CHAPTER V

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY

After the brilliant group of historians whose work illustrated the close

of the period covered by the preceding volume, it was some time before a

historical writer of the first rank again appeared in England; and there

were reasons for this. Not that, as in the case of purely creative

literature, in prose as in verse, there is any natural or actual lull

between different successive periods in this case; on the contrary the

writing of history is more likely to be stimulated by example, and

requires rather the utmost talent than positive genius, except in those

rare cases which, as in other departments, are not to be accounted for,

either in their presence or in their absence, by observation or

inference. But in the first place the greatest minds of the first

generation of which we have to take account, who were born about the

beginning of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, were, partly

by time and partly by chance, directed for the most part either into

poetry, or into politics, or into active life; and the five and twenty

years of the Revolutionary War in which they passed their manhood were

more likely to provide materials for history, than history itself.

Yet history, after the example given by Hume, by Robertson, and above

all by Gibbon, was not at all likely to cease, nor did some men of great

talents in other ways fail to betake themselves to it. Godwin was a

historian, and, considering his strong prejudices, the unkindness of

fortune (for history demands leisure almost as much as poetry), and some

defects of knowledge, not a contemptible historian in his way.

Mackintosh, intended for a philosopher, was a historian. Southey was a

very considerable historian, and master of one of the most admirable

historical styles on record. But he was signally unfortunate in having

that work of his which should have been most popular, the _History of

the Peninsular War_, pitted against another by a younger man of

professional competence, of actual experience, and of brilliant literary

powers, Sir William Napier (1786-1860). The literary value of these two

histories is more even than a generation which probably reads neither

much and has almost forgotten Southey is apt to imagine; and though

there is no doubt that the Poet Laureate was strongly prejudiced on the

Tory side, his competitor was even more partial and biassed against that

side. But the difference between the two books is the difference between

a task admirably performed, and performed to a certain extent _con

amore_, by a skilled practitioner in task-work, and the special effort

of one who was at once an enthusiast and an expert in his subject. It is

customary to call _Napier's History of the Peninsular War_ "the finest

military history in the English language," and so, perhaps, it is. The

famous description of the Battle of Albuera is only one of many showing

eloquence without any mere fine writing, and with the knowledge of the

soldier covering the artist's exaggeration.

Moore, Campbell, Scott himself, were all, as has been previously

recorded in the notices of their proper work, historians by trade,

though hardly, even to the extent to which Southey was, historians by

craft. But an exception must be made for the exquisite _Tales of a

Grandfather_, in which Sir Walter, without perhaps a very strict

application of historical criticism, applied his creative powers,

refreshed in their decay by combined affection for the subject and for

the presumed auditor, to fashioning the traditional history of old

Scotland into one of the most delightful narratives of any language or

time. But Henry Hallam, a contemporary of these men (1778-1859), unlike

them lives as a historian only, or as a historian and literary

critic--occupations so frequently combined during the present century

that perhaps an apology is due for the presentation of some writers

under the general head of one class rather than under that of the other.

Hallam, the son of a Dean of Bristol, educated at Eton and Christ

Church, an early _Edinburgh_ reviewer, and an honoured pundit and

champion of the Whig party, possessing also great literary tastes, much

industry, and considerable faculty both of judging and writing, united

almost all the qualifications for a high reputation; while his

abstinence from public affairs, and from participation in the violent

half-personal, half-political squabbles which were common among the

literary men of his day, freed him from most of the disadvantages, while

retaining for him all the advantages, of party connections. Early, too,

he obtained a post in the Civil Service (a Commissionership of Audit),

which gave him a comfortable subsistence while leaving him plenty of

leisure. For thirty years, between 1818 and 1848, he produced a series

of books on political and literary history which at once attained a very

high reputation, and can hardly be said to have yet lost it. These were

a _View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages_, published in the

first, and supplemented by a volume of notes and corrections in the

last, of the years just mentioned; a _Constitutional History of England_

from Henry VII. to George II. (1827); and an _Introduction to the

Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth

Centuries_ (1837-39).

The value of Hallam as a political and as a literary historian is by no

means the same. In the former capacity he was perhaps too much

influenced by that artificial and rather curious ideal of politics which

distinguished the Whig party of the later eighteenth century, which was

exaggerated, celebrated brilliantly, and perhaps buried by his pupil and

younger contemporary, Macaulay, and which practically erects the result

of a coincidence of accidents in English history into a permanent and

rationally defensible form of government, comparable with and preferable

to the earlier and unchanging forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and

democracy with their sub-varieties. A certain coldness and sluggishness

of temperament and sympathy also marred this part of Hallam's work,

though less mischievously than elsewhere. But to balance these drawbacks

handsomely in his favour, he possessed an industry which, immense as

have been the pains spent on his subjects since he wrote, leaves him in

possession of a very fair part of the field as a still trustworthy

authority; a mind, on the whole, judicial and fair; and an excellently

clear and scholarly if not exactly brilliant or engaging style.

As a literary historian and critic Hallam deserves, except on the score

of industry and width of reading, rather less praise; and his dicta,

once quoted with veneration even by good authorities, and borrowed, with

or without acknowledgment, by nearly all second-hand writers, are being

more and more neglected by both. Nor is this unjust, for Hallam, though

possessed, as has been said, of sound and wide scholarship, and of a

taste fairly trustworthy in accepted and recognised matters, was too apt

to be at a loss when confronted with an abnormal or eccentric literary

personality, shared far too much the hide-bound narrowness of the rules

which guided his friend Jeffrey, lacked the enthusiasm which not seldom

melted Jeffrey's chains of ice, and was constantly apt to intrude into

the court of literary judgments, methods, procedures, and codes of law

which have no business there.

Many other estimable, and some excellent writers fill up the space of

fifty years, which may be described best, both for remembrance and for

accuracy, as the space between Gibbon and Carlyle. William Roscoe, who

was born as far back as 1753 and did not die till 1831, was the son of a

market-gardener near Liverpool, and had few advantages of education, but

became an attorney, attached himself strenuously to literature,

especially Italian literature, and in 1796 published his _Life of

Lorenzo de Medici_, which, after finishing it, he followed up nine years

later with the _Life of Leo the Tenth_. Both obtained not merely an

English but a continental reputation, both became in a manner classics,

and both retain value to this day, though the Italian Renaissance has

been a specially favourite subject of modern inquiry. Roscoe was a

violent Whig, and not a very dispassionate student in some respects; but

he wrote well, and he is an early example of the diffusion of the

historic spirit proper, in which Gibbon had at once set the example and,

with some lapses, attained nearly to perfection.

William Mitford (1744-1827) was even an older man than Roscoe, and

belonged to a slightly less modern school of history-writing. He was a

man of means, a friend of Gibbon, his fellow-officer in the militia, and

like him a strong Tory, though unlike him he could not keep his politics

out of his history. Although Mitford's hatred of democracy, whether

well- or ill-founded, makes him sometimes unfair, and though his

_History of Greece_ contains some blunders, it is on the whole rather a

pity that it should have been superseded to the extent to which it

actually has been by those of Grote and Thirlwall. For it is not more

prejudiced and much better written than Grote's, while it has greater

liveliness and zest than the Bishop's. It occupied more than thirty

years in publication, the first volume appearing in 1784, the last in

1818.

While Roscoe and Mitford were thus dealing with foreign and ancient

subjects, English history became the theme of a somewhat younger pair of

historians, one of whom, Sharon Turner, was born in 1768 and died in

1847; while John Lingard, born three years later, outlived Turner by

four. Lingard was a Roman Catholic priest, and after being educated at

Douai, divided most of his time between pastoral work and teaching at

the newly founded Roman Catholic school of Ushaw. He was the author of

what still retains the credit of being the best history of England on

the great scale, in point of the union of accuracy, skilful arrangement,

fairness (despite his inevitable prepossessions), and competent literary

form,--no mean credit for a member of an unpopular minority to have

attained in a century of the most active historical investigation.

Turner was more of a specialist and particularist, and his style is not

very estimable. He wrote many books on English history, those on the

later periods being of little value. But his _History of the

Anglo-Saxons_, first issued in 1799, was based on thorough research, and

may be said to have for the first time rescued the period of origins of

English history from the discreditable condition of perfunctory,

traditional, and second- or third-hand treatment in which most, if not

all, previous historians of England had been content to leave it.

Sir Francis Palgrave, another historian to whom the student of early

English history is deeply indebted, was born in London in 1788, his

paternal name being Cohen. He took to the law, and early devoted himself

both within and outside his profession to genealogical and antiquarian

research. Before much attention had been paid in France itself to Old

French, he published a collection of Anglo-Norman poems in 1818, and

from these studies he passed to that of English history as such. He was

knighted in 1832, and made Deputy-Keeper of the Records in 1838; his

tenure of this post being only terminated by his death in 1861. Palgrave

edited many State documents (writs, calendars, rolls, and so forth), and

in his last years executed a _History of Normandy and England_ of great

value. His considerable literary power became more considerable still in

two of his sons: the eldest, for some time past Professor of Poetry at

Oxford, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, being still alive, and therefore merely to

be mentioned; while the second, William Gifford, who was born in 1826

and died in 1888, Minister at Monte Video, was a man of the most

brilliant talents and the most varied career. He was a soldier, a

Jesuit, a traveller in the most forbidden parts of Arabia at the expense

of a foreign country, and for nearly a quarter of a century a member of

the consular and diplomatic service of his own. His _Narrative_ of his

Arabian journey, his _Dutch Guiana_, and some remarkable poems are only

a few of his works, all of which have strong character.

Nearly contemporary with these was Dr. Thomas M'Crie (1772-1835), whose

_Lives of Knox_ (1812) and _Melville_ (1819) entitle him to something

like the title of Historian of Scotch Presbyterianism in its militant

period. M'Crie, who was styled by Hallam (a person not given to

nicknames), "the Protestant Hildebrand," was a worthy and learned man of

untiring industry, and his subjects so intimately concern not merely

Scottish but British history for nearly two centuries, that his handling

of them could not but be important. But he was desperately prejudiced,

and his furious attack on Sir Walter Scott's _Old Mortality_, by which

he is perhaps known to more persons than by his own far from

uninteresting works, argues a crass deficiency in intellectual and

aesthetic comprehension.

The tenth decade of the eighteenth century was as much a decade of

historians as the eighth had been a decade of poets; and with Milman and

Tytler born in 1791, Alison in 1792, Grote in 1794, Arnold and Carlyle

in 1795, Thirlwall in 1797, and Macaulay in 1800, it may probably

challenge comparison with any period of equal length. The batch falls

into three pretty distinct classes, and the individual members of it are

also pretty widely separated in importance, so that it may be more

convenient to discuss them in the inverse order of their merit rather

than in the direct order of their births.

Patrick Fraser Tytler, son and grandson of historians (his grandfather

William being the first and not the worst champion of Queen Mary against

the somewhat Philistine estimates of Hume and Robertson, and his father

Alexander a Professor of History, a Scotch Judge, and an excellent

writer in various kinds of _belles lettres_), was a man of the finest

character, the friend of most of the great men of letters at Edinburgh

in the age of Scott and Jeffrey, and the author of an excellent _History

of Scotland_ from Alexander the Third to the Union of the Crowns. He was

born in 1791, was called to the Scotch Bar in 1813, and died young for a

historian (a class which has so much to do with Time that he is apt to

be merciful to it) in 1849. He was perhaps hardly a man of genius, but

he commanded universal respect. Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a

clergyman of the same name, who, after taking orders in England and

holding some benefices there, became known as the author of _Essays on

the Principles of Taste_, which possess a good deal of formal and some

real merit. Archibald the younger was highly distinguished at the

University of Edinburgh, was called to the Scotch Bar, and distinguished

himself there also, being ultimately appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire.

Like most of the brighter wits among his immediate contemporaries in

Scotland (we have the indisputable testimony of Jeffrey to the fact)

Alison was an out-and-out Tory, and a constant contributor to

_Blackwood_, while his literary activity took very numerous shapes. At

last he began, and in the twenty years from 1839 to 1859 carried

through, a _History of Europe during the French Revolution_, completed

by one of _Europe from the Fall of the First to the Accession of the

Third Napoleon_. He died in 1867. It was rather unfortunate for Alison

that he did not undertake this great work until the period of Liberal

triumph which marked the middle decades of the century had well set in.

It was still more unlucky, and it could less be set down to the

operations of unkind chance, that in many of the qualifications of the

writer in general, and the historical writer in particular, he was

deficient. He had energy and industry; he was much less inaccurate than

it was long the fashion to represent him; a high sense of patriotism and

the political virtues generally, a very fair faculty of judging

evidence, and a thorough interest in his subject were his. But his book

was most unfortunately diffuse, earning its author the _sobriquet_ of

"Mr. Wordy," and it was conspicuously lacking in grasp, both in the

marshalling of events and in the depicting of characters. Critics, even

when they sympathised, have never liked it; but contrary to the wont of

very lengthy histories, it found considerable favour with the public,

who, as the French gibe has it, were not "hampered by the style," and

who probably found in the popular explanation of a great series of

important and interesting affairs all that they cared for. Nor is it

unlikely that this popularity rather exaggerated the ill-will of the

critics themselves. Alison is not quotable; he is, even after youth,

read with no small difficulty; but it would be no bad thing if other

periods of history had been treated in his manner and spirit.

Henry Hart Milman belongs to very much the same class of historian as

Hallam, but unlike Hallam he was a poet, and, though a Broad Churchman

of the days before the nickname was given, more of an adherent to the

imaginative and traditional side of things. His father was a King's

Physician, and he was educated at Eton and Brasenose. He obtained the

Newdigate, and after bringing out his best play _Fazio_ (of which more

will be said later), took orders and received the vicarage of St.

Mary's, Reading. Some poems of merit in the second class, including some

hymns very nearly in the first, followed, and in 1821 he became

Professor of Poetry at Oxford, where six years later he was Bampton

Lecturer. It was in 1829 that Milman, who had been a frequent

contributor to the _Quarterly Review_, began the series of his works on

ecclesiastical history with the _History of the Jews_, the weakest of

them (for Milman was not a very great Hebraist, and while endeavouring

to avoid rigid orthodoxy did not satisfy the demands of the newer

heterodox criticism). The _History of Christianity to the Abolition of

Paganism_ was better (1840), and the _History of Latin Christianity_

(1854) better still. This last indeed, based on an erudition which

enabled Milman to re-edit Gibbon with advantage, is a great book, and

will probably live. For Milman here really _knew_; he had (like most

poets who write prose with fair practice) an excellent style; and he was

able--as many men who have had knowledge have not been able, and as many

who have had style have not tried or have failed to do--to rise to the

height of a really great argument, and treat it with the grasp and ease

which are the soul of history. That he owed much to Gibbon himself is

certain; that he did not fail to use his pupilage to that greatest of

historians so as to rank among the best of his followers is not less

certain, and is high enough praise for any man. He received the Deanery

of St. Paul's in 1849, and held it till his death in 1868, having

worthily sustained the glory of this the most literary of all great

preferments in the Church of England by tradition, and having earned

among English ecclesiastical historians a place like that of Napier

among their military comrades.

Hallam and Milman were both, as has been said, Oxford men, and the

unmistakable impress of that University was on both, though less on

Hallam than on Milman. It is all the more interesting that their chief

historical contemporaries of the same class were, the one a Cambridge

man, and one of the most distinguished, the other not a University man

at all. Both Grote and Thirlwall, as it happens, were educated at the

same public school, Charterhouse. George Grote, the elder of them, born

in 1794, was the son of a banker, and himself carried on that business

for many years of his life. He was an extreme Liberal, or as it then

began to be called, Radical, and a chief of the Philosophical Radicals

of his time--persons who followed Bentham and the elder Mill. He was

elected member for the City in the first Reform Parliament and held the

seat for nine years; though if he had not retired he would probably have

been turned out. Leaving Parliament in 1841, he left business two years

later, and gave himself up to his _History of Greece_, which was

published in the ten years between 1846 and 1856. He died in 1871, and

was buried in Westminster Abbey. So was, four years later, his

school-fellow, fellow-historian of Greece, and junior by three years,

Connop Thirlwall. Thirlwall was one of the rare examples of

extraordinary infant precocity (he could read Latin at three and Greek

at four) who have been great scholars and men of distinction in after

life, and to a ripe age. He was of a Northumbrian family, but was born

at Stepney. From Charterhouse he went rather early (in 1814) to Trinity

College, Cambridge, where he had almost the most brilliant undergraduate

career on record, and duly gained his fellowship. He entered Lincoln's

Inn, was actually called to the Bar, but preferred the Church, and took

orders in his thirtieth year. He had already shown a strong leaning to

theology, and had translated Schleiermacher. He now returned to

Cambridge, taking both tutorial work and cure of souls; but in 1834 his

Liberal views attracted the disfavour of Christopher Wordsworth, Master

of Trinity, and Thirlwall, resigning his tutorship, was consoled by

Brougham with a Yorkshire living. Nor was this long his only preferment,

for the Whigs were not too well off for clergymen who united

scholarship, character, and piety, and he was made Bishop of St. David's

in 1840. He held the see for thirty-four years, working untiringly,

earning justly (though his orthodoxy was of a somewhat Broad character,

and he could reconcile his conscience to voting for the disestablishment

of the Irish Church) the character of one of the most exemplary bishops

of the century, and seldom dining without a cat on his shoulder.

Thirlwall wrote many Charges, some of them famous, some delightful

letters, part of a translation of Niebuhr, and some essays, while Grote,

besides his historical work, produced some political and other work

before it, with a large but not very good book on Plato, and the

beginning of another on Aristotle after it. But it is by their

_Histories of Greece_ that they must live in literature. These histories

(of which Grote's was planned and begun as early as 1823, though not

completed till long afterwards, while Thirlwall's began to appear in

1835, and was finished just after Grote's saw the light) were both

written with a certain general similarity of point of view as antidotes

to Mitford, and as putting the Liberal view of the ever memorable and

ever typical history of the Greek states. But in other respects they

diverge widely; and it has been a constant source of regret to scholars

that the more popular, and as the French would say _tapageur_, of the

two, to a considerable extent eclipsed the solid worth and the excellent

form of Thirlwall. Grote's history displays immense painstaking and no

inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very nearly as much a "party

pamphlet" as Macaulay's own, the advocate's client being in this case

not merely the Athenian democracy but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet

it to a great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes the

subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and

Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books into theses of eager and

stimulating interest. But it has absolutely no style; its scale is much

too great; the endless discussions and arguments on quite minor points

tend to throw the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student's

eye and mind to impartial and judicial handling; and the reader

constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, even for

the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead of the perpetual

singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter

discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.

It is possible, on the other hand, that Thirlwall may have sacrificed a

little too much, considering his age and its demands, to mere

dispassionate dignity. He is seldom picturesque, and indeed he never

tries to be so. But to a scholarship naturally far superior to Grote's,

he united a much fairer and more judicial mind, and the faculty of

writing--instead of loose stuff not exactly ungrammatical nor always

uncomely, but entirely devoid of any grace of style--an excellent kind

of classical English, but slightly changed from the best eighteenth

century models. And he had what Grote lacked, the gift of seeing that

the historian need not--nay, that he ought not to--parade every detail

of the arguments by which he has reached his conclusions; but should

state those conclusions themselves, reserving himself for occasional

emergencies in which process as well as result may be properly

exhibited. It is fair to say, in putting this curious pair forward as

examples respectively of the popular and scholarly methods of historical

writing, that Grote's learning and industry were very much more than

popular, while Thirlwall's sense and style might with advantage have put

on, now and then, a little more pomp and circumstance. But still the

contrast holds; and until fresh discoveries like that of the _Athenian

Polity_ accumulate to an extent which calls for and obtains a new real

historian of Greece, it is Thirlwall and not Grote who deserves the

first rank as such in English.

Intimately connected with all these historians in time and style, but

having over them the temporary advantage of being famous in another way,

and the, as some think, permanent disadvantage of falling prematurely

out of public favour, was Thomas Arnold. He was born at Cowes, in the

Isle of Wight, on 13th June 1795, and was educated at Winchester and at

Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the age of twenty he was elected a

fellow of Oriel--a distinction which was, and remained for two decades,

almost the highest in the University--and he gained both Chancellor's

Essay prizes, for Latin and English. Oriel was not in his time, as it

was very shortly afterwards, a centre of ecclesiastical orthodoxy; but

rather the home of a curious transition blend of thought which in

different persons took the high-and-dry or the Rationalist direction,

and was only generally opposed to Evangelicalism. Arnold himself

inclined to the Liberal side, and had also strong personal gifts for

teaching. He took orders, but neither became a tutor nor took a living,

and established himself at Laleham, on the Thames, to take private

pupils. After ten years' practice here he was elected to the

Head-mastership of Rugby, a school then, after vicissitudes, holding

little if anything more than a medium place among those English Grammar

Schools which ranked below the great schools of Eton, Harrow,

Westminster, Winchester, and Charterhouse. How he succeeded in placing

it on something like an equality with these, and how on the other hand

he became, as it were, the apostle of the infant Broad Church School

which held aloof alike from Evangelicals and Tractarians, are points

which do not directly concern us. His more than indirect influence on

literature was great; for few schools have contributed to it, in the

same time, a greater number of famous writers than Rugby did under his

head-mastership. His direct connection with it was limited to a fair

number of miscellaneous works, many sermons, an edition of Thucydides,

and a _History of Rome_ which did not proceed (owing to his death in

1842, just after he had been appointed Regius Professor of Modern

History at Oxford) beyond the Second Punic War. Arnold, once perhaps

injudiciously extolled by adoring pupils, and the defender of a theory

of churchmanship which strains rather to the uttermost the principle of

unorthodox economy, has rather sunk between the undying disapproval of

the orthodox and the fact that the unorthodox have long left his

standpoint. But his style is undoubtedly of its own kind scholarly and

excellent; the matter of his history suffers from the common fault of

taking Niebuhr at too high a valuation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay (who may be conveniently discussed before

Carlyle, though he was Carlyle's junior by five years, inasmuch as, even

putting relative critical estimate aside, he died much earlier and

represented on the whole an older style of thought) was born at Rothley

Temple in Leicestershire on 25th October 1800. His father, Zachary

Macaulay, though a very active agitator against the Slave Trade, was a

strong Tory; and the son's conversion to Whig opinions was effected at

some not clearly ascertained period after he had reached manhood. A very

precocious child, he was at first privately educated, but entered

Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. Here he fell in with

a set somewhat but not much less distinguished than that of the famous

time, about ten years later, of which Tennyson was the centre--a set the

most brilliant member of which, besides Macaulay, was the poet Praed.

Praed had been accustomed to journalism before he left Eton, and had

made acquaintance at Windsor with the bookseller Knight, for whose

_Quarterly Magazine_ both he and Macaulay wrote some very good things.

Macaulay himself obtained the Chancellor's prize for English poems on

"Pompeii" and "Evening," in two successive years 1819 and 1820; and

after a very distinguished undergraduate career was elected fellow of

his college. He went to the Bar, and his father's fortune, which had

been a good one, being lost, his chances were for a time uncertain. In

1825, however, he won the admiration of Jeffrey and a place on the

_Edinburgh Review_ by his well-known, and slightly gaudy, but

wonderfully fresh and stimulating article on Milton; and literature,

which had always been his ideal employment, seemed already likely to

yield him a fair subsistence--for review-writing was at that time much

more highly paid than it is at present. Moreover the Whigs, on the eve

of their long postponed triumph, were looking out for young men of

talent; and Macaulay, being recruited by them, was put into Lord

Lansdowne's pocket-borough of Calne. In the Reform debates themselves he

distinguished himself greatly, and after the Bill was carried, having

been elected for Leeds, he was not long in receiving his reward. It was

munificent, for he, a man of little more than thirty, who had made no

reputation at the Bar, though much elsewhere, was appointed Legal Member

of Council in India with a salary very much of which could in those days

be saved by a careful man, especially if, like Macaulay, he was

unmarried. Accordingly when, after between four and five years' stay,

Macaulay in 1838 returned home, he was in possession of means sufficient

to enable him to devote himself without fear or hindrance to literary

and political pursuits, while his fame had been raised higher during his

absence by his contributions to the _Edinburgh Review_. Indeed his

Indian experiences furnished the information--erroneous in some cases

and partisan in others, but brilliantly used--enabling him to write the

famous essays on Clive and on Hastings, where his historical method is

at almost its best. He was elected member for Edinburgh, a very high

compliment, in 1839; and next year became Secretary for War. In 1842 and

1843 respectively he established his position in verse and prose by

publishing the _Lays of Ancient Rome_ and a collection of his _Essays_;

and in 1846 he was made Postmaster-General. But his support of the

Maynooth Grant offended the Protestantism of his constituents, and he

lost his seat, and for the time his political opportunities, in 1847.

The disaster was no disaster for literature: he had long been employed

on a _History of England from the Accession of James II._, and being now

able to devote his whole time to it, he published the first volumes in

1848 with astonishing success.

He was re-elected for Edinburgh in 1852, published the third and fourth

volumes of his History in 1855 with success greater in pecuniary ways

and otherwise than even that of their forerunners, was raised to the

Upper House as Lord Macaulay of Rothley in 1857, and died two years

later, on 28th December 1859, of heart disease. Some personal

peculiarities of Macaulay's--his extraordinary reading and memory, his

brilliant but rather tyrannical conversation, his undoubting

self-confidence--were pretty well known in his lifetime, and did not

always create a prejudice in his favour. But a great revolution in this

respect was brought about by the _Life_ of him, produced a good many

years later by his nephew, Sir George Trevelyan--a Life, standing for

the interest of its matter and the skill and taste of its manner, not

too far below the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart.

The literary personality of Macaulay, though a great one in all

respects, is neither complex nor unequally present, and it is therefore

desirable to discuss all its manifestations together. In the order of

importance and of bulk his work may be divided into verse, prose-essays,

and history, for his speeches less directly concern us, and are very

little more than essays adroitly enough adjusted so as not to be tedious

to the hearer. In all three capacities he was eminently popular; and in

all three his popularity has brought with it a sort of reaction, partly

justified, partly unjust. The worst brunt of this reaction has fallen

upon his verse, the capital division of which, the _Lays of Ancient

Rome_, was persistently decried by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the critic of

most authority in the generation immediately succeeding Macaulay's. A

poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not; his way of thought was

too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery or of dream, to

command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to "make the common as if

it were not common." His best efforts of this kind are in small and not

very generally known things, the "Jacobite's Epitaph," "The Last

Buccaneer." But his ballads earlier and later, _Ivry_, _The Armada_,

_Naseby_, and the Roman quartet, exhibit the result of a consummate

literary faculty with a real native gift for rhythm and metre, applying

the lessons of the great Romantic generation with extraordinary vigour

and success, and not without considerable eloquence and refinement. It

is a gross and vulgar critical error to deem Macaulay's poetical effects

vulgar or gross. They are _popular_; they hit exactly that scheme of

poetry which the general ear can appreciate and the general brain

understand. They are coin for general circulation; but they are not base

coin. Hundreds and thousands of immature and 'prentice tastes have been

educated to the enjoyment of better things by them; thousands and tens

of thousands of tastes, respectable at least, have found in them the

kind of poetry which they can like, and beyond which they are not fitted

to go. And it would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting

critical appreciations which, while relishing things more exquisite and

understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savour the

simple genuine fare of poetry which Macaulay offers. There are few wiser

proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding "better bread

than is made of wheat," and the poetical bread of the _Lays of Ancient

Rome_ is an honest household loaf that no healthy palate will reject.

In the second division, that of essay writing, Macaulay occupies a

position both absolutely and relatively higher. That the best verse

ranks above even the best prose is not easily disputable; that prose

which is among the very best of its own particular kind ranks above

verse which though good is not the best, may be asserted without any

fear. And in their own kind of essay, Macaulay's are quite supreme.

Jeffrey, a master of writing and a still greater master of editing, with

more than twenty years' practice in criticism, asked him "where he got

that style?" The question was not entirely unanswerable. Macaulay had

taken not a little from Gibbon; he had taken something from a then still

living contributor of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private and

personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It had appeared

early (it can be seen in things of his written when he was an

undergraduate). It owed much to the general atmosphere of the century,

to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, idea, not merely from the

vernacular or from classical authorities, but from the great writers of

earlier European literature. And it would probably have been impossible

without the considerable body of forerunners which the _Edinburgh_, the

_Quarterly_, and other things of which some notice has been given in a

former chapter, had supplied. But still the individual character reigns

supreme.

Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary loose

acceptation of the term a household word; and it cannot be necessary to

single out individual instances where almost all are famous, and where

all deserve their fame. The "Milton" and the "Southey," the "Pitt" and

the "Chatham," the "Addison" and the "Horace Walpole," the "Clive" and

the "Hastings," the "Frederick the Great" and the "Madame D'Arblay," the

"Restoration Dramatists" and the "Boswell," the "Hallam" and the

"Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits and the

same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first place the

system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he carried to

perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less as a subject

of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than as a mere

starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views of the

subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters of pure

literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this latter kind, the

crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, though well enough

deserved in the particular case, escapes this condemnation only to fall

under another, that of looking at the parts rather than at the whole. It

is quite certain that, given their plan, the two famous critiques of

Tennyson and Keats, in the _Quarterly_ and in _Blackwood_, are well

enough justified. The critic looks only at the weak parts, and he judges

the weak parts only by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more

apparently generous method, Macaulay was exposed to equal dangers, and

succumbed to them less excusably. He had strong prejudices, and it is

impossible for any one who reads him with knowledge not to see that the

vindication of those prejudices, rather than the exposition and

valuation of the subject, was what he had first at heart. He was too

well informed (though, especially in the Indian Essays, he was sometimes

led astray by his authorities), and he was too honest a man, to be

untrustworthy in positive statement. But though he practised little in

the courts, he had the born advocate's gift, or drawback, of inclination

to _suppressio veri_ and _suggestio falsi_, and he has a heavy account

to make up under these heads. Even under them perhaps he has less to

answer for than on the charge of a general superficiality and

shallowness, which is all the more dangerous because of the apparently

transparent thoroughness of his handling, and because of the actual

clearness and force with which he both sees and puts his view. For a

first draft of a subject Macaulay is incomparable, if his readers will

only be content to take it for a first draft, and to feel that they must

fill up and verify, that they must deepen and widen. But the heights and

depths of the subject he never gives, and perhaps he never saw them.

Part of this is no doubt to be set down to the quality of his style;

part to a weakness of his, which was not so much readiness to accept any

conclusion that was convenient as a constitutional incapacity for not

making up his mind. To leave a thing in half lights, in compromise, to

take it, as the legal phrase of the country of his ancestors has it, _ad

avizandum_, was to Macaulay abhorrent and impossible. He must

"conclude," and he was rather too apt to do so by "quailing, crushing,

and quelling" all difficulties of opposing arguments and qualifications.

He simply would not have an unsolved problem mystery. Strafford was a

"rancorous renegade"; Swift a sort of gifted Judas; Bacon a mean fellow

with a great intellect; Dryden again a renegade, though not rancorous;

Marlborough a self-seeking traitor of genius. And all these conclusions

were enforced in their own style--the style of _l'homme meme_. It was

rather teasingly antithetical, "Tom's snip-snap" as the jealous

smartness of Brougham called it; it was somewhat mechanical in its

arrangement of narrative, set passages of finer writing, cunningly

devised summaries of facts, comparisons, contrasts (to show the

writer's learning and dazzle the reader with names), exordium,

iteration, peroration, and so forth. But it observed a very high

standard of classical English, a little intolerant of neologism, but not

stiff nor jejune. It had an almost unexampled--a certainly

unsurpassed--power (slightly helped by repetition perhaps) of bringing

the picture that the writer saw, the argument that he thought, the

sentiment that he felt, before the reader's eyes, mind, and feeling.

And, as indeed follows from this, it was pre-eminently clear. It is

perhaps the clearest style in English that does not, like those of Swift

and Cobbett, deliberately or scornfully eschew rhetorical ornament. What

Macaulay means you never, being any degree short of an idiot, can fail

to understand; and yet he gives you the sense, equipped with a very

considerable amount of preparation and trimming. It would not merely

have been ungrateful, it would have been positively wrong, if his

audience, specially trained as most of them were to his standpoint of

Whig Reformer, had failed to hail him as one of the greatest writers

that had ever been known. Nor would it be much less wrong if judges very

differently equipped and constituted were to refuse him a high place

among great writers.

The characteristics of the _Essays_ reproduce themselves on a magnified

scale so exactly in the _History_ that the foregoing criticism applies

with absolute fidelity to the later and larger, as well as to the

earlier and more minute work. But it would not be quite fair to say that

no new merits appear. There are no new defects; though the difference of

the scope and character of the undertaking intensifies in degree, as

well as magnifies in bulk, the faults of advocacy and of partiality

which have caused the book to be dismissed, with a flippancy only too

well deserved by its own treatment of opponents, as "a Whig pamphlet in

four octavo volumes." Yet the width of study and the grasp of results,

which, though remarkable, were not exactly extraordinary, in the compass

and employed on the subject of a _Review_ article, became altogether

amazing and little short of miraculous in this enlarged field. One of

the earliest and one of the best passages, the view of the state of

England at the death of Charles the Second, may challenge comparison, as

a clearly arranged and perfectly mastered collection of innumerable

minute facts sifted out of a thousand different sources, with anything

in history ancient or modern. The scale of the book is undoubtedly too

great; and if it had been carried, as the author originally intended, to

a date "within the memory of" his contemporaries, it would have required

the life of Old Parr to complete it and the patience of Job to read it

through. The necessity of a hero is a necessity felt by all the nobler

sort of writers. But the choice of William of Orange for the purpose

was, to say the least, unlucky; and the low morality which he had

himself, in an earlier work, confessed as to the statesmen of the period

imparted an additional stimulus to the historian's natural tendency to

be unfair to his political opponents, in the vain hope, by deepening the

blacks, to get a sort of whiteness upon the grays. It has further to be

confessed that independent examination of separate points is not very

favourable to Macaulay's trustworthiness. He never tells a falsehood;

but he not seldom contrives to convey one, and he constantly conceals

the truth. Still, the general picture is so vivid and stimulating, the

mastery of materials is so consummate, and the beauty of occasional

passages--the story of Monmouth's Conspiracy, that of James' insane

persecution of Magdalen College, that of the Trial of the Seven Bishops,

that of the Siege of Londonderry--so seductive, that the most hostile

criticism which is not prepared to shut eyes and ears to anything but

faults cannot refuse admiration. And it ought not to be omitted that

Macaulay was practically the first historian who not merely examined the

literature of his subject with unfailing care and attention, but took

the trouble to inspect the actual places with the zeal of a topographer

or an antiquary. That this added greatly to the vividness and

picturesque character of his descriptions need hardly be said; that it

often resulted in a distinct gain to historical knowledge is certain.

But perhaps not its least merit was the putting down in a practically

imperishable form, and in the clearest possible manner, of a vast number

of interesting details which time is only too quick to sweep away. The

face of England has changed more since Macaulay's time, though a bare

generation since, than it had changed in the four or five generations

between the day of his theme and his own; and thus he rescued for us at

once the present and the past.

It is almost impossible to imagine a greater contrast between two

contemporaries of the same nation, both men of letters of the first

rank, than that which exists between Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle.

In the subjects to which both had affinity there was a rather remarkable

connection. Macaulay's education rather than his sympathies made him

something of a master of at least the formal part of poetry, in which

Carlyle could do nothing. But essentially they were both writers of

prose; they were both men in whom the historico-politico-social

interests were much greater than the purely literary, the purely

artistic, or the purely scientific--though just as Carlyle was a bad

verse-writer or none at all, Macaulay a good one, so Carlyle was a good

mathematician, Macaulay a bad one or none at all. But in the point of

view from which they regarded the subjects with which they dealt, and in

the style in which they treated them, they were poles asunder. Indeed it

may be questioned whether "the style is the point of view" would not be

a better form of the famous deliverance than that which, in full or

truncated form, has obtained currency.

Carlyle was born on the 4th December 1795 at Ecclefechan (the Entepfuhl

of the _Sartor_), in Dumfriesshire, being the son of a stone-mason. He

was educated first at the parish school, then at that of Annan (the

nearest town), and was about fifteen when he was sent, in the usual way

of Scotch boys with some wits and no money, to the University of

Edinburgh. His destination was equally of course the Church, but he very

early developed that dislike to all fixed formularies which

characterised him through life, and which perhaps was not his greatest

characteristic. To mathematics, on the other hand, he took pretty

kindly, though he seems to have early exhausted the fascinations of

them. Like most men of no means who have little fancy for any of the

regular professions, he attempted teaching; and as a schoolmaster at

Annan, Haddington, and Kirkcaldy, or a private tutor (his chief

experience in which art was with Charles Buller), he spent no small

number of years, doing also some hack-work in the way of translating,

writing for Brewster's _Encyclopaedia_, and contributing to the _London

Magazine_, that short-lived but fertile nurse of genius. The most

remarkable of these productions was the _Life of Schiller_, which was

published as a volume in 1825, his thirtieth year, at which time he was

a resident in London and a frequenter--a not too amiable one--of

Coleridge's circle at Highgate and of other literary places.

The most important event in his life took place in 1826, when he married

Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady who traced her descent to John Knox, who

had some property, who had a genius of her own, and who was all the more

determined to marry a man of genius. She had hesitated between Irving

and Carlyle, and, whatever came of it, there can be no doubt that she

was right in preferring the somewhat uncouth and extremely undeveloped

tutor who had taught her several things,--whether love in the proper

sense was among them or not will always be a moot point. The _Edinburgh

Review_ was kind to Carlyle after its fashion, and he wrote for it; but

Jeffrey, though very well disposed both to Carlyle and to his wife,

could not endure the changes which soon came on his style, and might

have addressed the celebrated query which, as mentioned, just at the

same time he addressed in delighted surprise to Macaulay, "Where did you

get that style," to Carlyle in the identical words but with a very

different meaning. Even had it been different, it was impossible that

Carlyle should serve anywhere or any one; and his mind, not an early

ripening one, was even yet, at the age of thirty-two, in a very

unorganised condition. He resolved to retire to his wife's farm of

Craigenputtock in Nithsdale; and Mrs. Carlyle had the almost

unparalleled heroism to consent to this. For it must be remembered that

her husband, with the exception of the revenue of a few essays, was

living on her means, that he undertook no professional duties, and that

in the farmhouse she had to perform those of a servant as well as those

of a wife. Whatever other opinions may be passed on this episode of

Carlyle's life, which lasted from 1828 to 1834, there can be no doubt

that it "made" him. He did much positive work there, including all his

best purely literary essays. There he wrote _Sartor Resartus_, his

manifesto and proclamation, a wild book which, to its eternal honour,

_Fraser's Magazine_ accepted, probably under the influence of Lockhart,

with whom, strangely different as they were, Carlyle was always on good,

though never on intimate terms. There too was written great part of the

earlier form of the _French Revolution_. But the greatest thing that he

did at Craigenputtock was the thorough fermentation, clearing, and

settling of himself. When he went there, at nearly thirty-three, it was

more uncertain what would come of him than it is in the case of many a

man when he leaves the University at three and twenty. When he left it,

at close on his fortieth year, the drama of his literary life was

complete, though only a few lines of it were written.

That drama lasted in actual time for forty-seven years longer; and for

more than the first thirty of them fresh and ever fresh acts and scenes

carried it on. For the public his place was taken once and for all by

the _History of the French Revolution_, which, after alarming

vicissitudes (John Stuart Mill having borrowed the first volume in MS.

and lent it to a lady, to be destroyed by her housemaid), appeared in

1837. From at least that time Mrs. Carlyle's aspiration was fulfilled.

There were gain-sayers of course,--it may almost be said that genius

which is not gainsaid is not genius,--there were furious decriers of

style, temper, and so forth. But nine out of every ten men at least

whose opinion was worth taking knew that a new star of the first

magnitude had been added to English literature, however much they might

think its rays in some respects baleful.

Lecturing, after the example set chiefly by Coleridge and Hazlitt, was

at this time a favourite resource for those men of letters whose line

of composition was not of the gainfulest; and Carlyle delivered several

courses, some of which are unreported while others survive only in

inadequate shapes. But _Heroes and Hero-Worship_ was at first delivered

orally, though it was not printed till 1841; and about the same time, or

rather earlier, appeared the _Miscellaneous Essays_--a collection of his

work at its freshest, least mannered, most varied, and in some respects

best. _Chartism_ (1839) and _Past and Present_ (1843) reflected the

political problems of the time and Carlyle's interest in them. But it

was not till 1845 that a second, in the ordinary sense, great work,

_Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches_, was published. Five years

passed without anything substantive from him, but in 1850 appeared

_Latter-Day Pamphlets_, the most brilliantly satiric, and in 1851 the

softest, most finished, and (save theologically) least debatable of all

his books, the exquisite biography in miniature called the _Life of

Sterling_. Then he engaged, it is difficult to say whether by ill-luck

or not, on the last and largest of his great single undertakings, the

_History of Frederick the Great_. Fourteen years were passed, as a

matter of composition, in "the valley of the shadow of Frederick," as

his wife put it: half the time (from 1858 to 1865) saw the actual

publication. Shortly after the completion of this, Carlyle visited

Edinburgh to receive the Lord Rectorship of his University, and soon

after his wife died. He survived her fifteen years, but did nothing more

of great importance; indeed, he was seventy-one when this loss happened.

Some short things on "John Knox," on "The Early Kings of Norway," and a

famous letter on "Shooting Niagara" (the Reform Bill of 1867), with a

few more, appeared; but he was chiefly occupied (as far as he was

occupied at all) in writing reminiscences, and arranging memorials of

Mrs. Carlyle. The publication of these books after his death by the late

Mr. Froude led to a violent conflict of opinion both as to the propriety

of the publication and as to the character of Carlyle himself.

This conflict fortunately concerns us but little here. It is certain

that Carlyle--springing from the lower ranks of society, educated

excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but without attention

to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife early remarked in

him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a martyr from very early

years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring spirit and not too social

temper, thoroughly convinced that the times were out of joint and not at

all thoroughly convinced that he or any one could set them right,

finally possessed of an intensely religious nature which by accident or

waywardness had somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion--was not

a happy man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with

him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and to

those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too often unkindly

record, his bark was much worse than his bite. And it is further certain

that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden drudge, but a woman of brains

almost as alert as her husband's and a tongue almost as sharp as his,

who had deliberately made her election of the vocation of being "wife to

a man of genius," and who received what she had bargained for to the

uttermost farthing. There will always be those who will think that Mr.

Froude, doubtless with the best intentions, made a very great mistake;

that, at any rate for many years after Carlyle's death, only a strictly

genuine but judicious selection of the Reminiscences and Memorials

should have been published, or else that the whole should have been

worked into a real biography in which the frame and setting could have

given the relief that the text required. But already, after more than

the due voices, there is some peace on the subject; and a temporary wave

of neglect, partly occasioned by this very controversy, was to be

expected.

That this wave will pass may be asserted with a fulness and calmness of

assurance not to be surpassed in any similar case. Carlyle's influence

during a great part of the second and the whole of the third quarter of

this century was so enormous, his life was so prolonged, and the general

tone of public thought and public policy which has prevailed since some

time before his death has been so adverse to his temper, that the

reaction which is all but inevitable in all cases was certain to be

severe in his. And if this were a history of thought instead of being a

history of the verbal expression of thought, it would be possible and

interesting to explain this reaction, and to forecast the certain

rebound from it. As it is, however, we have to do with Carlyle as a man

of letters only; and if his position as the greatest English man of

letters of the century in prose be disputed, it will generally be found

that the opposition is due to some not strictly literary cause, while it

is certain that any competitor who is set up can be dislodged by a

fervent and well-equipped Carlylian without very much difficulty.

He has been classed here as a historian, and though the bulk of his work

is very great and its apparent variety considerable, it will be found

that history and her sister biography, even when his subjects bore an

appearance of difference, always in reality engaged his attention. His

three greatest books, containing more than half his work in bulk,--_The

French Revolution_, the _Cromwell_, and the _Frederick_,--are all openly

and avowedly historical. The _Schiller_ and the _Sterling_ are

biographies; the _Sartor Resartus_ a fantastic autobiography. Nearly all

the _Essays_, even those which are most literary in subject--all the

_Lectures on Heroes_, the greater part of _Past and Present_, _The Early

Kings of Norway_, the _John Knox_, are more or less plainly and strictly

historical or biographical. Even _Chartism_, the non-antique part of

_Past and Present_, and the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, deal with politics

in the sense in which politics are the principal agent in making

history, regard them constantly and almost solely in their actual or

probable effect on the life-story of the nation, and to no small extent

of its individual members. Out of the historic relation of nation or

individual Carlyle would very rarely attempt to place, and hardly ever

succeeded in placing, any thing or person. He could not in the least

judge literature--of which he was so great a practitioner always, and

sometimes so great a judge--from the point of view of form: he would

have scorned to do so, and did scorn those who did so. His deficiencies

in abstract philosophy, whether political, theological, metaphysical,

or other, arise directly from this--that he could never contemplate any

of these things as abstract, but only in the common conduct of men

towards their fellows, towards themselves, and towards God. For Carlyle

never "forgot God," though he might speak unadvisedly with his lips of

other men's ways of remembering Him. The "human document," as later

slang has it, was in effect the only thing that interested him; and he

was content to employ it in constructing human history. More than once

he put his idea of this history formally under a formal title. But his

entire work is a much better exposition of that idea than these

particular essays; and it is not easy to open any page of it in which

the idea itself is not vividly illustrated and enforced upon the reader.

But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less for a

discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian "Gospel of Work"; of its

apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, condemnations of shams

and cants; or of the innumerable applications and uses to which he put

these doctrines. The important thing for our purpose is that these

applications took form in thirty volumes of the most brilliant, the most

stimulating, the most varied, the most original work in English

literature. The titles of this work have been given; to give here any

notion of their contents would take the chapter. Carlyle could be--as in

the _Cromwell_, where he sets himself and confines himself to the double

task of elucidating his hero's rugged or crafty obscurities of speech

and writing and of piecing them into a connected history, or where he

wrestles with the huge accumulation of documents about Frederick--as

practical as the driest of Dry-as-dusts. But others could equal, though

few surpass him, in this. Where he stands alone is in a fantastic

fertility of divagation and comment which is as much his own as the

clear, neat directness of Macaulay is his. Much of it is due to his

gospel, or temper, or whatever it is to be called, of earnest suasion to

work and scornful denunciation of cant; something to his wide reading

and apt faculty of illustration; but most to his style.

In the early days of his unpopularity this style used to be abused with

heat or dismissed with scorn as mere falsetto, copied to a great extent

from Richter. It is certain that in Carlyle's very earliest works there

is small trace of it; and that he writes in a fashion not very

startlingly different from that of any well-read and well-taught author

of his time. And it is certain also that it was after his special

addiction to German studies that the new manner appeared. Yet it is very

far indeed from being copied from any single model, or even from any

single language; and a great deal that is in it is not German at all.

Something may even be traced to our own more fantastic writers in the

seventeenth century, such as Sir Thomas Urquhart in Scotland and Sir

Roger L'Estrange in England; much to a Scottish fervour and quaintness

blending itself with and utilising a wider range of reading than had

been usual with Scotsmen; most to the idiosyncrasy of the individual.

Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks and

manners; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a narrow inspection

will show that its effect is by no means due so much in reality as in

appearance to the retaining of capital letters, the violent breaches and

aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns and colourless parts of speech

generally, the coining of new words, and the introduction of unusual

forms. These things are often there, but they are not always; and even

when they are, there is something else much more important, much more

characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There is in

Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of enthusiasm

or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of unexpected

humour, in his expositions a vividness of presentment, in his arguments

a sledge-hammer force, all of which are not to be found together

anywhere else, and none of which is to be found anywhere in quite the

same form. And despite the savagery, both of his indignation and his

laughter, there is no greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at

home, and he seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like

none other,--it is the very sword of Goliath.

And this sword pierces to the joints and marrow as no other of the

second division of our authors of the nineteenth century proper pierces,

with the exception of that of Tennyson in verse. It is possible to

disagree with Carlyle intensely; perhaps it is not possible to agree

with him in any detailed manner, unless the agreer be somewhat destitute

of individual taste and judgment. But on his whole aspect and tendency,

reserving individual expressions, he is, as few are, great. The

_diathesis_ is there--the general disposition towards noble and high

things. The expression is there--the capacity of putting what is felt

and meant in a manner always contemptuous of mediocrity, yet seldom

disdainful of common sense. To speak on the best things in an original

way, in a distinguished style, is the privilege of the elect in

literature; and none of those who were born within, or closely upon, the

beginning of the century has had these gifts in English as have the

authors of _The Lotos Eaters_ and _Sartor Resartus_.

Only one other writer of history during the century, himself the latest

to die of his generation except Mr. Ruskin, deserves, for the union of

historical and literary merit, to be placed, if not on a level with

Macaulay and Carlyle, yet not far below them; but a not inconsiderable

number of historians and biographers of value who distinguished

themselves about or since the middle of the century must be chronicled

more or less briefly. Two Scottish scholars of eminence, both in turn

Historiographers Royal of Scotland, John Hill Burton and William Forbes

Skene, were born in the same year, 1809. Burton, who died in 1881,

busied himself with the history of his country at large, beginning with

the period since the Revolution, and tackling the earlier and more

distinctively national time afterwards. He was not a very good writer,

but displayed very great industry and learning with a sound and

impartial judgment. Skene, on the other hand, was the greatest authority

of his time (he lived till 1892) on "Celtic Scotland," which is the

title of his principal book. In the same year (or in 1808) was born

Charles Merivale, afterwards Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge,

and Dean of Ely, who, besides other work, established himself in the

same class of historians with Hallam and Milman, Thirlwall and Grote, by

his extensive _History of the Romans under the Empire_. On the whole,

Merivale (who died in 1894) ranks, both for historical and literary

gifts, somewhat below the other members of this remarkable group--a

position which is still a very honourable one.

Shortly after these three was born Alexander Kinglake (1811-1891)--a man

of very remarkable talents, but something of a "terrible example" in

regard to the practice, which has already been noticed as characteristic

of the century, of devoting enormously long histories to special

subjects and points. Kinglake, who was a native of Somerset, an Eton and

Cambridge man, a barrister subsequently, for some years a Member of

Parliament, and a man of independent means, first distinguished himself

in letters by the very brilliant and popular book of travels in the East

called _Eothen_ which was published in 1847. That there is something of

manner and trick about this is not to be denied; but it must be allowed

that the trick and manner have been followed, apparently with success,

in travel-writing for about half a century, while it cannot be fairly

said that Kinglake himself had any exact models, though he may have owed

something to Beckford and a little to Sterne. It is not very easy to say

whether Kinglake's literary reputation would have stood higher or lower

if he had written nothing else; but as a matter of fact, before many

years were over, he attempted a much more ambitious task in the _History

of the Crimean War_, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1863,

though the book was not finished till twenty years later. That this

history shows no small literary faculties no competent judge can deny.

The art of word-painting--a dubious and dangerous art--is pushed to

almost its furthest limits; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining

the minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible

whole; and the quality which the French untranslatably call _diable au

corps_, or, as we more pedantically say, "daemonic energy," is present

everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of proportion,--a single

battle has something like an entire volume, and the events of some two

years occupy eight,--and, clear as the individual pictures are, the

panorama is of such endless length that the mind's eye retains no proper

notion of it. In the second place, the style, though brilliant, is hard

and brassy, full of points that are more suitable to the platform or the

newspaper than to the historic page,--not so much polished as varnished,

and after a short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third,--and this is

the gravest fault of all,--the author's private or patriotic likes or

dislikes pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a

tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more disgusting by

the repetition of catch phrases and pet labels somewhat after the manner

of Dickens. Sir Stratford Canning, "the great Eltchi," is one of

Kinglake's divinities, Lord Raglan another; and an acute and energetic,

but not quite heaven-born diplomatist, a most honest, modest, and in

difficult circumstances steadfast, if not always judicious soldier,

become, the one Marlborough in the council-chamber, the other

Marlborough in the field. On the other hand, for this or that reason,

Mr. Kinglake had taken a violent dislike to the Emperor Napoleon the

Third, and affected, as did some other English Liberals, to consider the

_coup d'etat_ as not merely a dubious piece of statecraft, but a hideous

and abominable crime. Consequently, he abused all those who took part in

it with tedious virulence, which has probably made not a few Englishmen

look on them with much more leniency than they deserved. In short,

Kinglake, with many of the qualities of the craftsman in an

extraordinary degree, was almost entirely deficient in those of the

artist. He served as a favourite example to Mr. Matthew Arnold of the

deficiency of the British literary temper in accomplishment and grace,

and it cannot be denied that Mr. Arnold's strictures were here justified

to an extent which was not always the case when he assumed the office of

censor.

John Forster, who was born a year later than Kinglake, and died fifteen

years before him, was an industrious writer of biographies and

biographical history, the friend of a good many men of letters, editor

for many years of the _Examiner_, and secretary to the Lunacy

Commissioners. He paid particular attention to the period of the

Rebellion; his _Arrest of the Five Members_ being his chief work, among

several devoted to it. He wrote a _Life of Goldsmith_, and began one of

Swift. In contemporary biography his chief performances were lives of

Landor and of Dickens, with both of whom he was extremely intimate. In

private life Forster had the character of a bumptious busybody, which

character indeed the two books just mentioned, even without the

anecdotes abundant in more recent books of biography, abundantly

establish. And towards the men of letters with whom he was intimate

(Carlyle and Browning may be added to Landor and Dickens) he seems to

have behaved like a Boswell-Podsnap, while in the latter half of the

character he no doubt sat to Dickens himself. But he was an

indefatigable literary inquirer, and seems, in a patronising kind of

way, to have been liberal enough of the result of his inquiries. He had

a real interest both in history and literature, and he wrote fairly

enough.

One of the most curious figures among the historians of this century was

Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born near Blackheath in 1823, and privately

educated. He had ample means, and was fond of books; and in 1857 he

brought out the first volume (which was followed by a second in 1861) of

a _History of Civilisation_. He did not nearly complete--in fact he only

began--his scheme, in which the European part was ultimately intended to

be subordinate to the English, and he died of typhus at Damascus in May

1862. The book attained at once, and for some time kept, an

extraordinary popularity, which has been succeeded by a rather unjust

depreciation. Both are to be accounted for by the fact that it is in

many ways a book rather of the French than of the English type, and

displays in fuller measure than almost any of Buckle's contemporaries in

France itself, with the possible exception of Taine, could boast, the

frank and fearless, some would say the headlong and headstrong, habit

of generalisation--scorning particulars, or merely impressing into

service such as are useful to it and drumming the others out--on which

Frenchmen pride themselves, and for the lack of which they are apt to

pronounce English historians, and indeed English men of letters of all

kinds, plodding and unilluminated craftsmen rather than artists. In

Buckle's reflections on Spain and Scotland, he accounts for the whole

history of both countries and the whole character of both peoples by

local conditions in the first place, and by forms of civil and

ecclesiastical government. In respect to these last, his views were

crude Voltairianism; but perhaps this is the best and most

characteristic example of his method. He was extremely prejudiced; his

lack of solid disciplinary education made him unapt to understand the

true force and relative value of his facts and arguments; and as his

premises are for the most part capriciously selected facts cemented

together with an untempered mortar of theory, his actual conclusions are

rarely of much value. But his style is clear and vigorous; the

aggressive _raiding_ character of his argument is agreeably stimulating,

and excellent to make his readers clear up their minds on the other

side; while the dread of over-generalisation, however healthy in itself,

has been so long a dominant force in English letters and philosophy that

a little excess the other way might be decidedly useful as an

alterative. The worst fault of Buckle was the Voltairianism above

referred to, causing or caused by, as is always the case, a deplorable

lack of taste, which is not confined to religious matters.

Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than Buckle and

survived him for thirty years, had some points in common with the

historian of civilisation, though his education, interests, and tone in

reference to religion were wholly different. Mr. Freeman, who was not at

any public school but was a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon

devoted himself to the study of early English history, and secured a

durable position by his elaborate _History of the Norman Conquest_

(1867-76), which, even though the largest and most important, was only

one among scores of works, ending in an unfinished _History of Sicily_.

He was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History at

Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in determining

the course of historical study. He was also, for many years of his life,

an active journalist, being especially known as a contributor to the

_Saturday Review_, and he sometimes took a very busy part in politics.

Mr. Freeman was a student of untiring energy, and will always deserve

honourable memory as the first historian who recognised and utilised the

value of architecture in supplying historical documents and

illustrations. His style was at times picturesque but too diffuse, and

disfigured by a habit of allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or

Kinglake's stock phrases. That he was apt to pronounce very strong

opinions on almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less

drawback to his excellence as a historian than the violently

controversial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened

to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of manner

aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of English

history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Freeman did more than

any man had done before him, and as much as any man has done for any

other period; while in relation to his further subjects of study, his

work, though less trustworthy, is full of stimulus and of information.

His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 and died of

consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and was educated there at

Magdalen College School and Jesus College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman,

was a frequent contributor to the _Saturday Review_, and did some

clerical duty in the east of London; but he is best known by his

historical work on English subjects, especially the famous _Short

History of the English People_, perhaps the most popular work of its

class and kind ever written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which

had been growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception

of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These,

however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the

popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection of

interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style,

based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which exactly

hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green afterwards expanded

this book somewhat; and his early death cut short a series of more

extended monographs, _The Making of England_, _The Conquest of England_,

etc., which would have enabled him to display the minute knowledge on

which his more summary treatment of the general theme had been based.

Among historians to whom in larger space more extended notice than is

here possible would have to be given, perhaps the first place is due to

Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), who (chiefly under the

title of Lord Mahon, which he bore before his succession to the earldom

in 1855) was an active historical writer of great diligence and

impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished

style. The first notable work,--a _History of the War of the Succession

in Spain_ (1832),--of Lord Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some

part in politics, and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay,

and he wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his

reputation rests on his _History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht to

the Peace of Versailles_, which occupied him for some twenty years,

finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, but of singular

ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under the earlier name had

attracted considerable public attention as an Eton master and as author

of a small but remarkable volume of poems called _Ionica_. After his

retirement from Eton and the change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself

with the composition of a _History of England_, or rather a long essay

thereon, which was very little read and falls completely out of the

ordinary conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an

exceptionally good and scholarly style, as well as by views and

expressions of great originality. Many others must pass wholly unnoticed

that we may finish this chapter with one capital name.

One of the greatest historians of the century, except for one curious

and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) one of the greatest

writers of English prose during that century, was James Anthony Froude,

who was born at Dartington near Totnes in 1818, on 23rd April

(Shakespeare's birthday and St. George's Day), and died in 1894 at the

Molt near Salcombe in his native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of

the Archdeacon of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who

played so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William

Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, and went

to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellowship at Exeter.

Like his elder brother he engaged in the Tractarian Movement, and was

specially under the influence of Newman, taking orders in 1844. The

great convulsion, however, of Newman's secession sent him, not as it

sent some with Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into

scepticism if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his

change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseudonym of

"Zeta" a novel called _Shadows of the Clouds_) into a book entitled _The

Nemesis of Faith_, published in 1849, resigned his fellowship, gave up

or lost (to his great good fortune) a post which had been offered him in

Tasmania, and betook himself to literature, being very much, except in

point of style, under the influence of Carlyle. He wrote for _Fraser_,

the _Westminster_, and other periodicals; but was not content with

fugitive compositions, and soon planned a _History of England from the

Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Armada_. The first volumes of this

appeared in 1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from

time to time collected his essays into volumes called _Short Studies_,

which contain some of his very best writing. His next large work was

_The English in Ireland_, which was published in three volumes

(1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on Government missions to

the Cape, an importation of a French practice into England which was not

very well justified by the particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he

was occupied as Carlyle's literary executor in issuing his biographical

remains. Later _Oceana_ and _The English in the West Indies_ contained

at once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he

published an Irish historical romance, _The Two Chiefs of Dunboy_. He

was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in succession to

Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, _Erasmus_, published just before,

and _English Seamen_ some months after his death, contain in part the

results of the appointment.

It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some men appears

to be hot water. No English author of the century justifies this better

than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith attracted to him a very

considerable share of the obloquy which usually (and perhaps not so

unreasonably as is sometimes thought) attaches to violent revolutions of

opinion on important points. His _History_ was no sooner published than

most acrimonious attacks were made upon it, and continued for many

years, by a school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at

their head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of "Home Rule"

sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the Irish

Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, sympathised

with them in England. His colonial visits and criticisms not merely

attracted to him the animosity of all those Englishmen who espoused the

politics of non-intervention and non-aggrandisement, but aroused lively

irritation in the Colonies themselves. About his discharge of his duties

as Carlyle's executor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose; it being

alleged that he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with

deliberate treachery, revealed his dead friend's and master's weaknesses

and domestic troubles to the public view.

With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here dispensed

from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so far as they are

controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. The question of the

dealing with Carlyle's "Remains" is one rather of ethics than of

literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to make, in reference to

it, the warning observation that Lockhart, who is now considered by

almost all competent critics as a very pattern of the union of fidelity

and good taste towards both his subject and his readers, was accused, at

the appearance of his book, of treachery towards Scott.

But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were unfair (and

they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant opening to fair

criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps any of his others) was

planned on an unduly large scale, and indulged in far too extensive

dissertation, divagation, and so forth, was rather the fault of his time

than of himself. Grote and Macaulay had obtained, the first

considerable, the latter immense popularity by similar prolixity; and

Carlyle was about, in the _Frederick_, to follow the fashion. But

whereas all these three, according to the information open to them, were

and are among the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair

allowance, the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude

displayed an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must allow

to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously insufficient.

He has been called by well-affected critics "congenitally inaccurate,"

and there is warrant for it. Nor did any one of his three great models

come short of him in partiality, in advocacy, in the determination to

make the reader accept his own view first of all.

He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very poor man,

whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent circumstances, and

he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the carelessness of his dealing

with documents had more in it than lack of pence to purchase assistance,

or even than lack of dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His

enemies of course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was

dishonesty at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as

dishonesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present writer

once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book with which the

introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated errors of quotation or

allusion which actually weakened Mr. Froude's own argument--cases where

he made his own case worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his

_Erasmus_ itself, which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his

work would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory,

oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably no

historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history of

literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of fact, who

gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to be read with

implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics confined themselves to

pointing this out, and done him justice in his other and real merits,

little fault could have been found with them. But it is impossible not

to see that these merits were, at least in some cases, part of his

crime, in the eyes of those who did not like him; in others were of a

kind which their natural abilities did not qualify them to detect.

The first of these merits--the least it may be in some eyes, not so in

others--was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may remind us

of that which Macaulay in a famous passage has ascribed to Chatham in

modern times and to Demosthenes of old. This quality differed as much

from the flowery and conventional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of

some foreign nations, as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so

frequent in English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one

probably of Mr. Froude's day was less blind to English faults than he

was; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently admired the

greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his utmost in his own

vocation to keep her great.

His second excellence--an excellence still contested and in a way

contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and particular

opinion--was his command of the historic grasp, his share of the

historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to as if they were

chatter or claptrap; while the qualities which they denote are very

often confounded with qualities which, sometimes found in connection

with them, may exist without either. The historic sense may be roughly

described as the power of seizing, and so of portraying, a historic

character, incident, or period as if it were alive not dead; in such a

manner that the fit reader, whether he is convinced or not that the

things ever did happen, sees that they might and probably must have

happened. Some of the most estimable and excellent of historians have

not had even a glimmering of this sense: they have at best laboriously

assembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one with the

sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and Herodotus had it;

Tacitus had it, and even Sallust; it betrays itself in the most artless

fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, less artlessly in Comines;

Clarendon had it; Gibbon had it; Carlyle had it as none has had it

before or since. And Mr. Froude had it; not much less though more

fitfully than Carlyle. It is not in the least necessary to agree with

his views; it is possible to regard his facts with the most anxious

suspicion. You may think that the case made out for King Henry is pretty

weak, and the case made out against Queen Mary is much weaker. But Mr.

Froude is among the rare Deucalions of historic literature: he cannot

cast a stone but it becomes alive.

Thirdly, and still rising in the scale of incontestability, though even

so contested, I believe, by some, is the merit of style. I have

sometimes doubted whether Mr. Froude at his best has any superior among

the prose writers of the last half of this century. His is not a

catching style; and in particular it does not perhaps impress itself

upon green tastes. It has neither the popular and slightly brusque

appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique magnificence of Mr.

Ruskin, nor the fretted and iridescent delicacy of some other writers.

It must be frankly confessed that, the bulk of his work being very great

and his industry not being untiring, it is unequal, and sometimes not

above (it is never below) good journey-work. But at its best it is of a

simply wonderful attraction--simply in the pure sense, for it is never

very ornate, and does not proceed in point of "tricks" much beyond the

best varieties of the latest Georgian form. That strange quality of

"liveliness" which has been noticed in reference to its author's view of

history, animates it throughout. It is never flat; never merely

popular; never merely scholarly; never merely "precious" and eccentric.

And at its very best it is excelled by no style in this century, and

approached by few in this or any other, as a perfect harmony of

unpretentious music, adjusted to the matter that it conveys, and

lingering on the ear that it reaches.

NOTE.--As examples of the almost enforced omissions referred

to in the text may be mentioned earlier Archdeacon Coxe, the

biographer of Marlborough and the historian of the House of

Austria; later, Finlay (1799-1875), the valiant successor of

Gibbon, and the chronicler of the obscure and thankless

fortunes of the country called Greece, after it had ceased

to be living. Professor Sir J. R. Seeley, Kingsley's

successor at Cambridge (1834-94), equally distinguished in

his professional business, and as a lay theologian in a

sense rather extra-orthodox than unorthodox; and Sir John

Stirling-Maxwell, no mean historian either in the general

sense or in the special department of Art. It is open to any

one to contend that each and all of these as well deserve

notice as not a few dealt with above; yet if they were

admitted others still could hardly be excluded.