the genuine representative of the true Whig type. The practical value of
adherence to precedent is obvious. It may be justified by the assertion
that all sound political philosophy must be based upon experience: and
no one will deny that assertion to contain a most important truth. But
in Macaulay's mind this sound doctrine seems to be confused with the
very questionable doctrine that in political questions there is no
philosophy at all. To appeal to experience may mean either to appeal to
facts so classified and systematically arranged as to illustrate general
truths, or to appeal to a mere mass of observations, without taking the
trouble to elicit their true significance, or even to believe that they
can be resolved into particular cases of a general truth. This is the
difference between an experimental philosophy and a crude empiricism.
Macaulay takes the lower alternative. The vigorous attack upon James
Mill, which he very properly suppressed during his life on account of
its juvenile arrogance, curiously illustrates his mode of thought. No
one can deny, I think, that he makes some very good points against a
very questionable system of political dogmatism. But when we ask what
are Macaulay's own principles, we are left at a stand. He ought, by all
his intellectual sympathies, to be a utilitarian. Yet he treats
utilitarianism with the utmost contempt, though he has no alternative
theory to suggest. He ends his first Essay against Mill by one of his
customary purple patches about Baconian induction. He tells us, in the
second, how to apply it. Bacon proposed to discover the principle of
heat by observing in what qualities all hot bodies agreed, and in what
qualities all cold bodies. Similarly, we are to make a list of all
constitutions which have produced good or bad government, and to
investigate their points of agreement and difference. This sounds
plausible to the uninstructed, but is a mere rhetorical flourish.
Bacon's method is admittedly inadequate for reasons which I leave to men
of science to explain, and Macaulay's method is equally hopeless in
politics. It is hopeless for the simple reason that the complexity of
the phenomena makes it impracticable. We cannot find out what
constitution is best after this fashion, simply because the goodness or
badness of a constitution depends upon a thousand conditions of social,
moral, and intellectual development. When stripped of its pretentious
phraseology, Macaulay's teaching comes simply to this: the only rule in
politics is the rule of thumb. All general principles are wrong or
futile. We have found out in England that our constitution, constructed
in absolute defiance of all _à priori_ reasoning, is the best in the
world: it is the best for providing us with the maximum of bread, beef,
beer, and means of buying bread, beer, and beef: and we have got it
because we have never--like those publicans the French--trusted to fine
sayings about truth and justice and human rights, but blundered on,
adding a patch here and knocking a hole there, as our humour prompted
us.
This sovereign contempt of all speculation--simply as
speculation--reaches its acme in the Essay on Bacon. The curious naïveté
with which Macaulay denounces all philosophy in that vigorous production
excites a kind of perverse admiration. How can one refuse to admire the
audacity which enables a man explicitly to identify philosophy with
humbug? It is what ninety-nine men out of a hundred think, but not one
in a thousand dares to say. Goethe says somewhere that he likes
Englishmen because English fools are the most thoroughgoing of fools.
English 'Philistines,' as represented by Macaulay, the prince of
Philistines, according to Matthew Arnold, carry their contempt of the
higher intellectual interests to a pitch of real sublimity. Bacon's
theory of induction, says Macaulay, in so many words, was valueless.
Everybody could reason before it as well as after. But Bacon really
performed a service of inestimable value to mankind; and it consisted
precisely in this, that he called their attention from philosophy to the
pursuit of material advantages. The old philosophers had gone on
bothering about theology, ethics, and the true and beautiful, and such
other nonsense. Bacon taught us to work at chemistry and mechanics, to
invent diving-bells and steam-engines and spinning-jennies. We could
never, it seems, have found out the advantages of this direction of our
energies without a philosopher, and so far philosophy is negatively
good. It has written up upon all the supposed avenues to inquiry, 'No
admission except on business;' that is, upon the business of direct
practical discovery. We English have taken the hint, and we have
therefore lived to see when a man can breakfast in London and dine in
Edinburgh, and may look forward to a day when the tops of Ben-Nevis and
Helvellyn will be cultivated like flower-gardens, and when machines
constructed on principles yet to be discovered will be in every house.
The theory which underlies this conclusion is often explicitly stated.
All philosophy has produced mere futile logomachy. Greek sages and Roman
moralists and mediæval schoolmen have amassed words, and amassed nothing
else. One distinct discovery of a solid truth, however humble, is worth
all their labours. This condemnation applies not only to philosophy, but
to the religious embodiment of philosophy. No satisfactory conclusion
ever has been reached or ever will be reached in theological disputes.
On all such topics, he tells Mr. Gladstone, there has always been the
widest divergence of opinion. Nor are there better hopes for the future.
The ablest minds, he says in the Essay upon Ranke, have believed in
transubstantiation; that is, according to him, in the most ineffable
nonsense. There is no certainty that men will not believe to the end of
time the doctrines which imposed upon so able a man as Sir Thomas More.
Not only, that is, have men been hitherto wandering in a labyrinth
without a clue, but there is no chance that any clue will ever be found.
The doctrine, so familiar to our generation, of laws of intellectual
development, never even occurs to him. The collective thought of
generations marks time without advancing. A guess of Sir Thomas More is
as good or as bad as the guess of the last philosopher. This theory, if
true, implies utter scepticism. And yet Macaulay was clearly not a
sceptic. His creed was hidden under a systematic reticence, and he
resisted every attempt to raise the veil with rather superfluous
indignation. When a constituent dared to ask about his religious views,
he denounced the rash inquirer in terms applicable to an agent of the
Inquisition. He vouchsafed, indeed, the information that he was a
Christian. We may accept the phrase, not only on the strength of his
invariable sincerity, but because it falls in with the general turn of
his arguments. He denounces the futility of the ancient moralists, but
he asserts the enormous social value of Christianity.
His attitude, in fact, is equally characteristic of the man and his
surroundings. The old Clapham teaching had faded in his mind: it had not
produced a revolt. He retained the old hatred for slavery; and he
retained, with the whole force of his affectionate nature, reverence for
the school of Wilberforce, Thornton, and his own father. He estimated
most highly, not perhaps more highly than they deserved, the value of
the services rendered by them in awakening the conscience of the nation.
In their persistent and disinterested labours he recognised a
manifestation of the great social force of Christianity. But a belief
that Christianity is useful, and even that it is true, may consist with
a profound conviction of the futility of the philosophy with which it
has been associated. Here again Macaulay is a true Whig. The Whig love
of precedent, the Whig hatred for abstract theories, may consist with a
Tory application. But the true Whig differed from the Tory in adding to
these views an invincible suspicion of parsons. The first Whig battles
were fought against the Church as much as against the King. From the
struggle with Sacheverell down to the struggle for Catholic
emancipation, Toryism and High-Church principles were associated against
Whigs and Dissenters. By that kind of dumb instinct which outruns
reason, the Whig had learnt that there was some occult bond of union
between the claims of a priesthood and the claims of a monarchy. The
old maxim, 'No bishop, no king,' suggested the opposite principle that
you must keep down the clergy if you would limit the monarchy. The
natural interpretation of this prejudice into political theory, is that
the Church is extremely useful as an ally of the constable, but
possesses a most dangerous explosive power if allowed to claim
independent authority. In practice we must resist all claims of the
Church to dictate to the State. In theory we must deny the foundation
upon which such claims can alone be founded. Dogmatism must be
pronounced to be fundamentally irrational. Nobody knows anything about
theology; or what is the same thing, no two people agree. As they don't
agree, they cannot claim to impose their beliefs upon others.
This sentiment comes out curiously in the characteristic Essay just
mentioned. Macaulay says, in reply to Mr. Gladstone, that there is no
more reason for the introduction of religious questions into State
affairs than for introducing them into the affairs of a Canal Company.
He puts his argument with an admirable vigour and clearness which blinds
many readers to the fact that he is begging the question by evading the
real difficulty. If, in fact, Government had as little to do as a Canal
Company with religious opinion, we should have long ago learnt the great
lesson of toleration. But that is just the very _crux_. Can we draw the
line between the spiritual and the secular? Nothing, replies Macaulay,
is easier; and his method has been already indicated. We all agree that
we don't want to be robbed or murdered: we are by no means all agreed
about the doctrine of Trinity. But, says a churchman, a certain creed is
necessary to men's moral and spiritual welfare, and therefore of the
utmost importance even for the prevention of robbery and murder. This
is what Macaulay implicitly denies. The whole of dogmatic theology
belongs to that region of philosophy, metaphysics, or whatever you
please to call it, in which men are doomed to dispute for ever without
coming any nearer to a decision. All that the statesman has to do with
such matters is to see that if men are fools enough to speculate, they
shall not be allowed to cut each other's throats when they reach, as
they always must reach, contradictory results. If you raise a difficult
point--such, for example, as the education question--Macaulay replies,
as so many people have replied before and since, Teach the people 'those
principles of morality which are common to all the forms of
Christianity.' That is easier said than done! The plausibility of the
solution in Macaulay's mouth is due to the fundamental assumption that
everything except morality is hopeless ground of inquiry. Once get
beyond the Ten Commandments and you will sink in a bottomless morass of
argument, counterargument, quibble, logomachy, superstition, and
confusion worse confounded.
In Macaulay's teaching, as in that of his party, there is doubtless much
that is noble. He has a righteous hatred of oppression in all shapes and
disguises. He can tear to pieces with great logical power many of the
fallacies alleged by his opponents. Our sympathies are certainly with
him as against men who advocate persecution on any grounds, and he is
fully qualified to crush his ordinary opponents. But it is plain that
his whole political and (if we may use the word) philosophical teaching
rests on something like a downright aversion to the higher order of
speculation. He despises it. He wants something tangible and
concrete--something in favour of which he may appeal to the immediate
testimony of the senses. He must feel his feet planted on the solid
earth. The pain of attempting to soar into higher regions is not
compensated to him by the increased width of horizon. And in this
respect he is but the type of most of his countrymen, and reflects what
has been (as I should say) erroneously called their 'unimaginative' view
of things in general.
Macaulay, at any rate, distinctly belongs to the imaginative class of
minds, if only in virtue of his instinctive preference of the concrete
to the abstract, and his dislike, already noticed, to analysis. He has a
thirst for distinct and vivid images. He reasons by examples instead of
appealing to formulæ. There is a characteristic account in Mr.
Trevelyan's volumes of his habit of rambling amongst the older parts of
London, his fancy teeming with stories attached to the picturesque
fragments of antiquity, and carrying on dialogues between imaginary
persons as vivid, if not as forcible, as those of Scott's novels. To
this habit--rather inverting the order of cause and effect--he
attributes his accuracy of detail. We should rather say that the
intensity of the impressions generated both the accuracy and the
day-dreams. A philosopher would be arguing in his daily rambles where an
imaginative mind is creating a series of pictures. But Macaulay's
imagination is as definitely limited as his speculation. The genuine
poet is also a philosopher. He sees intuitively what the reasoner
evolves by argument. The greatest minds in both classes are equally
marked by their naturalisation in the lofty regions of thought,
inaccessible or uncongenial to men of inferior stamp. It is tempting in
some ways to compare Macaulay to Burke. Burke's superiority is marked by
this, that he is primarily a philosopher, and therefore instinctively
sees the illustration of a general law in every particular fact.
Macaulay, on the contrary, gets away from theory as fast as possible,
and tries to conceal his poverty of thought under masses of ingenious
illustration.
His imaginative narrowness would come out still more clearly by a
comparison with Carlyle. One significant fact must be enough. Everyone
must have observed how powerfully Carlyle expresses the emotion
suggested by the brief appearance of some little waif from past history.
We may remember, for example, how the usher, De Brézé, appears for a
moment to utter the last shriek of the old monarchical etiquette, and
then vanishes into the dim abysses of the past. The imagination is
excited by the little glimpse of light flashing for a moment upon some
special point in the cloudy phantasmagoria of human history. The image
of a past existence is projected for a moment upon our eyes, to make us
feel how transitory is life, and how rapidly one visionary existence
expels another. We are such stuff as dreams are made of:--
None other than a moving row
Of visionary shapes that come and go
Around the sun-illumined lantern held
In midnight by the master of the show.
Every object is seen against the background of eternal mystery. In
Macaulay's pages this element is altogether absent. We see a figure from
the past as vividly as if he were present. We observe the details of his
dress, the odd oaths with which his discourse is interlarded, the minute
peculiarities of his features or manner. We laugh or admire as we should
do at a living man; and we rightly admire the force of the illusion. But
the thought never suggests itself that we too are passing into oblivion,
that our little island of daylight will soon be shrouded in the
gathering mist, and that we tread at every instant on the dust of
forgotten continents. We treat the men of past ages quite at our ease.
We applaud and criticise Hampden or Chatham as we should applaud Peel or
Cobden. There is no atmospheric effect--no sense of the dim march of
ages, or of the vast procession of human life. It is doubtless a great
feat to make the past present. It is a greater to emancipate us from the
tyranny of the present, and to raise us to a point at which we feel that
we too are almost as dreamlike as the men of old time. To gain clearness
and definition Macaulay has dropped the element of mystery. He sees
perfectly whatever can be seen by the ordinary lawyer, or politician, or
merchant; he is insensible to the visions which reveal themselves only
to minds haunted by thoughts of eternity, and delighting to dwell in the
border-land where dreams blend with realities. Mysticism is to him
hateful, and historical figures form groups of individuals, not symbols
of forces working behind the veil.
Macaulay, therefore, can be no more a poet in the sense in which the
word is applied to Spenser, or to Wordsworth, both of whom he holds to
be simply intolerable bores, than he can be a metaphysician or a
scientific thinker. In common phraseology, he is a Philistine--a word
which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher
intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the
name applied by prigs to the rest of their species. And I hold that the
modern fashion of using it as a common term of abuse amounts to a
literary nuisance. It enables intellectual coxcombs to brand men with an
offensive epithet for being a degree more manly than themselves. There
is much that is good in your Philistine; and when we ask what Macaulay
was, instead of showing what he was not, we shall perhaps find that the
popular estimate is not altogether wrong.
Macaulay was not only a typical Whig, but the prophet of Whiggism to his
generation. Though not a poet or a philosopher, he was a born
rhetorician. His parliamentary career proves his capacity sufficiently,
though want of the physical qualifications, and of exclusive devotion to
political success, prevented him, as perhaps a want of subtlety or
flexibility of mind would have always prevented him, from attaining
excellence as a debater. In everything that he wrote, however, we see
the true rhetorician. He tells us that Fox wrote debates, whilst
Mackintosh spoke essays. Macaulay did both. His compositions are a
series of orations on behalf of sound Whig views, whatever their
external form. Given a certain audience--and every orator supposes a
particular audience--their effectiveness is undeniable. Macaulay's may
be composed of ordinary Englishmen, with a moderate standard of
education. His arguments are adapted to the ordinary Cabinet Minister,
or, what is much the same, to the person who is willing to pay a
shilling to hear an evening lecture. He can hit an audience composed of
such materials--to quote Burke's phrase about George Grenville--'between
wind and water.' He uses the language, the logic, and the images which
they can fully understand; and though his hearer, like his schoolboy, is
ostensibly credited at times with a portentous memory, Macaulay always
takes excellent care to put him in mind of the facts which he is assumed
to remember. The faults and the merits of his style follow from his
resolute determination to be understood of the people. He was specially
delighted, as his nephew tells us, by a reader at Messrs.
Spottiswoode's, who said that in all the 'History' there was only one
sentence the meaning of which was not obvious to him at first sight. We
are more surprised that there was one such sentence. Clearness is the
first of the cardinal virtues of style; and nobody ever wrote more
clearly than Macaulay. He sacrifices much, it is true, in order to
obtain it. He proves that two and two make four with a pertinacity which
would make him dull, if it were not for his abundance of brilliant
illustration. He always remembers the principle which should guide a
barrister in addressing a jury. He has not merely to exhibit his proofs,
but to hammer them into the heads of his audience by incessant
repetition. It is no small proof of artistic skill that a writer who
systematically adopts this method should yet be invariably lively. He
goes on blacking the chimney with a persistency which somehow amuses us
because he puts so much heart into his work. He proves the most obvious
truths again and again; but his vivacity never flags. This tendency
undoubtedly leads to great defects of style. His sentences are
monotonous and mechanical. He has a perfect hatred of pronouns, and for
fear of a possible entanglement between 'hims' and 'hers' and 'its,' he
will repeat not merely a substantive, but a whole group of substantives.
Sometimes, to make his sense unmistakable, he will repeat a whole
formula, with only a change in the copula. For the same reason, he hates
all qualifications and parentheses. Each thought must be resolved into
its constituent parts; each argument must be expressed as a simple
proposition: and his paragraphs are rather aggregates of independent
atoms than possessed of a continuous unity. His writing--to use a
favourite formula of his own--bears the same relation to a style of
graceful modulation that a bit of mosaic work bears to a picture. Each
phrase has its distinct hue, instead of melting into its neighbours.
Here we have a black patch and there a white. There are no half tones,
no subtle interblending of different currents of thought. It is partly
for this reason that his descriptions of character are often so
unsatisfactory. He likes to represent a man as a bundle of
contradictions, because it enables him to obtain startling contrasts. He
heightens a vice in one place, a virtue in another, and piles them
together in a heap, without troubling himself to ask whether nature can
make such monsters, or preserve them if made. To anyone given to
analysis, these contrasts are actually painful. There is a story of the
Duke of Wellington having once stated that the rats got into his bottles
in Spain. 'They must have been very large bottles or very small rats,'
said somebody. 'On the contrary,' replied the Duke, 'the rats were very
large and the bottles very small.' Macaulay delights in leaving us face
to face with such contrasts in more important matters. Boswell must, we
would say, have been a clever man or his biography cannot have been so
good as you say. On the contrary, says Macaulay, he was the greatest of
fools and the best of biographers. He strikes a discord and purposely
fails to resolve it. To men of more delicate sensibility the result is
an intolerable jar.
For the same reason, Macaulay's genuine eloquence is marred by the
symptoms of malice prepense. When he sews on a purple patch, he is
resolved that there shall be no mistake about it; it must stand out from
a radical contrast of colours. The emotion is not to swell by degrees,
till you find yourself carried away in the torrent which set out as a
tranquil stream. The transition is deliberately emphasised. On one side
of a full stop you are listening to a matter-of-fact statement; on the
other, there is all at once a blare of trumpets and a beating of drums,
till the crash almost deafens you. He regrets in one of his letters that
he has used up the celebrated, and, it must be confessed, really
forcible passage about the impeachment scene in Westminster Hall. It
might have come in usefully in the 'History,' which, as he then hoped,
would reach the time of Warren Hastings. The regret is unpleasantly
suggestive of that deliberation in the manufacture of eloquence which
stamps it as artificial.