In August of 1825 there appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ an article
on Milton which attracted instantaneous and universal attention. Though
it did not, perhaps, go to the bottom of the various topics it had to
deal with, it displayed so wonderful a range of knowledge, so great
a variety of strong and striking thoughts, and such a splendor of
rhetoric, that it dazzled and drew into an earnest enthusiasm the host
of readers of that already famous journal. When it came to be known
that the author of this marvellous piece of literary workmanship was
a young man of only twenty-five, it was at once perceived that a new
luminary had made its appearance in the galaxy of English authorship.
From that time till the day when, nearly thirty years later, his
services in behalf of letters were rewarded with a grave in the Poets’
Corner at Westminster Abbey, Thomas Babington Macaulay wielded a
literary influence not surpassed by that of any other master of English
prose.
He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, a man who had distinguished
himself as an anti-slavery philanthropist even among men like Stephen,
Clarkson, and Wilberforce. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Mills, a
bookseller, and a Quaker. Though the lad did not inherit a fortune, his
father was able without much inconvenience to give him the advantages
of an education at one of the universities. Up to the age of thirteen
he was taught almost exclusively by his mother; and when he was at
length placed in a private school, his brightness and eagerness of mind
astonished all those with whom he came in contact. That most charming
of all biographies of literary men, Trevelyan’s “Life and Letters of
Macaulay,” teems with evidence of his singular attainments at an early
age.
At Cambridge, which he entered at the age of eighteen, he devoted
himself with great fervor to the study of the classics, to reading in
history and general literature, and to the development of his abilities
as an extemporaneous speaker. He took whatever prizes came in his way,
but, owing to his distaste for the mathematics, did not try for honors
at the completion of his course. On leaving the university with the
degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1822, his mental habits and peculiarities
seem to have been substantially fixed. He was already master of vast
stores of information, which he always seemed to keep under the play
of his wit and his imagination. His memory was so prodigious that he
could repeat the names of the popes either backward or forward; and
he once remarked that if every copy of the “Paradise Lost” were to be
destroyed, he thought he could reproduce the poem from memory. He read
with such marvellous rapidity that he would devour a book in the course
of a morning walk in London; and the vast accumulations which he
thus brought into the range of his knowledge were so vitalized by his
feelings and his imagination that they were always completely at his
service.
Though his biographer shows us that he was one of the most charming
and lovable of men, his writings would convey another impression. He
appears never to have had any self-distrust; he was seldom in doubt
on any subject; what to others seemed mere probabilities were to him
positive certainties; indeed, on whatever question he wrote or spoke
his opinions always seemed to have been irrevocably fixed long before.
Lord Melbourne told the whole story when he once said: “I wish I was as
cock-sure of any thing as Tom Macaulay is of every thing.”
The essay on Milton was followed at brief intervals by that remarkable
series on Machiavelli, Dryden, Hallam, Hampden, Ranke, and others,
which has been the delight and inspiration of so many students in
England and America. Macaulay studied law, but we never hear that
his literary labors were disturbed by clients. The prices which his
articles commanded in the market of the Reviews enabled him to gratify
his tastes; and he seems never to have had any inclination to push
himself into an active practice of his profession.
One of the peculiar merits claimed for the old borough system by
its friends was that it enabled young men of great promise to find
an easy way into the House of Commons. Pitt, Channing, and Brougham
had first been appointed from pocket boroughs, and now Macaulay was
to receive a similar favor. In 1830, the very year when the Whigs,
after a long exclusion from office, came into power under Lord Grey,
Macaulay, through the favor of Lord Lansdowne, entered the House, as
the Member for Calne. Though he afterward boasted that, while sitting
as the nominee of Lord Lansdowne, he was as independent as when at a
later period he represented the popular constituencies of Leeds and
Edinburgh, it is worthy of note that from the first he was an ardent
and unqualified supporter of the Whigs. In the great question of
Representative Reform his sympathies were thoroughly enlisted on the
side of Earl Grey; and his speeches on the subject, four in number,
contributed not a little to the final triumph of that great movement.
Some of his letters, given by Trevelyan, reveal in the most graphic
light the intensity of public feeling while the contest was going on.
In the reformed Parliament of 1834 he took a seat as a member from
Leeds; but in that same year his place was made vacant by his
appointment as one of the Government Council for India. For this
position he was amply qualified. His essays on the “Utilitarian Theory
of Government” and “Dumont’s Recollections of Mirabeau” showed that he
had studied jurisprudence as a science, and even that he considered
the province of a jurist as superior to that of a statesman. Moreover
he had made an especial study of India. In July of 1833 the Government
brought forward its new India Bill, and Macaulay’s speech on the
measure left perhaps even a deeper impression than had been made by
either of his speeches on the Reform Bill. Jeffrey, who happened to
be present, wrote to one of his correspondents: “Mack is a marvellous
person. He made the very best speech that has been made this session on
India. The Speaker, who is a severe judge, says he rather thinks it the
best speech he ever heard.”
Trevelyan, in his life of Macaulay, has thrown out into clear light
the object of his uncle in exiling himself from England during four
years by going to India. While Macaulay was not without faith that he
could be of service to the Government, the consideration which led
to his decision was of a pecuniary nature. Though unmarried, he was
not in a condition to be strictly independent, and without pecuniary
independence, he was open to the charge while in Parliament of being
an adventurer. The salary of the position offered was liberal, even in
the English sense of that term. He was to receive £10,000 a year; and
his letters show with what care he computed that, being a bachelor, he
could live in India even in a governmental position on $25,000 a year,
and save a similar amount for permanent investment. His hope was that
at the end of five years he would be able to return with about $125,000
and henceforth devote himself with entire independence to a higher
range of literary study. He had already begun to make plans for his
great History.
There were, however, those who regarded the appointment as an unmerited
reward for political services. When some one sneered at his abilities,
Shiel, in his mocking way, replied: “Nonsense, sir! Don’t attempt to
run down Macaulay; he’s the cleverest man in Christendom. Didn’t he
make four speeches on the Reform Bill and get £10,000 a year? Think of
that and be dumb!”
While in India Macaulay’s chief energies were devoted to the
preparation of a code, by which he hoped to solve the perplexing
problems that constantly thrust themselves forward in the government
of that teeming peninsula. Though in this effort he was not successful,
the ability and ingenuity of his work were generally acknowledged. His
code was regarded as impracticable, and was finally rejected. It was
during his stay in India that the essays on Mackintosh and Bacon were
prepared.
Soon after his return in 1838 an election to Parliament by the
important constituency of Edinburgh once more brought him into
legislative activity. He supported Lord Melbourne till the downfall of
his ministry, in 1841, and then became an opponent of Sir Robert Peel,
in opposition to whose policy he delivered some of his ablest speeches.
When a candidate for reëlection in 1847, he was defeated on account of
some offence he had given in advocating a policy of liberality toward
the means of educating Catholics in Ireland. But this defeat, though
deeply mortifying to him at the time, was not without compensating
advantages. He now had leisure to devote himself to the great literary
work which for a considerable time had already been under his pen. In
1848 appeared the first two volumes of the “History of England from the
Time of James the Second.” The work sprang at once into that phenomenal
popularity which has scarcely yet abated, for it still enjoys the
high distinction of having been more read than any other historical
work in the language. The third and fourth volumes were given to the
world in 1855, just as he was beginning to feel the approaches of that
irresistible disease which was soon to bring his labors to an untimely
end. Two years after the appearance of the fourth volume his services
in behalf of history and letters were rewarded with the peerage. The
numerous essays flowing from his pen still showed that the splendor of
his faculties was undimmed, and it was therefore with surprise as well
as sorrow that, late in December of 1859, the English-speaking world
learned of his death from disease of the heart. With the unanimous
concurrence of a mourning nation, he was given the highest literary
honor of a burial in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.
The peculiarities of Macaulay’s oratory were strikingly similar to
those of his writings. With the exception, however, of his speech on
the government of India, no one of his orations has the elaborateness
so characteristic of his essays. Perhaps the most vivid notion of the
methods and qualities of his address is conveyed by the description
that appeared in the “Noctes Ambrosianæ” immediately after the delivery
of the speech selected for this volume. It is the description of a
most ardent political enemy and a most energetic hater of all Whigs.
After saying that Macaulay is “the cleverest declaimer on the Whig
side of the House,” Wilson goes on to say: “He is an ugly, cross-made,
splay-footed, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow, with a featureless
face too—except, indeed, a good expansive forehead,—sleek, puritanical,
sandy hair, large glimmering eyes, and a mouth from ear to ear. He has
a lisp and burr, moreover, and speaks thickly and huskily for several
minutes before he gets into the swing of his discourse; but after that
nothing can be more dazzling than his whole execution. What he says
is substantially, of course, stuff and nonsense; but it is so well
worded, and so volubly and forcibly delivered—there is such an endless
string of epigram and antithesis—such a flashing of epithets, such
an accumulation of images, and the voice is so trumpet-like, and the
action so grotesquely emphatic, that you might hear a pin drop in the
House. Even Manners Sutton himself listens.”