taste, discordant tothe fastidious ear, and worst of all, at enmity with the whole spirit oftruth. By vulgar we certainly do not mean homely, which marks a whollydifferent quality. No writer can be more homely than Mr. Carlyle, alikein his choice of particulars to dwell upon, and in the terms or imagesin which he describes or illustrates them, but there is also no writerfurther removed from vulgarity. Nor do we mean that Macaulay toocopiously enriches the tongue with infusion from any Doric dialect. Forsuch raciness he had little taste. What we find in him is that qualitywhich the French call brutal. The description, for instance, in theessay on Hallam, of the licence of the Restoration, seems to us a coarseand vulgar picture, whose painter took the most garish colours he couldfind on his palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity. Andwho is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account ofBoswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a greatwriter . . . He was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, ' and so forth, inwhich the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches thepuerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence aboutMontesquieu. 'The English at that time, ' Macaulay says of the middle ofthe eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked aboutconstitutional checks and fundamental laws as a prodigy not lessastonishing than the learned pig or musical infant. ' And he then goes onto describe the author of one of the most important books that ever werewritten, as 'specious but shallow, studious of effect, indifferent totruth--the lively President, ' and so forth, stirring in any reader whohappens to know Montesquieu's influence, a singular amazement. We arenot concerned with the judgment upon Montesquieu, nor with the truth asto contemporary English opinion about him, but a writer who devises anantithesis to such a man as Montesquieu in learned pigs and musicalinfants, deliberately condescends not merely to triviality or levity, but to flat vulgarity of thought, to something of mean and ignobleassociation. Though one of the most common, this is not Macaulay's onlysin in the same unfortunate direction. He too frequently resorts tovulgar gaudiness. For example, there is in one place a certaindescription of an alleged practice of Addison's. Swift had said ofEsther Johnson that 'whether from easiness in general, or from herindifference to persons, or from her despair of mending them, or fromthe same practice which she most liked in Mr. Addison, I cannotdetermine; but when she saw any of the company very warm in a wrongopinion, she was more inclined to confirm them in it than to opposethem. It prevented noise, she said, and saved time. '[2] Let us beholdwhat a picture Macaulay draws on the strength of this passage. 'If hisfirst attempts to set a presuming dunce right were ill-received, 'Macaulay says of Addison, 'he changed his tone, "assented with civilleer, " and lured the flattered coxcomb deeper and deeper intoabsurdity. ' To compare this transformation of the simplicity of theoriginal into the grotesque heat and overcharged violence of the copy, is to see the homely maiden of a country village transformed into thepainted flaunter of the city. One more instance. We should be sorry to violate any sentiment of[Greek: to semnon] about a man of Macaulay's genius, but what is adecorous term for a description of the doctrine of Lucretius's greatpoem, thrown in parenthetically, as the 'silliest and meanest system ofnatural and moral philosophy!' Even disagreeable artifices ofcomposition may be forgiven, when they serve to vivify truth, toquicken or to widen the moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy andhabitual recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentallyunscientific and untrue. There is no more instructive example in ourliterature than he, of the saying that the adjective is the enemy of thesubstantive. [Footnote 2: Forster's _Swift_, i. 265. ] * * * * * In 1837 Jeffrey saw a letter written by Macaulay to a common friend, andstating the reasons for preferring a literary to a political life. Jeffrey thought that his illustrious ally was wrong in the conclusion towhich he came. 'As to the tranquillity of an author's life, ' he said, 'Ihave no sort of faith in it. And as to fame, if an author's is now andthen more lasting, it is generally longer withheld, and except in a fewrare cases it is of a less pervading or elevating description. A greatpoet or a great _original_ writer is above all other glory. But whowould give much for such a glory as Gibbon's? Besides, I believe it isin the inward glow and pride of consciously influencing the destinies ofmankind, much more than in the sense of personal reputation, that thedelight of either poet or statesman chiefly consists. ' And Gibbon had atleast the advantage of throwing himself into a religious controversythat is destined to endure for centuries. He, moreover, was specificallya historian, while Macaulay has been prized less as a historian properthan as a master of literary art. Now a man of letters, in an age ofbattle and transition like our own, fades into an ever-deepeningdistance, unless he has while he writes that touching and impressivequality, --the presentiment of the eve; a feeling of the difficulties andinterests that will engage and distract mankind on the morrow. Nor canit be enough for enduring fame in any age merely to throw a golden haloround the secularity of the hour, or to make glorious the narrowestlimitations of the passing day. If we think what a changed sense isalready given to criticism, what a different conception now presidesover history, how many problems on which Macaulay was silent are now thefamiliar puzzles of even superficial readers, we cannot help feelingthat the eminent man whose life we are all about to read, is the hero ofa past which is already remote, and that he did little to make menbetter fitted to face a present of which, close as it was to him, heseems hardly to have dreamed.