"The dinner was not as good as usual, and her ladyship kept up a
continued lamentation during the whole repast. I should never have
found out that everything was not as it should be, but for her
criticisms. The soup was too salt; the cutlets were not exactly
_comme il faut_; and the pudding was hardly enough boiled. I was
amused to hear from the splendid mistress of such a house the same
sort of apologies which ---- made when her cook forgot the joint
and sent too small a dinner to table."
All these artless details were given to amuse his young sisters at
home,--the beings he loved best on earth, not only at this time but
throughout life. If he ever had any deeper love for another, there is no
hint given of it in his life or letters. Probably for many reasons he
never contemplated marriage. When he was young he was too poor to think
of it; when he was older he had his own family upon his hands, and cared
for them munificently to the end. He was very generous with his money
and never learned the art of saving. It would seem scarcely possible
that a man of his warm heart and ardent temperament could have gone
through life with no romance; but if he had any such experience it has
not been given to the world. He loved his sisters, and his nephews and
nieces, with the most passionate devotion, and was in turn idolized by
them. His nephew says:--
"It must be acknowledged that where he loved, he loved more
entirely and more exclusively than was well for himself. It was
improvident in him to consecrate such intensity of feeling upon
relations who, however deeply they were attached to him, could not
always be in a position to requite him with the whole of their time
and the whole of their heart. He suffered much for that
improvidence, but he was too just and kind to permit others to
suffer with him; and it is not for one who obtained by inheritance
a share of his inestimable affection to regret a weakness such as
this."
This refers to his grief at the marriage of his sisters, which was
really great and enduring. He had planned to have them in his home, and
not to be in theirs; and when it turned out otherwise he could not at
first be reconciled to it. His sister Nancy went out with him to India
after his appointment there, and soon fell in with young Trevelyan,--to
whom she became engaged, with her brother's approval but to his great
grief. He calls it "a tragical denouement to an absurd plot." After the
marriage they formed one household during his stay in India, and her
home was to all intents and purposes his own during life. His youngest
sister died during his stay abroad, and of her he thus writes:--
"The last month has been the most painful I ever went through.
Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable. Early in
January letters from England brought me news of the death of my
sister. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say
that she was dearer to me than anything in the world, for my sister
who was with me was equally dear; but she was as dear to me as one
human being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do
its healing work, I cannot write about her without being altogether
unmanned."
His only solace was found in books. He could at any time bury himself in
these and forget all the world. Probably there never was such a reader
before. He devoured books like a gourmand. He read everything--Greek,
Latin, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese; and books of all
kinds in these languages,--history, _belles-lettres_, poetry, novels,
old chronicles. He seemed to have a passion for all. He would read a
book in an hour which it would take any one else half a day to get
through in the poorest shape. And he would know what was in it, too. He
read enormous quantities of novels always, and was very fond of poor
ones,--none too poor for him were written at that time. It is a question
whether if he had lived till this day the same thing could have been
said of him. It is not recorded whether he ever encountered any of
Anthony Trollope's works during his life.
If Macaulay had not been known as a great man of letters he would
probably have been known as a great orator. He was, indeed, one of the
best speakers of his day, and the House of Commons, that listens to so
few speakers, always gave its attention to him. It seems a great pity
that he should have given so many years of his life to Parliament, and
to official work, when his true career undoubtedly was literature pure
and simple, for which no man of his time was so splendidly equipped,
both by nature and by preparation. We ought to have had from him more
enduring historical works, and more of his masterly estimates of the
works of other men. After his retirement into private life, in 1847, he
enjoyed his freedom intensely, and much regretted that he had not
obtained it sooner. He enjoyed the pleasures of society greatly at this
time. He was the centre of a gifted circle of men--the most brilliant of
their time--all of whom were his close friends and admirers. How
brilliantly these men talked is already a matter of tradition. Macaulay
was the most wonderful conversationalist, probably, since Dr. Johnson,
not even excepting Carlyle, or Sydney Smith, or Coleridge. Very
laughable stories are told, of course, of a man who would talk three
hours without pause, and undoubtedly there were many people sadly bored
by him in his day; but to those who could appreciate the remarkable
stores of information he possessed, and the lucidity with which he could
deal them forth,--to say nothing of his rhetorical splendors,--those
discourses of his were never tedious, but full of supreme interest. To
be sure, Sydney Smith sneered at his "wonderful stores of very
accurate--misinformation," but he was one who did not like a rival near
the throne; and in Macaulay's absence he was himself the sun around
which the social universe revolved. Thackeray wrote after Macaulay's
death:--
"Now that wonderful tongue is to speak no more, will not many a man
grieve that he no longer can listen? To remember the talk is to
wonder, to think not only of the treasures he had stored, but of
the trifles which he could produce with equal readiness. What a
vast, brilliant, wonderful store of learning he had; what strange
lore would he not fetch at your bidding."
No report of these conversations exists, except such as is found
scattered in private diaries. In these there are records of many an
Attic night, and still more agreeable morning. Lord Carlisle's journal
contains as many of these records, perhaps, as any one's. He makes
glowing mention of Macaulay and his eloquence, after nearly every
meeting of the famous circle. The only criticism he made, and it is one
that was frequently made on Macaulay, was that it was remarkable what
quantities of trash he remembered. He could repeat pages of the very
dreariest stuff that ever was written, and was in danger of doing so on
small provocation,--an infliction it must have been hard for his friends
to have endured sometimes. Great stories are told of his remarkable
memory,--one seldom equalled by any man. He was always willing to accept
a friendly challenge to a feat of memory. One day in the board-room of
the British Museum he handed to Lord Aberdeen a sheet of foolscap
covered with writing arranged in parallel columns down each of the four
pages. This document, on which the ink was still wet, proved to be a
full list of the Senior Wranglers at Cambridge, with their dates and
colleges for the hundred years during which the names of Senior
Wranglers had been recorded in the University Calendar. On another
occasion Sir David Dundas asked:--
"'Macaulay, do you know your Popes?' 'No,' was the answer; 'I
always get wrong among the Innocents.' 'But you can say your
Archbishops of Canterbury?' 'Any fool,' said Macaulay, 'could say
his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards;' and he went off at a
score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on some oddity."
He was easily bored in general society, and in later life rarely went
beyond his little circle of intimates. Children were the only people of
whom he never tired, and he was a royal companion to them always. He was
unrivalled in the invention of games, and never wearied of repeating
them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small dramas for his nieces,
and sustained a great variety of parts with much skill. An old friend of
the family writes:--
"There was one never-failing game of building up a den with
newspapers behind the sofa, and of enacting robbers and tigers; we
shrieking with terror, but always begging him to begin again, of
which we never grew weary."
He writes to a friend concerning Dickens, that he did not think it
possible for fiction to affect him as the death of little Nell had done,
and adds:--
"Have you seen the first number of 'Dombey'? There is not much in
it, but there is one passage which made me cry as if my heart would
break. It is the description of a little girl who has just lost her
mother, and is unkindly treated by everybody. Images of that kind
always overpower me even when the artist is less skilful than
Dickens."
In truth, his extreme sensibility was often a great annoyance to him. He
strove very hard to overcome it, but in vain; and he was moved to tears
upon a great many occasions, when he would have given much to be able to
control himself.
Let us quote a little more from Thackeray's tribute to him.
"All sorts of successes were easy to him. As a lad he goes down
into the arena with others, and wins all the prizes to which he has
a mind. A place in the Senate is straightway offered to the young
man. He takes his seat there, he speaks when so minded, without
party anger or intrigue, but not without party faith and a sort of
heroic enthusiasm for his cause; and speech is also a success to
him. Still he is a poet and philosopher even more than orator. . . .
Years ago there was a wretched outcry raised because he dated a
letter from Windsor Castle, where he was staying. Immortal gods!
was not this man a fit guest for any palace in the world, or a fit
companion for any man or woman in it? The place of such a natural
chief was among the first in the land."
Macaulay died, in 1860, a sudden and painless death, and lies buried in
Westminster Abbey, in the Poet's Corner, near the west wall of the South
Transept, at the feet of Addison.
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