THE FOREMOST ESSAYIST IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--HIS STYLE AND
LEARNING HAVE MADE MACAULAY A FAVORITE FOR OVER A HALF
CENTURY.
Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800,
but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense
partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson
and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason
of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and
his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only
writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal
forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and
of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain
dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces conviction on
the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is
true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older.
Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason
and of high enthusiasm--an appeal that never loses its force with
those who love the intellectual life.
Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they
received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the
EDINBURGH REVIEW in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the resources of
his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient and modern
classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to prove his
case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer, and he
never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the shadows
and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive and
Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor, Croker, over
the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every eminent Tory, as
he idealizes every prominent Whig in English political history.
Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though he were to
deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis; he
works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he
reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind
the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great
piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your
mind is amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the
conjuror's skill.
Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantages
were ample. He had a memory which made everything he read his own,
ready to be drawn upon at a moment's notice. He was famous as an
author at the early age of twenty-five; he was already a distinguished
Parliamentary orator at thirty; at thirty-three he had gained a place
in the East Indian Council. He never married, but he had an ideal
domestic life in the home of his sister, and one of his nephews,
George Otto Trevelyan, wrote his biography, one of the best in the
language, which reveals the sweetness of nature that lay under the
hard surface of Macaulay's character. He made a fortune out of his
books, and in ten years' service in India he gained another fortune,
with the leisure for wide reading, which he utilized in writing his
history of England. He died at the height of his fame, before his
great mental powers had shown any sign of decay. Take it all in all,
his was a happy life, brimful of work and enjoyment.
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born October 25, 1800, the son of a
wealthy merchant who was active in securing the abolition of the slave
trade. His precocity is almost beyond belief. He read at three years
of age, gave signs of his marvelous memory at four, and when only
eight years old wrote a theological discourse. He entered Trinity
College, Cambridge, at eighteen, but his aversion to mathematics cost
him college honors. He showed at Cambridge great fondness for Latin
declamation and for poetry. At twenty-four he became a fellow of
Trinity. He studied law, but did not practice. Literature and politics
absorbed his attention. At twenty-five he made his first hit with his
essay on Milton in the EDINBURGH REVIEW.
This was followed in rapid succession by the series of essays on which
his fame mainly rests. In 1830 he was elected to Parliament, and in
the following year he established his reputation as an orator by a
great speech on the reform bill. But financial reverses came when he
lost the lucrative post of Commissioner in Bankruptcy and his
fellowship at Trinity lapsed. To gain an income he accepted the
position of secretary of the Board of Control of Indian Affairs, and
soon after was offered a seat in the Supreme Council of India at
Calcutta at $50,000 a year. He lived in India four years, and it was
mainly in these years that he did the reading which afterward bore
fruit in his _History of England_.
[Illustration: THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY AT THE AGE OF
FORTY-NINE--AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY W. HOLL, FROM A DRAWING BY
GEORGE RICHMOND, A.R.A.]
At thirty-nine Macaulay began his _History of England_, which
continued to absorb most of his time for the next twenty years. While
he was working on his history he published _Lays of Ancient Rome_,
that had a success scarcely inferior to that of Scott's _Lady of the
Lake_ or Byron's _Childe Harold_. He also published his essays, which
had a remarkable sale. His history, the first two volumes of which
appeared in 1848, scored a success that astounded all the critics.
When the third volume appeared in 1855, no less than twenty-six
thousand, five hundred copies were sold in ten weeks, which broke all
records of that day. Macaulay received royalties of over $150,000 on
history, a sum which would have been trebled had he secured payment
on editions issued in the United States, where his works were more
popular than in his own country. His last years were crowded with
honors. He accepted a peerage two years before his death. When the end
came he was given a public funeral and a place in Westminster Abbey.
With Carlyle, Macaulay shares the honor of being the greatest of
English essayists. While he cannot compare with Carlyle in insight
into character and in splendor of imagination, he appeals to the wider
audience because of his attractive style, his wealth of ornament and
illustration and his great clearness. Carlyle's appeal is mainly to
students, but Macaulay appeals to all classes of readers.
Macaulay's style has been imitated by many hands, but no one has ever
worked such miracles as he wrought with apparent ease. In the first
place, his learning was so much a part of his mind that he drew on its
stores without effort. Scarcely a paragraph can be found in all his
essays which is not packed with allusions, yet all seem to illustrate
his subject so naturally that one never looks upon them as used to
display his remarkable knowledge.
Macaulay is a master of all the literary arts. Especially does he love
to use antithesis and to make his effects by violent contrasts. Add to
this the art of skilful climax, clever alliteration, happy
illustration and great narrative power and you have the chief features
of Macaulay's style. The reader is carried along on this flood of
oratorical style, and so great is the author's descriptive power that
one actually beholds the scenes and the personages which he depicts.
Of all his essays Macaulay shows his great powers most conspicuously
in those on Milton, Clive, Warren Hastings and Croker's edition of
Boswell's Johnson. In these he is always the advocate laboring to
convince his hearers; always the orator filled with that passion of
enthusiasm which makes one accept his words for the time, just as
one's mind is unconsciously swayed by the voice of an eloquent
speaker. It is this intense earnestness, this fierce desire to
convince, joined to this prodigal display of learning, which stamps
Macaulay's words on the brain of the receptive reader. Only when in
cold blood we analyze his essays do we escape from this literary
hypnotism which he exerts upon every reader.
The essays of Macaulay are full of meat and all are worth reading,
but, of course, every reader will differ in his estimate of them
according to his own tastes and sympathies. It is fine practice to
take one of these essays and look up the literary and historical
allusions. No more attractive work than this can be set before a
reading club. It will give rich returns in knowledge as well as in
methods of literary study. Macaulay's _History_ is not read to-day as
it was twenty years ago, mainly because historical writing in these
days has suffered a great change, due to the growth of religious and
political toleration. Macaulay is a partisan and a bigot, but if one
can discount much of his bias and bitterness it will be found
profitable to read portions of this history. Macaulay's verse is not
of a high order, but his _Lays_ are full of poetic fire, and they
appeal to a wider audience than more finished verse.
Of all the English writers of the last century Macaulay has preserved
the strongest hold on the reading public, and whatever changes time
may make in literary fashions, one may rest assured that Macaulay will
always retain his grip on readers of English blood.