simple matter to give multitudes a large and healthy enjoyment. The old
bodily enjoyments are dying out; there is no room for them any more;
the complex apparatus of civilisation cumbers the ground. We are thrown
back upon the mind, and the mind is a barren thing. It can spin little
from itself: few that describe what they see are in the way to discern
much. Exaggerated emotions, violent incidents, monstrous characters,
crowd our canvas; they are the resource of a weakness which would obtain
the fame of strength. Reading is about to become a series of collisions
against aggravated breakers, of beatings with imaginary surf. In such
times a book of sensible attraction is a public benefit; it diffuses a
sensation of vigour through the multitude. Perhaps there is a danger
that the extreme popularity of the manner may make many persons fancy
they understand the matter more perfectly than they do: some readers may
become conceited; several boys believe that they too are Macaulays. Yet,
duly allowing for this defect, it is a great good that so many people
should learn so much on such topics so agreeably; that they should feel
that they _can_ understand them; that their minds should be stimulated
by a consciousness of health and power.
The same peculiarities influence the style of the narrative. The art of
narration is the art of writing in hooks-and-eyes. The principle consists
in making the appropriate thought follow the appropriate thought, the
proper fact the proper fact; in first preparing the mind for what is to
come, and then letting it come. This can only be achieved by keeping
continually and insensibly before the mind of the reader some one object,
character, or image, whose variations are the events of the story, whose
unity is the unity of it. Scott, for example, keeps before you the mind
of some one person,—that of Morton in _Old Mortality_, of Rebecca in
_Ivanhoe_, of Lovel in _The Antiquary_,—whose fortunes and mental changes
are the central incidents, whose personality is the string of unity.
It is the defect of the great Scotch novels that their central figure
is frequently not their most interesting topic,—that their interest is
often rather in the accessories than in the essential principle—rather
in that which surrounds the centre of narration than in the centre
itself. Scott tries to meet this objection by varying the mind which he
selects for his unit; in one of his chapters it is one character, in
the next a different; he shifts the scene from the hero to the heroine,
from the ‘Protector of the settlement’ of the story to the evil being
who mars it perpetually: but when narrowly examined, the principle of
his narration will be found nearly always the same,—the changes in the
position—external or mental—of some one human being. The most curiously
opposite sort of narration is that of Hume. He seems to carry a _view_,
as the moderns call it, through everything. He forms to himself a
metaphysical—that perhaps is a harsh word—an intellectual conception
of the time and character before him; and the gradual working out or
development of that view is the principle of his narration. He tells the
story of the conception. You rise from his pages without much remembrance
of or regard for the mere people, but with a clear notion of an
elaborated view, skilfully abstracted and perpetually impressed upon you.
A critic of detail should scarcely require a better task than to show how
insensibly and artfully the subtle historian infuses his doctrine among
the facts, indicates somehow—you can scarcely say how—their relation to
it; strings them, as it were, upon it, concealing it in seeming beneath
them, while in fact it altogether determines their form, their grouping,
and their consistency. The style of Macaulay is very different from
either of these. It is a diorama of political pictures. You seem to begin
with a brilliant picture,—its colours are distinct, its lines are firm;
on a sudden it changes, at first gradually, you can scarcely tell how
or in what, but truly and unmistakably,—a slightly different picture is
before you; then the second vision seems to change,—it too is another and
yet the same; then the third shines forth and fades; and so without end.
The unity of this delineation is the identity—the apparent identity—of
the picture; in no two moments does it seem quite different, in no two is
it identically the same. It grows and alters as our bodies would appear
to alter and grow, if you could fancy any one watching them, and being
conscious of their daily little changes. The events are picturesque
variations; the unity is a unity of political painting, of represented
external form. It is evident how suitable this is to a writer whose
understanding is solid, whose sense is political, whose fancy is fine and
delineative.
To this merit of Macaulay is to be added another. No one describes
so well what we may call the _spectacle_ of a character. The art of
delineating character by protracted description is one which grows in
spite of the critics. In vain is it alleged that the character should
be shown dramatically; that it should be illustrated by events; that it
should be exhibited in its actions. The truth is, that these homilies are
excellent, but incomplete; true, but out of season. There is a utility
in verbal portrait, as Lord Stanhope says there is in painted. Goethe
used to observe, that in society—in a _tête-à-tête_, rather—you often
thought of your companion as if he was his portrait: you were silent;
you did not care what he said; but you considered him as a picture, as
a whole, especially as regards yourself and your relations towards him.
You require something of the same kind in literature; _some_ description
of a man is clearly necessary as an introduction to the story of his
life and actions. But more than this is wanted; you require to have the
object placed before you as a whole, to have the characteristic traits
mentioned, the delicate qualities drawn out, the firm features gently
depicted. As the practice which Goethe hints at is, of all others,
the most favourable to a just and calm judgment of character, so the
literary substitute is essential as a steadying element, as a summary,
to bring together and give a unity to our views. We must see the man’s
face. Without it, we seem to have heard a great deal about the person,
but not to have known him; to be aware that he had done a good deal,
but to have no settled, ineradicable notion what manner of man he was.
This is the reason why critics like Macaulay, who sneer at the practice
when estimating the works of others, yet make use of it at great length,
and, in his case, with great skill, when they come to be historians
themselves. The kind of characters whom Macaulay can describe is
limited—at least we think so—by the bounds which we indicated just now.
There are some men whom he is too impassive to comprehend; but he can
always tell us of such as he does comprehend, what they looked like, and
what they were.
A great deal of this vividness Macaulay of course owes to his style.
Of its effectiveness there can be no doubt; its agreeableness no one
who has just been reading it is likely to deny. Yet it has a defect. It
is not, as Bishop Butler would have expressed it, such a style as ‘is
suitable to such a being as man, in such a world as the present one.’ It
is too omniscient. Everything is too plain. All is clear; nothing is
doubtful. Instead of probability being, as the great thinker expressed
it, ‘the very guide of life,’ it has become a rare exception—an uncommon
phenomenon. You rarely come across anything which is not decided; and
when you do come across it, you seem to wonder that the positiveness,
which has accomplished so much, should have been unwilling to decide
everything. This is hardly the style for history. The data of historical
narratives, especially of modern histories, are a heap of confusion.
No one can tell where they lie, or where they do not lie; what is in
them, or what is not in them. Literature is called the ‘fragment of
fragments;’ little has been written, and but little of that little has
been preserved. So history is a vestige of vestiges; few facts leave any
trace of themselves, any witness of their occurrence; of fewer still
is that witness preserved; a slight track is all anything leaves, and
the confusion of life, the tumult of change, sweeps even that away in
a moment. It is not possible that these data can be very fertile in
certainties. Few people would make anything of them: a memoir here,
a MS. there—two letters in a magazine—an assertion by a person whose
veracity is denied,—these are the sort of evidence out of which a flowing
narrative is to be educed; and of course it ought not to be too flowing.
‘If you please, sir, tell me what you do _not_ know,’ was the inquiry of
a humble pupil addressed to a great man of science. It would have been a
relief to the readers of Macaulay if he had shown a little the outside of
uncertainties, which there must be—the gradations of doubt, which there
ought to be—the singular accumulation of difficulties, which must beset
the extraction of a very easy narrative from very confused materials.
This defect in style is, indeed, indicative of a defect in understanding.
Macaulay’s mind is eminently gifted, but there is a want of graduation in
it. He has a fine eye for probabilities, a clear perception of evidence,
a shrewd guess at missing links of fact; but each probability seems to
him a certainty, each piece of evidence conclusive, each analogy exact.
The heavy Scotch intellect is a little prone to this: one figures it as a
heap of formulæ, and if fact _b_ is reducible to formula B, that is all
which it regards; the mathematical mill grinds with equal energy at flour
perfect and imperfect—at matter which is quite certain and at matter
which is only a little probable. But the great cause of this error is,
an abstinence from practical action. Life is a school of probability.
In the writings of every man of patient practicality, in the midst of
whatever other defects, you will find a careful appreciation of the
degrees of likelihood; a steady balancing of them one against another;
a disinclination to make things too clear, to overlook the debit side
of the account in mere contemplation of the enormousness of the credit.
The reason is obvious: action is a business of risk; the real question
is the magnitude of that risk. Failure is ever impending; success is
ever uncertain; there is always, in the very best of affairs, a slight
probability of the former, a contingent possibility of the non-occurrence
of the latter. For practical men, the problem ever is to test the amount
of these inevitable probabilities; to make sure that no one increases too
far; that by a well-varied choice the number of risks may in itself be
a protection—be an insurance to you, as it were, against the capricious
result of any one. A man like Macaulay, who stands aloof from life, is
not so instructed; he sits secure: nothing happens in his study: he does
not care to test probabilities; he loses the detective sensation.
Macaulay’s so-called inaccuracy is likewise a phase of this defect.
Considering the enormous advantages which a picturesque style gives to
ill-disposed critics; the number of points of investigation which it
suggests; the number of assertions it makes, sentence by sentence; the
number of ill-disposed critics that there are in the world; remembering
Macaulay’s position,—set on a hill to be spied at by them,—he can
scarcely be thought an inaccurate historian. Considering all things,
they have found few certain blunders, hardly any direct mistakes. Every
sentence of his style requires minute knowledge; the vivid picture has
a hundred details; each of those details must have an evidence, an
authority, a proof. An historian like Hume passes easily over a period;
his chart is large; if he gets the conspicuous headlands, the large
harbours, duly marked, he does not care. Macaulay puts in the depth of
each wave, every remarkable rock, every tree on the shore. Nothing gives
a critic so great an advantage. It is difficult to do this for a volume;
simple for a page. It is easy to select a particular event, and learn all
which any one can know about it; examine Macaulay’s descriptions, say he
is wrong, that X is not buried where he asserts, that a little boy was
one year older than he states. But how would the critic manage, if he had
to work out all this for a million facts, for a whole period? Few men, we
suspect, would be able to make so few errors of simple and provable fact.
On the other hand, few men would arouse a sleepy critic by such startling
assertion. If Macaulay finds a new theory, he states it as a fact. Very
likely it really is the most probable theory; at any rate, we know of
no case in which his theory is not one among the most plausible. If it
had only been so stated, it would have been well received. His view of
Marlborough’s character, for instance, is a specious one; it has a good
deal of evidence, a large amount of real probability, but it has scarcely
more. Marlborough _may_ have been as bad as is said, but we can hardly be
_sure_ of it at this time.
Macaulay’s ‘party-spirit’ is another consequence of his positiveness.
When he inclines to a side, he inclines to it too much. His opinions are
a shade too strong; his predilections some degrees at least too warm.
William is too perfect, James too imperfect. The Whigs are a trifle
like angels; the Tories like, let us say, ‘our inferiors.’ Yet this is
evidently an honest party-spirit. It does not lurk in the corners of
sentences, it is not insinuated without being alleged; it does not,
like the unfairness of Hume, secrete itself so subtly in the turns of
the words, that when you look to prove it, it is gone. On the contrary,
it rushes into broad day. William is loaded with panegyric; James is
always spoken evil of. Hume’s is the artful pleading of a hired advocate;
Macaulay’s the bold eulogy of a sincere friend. As far as effect goes,
this is an error. The very earnestness of the affection leads to a
reaction; we are tired of having William called the ‘just;’ we cannot
believe so many pages; ‘all that’ can scarcely be correct. As we said, if
the historian’s preference for persons and parties had been duly tempered
and mitigated, if the probably good were only said to be probably good,
if the rather bad were only alleged to be rather bad, the reader would
have been convinced, and the historian would have escaped the savage
censure of envious critics.
The one thing which detracts from the pleasure of reading these
volumes, is the doubt whether they should have been written. Should not
these great powers be reserved for great periods? Is this abounding,
picturesque style suited for continuous history? Are small men to be so
largely described? Should not admirable delineation be kept for admirable
people? We think so. You do not want Raphael to paint sign-posts, or
Palladio to build dirt-pies. Much of history is necessarily of little
value,—the superficies of circumstance, the scum of events. It is very
well to have it described, indeed you must have it described; the chain
must be kept complete; the narrative of a country’s fortunes will not
allow of breaks or gaps. Yet all things need not be done equally well.
The life of a great painter is short. Even the industry of Macaulay will
not complete this history. It is a pity to spend such powers on such
events. It would have been better to have some new volumes of essays
solely on great men and great things. The diffuseness of the style
would have been then in place; we could have borne to hear the smallest
_minutiæ_ of magnificent epochs. If an inferior hand had executed
the connecting-links, our notions would have acquired an insensible
perspective; the works of the great artist, the best themes, would have
stood out from the canvas. They are now confused by the equal brilliancy
of the adjacent inferiorities.
Much more might be said on this narrative. As it will be read for very
many years, it will employ the critics for very many years. It would be
unkind to make all the best observations. Something, as Mr. Disraeli said
in a budget-speech, something should be left for ‘future statements of
this nature.’ There will be an opportunity. Whatever those who come after
may say against this book, it will be, and remain, the ‘Pictorial History
of England.’
_BERANGER._[12]
(1857.)
The invention of books has at least one great advantage. It has
half-abolished one of the worst consequences of the diversity of
languages. Literature enables nations to understand one another. Oral
intercourse hardly does this. In English a distinguished foreigner
says not what he thinks, but what he can. There is a certain intimate
essence of national meaning which is as untranslatable as good poetry.
Dry thoughts are cosmopolitan; but the delicate associations of language
which express character, the traits of speech which mark the man, differ
in every tongue, so that there are not even cumbrous circumlocutions
that are equivalent in another. National character is a deep thing—a shy
thing; you cannot exhibit much of it to people who have a difficulty in
understanding your language; you are in strange society, and you feel you
will not be understood. ‘Let an English gentleman,’ writes Mr. Thackeray,
‘who has dwelt two, four, or ten years in Paris, say at the end of any
given period how much he knows of French society, how many French houses
he has entered, and how many French friends he has made. Intimacy there
is none; we see but the outsides of the people. Year by year we live in
France, and grow grey and see no more. We play _écarté_ with Monsieur
de Trêfle every night; but what do we know of the heart of the man—of
the inward ways, thoughts, and customs of Trêfle? We have danced with
Countess Flicflac Tuesdays and Thursdays ever since the peace; and how
far are we advanced in her acquaintance since we first twirled her round
a room? We know her velvet gown and her diamonds; we know her smiles and
her simpers and her rouge; but the real, rougeless, _intime_ Flicflac we
know not.’[13] Even if our words did not stutter, as they do stutter on
our tongue, she would not tell us what she is. Literature has half mended
this. Books are exportable; the essence of national character lies flat
on a printed page. Men of genius with the impulses of solitude produce
works of art, whose words can be read and re-read and partially taken in
by foreigners to whom they could never be uttered, the very thought of
whose unsympathising faces would freeze them on the surface of the mind.
Alexander Smith has accused poetical reviewers of beginning as far as
possible from their subject. It may seem to some, though it is not so
really, that we are exemplifying this saying in commencing as we have
commenced an article on Béranger.
There are two kinds of poetry—which one may call poems of this world,
and poems not of this world. We see a certain society on the earth held
together by certain relations, performing certain acts, exhibiting
certain phenomena, calling forth certain emotions. The millions of
human beings who compose it have their various thoughts, feelings, and
desires. They hate, act, and live. The social bond presses them closely
together; and from their proximity new sentiments arise which are half
superficial and do not touch the inmost soul, but which nevertheless are
unspeakably important in the actual constitution of human nature, and
work out their effects for good and for evil on the characters of those
who are subjected to their influence. These sentiments of the world, as
one may speak, differ from the more primitive impulses and emotions of
our inner nature as the superficial phenomena of the material universe
from what we fancy is its real essence. Passing hues, transient changes
have their course before our eyes; a multiplex diorama is for ever
displayed; underneath it all we fancy—such is the inevitable constitution
of our thinking faculty—a primitive immovable essence, which is modified
into all the ever-changing phenomena we see, which is the grey granite
whereon they lie, the primary substance whose _débris_ they all are.
Just so from the original and primitive emotions of man, society—the
evolving capacity of combined action—brings out desires which seem new,
in a sense are new, which have no existence out of the society itself,
are coloured by its customs at the moment, change with the fashions of
the age. Such a principle is what we may call social gaiety: the love of
combined amusement which all men feel and variously express, and which
is to the higher faculties of the soul what a gay running stream is to
the everlasting mountain—a light, altering element which beautifies
while it modifies. Poetry does not shrink from expressing such feelings;
on the contrary, their renovating cheerfulness blends appropriately
with her inspiriting delight. Each age and each form of the stimulating
imagination has a fashion of its own. Sir Walter sings in his modernised
chivalry:
‘Waken, lords and ladies gay,
On the mountain dawns the day;
All the jolly chase is here,
With hawk and horse and hunting-spear.
Hounds are in their couples yelling,
Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling,
Merrily, merrily, mingle they:
Waken, lords and ladies gay.
‘Louder, louder chant the lay,
Waken, lords and ladies gay;
Tell them youth and mirth and glee
Run a course as well as we.
Time, stern huntsman, who can balk?
Stanch as hound and fleet as hawk;
Think of this, and rise with day,
Gentle lords and ladies gay.’
The poet of the people, ‘_vilain et très vilain_,’ sings with the pauper
Bohemian:
‘Voir, c’est avoir. Allons courir!
Vie errante
Est chose enivrante.
Voir, c’est avoir. Allons courir!
Car tout voir, c’est tout conquérir.
‘Nous n’avons donc, exempts d’orgueil,
De lois vaines,
De lourdes chaines;
Nous n’avons donc, exempts d’orgueil,
Ni berceau, ni toit, ni cercueil.
Mais croyez-en notre gaîté,
Noble ou prêtre,
Valet ou maître;
Mais, croyez-en notre gaîté,
Le bonheur, c’est la liberté.
‘Oui, croyez-en notre gaîté,
Noble ou prêtre,
Valet ou maître;
Oui, croyez-en notre gaîté,
Le bonheur, c’est la liberté.’
The forms of these poems of social amusement are, in truth, as various
as the social amusement itself. The variety of the world, singularly
various as it everywhere is, is nowhere so various as in that. Men have
more ways of amusing themselves than of doing anything else they do. But
the essence—the characteristic—of these poems everywhere is, that they
express more or less well the lighter desires of human nature;—those that
have least of unspeakable depth, partake most of what is perishable and
earthly, and least of the immortal soul. The objects of these desires
are social accidents; excellent, perhaps, essential, possibly—so is
human nature made—in one form and variety or another, to the well-being
of the soul, yet in themselves transitory, fleeting, and in other moods
contemptible. The old saying was, that to endure solitude a man must
either be a beast or a god. It is in the lighter play of social action,
in that which is neither animal nor divine, which in its half-way
character is so natural to man, that these poems of society, which we
have called poems of amusement, have their place.