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 LORD MACAULAY
 
 Edition: C. J. CLAY and SONS, 
 
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 (Sfto gorfe: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Bomban: E. SEYMOUR HALE.
 
 LORD MACAULAY 
 
 BY 
 
 D. H. MACGREGOR 
 
 SCHOLAR OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGI 
 
 BEING THE MEMBERS' PRIZE ESSAY FOR 1900 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 C. J. CLAY AND SONS 
 
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE 
 
 AVE MARIA LANE 
 
 1 90 1 
 
 [All Rights reserved]
 
 Cambridge : 
 
 PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY, 
 AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 
 (Win iyf.7 
 
 LORD MACAULAY. 
 
 A century after the birth of Macaulay, it is 
 still doubtful what rank of fame will finally be 
 his. Truly enough, we are still very near to 
 him ; too near, it may be, to gauge his height 
 correctly. We are still little remote from his 
 contemporaries ; we have even yet those among 
 us who have seen his features and heard his 
 voice. The influences of his work have not yet 
 passed away. They are not yet perfected and 
 may not yet be fully judged. And in this 
 generation criticism is in no slight degree stayed 
 by all that we know of the man himself, by the 
 singular fascination of his life and of his nature, 
 by the purity of his literary ardour, by the high 
 integrity of his public service. Time will remedy 
 all this ; a later posterity will see him in his true 
 
 M. I
 
 Lord Macau/ay 
 
 relations, and will judge him with the impartiality 
 of a stranger. But our nearness to him cannot 
 by itself account for the fact that his position 
 has yet to be assigned to him. For many who 
 lived by his side have gone to their rest secure 
 of a definite fame by the certain and general 
 judgment of men. Hallam and Wordsworth, 
 Dickens and Thackeray and Carlyle are names 
 not hard to place. Each of these has his evident 
 and peculiar stamp. The same cannot be said 
 of Macaulay. The clue to his genius is not easy 
 to follow. To read his works is to delight the 
 attention and inspire the feelings. But when 
 we are asked to estimate him, we hesitate. In 
 the cause of this hesitation, real difficulty must 
 be added to something of reluctance. 
 
 The great diversity of his work may well 
 render impossible a judgment without qualifi- 
 cation. All of us regard him from the standpoint 
 of our own tastes ; we severally think of him as 
 preeminently a poet, a critic, an historian, an 
 orator ; some may value him most for a certain
 
 Lord Macaulay 
 
 tone and spirit, a note of the old classic hu- 
 manitas that is felt in all, even his most faulty 
 work ; others may attribute to him the fame 
 only of a master of style. Something can be 
 said for every view of him. But wherever the 
 emphasis of our esteem may fall, none of his 
 work is slight enough to be overshadowed by 
 any other part of it. He lies in Poet's Corner ; 
 and in number, perhaps, those who know him 
 by his stirring Lays overtop any other body of 
 his admirers. But the tribute of his College to 
 his various qualities of mind is that which must 
 be followed here. In a judgment so broad it 
 may not be easy to preserve unity. Yet there 
 are, it seems to me, unique traits of genius 
 which reveal themselves in all the aspects of 
 his many-sided life. 
 
 At the present time the opinion of men -Jf* 
 of letters regarding him runs strongly in the 
 direction of criticism. All are agreed that the 
 man himself is an ornament to our literature 
 and our public life. It is agreed, too, that there 
 
 i — 2
 
 4 Lord Mac an lay 
 
 are few in this century whose work, despite high 
 literary qualities, has been so little over the 
 heads of the people. His influence does not 
 stay in the closet but reaches the forum ; and 
 he is welcome wherever he is known/) But yet, 
 as Aristotle has said of Plato, when both our 
 friends and the truth are dear to us, the truth 
 must be preferred ; and round the intrinsic 
 value of Macaulay's work vigorous and pene- 
 
 ' trative criticism continues to gather. His own 
 
 critical judgment is assailed ; the knife he did 
 
 so much to sharpen is turned upon himself. 
 
 , "^r-^His new and striking departure in historical 
 
 method is condemned on the witness of its 
 
 \ result. His poetry, it is said, is an exotic 
 
 "growth, his style a gaudy mannerism. To 
 much of this indictment we must consent ; but 
 
 . our consent will not always be unqualified. For 
 there are faults and faults. There are faults 
 which greatly serve the ends of truth by de- 
 fining her limits more closely; there are scholars' 
 errors which touch the imagination with all the
 
 Lord Macau lay 
 
 force of truth ; there are those errors of reaction 
 which goes to an extreme, but still of reaction 
 from what is false, which in every sphere of 
 knowledge have been the footsteps of progress. 
 From some of these, and from lesser, defects 
 no one will clear Macaulay. His was a mind 
 whose strength was closely allied to its weak- 
 ness ; which was too brilliant to be cautious, and 
 too quick to be profound. His faults therefore 
 lie side by side with his merits!: Yet from every 
 repeated appeal to his work, from weighing 
 what is best in it against its acknowledged 
 blots, we return with a conscious right to the 
 assertion that, despite many failings, time will 
 vindicate a great and an immortal name. 
 
 One characteristic of his work is peculiarly 
 liable to stand in the way of those who approach 
 it with open minds for the first time. He is a 
 writer of the utmost self-consciousness. He is 
 a critic who reflects upon himself?) With hisi 
 work he offers us the canons by which to test 
 it. We have his History and his Essay on
 
 6 Lord Macaulay 
 
 History ; his biographies, and his repeated 
 censure of the biographers' errors ; his poems 
 and his poetical criticism, together with his 
 favourite theory that the poetical and critical 
 faculties are all but incompatible. Where he 
 succeeds he is self-approved ; where he fails, 
 he is self-condemned. Sometimes his canons 
 betray his work, sometimes his work shows the 
 inadequacy of his canons. {/What is deserving 
 of attention is the unconscious advantage he is 
 apt to obtain over his reader. He predisposes 
 us to take a great deal for granted. By having 
 indicated the places of danger beforehand he is 
 apt to get the credit of being supposed immune 
 against falling into them ; by having applauded 
 all the virtues, he may be supposed to possess 
 them. He that accuses him of partiality as 
 an historian will be referred for his answer to 
 the Essay on History; to him who blames 
 Macaulay's love of the superlative in biography, 
 it will be replied that no one more severely 
 animadverted on this attitude than did Macaulay
 
 Lord Macaulay 
 
 himself. But such reasonings must not turn us 
 aside. We may be surprised at the qualities of 
 mind which made Macaulay at once sensitive 
 of errors and prone to commit them ; I though J 
 to those who know the Celtic nature there is 
 nothing new, but everything familiar in that. 
 The danger is, lest we take him too much at 
 his own valuation ; lest we read him through 
 his own spectacles. There are few authors so 
 likely, after this fashion, to warp their readers' 
 judgment. 
 
 The literary work of Macaulay reveals a 
 mind of a very remarkable order. He was 
 eminently receptive and unspontaneous. His 
 passion for literature partook almost of mysti- 
 cism. He made an almost unreserved surrender 
 of himself to the great intellects of history, to be 
 shaped and formed by them as clay is shaped 
 by the potter. He yielded up his spirit to be 
 pervaded by their influences, suffused by the 
 warmth of their genius, lit by the reflection of 
 their light. From childhood to old age, his
 
 8 Lord Macaiday 
 
 reverence was the same. He read and re-read 
 and read again, endlessly rehearsing the old 
 classics and the new, till their spirit was his 
 spirit, and his taste theirs. Hence it is, that his 
 mind is altogether formed from without and 
 that its deepest springs are untouched. Absence 
 of that initiative which marks a strong nature 
 makes him more of an impressionist than of a 
 thinker, sensitive and imaginative rather than 
 careful and exact, tasteful rather than syste- 
 matic, brilliant rather than consistent. His 
 emotions overbear his reason ; his heart is open 
 to all that is solemn or majestic or in any way 
 grand and impressive He is not active enough 
 in the assimilation of knowledge, does not go 
 out of himself to grasp it, but allows it merely 
 to make its mark upon the surface of his mind. 
 JlVe find in his work, therefore, great literary 
 grace and finesse, brilliant and vivid word- 
 painting, rapid and glancing argument, an air 
 of much learning that sits lightly, sympathies 
 that are quickly engaged, strong passions that
 
 Lord Macatilay g 
 
 14 t 
 
 will not be corrected. We miss depth and 
 method and caution, the strong sinews of 
 thought, and firm independence of judgment) 
 
 It is as essayist and critic that we may 
 speak of him first. Criticism is, however, not 
 the term which best suits his manner. Our 
 purpose will be better served by the division 
 of literature into a primary and a secondary 
 order. It is an important difference that some 
 men create their own materials, while others 
 merely develope materials given them, in history, 
 or in the work of other men. The type of genius 
 represented by the latter order implies the gifts 
 of sympathy, of arrangement, of interpretation, 
 of description, of comparison. It is work done 
 upon other work, the literature of literature. 
 
 Primary literature is the work of original 
 authors. These are the true poets or makers 
 who see visions and dream dreams. They are 
 the great creative and constructive minds of 
 history. It is the mark of their genius to be 
 spontaneous. The creative faculty is given.
 
 io Lord Mac an lay 
 
 Poets are born, not made. No keenness of 
 analytic power will by itself enable us to 
 construct. There is a genius that cannot be 
 equated with even an unlimited capacity for 
 taking pains. Fitter expression for it may be 
 acquired ; the power itself cannot be. This is 
 the genius of poetry and romance, and of all 
 the great library of inventors in all the fields 
 -=^- of knowledge. I Secondary literature, on the 
 other hand, implies the genius of history, of 
 commentary, of criticism. It weaves no graceful 
 or majestic fictions. It pays court not to fancy, 
 but to truth. It seeks not to create but to 
 interpret. " The task of an author," as Johnson 
 says, " is either to teach what is not known, or 
 to recommend known truths by his manner of 
 adorning them ; either to let new light in upon 
 the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect 
 or to vary the dress and situation of common 
 objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more 
 powerful attractions, to spread such flowers over 
 the regions through which the intellect has
 
 Lord Macaulay 1 1 
 
 already made its progress as may tempt it to 
 return and take a second view of things hastily 
 passed over or negligently regarded." {Rambler, 
 No. 3.) Secondary literature desires not to create 
 new wealth, but to make the old wealth current 
 coin ; not to conquer new land, but to hold that 
 which has been won. In the most general terms, 
 it is the genius of research. 
 
 When we style Macaulay a critic we imply ^r 
 all that comes under the title of secondary 
 literature^ It is when he abandons narration 
 and research for theory and speculation that he 
 fails most notably. All his work, in fact, is 
 conformable to our classification. For history, 
 biography, and criticism being granted, it is 
 also the mark of ballad poetry that in it the 
 author obliterates himself wholly, and tells in 
 the plainest and simplest verses some story of 
 the past. Macaulay is at his best where he is 
 fullest of this, the descriptive spirit. His Essays 
 are therefore of a different type from those of 
 Bacon and Cowley, Addison and Johnson and
 
 12 Lord Macaulay 
 
 Lamb. They create literature directly, he does 
 so only indirectly. Their imagination is pro- 
 ductive, his is reproductive. They love to break 
 new ground ; he loves to ramble in the old fields. 
 As a child, he had trod the highways of history 
 and of literature ; to his death, he liked nothing 
 so much as to traverse and retraverse their paths 
 and bypaths, to turn his lamp into every nook 
 and corner, and find them all familiar. From 
 the future he turned away ; the fanciful he left 
 to others. He did not seek to be a new ruler 
 in the world of letters ; but only to bring others 
 under the dominion of his sceptred dead — his 
 Milton, his Bacon, his Addison, his William the 
 Third, his Chatham, his Pitt. And the influence 
 which he seeks to convey is exerted more on 
 the imagination than on the reason. He likes 
 less to point the moral than to adorn the tale/ 
 ~^>( The issue, at the beginning of this century 
 of the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews marks 
 the foundation in England of the critical schools 
 Not that there had not been criticism before
 
 Lord Ma caul ay 13 
 
 then ; but at that date it was taken out of the 
 hands of a few poets and essayists, and took 
 official rank as a distinct order of literature^ 
 A new study, a new order of genius, were called 
 for. In the growth of this school from childhood 
 to manhood is found one of the distinguishing 
 marks of this century's progress. Decidedly 
 the most famous name is Macaulay's. He 
 brought new and high ideals of criticism into 
 vogue when the school was still young ; and so 
 he exerted an influence which has not yet ceased 
 to express itself. 
 
 Asperitatis et invidiae corrector et irae, 
 Recte facta refert, orientia tempora notis 
 Instruit exemplis. 
 
 Especially did Macaulay's ideals of historical 
 criticism become ingrown from an early stage 
 into the methods of critics. All his ideas have 
 been improved onN His treatment of the nota 
 exempla of the past is not always sound. But 
 the extrinsic value and influence of his work 
 remain. He is the outstanding figure among
 
 14 Lord Macaulay 
 
 ~ihe makers of English criticism. To him we 
 owe much of the progress which enables us to 
 see his defects. His faults of method are the 
 faults of a pioneer. 
 
 The influence of the school he so largely 
 formed has been twofold. It has been exercised 
 both on knowledge and on literature. On know- 
 ledge in the first instance ; for to order and 
 develope the vast material of the past is so far 
 from being the work of any artisan in Atlantis, 
 that we rightly regard the scholar's mind as 
 higher in the scale of literary greatness than 
 many grades of creative genius. Truth must 
 have its interpreters. And although language 
 may be of less absolute value than thought, yet 
 when both are essential we can as little deny 
 fame to the interpreter as to the thinker. We 
 cannot repeat the quarrel of the factors of 
 seventy-four, in which thirty-seven began to 
 assume airs, as being much the greater. The 
 critic's work is indispensable. The value of it 
 cannot be better expressed than in words used
 
 Lord Macaulay 1 5 
 
 of one of Macaulay's great successors 1 in criti- 
 cism : "He is an interpreter, an expositor. He 
 is eyes to men, a guide. That such work has 
 no place value, no one will admit. While we 
 are stern advocates of reading originals, we can 
 still recognise and apportion praise to any man 
 whose writings bring these originals to our use 
 and who inspire us to original study. Further- 
 more, the interpreter has an honourable and 
 distinctive place as such. It comes but rarely 
 that men make discoveries; it abides continually 
 that writers should make use of discoveries, work 
 out their application, and sternly demand that 
 they shall be considered. Nearly all that we 
 know, we know by such work." And there are 
 some critics, we may add, of whom Macaulay is 
 one, who have not merely interpreted, but have 
 interpreted in a language so delightful as to 
 enhance what they reveal. Such pre-eminently 
 was Cicero. If these men have not created, at 
 least they can claim that there was a world of 
 1 John Morley, v. Fortnightly Review for August ist, 1900.
 
 1 6 Lord Mac ate lay 
 
 knowledge which they found of brick and left 
 
 of marble. 
 
 The influence of criticism reaches also to 
 
 literature itself. It represents literature grown 
 
 self-conscious — framing rules of conduct for the 
 
 future by the lessons of the past. One of the 
 
 results of vigorous criticism is certain to be a 
 
 great attention to style. And we find that in 
 
 fact this century is fertile of men whose fame 
 
 lies as much in how they write as in what they 
 
 write. What a contrast between Scott and 
 
 Stevenson ! We were never more particular 
 
 than we are now regarding form. This is one 
 
 aspect of the movement in which Macaulay's 
 
 _N * part has been a great one. (His style must be 
 
 felt to be understood. But if, for the moment, 
 
 we lay aside the rhetorical features which have 
 
 somewhat spoiled its beauty, we shall not be 
 
 wrong in asserting that no English author has 
 
 displayed in an equal degree the ductility, the 
 
 purity, the transparency, of our language at its 
 
 best. ' He has been called "the perfect expositor 
 II
 
 Lord Macaulay i 7 
 
 of machine-made English " ; but this phrase 
 does not do justice to the liquid rhythm of his 
 diction. Such a model could not but have its 
 effect. To-day, we see style raised into a cult 
 by the critical school. But to render us jealous 
 of our language has not been the only result of 
 criticism. It has also developed the canons of 
 method in all the spheres of learning.QHere 
 again Macaulay 's influence was great and timely. 
 On History and Biography he imposed tests 
 and conferred ideals. Although he may some- 
 times have gone too far, as all ideals do go at 
 their origin, yet it remains that in these sciences 
 especially his tenets have long been guiding 
 posts and danger signals to both authors and 
 readers. Thus criticism has become in a way 
 the lately aroused conscience of literatureA 
 
 Such is the school of the critics, the "sentinels 
 in the avenues of time," and such Macaulay's 
 place in it. It is when we pass from the ex- 
 trinsic to the intrinsic value of his work that we 
 find greater scope for discussion. The recep- ^-~ 
 
 M. 2
 
 1 8 Lord Macaulay 
 
 tivity and imaginativeness of his mind betray 
 him into faults that are patent and that cannot 
 be argued away. The source and origin of his 
 failings as a critic may be indicated in either 
 of two ways, — a too sensitive imagination, or 
 a reason not sufficiently self-assertive. These 
 faults are implied in one another. And both 
 are closely connected with his merits/ 
 
 His imagination was too sensitive. From a 
 critic we look first for a balanced mind and 
 sensibilities well under control. He must be 
 patient of facts, must give way to no violent 
 enthusiasms or dislikes, must sketch the grey in 
 grey, must render, with an even impartiality, the 
 good as good, the bad as bad, the indifferent as 
 indifferent. But Macaulay's mind was impatient 
 of the commonplace, readily susceptible to loves 
 and hatreds, highly conservative of its first in- 
 fluences, prone to brilliance of colour and averse 
 to sombreness of hue, rendering the good as 
 admirable, the bad as despicable, and the in- 
 different almost not at all. j A gay, brilliant,
 
 Lord Macau/ay 19 
 
 glancing touch likes him better than the slow 
 elaboration of thoughtful paragraphs. He writes 
 with a smile on the lip and a sparkle in the eye 
 rather than with drawn brow and hesitating" 
 pen. (^He loved the picturesque, the clear-cut, 
 the definite, that which could bear the weight of 
 a vivid superlative. If he escapes the charge of 
 Boswellism, it is only because his failing is a 
 more general one. Boswell loved strong terms 
 of praise and adulation v^but Macaulay love 
 strong terms of any sort. Where he was at- 
 tracted, he was liable to be fascinated ; where 
 repelled, to be disgusted. This sensitiveness 
 reveals itself in many ways ; but most evidently 
 in the rhetorical tendencies of his style, and in 
 his extreme attitudes towards individuals or 
 principles of thought. 
 
 He disliked the commonplace as a banker 
 dislikes two per cent. ; and, like the latter, takes 
 risks rather than endure it. / He aims at vivid^ 
 impressions through telling figures of speech. 
 And if the truth will not fit an epigram, an 
 
 2 — 2
 
 20 
 
 Lord Macatilay 
 
 * 
 
 
 antithesis, or a superlative, Macaulay's bias is to 
 stretch the truth a point until it does ; to sub- 
 stitute the stylish overstatement for the prosaic 
 fact. But it is plain that whatever is thus 
 gained in force of style is lost in weight of 
 easoning. The brilliant is apt to become the 
 bizarre.) And where such rhetoric is carried far, 
 we are only led to suspect our author's good 
 faith. For we know that the chances are against 
 the conformability of the truth to such precise 
 and rigorous and extreme forms of expression. 
 
 A few cases may be instanced. How fre- 
 quent with Macaulay are the phrases " the best 
 in the world," or " the worst in the world." 
 Dante's simile of the sheep is " the most perfect 
 passage of its kind in the world"; while a 
 sonnet of Petrarch's is " the worst attempt at 
 poetry and the worst attempt at wit in the 
 world"; both these opinions being expressed 
 when Macaulay was only twenty-three. Be- 
 cause, apparently, Milton wrote a great epic in 
 an age of considerable enlightenment, therefore
 
 Lord Mac an lay 2 1 
 
 " no poet has ever had to struggle with more 
 unfavourable circumstances than Milton." Does 
 not the assertion leap out of the page like the 
 pattern of a gaudy wall-paper? Or take his % 
 favourite theory of poetry. " As civilisation 
 advances, poetry almost necessarily declines," 
 "as the reason grows, the imagination decays." 
 Such are the neat antitheses to which he seeks 
 to fit the history of poetry, with what success 
 everyone knows.) Writing on Dryden, he speaks 
 of poetry as a "spell"; yet in order to give 
 emphasis to his words on Milton he says : " We 
 often hear of the magical influence of poetry. 
 The expression in general means nothing ; but, 
 applied to the writings of Milton, it is most 
 appropriate." It "means nothing!" Though 
 he has just told us that " poetry produces an 
 illusion on the eye of the mind as a magic 
 lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the 
 body." Even in his biographies, despite his 
 censure on biographers for this practice, he is 
 not exempt from the same failing. But it is
 
 22 Lord Macaulay 
 
 idle to instance particular cases of a method so 
 characteristic of Macaulay. The whole Essay 
 on Milton, or the concluding half of the Essay 
 on Bacon, show most clearly how easily he was 
 carried away, by sensibilities not well in control, 
 into a rhetoric with which at times, and es- 
 pecially in the latter Essay, he becomes almost 
 intoxicated. But Criticism, in Johnson's fine 
 allegory, is the daughter of Labour and of 
 Truth ; the torch of her father " pierced through 
 the robes which rhetoric often sold to falsehood, 
 and detected the disproportion of parts which 
 artificial veils had been contrived to cover." 
 
 It is indeed not easy to find a parallel for 
 the style of Macaulay. Of its literary excellence 
 something has been said. It is to its power 
 that I refer now. Its art is often insidious, its 
 plausibility often saps the judgment entirely. 
 He is a master of the art of persuasion ; of 
 holding the attention to his words, of charming 
 it away from reflection, till the case is rushed 
 and we feel our reason coerced. He quickly
 
 Lord Macau lay 23 
 
 gets en rapport with his reader ; soon he has 
 him in his power. His bait is a paradox, or 
 an epigram, or an attractive and mysterious 
 opening sentence which excites the curiosity. 
 Then comes the swell of rhetoric, the balanced 
 antitheses, the kettle-drummery of his short 
 sentences, the rich allusions, the particular cases 
 which let down the sustained imagination, the 
 pleasant cadence which rounds off the whole. 
 We are "almost persuaded"; it is only when 
 we retrace our steps that we find fallacy lurking 
 in some ingenuous antithesis or epigram that 
 seemed too delightful not to be true. Evenness 
 of temper, grave and masculine judgment are 
 too often played withy 
 
 That he practised this "sham art," he has 
 himself avowed. "Probably," he writes to Napier, 
 "in estimating the real value of any tinsel which 
 I may put upon my articles, you and I should 
 not materially differ. But it is not by his own 
 taste but by the taste of the fish that the angler 
 is determined in his choice of bait." In the 
 
 J -
 
 ?\ Lord Macaulay 
 
 literature of fiction this may be the case. But 
 it is much to be regretted that these words have 
 come down to us from a great critic. Nor were 
 the heights of rhetoric his only art of style. He 
 could capture the reason by playing low as well 
 as by playing high. Under the appearance of 
 sturdy commonsense, he will introduce a certain 
 cavalierness of treatment, to give his opinion 
 the air of being quite plain to everybody who is 
 not a fool. Witness his attack on Utilitarianism. 
 The theory, now even more influential than in 
 his time, is, he says, " not much more laugh- 
 able than phrenology, and immeasurably more 
 humane than cock-fighting"; while the school 
 is largely composed, in his view, of " smatterers, 
 whose attainments just suffice to elevate them 
 from the insignificance of dunces to the dignity 
 of bores, and to spread dismay among their 
 pious aunts and grandmothers." Such methods 
 of argument are frequent with him. "We hear," 
 he says, " of essentially Protestant governments 
 and essentially Christian governments, words
 
 Lord Macau I ay 25 
 
 which mean just as much as essentially Pro- 
 testant cookery or essentially Christian horse- 
 manship." " For our part, if we are compelled 
 to make our choice between the first shoemaker 
 and the author of the three books on Anger, we 
 pronounce for the shoemaker." In this spirit 
 is the whole attack on speculative philosophy. 
 But ridicule is a weapon which a great critic 
 will use sparingly. It is so easy to make sport 
 for the Philistines. Macaulay's rhetoric is better 
 when it soars than when it flutters in this fashion. 
 /His strong attachments and dislikes are 
 matter of common fame. His attitude to 
 Boswell is still a puzzle. Johnson himself, in 
 his Journey to the Hebrides pays flattering com- 
 pliments to the " acuteness of intellect " and 
 "civility of manners" of his biographer. At 
 the inn in Aberdeen, he says, "we had some 
 difficulty in obtaining admission till Mr Boswell 
 made himself known ; his name overpowered all 
 objection, and we found a very good house and 
 civil treatment." " Mr Boswell," he elsewhere
 
 26 Lord Macaulay 
 
 remarks, "between his father's merits and his 
 own is sure of a reception wherever he comes." 
 And Carlyle, in reply to Macaulay, pointed out 
 that Boswell was "heir to an honourable name 
 and a great estate " ; that to associate with 
 Johnson was a social condescension on his part, 
 and no " sycophancy." But Boswell courted the 
 company of great men, especially of Johnson 
 and Paoli. His enthusiasm for the former was 
 certainly very great. But we know enough 
 about him to be quite sure that respect, and not 
 simpleness, inspired it. Despite all these facts, 
 Macaulay somehow took a notion that Boswell 
 was a vulgar fellow ; and in characteristic 
 fashion he speaks his mind outright in para- 
 doxes that only make us stare. Boswell was a 
 great genius because he was a great dunce ! 
 His intellectual capacity was not above that of 
 a boy of fifteen, yet he wrote what is, without a 
 rival, the greatest biography in the world ! He 
 was a bigot, a coxcomb, and a sot, yet he was 
 the friend of Johnson and Reynolds and Burke
 
 Lord Macau/ay 27 
 
 himself! No attempt is made by Macaulay to 
 reason these paradoxes. 
 
 Critical helplessness, as Mr Morison says, 
 could go no further. He disliked Boswell as 
 Martial disliked Sabidius : — 
 
 Non amo te, Sabidi, nee possum dicere quare; 
 Hoc tantum possum dicere, non amo te. 
 
 Nor is his aversion to Xenophon any better 
 founded. He was a "good young man" who 
 " had a weak head " ; given to " toothless 
 mumbling," " stammering, tottering, helpless," 
 as an infant in knowledge. His dislike of 
 Marlborough and Penn is equally strange. 
 And his loves are not less deserving of note. 
 Among the Latin poets he preferred Plautus, 
 among the moderns he thought Locke the 
 greatest philosopher ; of Kant he speaks with 
 airy and superior contempt. In his somewhat 
 sentimental " Lines in August," he aspires to 
 place himself in the company of so odd a four- 
 some as Bacon, Hyde, Raleigh, and Milton. 
 Such impressionability, such fastidious nicety,
 
 28 Lord Macau/ay 
 
 foreclosed many a question to his reason. And 
 he was little given to second thoughts. In 
 many of his criticisms there is therefore a felt 
 want of nerve. 
 
 -^ /Twin with this fault, and but the other 
 aspect of it, is a fault of the reason. He was 
 not a strong nor a courageous thinker. He 
 was, it must be confessed, a man of considerable 
 intellectual indolence and inertia. He avoids 
 problems. When he must face them, he solves 
 them out of his vast memory rather than by the 
 light of his own mental vision. Hence his 
 judgments are apt to be haphazard, superficial, 
 and inconsistent. He is neither a systematic 
 nor a methodical reasoner. In description he 
 is brilliant and inspiring; but when he attempts 
 the height of a high argument, his failure is 
 most marked. The whole training of his mind 
 was against strenuous and profound thought. 
 It was his touch and his taste that were cul- 
 tivated by his habits of study, i He roved 
 through literature as through a fair landscape,
 
 Lord Macaulay 29 
 
 ceaselessly retraversing it for the love of the 
 exercise, but averse to tempting new paths of 
 his own. He read and admired ; but his glance 
 was too wholly retrospective. He was fond of 
 this dalliance in the pleasant meadows ; but he 
 avoided the steep paths which lead to the 
 heights. It is said that as a child he .read on 
 the hearthrug, stretched at full length, his heels 
 in the air, and a slice of bread and butter in his 
 hand. This image suits him well even in his 
 later days, (it is fancy and feeling rather than <- 
 philosophy and science that lead him to litera- 
 ture. ; At College, he entirely neglected, to his 
 after regret, a scientific training. Even if the 
 mathematical sciences were as dull and passion- 
 less as he found them to be, yet the patient 
 plodding of their methods is one of the best 
 disciplines of the mind. Macaulay lacked this 
 discipline. Those therefore who seek charm in 
 his Essays on literature will find it in abun- 
 dance ; they will feel the touch of a scholar, the 
 finished art of a stylist who sees the beauty of
 
 2,o Lord Macaulay 
 
 truth and can reflect it in language. But in this 
 surfeit of the feelings they will find the reason 
 greatly denied, except where it is shocked. 
 The best sinews of the mind are wearied by 
 restraint, or irritated by the easy exercise of 
 destroying the fabrics which Macaulay pretends 
 to raise. The thoughts flow too quickly to run 
 deeply. Some of his Essays — on Milton, on 
 Byron, on Dry den, on Bacon — are bright and 
 rapid like the ripple of a stream in the sun- 
 light 
 
 None of his admirers but wishes he had 
 never penned the unhappy essay on Bacon. 
 The critique of speculative philosophy is a piece 
 of work which can only be marvelled at. Its 
 whole tone and temper, no less than its obvious 
 superficiality, have gravely injured his repute as 
 a critic. It is not easy to deal with it. There 
 is a story in Scott's Talisman, of how Richard 
 the Lionhearted and Saladin met in Palestine 
 together in presence of their suites. A silver 
 mace, the thickness of a man's wrist, lay on a
 
 Lord Macaulay 31 
 
 table in their midst. As a feat of strength, 
 Richard raised his sword, and to the wonder of 
 all severed it in two. Saladin, not to be out- 
 done, brought a cushion, so soft that it could 
 hardly stand upright, and turning to Richard 
 asked if he could cut that in sunder also. 
 " Nay," replied Cceur de Lion, " for man cannot 
 overcome that which offers no resistance to the 
 blow." But Saladin with a small toy of a sabre, 
 split the cushion with a cunning stroke. Richard's 
 answer is that which suits us best in dealing here 
 with Macaulay; to employ subtleties of argument 
 would only be to give his words the appearance 
 of requiring careful scrutiny. To every thinking 
 man the absurdity of Macaulay's reasoning is on 
 the surface. We have only to reflect that the 
 attack is calculated to destroy not philosophy 
 only but all the humane sciences, and religious 
 thought with them. " Words and more words 
 and nothing but words" — this is his comment 
 on the successors of Socrates. Let us ask a 
 plain question. Plato discovered that the things
 
 5 2 Lord Macaulay 
 
 o 
 
 that are seen are temporal, but the things that 
 are not seen are eternal. Newton discovered 
 the law of gravitation. Which truth is of the 
 greater value ? Judged even on the low level of 
 utility, which has done more to increase the 
 happiness and diminish the sorrow of life ? To 
 ask this question is to answer it. But all re- 
 flection vanishes in impatience at Macaulay's 
 treatment of logical science. " Every man of 
 sense," he says, " syllogises all day long without 
 suspecting it ; and the inductive process is not 
 likely to be better performed merely because 
 men know how they perform it. For a dray- 
 man calls out in a passion, ' You are a pretty 
 fellow,' without suspecting that irony is a primary 
 trope." It is strange that a man of culture should 
 really reason thus. As every schoolboy knows, 
 logic does not teach us how we do argue, which 
 is matter of psychology, but how we ought to 
 argue, which is quite another matter. If there 
 is no need of logic because all men syllogise all 
 day long, there is no need of medicine either,
 
 Lord Macaulay 
 
 oo 
 
 since all men live all clay long. But though 
 those that are whole need not a physician, those 
 that are sick do. When we are all infallible 
 popes we shall not require induction, nor any 
 other kind of logical science. But so long as 
 there is a difference between how we do argue 
 and how we ought to argue, a difference of 
 which Macaulay is ridiculously careless, we 
 shall require logic just as we require the phy- 
 sician. And all this should not require to be 
 insisted on. 
 
 That Macaulay did in the same fashion 
 discount all serious religious thought we know ' 
 from another Essay — that on Von Rankes 
 History of the Popes. He here argues that 
 because the revelation of Scripture was given 
 once for all, therefore the creed must be stereo- 
 typed, and our interpretation of its me aning 
 and m ysterj_miist_ibjL ever be the same. The 
 progress of thought is to reveal nothing new in 
 the old story. " A Christian of the fifth century 
 with a Bible is neither better nor worse situated 
 m. 3
 
 34 Lord Macaulay 
 
 than a Christian of the nineteenth century with 
 a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being 
 supposed equal.... Of the dealings of God with 
 man no more has been revealed to the nine- 
 teenth century than to the first, or to London 
 than to the wildest parish in the Hebrides. It 
 is true that in these things which concern this 
 life and this world man constantly becomes 
 wiser and wiser. But it is no less true that as 
 regards a higher power and a future state man, 
 in the language of Goethe's scoffing fiend, 
 
 ' Bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag, 
 Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag.' 
 
 In matters religious, he says in the History, 
 the difference is slight between Aristotle and a 
 child. Nor is natural religion any more pro- 
 gressive than revealed. For the evidences of 
 design in the world are now as they were in the 
 beginning, and as they shall be for ever! Surely, 
 we may reply, design is just that which cannot 
 be revealed except through change in time ; 
 which is not manifested at this moment or at
 
 Lord Macaulay 
 
 that, but is unfolded from age to age in a long 
 development ; it is purpose that is worked out 
 through the years. Are not these odd and 
 nerveless beliefs to come from a man like 
 Macaulay ? We can only wonder at words so 
 devoid of weight. If we ask for his own at- 
 titude to religion, he tells us, in his Essay on 
 SoittJieys Colloquies, that : — " We too rely on 
 God's goodness, on His goodness as manifested, 
 not in extraordinary interpositions, but in those 
 general laws which it has pleased Him to es- 
 tablish in the physical and moral world. We 
 rely on the natural tendency of the human 
 intellect to truth, and on the natural tendency 
 of society to improvement." This is not con- 
 sistent with the words quoted above ; but, such 
 as it is, it is his vindication of his intellectual 
 receptiveness, of his aversion to all the pressing 
 problems of human life and destiny. It is an- 
 easy philosophy. 
 
 /In justice to Macaulay, however, we cannot : 
 pass over the charge that his critique of specula- 
 
 3 *
 
 36 Lord Macaulay 
 
 tive thought, taken together with that of the 
 Utilitarian philosophy, brings us only to an in- 
 tellectual impasse. There are the two ways of 
 thinking, it is said — the speculative and the 
 utilitarian; in the Essay on Bacon, Macaulay 
 bars the former ; in the Essays on Mill he 
 bars the latter. This is not a fair statement. 
 Macaulay is a consistent enough utilitarian ; 
 it is not the system which the latter Essays 
 reject, but the abstract and deductive method 
 practised by a certain sect. It is not their 
 conclusion, but their method, from which he 
 differs, j 
 
 In nothing is the conflict of Macaulay's im- 
 agination with his reason more clearly seen than ' 
 in his attitude to Roman Catholicism. In spite 
 of trenchant criticism, he has still a hankering 
 after the rites and ceremonies, and all the 
 external beauties of the worship of that Church. 
 Although he believes that "to stunt the progress 
 of the human mind has everywhere been its 
 object," yet he cannot turn his eyes from its
 
 Lord Macaulay 37 
 
 " fair humanities." " It has enriched sculpture 
 and painting with the loveliest and most majestic 
 forms. To the Phidian Jupiter it can oppose 
 the Moses of Michael Angelo ; and to the 
 voluptuous beauty of the Queen of Cyprus the 
 serene and pensive loveliness of the Virgin 
 Mother. The legends of its martyrs and its 
 saints may vie in ingenuity and interest with 
 the mythological fables of Greece ; its cere- 
 monies and processions were the delight of the 
 vulgar ; the huge fabric of secular power with 
 which it was connected attracted the admiration 
 of the statesman." {On Dante) And with what 
 a magnificent panorama of this Church does he 
 open the Essay on Von Rankc ! All this is, in 
 his own words on Milton, "the very struggle of 
 the noble Othello. He kisses the beautiful 
 deceiver before he destroys her." 
 
 Macaulay's main positive contribution to 
 literary criticism is his theory of poetry.) It 
 too is open to the same charge — to satisfy the 
 imagination it denies the reason. His imagi-
 
 38 Lord Macaulay 
 
 nation is like a cork float that will not let 
 his reason sink. f He held that, as civilisation 
 advances, poetry declines ; for the advance of 
 civilisation is the growth of reason, and this 
 implies the decay of the imagination.; But imagi- 
 nation is the poetic faculty par excellence. The 
 child is the true poet. The man's reason and 
 culture are against him. And so it is the early 
 ages which produce the greatest poets. "He 
 who in an enlightened age aspires to be a great 
 poet must first become a little child. He must 
 unlearn much of that knowledge which has 
 perhaps constituted his chief title to superiority. 
 He must take to pieces the whole web of his 
 mind. His very talents will be a hindrance to 
 him. ...And it is well if after all his sacrifices 
 and exertions his work do not resemble a 
 lisping man or a modern ruin." {On Milton.) 
 Was ever such a paradox stated before ? Poetry 
 is to be the monopoly of barbaric and rude 
 minds, capable of all the extravagancies of 
 fancy and superstition — of Homeric heroes, of
 
 Lord Macau lay 39 
 
 trees which speak, of blood that spouts and 
 bones that are shattered, of giant-killers and 
 fairy wands. That deep insight into the 
 mystery of things which comes with time, is 
 to be put aside for this ! Truly enough, as 
 the reason grows, the imagination decays — but 
 in what way ? Surely in the way of being 
 chastened and limited in credulity by experi- 
 ence. But at the same time it becomes more 
 profound. The early imagination is purely 
 scenic. It differs in kind, not merely in degree, 
 from the late-developed and reason-born imagi- 
 nation which feels, 
 
 "A sense sublime 
 Of something far more deeply interfused ; 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 And the blue sky, and in the heart of man ; 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
 And rolls through all things." 
 
 *&' 
 
 This is poetic feeling at its truest and deepest. 
 It is the product of civilisation. It is impossible 
 to the child or to the poet of an early day. Not
 
 4-0 Lord Macatday 
 
 unnaturally, Macaulay found that facts were 
 wayward and would not stay by his theory. 
 Great poetical and creative works have been 
 produced even in an enlightened age, that are 
 triumphs of imagination. With such, Macaulay 
 takes strong measures. They are, he asserts, 
 the work of " uneducated men," like Bunyan or 
 Burns ; by " uneducated " being meant, appa- 
 rently, unskilled in literary criticism. This is 
 but poor thanks to Burns or Bunyan. But these 
 are not the only difficult instances. What of 
 the poetic genius of Dante, Goethe, and Schiller, 
 all of whom are also critics ? Or let us ask a 
 question that is crucial, — would Paradise Lost 
 have been a greater poem if Milton had been an 
 uneducated man ? But not even can Macaulay 
 be consistent with such a theory. Writing on 
 Dante, he says : " The orthodox poetical creed 
 is more Catholic. The noblest earthly object of 
 the contemplation of man is man himself. The 
 universe and all its fair and glorious forms are 
 indeed included in the wide empire of the imagi-
 
 Lord Macaulay 41 
 
 nation ; but she has placed her home and her 
 sanctuary amidst the inexhaustible varieties and 
 the impenetrable mysteries of the human mind." 
 We may well ask whether the growth of reason 
 and the advance of time increase or lessen our 
 knowledge of man himself? 
 
 It is under the influence of a purely pictorial 
 imagination that Macaulay is betrayed into such 
 errors. But this great fault, his lack of depth 
 and insight, is closely connected with his most 
 signal merit. For vividness of touch he has 
 few rivals. Some of his Essays are sketches 
 from life. We could almost paint Johnson out 
 of Macaulay. It is in the excess of this virtue 
 that his characteristic failing lies. His imagi- 
 nation was too light to sink. His reason was 
 too sluggish to rise. He has told us in a letter 
 that he had no skill of probing beneath the 
 surface of literary charm, keen though his appre- 
 ciation was of charm itself. We shall do him 
 no injustice therefore by the assertion that it is 
 in vividness of touch, in grace of presentment,
 
 42 Lord Macaulay 
 
 in the power to display the beauties of litera- 
 ture, that the merit of his literary critiques lies. 
 So far as their subject-matter is concerned, most 
 of them have by now served their purpose. 
 Yet the perusal of them still fascinates. And 
 after all his diatribes on philosophy and all his 
 odd paradoxes are forgotten, the grace of his 
 Addison, the brilliance of his Byron, the warm 
 enthusiasm of his Milton, will remain to stimu- 
 late the love of letters, and to convey from 
 himself to his reader something of 
 
 "The sense of beauty and the thirst of truth." 
 
 If he cannot analyse charm he can at least 
 impart it. " And after all," as Professor Saints- 
 bury has said, " what is the good of seeking for 
 the reason of charm ? — it is there. There were 
 better sense in the sad mechanic exercise of 
 determining the reason of its absence where 
 it is not." (Introduction to Jane Austen's 
 Pride and Prejudiced) Nor is it only in finesse 
 of touch that Macaulay excels. He writes also
 
 Lord Macaulay 43 
 
 with a conscious mastery over immense stores 
 of knowledge. In his own words on Addison, 
 " he was the possessor of a vast mine rich in a 
 hundred ores." He carries us, from any point, 
 all over a wide field of literature, with the delight 
 of one who shows its beauties to a stranger. And 
 he does so with a wealth of allusion, of happy 
 illustration, which opens glimpses of still broader 
 and richer fields behind. We are agreed that to 
 delight and stimulate the fancy is not everything; 
 but it is a great deal. And no higher tribute can 
 be paid to the fascination of Macaulay's scholar- 
 ship, or to his life-likeness as an impressionist, 
 than is implied in the fact that, despite faults 
 which might well have spelt ruin to a critic, his 
 essays on literature are still a brilliant and 
 delightful page. 
 
 In the historical and political essays, we find 
 the same merits, but with less of their accom- 
 panying lack of weight in treatment. They 
 reveal in a high degree the same power of 
 vivid and realistic description, which burns 
 
 ^
 
 44 Lord Macaulay 
 
 scenes and events deep into the mind. In them 
 Macaulay 's great art of scenic description begins 
 to be displayed to usy With a greater scope for 
 it, he revels in it with the freedom of conscious 
 strength. Few passages are better known than 
 his living description of the opening of the trial 
 of Hastings ; colour is heaped upon colour, 
 figure upon figure is painted in, finer and still 
 finer brushes are used, till the whole waiting 
 multitude is before us with the presence of 
 to-day. Word-painting has rarely been carried 
 to higher perfection. Neither Carlyle nor 
 Michelet has excelled it. There are only two 
 scenes which it recalls, and for different 
 reasons ; the trial of Rebecca, for the simi- 
 larity of the scene ; Burke's description of 
 Marie Antoinette for the living power of the 
 language. Hardly less splendid is the panorama 
 with which his Essay on Von Ranke is opened. 
 Of the Church of Rome he says : " No other 
 institution is left standing which carries the mind 
 back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice
 
 Lord Macaulay 45 
 
 rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards 
 and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. 
 The proudest of royal houses are but of yester- 
 day when compared with the line of the Supreme 
 Pontiffs.... Nor do we see any signs which indicate 
 that the term of her long dominion is approach- 
 ing. She was great and respected before the 
 Saxon had set foot in Britain, before the Frank 
 had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence 
 still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still 
 worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And she 
 may exist in undiminished vigour when some 
 traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst 
 of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken 
 arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of 
 St Paul's." This is the perfection of historical 
 description. 
 
 We have less reason in these Essays to com- 
 plain of want of depth of treatment. Macaulay 
 is sounder as a political critic, and this despite 
 his strong party bias. He thinks most safely 
 where the reference to facts is constant. His
 
 46 Lo7 r d Macaulay 
 
 speeches are perhaps more full of sound political 
 reflection than any other part of his work ; but 
 there is more of it in the Essays than in the 
 History. He here reveals the true historical 
 spirit, often under very fine figures. No better 
 simile of our national progress could be found 
 than that used in his review of Mcintosh, an 
 essay which is strangely neglected by Macaulay's 
 critics : " The motion of the public mind in our 
 country resembles that of the sea when the tide 
 is rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, 
 breaks, and rolls back ; but the great flood is 
 steadily coming in. A person who looked on 
 the waters only for a moment might fancy that 
 they were retiring. A person who looked on 
 them only for five minutes might fancy that they 
 were rushing capriciously to and fro. But when 
 he keeps his eye on them for a quarter of an 
 hour and sees one seamark disappear after 
 another, it is impossible for him to doubt of the 
 general direction in which the ocean is moved. 
 Just such has been the course of events in
 
 Lord Macanlay 47 
 
 England." Would that Macaulay's History 
 retained this spirit, or that of the Essay on 
 Hallam ! That he were less heedful of the 
 ripples and more careful to mark the swelling 
 of the whole ocean ! The Essays at least 
 reveal to us that he did not err from ignorance 
 of what the historical attitude properly is. 
 
 It would be to no purpose to argue here the 
 question of the partisanship of these reviews, 
 and that for an obvious reason. Were the 
 battles of Whig and Tory old and fought out 
 long ago, we should not compromise ourselves 
 by passing judgment on a Whig reviewer. But 
 such is not the case. It is the nature of our 
 constitution that its development is still, and 
 will be always, the resultant of the same old 
 forces of progress and of caution. Time does 
 not remove us, nor did it remove Macaulay, to 
 a position whence we may view this strife 
 unbiassed. And therefore to applaud or con- 
 demn would in this case only be to argue 
 ourselves Whigs or Tories. But since what is
 
 48 Lord Macaulay 
 
 called the party spirit of these Essays is supposed 
 to cast reflections on the worth of the History, 
 a word may profitably be said from this point 
 of view. We do find in these papers a most 
 whole-hearted enthusiasm for Whig principles. 
 The final words of that on Hallam point, with a 
 note of warning, to the " more excellent way " 
 of Reform. There is a tone of warm admiration 
 in his treatment of Hampden and Chatham. 
 In the essay on Mcintosh the progress of 
 English freedom is identified with the triumphs 
 of the Whigs. And yet I think we ought not 
 to neglect a development in Macaulay s opinions 
 through the Essays, and one which is con- 
 summated in the opening of the History itself. 
 In the papers written in the heat of the great 
 battle his tone is strong, and his words are 
 trenchant ; but as he shook off the dust of the 
 strife, his manner becomes graver, and he pleases 
 the party politicians less. I shall only choose 
 two passages, one from the Essay on the Spanish 
 Succession, written in 1833, when feeling still
 
 Lo7'd Macaulay 49 
 
 ruled high, the other eleven years later. In 1833 
 he writes : (^ Society, we believe, is constantly 
 advancing in knowledge. ) The tail is now where 
 the head was some generations ago. But the 
 head and the tail still keep their distance. A 
 nurse of this century is as wise as a justice of 
 the quorum and custalorum in Shallow's time. 
 The wooden spoon of this year would puzzle a 
 senior wrangler of the reign of George II. A 
 boy from the National School reads and spells 
 better than half the knights of the shire in the 
 October Club. But there is still as wide a 
 difference as ever between justices and nurses, 
 senior wranglers and wooden spoons, members 
 of Parliament and children at charity schools. 
 In the same way though a Tory now may be 
 very like what a Whig was a hundred and 
 twenty years ago, the Whig is as much in 
 advance of the Tory as ever. The stag who 
 ' feared his hind feet would o'ertake the fore,' 
 was not more mistaken than Lord Mahon, if he 
 thinks that he has really come up with the Whigs. 
 
 M. 4
 
 50 Lord Macaulay 
 
 The absolute position of the parties has been 
 altered ; the relative position remains unchanged.) 
 Through the whole of the great movement which 
 began before these party names existed and 
 which will continue after they have become 
 obsolete,... there have been under some name or 
 other two sets of men, those who were before 
 their age, and those who were behind it, those 
 who were the wisest among their contemporaries, 
 and those who gloried in being no wiser than 
 their great-grandfathers." Contrast with this 
 - his words in 1844, on Chatham: "If, rejecting 
 all that is merely accidental, we look at the 
 essential characteristics of the Whig and the 
 Tory, we may consider each of them as the 
 representative of a great principle, essential to 
 the welfare of nations. One is, in an especial 
 manner, the guardian of liberty, and the other 
 of order. One is the moving power and the 
 other the steadying power of the State. One is 
 the sail without which there would be no progress, 
 the other the ballast without which there would
 
 Lord Macaulay 5 1 
 
 be small safety in a tempest." With this deve- 
 lopment of opinion compare finally the attitude 
 with which the History opens: "The distinction 
 has always existed and always must exist. For 
 it has its origin in diversities of temper, of 
 understanding, and of interest, which are found 
 in all societies, and which will be found till the 
 human mind ceases to be drawn in opposite 
 directions by the charm of habit and by the 
 charm of novelty... .In the sentiments of both 
 classes there is something to approve. But of 
 both the best specimens will be found not far 
 from the common frontier." (Chap. I.) So 
 evident a movement from the position of an 
 advocate to that of a judge should not be 
 overlooked. They are guilty of a hasty inference ^T"~ 
 who base their charge against the History on 
 the alleged partizanship of the Essays.") 
 
 But of greater importance than their matter,*^ 
 is the new method on which his historical 
 reviews were written. (^He gave historical criti- 
 cism literary form. It ceased to consist of 
 
 4—2
 
 52 Lord Macaulay 
 
 parallel extracts and discussions of authorities. 
 It became an extract from history treated with 
 literary finish. ) The characteristic of the Essay 
 I take to be a certain freedom and broadness 
 of treatment, in contrast to the closer following 
 of the facts which is the mark of history. The 
 historian must narrate facts in the first place, 
 and interweave criticism and reflection with his 
 — ^ tale ; but the essayist must be for the most part 
 and primarily reflective and comparative. His 
 account of facts must be the minimum which is 
 necessary and sufficient ; he must be skilled in 
 taking facts for granted, without seeming to 
 desert them. Such was Macaulay's new method. 
 He took periods of history and treated them 
 with the freedom of an impressionist ; his facts 
 are sketched in rapidly and generally. The 
 essays on Hallam and Hampden are good 
 examples of this. His Mirabeau is altogether 
 taken up with broad reflections, with the 
 political setting of his subject, rather than with 
 ' an account of the subject itself. 'Macaulay's
 
 Lord Macaulay 53 
 
 art lies in making the background neither so 
 full as to hide the central figure nor so scant as 
 not to explain it. It lies, too, in the power to 
 gather up the threads which link his theme with 
 the past, to take a fragment out of history 
 without leaving its borders ragged. His political 
 essays are studies which can be read as closed 
 wholes even by laymen in history. They have 
 been well called " vignettes " from the past. , 
 
 To the historical reviews will be attached, 
 in my view, the greater part of Macaulay 's 
 critical repute properly so called. They are 
 still standard authorities for the periods they 
 cover ; while their style redeems them from the 
 dryness of history.) Some work, like that on 
 Clive and Hastings, he did pretty much once 
 for all. There is one figure which seems to me 
 to express better than any other the value of 
 such work — a figure used by Sir W. Hamilton 
 in another reference. These Essays are like 
 strongholds which keep conquered land for the 
 possession of the human mind, great towers 
 
 ■tf
 
 54 Lord Macatday 
 
 raised all along the line of march. They hold 
 for each of us our lines of communication, and 
 secure our further advance. They are centres 
 from which we sally out and to which we can 
 return. The intervening spaces are easily held 
 down. And even when time, which continually 
 shows the imperfections of the past, has moul- 
 dered the structure of Macaulay's work, these 
 Essays will still be grand and stately edifices. 
 Some will wear longer than others — his Clive 
 and his Hastings perhaps longest of all. But 
 after their immediate purpose is served, and we 
 hold all the fields of history under some easier 
 rule yet to be invented, they will still be works 
 of art, and their influence will be felt in some 
 of the best products of future labour. On this 
 basis rests most securely the critical fame of 
 Macaulay. 
 
 His biographies do not call for a great deal 
 of remark. We find in them the characteristic 
 marks of the Biography as distinguished from 
 the Essay — less discursiveness, less freedom of
 
 Lord Mac mi lay 55 
 
 treatment, a sterner adherence to the order of 
 facts. Yet the light touch of the Essays reasserts 
 itself, especially in the Lives of Goldsmith and 
 Johnson. Taken as a whole, however, this part 
 of Macaulay's work is unequal ; the method of 
 his Atterbury and his Pitt being different from 
 that of the two lives already mentioned. Bunyan 
 and Johnson had already been treated in the 
 Essays, and there are only the slightest modi- 
 fications of opinion in the Lives. Atterbury is 
 almost of too small importance to have deserved 
 so much of the time which Macaulay could ill 
 spare. With the exception of his stately monu- 
 ment to Pitt, and perhaps his Johnson, it is 
 doubtful if the biographies will greatly add to 
 his repute. 
 
 Macaulay had so constantly cried down the 
 biographer's error in the Essays, at the same 
 time at which he was committing a similar fault 
 himself, that we turn with interest to see whether 
 the later style of his own biographies is free 
 from it. To borrow superlatives from Cicero
 
 56 Lord Macaulay 
 
 seemed to him to be the darling sin of biography. 
 Yet it must be allowed that from this failing he 
 is little less free than other biographers, and 
 scarcely less as a biographer than as an essayist. 
 He still loves the extreme. Years have not 
 overcome his repugnance to the common place. 
 Partly for the sake of style, partly because it is 
 tiresome to find a man humdrum, partly because 
 separate consideration is apt to be oblivious of 
 comparison, his biographies are sprinkled with 
 superlatives which start out of the page. By 
 this mannerism the Life of Pitt is happily 
 unstained. 
 
 Of Goldsmith we are told that " no writer 
 was ever more uniformly agreeable." If this is 
 not merely a drawing-room compliment, it is 
 absurd. What of Addison ? or of Shakespeare 
 himself? But the biographer remembers to 
 forget such comparisons. Goldsmith was agree- 
 able ; therefore no writer was ever more so. 
 In the Life of foJinson all the extreme paradoxes 
 about Boswell are retained, despite Carlyle's
 
 Lord Macaulay 57 
 
 reply ; proof of how strong were Macaulay's 
 impressions when once formed. His remarks 
 on Johnson himself have also peculiar points. 
 Johnson's London is "a stately and vigorous 
 poem ; " yet because there are flaws in Irene, 
 therefore Johnson " had not the slightest notion 
 of what blank verse should be." Because John- 
 son did not attempt to emend the text of 
 Shakespeare, nor yet 
 
 "To find out three more points in Hamlet's soul 
 As yet untouched by Germans," 
 
 therefore, " it would be difficult to name a more 
 slovenly, a more worthless edition of any great 
 classic." And nothing is more interesting than 
 to compare the passages of Boswell with the 
 versions of them which occur in this Essay. 
 One sees then what a dangerous coquetry was 
 Macaulay's love of style. Many, too, will 
 demur from his judgment that Goldsmith's 
 Traveller has the simplest and noblest plan of 
 any didactic poem in the world. We cannot 
 exempt Macaulay from the suspicion of infection
 
 58 Lord Mac ate lay 
 
 by the lues Boswelliana ; though in his case the 
 disease has special symptoms, and manifests 
 itself in many extremes which are not extremes 
 of praise. 
 
 The biographies, we said, are unequal. Some 
 of them, those of Goldsmith and Johnson in 
 particular, are so full of colour and lively incident 
 as to remind us strongly of the touch of Plutarch 
 himself. "It is not always," says Plutarch, "in 
 the most distinguished achievements that men's 
 virtues or vices may be best discerned ; but very 
 often an action of small note, a short saying, or 
 a jest, will distinguish a person's real character 
 more than the greatest sieges or the most 
 important battles. Therefore, as painters labour 
 the likeness in the face, and especially about the 
 eyes, and run over the rest more lightly, so must 
 we be allowed to strike off the features of the 
 soul, and leave to others the circumstantial detail 
 of their labours and achievements." (On Alex- 
 ander: init.) In the Lives referred to this is 
 the method followed by Macaulay. They are
 
 Lord Macatday 59 
 
 free and sketch)-, and dwell on small points. 
 In fact, writing to Napier in 1842 regarding his 
 Frederic the Great, Macaulay says: " I shall try 
 to give a life of him after the manner of Plutarch. 
 That, I think, is my forte." We have seen 
 reason why we should endorse this opinion ; 
 for a gay and lively imagination of events was 
 Macaulay's most excellent faculty ; he had just 
 the genius of describing a man's life by sugges- 
 tive touches here and there, rather than by 
 psychological analysis or any interior treatment 
 of his mind. Johnson's grimaces and gestures 
 and mutterings, his twitching off of a lady's 
 shoe, his ejaculations of the Lord's Prayer, his 
 touching of the lamp-posts, his rapacious appe- 
 tite, his wig and snuff-coloured coat — all this is 
 in the style congenial to Macaulay's powers. 
 He did not get inside Johnson, and failed to 
 grasp the religious bent of his mind. Therefore 
 he does him some injustices, and his exterior 
 treatment is in danger often of being too meagre. 
 He does not reveal how deep Johnson's nature
 
 60 Lord Macaulay 
 
 really was, how splendid was the humility of his 
 great mind, how fast his life was anchored to 
 the hopes of Christian faith, how true of him 
 are the lines : 
 
 "Ah! those unspoken thoughts, which made 
 The inner man we never knew, 
 And all that in the genial shade 
 
 Of his great nature lived and grew, 
 From far-off founts their nurture drew." 
 
 (IV. G. Hole.) 
 
 But the circumstantial account which he gives 
 of Johnson is lifelike and admirable, with many 
 a true note of sympathy. His Goldsmith is 
 after the same style, with characteristically 
 Plutarchian touches here and there. This pas- 
 sage is typical : " How little Goldsmith was 
 qualified to write about the physical sciences 
 is sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He 
 on one occasion denied that the sun is larger 
 in the Northern than in the Southern signs. 
 It was vain to cite the authority of Maupertuis. 
 ' Maupertuis ! ' he cried, ' I understand these 
 matters better than Maupertuis.' On another
 
 Lord Macau lay 61 
 
 occasion he, in defiance of his own senses, 
 maintained obstinately and even angrily that he 
 chewed his dinner by moving his upper jaw." 
 The Life of Pitt, on the other hand, shakes 
 off all that is familiar, and is written with a 
 grave and loft}- dignity. The style and method 
 place it by itself among all his shorter works. 
 It is by far the greatest of his monographs. 
 There is no colour, none of that appeal merely 
 to the eye of the mind, which marks Macaulay 
 so peculiarly ; it is all in the sombre grey of 
 public life, in the reserved manner of the Cabinet 
 and the House of Commons. It has a stateliness, 
 a tone of high endeavour, which interpret the 
 author's distant reverence for one of his own 
 heroes. It is the echo in prose of Scott's fine 
 tribute to 
 
 " His worth who, in his mightiest hour, 
 A bauble held the pride of power : 
 Spurned at the sordid lust of pelf 
 And served his Albion for herself; 
 Who, when the frantic crowd amain 
 Strained at subjection's bursting vein,
 
 62 Lord Macaulay 
 
 O'er their wild mood full conquest gained, 
 
 The pride, he would not crush, restrained, 
 
 Showed their fierce zeal a worthier cause, 
 
 And brought the freeman's arm to aid the freeman's 
 
 laws." 
 
 It is the mature expression of Macaulay 's own 
 early lines of youthful enthusiasm : 
 
 " Remember the man who in sorrow and danger 
 When thy glory was set and thy spirit was low, 
 When thy hopes were o'erturned by the arms of the 
 
 stranger, 
 And thy banners displayed in the halls of the foe, 
 Stood forth in the tempest of doubt and disaster, 
 Unaided and single, the danger to brave, 
 Asserted thy claims, and the rights of his master, 
 Preserved thee to conquer and saved thee to save." 
 
 This martial spirit, which suits well the portrayal 
 of a great man wrestling with a great crisis, is 
 finely maintained in the biography. It is difficult 
 to choose extracts ; but the following passage is 
 a good example : 
 
 " While his schemes were confounded, while 
 his predictions were falsified, while the coalitions 
 which he had laboured to form were falling to 
 pieces, while the expeditions which he had sent
 
 Lord Macaulay 63 
 
 forth at enormous cost were ending in rout and 
 disgrace, while the enemy against whom he was 
 feebly contending was subjugating Flanders and 
 Brabant, the Electorate of Mentz, and the Elec- 
 torate of Treves, Holland, Piedmont, Liguria, 
 Lombardy, his authority over the House of 
 Commons was constantly becoming more and 
 more absolute. There was his empire. There 
 were his victories, his Lodi and his Areola, his 
 Rivoli and his Marengo. If some great misfor- 
 tune, a pitched battle lost by the allies, the 
 annexation of a new department to the French 
 Republic, a sanguinary insurrection in Ireland, a 
 mutiny in the fleet, a panic in the City, a run on 
 the Bank, had spread dismay through the ranks 
 of his majority, that dismay lasted only till he 
 rose from the Treasury bench, drew up his 
 haughty head, stretched his arm with com- 
 manding gesture, and poured forth in deep and 
 sonorous tones the lofty language of inextin- 
 guishable hope and inflexible resolution. Thus 
 through a long and calamitous period, every
 
 64 Lord Macaulay 
 
 disaster that happened without the walls of 
 Parliament was regularly followed by a triumph 
 within them. At length he had no longer an 
 opposition to encounter." 
 
 This is splendid writing. There is no tinsel 
 and no rhetoric. In this, the last of his articles, 
 Macaulay somewhat shakes off his old and fan- 
 ciful self, and wears a graver and more pensive 
 aspect. His Pitt is well fitted to stand in the 
 company of such tributes of reverence as Tenny- 
 
 I 
 
 son's great mausoleum to the memory of Hallam. 
 Though — and perhaps, some will say, because — 
 it departs from his old style and his old art, and 
 is not representative of the characteristics most 
 natural to Macaulay, it is of all his critical studies 
 the ripest and the best. 
 
 1 The result which follows most generally from 
 the study of Macaulay as a critic is this, that to 
 strong tastes and an imagination sensitive and 
 prone to the vivid and realistic he added a 
 graceful and finished literary touch ; and that 
 in these characteristics is to be found the source
 
 Lord Macmilay 65 
 
 of great faults no less than of merits equally 
 as great. Our study of his History will bear 
 this judgment out. 
 
 There is a habit now of representing his " 
 History as a bizarre and brilliant tour de force, 
 written on a wrong method and in a wrong spirit. 
 Those who so regard him, as one who took his 
 responsibilities too lightly, are predisposed to find 
 him superficial where he is not, and to exag- 
 gerate the defects which undoubtedly exist. It 
 must be insisted therefore that, as an historian, 
 Macaulay prized his function highly.) Ever since 
 Thucydides penned the words that have rung in 
 the ears of all his best successors — " no time- 
 serving argument, but an eternal possession " — 
 history, what is best of it, has assumed an air 
 of serious ambition and has reached out toward 
 high and conscious ideals. Of this spirit Ma- 
 caulay is full. ( His enthusiasm, as revealed in 
 the Essay on History, is strong and deep. It is 
 therefore not the fairest method of judging him 
 which prefaces its criticism with a text taken 
 
 M. 5
 
 66 Loi'd Macaulay 
 
 from a private letter, in which Macaulay writes : 
 "I have at last begun my historical labours.... 
 The materials for an amusing narrative are 
 immense. I shall not be satisfied unless I 
 produce something which shall for a few days 
 supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables 
 of young ladies." On these words Mr Morison 
 makes the following comment, as introductory 
 to a general discussion of the History : " We 
 did not need this intimation to make us ac- 
 quainted with the chief object which the writer 
 had in view ; but it is satisfactory to have it, as 
 now no doubt remains on the subject. This then 
 was Macaulay's polestar by which he guided his 
 historical argosy over the waters of the past — 
 young ladies for readers, laying down the novel 
 of the season to take up his History of England? 
 Whatever may be Macaulay's faults as an his- 
 torian, this is surely an entirely false keynote of 
 criticisms) 
 •<S^L His historical aim was not onefold but 
 twofold. His ideal was not fascinating narration
 
 Lord Macaulay 6j 
 
 alone ; though the neglect of this by modern 
 historians led him to lay great emphasis upon 
 it. He has told us times without number, in 
 the official Essay on History and throughout 
 the Essays, that like a good Whig he sought a 
 compromise. He saw historical novelists and 
 political philosophers working on independent 
 lines ; sometimes, as in Sismondi's case, he saw 
 the same man pursue in different works the 
 different studies. This separation was, in his 
 view, a distinct confession of failure. History \~ 
 he conceived to be neither an abstract science 
 nor a pleasing tale, but the harmonious union 
 of these two ; it is a narrative, but a narrative 
 told reflectively. Whether or not, in the History 
 itself, one of these aspects is developed so as to 
 stunt the other, is a question for discussion ; but 
 of this there can be no discussion, that in 
 Macaulay's own opinion each of these was of * 
 equal importance with the other. History was 
 the seamless web of which political philosophy 
 was the warp and facts themselves the woof. 
 
 5— 2
 
 68 Lord Macaulay 
 
 To separate the two was to avow the lack of the 
 power to interweave them, on the excellence of 
 which was staked the value of what was properly 
 called history. "A truly great historian," he 
 says, in one of many statements of his aim, 
 "would reclaim those materials which the 
 novelist has appropriated. The history of the 
 government and the history of the people would 
 be exhibited in that mode in which alone they 
 can be exhibited justly, in inseparable conjunc- 
 tion and intermixture. We should not then 
 have to look for the wars and votes of the 
 Puritans in Clarendon and for their phraseology 
 in Old Mortality ; for one half of King James 
 in Hume, and for the other half in the Fortunes 
 of Nigel." " History, at least in its state of ideal 
 perfection is a compound of poetry and philo- 
 sophy. \ It impresses general truths by a vivid 
 representation of particular characters and 
 incidents." And it is fortunate that in yet 
 another place Macaulay mentions " the last 
 novel " in comparison with his work, in a
 
 Lord Macaulay 69 
 
 passage which shows at once that " amusing 
 narrative" was not his sole or chief aim. 
 Writing on Mcintosh's pamphlet he says: 
 " We find in it the diligence, the accuracy, 
 and the judgment of Hallam, united to the 
 vivacity and colouring of Southey. A history 
 of England written throughout in this manner 
 would be the most fascinating book in the 
 language. It would be more in request at 
 the circulating libraries than the last novel." 
 These public statements seem to me to dis- 
 count entirely any emphasis that may be laid 
 on the less deliberate words of a private 
 letter. History, in Macaulay's view, was not 
 the same thing as political philosophy nor the 
 same as narration ; it was the union of the two, 
 the common treasure from which the special- 
 ists in philosophy and story-telling drew their 
 materials. 
 
 Macaulay's emphasis on the artistic side ' 
 of history is certainly very marked. There 
 are two reasons for this. The first was the 
 
 * ;
 
 jo Lord Macau/ay 
 
 influence of classical models, which seemed 
 to him not to have forgotten that history 
 was literature, and with whose spirit he was 
 thoroughly inspired. But a greater influence 
 was that of the new ideas which at the 
 beginning of this century were forcing their 
 way. Several causes led to this development. 
 -There was the rise of the critical school with 
 its analytic methods. Then the attention of 
 the whole educated world had been called to 
 a consideration of the principles of social 
 life, and the summons had come from France 
 in a form too terrible to be neglected. 
 Furthermore, it was but recently that Adam 
 Smith's great work had opened out a new 
 and vast field of knowledge, that was of no 
 speculative kind, but which was essential to 
 every practical man of affairs. His work was 
 carried forward by Malthus and Ricardo, and 
 their developments were such as to give pause 
 to all serious men. Even had it been less 
 fearful in itself, the Iron Laiv must have
 
 Lord Macaulay 7 1 
 
 derived terrible significance from the state of 
 England at that time. The poverty, the 
 misery, the squalor of the lives of the 
 working classes were only equalled by the 
 repulsive conditions under which they laboured 
 every day. To thousands who saw the people 
 strucrorlintr to live the life almost of beasts 
 of burden, the theories of the economists 
 seemed only too true. And hence out of 
 public discontent a great movement arose. 
 Socialism spread like fire. It was no academic 
 idea; it was preached to the people, in their alleys 
 and filthy houses, by the people. They were 
 taught to regard the capitalist, the aristocrat, 
 and the upper levels of society, not as their 
 enemies only, but as their despoilers ; as men 
 whose wealth was reared over the degradation 
 of labour, whose happiness was the reward of 
 theft and tyranny, whose right was might, the 
 price of whose greatness was the people's blood 
 and tears. 
 
 The result of all these movements was that
 
 72 Lord Macaulay 
 
 new problems were thrust into the daylight of 
 political study ; it was urgent that the consti- 
 tution of society should be thoroughly sifted. 
 The great historians, at home and abroad, set to 
 work on new methods. Philosophical insight 
 became a more important quality than clear 
 and vigorous narration. Among such men 
 Sismondi and Niebuhr were conspicuous, and 
 with them Macaulay was contemporary. John 
 Mill was publishing just as Macaulay took up 
 his pen in his historical labours. The intel- 
 lectual world was full of scientific ideas. What 
 was their influence on Macaulay ? 
 
 " Our modern historians miserably neglect 
 the art of narration," — this is his comment. 
 They seemed to him to be trespassing on 
 the bounds of political science. And in making 
 history more scientific they were, he thought, 
 unmaking it as literature. He was far from 
 unaware of or indifferent to the philosophical 
 principles of history ; but their elaboration was 
 the special study of a special science which along
 
 Lord Macanlay 
 
 / j 
 
 with the science of the historical novelists, drew 
 its materials from a common and less specialised 
 storehouse called history. The moderns seemed 
 to him to have forgotten the true harmony of 
 parts in this central study. Looking at their 
 work with the eyes of Thucydides, it seemed 
 to him that it had become unlovely and 
 unsplendid in the act of becoming profound. 
 
 Want of realistic treatment is his first com- 
 plaint against the modern method. It is not 
 his only complaint. The moderns seemed to 
 him to have sacrificed for the sake of scientific 
 depth, nearly all the other merits of history. 
 " They have characteristic faults, so closely 
 connected with their characteristic merits, that 
 it may well be doubted whether on the whole 
 this department of literature has gained or lost 
 during the last two-and-twenty centuries." 
 
 The first ideal they had neglected was art. 
 History proper " must be received by the imagi- 
 nation as well as by the reason. It must not be 
 merely traced on the mind, but branded into it."
 
 74 Loi'd Macaulay 
 
 On this point Macaulay is reasserting the old 
 ideal of Lucian. The mind of the historian, 
 Lucian said, must be touched with poetic fire, 
 especially in battles and sea-fights. He must 
 have the art of the sculptor. " The raw material 
 of facts is his gold or silver or ivory, which he 
 has to carve and polish and weld into a shape of 
 beauty ; to arrange in lovely order the things 
 that have been done, and to set them forth lit 
 up with the white light and splendour of reality." 
 " Facts," Macaulay says, " are the mere dross of 
 v history." His grudge against his contemporaries 
 is that in probing for theories, they were content 
 to lack altogether this art of description. They 
 were dead to the beauty of the facts them- 
 selves. 
 
 The philosophical treatment was also by him 
 \ held liable for a great deal of political partizan- 
 
 ship. Principles are apt to be preconceived and 
 to distort the meaning of history where facts 
 are not also fully dwelt on. The moderns "have 
 fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit
 
 Lord Macau/ay 75' 
 
 general principles. They arrive at a theory from 
 looking at some of the phenomena ; the remain- 
 ing phenomena they strain at or curtail to suit 
 the theory." Which of the phenomena they 
 will look at, it is not difficult to guess. We 
 get accomplished political advocates like Hume; 
 in the midst of whose disputes, " history proper 
 is disappearing. The high, grave, impartial 
 summing up of Thucydides is nowhere to be 
 found." 'Mr Morison makes too strong a 
 statement in asserting that " it does not 
 appear that Macaulay yielded to the silly 
 notion that abstract history must necessarily 
 be incorrect. All history is liable to be 
 incorrect, and concrete as much as any." 
 Macaulay was well aware of the latter fact, 
 and has been at pains to indicate it ; a 
 history may be false, he says, in which every 
 fact is true. But in abstract history he saw 
 the greater danger, and he saw it in fact 
 incurred. And so he repeats his warning in 
 the opening of his own work. A_bstractness
 
 j 6 Lord Macaulay 
 
 becomes political bias ; and history becomes 
 the " repository of title-deeds." 
 
 Ajt hird c harge is want of ..fulness of treat- 
 ment. We here strike on the idea most closely 
 associated with Macaulay 's historical work. 
 
 History, he com plains, is bein g_ limited to 
 
 constitutional developments alone. It is the 
 
 denizen only of the court and the senate. His 
 
 y 1 
 
 own ideal was broader/ History was to abandon 
 
 her reserve, to leave the haughty precincts of 
 kings, and come out among the people. It 
 was to become comprehensive of every part 
 of the national life. ' The_perfect historian 
 " shows us the court, the camp, and the senate, 
 but he also shows us the nation/ He considers 
 no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no 
 familiar saying as too insignificant for his 
 notice which is not too insignificant to illustrate 
 the operation of law, of religion, and of educa- 
 tion, and to mark the progress of the human 
 mind." " I shall cheerfully bear the reproach 
 of having descended below the dignity of
 
 Lord Macaulay yj 
 
 history, if I can succeed in placing before the 
 English of the Nineteenth Century a true 
 picture of the life of their ancestors." In the 
 philosophical method there was no scope for 
 this fulness of detail. " They think it beneath 
 the dignity," he says of the moderns, "of men 
 who describe the revolutions of nations to dwell 
 on the details which constitute the charm of 
 biography. They have imposed on themselves 
 a code of conventional decencies. The most 
 characteristic and interesting circumstances are 
 omitted because, we are told, they are too trivial 
 for the majesty of history." 
 
 Such were Macaulay's ideals. His work in | — 
 history is done on methods that are unique and 
 peculiar to himself. He was in conscious dis- 
 agreement from the ideas of modern historians. 
 It is therefore an exaggeration to state that 
 " he took no notice of the new history, showed 
 no curiosity in what was being done in that 
 direction." (Morison, ch. II.) On the contrary 
 he was well aware of what was being done, but
 
 78 Lord Macaulay 
 
 it did not seem to be done as well as it might be. 
 >They believed the historic spirit to imply the 
 detection of principles of political progress and 
 life. He differed from them. He believed it to 
 consist in an art of narration which should 
 sacrifice neither the facts nor the principles. 
 The separate study of principles alone, on the 
 other hand, was political science and not history. 
 It is on the value of the facts that he chiefly 
 insists. They must be stated fully, to correct 
 the false readings of theories ; they must be 
 stated well, for history is literature. He aimed 
 at uniting a scientific with a literary treatment. 
 The modern method was not false but inade- 
 quate. It was only the half of history. It was 
 political without being social ; descriptive but 
 not literary ; critical but not judicial. 
 
 A work so unique cannot be fairly criticised 
 by anyone who assumes the standpoint of the 
 moderns and accuses Macaulay of deficient 
 historical spirit. To argue thus is to fight with 
 a man of straw. Macaulay's method must not be
 
 Lord Macaulay 79 
 
 criticised on the principles of any other school, 
 but on the intrinsic merits of his work as a 
 history. And our judgment of so vast an 
 undertaking should not overlook his own ad- 
 mission that his ideal, like all ideals, was set 
 on a height : " A historian," he says, " such as 
 we have been attempting to describe would be 
 an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers 
 scarcely compatible with each other must be 
 tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall 
 sooner see another Shakespeare or another 
 Homer." 
 
 One aim of Macaulay's method was a 
 statement of facts so full as to avoid the 
 danger of partial treatment, which besets the 
 "abstract" histories. He wished less to argue 
 principles than to leave the complete evidence 
 with the reader, and allow him to draw his own 
 conclusions. Yet it was in spite of everything 
 inevitable, for reasons we have noticed already, 
 that he should be charged with Whig partiality. 
 While party government is with us under the
 
 8o Lord Macaulay 
 
 same old English forms, no historian is likely 
 to escape this blame. It is an ancient story of 
 the physician who advised his patient to read 
 Macaulay 's History, or some other pleasing- work 
 of fiction. But this is a charge from which he 
 has on the whole been absolved. 
 
 The party spirit of the Essays, as we have 
 seen, wore off as Macaulay's judgment ripened. 
 And if we compare the Edinburgh speech of 
 1839, or the Reform speech of 183 1, with the 
 Edinburgh speech of 1852, the difference of tone 
 is most marked. " In peace or in convulsion, by 
 the law or in spite of the law, through the 
 Parliament, or over the Parliament," he says 
 in 1 83 1, "Reform must be carried." But the 
 following is characteristic of him. after that great 
 struggle was over : " Let us prize our consti- 
 tution ; let us purify it ; let us amend it ; but 
 do not let us destroy it. If we love civil and 
 religious freedom, let us in the day of danger 
 uphold law and order ; if we are zealous for 
 law and order, let us prize, as our best safeguard
 
 Lord Macau/ay 81 
 
 of law and order, civil and religious freedom." 
 (Edin. 1852.) (\Nor could any judgment be 
 maturcr than these early words of the History: 
 "No man not utterly destitute of judgment and 
 candour will deny that there are many deep 
 stains on the fame of the party to which he 
 belongs, or that the party to which he is opposed 
 may justly boast of many illustrious names, of 
 many heroic actions, and of many great services 
 rendered to the State. The truth is that, though 
 both parties have often seriously erred, England 
 could have spared neither. If in her institutions 
 freedom and order, the advantages arising from 
 innovation and the advantages arising from 
 prescription have been combined to an extent 
 elsewhere unknown, we may attribute this happy 
 peculiarity to the strenuous conflicts and alter- 
 nate victories of two rival confederacies of 
 statesmen, a confederacy zealous for authority 
 and antiquity, and a confederacy zealous for 
 liberty and progress." (Ch. I.) And although 
 it is true that no one can close his work without 
 m. 6
 
 82 Lord Macaulay 
 
 a thrill of admiration for the party and the 
 Prince who vindicated our freedom in its darkest 
 hour, it would still be difficult to point to any 
 part of it where the politician gets the better 
 of the historian. Macaulay had his antipathies 
 to individuals. He has not done Marlborough 
 justice ; but I doubt if he has done him very 
 serious injustice. In point of evidence his 
 condemnation is wrong, but much less so in 
 N point of conclusion. But, individuals apart, 
 every turn of the History shows party animosity 
 well in hand. His criticism of the Whigs at the 
 time of the Exclusion Bill is unsparing. His 
 remarks on the clergy are offensively spoken, 
 but Thackeray's Dr Tusher is not a pleasing 
 picture. Over the Revolution itself there is no 
 party paean sung ; there is only praise for the 
 reformer who knew where to pause. There is 
 no exultation over the schism in the Church, but 
 only censure for the Whigs who rejoiced over it. 
 There is no garbling of facts regarding the 
 Junto; Russell was an undetected traitor; the
 
 Lord Macaulay 8$ 
 
 doubts on Somers' private life, dim enough as 
 they are, are not concealed ; Montague " had 
 great faults, and unhappily faults not of the 
 noblest kind " ; Wharton is mercilessly exposed. 
 The chiefs of the Tory party show best in this 
 celebrated gallery of statesmen. Macaulay's 
 tone well satisfies the words of Polybius : " A 
 good man should be attached to his friends and 
 to his country, and out of sympathy for these 
 should hate their enemies and love their friends. 
 But when a man assumes the attitude of mind 
 that is proper to history, he is bound to leave 
 out of sight all such considerations, and he must 
 often speak well of his enemies and adorn them 
 with the highest praises when the facts demand 
 it ; and again he must often blame his nearest 
 friends and bring home their faults to them 
 whenever their conduct requires. For if you 
 take away the truth out of history what is left 
 is merely an unprofitable tale." .^Some perhaps T - 
 will not thank us for not taking Macaulay's 
 impartiality for granted ; but the hot conflict 
 
 6—2
 
 84 Lord Macaulay 
 
 of his political life would in itself require this 
 vindication even of the author of the Essay on 
 History. 
 
 The gravest doubts have been raised against 
 Macaulay's new departure in historical method 
 — his comprehensiveness of treatment. His 
 criterion of historical data was a very broad 
 one. The happiness of mankind he held to 
 be the most general and elastic expression of 
 the function of government (cf. on Mitford and 
 passim). All that tended to promote this, in 
 any sphere of life, was the historian's material ; 
 all the sources from which information regarding 
 it could be drawn were his authorities. History 
 must stand on no etiquette ; it is her function 
 " to call up our ancestors before us with all their 
 peculiarities of language, manner, and garb, to 
 show us over their houses, to seat us at their 
 tables, to rummage their old-fashioned ward- 
 robes." On this point, Thackeray's judgment 
 must be added to Macaulay's : " The Muse of 
 History," says Esmond, "hath encumbered her-
 
 Lord Macaulay 85 
 
 self with ceremony as well as her sister of the 
 theatre. She too wears the mask and the co- 
 thurnus and speaks to measure. She too in our 
 age busies herself only with the affairs of kings ; 
 waiting on them obsequiously and stately, as if 
 she were but a mistress of court ceremonies and 
 had nothing to do with the registering of the 
 affairs of the common people.... I wonder shall 
 History ever pull off her periwig and cease to 
 be court-ridden ? Shall we see something of 
 France and England besides Versailles and 
 Windsor?... Why shall History go on kneeling 
 to the end of time ? I am for having her rise 
 up off her knees and take a natural posture.... In 
 a word, I would have history familiar rather 
 than heroic ; and think that Mr Hogarth and 
 Mr Fielding will give our children a much better 
 idea of the manners of the present age in England 
 than the Court Gazette and the newspapers which 
 we get thence." 
 
 (On this matter differences of opinion will 
 be fundamental and final. Some will say with
 
 86 Lord Macaulay 
 
 Aristotle that the unity of the State is its 
 polity, and that whatever does not bear with 
 some degree of immediacy on the development 
 of the polity is not history at all, but anti- 
 quities j all very interesting, but out of place. 
 It belongs, they will say, to a specialist, just as 
 do the histories of literature and science. History 
 proper is political, the tale of how 
 
 " Freedom slowly broadens down 
 From precedent to precedent." 
 
 "^ (Others will answer that there must be, as the 
 centre and point of meeting of all the specialised 
 studies, a history not of this or of that, but 
 which draws together all the threads, showing 
 the nation in the concrete as it is, not merely 
 the separated aspects of it in the abstract) This 
 will not be the history of politics, or of litera- 
 ture, or of science, or of fashion, but history 
 plain and simple, with no adjective at all. They 
 will say that without such a central study all 
 the special studies are abstract and bloodless 
 and in the air.
 
 Lord Macaiday 87 
 
 Under strong influences, positive and nega-~ 
 tive, Macaulay chose the latter view. The 
 magnitude of the task his choice set to him 
 was immense. His method and his success 
 must be judged solely by the result. 
 
 It has been objected to the Third Chapter, 
 which unfolds the spectacle of a nation's life in 
 one view, that it is defective in historical spirit, 
 in that it compares the past, to its disparage- 
 ment, with the present. Now plainly, an his- 
 torian who sets himself to review the periods of 
 national development, must begin somewhere ; 
 and the only time he can compare at the outset 
 with that past with which he begins is the 
 present. Further, such a comparison js surely 
 that which will make the past most vivid, and 
 which will throw its strange features into the 
 sharpest relief. And surely there is nothing 
 either new or shocking in the fact that such a 
 comparison must disparage the past, at least in 
 the sense of showing its inferiority to the present. 
 We need waste no sentiment in bemoaning
 
 88 Loi'd Macau/ay 
 
 that. And it ought further to be observed that 
 Macaulay's review of England in 1685 is only 
 the first, in all likelihood, of a number of such 
 reviews which were intended ; the next period 
 would have been compared, to its credit, with 
 1685. 
 
 Another "low-minded objection" may also 
 be met. Mr Morison points out that the task 
 Macaulay took in hand would, at his rate of 
 working, have taken him a hundred and fifty 
 years and fifty volumes to accomplish. " This," 
 he says, " is almost a practical refutation of the 
 method he adopted. And yet such an absurd 
 result could not, on his principles, be avoided." 
 And Mr Harrison points out that Gibbon wrote 
 the history of a century in the space required 
 by Macaulay for a single year. But let us not 
 forget that Macaulay's ideal was a History 
 which should be so full as to be exhaustive of 
 the narrative of the period. Suppose that it 
 would take fifty volumes to finish his period ; 
 suppose that it would take a hundred and fifty
 
 Lord Macau lay 89 
 
 years of life. Let us ask — how many volumes 
 have already been required for that period ? 
 how many years of life have collectively been 
 given to it ? There are many more than the 
 sum charged against Macaulay ; but had his 
 method been carried on, a single vast work was 
 to have taken the place of a multitude of lesser 
 works. This technical objection can therefore 
 be met on its own ground. 
 
 It is a better argument that the details of 4- 
 his History were not under sufficient control. 
 It must be allowed that this assertion is well 
 grounded. Development is not clearly enough 
 traced ; individuals and events have too great a 
 share of the narrative. It is not that Macaulay 
 was unaware of the ideas of social progress. 
 Nor is it that the stages of progress are not 
 marked down in his History. What sends us 
 unsatisfied away is in part the want of emphasis 
 upon them, but chiefly the absence of retro- 
 spective comparison. Macaulay rarely turns 
 back to see the ground he has traversed. He
 
 90 Lord Macaulay 
 
 shows us the milestones ; but he does not call 
 on us to look from one toward the last, in order 
 to get a view of our course as a whole. The 
 milestones are not the most interesting things 
 he has to show us ; he indicates them, but then 
 turns again to delight our vision with the colours 
 of the scenery. We become oblivious of distance 
 or direction. When we are come to our journey's 
 end what we remember least is the road we 
 journeyed on. Or, to adopt his own figure, 
 though he shows us the ebb and flow of all the 
 little waves of popular feeling, civil and religious, 
 yet he fails to sufficiently call our attention to 
 the rising of the whole tide, to 
 
 " Watch what main-currents draw the years." 
 
 He continually displays the law by which the 
 reactions of civil and religious feeling go from 
 extreme to extreme — in 1660, in 1678, in 168 1, 
 in 1685: but the "still, sad music" is often 
 drowned in these shoutings of his London 
 crowds, with their " No Popery" and " Long live
 
 Lord Macaulay 91 
 
 the King." We are not criticising Macaulay on 
 the principles of the modern schools; we are 
 taking his own ideal of history and examining 
 how he has lived up to it. Our complaint is 
 that he has not kept a due proportion between 
 the two aspects of history he sought to inter- 
 twine. It is his old error. His imagination is' 
 stronger than his reason ; it is a scenic rather 
 than an intellectual imagination. It lacks the 7^ 
 ballast of central controlling ideas. Hence 
 continuity of development is apt to be hidden 
 in the History. The overtones sometimes 
 drown the tune. In a nation as in an individual 
 there is that within which passeth show ; the 
 interpretation of which requires a deeper imagi- 
 nation than that which loves the suits and 
 trappings of life. A nation is an organism : 
 its development must as such be traced. Yet 
 even in his remarks on the Revolution as a 
 whole, where surely a halt should have been 
 called, Macaulay 's treatment is painfully meagre. 
 He gives himself up for the most part to a
 
 92 Lord Macaulay 
 
 rhetorical paean. Let it be understood where 
 precisely the error lies. It is not in that 
 Macaulay omits the notice of constitutional 
 principles ; it is in that the illuminating touch 
 of retrospective comparison is lacking. The 
 " philosophy of history " is there and it is dwelt 
 
 on ; but it is not Continuously traced. /)Indi- 
 
 viduals are made to act with too great a degree 
 
 of isolation from social movements of which 
 
 they are but the expression. We may still 
 
 reject the interpretation that Macaulay wrote 
 
 a romance " for young ladies to read " — his nam 
 
 plebecula gaudct. This was not his aim, and, 
 
 spite of all, it is not the result. His History 
 
 has many thoughtful touches, many reflections 
 
 on the constitutional position. But it has not 
 
 enough — that is the whole fault./ The attention 
 
 is apt to be held less oiT_deyj^loprnjmts, than nn- 
 
 events) 
 
 Dum fugiunt equitum turmae peditumque catervae; 
 Mox trahitur manibus regum fortuna retortis, 
 Esseda festinant, pilenta, petorrita, naves, 
 Captivum portatur ebur, captiva Corinthus.
 
 Lord Maccmlay 
 
 Does this fault condemn the method? Mr 
 Morley thinks it does. I hesitate to agree. A 
 few strokes only are required to adjust the 
 balance of the work. They might so easily 
 have been added that their absence is vexatious. 
 But it must at least be agreed that the work 
 itself is a cripple, grandly arrayed, but still a 
 cripple for the want of them. 
 
 And yet the fault is for many reasons a - 
 splendid one. Against it in the account must 
 be placed the brilliant and unsurpassed variety 
 of Macaulay's narrative. There is nothing equal 
 to it for vividness in all the works of serious 
 literature. Critics have exhausted metaphor in 
 speaking of it. It is a drama, an oratorio, a 
 mosaic, a field of the cloth of gold. Macaulay's 
 native genius of description fairly revels amid 
 the wonders of the great past of our country. 
 He draws all the threads into one pattern of our 
 national life. And between the lines there is 
 pattern within and overlaid on pattern ; threads 
 crossed and interlaced, and all contributing their
 
 94 Lord Macaulay 
 
 moiety of colour. He gave to truth the vividness 
 of fancy — effecit tit vera fictis libentius legerentur. 
 He made history a moving drama ; plot and un- 
 derplot are fitted together. Indeed, if Carlyle's 
 French Revolution has been well styled an epic, 
 drama is the only apt term for Macaulay's 
 History of England and for his presentment of 
 William. As we close the record, scene upon 
 scene rises up before us, all garnished with the 
 splendour of great detail of circumstance. We 
 see the thin and youthful figure of the Stadt- 
 holder. We see him at Salisbury, grave and 
 unruffled amid many a faction, controlling, pre- 
 paring, and waiting ; in the banqueting Hall, 
 the crowned King of England ; wounded and 
 victorious at the Boyne, or saving a lost day at 
 Landen ; in the death-chamber of Mary ; amid 
 those he could trust at Loo, at Whitehall amid 
 perfidy and intrigue ; bursting all the meshes of 
 treason, pressing with a single eye to one end, 
 and laying down the sceptre amid the gathering 
 clouds of crisis and of war. " A ring and a lock
 
 Lord Macaulay 95 
 
 of the hair of Mary " — these are the touches 
 which make him real to us. Macaulay wrote 
 history with enthusiasm. He worshipped Clio 
 as a Muse. He carved the severe outlines and 
 bare stones of her temple into reliefs of her 
 battles, her revolutions, her coronations, her 
 deaths. In the niches he set the statues of her 
 dead with the pose and expression of life. Here, 
 on this relief, we see the Bishops passing through 
 a shouting populace ; there is the battle of the 
 Boyne, there is Sedgemoor, that kilted struggle 
 is the treachery of Glencoe; there is the standard 
 of Monmouth, and there the burning of Alice 
 Lisle. In this niche are the dark harsh features 
 of Danby ; in that niche, the repulsive lineaments 
 of Oates. Here is the serenity of Somers, and 
 there is Jeffreys with his cruel sneer. And there, 
 in his own high place of honour, is the slender 
 figure, the high and pensive brow, the thin care- 
 worn cheek, the eagle eye, the firm lip of William. 
 All honour is due to Macaulay for the example 
 of his work in history. He pressed into notice
 
 96 Lord Macaulay 
 
 a neglected ideal — an ideal which he was the 
 very man to enhance. He made history live as 
 few have done before him or since his time. 
 Even those who deny his method would rather 
 we had not been without his work. 
 
 It is an interesting speculation whether 
 Macaulay 's success would not have been greater 
 had he attempted the historical novel rather 
 than history pure and simple. A work like 
 Esmond would, one would think, have suited his 
 genius admirably. He is so fond of the ramifi- 
 cations of history that it is almost strange he 
 did not turn his mind and his imagination this 
 way. Yet except for an admirable " Fragment 
 of a Roman Tale," written at College in 1823, 
 he left this mine unworked. The more we read 
 his History, the more we reflect on the imagina- 
 tive bent of his disposition, the more, I think, 
 we ought to wonder whether the company of 
 Scott and Thackeray was not more suited to 
 him than that of Clarendon and Hume and 
 Hallam. Certain it is, that his faults as an
 
 Lord Macatday 97 
 
 historian are such as would have been his merits 
 as an historical novelist. — 
 
 No one except Gray has achieved equal 
 poetic fame with Macaulay on so small a volume 
 of poems. But Macaulay's fame depends on 
 different qualities of mind. If we say that poets 
 must be born and not made, I doubt if Macaulay 
 is a poet at all. Yet the nation has chosen to 
 honour him as such. Some enquiry is therefore 
 needed into the nature of that style of poetry in 
 which he excels. 
 
 We have already found it most fitting to 
 classify Macaulay's genius as secondary, the 
 distinction of this from primary literature being 
 one of kind and not of degree. His poems well 
 suit this classification. He is not a poet of the 
 same order as Milton or Dante or Shakespeare ; 
 he has not 
 
 '"The vision and the faculty divine." 
 His imagination is not creative, but reproductive. 
 It is not by the mystic influence of fancy or deep 
 insight that he affects us ; it is by the force of 
 
 m. 7
 
 98 Lord Macaiday 
 
 events as such to thrill us by the thought of 
 them. He is a ballad poet. 
 
 Ballad poetry is the simple narration in verse 
 of deeds which in themselves appeal to us. It 
 is native to those early stages of life where 
 imagination is still scenic and pictorial, before 
 deep and serious views of life are in vogue, when 
 the emotions of men are still only those of 
 feudalism and romance — the emotions of love, 
 and war, and the chase. The poetry of such men 
 is but the versified tale of great deeds told 
 plainly, without the consciousness that the tale 
 of them is poetry at all. The ballad poet is 
 "the bard of buoyancy, hope, heroism"; the 
 chords of nature he plays on are those which in 
 the struggle to live are earliest formed. 
 
 What then are the characteristics of such 
 poetry? First among them is its simplicity. 
 The ballad singer does not know he is a poet ; 
 he is full of his tale and eager to tell it. He 
 speaks with the eagerness of a breathless mes- 
 senger, who does not think of his words, but
 
 Lord Macaulay 99 
 
 only of his story. He hurries to its consum- 
 mation, he thinks only of that, he may not 
 stay, he has no time to wait. What we have, 
 therefore, in all the old and native ballads is 
 " the direct word, the unrestrained emotion ; 
 a breathless, rushing narrative of a simple suc- 
 cession of events told with the utmost sim- 
 plicity." As an old song has it, the ballad 
 poets are 
 
 " Those venerable ancient song-enditers," 
 who 
 
 "Soared many a pitch above our modern writers; 
 With rough majestic force they moved the heart, 
 And strength and nature made amends for art." 
 
 A word and a blow were their ancient manners ; 
 and their poetry stands on ceremony just as 
 little. 
 
 To this simplicity of language is added an 
 equal simplicity of feeling. There are no moral 
 reflections in a ballad ; the poet has no time for 
 that, even if he had the disposition. He leaves 
 his tale to tell with its own effect. Morality in 
 
 7—2
 
 ioo Lord Macaulay 
 
 a ballad would be like a discord in a tune ; it 
 could not be more out of place. As beauty is 
 spoiled by the consciousness of it, or wit by the 
 indication of it, so is the ballad spoiled if the 
 poet becomes a moralist. All this is alien to 
 the age and spirit of such poetry. In the same 
 way, there must be no exordium, no " sing 
 Heavenly Muse," no " /u,fjviv aeiSe Bed" and no 
 descriptions of scenery or circumstance to hinder 
 the direct and rapid progress of the tale. The 
 balladist plunges into his story and goes straight 
 through with it. Take such characteristic open- 
 ings as those of " Sir Patrick Spens " or " Keith 
 of Ravelstone" : 
 
 "The King sits in Dunfermline town 
 Drinking die blude-red wine : 
 
 ' Oh, where will I get a skeely skipper 
 To sail this ship o' mine?'" 
 
 and 
 
 " The murmur of the morning ghost 
 
 That keeps the shadowy kine : 
 ' Oh, Keith of Ravelstone, 
 
 The sorrows of thy line!" : 
 
 This is the same as is implied in saying that in
 
 Lord Macaulay 101 
 
 the ballad the poet obliterates himself. He tells 
 only his tale. Ballad poetry is from its nature 
 essentially objective. The lyric is the opposite 
 extreme. And lastly, the emotions that are 
 touched must be primitive, must be those of the 
 age to which the ballad is native. Ballads are, 
 in Warton's lines, 
 
 " The songs to savage virtue dear 
 That won of yore the public ear, 
 E'er Polity, sedate and sage, 
 Had quenched the fire of feudal rage." 
 
 It is plain that in the nineteenth century 
 such poetry can exist only as a hothouse growth 
 — as an exotic. The ballads of our time are 
 imitations ; they are no longer the spontaneous 
 songs of the people, but the laborious products 
 of the study. To write them requires a mastery 
 of the difficult art of concealing art. An old 
 ballad writer was unconscious that he was a 
 poet ; but a modern balladist must be highly 
 self-conscious. He must consciously strive to 
 throw off his highest emotions, and transfer
 
 102 Lord Macaulay 
 
 himself to a ruder frame of mind. He must 
 criticise his work with a keen eye, lest any word 
 betray the twentieth century. He is aware that 
 it is artificial and forced. 
 
 That Macaulay's poems are exotics there 
 can therefore be no question. We know with 
 what labour they were polished and burnished 
 into shape. The question for a critic is not 
 whether they are forced growths, but whether, 
 in spite of themselves, they reveal it; not whether 
 they come from the study, but whether they 
 smell of the lamp. 
 
 So far as their vigour is concerned, there can 
 be but one opinion. It is free and fresh and 
 thrilling. " I could scarcely read them," said 
 Mrs Browning, " and keep lying down. They 
 seemed to draw me up to my feet, as the 
 mesmeric powers are said to do." " His 
 ballads," says Mrs Humphrey Ward, " have 
 the clear resonance, the metallic note, of the 
 trumpet." Other questions apart, no ballad 
 in our language stirs us like Horatins. Few
 
 Lord Macaulay 103 
 
 passages thrust at our feelings so directly as the 
 speech of Icilius. To read it with appreciation 
 is to go about frowning, and with a quick step, 
 for half-an-hour after. In Freedom, Macaulay 
 found his congenial Muse. 
 
 But by many characteristics the spirit of 
 modernity betrays itself in the ballads of 
 Macaulay, as in those of Scott. It is a mark 
 of the ballad not to dwell on description, as of 
 scenery. Nothing must delay the tale. Yet 
 Horatiiis opens with such a description as 
 perceptibly makes a pause in the action of 
 the poem. Horatius at the bridge is the centre 
 of this story ; to his deed the tale ought to 
 hasten ; what would it have mattered to an old 
 balladist where Porsena's troops came from ? 
 He would not have thought of dwelling on 
 that. His tale would have begun with the 
 
 lines 
 
 The Fathers of the City 
 They sat all night and day, 
 
 For every hour some horseman came 
 With tidings of dismay.
 
 104 Lord Macaulay 
 
 To eastward and to westward 
 Have spread the Tuscan bands, 
 
 Nor house, nor fence, nor dovecote 
 In Crustumerium stands." 
 
 Consider in the same way the opening of the 
 Battle of Lake Regillus. The long reflective 
 exordium is quite out of the ballad spirit. 
 Without doubt, to preserve this spirit, we should 
 start from these lines in the fifth stanza : 
 
 "The Herald of the Latines 
 
 From Gabii came in state, 
 The Herald of the Latines 
 
 Passed through Rome's Eastern Gate, 
 The Herald of the Latines 
 
 Did in our Forum stand ; 
 And there he did his office, 
 
 A sceptre in his hand." 
 
 Anyone who will refer to the Old English 
 Ballads will see at once how immediately they 
 plunge us into the action, and how rapidly they 
 take us through it. The opening of Virginia is 
 truer to this old spirit. 
 
 Yet it must be granted that Macaulay has a 
 manner of description which is his own, which is
 
 Lord Macaulay 105 
 
 consonant with all else we know of him, and 
 which does not hold the attention at a halt as 
 description of scenery in general does. He 
 paints all his scenery in moving colours. It is 
 not still life ; it is all in action. It is for this 
 reason that we are insensible to any pause in his 
 ballads, where otherwise we certainly should 
 feel it. Compare these descriptions : 
 
 " Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm : 
 And in the chasm are foam and yellow sands ; 
 Beyond, red roofs about a narrow wharf 
 In cluster ; then a mouldered church ; and higher, 
 A long street climbs to one tall-towered mill ; 
 And high in Heaven behind it a gray down 
 With Danish barrows ; and a hazelwood, 
 By autumn nutters haunted, flourishes 
 Green in a cuplike hollow of the down." 
 
 {Enoch Ardeii : init.) 
 and 
 
 " Tall are the oaks whose acorns 
 
 Drop in dark Auser's rill, 
 Fat are the stags that champ the boughs 
 
 Of the Ciminian hill ; 
 Beyond all streams Clitumnus 
 
 Is to the herdsman dear, 
 Best of all pools the fowler loves 
 
 The great Volsinian mere.
 
 106 Lord Macaulay 
 
 But now no sound of woodman 
 
 Is heard by Auser's rill, 
 No hunter tracks the stag's green path 
 
 Up the Ciminian hill ; 
 Unwatched, along Clitumnus 
 
 Grazes the milk-white steer, 
 Unharmed, the waterfowl may dip 
 
 In the Volsinian mere." 
 
 Both are descriptions of scenery ; and yet how 
 different. The one is quiescent, the other all in 
 terms of life and action. The latter is Macaulay's 
 constant mode of description. He peoples his 
 scenery : makes it, as it were, a function of 
 personal activities. Take such passages as these : 
 
 " From lordly Volaterrae, 
 
 Where scowls the far-famed hold 
 Piled by the hands of giants 
 
 For godlike Kings of old ; 
 From seagirt Populonia, 
 
 Whose sentinels descry 
 Sardinia's snowy mountain tops 
 
 Fringing the southern sky." 
 
 and 
 
 " The harvest of Aretium 
 
 This year old men shall reap, 
 This year young boys in Umbro 
 Shall plunge the struggling sheep.
 
 Lord Macaulay 107 
 
 And, in the vats of Luna, 
 
 This year, the must shall foam 
 
 Round the white feet of laughing girls, 
 Whose sires have marched for Rome." 
 
 Such quotations could be multiplied at pleasure. 
 The effect of this method of description is that 
 the attention is kept alive and active; it scarcely 
 feels that the poet is really pausing in his 
 narrative. Although therefore scenic description 
 is alien to the ballad, Macaulay has made a 
 compromise which almost conceals the intrusion 
 of a modern innovation. He describes ; but in 
 terms of life. And few but will pardon a tech- 
 nical liberty which has given us these lines. 
 
 There are, naturally, other touches which 
 betray Macaulay's Lays as exotics, as con- 
 sciously written poems instead of rhymes of 
 the people. As in his prose, he is fond in his 
 poetry of opening up little glimpses into the 
 background, of dashing in a little colour with 
 each name he mentions. Compare the lines on 
 
 "Aruns of Volsinium 
 Who slew the great wild boar —
 
 io8 Lord Macaulay 
 
 The great wild boar that had its den 
 Amid the reeds of Cosa's fen, 
 And wasted fields, and slaughtered men 
 Along Albinia's shore." 
 
 And those on how 
 
 Valerius smote down Julius 
 
 Of Rome's great Julian line, 
 Julius, who left his mansion 
 
 High on tJic Velian hill, 
 And through all turns of weal and woe 
 
 Followed proud Tarqitin still. 
 Now right across proud Tarquin 
 
 A corpse was Julius laid " etc. 
 
 A ballad poet or singer, eager to come to the 
 climax of his tale, would not dart in this fashion 
 along the lines of needless association, nor fill 
 in these purely literary garnishings of the story. 
 Always alien to the strict ballad spirit, they are 
 a distinct error when introduced in such a 
 passage as Virginius' speech to his daughter. 
 This is perhaps the least fortunate passage 
 Macaulay has penned in verse. Such a piece 
 of literary refinement is an incongruous patch 
 on a poem which aims at reproducing the old 
 simplicity of the ballad. Virginius is actually
 
 Lord Macaulay 109 
 
 made, at this intense moment, to indulge in 
 phrases like " Capua's marble halls," and in 
 comparisons like that of Appius to a kite. We 
 see now the effect of allowing the thin end of 
 the wedge : the modern spirit has gone too far 
 and defaced the old style of poetry. Far truer 
 to the ballad spirit are the simple words in which 
 Horatius dedicates himself: 
 
 " Oh Tiber, Father Tiber, 
 
 To whom the Romans pray, 
 A Roman's life, a Roman's arms 
 Take thou in charge this day." 
 
 That is all. The whole scene appeals by its 
 own force. 
 
 There is a tone, too, about the modern ballads, 
 of a higher morality than belongs to the period 
 of the true ballad songs. The old theme is war 
 and the chase and love, with perhaps a word of 
 rude morality here and there. We have ad- 
 vanced from that stage and our poetry cannot 
 but reflect that advance. In Macaulay, over 
 and above the excitement of event, our sympathy
 
 1 10 Lord Macau/ay 
 
 is enlisted on one side or other as being the side 
 
 of right against wrong. There is a civic tone, 
 
 also, in Macaulay, as Mr Morison has indicated; 
 
 although " the real romantic ballad and its 
 
 modern imitations properly refer to times in 
 
 which the notion of a State has not emerged. 
 
 The polis is not to be found in Homer, or in 
 
 Chevy Chase, or in Scott." Horatius offers his 
 
 life '• for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples 
 
 of his gods " — not merely in an old-time spirit 
 
 of defiance and war — 
 
 " And for the holy maidens 
 
 Who feed the eternal flame, 
 To save them from false Sextus 
 That wrought the deed of shame." 
 
 They who fight are " Romans in Rome's quarrel " ; 
 
 it is no Homeric contest 
 
 alev dpiareveiv kol viveipoytw e/x/xevai aWcov. 
 
 And in the battle at Regillus we feel of the 
 
 gods, before they say it, that 
 
 " For the right, we come to fight, 
 Before the ranks of Rome." 
 
 In Virginia the civic and moral feelings are
 
 Lord Macaulay 1 1 1 
 
 strongest of all. So far as such moral motives 
 are added to heroic deeds, a sentiment is revealed 
 which is in advance of the age of the ballad. 
 There is less of it in Scott than in Macaulay, 
 less in Macaulay than in Wordsworth. 
 
 By all such departures from the old spirit 
 of the autochthonous ballad songs, we can find 
 out- their modern imitations. Yet to a modern 
 reader all this will be unnoticed, and our criti- 
 cism, it may be, will savour of the pedantic. 
 But we ought to remember that the same reason 
 which leads to the commission of what are 
 strictly errors, leads the reader also to overlook 
 them. They are there because the author is a 
 modern author ; they are not seen because the 
 reader is a modern reader. None the less ought 
 they to be observed when, as in Macaulay's case, 
 the poet makes a distinct bid for fame as a 
 ballad singer. 
 
 Macaulay's lesser poems require little com- 
 ment. His Sermon in a Churchyard does not 
 gain by comparison with Gray's Elegy, unless
 
 112 Lord Macaulay 
 
 in the great purity of its English ; his religious 
 poems show only in another aspect the recept- 
 iveness of his mind to such influences. Naseby 
 is the best of these works ; its metre is tuneful 
 and well fits the spirit of the theme. His fame 
 will be attached to his Lays. And, exotic or 
 not exotic, criticism will not dull the fire of 
 those brilliant verses. Innovator or not, correct 
 or not, he is the most splendid balladist of this 
 century ; less complex than Scott, more vigorous 
 than Coleridge, far fresher than the Laodamia. 
 Nor is it easy to remember even among the old 
 ballads the same vigour and life which shoots 
 through the Lays. They speak our language 
 with beauty, and our sentiments truly. A mar- 
 tial hurry and rush, a spirit that is clear and 
 high and warlike and noble against odds — these 
 are the things which in a brave and free land 
 are most potent to thrill the soul and make the 
 blood leap. And Macaulay's versification is 
 splendidly deceptive, continually exciting the 
 mind, and hustling the attention to keep it
 
 Lord Macazilay 113 
 
 active, breaking through the old barriers of 
 alternate measure, and holding us often in 
 breathless pause by the ring of many con- 
 secutive rhymes. It rises and falls with free 
 irregularity to suit the theme. Such sentiments 
 so expressed give the type of his poetic genius; 
 nothing that is lofty or profound : but directness, 
 effectiveness, vividness of presentation of those 
 things which stir and disturb what is next to 
 the best in our nature, — its spirit, its animus, its 
 courage never to submit nor yield. 
 
 Thus far Macaulay as a man of letters. He 
 is an interpreter between us and great minds of 
 the past. His enthusiasm is full of heat and 
 force ; his language is full of grace and sweet- 
 ness ; his page is brilliant and vivid. And he 
 himself is one of whom Literature may boast ; 
 all that we know of the man adds new loveliness 
 to what he has written. There are but a few 
 men whose names we thus treasure for what 
 they were, whose writings we cherish, spite of 
 faults that are plain to the reason, for the 
 m. 8
 
 114 Lord Mac an lay 
 
 reflection we see in them of true greatness and 
 nobility of mind ; and of these men Johnson 
 and Macaulay are, to me, the greatest. Even 
 had they themselves not made literature, we 
 could still take pride in thinking that such are 
 the men whom literature has made. Such alumni 
 reflect the glory of, and are an ornament to, the 
 \ pursuit. No criticism of what he has said will 
 deny Macaulay's splendid influence, an influence 
 that has not passed away, but has been absorbed 
 into the vital spirit of the literature of our 
 century ; an influence revealed not less in our 
 purity of style, than in the purity of our love of 
 literature herself. All that she made him, he 
 has helped to make his age. On this ground 
 we stand surest in predicting his immortality. 
 His "glorious lady with the eyes of light" will 
 continue to fulfil to him her promise : 
 
 " Yes ; thou wilt love me with exceeding love, 
 And I will tenfold all that love repay." 
 
 There are many who think that Macaulay's 
 best genius was for public life. And although
 
 Lord Macaulay 1 1 5 
 
 this was not his own feeling, it must be admitted 
 that his speeches are sounder and more solid 
 than anything he wrote, while they are still 
 among the outstanding models of our national 
 oratory. As it is, however, he gave to the State, 
 not without inward grudgings, but a brief portion 
 of his life. Of high office, he had only a taste. 
 His political work in England was done for the 
 most part on the floor of the House, rather than 
 in an Office of State. His speeches sum up by 
 far the most valuable part of it. 
 
 He achieved political fame with marvellous 
 rapidity : his public life is a brief meteor-like 
 flash of genius. Nearly all that is great in it is 
 connected with the events of those few turbulent 
 years, during which he stepped at one stride 
 from obscurity into the front of political life, and 
 fought in the van, second almost to none, for 
 emancipation and Reform. 
 
 " To him, as to the burning levin, 
 Short, bright, resistless course was given.'' 
 
 Few statesmen have made their mark so rapidly, 
 
 8—2
 
 i 1 6 Lord Mac an lay 
 
 so decisively, and so triumphantly. In but a 
 short period of active conflict, at an early age, 
 and while still in his political apprenticeship, he 
 made his name a name of dread to the most 
 skilled Parliamentarians of the Tory Party, and 
 his voice a rallying note amid those who rushed 
 the outworks in the struggle for political freedom. 
 It was in a brief and brilliant moment, a moment 
 of crisis which found him ready, that he did his 
 greatest work as an orator. Thenceforth he was 
 content to see others carry on the torch, and to 
 stand forth but now and then in offensive or 
 defensive debate. 
 
 His weakness as a man of letters was, in 
 great part, his strength as a debater. The 
 House of Commons has never been patient of 
 theorists. There was a time, in the days of such 
 as Addison, when literary eminence was the 
 surest step to an appointment from the Crown. 
 That day is now past ; and even the great men 
 of letters who adorn, and have adorned the 
 House of Commons in recent years, have not,
 
 Lord Macaulay 1 1 7 
 
 for all their deeper wisdom, proved in debate to 
 be the match of men whose readiness has been 
 greater than their learning". Resource is a far 
 more important quality of the politician than 
 depth. The House of Commons does not want 
 abstract reasonings in political science ; what it 
 requires is practical civil wisdom, coolness in the 
 heat of crisis, ready intuition of the right thing 
 to do, decisive utterance of the chosen policy, 
 firmness in carrying it right through. It does 
 not want men who expound consistent and 
 symmetrical policies ; but men who can quickly 
 adapt their policy to new facts, who can see the 
 practically expedient course to take, who prefer 
 the compromise that is useful in the present to 
 consistency with the past, who stand by plain 
 maxims of common sense rather than see much 
 to be said for both sides, who can hit hard rather 
 than reason profoundly. " We Englishmen," as 
 Burke says, " stop very short of the principles 
 upon which we support any given part of our 
 constitution ; or even the whole of it together...
 
 u8 Lord Macaulay 
 
 This is nothing but what is natural and proper. 
 All government, indeed every human benefit 
 and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent 
 act, is founded on compromise and barter. 
 We balance inconveniences ; we give and take ; 
 we remit some rights that we may enjoy 
 others ; and we choose rather to be happy 
 citizens than subtle disputants... Man acts from 
 adequate motives relative to his interest, 
 and not on metaphysical speculations." It is 
 slight wonder, therefore, that Macaulay rapidly 
 achieved fame in Parliament. His ready en- 
 thusiasms, the quickness with which he made up 
 his mind, the tenacity with which he held to 
 his convictions, his distaste for theory, his 
 respect for history, were the very qualities 
 to win him success. He has often shown us 
 that this was his own estimate of political 
 method in England. "To think nothing of 
 symmetry and much of convenience ; never to 
 innovate except when some grievance is felt ; 
 never to innovate except so far as to get rid
 
 Lord Macaulay i 19 
 
 of the grievance ; never to lay down any pro- 
 position of wider extent than the particular 
 case for which it is necessary to provide ; these 
 are the rules which have, from the age of John 
 to the age of Victoria, generally guided the 
 deliberations of our two hundred and fifty 
 Parliaments. Our national distaste for what- 
 ever is abstract in political science amounts 
 undoubtedly to a fault ; yet it is perhaps a fault 
 on the right side." {History, Ch. XI.) Such is 
 the temper to which his own mind was adapted. 
 It is characteristic of him to speak as he spoke 
 on the Reform Bill, when he said : " I praise the 
 Ministers for not attempting at the present time 
 to make the representation uniform. I praise 
 them for not assigning members to the districts 
 by the Rule of Three. The Government has, in 
 my opinion, done all that was necessary for the 
 removal of a great practical evil, and no more 
 than was necessary. I consider this as a prac- 
 tical question. I rest my opinion on no general 
 theory of government. I distrust all general 
 theories of government." All that aversion to
 
 120 Lord Macaulay 
 
 speculation which detracts from his written words 
 gave nerve to his eloquence when he spoke. 
 
 His speeches on Reform are a clear note of 
 triumph that the forward spirit must have its 
 way, and of warning against the policy of 
 coercion. They are the utterances of a man 
 who is essentially the product of his age, for 
 whose thoughts the season is just fully ripe. 
 He had well gauged the spirit of his time. He 
 saw that the England which emerged from the 
 great European struggle was altogether a new 
 England. National pride was high. In the 
 presence of a great danger loyalty to the State 
 had been preferred to loyalty to party. The 
 ideals of statesmanship had been purified ; per- 
 fect political uprightness became a mark of the 
 ministers of the Crown. England had been 
 sobered and shaken together. In morals and 
 literature the same new light was reflected. 
 National spirit was swelling, and coming to 
 greater self-consciousness. In the excitement 
 of the war it had revealed itself in jealous and 
 loyal patriotism. It was inevitable that after
 
 Lord Mac an lay 1 2 1 
 
 the war this spirit, once stirred, should be found 
 pressing on within the nation toward the ideals 
 for which the time was ready. But though the 
 fire of new esprit de corps was burning, it was 
 damped by evils that called for remedy. Food 
 was dear. The very cessation of the war had 
 given a violent shock to prices and to agriculture. 
 The promises made to Ireland in 1800 were still 
 unredeemed, and the people was restless under 
 the yoke of an alien creed. Above all, the 
 expanding spirit of the whole nation was stifled 
 and choked in expression for the want of a free 
 political air. Therefore, within a common en- 
 thusiasm which united the whole State, great 
 social movements were beginning to shape them- 
 selves ; 
 
 "The warders of the growing hour, 
 But vague in vapour, hard to mark." 
 
 National liberty was bringing political freedom 
 to the birth. The State was in the throes of 
 reform. Extreme developments, Socialism and 
 Chartism, were hurrying on her hour.
 
 122 Lord Mac aid ay 
 
 Yet now, as always, England was patient and 
 long-suffering. Reform was often mooted in 
 the Commons, only to be dismissed. The Six 
 Acts were passed. Two Tory Ministries re- 
 pressed with a high hand, and not without 
 bloodshed, a spirit they did not understand. 
 Yet the people accepted such reforms in trade 
 and currency as were offered, and was content 
 to nurse its spirit against a later day. But after 
 fourteen years the time was come. The sign of 
 it was the Repeal of the Test and Corporation 
 Acts. 
 
 This was the moment for a great statesman, 
 and England was well served. The Whig leaders 
 were at least earnest and firm. They felt the 
 pulse quicken and they knew it was no fever, 
 but England's hour : 
 
 " The spirit of the years to come 
 Yearning to mix itself with life." 
 
 They had made no mistake. Our Greater 
 Charter was delivered in its season, in peace and 
 without convulsion.
 
 Lord Macaulay 123 
 
 It was at this time that Macaulay entered 
 the House. He was full of the national spirit. 
 He had balanced the risks, and he stepped into 
 the arena with all the enthusiasm of a winning 
 cause. The time had produced one of its men. 
 By warning, exhortation, and appeal, his splendid 
 eloquence stirred and shook the spirit of the 
 House. He had the heat and force of a reformer, 
 and the highest power of effective eloquence. 
 The result of his first speech was extraordinary. 
 The House was profoundly moved. Nor can 
 we wonder; for it is a speech in which the orator 
 can be felt to be the spokesman of an epoch. 
 It is pervaded, like all his speeches on Reform, 
 by a glowing Demosthenic fire, by the throb of 
 genuine emotion and excitement. It cannot be 
 read slowly. We can only imagine its delivery. 
 Thereafter, in the youthful member for Calne, 
 Reform had found its most formidable ex- 
 pression. His voice, Mr Gladstone tells us, was 
 " like a trumpet-call to fill the benches." And 
 who but could wish Demosthenes were here to
 
 124 Lord Macaulay 
 
 render in Greek this splendid and burning pero- 
 ration ? 
 
 " Do they wait for that last and most dreadful 
 paroxysm of popular rage, for that last and most 
 cruel test of military fidelity ? Let them wait, 
 if their past experience shall induce them to 
 think that any high honour or any exquisite 
 pleasure is to be attained by a policy like this. 
 Let them wait, if this strange and fearful in- 
 fatuation be indeed upon them, that they should 
 not see with their eyes, nor hear with their ears, 
 nor understand with their heart. But let us 
 know our interest and our duty better. Turn 
 where we may, within, around, the voice of great 
 events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you 
 may preserve. Now therefore, while everything, 
 at home and abroad, forbodes ruin to those who 
 persist in a hopeless struggle against the spirit 
 of the age, now, while the crash of the proudest 
 throne on the Continent is still sounding in our 
 ears, now, while the roof of a British palace 
 affords an ignominious shelter to the exiled heir
 
 Lord Macau lay 125 
 
 of forty kings, now, while we see on every side 
 
 ancient institutions subverted and great societies 
 
 dissolved, now, while the heart of England is 
 
 still sound, now, while old feelings and old 
 
 associations retain a power and a charm that 
 
 may too soon pass away, now, in this your 
 
 accepted time, now, in this your day of salvation, 
 
 take counsel, not of party spirit, not of the 
 
 ignominious pride of a fatal consistency, but of 
 
 history, of reason, of the ages that are past, of 
 
 the signs of this most portentous time. Renew 
 
 the youth of the State. Save property divided 
 
 against itself. Save the multitude, endangered 
 
 by its own ungovernable passions. Save the 
 
 aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular 
 
 power. Save the greatest and fairest and most 
 
 civilised community that ever existed, from 
 
 calamities which may in a few days sweep away 
 
 all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom 
 
 and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is 
 
 short. If this bill should be rejected, I pray to 
 
 God that none of those who concur in rejecting
 
 126 Lord Mac aulay 
 
 it may ever remember their votes with unavailing 
 remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion 
 of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the 
 dissolution of social order." 
 
 Little wonder if the excitement of the House 
 was tremendous, if the then Speaker looked on 
 a scene his experience could not parallel, if the 
 names of Canning and Fox and Burke were on 
 everyone's lips. 
 
 " Reform that you may preserve," — this is 
 the note that Macaulay strikes. He is for 
 Reform that preserves the old while ingrafting 
 on it the new. Between incautious change and 
 stubborn prescription, the Whig party, as he 
 understood it, took the middle way. The spirit 
 of his oratory is essentially that of a movement 
 which has come in its proper and due season ; 
 which can afford to be moderate although firm ; 
 which is no passing reaction that runs headlong 
 to an extreme ; which puts aside Chartism no 
 less than prescription. It is the spirit of a 
 reform strictly defensive ; a reform that invaded
 
 Lord Mac aulay 127 
 
 no rights, but which came at the moment to 
 prevent such an invasion ; a reform which aimed 
 at the organic development of our constitution, 
 not at its destruction and renovation. England 
 has been fortunate in this patience and sobriety 
 of her national spirit in crises such as upset 
 thrones abroad. We may be grateful that the 
 Reform leaders spoke in the tones of defence 
 rather than of aggression : that those who, like 
 Macaulay, led the advance, were no bigots with 
 a theory, but men in touch with and responsive 
 to the spirit of their age ; 
 
 " Who knew the season when to take 
 Occasion by the hand, and make 
 The bounds of freedom wider yet." 
 
 His speeches on the Irish question, as it then 
 appeared, well show how much in hand did he 
 hold the spirit of progress. His sympathy with 
 Ireland was one of the moving influences of his 
 political life. Next to his Reform speeches, and 
 a speech on Indian affairs, none of his utterances 
 are so eloquent as those on behalf of the religious
 
 128 Lord Macaulay 
 
 and social freedom of that strangely ill-fated 
 country. But he would have none of the Repeal 
 of the Union ; his famous reply to O'Connell is 
 in his firmest and most direct tone. And it is 
 of interest to note, in view of the recent develop- 
 ments of this question, that Macaulay is to be 
 ranked with those Whigs who saw no practica- 
 bility in the in-and-out scheme. It had not, in 
 his day, been propounded with the same pre- 
 tence with which it was ushered in in 1886 ; but 
 it is certain at least that Macaulay repudiated it 
 on much the same grounds as those which were 
 afterwards to send half the Whig leaders over to 
 the other side. " To remove every just cause of 
 complaint," was his policy in 1833. Whether in 
 1886 this would still have been his attitude must 
 depend on what emerges, after sixty years, from 
 his words: " If, on a fair trial, it be found that 
 Great Britain and Ireland cannot exist happily 
 together as parts of one empire, in God's name 
 let them separate." But he had too wholesome 
 a respect for prescription to be found with the
 
 Lord Macau lay 129 
 
 Home Rule party in the first flush of its en- 
 thusiasm. 
 
 The high authority of his voice was given 
 also to the movement for a broader religious 
 toleration. At his time, this question was 
 touching the heart of the nation deeply. Ireland 
 exhibited the doubtful experiment of the ruling 
 of creed by creed. From the discontent in that 
 country, which was not wholly removed in 1829, 
 came the germ of reflection which has bloomed 
 and borne fruit there, and which is in its blossom 
 in England to-day. Macaulay's descent may 
 have greatly influenced his views on this ques- 
 tion ; but his toleration, from whatever source it 
 came, was both lofty and broad ; how broad, 
 may be seen by anyone who compares the speech 
 on Maynooth College with his unsparing attack 
 on Catholicism in the opening of the History. 
 There can be no doubt that the disestablishment 
 movement would have found in him a powerful 
 and strenuous advocate. 
 
 But of all his speeches by far the grandest is 
 m. 9
 
 130 Lord Macaulay 
 
 that which he delivered on Indian affairs in 1833, 
 and which secured him his seat as a Member of 
 Council in Calcutta for the next few years. It 
 is not, as we shall see, in the style most charac- 
 teristic of his oratory ; it rather resembles the 
 most brilliant and richly coloured of his Essays. 
 The theme of India inspired him to the richest 
 wealth of allusion and the most gorgeous illus- 
 tration ; and all this is welded, by his warm 
 earnestness, into one with exact and careful 
 statesmanship. Next to his first speech on 
 Reform, none so well deserves to be quoted to 
 the fame of his eloquence. 
 
 Macaulay returned from India to find that 
 the glory of the Whigs had departed. For two 
 years he served, in Office, a broken and divided 
 party. For six years more his voice was still at 
 the service of the old cause. But with the fall 
 of the Melbourne Ministry, politics ceased to 
 occupy the centre of his life. The spirit of the 
 fight might draw him now and again to match 
 himself with Peel ; and the force and vigour of
 
 Lord Macaulay 131 
 
 his eloquence remained unimpaired. But his 
 heart was elsewhere. He did not court the 
 fame of an orator or a statesman. There was 
 another fame which he coveted more. Hence 
 his defeat in 1847 was almost a welcome relief. 
 And in the closing days of his life, when his 
 judgment had matured by retirement, and the 
 hot impulse of party spirit had cooled, what we 
 see is the individual silently watching from his 
 seat in the House, with a graver eye, and a mind 
 filled with reminiscences and reflections, the old 
 and ever-changing struggle in which Pitt and 
 Fox, Melbourne and Peel, Palmerston and 
 Disraeli, were, he remembered, but the new and 
 successive leaders of forces as old as our con- 
 stitution, and each, in its measure, indispensable 
 to our national life and freedom. Twice he 
 stood forth on his own account, and his elo- 
 quence turned the feeling of the House to his 
 view. He defeated, — " slew with his single 
 arm" — the Copyright Bill of 1841, and carried 
 on the lines of his own policy the Bill of 1842. 
 
 9—2
 
 132 Lord Macaulay 
 
 In 1853 lie secured the rejection of the Ex- 
 clusion of Judges Bill. For the rest, it was his 
 high distinction as an individual which gave 
 authority to his utterances on Free Trade and 
 the Education movement. 
 
 A word must in conclusion be said on the 
 style of his oratory. In the House itself, it was 
 compared with that of Burke and Fox and 
 Canning. Time has justified the comparison, in 
 so far as it is true that while most histories 
 barely mention Macaulay's name, no compen- 
 dium of English, oratory would be complete 
 without his greatest speeches. But with some 
 points of resemblance to these great predecessors, 
 Macaulay has distinctive characteristics of his 
 own. Burke is an orator in the true and literal 
 sense. He is an accomplished pleader. He 
 appeals to us as Englishmen to be cautious and 
 calm and reasonable. He takes his audience 
 into his own confidence, offers them the right 
 hand and says " Come, let us reason together." 
 He persuades, convinces, wins. He argues in a
 
 Lord Macaulay i 33 
 
 spirit of conciliation — a spirit of patriotism 
 which seeks to bring friend and foe into one 
 common standpoint. He hides the party note 
 in higher chords. He reasons as with a quick- 
 tempered person who must not be scolded, but 
 drawn over. Though skilled in fence, he con- 
 ceals his skill. He takes the town by sap rather 
 than sword in hand. He is lofty and sonorous 
 rather than keen and dialectical. He seeks to 
 embrace his opponent by consent, rather than 
 to strike him down. This passage is in Burke's 
 manner : 
 
 " For that service, for all service, whether of 
 revenue, trade or empire, my trust is her interest 
 in the British constitution. My hold of the 
 colonies is in the close affection which springs 
 from common names, from kindred blood, from 
 similar privileges, from equal protection. These 
 are ties which though light as air, are as strong 
 as links of iron. Let the colonies always keep 
 the idea of their civil rights associated with your 
 government — they will cling and grapple to you;
 
 134 Lord Macaulay 
 
 and no force under Heaven will be of power to 
 tear them from their allegiance. But let it be 
 once understood that your government may be 
 one thing and their privileges another ; that 
 these two things may exist without any mutual 
 relation ; the cement is gone ; the cohesion is 
 loosened ; and everything hastens to decay and 
 dissolution... Do not dream that your letters of 
 office and your instructions and your suspending 
 clauses are the things that hold together the 
 great contexture of the mysterious whole. These 
 things do not make your government. Dead 
 instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the 
 spirit of the English communion that gives all 
 their life and efficacy to them. It is the 
 spirit of the English constitution which, infused 
 through the mighty mass pervades, feeds, unites, 
 invigorates, vivifies every part of the Empire, 
 even down to the minutest member." {On the 
 
 War ivitJi America?) 
 
 Even in argument there is no venom in 
 
 Burke ; it is all clothed in rich eloquence and
 
 Lord Macaulay 135 
 
 deep solemnity of exhortation. Fox, on the 
 other hand, is a debater firstly and chiefly. 
 Here is the thrust and parry, the hot invective 
 of debate ; the flash and the ring of a rapier. 
 But Fox fights as one taught to fight in style, 
 as one trained to fence with grace ; with long 
 lunges, without flurry, without start, but all in 
 one piece, now faster and now slower, now in 
 earnest and now in play, like a single and 
 continuous and ever-changing melody. His aim 
 is to destroy his opponent, not to persuade him ; 
 but he displays a finished skill in the act of 
 destruction. This is wherein he differs from 
 Macaulay. The latter fights with less grace 
 than effect ; his blows are straight from the 
 shoulder, he hits wherever and whenever he 
 can. His is not the long easy rapier stroke 
 of Fox, but the short, sharp stab of a dagger. 
 His invective is clothed in no art, is infused 
 only with passion. Instead of the subtle play 
 of sarcasm which we find in Fox, we have 
 in Macaulay more downrightness of argument.
 
 136 Lord Macaulay 
 
 " I defy you," " I challenge you," " Answer me, 
 if you can, but do not interrupt me," such is 
 Macaulay's method. He fights, not by art, but 
 by the pure strength of his arm — with quick, 
 hard, well-aimed blows. Of his style, we see 
 the tone in such a passage as the following: 
 
 "If it be said that there is an evil in change 
 as change, I answer that there is often an evil 
 in discontent as discontent. This indeed is the 
 strongest part of our case. It is said that the 
 system works well. I deny it. I deny that a 
 system works well which the people regards 
 
 with aversion Who wishes to dethrone the 
 
 King-? Who wishes to turn the Lords out of 
 their House? Here and there a crazy radical 
 whom the boys in the street point at as he walks 
 along. Who wishes to alter the constitution of 
 this House ? The whole people. It is natural 
 that it should be so.... We have tried anodynes. 
 We have tried cruel operations. What are we 
 to try now ? Who flatters himself that he can 
 turn this feeling back ? Does there remain any
 
 Lord Macaulay 137 
 
 argument which escaped the comprehensive 
 intellect of Mr Burke, or the subtlety of 
 Mr Windham ? Does there remain any species 
 of coercion which was not tried by Mr Pitt and 
 by Lord Londonderry? We have had laws. 
 We have had blood. New treasons have been 
 created. The Press has been shackled. The 
 Habeas Corpus Act has been suspended. Public 
 Meetings have been prohibited. The event has 
 proved that these expedients were mere pallia- 
 tives. You are at the end of your palliatives. 
 The evil remains. It is more formidable than 
 ever. What is to be done?" His well-known 
 invective against Peel in 1845 reveals the same 
 qualities. There are indeed speeches in which 
 he approaches nearer to the spirit of Burke ; as 
 in the Indian speech of 1833. But this is not 
 his dominant mood as a speaker. He is by 
 his proper genius a debater; more direct than 
 Burke, less subtle than Fox. His eloquence is 
 the passion of strong conviction, and the mark 
 of it is its heat.
 
 138 Lord Macaulay 
 
 The study of Macaulay has been a labour of 
 love. To enter into his mind is to be refreshed 
 and inspired. His faults only bring him nearer 
 to us; and apart from these, and from the virtues 
 to which they are so closely wedded, the man, 
 the figure, has a greatness of its own. In a 
 passing century his name will be a time mark. 
 His words and his deeds will be less than his 
 life and his influence. His perfect love of letters 
 will be the half at least of his literary fame; the 
 high integrity, and the silent influence, of his 
 active life will be a great part of his political 
 fame. We have striven here to shun these 
 extremes of statement to which all are liable 
 who consider a great man by himself apart; and 
 in Macaulay 's case there is no room for any too 
 thorough attitudes of admiration or distrust. He 
 is too human for that. There is nothing about 
 him of the grand. He stands on no pedestal. 
 He is throughout affable, easy of access, plain 
 spoken, with no barrier of reserve. He is a 
 familiar friend who communicates readily all his
 
 Lord Macaulay 139 
 
 vast knowledge, and in whose life we understand 
 every act. There is nothing awesome or mys- 
 terious in his genius. The impression he leaves 
 on us is not that of exceptional qualities of mind ; 
 it is that of a human nature much refined, but 
 still very human. The immortality which he 
 coveted most will be secured to him for the 
 reflection that is in him of the light of know- 
 ledge, for the spirit he breathes of all that is 
 noblest in literature. His fame will be that of 
 one who gave efficient force to new ideas, whose 
 work is absorbed in the spirit of the work of 
 others, and who, in his generation, was great in 
 achievement, but greater in example and in 
 promise. 
 
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