Education that those labours were voluntary and unpaid; and voluntary
and unpaid likewise was another service which he rendered to India, not
less durable than the first, and hardly less important. A clause in the
Act of 1833 gave rise to the appointment of a Commission to inquire into
the jurisprudence and jurisdiction of our Eastern Empire. Macaulay, at
his own instigation, was appointed President of that Commission. He had
not been many months engaged in his new duties before he submitted a
proposal, by the adoption of which his own industry and the high talents
of his colleagues, Mr. Cameron and Sir John Macleod, might be turned to
the best account by being employed in framing a Criminal Code for the
whole Indian Empire. "This Code," writes Macaulay, "should not be a mere
digest of existing usages and regulations, but should comprise all the
reforms which the Commission may think desirable. It should be framed
on two great principles, the principle of suppressing crime with the
smallest possible amount of suffering, and the principle of ascertaining
truth at the smallest possible cost of time and money. The Commissioners
should be particularly charged to study conciseness, as far as it is
consistent with perspicuity. In general, I believe, it will be found
that perspicuous and concise expressions are not only compatible, but
identical."
The offer was eagerly accepted, and the Commission fell to work. The
results of that work did not show themselves quickly enough to satisfy
the most practical, and, (to its credit be it spoken,) the most exacting
of Governments; and Macaulay was under the necessity of explaining and
excusing a procrastination, which was celerity itself as compared with
any codifying that had been done since the days of Justinian.
"During the last rainy season,--a season, I believe, peculiarly
unhealthy,--every member of the Commission, except myself, was wholly
incapacitated for exertion. Mr. Anderson has been twice under the
necessity of leaving Calcutta, and has not, till very lately, been
able to labour with his accustomed activity. Mr. Macleod has been, till
within the last week or ten days, in so feeble a state that the smallest
effort seriously disordered him; and his health is so delicate that,
admirably qualified as he is, by very rare talents, for the discharge
of his functions, it would be imprudent, in forming any prospective
calculation, to reckon on much service from him. Mr. Cameron, of the
importance of whose assistance I need not speak, has been, during more
than four months, utterly unable to do any work, and has at length been
compelled to ask leave of absence, in order to visit the Cape for the
recovery of his health. Thus, as the Governor-General has stated, Mr.
Millett and myself have, during a considerable time, constituted the
whole effective strength of the Commission. Nor has Mr. Millett been
able to devote to the business of the Commission his whole undivided
attention.
"I must say that, even if no allowance be made for the untoward
occurrences which have retarded our progress, that progress cannot
be called slow. People who have never considered the importance and
difficulty of the task in which we are employed are surprised to find
that a Code cannot be spoken of extempore, or written like an article
in a magazine. I am not ashamed to acknowledge that there are several
chapters in the Code on which I have been employed for months; of which
I have changed the whole plan ten or twelve times; which contain not a
single word as it originally stood; and with which I am still very far
indeed from being satisfied. I certainly shall not hurry on my share
of the work to gratify the childish impatience of the ignorant. Their
censure ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to men engaged in
a task, on the right performance of which the welfare of millions may,
during a long series of years, depend. The cost of the Commission is
as nothing when compared with the importance of such a work. The time
during which the Commission has sat is as nothing compared with the time
during which that work will produce good, or evil, to India.
"Indeed, if we compare the progress of the Indian Code with the progress
of Codes under circumstances far more favourable, we shall find little
reason to accuse the Law Commission of tardiness. Buonaparte had at his
command the services of experienced jurists to any extent to which he
chose to call for them; yet his legislation proceeded at a far slower
rate than ours. The French Criminal Code was begun, under the Consulate,
in March 1801; and yet the Code of Criminal Procedure was not completed
till 1808, and the Penal Code not till 1810. The Criminal Code
of Louisiana was commenced in February 1821. After it had been in
preparation during three years and a half, an accident happened to the
papers which compelled Mr. Livingstone to request indulgence for another
year. Indeed, when I remember the slow progress of law reforms at home,
and when I consider that our Code decides hundreds of questions, every
one of which, if stirred in England, would give occasion to voluminous
controversy and to many animated debates, I must acknowledge that I am
inclined to fear that we have been guilty rather of precipitation than
of delay."
This Minute was dated the end of January, 1837; and in the course of
the same year the Code appeared, headed by an Introductory Report in the
shape of a letter to the Governor-General, and followed by an Appendix
containing eighteen notes, each in itself an essay. The most readable of
all Digests, its pages are alive with illustrations drawn from history,
from literature, and from the habits and occurrences of everyday life.
The offence of fabricating evidence is exemplified by a case which may
easily be recognised as that of Lady Macbeth and the grooms; ["A, after
wounding a person with a knife, goes into the room where Z is sleeping,
smears Z's clothes with blood, and lays the knife under Z's pillow;
intending not only that suspicion may thereby be turned away front
himself, but also that Z may be convicted of voluntarily causing
grievous hurt. A is liable to punishment as a fabricator of false
evidence."] and the offence of voluntary culpable homicide by an
imaginary incident of a pit covered with sticks and turf, which
irresistibly recalls a reminiscence of Jack the Giant-killer. The
chapters on theft and trespass establish the rights of book owners
as against book stealers, book borrowers, and book defacers, with an
affectionate precision which would have gladdened the heart of Charles
Lamb or Sir Walter Scott. ["A, being on friendly terms with Z, goes
into Z's library, in Z's absence, and takes a book without Z's express
consent. Here, it is probable that A may have conceived that he had Z's
implied consent to use Z's books. If this was A's impression, A has not
committed theft."
"A takes up a book belonging to Z, and reads it, not having any right
over the book, and not having the consent of any person entitled to
authorise A so to do. A trespasses.
"A, being exasperated at a passage in a book which is lying on the
counter of Z, snatches it up, and tears it to pieces. A has not
committed theft, as he has not acted fraudulently, though he may
have committed criminal trespass and mischief."] In the chapter on
manslaughter, the judge is enjoined to treat with lenity an act done
in the first anger of a husband or father, provoked by the intolerable
outrage of a certain kind of criminal assault. "Such an assault produced
the Sicilian Vespers. Such an assault called forth the memorable blow of
Wat Tyler." And, on the question whether the severity of a hurt should
be considered in apportioning the punishment, we are reminded of
"examples which are universally known. Harley was laid up more than
twenty days by the wound which he received from Guiscard;" while "the
scratch which Damien gave to Louis the Fifteenth was so slight that it
was followed by no feverish symptoms." Such a sanguine estimate of the
diffusion of knowledge with regard to the details of ancient crimes
could proceed from no pen but that of the writer who endowed schoolboys
with the erudition of professors, and the talker who, when he poured
forth the stores of his memory, began each of his disquisitions with the
phrase, "don't you remember?"
If it be asked whether or not the Penal Code fulfils the ends for which
it was framed, the answer may safely be left to the gratitude of Indian
civilians, the younger of whom carry it about in their saddle-bags, and
the older in their heads. The value which it possesses in the eyes of a
trained English lawyer may be gathered from the testimony of Macaulay's
eminent successor, Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, who writes of it thus:
"In order to appreciate the importance of the Penal Code, it must be
borne in mind what crime in India is. Here, in England, order is so
thoroughly well established that the crime of the country is hardly more
than an annoyance. In India, if crime is allowed to let to a head, it
is capable of destroying the peace and prosperity of whole tracts
of country. The mass of the people in their common moods are gentle,
submissive, and disposed to be innocent; but, for that very reason, bold
and successful criminals are dangerous in the extreme. In old days, when
they joined in gangs or organised bodies, they soon acquired political
importance. Now, in many parts of India, crime is quite as uncommon
as in the least criminal parts of England; and the old high-handed
systematised crime has almost entirely disappeared. This great
revolution (for it is nothing less) in the state of society of a whole
continent has been brought about by the regular administration of a
rational body of criminal law.
"The administration of criminal justice is entrusted to a very
small number of English magistrates, organised according to a
carefully-devised system of appeal and supervision which represents the
experience of a century. This system is not unattended by evils; but it
is absolutely necessary to enable a few hundred civilians to govern a
continent. Persons in such a position must be provided with the plainest
instructions as to the nature of their duties. These instructions, in
so far as the administration of criminal justice is concerned, are
contained in the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure.
The Code of Criminal Procedure contains 541 sections, and forms a
pamphlet of 210 widely printed octavo pages. The Penal Code consists of
510 sections. Pocket editions of these Codes are published, which may be
carried about as easily as a pocket Bible; and I doubt whether, even
in Scotland, you would find many people who know their Bibles as Indian
civilians know their Codes."
After describing the confusion and complication of the criminal law of
our Indian Empire before it was taken in hand by the Commission of 1834,
Mr. Stephen proceeds to say:
"Lord Macaulay's great work was far too daring and original to be
accepted at once. It was a draft when he left India in 1838. His
successors made remarks on it for twenty-two years. Those years were
filled with wars and rumours of wars. The Afghan disasters and triumphs,
the war in Central India, the wars with the Sikhs, Lord Dalhousie's
annexations, threw law reform into the background, and produced a state
of mind not very favourable to it. Then came the Mutiny, which in its
essence was the breakdown of an old system; the renunciation of an
attempt to effect an impossible compromise between the Asiatic and the
European view of things, legal, military, and administrative. The effect
of the Mutiny on the Statute-book was unmistakable. The Code of Civil
Procedure was enacted in 1859. The Penal Code was enacted in 1860, and
came into operation on the 1st of January 1862. The credit of passing
the Penal Code into law, and of giving to every part of it the
improvements which practical skill and technical knowledge could bestow,
is due to Sir Barnes Peacock, who held Lord Macaulay's place during the
most anxious years through which the Indian Empire has passed. The Draft
and the Revision are both eminently creditable to their authors; and the
result of their successive efforts has been to reproduce in a concise,
and even beautiful, form the spirit of the law of England; the most
technical, the most clumsy, and the most bewildering of all systems of
criminal law; though I think, if its principles are fully understood, it
is the most rational. If anyone doubts this assertion, let him compare
the Indian Penal Code with such a book as Mr. Greaves's edition of
Russell on Crimes. The one subject of homicide, as treated by Mr.
Greaves and Russell, is, I should think, twice as long as the whole
Penal Code; and it does not contain a tenth part of the matter."
"The point which always has surprised me most in connection with
the Penal Code is, that it proves that Lord Macaulay must have had a
knowledge of English criminal law which, considering how little he had
practised it, may fairly be called extraordinary. [Macaulay's practice
at the bar had been less than little, according to an account which he
gave of it at a public dinner: "My own forensic experience, gentlemen,
has been extremely small; for my only recollection of an achievement
that way is that at quarter sessions I once convicted a boy of stealing
a parcel of cocks and hens."] He must have possessed the gift of going
at once to the very root of the matter, and of sifting the corn from the
chaff to a most unusual degree; for his Draft gives the substance of
the criminal law of England, down to its minute working details, in
a compass which, by comparison with the original, may be regarded as
almost absurdly small. The Indian Penal Code is to the English criminal
law what a manufactured article ready for use is to the materials out of
which it is made. It is to the French 'Code Penal,' and, I may add, to
the North German Code of 1871, what a finished picture is to a sketch.
It is far simpler, and much better expressed, than Livingstone's Code
for Louisiana; and its practical success has been complete. The clearest
proof of this is that hardly any questions have arisen upon it which
have had to be determined by the courts; and that few and slight
amendments have had to be made in it by the Legislature."
Without troubling himself unduly about the matter, Macaulay was
conscious that the world's estimate of his public services would be
injuriously affected by the popular notion, which he has described as
"so flattering to mediocrity," that a great writer cannot be a great
administrator; and it is possible that this consciousness had something
to do with the heartiness and fervour which he threw into his defence
of the author of "Cato" against the charge of having been an inefficient
Secretary of State. There was much in common between his own lot
and that of the other famous essayist who had been likewise a Whig
statesman; and this similarity in their fortunes may account in part for
the indulgence, and almost tenderness, with which he reviewed the career
and character of Addison. Addison himself, at his villa in Chelsea, and
still more amidst the gilded slavery of Holland House, might have envied
the literary seclusion, ample for so rapid a reader, which the usages of
Indian life permitted Macaulay to enjoy. "I have a very pretty garden,"
he writes, "not unlike our little grass-plot at Clapham, but larger.
It consists of a fine sheet of turf, with a gravel walk round it, and
flower-beds scattered over it. It looks beautiful just now after the
rains, and I hear that it keeps its verdure during a great part of the
year. A flight of steps leads down from my library into the garden, and
it is so well shaded that you may walk there till ten o'clock in the
morning."
Here, book in hand, and in dressing-gown and slippers, he would spend
those two hours after sun-rise which Anglo-Indian gentlemen devote
to riding, and Anglo-Indian ladies to sleeping off the arrears of the
sultry night. Regularly, every morning, his studies were broken in upon
by the arrival of his baby niece, who came to feed the crows with the
toast which accompanied his early cup of tea; a ceremony during which
he had much ado to protect the child from the advances of a multitude of
birds, each almost as big as herself, which hopped and fluttered round
her as she stood on the steps of the verandah. When the sun drove him
indoors, (which happened sooner than he had promised himself, before he
had learned by experience what the hot season was,) he went to his bath
and toilette, and then to breakfast; "at which we support nature under
the exhausting effects of the climate by means of plenty of eggs,
mango-fish, snipe-pies, and frequently a hot beefsteak. My cook is
renowned through Calcutta for his skill. He brought me attestations of
a long succession of gourmands, and among them one from Lord Dalhousie,
who pronounced him decidedly the first artist in Bengal. [Lord
Dalhousie, the father of the Governor-General, was Commander-In-Chief
in India during the years 1830 and 1831.] This great man, and his two
assistants, I am to have for thirty rupees a month. While I am on the
subject of the cuisine, I may as well say all that I have to say about
it at once. The tropical fruits are wretched. The best of them is
inferior to our apricot or gooseberry. When I was a child, I had a
notion of its being the most exquisite of treats to eat plantains and
yams, and to drink palm-wine. How I envied my father for having enjoyed
these luxuries! I have now enjoyed them all, and I have found like much
greater men on much more important occasions, that all is vanity. A
plantain is very like a rotten pear,--so like that I would lay twenty to
one that a person blindfolded would not discover the difference. A yam
is better. It is like an indifferent potato. I tried palm-wine at a
pretty village near Madras, where I slept one night. I told Captain
Barron that I had been curious to taste that liquor ever since I first
saw, eight or nine and twenty years ago, the picture of the negro
climbing the tree in Sierra Leone. The next morning I was roused by a
servant, with a large bowl of juice fresh from the tree. I drank it, and
found it very like ginger-beer in which the ginger has been sparingly
used."
Macaulay necessarily spent away from home the days on which the Supreme
Council, or the Law Commission, held their meetings; but the rest of his
work, legal, literary, and educational, he carried on in the quiet of
his library. Now and again, a morning was consumed in returning calls,
an expenditure of time which it is needless to say that he sorely
grudged. "Happily, the good people here are too busy to be at home.
Except the parsons, they are all usefully occupied somewhere or other,
so that I have only to leave cards; but the reverend gentlemen are
always within doors in the heat of the day, lying on their backs,
regretting breakfast, longing for tiffin, and crying out for lemonade."
After lunch he sate with Mrs. Trevelyan, translating Greek or reading
French for her benefit; and Scribe's comedies and Saint Simon's Memoirs
beguiled the long languid leisure of the Calcutta afternoon, while the
punkah swung overhead, and the air came heavy and scented through the
moistened grass-matting which shrouded the windows. At the approach of
sunset, with its attendant breeze, he joined his sister in her drive
along the banks of the Hooghly; and they returned by starlight,--too
often to take part in a vast banquet of forty guests, dressed as
fashionably as people can dress at ninety degrees East from Paris; who,
one and all, had far rather have been eating their curry, and drinking
their bitter beer, at home, in all the comfort of muslin and nankeen.
Macaulay is vehement in his dislike of "those great formal dinners,
which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and
discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody
speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most
deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest
rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in
the company, I am worse off than my neighbours."
Nevertheless he was far too acute a judge of men to undervalue the
special type of mind which is produced and fostered by the influences of
an Indian career. He was always ready to admit that there is no better
company in the world than a young and rising civilian; no one who has
more to say that is worth hearing, and who can say it in a manner better
adapted to interest those who know good talk from bad. He delighted in
that freedom from pedantry, affectation, and pretension which is one of
the most agreeable characteristics of a service, to belong to which
is in itself so effectual an education, that a bore is a phenomenon
notorious everywhere within a hundred miles of the station which has the
honour to possess him, and a fool is quoted by name throughout all the
three Presidencies. Macaulay writes to his sisters at home: "The best
way of seeing society here is to have very small parties. There is
a little circle of people whose friendship I value, and in whose
conversation I take pleasure: the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Ryan; my old
friend, Malkin; Cameron and Macleod, the Law Commissioners; Macnaghten,
among the older servants of the Company, and Mangles, Colvin, and John
Peter Grant among the younger. [It cannot be said that all the claims
made upon Macaulay's friendship were acknowledged as readily as those
of Sir Benjamin Malkin. "I am dunned unmercifully by place-hunters. The
oddest application that I have received is from that rascal --, who is
somewhere in the interior. He tells me he is sure that prosperity has
not changed me; that I am still the same John Macaulay who was his
dearest friend, his more than brother; and that he means to come up, and
live with me at Calcutta. If he fulfils his intention, I will have him
taken before the police-magistrates."] These, in my opinion, are the
flower of Calcutta society, and I often ask some of them to a quiet
dinner." On the Friday of every week, these chosen few met round
Macaulay's breakfast table to discuss the progress which the Law
Commission had made in its labours; and each successive point which
was started opened the way to such a flood of talk,--legal, historical,
political, and personal,--that the company would sit far on towards
noon over the empty teacups, until an uneasy sense of accumulating
despatch-boxes drove them, one by one, to their respective offices.
There are scattered passages in these letters which prove that
Macaulay's feelings, during his protracted absence from his native
country, were at times almost as keen as those which racked the breast
of Cicero, when he was forced to exchange the triumphs of the Forum,
and the cozy suppers with his brother augurs, for his hateful place
of banishment at Thessalonica, or his hardly less hateful seat of
government at Tarsus. The complaints of the English statesman do not,
however, amount in volume to a fiftieth part of those reiterated out
pourings of lachrymose eloquence with which the Roman philosopher
bewailed an expatriation that was hardly one-third as long. "I have no
words," writes Macaulay, very much under-estimating the wealth of his
own vocabulary, "to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely
bitter exile has been to me, though I hope that I have borne it well. I
feel as if I had no other wish than to see my country again and die. Let
me assure you that banishment is no light matter. No person can judge of
it who has not experienced it. A complete revolution in all the habits
of life; an estrangement from almost every old friend and acquaintance;
fifteen thousand miles of ocean between the exile and everything that
he cares for; all this is, to me at least, very trying. There is no
temptation of wealth, or power, which would induce me to go through it
again. But many people do not feel as I do. Indeed, the servants of the
Company rarely have such a feeling; and it is natural that they should
not have it, for they are sent out while still schoolboys, and when they
know little of the world. The moment of emigration is to them also the
moment of emancipation; and the pleasures of liberty and affluence to a
great degree compensate them for the loss of their home. In a few years
they become orientalised, and, by the time that they are of my age, they
would generally prefer India, as a residence, to England. But it is a
very different matter when a man is transplanted at thirty-three."
Making, as always, the best of everything, he was quite ready to allow
that he might have been placed in a still less agreeable situation. In
the following extract from a letter to his friend, Mrs. Drummond, there
is much which will come home to those who are old enough to remember how
vastly the Dublin of 1837 differed, for the worse, from the Dublin of
1875, "It now seems likely that you may remain in Ireland for years.
I cannot conceive what has induced you to submit to such an exile.
I declare, for my own part, that, little as I love Calcutta, I would
rather stay here than be settled in the Phoenix Park. The last residence
which I would choose would be a place with all the plagues, and none of
the attractions, of a capital; a provincial city on fire with factions
political and religious, peopled by raving Orangemen and raving
Repealers, and distracted by a contest between Protestantism as
fanatical as that of Knot and Catholicism as fanatical as that of
Bonner. We have our share of the miseries of life in this country.
We are annually baked four months, boiled four more, and allowed the
remaining four to become cool if we can. At this moment, the sun is
blazing like a furnace. The earth, soaked with oceans of rain, is
steaming like a wet blanket. Vegetation is rotting all round us. Insects
and undertakers are the only living creatures which seem to enjoy the
climate. But, though our atmosphere is hot, our factions are lukewarm. A
bad epigram in a newspaper, or a public meeting attended by a tailor,
a pastry-cook, a reporter, two or three barristers, and eight or ten
attorneys, are our most formidable annoyances. We have agitators in
our own small way, Tritons of the minnows, bearing the same sort of
resemblance to O'Connell that a lizard bears to an alligator. Therefore
Calcutta for me, in preference to Dublin."
He had good reason for being grateful to Calcutta, and still better for
not showing his gratitude by prolonging his stay there over a fourth
summer and autumn. "That tremendous crash of the great commercial houses
which took place a few years ago has produced a revolution in fashions.
It ruined one half of the English society in Bengal, and seriously
injured the other half. A large proportion of the most important
functionaries here are deeply in debt, and accordingly, the mode of
living is now exceedingly quiet and modest. Those immense subscriptions,
those public tables, those costly equipages and entertainments of which
Heber, and others who saw Calcutta a few years back, say so much,
are never heard of. Speaking for myself, it was a great piece of good
fortune that I came hither just at the time when the general distress
had forced everybody to adopt a moderate way of living. Owing very much
to that circumstance, (while keeping house, I think, more handsomely
than any other member of Council,) I have saved what will enable me
to do my part towards making my family comfortable; and I shall have a
competency for myself, small indeed, but quite sufficient to render
me as perfectly independent as if I were the possessor of Burleigh or
Chatsworth." [Macaulay writes to Lord Mahon on the last day of December
1836: "In another year I hope to leave this country, with a fortune
which you would think ridiculously small, but which will make me as
independent as if I had all that Lord Westminster has above the ground,
and Lord Durham below it. I have no intention of again taking part in
politics; but I cannot tell what effect the sight of the old Hall and
Abbey may produce on me."]
"The rainy season of 1837 has been exceedingly unhealthy. Our house has
escaped as well as any; yet Hannah is the only one of us who has come
off untouched. The baby has been repeatedly unwell. Trevelyan has
suffered a good deal, and is kept right only by occasional trips in a
steamer down to the mouth of the Hooghly. I had a smart touch of fever,
which happily stayed but an hour or two, and I took such vigorous
measures that it never came again; but I remained unnerved and exhausted
for nearly a fortnight. This was my first, and I hope my last, taste of
Indian maladies. It is a happy thing for us all that we are not to pass
another year in the reek of this deadly marsh." Macaulay wisely declined
to set the hope of making another lac of rupees against the risk, to
himself and others of such a fate as subsequently befell Lord Canning
and Mr. James Wilson. He put the finishing stroke to his various
labours; resigned his seat in the Council, and his Presidentships of the
Law Commission and the Committee of Public Instruction; and, in company
with the Trevelyans, sailed for England in the first fortnight of the
year 1838.
To Mr Thomas Flower Ellis.
Calcutta: December 16, 1834.
Dear Ellis,--Many thanks for your letter. It is delightful in this
strange land to see the handwriting of such a friend. We must keep up
our spirits. We shall meet, I trust, in little more than four years,
with feelings of regard only strengthened by our separation. My spirits
are not bad; and they ought not to be bad. I have health; affluence;
consideration; great power to do good; functions which, while they are
honourable and useful, are not painfully burdensome; leisure for study;
good books; an unclouded and active mind; warm affections; and a very
dear sister. There will soon be a change in my domestic arrangements. My
sister is to be married next week. Her lover, who is lover enough to
be a knight of the Round Table, is one of the most distinguished of our
young Civilians.
I have the very highest opinion of his talents both for action and for
discussion. Indeed, I should call him a man of real genius. He is also,
what is even more important, a man of the utmost purity of honour, of
a sweet temper, and of strong principle. His public virtue has gone
through very severe trials, and has come out resplendent. Lord William,
in congratulating me the other day, said that he thought my destined
brother-in-law the ablest young man in the service. His name is
Trevelyan. He is a nephew of Sir John Trevelyan, a baronet; in Cornwall
I suppose, by the name; for I never took the trouble to ask.
He and my sister will live with me during my stay here. I have a house
about as large as Lord Dudley's in Park Lane, or rather larger, so
that I shall accommodate them without the smallest difficulty. This
arrangement is acceptable to me, because it saves me from the misery of
parting with my sister in this strange land; and is, I believe, equally
gratifying to Trevelyan, whose education, like that of other Indian
servants, was huddled up hastily at home; who has an insatiable thirst
for knowledge of every sort; and who looks on me as little less than
an oracle of wisdom. He came to me the other morning to know whether
I would advise him to keep up his Greek, which he feared he had nearly
lost. I gave him Homer, and asked him to read a page; and I found that,
like most boys of any talent who had been at the Charterhouse, he was
very well grounded in that language. He read with perfect rapture, and
has marched off with the book, declaring that he shall never be content
till he has finished the whole. This, you will think, is not a bad
brother-in-law for a man to pick up in 22 degrees of North latitude, and
100 degrees of East longitude.
I read much, and particularly Greek; and I find that I am, in all
essentials, still not a bad scholar. I could, I think, with a year's
hard study, qualify myself to fight a good battle for a Craven's
scholarship. I read, however, not as I read at College, but like a
man of the world. If I do not know a word, I pass it by unless it is
important to the sense. If I find, as I have of late often found, a
passage which refuses to give up its meaning at the second reading, I
let it alone. I have read during the last fortnight, before breakfast,
three books of Herodotus, and four plays of Aeschylus. My admiration of
Aeschylus has been prodigiously increased by this reperusal. I cannot
conceive how any person of the smallest pretension to taste should doubt
about his immeasurable superiority to every poet of antiquity, Homer
only excepted. Even Milton, I think, must yield to him. It is quite
unintelligible to me that the ancient critics should have placed him
so low. Horace's notice of him in the Ars Poetica is quite ridiculous.
There is, to be sure, the "magnum loqui;" but the great topic insisted
on is the skill of Aeschylus as a manager, as a property-man; the
judicious way in which he boarded the stage; the masks, the buskins, and
the dresses.
["Post hunc personae pallaeque repertor honestae
Aeschylus et modicis instravit pulpita tignis,
Et docuit magnumnque loqui, nitique cothuruo."]
And, after all, the "magnum loqui," though the most obvious
characteristic of Aeschylus, is by no means his highest or his best. Nor
can I explain this by saying that Horace had too tame and unimaginative
a mind to appreciate Aeschylus. Horace knew what he could himself do,
and, with admirable wisdom, he confined himself to that; but he seems
to have had a perfectly clear comprehension of the merit of those
great masters whom he never attempted to rival. He praised Pindar most
enthusiastically. It seems incomprehensible to me that a critic, who
admired Pindar, should not admire Aeschylus far more.
Greek reminds me of Cambridge and of Thirlwall. When you see Thirlwall,
tell him that I congratulate him from the bottom of my soul on having
suffered in so good a cause; and that I would rather have been treated
as he has been treated, on such an account, than have the Mastership of
Trinity. [The subjoined extract from the letter of a leading member of
Trinity College explains Macaulay's indignation. "Thirlwall published a
pamphlet in 1834, on the admission of Dissenters to the University. The
result was that he was either deprived of his Assistant Tutorship or had
to give it up. Thirlwall left Cambridge soon afterwards. I suppose
that, if he had remained, he would have been very possibly Wordsworth's
successor in the Mastership."] There would be some chance for the
Church, if we had more Churchmen of the same breed, worthy successors of
Leighton and Tillotson.
From one Trinity Fellow I pass to another. (This letter is quite a study
to a metaphysician who wishes to illustrate the Law of Association.) We
have no official tidings yet of Malkin's appointment to the vacant seat
on the Bench at Calcutta. I cannot tell you how delighted I am at
the prospect of having him here. An honest enlightened Judge, without
professional narrowness, is the very man whom we want on public grounds.
And, as to my private feelings, nothing could be more agreeable to me
than to have an old friend, and so estimable a friend, brought so near
to me in this distant country.
Ever, dear Ellis,
Yours very affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: February 8, 1835.
Dear Ellis,--The last month has been the most painful that I ever went
through. Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable. Early
in January, letters from England brought me news of the death of my
youngest sister. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say
that she was dearer to me than anything in the world; for my sister who
was with me was equally dear; but she was as dear to me as one human
being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do its healing
office, I cannot write about her without being altogether unmanned. That
I have not utterly sunk under this blow I owe chiefly to literature.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;--to be able to
converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal! Many times during
the last few weeks I have repeated to myself those fine lines of old
Hesiod:
ei gar tis kai penthos egon neokedei thumo
aksetai kradien akakhemenos, autar aoidos
mousaon therapon kleia proteron anthropon
umnese, makaras te theous oi Olumpon ekhousi,
aips oge dusphroneon epilethetai oude ti kedeon
memnetai takheos de paretrape dora theaon.
["For if to one whose grief is fresh as he sits silent with
sorrow-stricken heart, a minstrel, the henchman of the Muses, celebrates
the men of old and the gods who possess Olympus; straightway he forgets
his melancholy, and remembers not at all his grief, beguiled by the
blessed gift of the goddesses of song." In Macaulay's Hesiod this
passage is scored with three lines in pencil.]
I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing
to myself. I have never felt anything like it. I was enraptured with
Italian during the six months which I gave up to it; and I was little
less pleased with Spanish. But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt
as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that
wonderful people! There is not one art, not one science, about which we
may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the
victory over superstition, "Primum Graius homo--."
I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these
great masters while still in the full vigour of life, and when my taste
and judgment are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever
read before they are five and twenty. They never find time for such
studies afterwards till they are in the decline of life; and then their
knowledge of the language is in a great measure lost, and cannot easily
be recovered. Accordingly, almost all the ideas that people have of
Greek literature, are ideas formed while they were still very young. A
young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as
Thucydides. I had no high opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been
reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches, and to
political affairs; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and
at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my
recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet! The Medea, the
Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchae, are alone sufficient to place him in
the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may,
for aught I know, end by editing him.
I have read Pindar,--with less pleasure than I feel in reading the great
Attic poets, but still with admiration. An idea occurred to me which may
very likely have been noticed by a hundred people before. I was always
puzzled to understand the reason for the extremely abrupt transitions
in those Odes of Horace which are meant to be particularly fine. The
"justum et tenacem" is an instance. All at once you find yourself in
heaven, Heaven knows how. What the firmness of just men in times of
tyranny, or of tumult, has to do with Juno's oration about Troy it
is hardly possible to conceive. Then, again, how strangely the fight
between the Gods and the Giants is tacked on to the fine hymn to the
Muses in that noble ode, "Descende coelo et die age tibia"! This
always struck me as a great fault, and an inexplicable one; for it
is peculiarly alien from the calm good sense, and good taste, which
distinguish Horace.
My explanation of it is this. The Odes of Pindar were the acknowledged
models of lyric poetry. Lyric poets imitated his manner as closely as
they could; and nothing was more remarkable in his compositions than the
extreme violence and abruptness of the transitions. This in Pindar was
quite natural and defensible. He had to write an immense number of poems
on subjects extremely barren, and extremely monotonous. There could be
little difference between one boxing-match and another. Accordingly,
he made all possible haste to escape from the immediate subject, and to
bring in, by hook or by crook, some local description; some old legend;
something or other, in short, which might be more susceptible
of poetical embellishment, and less utterly threadbare, than the
circumstances of a race or a wrestling-match. This was not the practice
of Pindar alone. There is an old story which proves that Simonides did
the same, and that sometimes the hero of the day was nettled at finding
how little was said about him in the Ode for which he was to pay. This
abruptness of transition was, therefore, in the Greek lyric poets, a
fault rendered inevitable by the peculiarly barren and uniform nature
of the subjects which they had to treat. But, like many other faults
of great masters, it appeared to their imitators a beauty; and a beauty
almost essential to the grander Ode. Horace was perfectly at liberty to
choose his own subjects, and to treat them after his own fashion. But he
confounded what was merely accidental in Pindar's manner with what was
essential; and because Pindar, when he had to celebrate a foolish lad
from Aegina who had tripped up another's heels at the Isthmus, made all
possible haste to get away from so paltry a topic to the ancient heroes
of the race of Aeacus, Horace took it into his head that he ought always
to begin as far from the subject as possible, and then arrive at it by
some strange and sudden bound. This is my solution. At least I can
find no better. The most obscure passage,--at least the strangest
passage,--in all Horace may be explained by supposing that he was
misled by Pindar's example: I mean that odd parenthesis in the "Qualem
Ministrum:"
quibus
Mos unde deductus per omne--.
This passage, taken by itself, always struck me as the harshest,
queerest, and most preposterous digression in the world. But there are
several things in Pindar very like it. [Orelli makes an observation,
much to the same effect, in his note on this passage in his edition of
1850.]
You must excuse all this, for I labour at present under a suppression of
Greek, and am likely to do so for at least three years to come. Malkin
may be some relief; but I am quite unable to guess whether he means to
come to Calcutta. I am in excellent bodily health, and I am recovering
my mental health; but I have been sorely tried. Money matters look well.
My new brother-in-law and I are brothers in more than law. I am more
comfortable than I expected to be in this country; and, as to the
climate, I think it, beyond all comparison, better than that of the
House of Commons.
Yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
Writing three days after the date of the foregoing letter, Macaulay
says to his old friend Mr. Sharp: "You see that my mind is not in great
danger of rusting. The danger is that I may become a mere pedant. I feel
a habit of quotation growing on me; but I resist that devil, for such
it is, and it flees from me. It is all that I can do to keep Greek and
Latin out of all my letters. Wise sayings of Euripides are even now at
my fingers' ends. If I did not maintain a constant struggle against this
propensity, my correspondence would resemble the notes to the 'Pursuits
of Literature.' It is a dangerous thing for a man with a very strong
memory to read very much. I could give you three or four quotations
this moment in support of that proposition; but I will bring the vicious
propensity under subjection, if I can." [Many years later Macaulay wrote
to my mother: "Dr. -- came, and I found him a very clever man; a little
of a coxcomb, but, I dare say, not the worse physician for that. He must
have quoted Horace and Virgil six times at least a propos of his medical
inquiries. Horace says, in a poem in which he jeers the Stoics, that
even a wise man is out of sort when 'pituita molesta est;' which is,
being interpreted, 'when, his phlegm is troublesome.' The Doctor thought
it necessary to quote this passage in order to prove that phlegm is
troublesome;--a proposition, of the truth of which, I will venture to
say, no man on earth is better convinced than myself."]
Calcutta, May 29, 1835.
Dear Ellis,--I am in great want of news. We know that the Tories
dissolved at the end of December, and we also know that they were beaten
towards the end of February. [In November 1834 the King called Sir
Robert Peel to power; after having of his own accord dismissed the Whig
Ministry. Parliament was dissolved, but the Tories did not succeed in
obtaining a majority. After three months of constant and angry fighting,
Peel was driven from office in April 1835.] As to what passed in the
interval, we are quite in the dark. I will not plague you with comments
on events which will have been driven out of your mind by other events
before this reaches you, or with prophecies which may be falsified
before you receive them. About the final issue I am certain. The
language of the first great reformer is that which I should use in reply
to the exultation of our Tories here, if there were any of them who
could understand it
sebou, proseukhou thopte ton kratount aei
emoi d'elasson Zeuos e meden melei.
drato krateito tonde ton brakhun khronon
opes thelei daron gar ouk arksei theois
["Worship thou, adore, and flatter the monarch of the hour. To me Jove
is of less account than nothing. Let him have his will, and his sceptre,
for this brief season; for he will not long be the ruler of the Gods."
It is needless to say that poor William the Fourth was the Jove of the
Whig Prometheus.]
As for myself, I rejoice that I am out of the present storm. "Suave mari
magno;" or, as your new Premier, if he be still Premier, construes. "It
is a source of melancholy satisfaction." I may, indeed, feel the effects
of the changes here, but more on public than private grounds. A Tory
Governor-General is not very likely to agree with me about the very
important law reforms which I am about to bring before the Council. But
he is not likely to treat me ill personally; or, if he does,
all ou ti khairon, en tod orthothe Belos,
["It shall be to his cost, so long as this bow carries true."]
as Philoctetes says. In a few months I shall have enough to enable me to
live, after my very moderate fashion, in perfect independence at home;
and whatever debts any Governor-General may choose to lay on me at
Calcutta shall be paid off, he may rely on it, with compound interest,
at Westminster.
My time is divided between public business and books. I mix with society
as little as I can. My spirits have not yet recovered,--I sometimes
think that they will never wholly recover,--the shock which they
received five months ago. I find that nothing soothes them so much as
the contemplation of those miracles of art which Athens has bequeathed
to us. I am really becoming, I hope not a pedant, but certainly an
enthusiast about classical literature. I have just finished a second
reading of Sophocles. I am now deep in Plato, and intend to go right
through all his works. His genius is above praise. Even where he is most
absurd,--as, for example, in the Cratylus,--he shows an acuteness, and
an expanse of intellect, which is quite a phenomenon by itself. The
character of Socrates does not rise upon me. The more I read about him,
the less I wonder that they poisoned him. If he had treated me as he
is said to have treated Protagoras, Hippias, and Gorgias, I could never
have forgiven him.
Nothing has struck me so much in Plato's dialogues as the raillery.
At college, somehow or other, I did not understand or appreciate it. I
cannot describe to you the way in which it now tickles me. I often sink
forward on my huge old Marsilius Ficinus in a fit of laughter. I should
say that there never was a vein of ridicule so rich, at the same time so
delicate. It is superior to Voltaire's; nay, to Pascal's. Perhaps there
are one or two passages in Cervantes, and one or two in Fielding, that
might give a modern reader a notion of it.
I have very nearly finished Livy. I never read him through before. I
admire him greatly, and would give a quarter's salary to recover the
lost Decades. While I was reading the earlier books I went again
through Niebuhr. And I am sorry to say that, having always been a little
sceptical about his merits, I am now a confirmed unbeliever. I do not of
course mean that he has no merit. He was a man of immense learning, and
of great ingenuity. But his mind was utterly wanting in the faculty
by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible
supposition. He is not content with suggesting that an event may have
happened. He is certain that it happened, and calls on the reader to be
certain too, (though not a trace of it exists in any record whatever,)
because it would solve the phenomena so neatly. Just read over again, if
you have forgotten it, the conjectural restoration of the Inscription in
page 126 of the second volume; and then, on your honour as a scholar and
a man of sense, tell me whether in Bentley's edition of Milton there is
anything which approaches to the audacity of that emendation. Niebuhr
requires you to believe that some of the greatest men in Rome were
burned alive in the Circus; that this event was commemorated by an
inscription on a monument, one half of which is sill in existence; but
that no Roman historian knew anything about it; and that all tradition
of the event was lost, though the memory of anterior events much less
important has reached our time. When you ask for a reason, he tells you
plainly that such a thing cannot be established by reason; that he is
sure of it; and that you must take his word. This sort of intellectual
despotism always moves me to mutiny, and generates a disposition to
pull down the reputation of the dogmatist. Niebuhr's learning was
immeasurably superior to mine; but I think myself quite as good a judge
of evidence as he was. I might easily believe him if he told me that
there were proofs which I had never seen; but, when he produces all his
proofs, I conceive that I am perfectly competent to pronounce on their
value.
As I turned over his leaves just now, I lighted on another instance
of what I cannot but call ridiculous presumption. He says that Martial
committed a blunder in making the penultimate of Porsena short. Strange
that so great a scholar should not know that Horace had done so too!
Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenae manus.
There is something extremely nauseous to me in a German Professor
telling the world, on his own authority, and without giving the smallest
reason, that two of the best Latin poets were ignorant of the quantity
of a word which they must have used in their exercises at school a
hundred times.
As to the general capacity of Niebuhr for political speculations,
let him be judged by the Preface to the Second Volume. He there says,
referring to the French Revolution of July 1830, that "unless God
send us some miraculous help, we have to look forward to a period of
destruction similar to that which the Roman world experienced about the
middle of the third century." Now, when I see a man scribble such abject
nonsense about events which are passing under our eyes, what confidence
can I put in his judgment as to the connection of causes and effects in
times very imperfectly known to us.
But I must bring my letter, or review, to a close. Remember me most
kindly to your wife. Tell Frank that I mean to be a better scholar than
he when I come back, and that he must work hard if he means to overtake
me.
Ever, dear Ellis,
Your affectionate friend
T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: August 25, 1835.
Dear Ellis,--Cameron arrived here about a fortnight ago, and we are most
actively engaged in preparing a complete Criminal Code for India. He and
I agree excellently. Ryan, the most liberal of Judges, lends us his best
assistance. I heartily hope, and fully believe, that we shall put
the whole Penal law, and the whole law of Criminal Procedure, into a
moderately sized volume. I begin to take a very warm interest in this
work. It is, indeed, one of the finest employments of the intellect that
it is easy to conceive. I ought, however, to tell you that, the more
progress I make as a legislator, the more intense my contempt for the
mere technical study of law becomes.
I am deep in the examination of the political theories of the old
philosophers. I have read Plato's Republic, and his laws; and I am now
reading Aristotle's Politics; after which I shall go through Plato's two
treatises again. I every now and then read one of Plutarch's Lives on
an idle afternoon; and in this way I have got through a dozen of them. I
like him prodigiously. He is inaccurate, to be sure, and a romancer;
but he tells a story delightfully, and his illustrations and sketches
of character are as good as anything in ancient eloquence. I have never,
till now, rated him fairly.
As to Latin, I am just finishing Lucan, who remains pretty much where he
was in my opinion; and I am busily engaged with Cicero, whose character,
moral and intellectual, interests me prodigiously. I think that I see
the whole man through and through. But this is too vast a subject for
a letter. I have gone through all Ovid's poems. I admire him; but I was
tired to death before I got to the end. I amused myself one evening with
turning over the Metamorphoses, to see if I could find any passage of
ten lines which could, by possibility, have been written by Virgil.
Whether I was in ill luck or no I cannot tell; but I hunted for half
an hour without the smallest success. At last I chanced to light on a
little passage more Virgilian, to my thinking, than Virgil himself. Tell
me what you say to my criticism. It is part of Apollo's speech to the
laurel
Semper habebunt
Te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae
Tu ducibus Latiis aderis, cum laeta triumphum
Vox canet, et longas visent Capitolia pompas.
Portibus Augustis cadem fidissima custos
Ante fores stabis, mediamque tuebere quercum.
As to other Latin writers, Sallust has gone sadly down in my opinion.
Caesar has risen wonderfully. I think him fully entitled to Cicero's
praise. [In the dialogue "De Claris Oratoribus" Cicero makes Atticus say
that 'A consummate judge of style (who is evidently intended for Cicero
himself,) pronounces Caesar's Latin to be the most elegant, with one
implied exception, that had ever been heard in the Senate or the Forum'.
Atticus then goes on to detail at full length a compliment which Caesar
had paid to Cicero's powers of expression; and Brutus declares with
enthusiasm that such praise, coming from such a quarter, is worth more
than a Triumph, as Triumphs were then given; and inferior in value
only to the honours which were voted to the statesman who had baffled
Catiline. The whole passage is a model of self-glorification, exquisite
in skill and finish.] He has won the honour of an excellent historian
while attempting merely to give hints for history. But what are they
all to the great Athenian? I do assure you that there is no prose
composition in the world, not even the De Corona, which I place so high
as the seventh book of Thucydides. It is the ne plus ultra of human art.
I was delighted to find in Gray's letters the other day this query to
Wharton: "The retreat from Syracuse--Is it or is it not the finest thing
you ever read in your life?"
Did you ever read Athenaeus through? I never did; but I am meditating
an attack on him. The multitude of quotations looks very tempting; and I
never open him for a minute without being paid for my trouble.
Yours very affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: December 30, 1835,
Dear Ellis,--What the end of the Municipal Reform Bill is to be I cannot
conjecture. Our latest English intelligence is of the 15th of August.
The Lords were then busy in rendering the only great service that I
expect them ever to render to the nation; that is to say, in hastening
the day of reckoning. [In the middle of August the Irish Tithe Bill went
up to the House of Lords, where it was destined to undergo a mutilation
which was fatal to its existence.] But I will not fill my paper with
English politics.
I am in excellent health. So are my sister and brother-in-law, and their
little girl, whom I am always nursing; and of whom I am becoming fonder
than a wise man, with half my experience, would choose to be of anything
except himself. I have but very lately begun to recover my spirits. The
tremendous blow which fell on me at the beginning of this year has left
marks behind it which I shall carry to my grave. Literature has saved my
life and my reason. Even now, I dare not, in the intervals of business,
remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand. What my course of
life will be, when I return to England, is very doubtful. But I am more
than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to
letters; to undertake some great historical work, which may be at once
the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of
pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs
to Roebuck and to Praed.
In England I might probably be of a very different opinion. But, in the
quiet of my own little grass-plot,--when the moon, at its rising, finds
me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand,--I often wonder
what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to
squander their intellect, their health, their energy, on such subjects
as those which most statesmen are engaged in pursuing. I comprehend
perfectly how a man who can debate, but who would make a very
indifferent figure as a contributor to an annual or a magazine,--such a
man as Stanley, for example,--should take the only line by which he
can attain distinction. But that a man before whom the two paths of
literature and politics lie open, and who might hope for eminence
in either, should choose politics, and quit literature, seems to me
madness. On the one side is health, leisure, peace of mind, the search
after truth, and all the enjoyments of friendship and conversation.
On the other side is almost certain ruin to the constitution, constant
labour, constant anxiety. Every friendship which a man may have, becomes
precarious as soon as he engages in politics. As to abuse, men soon
become callous to it, but the discipline which makes them callous is
very severe. And for what is it that a man who might, if he chose, rise
and lie down at his own hour, engage in any study, enjoy any amusement,
and visit any place, consents to make himself as much a prisoner as
if he were within the rules of the Fleet; to be tethered during eleven
months of the year within the circle of half a mile round Charing Cross;
to sit, or stand, night after night for ten or twelve hours, inhaling a
noisome atmosphere, and listening to harangues of which nine-tenths are
far below the level of a leading article in a newspaper? For what is
it that he submits, day after day, to see the morning break over the
Thames, and then totters home, with bursting temples, to his bed? Is
it for fame? Who would compare the fame of Charles Townshend to that of
Hume, that of Lord North to that of Gibbon, that of Lord Chatham to that
of Johnson? Who can look back on the life of Burke and not regret that
the years which he passed in ruining his health and temper by political
exertions were not passed in the composition of some great and durable
work? Who can read the letters to Atticus, and not feel that Cicero
would have been an infinitely happier and better man, and a not less
celebrated man, if he had left us fewer speeches, and more Academic
Questions and Tusculan Disputations; if he had passed the time which he
spent in brawling with Vatinius and Clodius in producing a history
of Rome superior even to that of Livy? But these, as I said, are
meditations in a quiet garden, situated far beyond the contagious
influence of English action. What I might feel if I again saw Downing
Street and Palace Yard is another question. I tell you sincerely my
present feelings.
I have cast up my reading account, and brought it to the end of the year
1835. It includes December 1834; for I came into my house and unpacked
my books at the end of November 1834. During the last thirteen months
I have read Aeschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar
twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus
twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon's works; almost all
Plato; Aristotle's Politics, and a good deal of his Organon, besides
dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's Lives; about half of
Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice;
Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius
Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly,
Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall
finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian.
Of Aristophanes I think as I always thought; but Lucian has agreeably
surprised me. At school I read some of his Dialogues of the Dead when I
was thirteen; and, to my shame, I never, to the best of my belief, read
a line of him since. I am charmed with him. His style seems to me to be
superior to that of any extant writer who lived later than the age of
Demosthenes and Theophrastus. He has a most peculiar and delicious
vein of humour. It is not the humour of Aristophanes; it is not that of
Plato; and yet it is akin to both; not quite equal, I admit, to either,
but still exceedingly charming. I hardly know where to find an instance
of a writer, in the decline of a literature, who has shown an invention
so rich, and a taste so pure. But, if I get on these matters, I shall
fill sheet after sheet. They must wait till we take another long walk,
or another tavern dinner, together; that is, till the summer of 1838.
I had a long story to tell you about a classical examination here; but I
have not time. I can only say that some of the competitors tried to read
the Greek with the papers upside down; and that the great man of the
examination, the Thirlwall of Calcutta, a graduate of Trinity College,
Dublin, translated the words of Theophrastus, osas leitourgias
leleitroupgeke "how many times he has performed divine service." ["How
many public services he had discharged at his own expense." Macaulay
used to say that a lady who dips into Mr. Grote's history, and learns
that Alcibiades won the heart of his fellow-citizens by the novelty of
his theories and the splendour of his liturgies, may get a very false
notion of that statesman's relations with the Athenian public.]
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
That the enormous list of classical works recorded in the foregoing
letter was not only read through, but read with care, is proved by the
pencil marks, single, double, and treble, which meander down the margin
of such passages as excited the admiration of the student; and by the
remarks, literary, historical, and grammatical, with which the critic
has interspersed every volume, and sometimes every page. In the case
of a favourite writer, Macaulay frequently corrects the errors of the
press, and even the punctuation, as minutely as if he were preparing
the book for another edition. He read Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes
four times through at Calcutta; and Euripides thrice. [See the Appendix
at the end.] In his copy of Quintus Calaber, (a versifier who is less
unknown by the title of Quintus Smyrnaeus,) appear the entries,
"September 22, 1833." "Turned over, July 13, 1837."
It may be doubted whether the Pandects would have attained the celebrity
which they enjoy, if, in the course of the three years during which
Justinian's Law Commission was at work, the president Tribonian had read
Quintus Smyrnaeus twice.
Calcutta; May 30, 1836.
Dear Ellis,--I have just received your letter dated December, 28; How
time flies! Another hot season has almost passed away, and we are daily
expecting the beginning of the rains. Cold season, hot season, and
rainy season are all much the same to me. I shall have been two years on
Indian ground in less than a fortnight, and I have not taken ten grains
of solid, or a pint of liquid, medicine during the whole of that time.
If I judged only from my own sensations, I should say that this climate
is absurdly maligned; but the yellow, spectral, figures which surround
me serve to correct the conclusions which I should be inclined to draw
from the state of my own health.
One execrable effect the climate produces. It destroys all the works of
man with scarcely one exception. Steel rusts; razors lose their edge;
thread decays; clothes fall to pieces; books moulder away, and drop out
of their bindings; plaster cracks; timber rots; matting is in shreds.
The sun, the steam of this vast alluvial tract, and the infinite armies
of white ants, make such havoc with buildings that a house requires
a complete repair every three years. Ours was in this situation about
three months ago; and, if we had determined to brave the rains without
any precautions, we should, in all probability, have had the roof down
on our heads. Accordingly we were forced to migrate for six weeks from
our stately apartments and our flower-beds, to a dungeon where we were
stifled with the stench of native cookery, and deafened by the noise
of native music. At last we have returned to our house. We found it
all snow-white and pea-green; and we rejoice to think that we shall not
again be under the necessity of quitting it, till we quit it for a ship
bound on a voyage to London.
We have been for some months in the middle of what the people here think
a political storm. To a person accustomed to the hurricanes of English
faction this sort of tempest in a horsepond is merely ridiculous.
We have put the English settlers up the country under the exclusive
jurisdiction of the Company's Courts in civil actions in which they are
concerned with natives. The English settlers are perfectly contented;
but the lawyers of the Supreme Court have set up a yelp which they think
terrible, and which has infinitely diverted me. They have selected me as
the object of their invectives, and I am generally the theme of five
or six columns of prose and verse daily. I have not patience to read
a tenth part of what they put forth. The last ode in my praise which I
perused began,
"Soon we hope they will recall ye,
Tom Macaulay, Tom Macaulay."
The last prose which I read was a parallel between me and Lord
Strafford.
My mornings, from five to nine, are quite my own. I still give them
to ancient literature. I have read Aristophanes twice through since
Christmas; and have also read Herodotus, and Thucydides again. I got
into a way last year of reading a Greek play every Sunday. I began on
Sunday the 18th of October with the Prometheus, and next Sunday I shall
finish with the Cyclops of Euripides. Euripides has made a complete
conquest of me. It has been unfortunate for him that we have so many
of his pieces. It has, on the other hand, I suspect, been fortunate for
Sophocles that so few of his have come down to us. Almost every play of
Sophocles, which is now extant, was one of his masterpieces. There
is hardly one of them which is not mentioned with high praise by some
ancient writer. Yet one of them, the Trachiniae, is, to my thinking,
very poor and insipid. Now, if we had nineteen plays of Sophocles, of
which twelve or thirteen should be no better than the Trachiniae,--and
if, on the other hand, only seven pieces of Euripides had come down to
us, and if those seven had been the Medea, the Bacchae, the Iphigenia in
Aulis, the Orestes, the Phoenissae, the Hippolytus, and the Alcestis, I
am not sure that the relative position which the two poets now hold in
our estimation would not be greatly altered.
I have not done much in Latin. I have been employed in turning over
several third-rate and fourth-rate writers. After finishing Cicero, I
read through the works of both the Senecas, father and son. There is
a great deal in the Controversiae both of curious information, and of
judicious criticism. As to the son, I cannot bear him. His style affects
me in something the same way with that of Gibbon. But Lucius Seneca's
affectation is even more rank than Gibbon's. His works are made up of
mottoes. There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted; but to
read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce.
I have read, as one does read such stuff, Valerius Maximus, Annaeus
Florus, Lucius Ampelius, and Aurelius Victor. I have also gone through
Phaedrus. I am now better employed. I am deep in the Annals of Tacitus,
and I am at the same time reading Suetonius.
You are so rich in domestic comforts that I am inclined to envy you. I
am not, however, without my share. I am as fond of my little niece
as her father. I pass an hour or more every day in nursing her, and
teaching her to talk. She has got as far as Ba, Pa, and Ma; which, as
she is not eight months old, we consider as proofs of a genius little
inferior to that of Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newton.
The municipal elections have put me in good spirits as to English
politics. I was rather inclined to despondency.
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: July 25, 1836.
My dear Ellis,--I have heard from you again, and glad I always am to
hear from you. There are few things to which I look forward with more
pleasure than to our meeting. It is really worth while to go into
banishment for a few years for the pleasure of going home again. Yet
that home will in some things be a different home--oh how different a
home!--from that to which I expected to return. But I will not stir up
the bitterness of sorrow which has at last subsided.
You take interest, I see, in my Greek and Latin studies. I continue to
pursue them steadily and actively. I am now reading Demosthenes with
interest and admiration indescribable. I am slowly, at odd minutes,
getting through the stupid trash of Diodorus. I have read through
Seneca, and an affected empty scribbler he is. I have read Tacitus
again, and, by the bye, I will tell you a curious circumstance relating
to that matter. In my younger days I always thought the Annals a
prodigiously superior work to the History. I was surprised to find that
the Annals seemed cold and poor to me on the last reading. I began to
think that I had overrated Tacitus. But, when I began the History, I was
enchanted, and thought more highly of him than ever. I went back to the
Annals, and liked them even better than the History. All at once the
explanation of this occurred to me. While I was reading the Annals I
was reading Thucydides. When I began the History, I began the Hellenics.
What made the Annals appear cold and poor to me was the intense interest
which Thucydides inspired. Indeed, what colouring is there which would
not look tame when placed side by side with the magnificent light, and
the terrible shade, of Thucydides? Tacitus was a great man, but he was
not up to the Sicilian expedition. When I finished Thucydides, and
took up Xenophon, the case was reversed. Tacitus had been a foil to
Thucydides. Xenophon was a foil to Tacitus.
I have read Pliny the Younger. Some of the Epistles are interesting.
Nothing more stupid than the Panegyric was ever preached in the
University church. I am reading the Augustan History, and Aulus Gellius.
Aulus is a favourite of mine. I think him one of the best writers of his
class.
I read in the evenings a great deal of English, French, and Italian;
and a little Spanish. I have picked up Portuguese enough to read Camoens
with care; and I want no more. I have adopted an opinion about the
Italian historians quite different from that which I formerly held, and
which, I believe, is generally considered as orthodox. I place Fra Paolo
decidedly at the head of them, and next to him Davila, whom I take to
be the best modern military historian except Colonel Napier. Davila's
battle of Ivry is worthy of Thucydides himself. Next to Davila I put
Guicciardini, and last of all Machiavelli. But I do not think that you
ever read much Italian.
The English poetry of the day has very few attractions for me. Van
Artevelde is far the best specimen that I have lately seen. I do not
much like Talfourd's Ion; but I mean to read it again. It contains
pretty lines; but, to my thinking, it is neither fish nor flesh. There
is too much, and too little, of the antique about it. Nothing but the
most strictly classical costume can reconcile me to a mythological plot;
and Ion is a modern philanthropist, whose politics and morals have been
learned from the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful
Knowledge.
I do not know whether the noise which the lawyers of the Supreme Court
have been raising against our legislative authority has reached, or
will reach, England. They held a public meeting, which ended,--or rather
began, continued, and ended,--in a riot; and ever since then the leading
agitators have been challenging each other, refusing each other's
challenges, libelling each other, swearing the peace against each other,
and blackballing each other. Mr. Longueville Clarke, who aspires to
be the O'Connell of Calcutta, called another lawyer a liar. The
last-mentioned lawyer challenged Mr. Longueville Clarke. Mr. Longueville
Clarke refused to fight, on the ground that his opponent had been
guilty of hugging attorneys. The Bengal Club accordingly blackballed
Longueville. This, and some other similar occurrences, have made the
opposition here thoroughly ridiculous and contemptible. They will
probably send a petition home; but, unless the House of Commons has
undergone a great change since 1833, they have no chance there.
I have almost brought my letter to a close without mentioning the most
important matter about which I had to write. I dare say you have heard
that my uncle General Macaulay, who died last February, has left me
L10,000 This legacy, together with what I shall have saved by the end of
1837, will make me quite a rich man; richer than I even wish to be as a
single man; and every day renders it more unlikely that I should marry.
We have had a very unhealthy season; but sickness has not come near our
house. My sister, my brother-in-law, and their little child, are as well
as possible. As to me, I think that, as Buonaparte said of himself after
the Russian campaign, J'ai le diable au corps.
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
To Macvey Napier, Esq.
Calcutta: November 26, 1836.
Dear Napier,--At last I send you an article of interminable length about
Lord Bacon. I hardly know whether it is not too long for an article in a
Review; but the subject is of such vast extent that I could easily have
made the paper twice as long as it is.
About the historical and political part there is no great probability
that we shall differ in opinion; but what I have said about Bacon's
philosophy is widely at variance with what Dugald Stuart, and
Mackintosh, have said on the same subject. I have not your essay; nor
have I read it since I read it at Cambridge, with very great pleasure,
but without any knowledge of the subject. I have at present only a very
faint and general recollection of its contents, and have in vain tried
to procure a copy of it here. I fear, however, that, differing widely
as I do from Stewart and Mackintosh, I shall hardly agree with you. My
opinion is formed, not at second hand, like those of nine-tenths of the
people who talk about Bacon; but after several very attentive perusals
of his greatest works, and after a good deal of thought. If I am in the
wrong, my errors may set the minds of others at work, and may be the
means of bringing both them, and me, to a knowledge of the truth. I
never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is
not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been
repeatedly recast. I have no expectation that the popularity of the
article will bear any proportion to the trouble which I have expended
on it. But the trouble has been so great a pleasure to me that I have
already been greatly overpaid. Pray look carefully to the printing.
In little more than a year I shall be embarking for England, and I
have determined to employ the four months of my voyage in mastering
the German language. I should be much obliged to you to send me out,
as early as you can, so that they may be certain to arrive in time, the
best grammar, and the best dictionary, that can be procured; a German
Bible; Schiller's works; Goethe's works; and Niebuhr's History, both in
the original, and in the translation. My way of learning a language is
always to begin with the Bible, which I can read without a dictionary.
After a few days passed in this way, I am master of all the common
particles, the common rules of syntax, and a pretty large vocabulary.
Then I fall on some good classical work. It was in this way that I
learned both Spanish and Portuguese, and I shall try the same course
with German.
I have little or nothing to tell you about myself. My life has flowed
away here with strange rapidity. It seems but yesterday that I left
my country; and I am writing to beg you to hasten preparations for my
return. I continue to enjoy perfect health, and the little political
squalls which I have had to weather here are mere capfuls of wind to a
man who has gone through the great hurricanes of English faction.
I shall send another copy of the article on Bacon by another ship.
Yours very truly
T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: November 28, 1836.
Dear Napier,--There is an oversight in the article on Bacon which I
shall be much obliged to you to correct. I have said that Bacon did not
deal at all in idle rants "like those in which Cicero and Mr. Shandy
sought consolation for the loss of Tullia and of Bobby." Nothing can, as
a general remark, be more true, but it escaped my recollection that two
or three of Mr. Shandy's consolatory sentences are quoted from Bacon's
Essays. The illustration, therefore, is singularly unfortunate. Pray
alter it thus; "in which Cicero vainly sought consolation for the loss
of Tullia." To be sure, it is idle to correct such trifles at a distance
of fifteen thousand miles.
Yours ever
T. B. MACAULAY.
From Lord Jeffrey to Macvey Napier, Esq.
May 2, 1837.
My dear N.,--What mortal could ever dream of cutting out the least
particle of this precious work, to make it fit better into your Review?
It would be worse than paring down the Pitt Diamond to fit the old
setting of a Dowager's ring. Since Bacon himself, I do not know that
there has been anything so fine. The first five or six pages are in a
lower tone, but still magnificent, and not to be deprived of a word.
Still, I do not object to consider whether it might not be best to serve
up the rich repast in two courses; and on the whole I incline to that
partition. 120 pages might cloy even epicures, and would be sure to
surfeit the vulgar; and the biography and philosophy are so entirely
distinct, and of not very unequal length, that the division would not
look like a fracture.
FRANCIS JEFFREY.
In the end, the article appeared entire; occupying 104 pages of the
Review; and accompanied by an apology for its length in the shape of one
of those editorial appeals to "the intelligent scholar," and "the best
class of our readers," which never fail of success.
The letters addressed to Zachary Macaulay are half filled with anecdotes
of the nursery; pretty enough, but such as only a grandfather could
be expected to read. In other respects, the correspondence is chiefly
remarkable for the affectionate ingenuity with which the son selects
such topics as would interest the father.
Calcutta: October 12 1836.
My dear Father, We were extremely gratified by receiving, a few days
ago, a letter from you which, on the whole, gave a good account of your
health and spirits. The day after tomorrow is the first anniversary of
your little grand-daughter's birthday. The occasion is to be celebrated
with a sort of droll puppet-show, much in fashion among the natives; an
exhibition much in the style of Punch in England, but more dramatic and
more showy. All the little boys and girls from the houses of our friends
are invited, and the party will, I have no doubt, be a great deal more
amusing than the stupid dinners and routs with which the grown-up people
here kill the time.
In a few months,--I hope, indeed, in a few weeks,--we shall send up the
Penal Code to Government. We have got rid of the punishment of death,
except in the case of aggravated treason and wilful murder. We shall
also get rid indirectly of everything that can properly be called
slavery in India. There will remain civil claims on particular people
for particular services, which claims may be enforced by civil action;
but no person will be entitled, on the plea of being the master of
another, to do anything to that other which it would be an offence to do
to a free-man.
Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. We find it
difficult,--indeed, in some places impossible,--to provide instruction
for all who want it. At the single town of Hoogly fourteen hundred boys
are learning English. The effect of this education on the Hindoos is
prodigious. No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever
remains sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it
as matter of policy; but many profess themselves pure Deists, and
some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that, if our plans of
education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among
the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will
be effected without any efforts to proselytise; without the smallest
interference with religious liberty; merely by the natural operation of
knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the prospect.
I have been a sincere mourner for Mill. He and I were on the best terms,
and his services at the India House were never so much needed as at this
time. I had a most kind letter from him a few weeks before I heard of
his death. He has a son just come out, to whom I have shown such little
attentions as are in my power.
Within half a year after the time when you read this we shall be making
arrangements for our return. The feelings with which I look forward to
that return I cannot express. Perhaps I should be wise to continue
here longer, in order to enjoy during a greater number of months the
delusion,--for I know that it will prove a delusion,--of this delightful
hope. I feel as if I never could be unhappy in my own country; as if
to exist on English ground and among English people, seeing the old
familiar sights and hearing the sound of my mother tongue, would be
enough for me. This cannot be; yet some days of intense happiness I
shall surely have; and one of those will be the day when I again see my
dear father and sisters.
Ever yours most affectionately T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: November 30, 1836.
Dear Ellis,--How the months run away! Here is another cold season;
morning fogs, cloth coats, green peas, new potatoes, and all the
accompaniments of a Bengal winter. As to my private life, it has glided
on, since I wrote to you last, in the most peaceful monotony. If it were
not for the books which I read, and for the bodily and mental growth of
my dear little niece, I should have no mark to distinguish one part of
the year from another. Greek and Latin, breakfast; business, an evening
walk with a book, a drive after sunset, dinner, coffee, my bed,--there
you have the history of a day. My classical studies go on vigorously.
I have read Demosthenes twice,--I need not say with what delight and
admiration. I am now deep in Isocrates and from him I shall pass to
Lysias. I have finished Diodorus Siculus at last, after dawdling over
him at odd times ever since last March. He is a stupid, credulous,
prosing old ass; yet I heartily wish that we had a good deal more of
him. I have read Arrian's expedition of Alexander, together with Quintus
Curtius. I have at stray hours read Longus's Romance and Xenophon's
Ephesiaca; and I mean to go through Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius,
in the same way. Longus is prodigiously absurd; but there is often an
exquisite prettiness in the style. Xenophon's Novel is the basest thing
to be found in Greek. [Xenophon the Ephesian lived in the third or
fourth century of the Christian era. At the end of his work Macaulay has
written: "A most stupid worthless performance, below the lowest trash of
an English circulating library." Achilles Tatius he disposes of with
the words "Detestable trash;" and the Aethiopics of Heliodorus, which he
appears to have finished on Easter-day, 1837, he pronounces "The best of
the Greek Romances, which is not saying much for it."] It was discovered
at Florence, little more than a hundred years ago, by an English envoy.
Nothing so detestable ever came from the Minerva Press. I have read
Theocritus again, and like him better than ever.
As to Latin, I made a heroic attempt on Pliny's Natural History; but I
stuck after getting through about a quarter of it. I have read Ammianus
Marcellinus, the worst written book in ancient Latin. The style would
disgrace a monk of the tenth century; but Marcellinus has many of the
substantial qualities of a good historian. I have gone through the
Augustan history, and much other trash relating to the lower empire;
curious as illustrating the state of society, but utterly worthless as
composition. I have read Statius again and thought him as bad as ever.
I really found only two lines worthy of a great poet in all the Thebais.
They are these. What do you think of my taste?
"Clamorem, bello qualis supremus apertis
Urbibus, aut pelago jam descendente carina."
I am now busy with Quintilian and Lucan, both excellent writers. The
dream of Pompey in the seventh book of the Pharsalia is a very noble
piece of writing. I hardly know an instance in poetry of so great an
effect produced by means so simple. There is something irresistibly
pathetic in the lines
"Qualis erat populi facies, clamorque faventum
Olim cum juvenis--"
and something unspeakably solemn in the sudden turn which follows
"Crastina dira quies--"
There are two passages in Lucan which surpass in eloquence anything
that I know in the Latin language. One is the enumeration of Pompey's
exploits
"Quod si tam sacro dignaris nomine saxum--"
The other is the character which Cato gives of Pompey,
"Civis obit, inquit--"
a pure gem of rhetoric, without one flaw, and, in my opinion, not
very far from historical truth. When I consider that Lucan died at
twenty-six, I cannot help ranking him among the most extraordinary men
that ever lived.
[The following remarks occur at the end of Macaulay's copy of the
Pharsalia
August 30, 1835.
"When Lucan's age is considered, it is impossible not to allow that the
poem is a very extraordinary one; more extraordinary, perhaps, than if
it had been of a higher kind; for it is more common for the imagination
to be in full vigour at an early time of life than for a young man to
obtain a complete mastery of political and philosophical rhetoric. I
know no declamation in the world, not even Cicero's best, which equals
some passages in the Pharsalia. As to what were meant for bold poetical
flights,--the sea-fight at Marseilles, the Centurion who is covered
with wounds, the snakes in the Libyan desert, it is all as detestable as
Cibber's Birthday Odes. The furious partiality of Lucan takes away much
of the pleasure which his talents would otherwise afford. A poet who
is, as has often been said, less a poet than a historian, should to a
certain degree conform to the laws of history. The manner in which he
represents the two parties is not to be reconciled with the laws even of
fiction. The senators are demigods; Pompey, a pure lover of his country;
Cato, the abstract idea of virtue; while Caesar, the finest gentleman,
the most humane conqueror, and the most popular politician that Rome
ever produced, is a bloodthirsty ogre. If Lucan had lived, he would
probably have improved greatly." "Again, December 9, 1836,"]
I am glad that you have so much business, and sorry that you have so
little leisure. In a few years you will be a Baron of the Exchequer; and
then we shall have ample time to talk over our favourite classics. Then
I will show you a most superb emendation of Bentley's in Ampelius, and
I will give you unanswerable reasons for pronouncing that Gibbon was
mistaken in supposing that Quintus Curtius wrote under Gordian.
Remember me most kindly to Mrs. Ellis. I hope that I shall find Frank
writing as good Alcaics as his father.
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
Calcutta: March 8, 1837.
Dear Ellis,--I am at present very much worked, and have been so for a
long time past. Cameron, after being laid up for some months, sailed at
Christmas for the Cape, where I hope his health will be repaired; for
this country can very ill spare him. However, we have almost brought
our great work to a conclusion. In about a month we shall lay before the
Government a complete penal Code for a hundred millions of people,
with a commentary explaining and defending the provisions of the text.
Whether it is well, or ill, done heaven knows. I only know that it seems
to me to be very ill done when I look at it by itself; and well done
when I compare it with Livingstone's Code, with the French Code, or
with the English statutes which have been passed for the purpose of
consolidating and amending the Criminal Law. In health I am as well
as ever I was in my life. Time glides fast. One day is so like another
that, but for a habit which I acquired soon after I reached India of
pencilling in my books the date of my reading them, I should have hardly
any way of estimating the lapse of time. If I want to know when an event
took place, I call to mind which of Calderon's plays, or of Plutarch's
Lives, I was reading on that day. I turn to the book; find the date; and
am generally astonished to see that, what seems removed from me by only
two or three months, really happened nearly a year ago.
I intend to learn German on my voyage home, and I have indented largely,
(to use our Indian official term), for the requisite books. People tell
me that it is a hard language; but I cannot easily believe that there is
a language which I cannot master in four months, by working ten hours
a day. I promise myself very great delight and information from German
literature; and, over and above, I feel a soft of presentiment, a kind
of admonition of the Deity, which assures me that the final cause of my
existence,--the end for which I was sent into this vale of tears,--was
to make game of certain Germans. The first thing to be done in obedience
to this heavenly call is to learn German; and then I may perhaps try, as
Milton says,
"Frangere Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges."
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.
The years which Macaulay spent in India formed a transition period
between the time when he kept no journal at all, and the time when the
daily portion of his journal was completed as regularly as the daily
portion of his History. Between 1834 and 1838, he contented himself with
jotting down any circumstance that struck his fancy in the book which he
happened to have in hand. The records of his Calcutta life, written in
half a dozen different languages, are scattered throughout the whole
range of classical literature from Hesiod to Macrobius. At the end
of the eighty-ninth Epistle of Seneca we read: "April 11, 1836. Hodie
praemia distribui tois en to mouseio Sanskritiko neaniskois. [To-day I
distributed the prizes to the students of the Sanscrit College."]
On the last page of the Birds of Aristophanes: "Jan. 16, 1836. Oi
presbeis of papa ton Basileos ton Nepauliton eisegonto khthes es
Kalkouttan." ["The ambassadors from the King of Nepaul entered Calcutta
yesterday." It may be observed that Macaulay wrote Greek with or without
accents, according to the humour, or hurry, of the moment.]
On the first page of Theocrats: "March 20, 1835. Lord W. Bentinck sailed
this morning."
On the last page of the "De Amicitia:" "March 5, 1836. Yesterday Lord
Auckland arrived at Government House, and was sworn in."
Beneath an idyl of Moschus, of all places in the world, Macaulay notes
the fact of Peel being First Lord of the Treasury; and he finds space,
between two quotations in Athenaeus, to commemorate a Ministerial
majority of 29 on the Second Reading of the Irish Church Bill.
A somewhat nearer approach to a formal diary may be found in his
Catullus, which contains a catalogue of the English books that he read
in the cold season of 1835-36; as for instance
Gibbon's Answer to Davis. November 6 and 7
Gibbon on Virgil's VI Aeneid November 7
Whately's Logic November 15
Thirlwall's Greece November 22
Edinburgh Review November 29
And all this was in addition to his Greek and Latin studies, to his
official work, to the French that he read with his sister, and the
unrecorded novels that he read to himself; which last would alone have
afforded occupation for two ordinary men, unless this month of November
was different from every other month of his existence since the day that
he left Mr. Preston's schoolroom. There is something refreshing, amidst
the long list of graver treatises, to light upon a periodical entry of
"Pikwikina"; the immortal work of a Classic who has had more readers in
a single year than Statius and Seneca in all their eighteen centuries
together. Macaulay turned over with indifference, and something of
distaste, the earlier chapters of that modern Odyssey. The first touch
which came home to him was Jingle's "Handsome Englishman?" In that
phrase he recognised a master; and, by the time that he landed in
England, he knew his Pickwick almost as intimately as his Grandison.
Calcutta: June 15, 1837
Dear Napier,--Your letter about my review of Mackintosh miscarried,
vexatiously enough. I should have been glad to know what was thought of
my performance among friends and foes; for here we have no information
on such subjects. The literary correspondents of the Calcutta newspapers
seem to be penny-a-line risen, whose whole stock of literature comes
from the conversations in the Green Room.
My long article on Bacon has, no doubt, been in your hands some time. I
never, to the best of my recollection, proposed to review Hannah More's
Life or Works. If I did, it must have been in jest. She was exactly
the very last person in the world about whom I should choose to write
a critique. She was a very kind friend to me from childhood. Her notice
first called out my literary tastes. Her presents laid the foundation
of my library. She was to me what Ninon was to Voltaire,--begging her
pardon for comparing her to a bad woman, and yours for comparing myself
to a great man. She really was a second mother to me. I have a real
affection for her memory. I therefore could not possibly write about her
unless I wrote in her praise; and all the praise which I could give to
her writings, even after straining my conscience in her favour, would be
far indeed from satisfying any of her admirers.
I will try my hand on Temple, and on Lord Clive. Shaftesbury I shall
let alone. Indeed, his political life is so much connected with Temple's
that, without endless repetition, it would be impossible for me to
furnish a separate article on each. Temple's Life and Works, the part
which he took in the controversy about the ancients and moderns; the
Oxford confederacy against Bentley; and the memorable victory which
Bentley obtained, will be good subjects. I am in training for this part
of the subject, as I have twice read through the Phalaris controversy
since I arrived in India.
I have been almost incessantly engaged in public business since I sent
off the paper on Bacon; but I expect to have comparative leisure
during the short remainder of my stay here. The Penal Code of India is
finished, and is in the press. The illness of two of my colleagues threw
the work almost entirely on me. It is done, however; and I am not likely
to be called upon for vigorous exertion during the rest of my Indian
career.
Yours ever
T. B. MACAULAY.
If you should have assigned Temple, or Clive, to anybody else, pray do
not be uneasy on that account. The pleasure of writing pays itself.
Calcutta: December 18, 1837.
Dear Ellis,--My last letter was on a deeply melancholy subject, the
death of our poor friend Malkin. I have felt very much for his widow.
The intensity of her affliction, and the fortitude and good feeling
which she showed as soon as the first agony was over, have interested me
greatly in her. Six or seven of Malkin's most intimate friends here have
joined with Ryan and me, in subscribing to put up a plain marble
tablet in the cathedral, for which I have written an inscription. [This
inscription appears in Lord Macaulay's Miscellaneous Works.]
My departure is now near at hand. This is the last letter which I shall
write to you from India. Our passage is taken in the Lord Hungerford;
the most celebrated of the huge floating hotels which run between London
and Calcutta. She is more renowned for the comfort and luxury of her
internal arrangements than for her speed. As we are to stop at the Cape
for a short time, I hardly expect to be with you till the end of May, or
the beginning of June. I intend to make myself a good German scholar by
the time of my arrival in England. I have already, at leisure moments
broken the ice. I have read about half of the New Testament in Luther's
translation, and am now getting rapidly, for a beginner, through
Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War. My German library consists
of all Goethe's works, all Schiller's works, Muller's History of
Switzerland, some of Tieck, some of Lessing, and other works of less
fame. I hope to despatch them all on my way home. I like Schiller's
style exceedingly. His history contains a great deal of very just and
deep thought, conveyed in language so popular and agreeable that dunces
would think him superficial.
I lately took it into my head to obtain some knowledge of the Fathers,
and I read therefore a good deal of Athanasius, which by no means raised
him in my opinion. I procured the magnificent edition of Chrysostom, by
Montfaucon, from a public library here, and turned over the eleven huge
folios, reading wherever the subject was of peculiar interest. As to
reading him through, the thing is impossible. These volumes contain
matter at least equal to the whole extant literature of the best times
of Greece, from Homer to Aristotle inclusive. There are certainly some
very brilliant passages in his homilies. It seems curious that, though
the Greek literature began to flourish so much earlier than the Latin,
it continued to flourish so much later. Indeed, if you except the
century which elapsed between Cicero's first public appearance and
Livy's death, I am not sure that there was any time at which Greece had
not writers equal or superior to their Roman contemporaries. I am sure
that no Latin writer of the age of Lucian is to be named with Lucian;
that no Latin writer of the age of Longinus is to be named with
Longinus; that no Latin prose of the age of Chrysostom can be named with
Chrysostom's compositions. I have read Augustin's Confessions. The book
is not without interest; but he expresses himself in the style of a
field-preacher.
Our Penal Code is to be published next week. It has cost me very intense
labour; and, whatever its faults may be, it is certainly not a slovenly
performance. Whether the work proves useful to India or not, it has been
of great use, I feel and know, to my own mind.
[In October 1854, Macaulay writes to my mother: "I cannot but be pleased
to find that, at last, the Code on which I bestowed the labour of two of
the best years of my life has had justice done to it. Had this justice
been done sixteen years ago, I should probably have given much more
attention to legislation, and much less to literature than I have done.
I do not know that I should have been either happier or more useful than
I have been."]
Ever yours affectionately
T. B. MACAULAY.