[From _The Westminster Review_. February, 1843]
It is with the two great masters of modern ballad poetry (Campbell and
Scott) that Mr. Macaulay's performances are really to be compared, and
not with the real ballads or epics of an early age. The "Lays," in point
of form, are not in the least like the genuine productions of a
primitive age or people, and it is no blame to Mr. Macaulay that they
are not. He professes imitation of Homer, but we really see no
resemblance, except in the nature of some of the incidents, and the
animation and vigour of the narrative; and the "Iliad," after all, is
not the original ballads of the Trojan War, but these ballads moulded
together, and wrought into the forms of a more civilised and cultivated
age. It is difficult to conjecture what the form of the old Roman ballad
may have been, and certain, that whatever they were, they could no more
satisfy the aesthetic requirements of modern culture, than an ear
accustomed to the great organs of Freyburg or Harlem could relish
Orpheus's hurdy-gurdy, although the airs which Orpheus played, if they
could be recovered, might perhaps be executed with great effect on the
more perfect instrument.
The former of Mr. Macaulay's ballad poetry are essentially modern: they
are those of the romantic and chivalrous, not the classical ages, and
even in those they are a reproduction, not of the originals, but of the
imitations of Scott. In this we think he has done well, for Scott's
style is as near to that of the ancient ballad as we conceive to be at
all compatible with real popular effect on the modern mind. The
difference between the two may be seen by the most cursory comparison of
any real old ballad, "Chevy Chase," for instance, with last canto of
Marmion, or with any of these "Lays." Conciseness is the characteristic
of the real ballad, diffuseness of the modern adaptation. The old bard
did everything by single touches; Scott and Mr. Macaulay by repetition
and accumulation of particulars. They produce all their effect by what
they _say_; he by what he _suggested_; by what he stimulated the
imagination to paint for itself. But then the old ballads were not
written for the light reading of tired readers. To do the work in
_their_ way, they required to be brooded over, or had at least the aid
of tune and of impassioned recitation. Stories which are to be told to
children in the age of eagerness and excitability, or sung in banquet
halls to assembled warriors, whose daily ideas and feelings supply a
flood of comment ready to gush forth on the slightest hint of the poet,
cannot fly too swift and straight to the mark. But Mr. Macaulay wrote to
be only read, and by readers for whom it was necessary to do all.
These poems, therefore, are not the worse for being un-Roman in their
form; and in their substance they are Roman to a degree which deserves
great admiration. Mr. Macaulay's prose writings had not prepared us for
the power which he has here manifested of identifying himself easily and
completely, with states of feeling and modes of life alien to modern
experience. Nobody could have previously doubted that he possessed
fancy, but he has added to it the higher faculty of Imagination. We have
not been able to detect, in the four poems, one idea or feeling which
was not, or might not have been Roman; while the externals of Roman
life, and the feelings characteristic of Rome and of that particular
age, are reproduced with great felicity, and without being made unduly
predominant over the universal features of human nature and human life.
Independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are
a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has
made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the
work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of
early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made
Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is
no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is
no estimating the injury which the cause of popular institutions has
suffered, and still suffers from misrepresentations of the early
condition of the Roman and Plebs, and its noble struggles against its
taskmasters. And the study of the manner in which the heroic legends of
early Rome grew up as poetry and gradually became history, has important
bearings on the general laws of historical evidence, and on the many
things which, as philosophy advances, are more and more seen to be
therewith connected. On this subject Mr. Macaulay has not only
presented, in an agreeable form, the results of previous speculation,
but has, though in an entirely unpretending manner, thrown additional
light upon it by his own remarks: as where he shows, by incontestible
instances, that a similar transformation of poetic fiction into history
has taken place on various occasions in modern and sceptical times....
We are more disposed to break a lance with our author on the general
merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he
sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of
its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no
Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last
was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators.
But where was the Greek model of the noble poem of Lucretius? What,
except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and whoever
thinks of comparing the two poems? Where, in Homer or the Euripides,
will be found the original of the tender and pathetic passages in the
Aeneid, especially the exquisitely told story of Dido? There is no
extraordinary merit in the "Carmen Secculare" as we have it, the only
production of Horace which challenges comparison with Pindar; although
we are not among those who deem Pindar one of the brightest stars in the
Greek heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's _Carmina_
borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of
Burns or Béranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what
Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom
some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even
the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a
hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture,
yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" The complete originality and
eminent merit of their satiric poetry, Mr. Macaulay himself
acknowledges. As for prose, we give up Cicero as compared with
Demosthenes, but with no one else; and is Livy less original, or less
admirable, than Herodotus? Tacitus may have imitated, even to
affectation, the condensation of Thucydides, as Milton imitated the
Greek and Hebrew poets; but was the mind of the one as essentially
original as that of the other? Is the Roman less an unapprochable
master, in his peculiar line, that of sentimental history, than the
Grecian in his? and what Greek historian has written anything similar or
comparable to the sublime peroration of the _Life of Agricola_? The
Latin genius lay not in speculation, and the Romans did undoubtedly
borrow all their philosophical principles from the Greeks. Their
originality _there_, as is well said by a remarkable writer in the most
remarkable of his works,[1] consisted in taking these principles _au
serieux_. They _did_ what the others talked about. Zeno, indeed, was not
a Roman; but Poetus Thrasea and Marcus Antoninus were.
[1] Mr. Maurice, in the essay on the history of moral speculation and
culture, which forms the article "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy"
in the _Encyclopaedia Metropolitana._