politics and society in the absorbing interest which he took in his
History, confining himself to his library, and sometimes allowing months
to pass without accepting any invitation whatever to a social gathering.
No man was ever more disenchanted with society. He begrudged his time
even when tempted by the calls of friendship. When visitors penetrated
to his den, he bowed them out with ironical politeness. He had no favors
to ask from friends or foes, for he declined political office, and was
as independent as wealth or fame could make him. In 1849 he was made
Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and the acclamations following
his address were prodigious. Lord John Russell gave to Macaulay's
brother John a living worth £1100. Macaulay himself was offered the
professorship of History at Cambridge. In one year he received for the
first edition of his third and fourth volumes of the History, published
in 1855, £20,000 in a single check from Longman. At the age of
forty-nine, he writes in his diary: "I have no cause for
complaint,--tolerable health, competence, liberty, leisure, dear
relatives and friends, and a very great literary reputation."
With all this prosperity, Macaulay now naturally set up his carriage. He
dined often with the Queen, and was a great man, according to English
notions, more even from his wealth and social position than from his
success in letters. Lord John Russell pressed him to accept a seat in
his cabinet, but "I told him," Macaulay writes, "that I should be of no
use,--that I was not a debater; that it was too late to become one; that
my temper, taste, and literary habits alike prevented." He was, however,
induced to become again a member of Parliament, and in 1852 was elected
once more for Edinburgh, which had repented of its rejection of him in
1847. But he insisted on perfect independence to vote as he pleased. He
regarded this re-entrance into public life as a great personal
sacrifice, since it might postpone the appearance of his next two
volumes of the History. His election, however, was received with great
acclamation. Even Professor Wilson, the most conservative of Scotch
Tories, voted for him. It was not a party victory, but purely a
personal triumph.
A serious illness now follows,--a weakness of the heart, from the
effects of which Macaulay died a few years afterwards. He retires to
Clifton, and gives himself up to getting well, visiting Barley Wood, and
driving in his private carriage among the most interesting scenery in
the west of England. But he was never perfectly well again, although he
continued to work on his History. His intimate friends saw the change in
him with sadness, but he himself was serene and uncomplaining. Although
he suffered from an oppression of the chest, he still on great occasions
addressed the House. His mind was clear, but his voice was faint. The
last speech he made was in behalf of the independence of the Scottish
Church. The strain of the House of Commons proved to be too great for
his now enfeebled constitution. "Nor could he conceal from himself and
his friends," says Trevelyan, "that it was a grievous waste, while the
reign of Anne still remained unwritten, for him to consume his scanty
stock of vigor in the tedious and exhaustive routine of political
existence; waiting whole evenings for the vote, and then ... trudging
home at three in the morning through the slush of a February thaw." He
therefore spared himself as a member of Parliament, and carefully
husbanded his powers in order to work upon his book. He gave himself
more time for his annual vacation, yet would write when he could on the
subjects which engrossed his life. His labors were too severe for his
strength, but he worked on, and even harder and harder.
At length on the 25th of November, 1855, Macaulay sent to the printer
the last twenty pages of his History, and an edition of twenty-five
thousand was ordered. Within a generation one hundred and forty thousand
copies of the work were sold in the United Kingdom alone. Six rival
translators were engaged in turning it into German; and it was published
in the Polish, the Danish, the Swedish, the Italian, the French, the
Dutch, the Spanish, the Hungarian, the Russian, and the Bohemian
languages, to say nothing of its immense circulation in the United
States. Such extraordinary literary popularity was accompanied by great
honors. In 1857 Macaulay was created a British Peer and elected Lord
High Steward of the borough of Cambridge. The academies of Utrecht,
Munich, and Turin elected him to honorary membership. The King of
Prussia made him a member of the Order of Merit. Oxford conferred on him
the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, and he was elected president of the
Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. He could have little more in the
way of academic and governmental honors.
The failing health of Macaulay now compelled him to resign his seat in
the House of Commons. It was also thought desirable for him to vacate
his apartments at The Albany, which he had occupied for fifteen years,
that he might be more retired and perhaps more comfortable. His
friends, at the suggestion of Dean Milman, selected a house in
Kensington, the rooms of which were small, except the library, which
opened upon a beautiful lawn, adorned with flowers and shrubs; it was
called Holly Lodge, and was very secluded and attractive. Here his
latter days were spent, in the society of his nieces and a few devoted
friends, and in dispensing simple hospitalities. His favorite form of
entertainment was the breakfast, at which his guests would linger till
twelve, enchanted by his conversation, for his mind showed no signs
of decay.
From this charming retreat Lord Macaulay very seldom appeared in London
society. Years passed without his even accepting invitations. An
occasional night at a friend's house in the country, one or two nights
at Windsor Castle, and one or two visits to Lord Stanhope's seat in Kent
in order to consult his magnificent library, were the only visits which
Macaulay made in the course of the year. He always had a dislike of
visiting in private houses, much preferring hotels, where he could be
free from conventional life.
Macaulay was always careful in his expenditures, wasting nothing that he
might enjoy the pleasure of charity,--for he gave liberally, especially
to needy and unfortunate men of letters. Once he gave £100 to a total
stranger who implored his aid. In his household he was revered, for he
was the kindest and most considerate of masters, while his relatives
absolutely worshipped him. At home he made no claim to the privileges of
genius; he had few eccentricities; he never interfered with the
pleasures of others; he never obtruded his advice, or demanded that his
own views or tastes should be consulted; he was especially careful not
to wound the feelings of those with whom he lived. Children were his
delight and solace. Over them he seemed to have unbounded influence. He
would spend the half of a busy day in playing with them, and in
inventing new games for their diversion. One of his pleasures was to
take them to see the sights of London. His sympathies were quick and
generous; although apparently so cynical in his opinions of books, he
was always affected at any touches of pathos, even to tears.
It was hard for Macaulay to realize that the time had come when he must
leave untold that portion of English history with which he was more
familiar than any other living man; but he submitted to the inevitable
without repining. He had done what he could. Even when he was compelled
to give up his daily task, his love of reading remained; a book was his
solace to the last. He had no extensive acquaintance with the works of
some of the best writers of his own generation, preferring the classic
authors of antiquity, and of England in the time of Anne. He did not
relish Coleridge or Carlyle or Buckle or Ruskin, or indeed any writer
who seemed to strain after originality of style, in defiance of the old
and conservative canons. He preferred Miss Austen to Dickens. He felt
that he owed a great debt to the master-minds of by-gone ages, who
reached perfection of style, so far as it can be attained. Even the
English writers of the reign of Anne, to his mind, have never been
surpassed. His admiration for Addison was unbounded. Dryden and Pope to
him were greater poets than any who have succeeded them. Such a poet as
Tennyson or Wordsworth he pretended he did not understand. He wanted
transparent clearness of expression. Browning would have been to him an
abomination. He despised the poetry of his own age, with its involved
sentences, its obscurity, and its strange metres. His own poetry was as
direct as Homer, as simple as Chaucer, and as graphic as Scott.
In 1859, Macaulay contrived to visit once more the English lakes and the
western highlands, where he was received with great veneration, being
recognized everywhere on steamers and railway stations. But his
cheerfulness had now departed, although he made an effort to be
agreeable. In December of this year he ceased writing in his diary. The
physicians pretended to think that he was better, but fainting fits set
in. On Christmas he said but little, and was constantly dropping to
sleep. His relatives did not seem to think that he was in immediate
danger, but the end was near. He died without pain, and was buried in
Westminster Abbey on the 9th of January, 1860, having for pall-bearers
the most illustrious men in England. He rests in the Poet's Corner, amid
the tombs of Johnson and Garrick, Handel and Goldsmith, Gay and Addison,
leaving behind him an immortal fame.
And what is this fame? It is not that of a philosophical historian like
Guizot, for his History is not marked by profound generalizations, or
even thoughtful reflections. He was not a judicial historian like
Hallam, seeking to present the truth alone; for he was a partisan, full
of party prejudices. Nor was he an historian like Ranke, raking out the
hidden facts of a remote period, and unveiling the astute diplomacy of
past ages. Macaulay was a great historical painter of the realistic
school, whose pictures have never been surpassed, or even equalled, for
vividness and interest. In this class of historians he stands out alone
and peerless, the most exciting and the most interesting of all the
historians who have depicted the manners, the events, and the characters
of a former age,--never by any accident dull, but fatiguing, if at all,
only by his wealth of illustration and the over-brilliancy of his
coloring. He is the Titian of word-painting, and as such will live like
that immortal colorist. Critics may say what they please about his
rhetoric, about his partial statements, about his want of insight into
deep philosophical questions; but as a painter who made his figures
stand out on the historical canvas with unique vividness, Macaulay
cannot fail to be regarded, as long as the English language is spoken or
written, as one of the great masters of literary composition. This was
the verdict pronounced by the English nation at large; and its great
political and literary leaders expressed and confirmed it, when they
gave him fortune and fame, elevated him to the peerage, bestowed on him
stars and titles, and buried him with august solemnity among those
illustrious men who gave to England its power and glory.
SHAKSPEARE; OR, THE POET.[3]
1564-1616.
BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by
originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving,
like a spider, their web from their own bowels; in finding clay and
making bricks and building the house; no great men are original. Nor
does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero
is in the press of knights and the thick of events; and seeing what men
want and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight and
of arm to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the most
indebted man. A poet is no rattle-brain, saying what comes uppermost,
and, because he says everything, saying at last something good; but a
heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical
and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad earnest, freighted
with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most determined
aim which any man or class knows of in his times.
[Footnote 3: Reprinted from "Representative Men," by permission of
Messrs. HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN, AND CO., publishers of Emerson's works.]
The Genius of our life is jealous of individuals, and will not have any
individual great, except through the general. There is no choice to
genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning and say, 'I am
full of life, I will go to sea and find an Antarctic continent: to-day I
will square the circle: I will ransack botany and find a new food for
man: I have a new architecture in my mind: I foresee a new mechanic
power:' no, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and
events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his
contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and
their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The Church
has reared him amidst rites and pomps, and he carries out the advice
which her music gave him, and builds a cathedral needed by her chants
and processions. He finds a war raging: it educates him, by trumpet, in
barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping
to bring coal, or flour, or fish, from the place of production to the
place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found
his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his
people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy
of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is
done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The
human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows,
and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have
worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing,
out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history,
and he would have all to do for himself: his powers would be expended in
the first preparations. Great genial power, one would almost say,
consists in not being original at all; in being altogether receptive, in
letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass
unobstructed through the mind.
Shakspeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were
importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offence easily
at political allusions and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a
growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican
church, would suppress them. But the people wanted them. Inn-yards,
houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at country fairs
were the ready theatres of strolling players. The people had tasted this
new joy; and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now,--no, not
by the strongest party,--neither then could king, prelate, or puritan,
alone or united, suppress an organ which was ballad, epic, newspaper,
caucus, lecture, Punch and library, at the same time. Probably king,
prelate, and puritan all found their own account in it. It had become,
by all causes, a national interest,--by no means conspicuous, so that
some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English
history,--but not a whit less considerable because it was cheap and of
no account, like a baker's-shop. The best proof of its vitality is the
crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field: Kyd, Marlow,
Greene, Jonson, Chapman, Dekker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peele,
Ford, Massinger, Beaumont and Fletcher.
The secure possession, by the stage, of the public mind, is of the first
importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle
experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of
Shakspeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford and
went up to London, a great body of stage-plays of all dates and writers
existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is
the Tale of Troy, which the audience will bear hearing some part of,
every week; the Death of Julius Caesar, and other stories out of
Plutarch, which they never tire of; a shelf full of English history,
from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur down to the royal Henries, which
men hear eagerly; and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian
tales, and Spanish voyages, which all the London 'prentices know. All
the mass has been treated, with more or less skill, by every playwright,
and the prompter has the soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no
longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property
of the Theatre so long, and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or
altered them, inserting a speech or a whole scene, or adding a song,
that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of numbers.
Happily, no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have
few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where
they are.
Shakspeare, in common with his comrades, esteemed the mass of old plays
waste stock, in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the
_prestige_ which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could
have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in
the play, as in street-ballads, and gave body which he wanted to his
airy and majestic fancy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on
which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due
temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his
edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at
leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. In
short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple.
Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to
architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall: at first a rude
relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder and a head or
arm was projected from the wall; the groups being still arranged with
reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the
figures; and when at last the greatest freedom of style and treatment
was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a
certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was
begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art
began to decline: freak, extravagance, and exhibition took the place of
the old temperance. This balance-wheel, which the sculptor found in
architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the
accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wonted,
and which had a certain excellence which no single genius, however
extraordinary, could hope to create.
In point of fact it appears that Shakspeare did owe debts in all
directions, and was able to use whatever he found, and the amount of
indebtedness may be inferred from Malone's laborious computations in
regard to the First, Second, and Third parts of Henry VI., in which,
"out of 6,043 lines, 1,771 were written by some author preceding
Shakspeare, 2,373 by him, on the foundations laid by his predecessors,
and 1,899 were entirely his own." And the proceeding investigation
hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's
sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII. I
think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his
own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior,
thoughtful man, with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines, and know well
their cadence. See Wolsey's soliloquy, and the following scene with
Cromwell, where, instead of the metre of Shakspeare, whose secret is
that the thought constructs the tune, so that reading for the sense will
best bring out the rhythm,--here the lines are constructed on a given
tune, and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play
contains through all its length unmistakable traits of Shakspeare's
hand, and some passages, as the account of the coronation, are like
autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the
bad rhythm.
Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any
invention can. If he lost any credit of design, he augmented his
resources; and, at that day, our petulant demand for originality was not
so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal
reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in
illiterate times, absorbs into his sphere all the light which is
anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment
it is his fine office to bring to his people; and he comes to value his
memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous
whence his thoughts have been derived; whether through translation,
whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries,
whether by inspiration; from whatever source, they are equally welcome
to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men
say wise things as well as he; only they say a good many foolish things,
and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of
the true stone, and puts it in high place, wherever he finds it. Such is
the happy position of Homer perhaps; of Chaucer, of Saadi. They felt
that all wit was their wit. And they are librarians and
historiographers, as well as poets. Each romancer was heir and dispenser
of all the hundred tales of the world,--
"Presenting Thebes' and Pelops' line
And the tale of Troy divine."
The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature; and
more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but,
in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is
easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many
pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew
continually, through Lydgate and Caxton, from Guido di Colonna, whose
Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Bares
Phrygius, Ovid and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Provençal
poets are his benefactors; the Romaunt of the Rose is only judicious
translation from William of Lorris and John of Meung; Troilus and
Creseide, from Lollius of Urbino; The Cock and the Fox, from the _Lais_
of Marie; The House of Fame, from the French or Italian; and poor Gower
he uses as if he were only a brick-kiln or stone-quarry out of which to
build his house. He steals by this apology,--that what he takes has no
worth where he finds it and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come
to be practically a sort of rule in literature, that a man having once
shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to
steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property
of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A
certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts; but as soon as
we have learned what to do with them they become our own.
Thus all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The
learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington,
speaks and votes for thousands. Show us the constituency, and the now
invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes;
the crowd of practical and knowing men, who, by correspondence or
conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates,
and it will bereave his fine attitudes and resistance of something of
their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Webster vote, so Locke
and Rousseau think, for thousands; and so there were fountains all
around Homer, Manu, Saadi, or Milton, from which they drew; friends,
lovers, books, traditions, proverbs,--all perished--which, if seen,
would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he
feel himself overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the
consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi
whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so,
yea or nay? and to have answer, and to rely on that? All the debts which
such a man could contract to other wit would never disturb his
consciousness of originality; for the ministrations of books and of
other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which
he has conversed.