Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3)
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John Morley >> Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3)
CRITICAL MISCELLANIES
by
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. I.
ESSAY 4: MACAULAY
London
MacMillan and Co., Limited
New York: The MacMillan Company
1904
MACAULAY.
The Life of Macaulay 253
Macaulay's vast popularity 254
He and Mill, the two masters of the modern journalist 256
His marked quality 259
Set his stamp on style 260
His genius for narration 262
His copiousness of illustration 264
Macaulay's, the style of literary knowledge 266
His use of generous commonplace 267
Perfect accord with his audience 271
Dislike of analysis 272
Not meditative 273
Macaulay's is the prose of spoken deliverance 276
Character of his geniality 278
Metallic hardness and brightness 279
Compared with Carlyle 281
Harsh modulations and shallow cadences 283
Compared with Burke 283
Or with Southey 285
Faults of intellectual conscience 286
Vulgarity of thought 289
Conclusion 290
MACAULAY.
'After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book,' says
Gibbon, 'I suspended the perusal till I had finished the task of
self-examination, till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew
or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some
particular chapter; I was then qualified to discern how much the author
added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the
agreement, I was sometimes warned by the opposition of our ideas.' It is
also told of Strafford that before reading any book for the first time,
he would call for a sheet of paper, and then proceed to write down upon
it some sketch of the ideas that he already had upon the subject of the
book, and of the questions that he expected to find answered. No one who
has been at the pains to try the experiment, will doubt the usefulness
of this practice: it gives to our acquisitions from books clearness and
reality, a right place and an independent shape. At this moment we are
all looking for the biography of an illustrious man of letters, written
by a near kinsman, who is himself naturally endowed with keen literary
interests, and who has invigorated his academic cultivation by
practical engagement in considerable affairs of public business. Before
taking up Mr. Trevelyan's two volumes, it is perhaps worth while, on
Strafford's plan, to ask ourselves shortly what kind of significance or
value belongs to Lord Macaulay's achievements, and to what place he has
a claim among the forces of English literature. It is seventeen years
since he died, and those of us who never knew him nor ever saw him, may
now think about his work with that perfect detachment which is
impossible in the case of actual contemporaries.[1]
[Footnote 1: Since the following piece was written, Mr. Trevelyan's
biography of Lord Macaulay has appeared, and has enjoyed the great
popularity to which its careful execution, its brightness of style, its
good taste, its sound judgment, so richly entitle it. If Mr. Trevelyan's
course in politics were not so useful as it is, one might be tempted to
regret that he had not chosen literature for the main field of his
career. The portrait which he draws of Lord Macaulay is so irresistibly
attractive in many ways, that a critic may be glad to have delivered his
soul before his judgment was subject to a dangerous bias, by the picture
of Macaulay's personal character--its domestic amiability, its
benevolence to unlucky followers of letters, its manliness, its high
public spirit and generous patriotism. On reading my criticism over
again, I am well pleased to find that not an epithet needs to be
altered,--so independent is opinion as to this strong man's work, of our
esteem for his loyal and upright character.]
That Macaulay comes in the very front rank in the mind of the ordinary
bookbuyer of our day is quite certain. It is an amusement with some
people to put an imaginary case of banishment to a desert island, with
the privilege of choosing the works of one author, and no more than one,
to furnish literary companionship and refreshment for the rest of a
lifetime. Whom would one select for this momentous post? Clearly the
author must be voluminous, for days on desert islands are many and long;
he must be varied in his moods, his topics, and his interests; he must
have a great deal to say, and must have a power of saying it that shall
arrest a depressed and dolorous spirit. Englishmen, of course, would
with mechanical unanimity call for Shakespeare; Germans could hardly
hesitate about Goethe; and a sensible Frenchman would pack up the ninety
volumes of Voltaire. It would be at least as interesting to know the
object of a second choice, supposing the tyrant in his clemency to give
us two authors. In the case of Englishmen there is some evidence as to a
popular preference. A recent traveller in Australia informs us that the
three books which he found on every squatter's shelf, and which at last
he knew before he crossed the threshold that he should be sure to find,
were Shakespeare, the Bible, and Macaulay's Essays. This is only an
illustration of a feeling about Macaulay that has been almost universal
among the English-speaking peoples.
We may safely say that no man obtains and keeps for a great many years
such a position as this, unless he is possessed of some very
extraordinary qualities, or else of common qualities in a very uncommon
and extraordinary degree. The world, says Goethe, is more willing to
endure the Incongruous than to be patient under the Insignificant. Even
those who set least value on what Macaulay does for his readers, may
still feel bound to distinguish the elements that have given him his
vast popularity. The inquiry is not a piece of merely literary
criticism, for it is impossible that the work of so imposing a writer
should have passed through the hands of every man and woman of his time
who has even the humblest pretensions to cultivation, without leaving a
very decided mark on their habits both of thought and expression. As a
plain matter of observation, it is impossible to take up a newspaper or
a review, for instance, without perceiving Macaulay's influence both in
the style and the temper of modern journalism, and journalism in its
turn acts upon the style and temper of its enormous uncounted public.
The man who now succeeds in catching the ear of the writers of leading
articles, is in the position that used to be held by the head of some
great theological school, whence disciples swarmed forth to reproduce in
ten thousand pulpits the arguments, the opinions, the images, the
tricks, the postures, and the mannerisms of a single master.
Two men of very different kinds have thoroughly impressed the
journalists of our time, Macaulay and Mr. Mill. Mr. Carlyle we do not
add to them; he is, as the Germans call Jean Paul, _der Einzige_. And he
is a poet, while the other two are in their degrees serious and
argumentative writers, dealing in different ways with the great topics
that constitute the matter and business of daily discussion. They are
both of them practical enough to interest men handling real affairs, and
yet they are general or theoretical enough to supply such men with the
large and ready commonplaces which are so useful to a profession that
has to produce literary graces and philosophical decorations at an
hour's notice. It might perhaps be said of these two distinguished men
that our public writers owe most of their virtues to the one, and most
of their vices to the other. If Mill taught some of them to reason,
Macaulay tempted more of them to declaim: if Mill set an example of
patience, tolerance, and fair examination of hostile opinions, Macaulay
did much to encourage oracular arrogance, and a rather too thrasonical
complacency; if Mill sowed ideas of the great economic, political, and
moral bearings of the forces of society, Macaulay trained a taste for
superficial particularities, trivial circumstantialities of local
colour, and all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-picturesque.
Of course nothing so obviously untrue is meant as that this is an
account of Macaulay's own quality. What is empty pretension in the
leading article, was often a warranted self-assertion in Macaulay; what
in it is little more than testiness, is in him often a generous
indignation. What became and still remain in those who have made him
their model, substantive and organic vices, the foundation of literary
character and intellectual temper, were in him the incidental defects
of a vigorous genius. And we have to take a man of his power and vigour
with all his drawbacks, for the one are wrapped up in the other. Charles
Fox used to apply to Burke a passage that Quintilian wrote about Ovid.
'Si animi sui affectibus temperare quam indulgere maluisset,' quoted
Fox, 'quid vir iste praestare non potuerit!' But this is really not at
all certain either of Ovid, or Burke, or any one else. It suits
moralists to tell us that excellence lies in the happy mean and nice
balance of our faculties and impulses, and perhaps in so far as our own
contentment and an easy passage through life are involved, what they
tell us is true. But for making a mark in the world, for rising to
supremacy in art or thought or affairs--whatever those aims may be
worth--a man possibly does better to indulge, rather than to chide or
grudge, his genius, and to pay the penalties for his weakness, rather
than run any risk of mutilating those strong faculties of which they
happen to be an inseparable accident. Versatility is not a universal
gift among the able men of the world; not many of them have so many
gifts of the spirit, as to be free to choose by what pass they will
climb 'the steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar.' If Macaulay had
applied himself to the cultivation of a balanced judgment, of tempered
phrases, and of relative propositions, he would probably have sunk into
an impotent tameness. A great pugilist has sometimes been converted from
the error of his ways, and been led zealously to cherish gospel graces,
but the hero's discourses have seldom had the notes of unction and
edification. Macaulay, divested of all the exorbitancies of his spirit
and his style, would have been a Samson shorn of the locks of his
strength.
Although, however, a writer of marked quality may do well to let his
genius develop its spontaneous forces without too assiduous or vigilant
repression, trusting to other writers of equal strength in other
directions, and to the general fitness of things and operation of time,
to redress the balance, still it is the task of criticism in counting up
the contributions of one of these strong men to examine the mischiefs no
less than the benefits incident to their work. There is no puny carping
nor cavilling in the process. It is because such men are strong that
they are able to do harm; they may injure the taste and judgment of a
whole generation, just because they are never mediocre. That is implied
in strength. Macaulay is not to be measured now merely as if he were the
author of a new book. His influence has been a distinct literary force,
and in an age of reading, this is to be a distinct force in deciding the
temper, the process, the breadth, of men's opinions, no less than the
manner of expressing them. It is no new observation that the influence
of an author becomes in time something apart from his books: a certain
generalised or abstract personality impresses itself on our minds, long
after we have forgotten the details of his opinions, the arguments by
which he enforced them, and even, what are usually the last to escape
us, the images by which he illustrated them. Phrases and sentences are a
mask: but we detect the features of the man behind the mask. This
personality of a favourite author is a real and powerful agency.
Unconsciously we are infected with his humours; we apply his methods; we
find ourselves copying the rhythm and measure of his periods; we wonder
how he would have acted, or thought, or spoken in our circumstances.
Usually a strong writer leaves a special mark in some particular region
of mental activity: the final product of him is to fix some persistent
religious mood, or some decisive intellectual bias, or else some trick
of the tongue. Now Macaulay has contributed no philosophic ideas to the
speculative stock, nor has he developed any one great historic or social
truth. His work is always full of a high spirit of manliness, probity,
and honour; but he is not of that small band to whom we may apply
Mackintosh's thrice and four times enviable panegyric on the eloquence
of Dugald Stewart, that its peculiar glory consisted in having 'breathed
the love of virtue into whole generations of pupils.' He has painted
many striking pictures, and imparted a certain reality to our conception
of many great scenes of the past. He did good service in banishing once
for all those sentimental Jacobite leanings and prejudices which had
been kept alive by the sophistry of the most popular of historians, and
the imagination of the most popular of romance writers. But where he set
his stamp has been upon style; style in its widest sense, not merely on
the grammar and mechanism of writing, but on what De Quincey described
as its _organology_; style, that is to say, in its relation to ideas and
feelings, its commerce with thought, and its reaction on what one may
call the temper or conscience of the intellect.
Let no man suppose that it matters little whether the most universally
popular of the serious authors of a generation--and Macaulay was nothing
less than this--affects _style coupe_ or _style soutenu_. The critic of
style is not the dancing-master, declaiming on the deep ineffable things
that lie in a minuet. He is not the virtuoso of supines and gerundives.
The morality of style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose.' When Comte
took pains to prevent any sentence from exceeding two lines of his
manuscript or five of print; to restrict every paragraph to seven
sentences; to exclude every hiatus between two sentences, or even
between two paragraphs; and never to reproduce any word, except the
auxiliary monosyllables, in two consecutive sentences; he justified his
literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and
intelligence of submission to artificial institutions. He felt, after he
had once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source
of continual and unforeseeable improvements even in thought, and he
perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary
perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of
rigorous forms. We may add that verse itself is perfected, in the hands
of men of poetic genius, in proportion to the severity of this
mechanical regulation. Where Pope or Racine had one rule of metre,
Victor Hugo has twenty, and he observes them as rigorously as an
algebraist or an astronomer observes the rules of calculation or
demonstration. One, then, who touches the style of a generation acquires
no trifling authority over its thought and temper, as well as over the
length of its sentences.
* * * * *
The first and most obvious secret of Macaulay's place on popular
bookshelves is that he has a true genius for narration, and narration
will always in the eyes, not only of our squatters in the Australian
bush, but of the many all over the world, stand first among literary
gifts. The common run of plain men, as has been noticed since the
beginning of the world, are as eager as children for a story, and like
children they will embrace the man who will tell them a story, with
abundance of details and plenty of colour, and a realistic assurance
that it is no mere make-believe. Macaulay never stops to brood over an
incident or a character, with an inner eye intent on penetrating to the
lowest depth of motive and cause, to the furthest complexity of impulse,
calculation, and subtle incentive. The spirit of analysis is not in him,
and the divine spirit of meditation is not in him. His whole mind runs
in action and movement; it busies itself with eager interest in all
objective particulars. He is seized by the external and the superficial,
and revels in every detail that appeals to the five senses. 'The
brilliant Macaulay,' said Emerson, with slight exaggeration, 'who
expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day,
explicitly teaches that _good_ means good to eat, good to wear, material
commodity.' So ready a faculty of exultation in the exceeding great
glories of taste and touch, of loud sound and glittering spectacle, is a
gift of the utmost service to the narrator who craves immense audiences.
Let it be said that if Macaulay exults in the details that go to our
five senses, his sensuousness is always clean, manly, and fit for honest
daylight and the summer sun. There is none of that curious odour of
autumnal decay that clings to the passion of a more modern school for
colour and flavour and the enumerated treasures of subtle indulgence.
Mere picturesqueness, however, is a minor qualification compared with
another quality which everybody assumes himself to have, but which is in
reality extremely uncommon; the quality, I mean, of telling a tale
directly and in straightforward order. In speaking of Hallam, Macaulay
complained that Gibbon had brought into fashion an unpleasant trick of
telling a story by implication and allusion. This provoking obliquity
has certainly increased rather than declined since Hallam's day. Mr.
Froude, it is true, whatever may be his shortcomings on the side of
sound moral and political judgment, has admirable gifts in the way of
straightforward narration, and Mr. Freeman, when he does not press too
hotly after emphasis, and abstains from overloading his account with
super-abundance of detail, is usually excellent in the way of direct
description. Still, it is not merely because these two writers are alive
and Macaulay is not, that most people would say of him that he is
unequalled in our time in his mastery of the art of letting us know in
an express and unmistakable way exactly what it was that happened;
though it is quite true that in many portions of his too elaborated
History of William the Third he describes a large number of events about
which, I think, no sensible man can in the least care either how they
happened, or whether indeed they happened at all or not.
Another reason why people have sought Macaulay is, that he has in one
way or another something to tell them about many of the most striking
personages and interesting events in the history of mankind. And he does
really tell them something. If any one will be at the trouble to count
up the number of those names that belong to the world and time, about
which Macaulay has found not merely something, but something definite
and pointed to say, he will be astonished to see how large a portion of
the wide historic realm is traversed in that ample flight of reference,
allusion, and illustration, and what unsparing copiousness of knowledge
gives substance, meaning, and attraction to that resplendent blaze of
rhetoric.
Macaulay came upon the world of letters just as the middle classes were
expanding into enormous prosperity, were vastly increasing in numbers,
and were becoming more alive than they had ever been before to literary
interests. His Essays are as good as a library: they make an
incomparable manual and vade-mecum for a busy uneducated man, who has
curiosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know a little about the
great lives and great thoughts, the shining words and many-coloured
complexities of action, that have marked the journey of man through the
ages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance both with the imaginative
literature and the history of Greece and Rome, with the literature and
the history of modern Italy, of France, and of England. Whatever his
special subject, he contrives to pour into it with singular dexterity a
stream of rich, graphic, and telling illustrations from all these widely
diversified sources. Figures from history, ancient and modern, sacred
and secular; characters from plays and novels from Plautus down to
Walter Scott and Jane Austen; images and similes from poets of every age
and every nation, 'pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical;' shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise saws from
sages, pleasantries caustic or pathetic from humorists; all these throng
Macaulay's pages with the bustle and variety and animation of some
glittering masque and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men.
Hence, though Macaulay was in mental constitution one of the very least
Shakesperean writers that ever lived, yet he has the Shakesperean
quality of taking his reader through an immense gallery of interesting
characters and striking situations. No writer can now expect to attain
the widest popularity as a man of letters unless he gives to the world
_multa_ as well as _multum_. Sainte-Beuve, the most eminent man of
letters in France in our generation, wrote no less than twenty-seven
volumes of his incomparable _Causeries_. Mr. Carlyle, the most eminent
man of letters in England in our generation, has taught us that silence
is golden in thirty volumes. Macaulay was not so exuberantly copious as
these two illustrious writers, but he had the art of being as various
without being so voluminous.
There has been a great deal of deliberate and systematic imitation of
Macaulay's style, often by clever men who might well have trusted to
their own resources. Its most conspicuous vices are very easy to
imitate, but it is impossible for any one who is less familiar with
literature than Macaulay was, to reproduce his style effectively, for
the reason that it is before all else the style of great literary
knowledge. Nor is that all. Macaulay's knowledge was not only very wide;
it was both thoroughly accurate and instantly ready. For this stream of
apt illustrations he was indebted to his extraordinary memory, and his
rapid eye for contrasts and analogies. They come to the end of his pen
as he writes; they are not laboriously hunted out in indexes, and then
added by way of afterthought and extraneous interpolation. Hence
quotations and references that in a writer even of equal knowledge, but
with his wits less promptly about him, would seem mechanical and
awkward, find their place in a page of Macaulay as if by a delightful
process of complete assimilation and spontaneous fusion.
* * * * *
We may be sure that no author could have achieved Macaulay's boundless
popularity among his contemporaries, unless his work had abounded in
what is substantially Commonplace. Addison puts fine writing in
sentiments that are natural without being obvious, and this is a true
account of the 'law' of the exquisite literature of the Queen Anne men.
We may perhaps add to Addison's definition, that the great secret of the
best kind of popularity is always the noble or imaginative handling of
Commonplace. Shakespeare may at first seem an example to the contrary;
and indeed is it not a standing marvel that the greatest writer of a
nation that is distinguished among all nations for the pharisaism,
puritanism, and unimaginative narrowness of its judgments on conduct and
type of character, should be paramount over all writers for the breadth,
maturity, fulness, subtlety, and infinite variousness of his conception
of human life and nature? One possible answer to the perplexity is that
the puritanism does not go below the surface in us, and that Englishmen
are not really limited in their view by the too strait formulas that are
supposed to contain their explanations of the moral universe. On this
theory the popular appreciation of Shakespeare is the irrepressible
response of the hearty inner man to a voice, in which he recognises the
full note of human nature, and those wonders of the world which are not
dreamt of in his professed philosophy. A more obvious answer than this
is that Shakespeare's popularity with the many is not due to those finer
glimpses that are the very essence of all poetic delight to the few, but
to his thousand other magnificent attractions, and above all, after his
skill as a pure dramatist and master of scenic interest and situation,
to the lofty or pathetic setting with which he vivifies, not the
subtleties or refinements, but the commonest and most elementary traits
of the commonest and most elementary human moods. The few with minds
touched by nature or right cultivation to the finer issues, admire the
supreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale, with its coarse plot
and gross personages, and shooting it through with threads of variegated
meditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative reflection and high
pensive suggestion as to the deepest things and most secret parts of the
life of men. But to the general these finer threads are indiscernible.
What touches them in the Shakesperean poetry, and most rightly touches
them and us all, are topics eternally old, yet of eternal freshness, the
perennial truisms of the grave and the bride-chamber, of shifting
fortune, of the surprises of destiny, and the emptiness of the answered
vow. This is the region in which the poet wins his widest if not his
hardest triumphs, the region of the noble Commonplace.