an honest ambition, of an enlarged philanthropy, of a sincere
love of truth. There no temptation drew him away from the
right course. Thomas Aquinas could pay no fees, Duns Scotus
could confer no peerages. The “Master of the Sentences” had no
rich reversions in his gift. Far different was the situation
of the great philosopher when he came forth from his study
and his laboratory to mingle with the crowd which filled the
galleries of Whitehall. In all that crowd there was no man
equally qualified to render great and lasting services to
mankind. But in all that crowd there was not a heart more set
on things which no man ought to suffer to be necessary to his
happiness,—on things which can often be obtained only by the
sacrifice of integrity and honour. To be the leader of the
human race in the career of improvement, to found on the ruins
of ancient intellectual dynasties a more prosperous and more
enduring empire, to be revered to the latest generations as
the most illustrious among the benefactors of mankind,—all
this was within his reach. But all this availed him nothing,
while some quibbling special pleader was promoted before him to
the Bench,—while some heavy country gentleman took precedence
of him by virtue of a purchased coronet,—while some pander,
happy in a fair wife, could obtain a more cordial salute from
Buckingham,—while some buffoon, versed in all the latest
scandal of the Court, could draw a louder laugh from James.’
Yet a less experience, or a less opportunity of experience, would have
warned a mind more observant that the bare desire for long posthumous
renown is but a feeble principle in common human nature. Bacon had
as much of it as most men. The keen excitability to this world’s
temptations must be opposed by more exciting impulses, by more retarding
discouragements, by conscience, by religion, by fear. If you would
vanquish earth, you must ‘invent heaven.’ It is the fiction of a cold
abstractedness that the possible respect of unseen people can commonly be
more desired than the certain homage of existing people.
In a more conspicuous manner the chill nature of the most brilliant
among English historians is shown in his defective dealing with the
passionate eras of our history. He has never been attracted, or not
proportionally attracted, by the singular mixture of heroism and
slavishness, of high passion and base passion, which mark the Tudor
period. The defect is apparent in his treatment of a period on which
he has written powerfully—the time of the civil wars. He has never in
the highest manner appreciated either of the two great characters—the
Puritan and the Cavalier—which are the form and life of those years.
What historian, indeed, has ever estimated the Cavalier character?
There is Clarendon—the grave, rhetorical, decorous lawyer—piling words,
congealing arguments,—very stately, a little grim. There is Hume—the
Scotch metaphysician—who has made out the best case for such people as
never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Strafford who would
never have been attainted,—a saving, calculating North-countryman,—fat,
impassive,—who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people to do
with an enjoying English gentleman? It is easy for a _doctrinaire_ to
bear a _post-mortem_ examination,—it is much the same whether he be
alive or dead; but not so with those who live during their life, whose
essence is existence, whose being is in animation. There seem to be
some characters who are not made for history, as there are some who
are not made for old age. A Cavalier is always young. The buoyant life
arises before us rich in hope, strong in vigour, irregular in action;
men young and ardent, framed in the ‘prodigality of nature;’ open to
every enjoyment, alive to every passion; eager, impulsive; brave without
discipline; noble without principle; prizing luxury, despising danger,
capable of high sentiment, but in each of whom the
‘Addiction was to courses vain;
His companies unlettered, rude and shallow,
His hours filled up with riots, banquets, sports,
And never noted in him any study,
Any retirement, any sequestration
From open haunts and popularity.’
We see these men setting forth or assembling to defend their King and
Church; and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger; a
deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see
what is analogous. Some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the
‘uneducated gentry;’ the ‘uneducated gentry’ would be Cavaliers now. The
political sentiment is part of the character. The essence of Toryism
is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome Conservatism
throughout this country: give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts
(and perhaps this is as well—you may be able to give an argumentative
answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of
the dignified dulness of politics); but as far as communicating and
establishing your creed are concerned—try a little pleasure. The way to
keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied
with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things. Over
the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there
is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy
at an old feast. Sir Walter Scott is an example of this. Every habit
and practice of old Scotland was inseparably in his mind associated
with genial enjoyment. To propose to touch one of her institutions, to
abolish one of those practices, was to touch a personal pleasure—a point
on which his mind reposed, a thing of memory and hope. So long as this
world is this world, will a buoyant life be the proper source of an
animated Conservatism. The ‘Church-and-King’ enthusiasm has even a deeper
connection with the Cavaliers. Carlyle has said, in his vivid way, ‘Two
or three young gentlemen have said, “Go to, I will _make_ a religion.”’
This is the exact opposite of what the irregular, enjoying man can think
or conceive. What! is he, with his untrained mind and his changeful
heart and his ruleless practice, to create a creed? Is the gushing life
to be asked to construct a cistern? Is the varying heart to be its own
master, the evil practice its own guide? Sooner will a ship invent its
own rudder, devise its own pilot, than the eager being will find out the
doctrine which is to restrain him. The very intellect is a type of the
confusion of the soul. It has little arguments on a thousand subjects,
hearsay sayings, original flashes, small and bright, struck from the
heedless mind by the strong impact of the world. And it has nothing else.
It has no systematic knowledge; it has a hatred of regular attention.
What can an understanding of this sort do with refined questioning or
subtle investigation? It is obliged in a sense by its very nature to take
what comes; it is overshadowed in a manner by the religion to which it
is born; its conscience tells it that it owes obedience to something;
it craves to worship something; that something, in both cases, it takes
from the past. ‘Thou hast not chosen me, but I have chosen thee,’ might
his faith say to a believer of this kind. A certain bigotry is altogether
natural to him. His creed seems to him a primitive fact, as certain and
evident as the stars. The political faith (for it is a faith) of these
persons is of a kind analogous. The virtue of loyalty assumes in them a
passionate aspect, and overflows, as it were, all the intellect which
belongs to the topic. This virtue, this need of our nature, arises, as
political philosophers tell us, from the conscious necessity which man is
under of obeying an external moral rule. We feel that we are by nature
and by the constitution of all things under an obligation to conform to
a certain standard, and we seek to find or to establish in the sphere
without, an authority which shall enforce it, shall aid us in compelling
others and also in mastering ourselves. When a man impressed with this
principle comes in contact with the institution of civil government as
it now exists and as it has always existed, he finds what he wants—he
discovers an authority; and he feels bound to submit to it. We do not, of
course, mean that all this takes place distinctly and consciously in the
mind of the person; on the contrary, the class of minds most subject to
its influence are precisely those which have in general the least defined
and accurate consciousness of their own operations, or of what befalls
them. In matter of fact, they find themselves under the control of laws
and of a polity from the earliest moment that they can remember, and they
obey it from habit and custom years before they know why. Only in later
life, when distinct thought is from an outward occurrence forced upon
them, do they feel the necessity of some such power; and in proportion to
their passionate and impulsive disposition they feel it the more. The law
has in a less degree on them the same effect which military discipline
has in a greater. It braces them to defined duties, and subjects them
to a known authority. Quieter minds find this authority in an internal
conscience; but in riotous natures its still small voice is lost if it be
not echoed in loud harsh tones from the firm and outer world:
‘Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride.’
From without they crave a bridle and a curb. The doctrine of
non-resistance is no _accident_ of the Cavalier character, though it
seems at first sight singular in an eager, tumultuous disposition. So
inconsistent is human nature, that it proceeds from the very extremity
of that tumult. They know that they cannot allow themselves to question
the authority which is upon them; they feel its necessity too acutely,
their intellect is untrained in subtle disquisitions, their conscience
fluctuating, their passions rising. They are sure that if they once
depart from that authority, their whole soul will be in anarchy. As a
riotous state tends to fall under a martial tyranny, a passionate mind
tends to subject itself to an extrinsic law—to enslave itself to an
outward discipline. ‘That is what the king says, boy, and that was ever
enough for Sir Henry Lee.’ An hereditary monarch is, indeed, the very
embodiment of this principle. The authority is so defined, so clearly
vested, so evidently intelligible; it descends so distinctly from the
past, it is imposed so conspicuously from without. Anything free refers
to the people; anything elected seems self-chosen. ‘The divinity that
doth hedge a king’ consists in his evidently representing an unmade,
unchosen, hereditary duty.
The greatness of this character is not in Macaulay’s way, and its faults
are. Its license affronts him; its riot alienates him. He is for ever
contrasting the dissoluteness of Prince Rupert’s horse with the restraint
of Cromwell’s pikemen. A deep enjoying nature finds no sympathy. The
brilliant style passes forward: we dwell on its brilliancy, but it is
cold. Macaulay has no tears for that warm life, no tenderness for that
extinct joy. The ignorance of the Cavalier, too, moves his wrath: ‘They
were ignorant of what every schoolgirl knows.’ Their loyalty to their
sovereign is the devotion of the Egyptians to the god Apis, who selected
‘a calf to adore.’ Their non-resistance offends the philosopher: their
license is commented on with the tone of a precisian. Their indecorum
does not suit the dignity of the narrator. Their rich free nature is
unappreciated; the tingling intensity of their joy is unnoticed. In a
word, there is something of the schoolboy about the Cavalier—there is
somewhat of a schoolmaster about the historian.
It might be thought, at first sight, that the insensibility and
coldness which are unfavourable to the appreciation of the Cavalier
would be particularly favourable to that of the Puritan. Some may say
that a natural aloofness from things earthly would dispose a man to
the doctrines of a sect which enjoins above all other commandments
abstinence and aloofness _from_ those things. In Macaulay’s case it
certainly has had no such consequence. He was bred up in the circle
which more than any other has resembled that of the greatest and best
Puritans—in the circle which has presented the evangelical doctrine in
its most influential and celebrated, and not its least genial form. Yet
he has revolted against it. The bray of ‘Exeter Hall’ is a phrase which
has become celebrated: it is an odd one for his father’s son. The whole
course of his personal fortunes, the entire scope of his historical
narrative, show an utter want of sympathy with the Puritan disposition.
It would be idle to quote passages; it will be enough to recollect the
contrast between the estimate—say, of Cromwell—by Carlyle and that by
Macaulay, to be aware of the enormous discrepancy. The one’s manner
evinces an instinctive sympathy, the other’s an instinctive aversion.
We believe that this is but a consequence of the same impassibility
of nature which we have said so much of. M. de Montalembert, in a
striking _éloge_ on a French historian—a man of the Southey type—after
speaking of his life in Paris during youth (a youth cast in the early
and exciting years of the first Revolution, and of the prelude to it),
and graphically portraying a man subject to scepticism, but not given
to vice; staid in habits, but unbelieving in opinion; without faith and
without irregularity,—winds up the whole by the sentence, that ‘_he was
hardened at once against good and evil_.’ In his view, the insensibility
which was a guard against exterior temptation was also a hindrance to
inward belief: and there is a philosophy in this. The nature of man
is not two things, but one thing. We have not one set of affections,
hopes, sensibilities, to be affected by the present world, and another
and a different to be affected by the invisible world: we are moved by
grandeur, or we are not; we are stirred by sublimity, or we are not; we
hunger after righteousness, or we do not; we hate vice, or we do not;
we are passionate, or not passionate; loving, or not loving; cold, or
not cold; our heart is dull, or it is wakeful; our soul is alive, or it
is dead. Deep under the surface of the intellect lies the _stratum_ of
the passions, of the intense, peculiar, simple impulses which constitute
the heart of man; there is the eager essence, the primitive desiring
being. What stirs this latent being we know. In general it is stirred
by everything. Sluggish natures are stirred little, wild natures are
stirred much; but all are stirred somewhat. It is not important whether
the object be in the visible or invisible world: whoso loves what he
has seen, will love what he has not seen; whoso hates what he has seen,
will hate what he has not seen. Creation is, as it were, but the garment
of the Creator: whoever is blind to the beauty on its surface, will be
insensible to the beauty beneath; whoso is dead to the sublimity before
his senses, will be dull to that which he imagines; whoso is untouched by
the visible man, will be unmoved by the invisible God. These are no new
ideas; and the conspicuous evidence of history confirms them. Everywhere
the deep religious organisation has been deeply sensitive to this world.
If we compare what are called sacred and profane literatures, the depth
of human affection is deepest in the sacred. A warmth as of life is on
the Hebrew, a chill as of marble is on the Greek. In Jewish history the
most tenderly religious character is the most sensitive to earth. Along
every lyric of the Psalmist thrills a deep spirit of human enjoyment; he
was alive as a child to the simple aspects of the world; the very errors
of his mingled career are but those to which the open, enjoying character
is most prone; its principle, so to speak, was a tremulous passion for
that which he had seen, as well as that which he had not seen. There is
no paradox, therefore, in saying that the same character which least
appreciates the impulsive and ardent Cavalier is also the most likely not
to appreciate the warm zeal of an overpowering devotion.
Some years ago it would have been necessary to show at length that
the Puritans had such a devotion. The notion had been that they were
fanatics, who simulated zeal, and hypocrites, who misquoted the Old
Testament. A new era has arrived; one of the great discoveries which the
competition of authors has introduced into historical researches has
attained a singular popularity. Times are changed. We are rather now, in
general, in danger of holding too high an estimate of the puritanical
character than a too low or contemptuous one. Among the disciples of
Carlyle it is considered that having been a Puritan is the next best
thing to having been in Germany. But though we cannot sympathise with
everything that the expounders of the new theory allege, and though we
should not select for praise the exact peculiarities most agreeable to
the slightly grim ‘gospel of earnestness,’ we acknowledge the great
service which they have rendered to English history. No one will now ever
overlook, that in the greater, in the original Puritans—in Cromwell, for
example—the whole basis of the character was a passionate, deep, rich,
religious organisation.
This is not in Macaulay’s way. It is not that he is sceptical; far
from it. ‘Divines of all persuasions,’ he tells us, ‘are agreed that
there is a religion;’ and he acquiesces in their teaching. But he
has no passionate self-questionings, no indomitable fears, no asking
perplexities. He is probably pleased at the exemption. He has praised
Bacon for a similar want of interest. ‘Nor did he ever meddle with those
enigmas which have puzzled hundreds of generations, and will puzzle
hundreds more. He said nothing about the grounds of moral obligation, or
the freedom of the human will. He had no inclination to employ himself
in labours resembling those of the damned in the Grecian Tartarus—to
spin for ever on the same wheel round the same pivot. He lived in an
age in which disputes on the most subtle points of divinity excited an
intense interest throughout Europe; and nowhere more than in England.
He was placed in the very thick of the conflict. He was in power at the
time of the Synod of Dort, and must for months have been daily deafened
with talk about election, reprobation, and final perseverance. Yet we
do not remember a line in his works from which it can be inferred that
he was either a Calvinist or an Arminian. While the world was resounding
with the noise of a disputatious philosophy and a disputatious theology,
the Baconian school, like Allworthy seated between Square and Thwackum,
preserved a calm neutrality,—half-scornful, half-benevolent,—and, content
with adding to the sum of practical good, left the war of words to those
who liked it.’ This may be the writing of good sense, but it is not the
expression of an anxious or passionate religious nature.
Such is the explanation of Macaulay’s not prizing so highly as he should
prize the essential excellences of the Puritan character. He is defective
in the one point in which they were very great; he is eminent in the very
point in which they were most defective. A spirit of easy cheerfulness
pervades his writings, a pleasant geniality overflows his history: the
rigid asceticism, the pain for pain’s sake, of the Puritan is altogether
alien to him. Retribution he would deny; sin is hardly a part of his
creed. His religion is one of thanksgiving. His notion of philosophy—it
would be a better notion of his own writing—is _illustrans commoda vitæ_.
The English Revolution is the very topic for a person of this character.
It is eminently an unimpassioned movement. It requires no appreciation
of the Cavalier or of the zealot; no sympathy with the romance of this
world; no inclination to pass beyond, and absorb the mind’s energies
in another. It had neither the rough enthusiasm of barbarism nor the
delicate grace of high civilisation; the men who conducted it had neither
the deep spirit of Cromwell’s Puritans nor the chivalric loyalty of the
enjoying English gentleman. They were hard-headed sensible men, who knew
that politics were a kind of business, that the essence of business is
compromise, of practicality concession. They drove no theory to excess;
for they had no theory. Their passions did not hurry them away; for
their temperament was still, their reason calculating and calm. Locke
is the type of the best character of his era. There is nothing in him
which a historian such as we have described could fail to comprehend,
or could not sympathise with when he did comprehend. He was the very
reverse of a Cavalier; he came of a Puritan stock; he retained through
life a kind of chilled Puritanism; he had nothing of its excessive,
overpowering, interior zeal, but he retained the formal decorum which
it had given to the manners, the solid earnestness of its intellect,
the heavy respectability of its character. In all the nations across
which Puritanism has passed you may notice something of its indifference
to this world’s lighter enjoyments; no one of them has been quite able
to retain its singular interest in what is beyond the veil of time and
sense. The generation to which we owe our Revolution was in the first
stage of the descent. Locke thought a zealot a dangerous person, and
a poet little better than a rascal. It has been said, with perhaps an
allusion to Macaulay, that our historians have held that ‘all the people
who lived before 1688 were either knaves or fools.’ This is, of course,
an exaggeration; but those who have considered what sort of person a
historian is likely to be, will not be surprised at his preference for
the people of that era. They had the equable sense which he appreciates;
they had not the deep animated passions to which his nature is insensible.
Yet, though Macaulay shares in the common temperament of historians,
and in the sympathy with, and appreciation of, the characters most
congenial to that temperament, he is singularly contrasted with them
in one respect—he has a vivid fancy, they have a dull one. History is
generally written on the principle that human life is a transaction;
that people come to it with defined intentions and a calm self-possessed
air, as stockjobbers would buy ‘omnium,’ as timber-merchants buy ‘best
middling;’ people are alike, and things are alike; everything is a
little dull, every one a little slow; manners are not depicted, traits
are not noticed; the narrative is confined to those great transactions
which can be understood without any imaginative delineation of their
accompaniments. There are two kinds of things—those which you need only
to _understand_, and those which you need also to _imagine_. That a man
bought nine hundredweight of hops is an intelligible idea—you do not
want the hops delineated or the man described; that he went into society
suggests an inquiry—you want to know what the society was like, and how
far he was fitted to be there. The great business transactions of the
political world are of the intelligible description. Macaulay has himself
said:
‘A history, in which every particular incident may be true,
may on the whole be false. The circumstances which have
most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of
manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty
to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to
humanity,—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions.
Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are
pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by
armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no
treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in
every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at
ten thousand firesides. The upper current of society presents
no certain criterion by which we can judge of the direction
in which the under current flows. We read of defeats and
victories; but we know that nations may be miserable amidst
victories, and prosperous amidst defeats. We read of the fall
of wise ministers, and of the rise of profligate favourites;
but we must remember how small a proportion the good or evil
effected by a single statesman can bear to the good or evil of
a great social system.’