it that redeems them? The first answer is, that the work is impressive
because it is thoroughly genuine. The stream, it is true, comes forth by
spasmodic gushes, when it ought to flow in a continuous current; but it
flows from a full reservoir instead of being pumped from a shallow
cistern. The knowledge and, what is more, the thoroughly-assimilated
knowledge, is enormous. Mr. Trevelyan has shown in detail what we had
all divined for ourselves, how much patient labour is often employed in
a paragraph or the turn of a phrase. To accuse Macaulay of
superficiality is, in this sense, altogether absurd. His speculation may
be meagre, but his store of information is simply inexhaustible. Mill's
writing was impressive, because one often felt that a single argument
condensed the result of a long process of reflection. Macaulay has the
lower but similar merit that a single picturesque touch implies
incalculable masses of knowledge. It is but an insignificant part of the
building which appears above ground. Compare a passage with the assigned
authority, and you are inclined to accuse him--sometimes it may be
rightfully--of amplifying and modifying. But more often the particular
authority is merely the nucleus round which a whole volume of other
knowledge has crystallised. A single hint is significant to a
properly-prepared mind of a thousand facts not explicitly contained in
it. Nobody, he said, could judge of the accuracy of one part of his
'History' who had not 'soaked his mind with the transitory literature of
the day.' His real authority was not this or that particular passage,
but a literature. And for this reason alone, Macaulay's historical
writings have a permanent value which will prevent them from being
superseded even by more philosophical thinkers, whose minds have not
undergone the 'soaking' process.
It is significant again that imitations of Macaulay are almost as
offensive as imitations of Carlyle. Every great writer has his
parasites. Macaulay's false glitter and jingle, his frequent flippancy
and superficiality of thought, are more easily caught than his virtues;
but so are all faults. Would-be followers of Carlyle catch the strained
gestures without the rapture of his inspiration. Would-be followers of
Mill fancied themselves to be logical when they were only hopelessly
unsympathetic and unimaginative; and would-be followers of some other
writers can be effeminate and foppish without being subtle or graceful.
Macaulay's thoroughness of work has, perhaps, been less contagious than
we could wish. Something of the modern raising of the standard of
accuracy in historical inquiry may be set down to his influence. The
misfortune is that, if some writers have learnt from him to be flippant
without learning to be laborious, others have caught the accuracy
without the liveliness. In the later volumes of his 'History,' his
vigour began to be a little clogged by the fulness of his knowledge; and
we can observe symptoms of the tendency of modern historians to grudge
the sacrifice of sifting their knowledge. They read enough, but instead
of giving us the results, they tumble out the accumulated mass of raw
materials upon our devoted heads, till they make us long for a fire in
the State Paper Office.
Fortunately, Macaulay did not yield to this temptation in his earlier
writings, and the result is that he is, for the ordinary reader, one of
the two authorities for English history, the other being Shakespeare.
Without comparing their merits, we must admit that the compression of so
much into a few short narratives shows intensity as well as compass of
mind. He could digest as well as devour, and he tried his digestion
pretty severely. It is fashionable to say that part of his practical
force is due to the training of parliamentary life. Familiarity with the
course of affairs doubtless strengthened his insight into history, and
taught him the value of downright common-sense in teaching an average
audience. Speaking purely from the literary point of view, I cannot
agree further in the opinion suggested. I suspect the 'History' would
have been better if Macaulay had not been so deeply immersed in all the
business of legislation and electioneering. I do not profoundly
reverence the House of Commons' tone--even in the House of Commons; and
in literature it easily becomes a nuisance. Familiarity with the actual
machinery of politics tends to strengthen the contempt for general
principles, of which Macaulay had an ample share. It encourages the
illusion of the fly upon the wheel, the doctrine that the dust and din
of debate and the worry of lobbies and committee-rooms are not the
effect but the cause of the great social movement. The historian of the
Roman Empire, as we know, owed something to the captain of Hampshire
Militia; but years of life absorbed in parliamentary wrangling and in
sitting at the feet of the philosophers of Holland House were not
likely to widen a mind already disposed to narrow views of the world.
For Macaulay's immediate success, indeed, the training was undoubtedly
valuable. As he carried into Parliament the authority of a great writer,
so he wrote books with the authority of the practical politician. He has
the true instinct of affairs. He knows what are the immediate motives
which move masses of men; and is never misled by fanciful analogies or
blindfolded by the pedantry of official language. He has seen
flesh-and-blood statesmen--at any rate, English statesmen--and
understands the nature of the animal. Nobody can be freer from the
dominion of crotchets. All his reasoning is made of the soundest common
sense, and represents, if not the ultimate forces, yet forces with which
we have to reckon. And he knows, too, how to stir the blood of the
average Englishman. He understands most thoroughly the value of
concentration, unity, and simplicity. Every speech or essay forms an
artistic whole, in which some distinct moral is vigorously driven home
by a succession of downright blows. This strong rhetorical instinct is
shown conspicuously in the 'Lays of Ancient Rome,' which, whatever we
might say of them as poetry, are an admirable specimen of rhymed
rhetoric. We know how good they are when we see how incapable are modern
ballad-writers in general of putting the same swing and fire into their
verses. Compare, for example, Aytoun's 'Lays of the Cavaliers,' as the
most obvious parallel:--
Not swifter pours the avalanche
Adown the steep incline,
That rises o'er the parent springs
Of rough and rapid Rhine,
than certain Scotch heroes over an entrenchment. Place this mouthing by
any parallel passage in Macaulay:--
Now, by our sire Quirinus,
It was a goodly sight
To see the thirty standards
Swept down the tide of flight.
So flies the spray in Adria
When the black squall doth blow.
So corn-sheaves in the flood time
Spin down the whirling Po.
And so on in verses which innumerable schoolboys of inferior pretensions
to Macaulay's know by heart. And in such cases the verdict of the
schoolboy is perhaps more valuable than that of the literary
connoisseur. There are, of course, many living poets who can do
tolerably something of far higher quality which Macaulay could not do at
all. But I don't know who, since Scott, could have done this particular
thing. Possibly Mr. Kingsley might have approached it, or the poet, if
he would have condescended so far, who sang the bearing of the good news
from Ghent to Aix. In any case, the feat is significant of Macaulay's
true power. It looks easy; it involves no demands upon the higher
reasoning or imaginative powers: but nobody will believe it to be easy
who observes the extreme rarity of a success in a feat so often
attempted.
A similar remark is suggested by Macaulay's 'Essays.' Read such an essay
as that upon Clive, or Warren Hastings, or Chatham. The story seems to
tell itself. The characters are so strongly marked, the events fall so
easily into their places, that we fancy that the narrator's business has
been done to his hand. It wants little critical experience to discover
that this massive simplicity is really indicative of an art not, it may
be, of the highest order, but truly admirable for its purpose. It
indicates not only a gigantic memory, but a glowing mind, which has
fused a crude mass of materials into unity. If we do not find the sudden
touches which reveal the philosophical sagacity or the imaginative
insight of the highest order of intellects, we recognise the true
rhetorical instinct. The outlines may be harsh, and the colours too
glaring; but the general effect has been carefully studied. The details
are wrought in with consummate skill. We indulge in an intercalary pish!
here and there; but we are fascinated and we remember. The actual amount
of intellectual force which goes to the composition of such written
archives is immense, though the quality may leave something to be
desired. Shrewd common-sense may be an inferior substitute for
philosophy, and the faculty which brings remote objects close to the eye
of an ordinary observer for the loftier faculty which tinges everyday
life with the hues of mystic contemplation. But when the common
faculties are present in so abnormal a degree, they begin to have a
dignity of their own.
It is impossible in such matters to establish any measure of comparison.
No analysis will enable us to say how much pedestrian capacity may be
fairly regarded as equivalent to a small capacity for soaring above the
solid earth, and therefore the question as to the relative value of
Macaulay's work and that of some men of loftier aims and less perfect
execution must be left to individual taste. We can only say that it is
something so to have written the history of many national heroes as to
make their faded glories revive to active life in the memory of their
countrymen. So long as Englishmen are what they are--and they don't seem
to change as rapidly as might be wished--they will turn to Macaulay's
pages to gain a vivid impression of our greatest achievements during an
important period.
Nor is this all. The fire which glows in Macaulay's history, the intense
patriotic feeling, the love of certain moral qualities, is not
altogether of the highest kind. His ideal of national and individual
greatness might easily be criticised. But the sentiment, as far as it
goes, is altogether sound and manly. He is too fond, it has been said,
of incessant moralising. From a scientific point of view the moralising
is irrelevant. We want to study the causes and the nature of great
social movements; and when we are stopped in order to inquire how far
the prominent actors in them were hurried beyond ordinary rules, we are
transported into a different order of thought. It would be as much to
the purpose if we approved an earthquake for upsetting a fort, and
blamed it for moving the foundations of a church. Macaulay can never
understand this point of view. With him, history is nothing more than a
sum of biographies. And even from a biographical point of view his
moralising is often troublesome. He not only insists upon transporting
party prejudice into his estimates, and mauls poor James II. as he
mauled the Tories in 1832; but he applies obviously inadequate tests. It
is absurd to call upon men engaged in a life-and-death wrestle to pay
scrupulous attention to the ordinary rules of politeness. There are
times when judgments guided by constitutional precedent become
ludicrously out of place, and when the best man is he who aims
straightest at the heart of his antagonist. But, in spite of such
drawbacks, Macaulay's genuine sympathy for manliness and force of
character generally enables him to strike pretty nearly the true note.
To learn the true secret of Cromwell's character we must go to Carlyle,
who can sympathise with deep currents of religious enthusiasm. Macaulay
retains too much of the old Whig distrust for all that it calls
fanaticism fully to recognise the grandeur beneath the grotesque outside
of the Puritan. But Macaulay tells us most distinctly why Englishmen
warm at the name of the great Protector. We, like the banished
Cavaliers, 'glow with an emotion of national pride' at his animated
picture of the unconquerable Ironsides. One phrase may be sufficiently
illustrative. After quoting Clarendon's story of the Scotch nobleman who
forced Charles to leave the field of Naseby by seizing his horse's
bridle, 'no man,' says Macaulay, 'who had much value for his life would
have tried to perform the same friendly office on that day for Oliver
Cromwell.'
Macaulay, in short, always feels, and therefore communicates, a hearty
admiration for sheer manliness. And some of his portraits of great men
have therefore a genuine power, and show the deeper insight which comes
from true sympathy. He estimates the respectable observer of
constitutional proprieties too highly; he is unduly repelled by the
external oddities of the truly masculine and noble Johnson; but his
enthusiasm for his pet hero, William, or for Chatham or Clive, carries
us along with him. And at moments when he is narrating their exploits,
and can forget his elaborate argumentations and refrain from bits of
deliberate bombast, the style becomes graphic in the higher sense of a
much-abused word, and we confess that we are listening to genuine
eloquence. Putting aside for the moment recollection of foibles, almost
too obvious to deserve the careful demonstration which they have
sometimes received, we are glad to surrender ourselves to the charm of
his straightforward, clear-headed, hard-hitting declamation. There is no
writer with whom it is easier to find fault, or the limits of whose
power may be more distinctly defined; but within his own sphere he goes
forward, as he went through life, with a kind of grand confidence in
himself and his cause, which is attractive, and at times even
provocative of sympathetic enthusiasm.
Macaulay said, in his Diary, that he wrote his 'History' with an eye to
a remote past and a remote future. He meant to erect a monument more
enduring than brass, and the ambition at least stimulated him to
admirable thoroughness of workmanship. How far his aim was secured must
be left to the decision of a posterity which will not trouble itself
about the susceptibilities of candidates for its favour. In one sense,
however, Macaulay must be interesting so long as the type which he so
fully represents continues to exist. Whig has become an old-fashioned
phrase, and is repudiated by modern Liberals and Radicals, who think
themselves wiser than their fathers. The decay of the old name implies a
remarkable political change; but I doubt whether it implies more than a
very superficial change in the national character. New classes and new
ideas have come upon the stage; but they have a curious family likeness
to the old. The Whiggism whose peculiarities Macaulay reflected so
faithfully represents some of the most deeply-seated tendencies of the
national character. It has, therefore, both its ugly and its honourable
side. Its disregard, or rather its hatred, for pure reason, its
exaltation of expediency above truth and precedent above principle, its
instinctive dread of strong religious or political faiths, are of course
questionable qualities. Yet even they have their nobler side. There is
something almost sublime about the grand unreasonableness of the average
Englishman. His dogged contempt for all foreigners and philosophers,
his intense resolution to have his own way and use his own eyes, to see
nothing that does not come within his narrow sphere of vision, and to
see it quite clearly before he acts upon it, are of course abhorrent to
thinkers of a different order. But they are great qualities in the
struggle for existence which must determine the future of the world. The
Englishman, armed in his panoply of self-content, and grasping facts
with unequalled tenacity, goes on trampling upon acuter sensibilities,
but somehow shouldering his way successfully through the troubles of the
universe. Strength may be combined with stupidity, but even then it is
not to be trifled with. Macaulay's sympathy with these qualities led to
some annoying peculiarities, to a certain brutal insularity, and to a
commonness, sometimes a vulgarity, of style which is easily criticised.
But, at least, we must confess that, to use an epithet which always
comes up in speaking of him, he is a thoroughly manly writer. There is
nothing silly or finical about him. He sticks to his colours resolutely
and honourably. If he flatters his countrymen, it is the unconscious and
spontaneous effect of his participation in their weaknesses. He never
knowingly calls black white, or panders to an ungenerous sentiment. He
is combative to a fault, but his combativeness is allied to a genuine
love of fair-play. When he hates a man, he calls him knave or fool with
unflinching frankness, but he never uses a base weapon. The wounds which
he inflicts may hurt, but they do not fester. His patriotism may be
narrow, but it implies faith in the really good qualities, the
manliness, the spirit of justice, and the strong moral sense of his
countrymen. He is proud of the healthy vigorous stock from which he
springs; and the fervour of his enthusiasm, though it may shock a
delicate taste, has embodied itself in writings which will long continue
to be the typical illustration of qualities of which we are all proud at
bottom--indeed, be it said in passing, a good deal too proud.
END OF THE SECOND VOLUME
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
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| Transcriber's Notes: |
| |
| Page 31: illlustrations amended to illustrations |
| Page 38: Single quote mark removed from end of excerpt. |
| ("And Shelburne's fame through laughing valleys ring!") |
| Page 81: idiosyncracy amended to idiosyncrasy |
| Page 117: Single quote mark in front of "miserable" |
| removed. ("'The man they called Dizzy' can despise a |
| miserable creature ...") |
| Page 131: sweatmeats amended to sweetmeats |
| Page 143: aristocractic amended to aristocratic |
| Page 147: sentiment amended to sentiments |
| Page 163: Mahommedan amended to Mohammedan |
| Page 181: Macchiavelli amended to Machiavelli |
| Page 241: Full stop added after "third generation." |
| Page 247: Comma added after "We both love the |
| Constitution...." |
| Page 325: chartalan amended to charlatan |
| Page 368: Shakspeare amended to Shakespeare |
| |
| Italicisation and hyphenation have been standardised. |
| However, where there is an equal number of instances of |
| a hyphenated and unhyphenated word, both have been |
| retained: dreamlike/dream-like; evildoers/evil-doers; |
| highflown/high-flown; jogtrot/jog-trot; |
| overdoses/over-doses; textbook/text-book. |
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