Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3)
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John Morley >> Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3)
A writer dealing with such matters as principally occupied Macaulay,
has not the privilege of resort to these great poetic inspirations. Yet
history, too, has its generous commonplaces, its plausibilities of
emotion, and no one has ever delighted more than Macaulay did, to appeal
to the fine truisms that cluster round love of freedom and love of
native land. The high rhetorical topics of liberty and patriotism are
his readiest instruments for kindling a glowing reflection of these
magnanimous passions in the breasts of his readers. That Englishman is
hardly to be envied who can read without a glow such passages as that in
the History, about Turenne being startled by the shout of stern
exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and
expressing the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was
ever the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they
beheld the enemy; while even the banished cavaliers felt an emotion of
national pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered
by foes and abandoned by friends, drive before it in headlong rout the
finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp which
had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of
France. Such prose as this is not less thrilling to a man who loves his
country, than the spirited verse of the Lays of Ancient Rome. And the
commonplaces of patriotism and freedom would never have been so powerful
in Macaulay's hands, if they had not been inspired by a sincere and
hearty faith in them in the soul of the writer. His unanalytical turn
of mind kept him free of any temptation to think of love of country as a
prejudice, or a passion for freedom as an illusion. The cosmopolitan or
international idea which such teachers as Cobden have tried to impress
on our stubborn islanders, would have found in Macaulay not lukewarm or
sceptical adherence, but point-blank opposition and denial. He believed
as stoutly in the supremacy of Great Britain in the history of the good
causes of Europe, as M. Thiers believes in the supremacy of France, or
Mazzini believed in that of Italy. The thought of the prodigious
industry, the inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free government,
the wise and equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island
and its majestic empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and
tenacity by which all these great material and still greater intangible
possessions had been first won, and then kept, against every hostile
comer whether domestic or foreign, sent through Macaulay a thrill, like
that which the thought of Paris and its heroisms moves in the great poet
of France, or sight of the dear city of the Violet Crown moved in an
Athenian of old. Thus habitually, with all sincerity of heart, to offer
to one of the greater popular prepossessions the incense due to any
other idol of superstition, sacred and of indisputable authority, and to
let this adoration be seen shining in every page, is one of the keys
that every man must find, who would make a quick and sure way into the
temple of contemporary fame.
It is one of the first things to be said about Macaulay, that he was in
exact accord with the common average sentiment of his day on every
subject on which he spoke. His superiority was not of that highest kind
which leads a man to march in thought on the outside margin of the
crowd, watching them, sympathising with them, hoping for them, but
apart. Macaulay was one of the middle-class crowd in his heart, and only
rose above it by splendid attainments and extraordinary gifts of
expression. He had none of that ambition which inflames some hardy men,
to make new beliefs and new passions enter the minds of their
neighbours; his ascendency is due to literary pomp, not to fecundity of
spirit. No one has ever surpassed him in the art of combining resolute
and ostentatious common sense of a slightly coarse sort in choosing his
point of view, with so considerable an appearance of dignity and
elevation in setting it forth and impressing it upon others. The
elaborateness of his style is very likely to mislead people into
imagining for him a corresponding elaborateness of thought and
sentiment. On the contrary, Macaulay's mind was really very simple,
strait, and with as few notes in its register, to borrow a phrase from
the language of vocal compass, as there are few notes, though they are
very loud, in the register of his written prose. When we look more
closely into it, what at first wore the air of dignity and elevation, in
truth rather disagreeably resembles the narrow assurance of a man who
knows that he has with him the great battalions of public opinion. We
are always quite sure that if Macaulay had been an Athenian citizen
towards the ninety-fifth Olympiad, he would have taken sides with Anytus
and Meletus in the impeachment of Socrates. A popular author must, in a
thorough-going way, take the accepted maxims for granted. He must
suppress any whimsical fancy for applying the Socratic elenchus, or any
other engine of criticism, scepticism, or verification, to those
sentiments or current precepts of morals, which may in truth be very
equivocal and may be much neglected in practice, but which the public
opinion of his time requires to be treated in theory and in literature
as if they had been cherished and held sacred _semper, ubique, et ab
omnibus_.
This is just what Macaulay does, and it is commonly supposed to be no
heavy fault in him or any other writer for the common public. Man cannot
live by analysis alone, nor nourish himself on the secret delights of
irony. And if Macaulay had only reflected the more generous of the
prejudices of mankind, it would have been well enough. Burke, for
instance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of a modern society as
deeply as Macaulay did; he believed society to be founded on prejudices
and held compact by them. Yet what size there is in Burke, what fine
perspective, what momentum, what edification! It may be pleaded that
there is the literature of edification, and there is the literature of
knowledge, and that the qualities proper to the one cannot lawfully be
expected from the other, and would only be very much out of place if
they should happen to be found there. But there are two answers to this.
First, Macaulay in the course of his varied writings discusses all sorts
of ethical and other matters, and is not simply a chronicler of party
and intrigue, of dynasties and campaigns. Second, and more than this,
even if he had never travelled beyond the composition of historical
record, he could still have sown his pages, as does every truly great
writer, no matter what his subject may be, with those significant images
or far-reaching suggestions, which suddenly light up a whole range of
distant thoughts and sympathies within us; which in an instant affect
the sensibilities of men with a something new and unforeseen; and which
awaken, if only for a passing moment, the faculty and response of the
diviner mind. Tacitus does all this, and Burke does it, and that is why
men who care nothing for Roman despots or for Jacobin despots, will
still perpetually turn to those writers almost as if they were on the
level of great poets or very excellent spiritual teachers.
One secret is that they, and all such men as they were, had that of
which Macaulay can hardly have had the rudimentary germ, the faculty of
deep abstract meditation and surrender to the fruitful 'leisures of the
spirit.' We can picture Macaulay talking, or making a speech in the
House of Commons, or buried in a book, or scouring his library for
references, or covering his blue foolscap with dashing periods, or
accentuating his sentences and barbing his phrases; but can anybody
think of him as meditating, as modestly pondering and wondering, as
possessed for so much as ten minutes by that spirit of inwardness, which
has never been wholly wanting in any of those kings and princes of
literature, with whom it is good for men to sit in counsel? He seeks
Truth, not as she should be sought, devoutly, tentatively, and with the
air of one touching the hem of a sacred garment, but clutching her by
the hair of the head and dragging her after him in a kind of boisterous
triumph, a prisoner of war and not a goddess.
All this finds itself reflected, as the inner temper of a man always is
reflected, in his style of written prose. The merits of Macaulay's prose
are obvious enough. It naturally reproduces the good qualities I of his
understanding, its strength, manliness, and directness. That exultation
in material goods and glories of which we have already spoken, makes his
pages rich in colour, and gives them the effect of a sumptuous
gala-suit. Certainly the brocade is too brand-new, and has none of the
delicate charm that comes to such finery when it is a little faded.
Again, nobody can have any excuse for not knowing exactly what it is
that Macaulay means. We may assuredly say of his prose what Boileau says
of his own poetry--'Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque
chose.' This is a prodigious merit, when we reflect with what fatal
alacrity human language lends itself in the hands of so many performers
upon the pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity, ambiguity,
disguise, and pretentious mystification. Scaliger is supposed to have
remarked of the Basques and their desperate tongue: ''Tis said the
Basques understand one another; for my part, I will never believe it.'
The same pungent doubt might apply to loftier members of the hierarchy
of speech than that forlorn dialect, but never to English as handled by
Macaulay. He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life, and this may
seem a small merit, until we remember of how few writers we could say
the same.
Macaulay is of those who think prose as susceptible of polished and
definite form as verse, and he was, we should suppose, of those also who
hold the type and mould of all written language to be spoken language.
There are more reasons for demurring to the soundness of the latter
doctrine, than can conveniently be made to fill a digression here. For
one thing, spoken language necessarily implies one or more listeners,
whereas written language may often have to express meditative moods and
trains of inward reflection that move through the mind without trace of
external reference, and that would lose their special traits by the
introduction of any suspicion that they were to be overheard. Again,
even granting that all composition must be supposed to be meant, by the
fact of its existence, to be addressed to a body of readers, it still
remains to be shown that indirect address to the inner ear should follow
the same method and rhythm as address directly through impressions on
the outer organ. The attitude of the recipient mind is different, and
there is the symbolism of a new medium between it and the speaker. The
writer, being cut off from all those effects which are producible by the
physical intonations of the voice, has to find substitutes for them by
other means, by subtler cadences, by a more varied modulation, by firmer
notes, by more complex circuits, than suffice for the utmost perfection
of spoken language, which has all the potent and manifold aids of
personality. In writing, whether it be prose or verse, you are free to
produce effects whose peculiarity one can only define vaguely, by saying
that the senses have one part less in them than in any other of the
forms and effects of art, and the imaginary voice one part more. But the
question need not be laboured here, because there can be no dispute as
to the quality of Macaulay's prose. Its measures are emphatically the
measures of spoken deliverance. Those who have made the experiment,
pronounce him to be one of the authors whose works are most admirably
fitted for reading aloud. His firmness and directness of statement, his
spiritedness, his art of selecting salient and highly coloured detail,
and all his other merits as a narrator, keep the listener's attention,
and make him the easiest of writers to follow.
Although, however, clearness, directness, and positiveness are master
qualities and the indispensable foundations of all good style, yet does
the matter plainly by no means end with them. And it is even possible
to have these virtues so unhappily proportioned and inauspiciously mixed
with other turns and casts of mind, as to end in work with little grace
or harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening purpose and
vehement will. And it is overweeningness and self-confident will that
are the chief notes of Macaulay's style. It has no benignity. Energy is
doubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's energy is perhaps
energy without momentum, and he impresses us more by a strong volubility
than by volume. It is the energy of interests and intuitions, which
though they are profoundly sincere if ever they were sincere in any man,
are yet in the relations which they comprehend, essentially superficial.
Still, trenchancy whether in speaker or writer is a most effective tone
for a large public. It gives them confidence in their man, and prevents
tediousness--except to those who reflect how delicate is the poise of
truth, and what steeps and pits encompass the dealer in unqualified
propositions. To such persons, a writer who is trenchant in every
sentence of every page, who never lapses for a line into the contingent,
who marches through the intricacies of things in a blaze of certainty,
is not only a writer to be distrusted, but the owner of a doubtful and
displeasing style. It is a great test of style to watch how an author
disposes of the qualifications, limitations, and exceptions that clog
the wings of his main proposition. The grave and conscientious men of
the seventeenth century insisted on packing them all honestly along with
the main proposition itself, within the bounds of a single period.
Burke arranges them in tolerably close order in the paragraph. Dr.
Newmann, that winning writer, disperses them lightly over his page. Of
Macaulay it is hardly unfair to say that he despatches all
qualifications into outer space before he begins to write, or if he
magnanimously admits one or two here and there, it is only to bring them
the more imposingly to the same murderous end.
We have spoken of Macaulay's interests and intuitions wearing a certain
air of superficiality; there is a feeling of the same kind about his
attempts to be genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandonment
in it. It has no deep root in moral humour, and is merely a literary
form, resembling nothing so much as the hard geniality of some clever
college tutor of stiff manners, entertaining undergraduates at an
official breakfast-party. This is not because his tone is bookish; on
the contrary, his tone and level are distinctly those of the man of the
world. But one always seems to find that neither a wide range of
cultivation, nor familiar access to the best Whig circles, had quite
removed the stiffness and self-conscious precision of the Clapham Sect.
We would give much for a little more flexibility, and would welcome ever
so slight a consciousness of infirmity. As has been said, the only
people whom men cannot pardon are the perfect. Macaulay is like the
military king who never suffered himself to be seen, even by the
attendants in his bed-chamber, until he had had time to put on his
uniform and jack-boots. His severity of eye is very wholesome; it makes
his writing firm, and firmness is certainly one of the first qualities
that good writing must have. But there is such a thing as soft and
considerate precision, as well as hard and scolding precision. Those
most interesting English critics of the generation slightly anterior to
Macaulay,--Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt,--were fully his equals
in precision, and yet they knew how to be clear, acute, and definite,
without that edginess and inelasticity which is so conspicuous in
Macaulay's criticisms, alike in their matter and their form.
To borrow the figure of an old writer, Macaulay's prose is not like a
flowing vestment to his thought, but like a suit of armour. It is often
splendid and glittering, and the movement of the opening pages of his
History is superb in its dignity. But that movement is exceptional. As a
rule there is the hardness, if there is also often the sheen, of
highly-wrought metal. Or, to change our figure, his pages are composed
as a handsome edifice is reared, not as a fine statue or a frieze 'with
bossy sculptures graven' grows up in the imaginative mind of the
statuary. There is no liquid continuity, such as indicates a writer
possessed by his subject and not merely possessing it. The periods are
marshalled in due order of procession, bright and high-stepping; they
never escape under an impulse of emotion into the full current of a
brimming stream. What is curious is that though Macaulay seems ever to
be brandishing a two-edged gleaming sword, and though he steeps us in an
atmosphere of belligerency, yet we are never conscious of inward
agitation in him, and perhaps this alone would debar him from a place
among the greatest writers. For they, under that reserve, suppression,
or management, which is an indispensable condition of the finest
rhetorical art, even when aiming at the most passionate effects, still
succeed in conveying to their readers a thrilling sense of the strong
fires that are glowing underneath. Now when Macaulay advances with his
hectoring sentences and his rough pistolling ways, we feel all the time
that his pulse is as steady as that of the most practised duellist who
ever ate fire. He is too cool to be betrayed into a single phrase of
happy improvisation. His pictures glare, but are seldom warm. Those
strokes of minute circumstantiality which he loved so dearly, show that
even in moments when his imagination might seem to be moving both
spontaneously and ardently, it was really only a literary instrument, a
fashioning tool and not a melting flame. Let us take a single example.
He is describing the trial of Warren Hastings. 'Every step in the
proceedings,' he says, 'carried the mind either backward through many
troubled centuries to the days when the foundations of our constitution
were laid; or far away over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations
living under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing
strange characters from right to left. The odd triviality of the last
detail, its unworthiness of the sentiment of the passage, leaves the
reader checked, what sets out as a fine stroke of imagination dwindles
down to a sort of literary conceit. And this puerile twist, by the way,
is all the poorer, when it is considered that the native writing is
really from left to right, and only takes the other direction in a
foreign, that is to say, a Persian alphabet. And so in other places,
even where the writer is most deservedly admired for gorgeous
picturesque effect, we feel that it is only the literary picturesque, a
kind of infinitely glorified newspaper-reporting. Compare, for instance,
the most imaginative piece to be found in any part of Macaulay's
writings with that sudden and lovely apostrophe in Carlyle, after
describing the bloody horrors that followed the fall of the Bastille in
1789:--'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant
on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on balls at the Orangerie
at Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the Palace are even now
dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring
Hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville!' Who does not feel in this the breath of
poetic inspiration, and how different it is from the mere composite of
the rhetorician's imagination, assiduously working to order?
This remark is no disparagement of Macaulay's genius, but a
classification of it. We are interrogating our own impressions, and
asking ourselves among what kind of writers he ought to be placed.
Rhetoric is a good and worthy art, and rhetorical authors are often more
useful, more instructive, more really respectable than poetical authors.
But it is to be said that Macaulay as a rhetorician will hardly be
placed in the first rank, by those who have studied both him and the
great masters. Once more, no amount of embellishment or emphasis or
brilliant figure suffices to produce this intense effect of agitation
rigorously restrained; nor can any beauty of decoration be in the least
a substitute for that touching and penetrative music, which is made in
prose by the repressed trouble of grave and high souls. There is a
certain music, we do not deny, in Macaulay, but it is the music of a man
everlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a silver trumpet, never the
swelling diapasons of the organ, and never the deep ecstasies of the
four magic strings. That so sensible a man as Macaulay should keep clear
of the modern abomination of dithyrambic prose, that rank and sprawling
weed of speech, was natural enough; but then the effects which we miss
in him, and which, considering how strong the literary faculty in him
really was, we are almost astonished to miss, are not produced by
dithyramb but by repression. Of course the answer has been already
given; Macaulay, powerful and vigorous as he was, had no agitation, no
wonder, no tumult of spirit to repress. The world was spread out clear
before him; he read it as plainly and as certainly as he read his books;
life was all an affair of direct categoricals.
This was at least one secret of those hard modulations and shallow
cadences. How poor is the rhythm of Macaulay's prose we only realise by
going with his periods fresh in our ear to some true master of harmony.
It is not worth while to quote passages from an author who is in
everybody's library, and Macaulay is always so much like himself that
almost any one page will serve for an illustration exactly as well as
any other. Let any one turn to his character of Somers, for whom he had
so much admiration, and then turn to Clarendon's character of
Falkland;--'a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge,
of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of so flowing
and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive
simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon
this odious and accursed civil war than that single loss, it must be
most infamous and execrable to all posterity.' Now Clarendon is not a
great writer, not even a good writer, for he is prolix and involved, yet
we see that even Clarendon, when he comes to a matter in which his heart
is engaged, becomes sweet and harmonious in his rhythm. If we turn to a
prose-writer of the very first place, we are instantly conscious of a
still greater difference. How flashy and shallow Macaulay's periods
seem, as we listen to the fine ground-base that rolls in the melody of
the following passage of Burke's, and it is taken from one of the least
ornate of all his pieces:--
You will not, we trust, believe that, born in a civilised country,
formed to gentle manners, trained in a merciful religion, and living
in enlightened and polished times, where even foreign hostility is
softened from its original sternness, we could have thought of
letting loose upon you, our late beloved brethren, these fierce
tribes of savages and cannibals, in whom the traces of human nature
are effaced by ignorance and barbarity. We rather wished to have
joined with you in bringing gradually that unhappy part of mankind
into civility, order, piety, and virtuous discipline, than to have
confirmed their evil habits and increased their natural ferocity by
fleshing them in the slaughter of you, whom our wiser and better
ancestors had sent into the wilderness with the express view of
introducing, along with our holy religion, its humane and charitable
manners. We do not hold that all things are lawful in war. We should
think every barbarity, in fire, in wasting, in murders, in tortures,
and other cruelties, too horrible and too full of turpitude for
Christian mouths to utter or ears to hear, if done at our
instigation, by those who we know will make war thus if they make it
at all, to be, to all intents and purposes, as if done by ourselves.
We clear ourselves to you our brethren, to the present age, and to
future generations, to our king and our country, and to Europe, which
as a spectator, beholds this tragic scene, of every part or share in
adding this last and worst of evils to the inevitable mischiefs of a
civil war.
We do not call you rebels and traitors. We do not call for the
vengeance of the crown against you. We do not know how to qualify
millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an
admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness
and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly
revere the principles on which you act, though we lament some of
their effects. Armed as you are, we embrace you, as our friends and
as our brethren by the best and dearest ties of relation.