Macaulay, who counted his years of life by those of this century, may
fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the
most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy
years since his first brilliant essay on "Milton" took the world by
storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series of _Essays_
was closed, and little short of that time since his famous _History_
appeared. The editions of it in England and in America are counted by
thousands; it has six translations into German, and translations into
ten other European languages. It made him rich, famous, and a peer.
Has it given him a foremost place in English literature?
Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of
experts is in striking contrast. The readers both of the Old and of
the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they
love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose
works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally
good. _Essays, Lays, History, Lives_--all are read by millions: as
critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay has achieved world-wide
renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste,
or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene
judgment. They say he is always more declaimer than thinker--more
advocate than judge. The poets deny that the _Lays_ are poetry at all.
The modern school of scientific historians declare that the _History_
is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which
it is constructed. The purists in style shake their heads over his
everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the
perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force
of these defects, which they usually speak of as his "limitations" or
his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those
long-drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he
would himself have revelled in the paradox--"that books which were
household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every Baboo in
Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine
and a mannerist"; "how ballads which were the delight of every child
were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a
prize in a public school"; "how the most famous of all modern reviewers
scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subtle
analysis"; how it comes about "that the most elaborate of modern
histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a
crammer's textbook"--and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style
which is so clear and so familiar. But let us beware of applying to
Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis
which he so often applied to others. Boswell, he says, was immortal,
"_because_ he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb." It would be a
feeble parody to retort that Macaulay became a great literary power
"because he had no philosophy, little subtlety, and a heavy hand." For
my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole
English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a
century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such
delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so
many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an
ungovernable partisan. No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious
knowledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied
improvisation he has rarely been surpassed; that his good sense is
unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his
command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy,
and brilliance. These are all very great and sterling qualities. And
it is right to acknowledge them with no unstinted honour--even whilst
we are fully conscious of the profound shortcomings and limitations
that accompanied but did not destroy them.
In a previous paper we discussed the permanent contribution to English
literature of Thomas Carlyle; and it is curious to note how complete a
contrast these two famous writers present. Carlyle was a simple,
self-taught, recluse man of letters: Macaulay was legislator, cabinet
minister, orator, politician, peer--a pet of society, a famous talker,
and member of numerous academies. Carlyle was poor, despondent,
morbid, and cynical: Macaulay was rich, optimist, overflowing with
health, high spirits, and good nature. The one hardly ever knew what
the world called success: the other hardly ever knew failure. Carlyle
had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle,
the social philosopher. In Macaulay these were singularly wanting; he
was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the
eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the
ultimate triumph of all that is practical and commonplace, and in the
final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The
Teufelsdröckhian dialect is obscure even to its select students: the
Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift himself. Carlyle's gospel
is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems.
Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of
gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is; on the
contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well
satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its
ancestors.
The great public, wherever English books penetrate, from the White Sea
to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the
brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers
care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not
decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic
has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and
with the apocalyptic spirit of _Sartor_, it is certain that millions
would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they
did. And if the only books were such "purple patches" of history as
Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep
and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees,
narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely
emphatic style--this generation would have a very patchwork idea of
past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language.
There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many
kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay
has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to
know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done
them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that
can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which
the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for
his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philosopher, or
master. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion.
In one thing all agree--critics, public, friends, and opponents.
Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity,
affection, and manly perseverance, almost without a stain or a defect.
His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few
trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable
egoism of the opulent middle classes; the religion of comfort,
_laisser-faire_, and social order was infused into his bones. But, so
far as his traditions and temper would permit, his life was as
honourable, as unsullied, and as generous, as ever was that of any man
who lived in the fierce light that beats upon the famous. We know his
nature and his career as well as we know any man's; and we find it on
every side wholesome, just, and right. He has been fortunate in his
biographers, and amply criticised by the best judges. His nephew, Sir
George Trevelyan, has written his life at length in a fine book. Dean
Milman and Mark Pattison have given us vignettes; Cotter Morison has
adorned the _Men of Letters_ series with a delightful and sympathetic
sketch; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the
balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one
voice in all this company. It was a fine, generous, honourable, and
sterling nature. His books deserve their vast popularity and may long
continue to maintain it. But Macaulay must not be judged amongst
philosophers--nor even amongst the real masters of the English
language. And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students
astray and his imitators into an obtrusive mannerism.
Let us take a famous passage from one of his most famous essays,
written in the zenith of his powers after his return from India, at the
age of forty--an essay on a grand subject which never ceased to
fascinate his imagination, composed with all his amazing resources of
memory and his dazzling mastery of colour. It is the third paragraph
of his well-known review of Von Ranke's _History of the Popes_. The
passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are
household words. It is rather long as well as trite; but it contains
in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion; it is so
vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources
as in all his mannerism and limitations; it is so essentially true, and
yet so thoroughly obvious; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in
philosophic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail;
and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it convey to
most readers little more than a sonorous truism.
There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy
so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The
history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human
civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the
mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the
Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian
amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when
compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace
back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the
nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far
beyond Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the
twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But
the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and
the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy
remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and
youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the
farthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed
in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the
same spirit with which she confronted Attila. The number of her
children is greater than in any former age. Her acquisitions in the
New World have more than compensated her for what she has lost in the
Old. Her spiritual ascendancy extends over the vast countries which
lie between the plains of the Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which,
a century hence, may not improbably contain a population as large as
that which now inhabits Europe. The members of her communion are
certainly not fewer than a hundred and fifty millions; and it will be
difficult to show that all the other Christian sects united amount to a
hundred and twenty millions. Nor do we see any sign which indicates
that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the
commencement of all the governments and of all the ecclesiastical
establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance
that she is not destined to see the end of them all. She was great and
respected before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, before the Frank
had crossed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in
Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And
she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New
Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a
broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.
Here we have Macaulay in all his strength and all his limitations. The
passage contains in the main a solid truth--a truth which was very
little accepted in England in the year 1840--a truth of vast import and
very needful to assert. And this truth is clothed in such pomp of
illustration, and is hammered into the mind with such accumulated
blows; it is so clear, so hard, so coruscating with images, that it is
impossible to escape its effect. The paragraph is one never to be
forgotten, and not easy to be refuted or qualified. No intelligent
tiro in history can read that page without being set a-thinking,
without feeling that he has a formidable problem to solve. Tens of
thousands of young minds must have had that deeply-coloured picture of
Rome visibly before them in many a Protestant home in England and in
America. Now, all this is a very great merit. To have posed a great
historical problem, at a time when it was very faintly grasped, and to
have sent it ringing across the English-speaking world in such a form
that he who runs may read--nay, he who rides, he who sails, he who
watches sheep or stock _must_ read--this is a real and signal service
conferred on literature and on thought. Compare this solid sense with
Carlyle's ribaldry about "the three-hatted Papa," "pig's wash,"
"servants of the Devil," "this accursed nightmare," and the rest of his
execrations--and we see the difference between the sane judgment of the
man of the world and the prejudices of intolerant fanaticism.
But, unfortunately, Macaulay, having stated in majestic antitheses his
problem of "the unchangeable Church," makes no attempt to provide us
with a solution. This splendid eulogium is not meant to convert us to
Catholicism--very far from it. Macaulay was no Catholic, and had only
a sort of literary admiration for the Papacy. As Mr. Cotter Morison
has shown, he leaves the problem just where he found it, and such
theories as he offers are not quite trustworthy. He does not suggest
that the Catholic Church is permanent because it possesses truth: but,
rather, because men's ideas of truth are a matter of idiosyncrasy or
digestion. The whole essay is not a very safe guide to the history of
Protestantism or of Catholicism, though it is full of brilliant points
and sensible assertions. And in the end our essayist, the rebel from
his Puritan traditions, and the close ally of sceptical Gallios, after
forty pages of learned _pros_ and _cons_, declares that he will not say
more for fear of "exciting angry feelings." He rather sneers at
Protestant fervour: he declaims grand sentences about Catholic fervour.
He will not declare for either of them; and it does not seem to matter
much in the long run for which men declare, provided they can be kept
well in hand by saving common-sense. In the meantime the topic is a
mine of paradox to the picturesque historian. This is not philosophy,
it is not history, but it is full of a certain rich literary seed.
The passage, though a truism to all thoughtful men, was a striking
novelty to English Protestants fifty years ago. But it will hardly
bear a close scrutiny of these sweeping, sharp-edged, "cock-sure"
dogmas of which it is composed. The exact propositions it contains may
be singly accurate; but as to the most enduring "work of human policy,"
it is fair to remember that the Civil Law of Rome has a continuous
history of at least twenty-four centuries; that the Roman Empire from
Augustus to the last Constantine in New Rome endured for fifteen
centuries; and from Augustus to the last Hapsburg it endured for
eighteen centuries. There is a certain ambiguity between the way in
which Macaulay alternates between the Papacy and the Christian Church,
which are not at all the same thing. The Papacy, as a European or
cosmical institution, can hardly be said to have more than twelve
centuries of continuous history on the stage of the world. The
religion and institutions of Confucius and of Buddha have twice that
epoch; and the religion and institutions of Moses have thirty
centuries; and the Califate in some form or other is nearly coeval with
the Papacy. The judicious eulogist has guarded himself against denying
in words any of these facts; but a cool survey of universal history
will somewhat blunt the edge of Macaulay's trenchant phrases. After
all, we must admit that the passage as a whole, apart from the
superlatives, is substantially true, and contains a most valuable and
very striking thought.
Passing from the thought to the form of this famous passage, with what
a wealth of illustration is it enforced, with what telling contrasts,
with what gorgeous associations! How vivid the images, how stately the
personages, who are called up to heighten the lights of the tableau of
the Vatican! Ancient and modern civilisation are joined by it; it
recalls the Pantheon and the Colosseum; it gave sanction to the Empire
of Charlemagne and to that of Napoleon, it inspired Augustin, and
confronted Attila; Venice is a mere modern foundation; the Church is
older than Hengist and Horsa, Clovis, or Mahomet; yet it stretches over
the Atlantic continent from Missouri to Cape Horn, and still goes on
conquering and to conquer. And the climax of this kaleidoscopic
"symphony in purple and gold"--the New Zealander sketching the ruins of
St. Paul's from a broken arch of London Bridge--has become a proverb,
and is repeated daily by men who never heard of Macaulay, much less of
Von Ranke, and is an inimitable bit of picturesque colouring. It is
very telling, nobly hyperbolic, no man can misunderstand it, or forget
it. The most practised hand will not find it easy to "go one better
than" Macaulay in a swingeing trope. It is a fascinating literary
artifice, and it has fascinated many to their ruin. In feebler hands,
it degenerates into what in London journalistic slang is known as
"telegraphese." A pocket encyclopaedia and a copious store of
adjectives have enabled many a youth to roar out brilliant articles "as
gently as a sucking dove." But all men of power have their imitators,
and are open to parody and spurious coining. Now, Macaulay, however
brilliant and kaleidoscopic, is always using his own vast reading, his
own warm imagination, his unfailing fecundity, and his sterling good
sense.
Turn to the style of the passage--it is perfectly pellucid in meaning,
rings on the ear like the crack of a rifle, is sonorous, rich, and
swift. One can fancy the whole passage spoken by an orator; indeed it
is difficult to resist the illusion that it was "declaimed" before it
was written. We catch the oratorial tags and devices, the repeated
phrase, the incessant antithesis, the alternate rise and fall of
eloquent speech. It is declamation--fine declamation--but we miss the
musical undertones, the subtle involutions, the unexpected bursts, and
mysterious cadences of really great written prose. The term "the
Republic of Venice" is repeated three times in three lines: the term
"the Papacy" is repeated three times in two lines. Any other writer
would substitute a simple "it" for most of these; and it is difficult
to see how the paragraph would lose. The orator aids his hearers by
constant repetition of the same term; the writer avoids this lest he
prove monotonous. The short sentences of four or five words interposed
to break the torrent--the repetition of the same words--the see-saw of
black and white, old and young, base and pure--all these are the
stock-in-trade of the rhetorician, not of the master of written prose.
Now, Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate rhetorician, who wrote
powerful invectives or panegyrics in massive rhetoric which differed
from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled
phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary
illustration. If it was oratory, it was the oratory of a speaker of
enormous reading, inexhaustible memory, and consummate skill with words.
There is nothing at all exceptional about this passage which has been
chosen for analysis. It is a fair and typical piece of Macaulay's best
style. Indeed his method is so uniform and so mechanical that any page
of his writing exhibits the same force and the same defects as any
other. Take one of the most famous of his scenes, the trial of Warren
Hastings, toward the end of that elaborate essay, written in 1841.
Every one knows the gorgeous and sonorous description of Westminster
Hall, beginning--"The place was worthy of such a trial." In the next
sentence the word "hall" recurs five times, and the relative "which"
occurs three times, and is not related to the same noun. Ten sentences
in succession open with the pronoun "there." It is a perfect galaxy of
varied colour, pomp, and illustration; but the effect is somewhat
artificial, and the whole scene smells of the court upholsterer. The
"just sentence of Bacon" pairs off with "the just absolution of
Somers"; the "greatest painter" sits beside the "greatest scholar of
the age"; ladies have "lips more persuasive than those of Fox"; there,
too, is "the beautiful mother of a beautiful race." And in the midst
of these long-drawn superlatives and glittering contrasts come in short
martial phrases, as brief and sharp as a drill-sergeant's word of
command. "Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting"--"The avenues
were lined with grenadiers"--"The streets were kept clear by cavalry."
No man can forget these short, hard decisive sentences.
The artificial structure of his paragraphs grew upon Macaulay with age.
His _History of England_ opens with a paragraph of four sentences.
Each of these begins with "I purpose," "I shall"; and the last sentence
of the four has ten clauses each beginning with "how." The next
paragraph has four successive sentences beginning "It will be
seen"--and the last sentence has again three clauses each beginning
with "how." The fourth paragraph contains the word "I" four times in
as many lines. This method of composition has its own merits. The
repetition of words and phrases helps the perception and prevents the
possibility of misunderstanding. Where effects are simply enumerated,
the monotony of form is logically correct. Every successive sentence
heralded by a repeated "how," or "there," or "I," adjusts itself into
its proper line without an effort of thought on the reader's part. It
is not graceful; it is pompous, and distinctly rhetorical. But it is
eminently clear, emphatic, orderly, and easy to follow or to remember.
Hence it is unpleasing to the finely-attuned ear, and is counted
somewhat vulgar by the trained lover of style, whilst it is immensely
popular with those who read but little, and is able to give them as
much pleasure as it gives instruction.
The famous passage about Westminster Hall, written in 1841, may be
compared with the equally known passage on the Chapel in the Tower
which occurs in the fifth chapter of the _History_, written in 1848.
It begins as all lovers of English remember--"In truth there is no
sadder spot on the earth than this little cemetery." The passage
continues with "there" and "thither" repeated eight times; it bristles
with contrasts, graces and horrors, antithesis, climax, and sonorous
heraldries. "Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth
mingled." It is a fine paragraph, which has impressed and delighted
millions. But it is, after all, rather facile moralising; its
rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize
essay and not a few tall-talking journals. How much more pathos is
there in a stanza from Gray's _Elegy_, or a sentence from Carlyle's
_Bastille_, or Burke's _French Revolution_!
The habit of false emphasis and the love of superlatives is a far worse
defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge. It
runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which
he astonished the town at the age of twenty-five, down to the close of
his _History_ wherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as
"author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw." Indeed no more
glaring example of Macaulay's _megalomania_ or taste for exaggeration
can be found than the famous piece in the _Milton_ on the Restoration
of Charles II.
Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of
servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish
talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow
minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The
king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank
into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her
degrading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of
harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State.
The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion
enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every
grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean.
In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and
Moloch; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the
blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and
disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a
second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be
a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations.
This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or
Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire.
At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on
Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its frequenters. It differs
also from much in Macaulay's invectives in being the genuine hot-headed
passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old. It is
substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration:
but in form how extravagant, even of that! Charles II. is Belial;
James is Moloch; and Charles is _propitiated_ by the blood of
Englishmen!--Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profligate
Charles. And all this of the age of the _Paradise Lost_ and the
_Morning Hymn_, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and
Wren! Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum--"servitude
without loyalty and sensuality without love"--"dwarfish talents and
gigantic vices"--"ability enough to deceive"--"religion enough to
persecute." Every phrase is a superlative; every word has its
contrast; every sentence has its climax. And withal let us admit that
it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget
it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and
contempt. And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid
truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be
fascinated by Charles's good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the
divine consecration of kings.
But the savage sarcasms which are tolerable in a passionate young
reformer smarting under the follies of George IV., are a serious defect
in a grave historian, when used indiscriminately of men and women in
every age and under every condition. In his _Machiavelli_, Macaulay
hints that the best histories are perhaps "those in which a little of
fictitious narrative is judiciously employed." "Much," he says, "is
gained in effect." It is to be feared that this youthful indiscretion
was never wholly purged out of him. Boswell, we know, was "a dunce, a
parasite, and a coxcomb"--_and therefore_ immortal. He was one of "the
smallest men that ever lived," of "the meanest and feeblest intellect,"
"servile," "shallow," "a bigot and a sot," and so forth--and yet, "a
great writer, _because_ he was a great fool." We all know what is
meant; and there is a substratum of truth in this; but it is tearing a
paradox to tatters. How differently has Carlyle dealt with poor dear
Bozzy! Croker's _Boswell's Johnson_ "is as bad as bad can be," full of
"monstrous blunders"--(he had put 1761 for 1766) "gross mistakes"--"for
which a schoolboy would be flogged." Southey is "utterly destitute of
the power of discerning truth from falsehood." He prints a joke which
"is enough to make us ashamed of our species." Robert Montgomery pours
out "a roaring cataract of nonsense." One of his tropes is "the worst
similitude in the world." And yet Macaulay can rebuke Johnson for "big
words wasted on little things"!
Neither Cicero, Milton, Swift, nor Junius ever dealt in more furious
words than Macaulay, who had not the excuse of controversy or passion.
Frederick William of Prussia was "the most execrable of fiends, a cross
between Moloch and Puck"; "his palace was hell"; compared with the
Prince, afterwards Frederick the Great, "Oliver Twist in the workhouse,
and Smike at Dotheboys Hall were petted children." It would be
difficult for Mark Twain to beat that. "The follies and vices of King
John _were the salvation_ of England." Cranmer was peculiarly fitted
to organise the Church of England by being "unscrupulous, indifferent,
a coward, and a time-server." James I. was given to "stammering,
slobbering, shedding unmanly tears," alternating between the buffoon
and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters
shriek"; he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in
understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country
gentleman of that age talked like "the most ignorant clown"; his wife
and daughter were in taste "below a stillroom maid of the present day."
The chaplain was a mere servant, and was expected to marry a servant
girl whose character had been blown upon.
But it ought to be remembered that all of these descriptions are
substantially true. Macaulay's pictures of the Stuarts, of Cromwell,
of the Restoration and its courtiers, of Milton, of William III., are
all faithful and just; Boswell _was_ often absurd; Southey _was_
shallow; Montgomery _was_ an impostor; Frederick William _did_ treat
his son brutally; the country squire and the parson two centuries ago
were much rougher people than they are to-day. And if Macaulay had
simply told us this in measured language of this kind, he would have
failed in beating his lesson into the mind. Not only was "a little of
fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of
picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an
even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself
"squat, low-browed, commonplace"--"a poor creature, with his dictionary
literature and his saloon arrogance"--"no vision in him"--"will neither
see nor do any great thing"?[1] Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others
have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it
has been under the stimulus of violent indignation. With Macaulay the
superlatives pour out as his native vernacular without heat or wrath,
as a mere rhetorician's trick, as the favourite tones of a great
colourist. And though the trick, like all literary tricks, grows upon
the artist, and becomes singularly offensive to the man of taste, it
must always be remembered that, with Macaulay, the praise or blame is
usually just and true; he is very rarely grossly unfair and wrong, as
Carlyle so often is; and if Macaulay resorts too often to the
superlative degree, he is usually entitled to use the comparative
degree of the same adjective.
The style, with all its defects, has had a solid success and has done
great things. By clothing his historical judgments and his critical
reflections in these cutting and sonorous periods, he has forced them
on the attention of a vast body of readers wherever English is read at
all, and on millions who have neither time nor attainments for any
regular studies of their own. How many men has Macaulay succeeded in
reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or
a book in an unknown tongue! If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed
fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially
right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous
feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite
literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable services on the
readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic
historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand
between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified
journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to
the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he
could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of
the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or
were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best
journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, so
direct, so resonant. We need not imitate his mannerism; we may all
learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk.
It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of
the great public which has drawn down on Macaulay the grave rebukes of
so many fine judges of the higher historical literature. Cotter
Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that
his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his
conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke
down by its own unwieldy proportions. Mr. Morison has very justly
remarked that if the _History of England_ had ever been completed on
the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it
would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition
one hundred and fifty years. As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes
give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701; so that the
history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar
volumes. Now, Gibbon's eight octavo volumes give us the history of the
world for thirteen centuries; that is to say, Gibbon has recounted the
history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the
history of a year. There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon's _Decline and
Fall_ is immeasurably superior to Macaulay's fragment, in thought, in
imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it
stands on a far higher plane; it will long outlast and overshadow it.
Compared with this, Macaulay's delightful and brilliant pictures are
mere glorified journalism.
Macaulay, who was no braggart, has put it on record that his conception
of history was more just than that of Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and
Gibbon. It is perfectly true that his conception was different from
theirs, his execution was different, and he does not address the same
class of readers. But his conception of history was not just; it was a
mistake. His leading idea was to make history a true romance. He has
accomplished this; and he has given us _a historical novel drawn from
authentic documents_. This is, no doubt, a very useful thing to do, a
most interesting book to read; it is very pleasant literature, and has
a certain teaching of its own to a certain order of readers. But it is
not history. It sacrifices the breadth of view, the organic life, the
philosophy, the grand continuity of human society. It must be a
sectional picture of a very limited period in a selected area; it can
give us only the external; it inevitably tends to trivial detail and to
amusing personalities; it necessarily blinds us to the slow sequence of
the ages. Besides this, it explains none of the deeper causes of
movement; for, to make a picture, the artist must give us the visible
and the obvious. History, in its highest sense, is the record of the
evolution of humanity, in whole or in part. To compose an historical
novel from documents is to put this object aside. History, said
Macaulay in his _Hallam_, "is a compound of poetry and philosophy." But
in practice, he substituted word-painting for poetry, and anecdote for
philosophy. His own delightful and popular _History of England_ is a
compound of historical romance and biographical memoir.
Macaulay's strong point was in narrative, and in narrative he has been
surpassed by hardly any historian and even by few novelists. Scott and
Victor Hugo have hardly a scene more stirring than Macaulay's death of
Charles II., Monmouth's rebellion, the flight of James II., the trial
of Titus Gates, the inner life of William III. This is a very great
quality which has deservedly made him popular. And if Macaulay had
less philosophy than almost any historian of the smallest pretension,
he has a skill in narration which places him in a fair line with the
greatest. Unfortunately, this superb genius for narration has rarely
been devoted to the grander events and the noblest chiefs in history.
Even his hero William III. hardly lives in his canvas with such a
glowing light as Charles II., Monmouth, and Jeffreys. The expulsion of
James II. was a very poor affair if compared with the story of Charles
I. and the Parliament. If Macaulay had painted for us the Council
Chamber of Cromwell as he has painted the Whitehall of Charles II.; if
he had described the battle of Naseby as well as he has pictured the
fight of Sedgemoor; if he had narrated the campaigns of Marlborough as
brilliantly as he has told that which ended at the Boyne--how much
should we have had!
But it could not be. His own conception of history made this
impossible. It is well said that he planned his history "on the scale
of an ordnance map." He did what a German professor does when he tries
to fathom English society by studying the _Times_ newspaper day by day.
The enormous mass of detail, the infinitesimal minuteness of view, beat
him. As he complained about Samuel Johnson, he runs into "big words
about little things." Charles's mistress, her pug-dog, the page-boy
who tended the dog, nay, the boy's putative father, occupy the
foreground: and the poet, the statesman, and the hero retire into the
middle distance or the background. What would we not have given to
have had Macaulay's _History of England_ continued down to his own
time, the wars of Marlborough, the reign of Anne, the poets, wits,
romancers, inventors, reformers, and heroes of the eighteenth century,
the careers of Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, Burke, Fox, Nelson, Wellington,
Brougham, Bentham, and Canning--the formation of the British
Empire--the great revolutionary struggle in Europe! The one thought
which dims our enjoyment of this fascinating collection of memoirs, and
these veracious historical romances, is the sense of what we might have
had, if their author had been a great historian as well as a
magnificent literary artist.
[1] Froude's _Carlyle_, i. 192.