Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3)
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John Morley >> Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3)
It may be said that there is a patent injustice in comparing the prose
of a historian criticising or describing great events at second hand,
with the prose of a statesman taking active part in great events, fired
by the passion of a present conflict, and stimulated by the vivid
interest of undetermined issues. If this be a well-grounded plea, and it
may be so, then of course it excludes a contrast not only with Burke,
but also with Bolingbroke, whose fine manners and polished gaiety give
us a keen sense of the grievous garishness of Macaulay. If we may not
institute a comparison between Macaulay and great actors on the stage of
affairs, at least there can be no objection to the introduction of
Southey as a standard of comparison. Southey was a man of letters pure
and simple, and it is worth remarking that Macaulay himself admitted
that he found so great a charm in Southey's style, as nearly always to
read it with pleasure, even when Southey was talking nonsense. Now, take
any page of the Life of Nelson or the Life of Wesley; consider how easy,
smooth, natural, and winning is the diction and the rise and fall of the
sentence, and yet how varied the rhythm and how nervous the phrases; and
then turn to a page of Macaulay, and wince under its stamping emphasis,
its over-coloured tropes, its exaggerated expressions, its unlovely
staccato. Southey's History of the Peninsular War is now dead, but if
any of my readers has a copy on his highest shelves, I would venture to
ask him to take down the third volume, and read the concluding pages,
of which Coleridge used to say that they were the finest specimen of
historic eulogy he had ever read in English, adding with forgivable
hyperbole, that they were more to the Duke's fame and glory than a
campaign. 'Foresight and enterprise with our commander went hand in
hand; he never advanced but so as to be sure of his retreat; and never
retreated but in such an attitude as to impose upon a superior enemy,'
and so on through the sum of Wellington's achievements. 'There was
something more precious than these, more to be desired than the high and
enduring fame which he had secured by his military achievements, the
satisfaction of thinking to what end those achievements had been
directed; that they were for the deliverance of two most injured and
grievously oppressed nations; for the safety, honour, and welfare of his
own country; and for the general interests of Europe and of the
civilised world. His campaigns were sanctified by the cause; they were
sullied by no cruelties, no crimes; the chariot-wheels of his triumphs
have been followed by no curses; his laurels are entwined with the
amaranths of righteousness, and upon his death-bed he might remember his
victories among his good works.'
What is worse than want of depth and fineness of intonation in a period,
is all gross excess of colour, because excess of colour is connected
with graver faults in the region of the intellectual conscience.
Macaulay is a constant sinner in this respect. The wine of truth is in
his cup a brandied draught, a hundred degrees above proof, and he too
often replenishes the lamp of knowledge with naphtha instead of fine
oil. It is not that he has a spontaneous passion for exuberant
decoration, which he would have shared with more than one of the
greatest names in literature. On the contrary, we feel that the
exaggerated words and dashing sentences are the fruit of deliberate
travail, and the petulance or the irony of his speech is mostly due to a
driving predilection for strong effects. His memory, his directness, his
aptitude for forcing things into firm outline, and giving them a sharply
defined edge,--these and other singular talents of his all lent
themselves to this intrepid and indefatigable pursuit of effect. And the
most disagreeable feature is that Macaulay was so often content with an
effect of an essentially vulgar kind, offensive to taste, discordant to
the fastidious ear, and worst of all, at enmity with the whole spirit of
truth. By vulgar we certainly do not mean homely, which marks a wholly
different quality. No writer can be more homely than Mr. Carlyle, alike
in his choice of particulars to dwell upon, and in the terms or images
in which he describes or illustrates them, but there is also no writer
further removed from vulgarity. Nor do we mean that Macaulay too
copiously enriches the tongue with infusion from any Doric dialect. For
such raciness he had little taste. What we find in him is that quality
which the French call brutal. The description, for instance, in the
essay on Hallam, of the licence of the Restoration, seems to us a coarse
and vulgar picture, whose painter took the most garish colours he could
find on his palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity. And
who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of
Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great
writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in
which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the
puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about
Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of
the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked about
constitutional checks and fundamental laws as a prodigy not less
astonishing than the learned pig or musical infant.' And he then goes on
to describe the author of one of the most important books that ever were
written, as 'specious but shallow, studious of effect, indifferent to
truth--the lively President,' and so forth, stirring in any reader who
happens to know Montesquieu's influence, a singular amazement. We are
not concerned with the judgment upon Montesquieu, nor with the truth as
to contemporary English opinion about him, but a writer who devises an
antithesis to such a man as Montesquieu in learned pigs and musical
infants, deliberately condescends not merely to triviality or levity,
but to flat vulgarity of thought, to something of mean and ignoble
association. Though one of the most common, this is not Macaulay's only
sin in the same unfortunate direction. He too frequently resorts to
vulgar gaudiness. For example, there is in one place a certain
description of an alleged practice of Addison's. Swift had said of
Esther Johnson that 'whether from easiness in general, or from her
indifference to persons, or from her despair of mending them, or from
the same practice which she most liked in Mr. Addison, I cannot
determine; but when she saw any of the company very warm in a wrong
opinion, she was more inclined to confirm them in it than to oppose
them. It prevented noise, she said, and saved time.'[2] Let us behold
what a picture Macaulay draws on the strength of this passage. 'If his
first attempts to set a presuming dunce right were ill-received,'
Macaulay says of Addison, 'he changed his tone, "assented with civil
leer," and lured the flattered coxcomb deeper and deeper into
absurdity.' To compare this transformation of the simplicity of the
original into the grotesque heat and overcharged violence of the copy,
is to see the homely maiden of a country village transformed into the
painted flaunter of the city.
One more instance. We should be sorry to violate any sentiment of
[Greek: to semnon] about a man of Macaulay's genius, but what is a
decorous term for a description of the doctrine of Lucretius's great
poem, thrown in parenthetically, as the 'silliest and meanest system of
natural and moral philosophy!' Even disagreeable artifices of
composition may be forgiven, when they serve to vivify truth, to
quicken or to widen the moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy and
habitual recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentally
unscientific and untrue. There is no more instructive example in our
literature than he, of the saying that the adjective is the enemy of the
substantive.
[Footnote 2: Forster's _Swift_, i. 265.]
* * * * *
In 1837 Jeffrey saw a letter written by Macaulay to a common friend, and
stating the reasons for preferring a literary to a political life.
Jeffrey thought that his illustrious ally was wrong in the conclusion to
which he came. 'As to the tranquillity of an author's life,' he said, 'I
have no sort of faith in it. And as to fame, if an author's is now and
then more lasting, it is generally longer withheld, and except in a few
rare cases it is of a less pervading or elevating description. A great
poet or a great _original_ writer is above all other glory. But who
would give much for such a glory as Gibbon's? Besides, I believe it is
in the inward glow and pride of consciously influencing the destinies of
mankind, much more than in the sense of personal reputation, that the
delight of either poet or statesman chiefly consists.' And Gibbon had at
least the advantage of throwing himself into a religious controversy
that is destined to endure for centuries. He, moreover, was specifically
a historian, while Macaulay has been prized less as a historian proper
than as a master of literary art. Now a man of letters, in an age of
battle and transition like our own, fades into an ever-deepening
distance, unless he has while he writes that touching and impressive
quality,--the presentiment of the eve; a feeling of the difficulties and
interests that will engage and distract mankind on the morrow. Nor can
it be enough for enduring fame in any age merely to throw a golden halo
round the secularity of the hour, or to make glorious the narrowest
limitations of the passing day. If we think what a changed sense is
already given to criticism, what a different conception now presides
over history, how many problems on which Macaulay was silent are now the
familiar puzzles of even superficial readers, we cannot help feeling
that the eminent man whose life we are all about to read, is the hero of
a past which is already remote, and that he did little to make men
better fitted to face a present of which, close as it was to him, he
seems hardly to have dreamed.