MACAULAY.
R. LESLIE STEPHEN'S lecture on Macaulay at
Toynbee Hall this day week, seems to us, if we may trust the report, to have done scant justice to him. Macaulay was too much of a Whig optimist for Mr. Stephen, and he con- cluded his lecture by a prediction that Macaulay would retain " a good, fixed, and unassailable place in the affections of some generations of his countrymen," but that he would be placed on a level "distinctly below that of his most eminent contem- poraries." We do not dispute the words of the judgment itself, but we suspect that very few of his contemporaries will outshine him. No doubt there will be a poet or two above him ; no doubt, again, before a unique imagina- tion more brilliant in its flashes than constructive and coherent in the region of history, like Carlyle's, Macaulay's imagination may look poor and pale ; but in that region will there be any other P We greatly doubt it. Macaulay will continue, we think, to be far the most popular of the historical writers of the Victorian era, for Carlyle sur- passes him rather in his insight into the depth and signifi- cance of the passions of nations than in his narrative of their external history and conduct. Macaulay's imagina- tion is no doubt limited in its field of view, and more limited still in its resources of expression. As Mr. Bagehot has justly said of him, he combined the very unusual coexisting qualities of a " flowing fancy " and " an insensible organisation." Mr. Bagehot has happily quoted, in reference to Macaulay, Montalembert's remark on one of the French historians, that " he was hardened alike against good and evil." There was much of this picturesque insensibility in Macaulay. He presented a brilliant picture of life, and yet a picture with a certain glaze upon it. It was interesting, and even exciting ; but it was, as it were, cast iu a single mould, it was engine-turned rhetoric, full of very impressive but very monotonously designed and coloured pictures. Still, there are many wonderful qualities in Macaulay which will, in our opinion, ensure him a popularity secured only to two or three of his contemporaries. Let us consider what singularly great qualities he had, while admitting frankly the tendency of his imagination to run into somewhat stiff moulds, and to give history the air of a staid and sober pageant, conceived and formally endorsed in some celestial antitype of Holland House.
Mr. Stephen is surely unjust to Macaulay in speaking of him as "one embodiment of the English spirit of his day, the typical John Bull who flowered during the genera-
tion that succeeded the Reform Bill of 1832." That ex- presses but a very minute fragment of Macaulay, who was both a great deal more and a good deal less than a typical expression of the national character. He was both less and more, for there was a tendency to a formulated conception of life, to a definitely balanced, modulated, and coherent appre- hension of history in Macaulay, of which no typical John Bull is even capable. One of the great qualities in Macaulay is the rhythmic movement of his mind, a tendency very far from characteristic of John Bull. It is this simple and rather monotonous rhythm, —a rhythm very inadequate, as we admit, to express the great complexity of our life, and even of our political life,—which makes Macaulay so delightful to the schoolboy. The schoolboy at least learns from him to regard history as having a rhythm of its own, a law of development which contains more or less of the grandeur and effect of oratory. No doubt the rhythm is a little artificial, a little mannered, a little poverty-stricken, to any man who has learnt how many and how different are the forces which take shape in history. But still, it is a great thing to fascinate the imagination of the young with the conception of history as an ebbing and flowing tide, a succession of waves with a measure, and a sway, and a kind of tidal move. ment of their own. And thus much even Macaulay's brilliant and picturesque monotony manages to impress most effectively on the boyish mind. Take, as an example, the kind of imaginative eloquence with which he described the French Revolution,—infinitely inferior, no doubt, in fire and grasp and significance to Carlyle's,—but still in its way most effec- tive; indeed, much more effective for the purpose of impress- ing young and half-formed intellects :—" Despotism and License mingling in unblest union, engendered that mighty Devolution in whose features the lineaments of both parents were strangely blended ; the long gestation was accomplished, and Europe saw with mingled hope and terror, that agonising travail and that portentous birth." That is elaborate rhetoric, no doubt, but it is just the elaborate rhetoric which stamps young minds with the notion of a law of evolution in history, and sets that law to a sort of grandiose music of its own, No one will assert that the "typical John Bull" has any deep sense, however inadequate, of the continuity of history, of the rhythm of progress, of the unity of Providential purpose.
Again, besides his strong sense of the measure and con- tinuity in human affairs, Macaulay had so vivid an apprehen- sion of the petty detail which fills up the great pageant, that he lights up for his readers the full complexity of the external human life of which he writes as no other English writer of the day could have lit it up. Even Carlyle, who had a far deeper hold of the interior of human pasision, had nothing like the same grasp of the external detail of ordinary life, of the petty items which constituted the picturesque and variegated story of which he was treating. Open Macaulay's pages at random, and you are sure to meet with evidence of this power of realising the complexity and variety, and yet the unity of his topic, even in dealing. with the tamest subject- matter. Open the essay, for instance, on Sir William Temple, and we come at once on a passage of this kind :—" In October, 1680, the Houses met, and the great question of the Exclusion was revived. Few Parliamentary contests in our history appear to have called forth a greater display of talent ; none certainly ever called forth more violent passions. The whole nation was convulsed by party spirit ; the gentlemen of every eounty, the traders of every town, the boys of every public school, were divided into exclusionists and abhorrers. The bookstalls were covered with tracts on the sacredness of here- ditary right, on the omnipotence of Parliament, on the dangers of a disputed succession, on the dangers of a Popish reign. It was in the midst of this ferment that Temple took his seat for the first time in the House of Commons." That is a very inadequate specimen of what we mean, but it will serve the purpose. Macaulay's vision of the detail in which public events and public opinion manifested themselves, was a keen and significant vision which brings back the meaning of these abstract phrases to the mind. No man can truly say that the typical John Bull " has any such mastery of the concrete meaning of the abstract terms he uses to describe the phases of political life. Macaulay can always make you see what a social or political crisis means, with that tangible imagination which makes the reader conceive himself present in it, handling its thorny questions, and watching the effervescence of the hour. But, again, Macaulay in spite of what Mr. Bageliot truly enough, his " insensible organisation," had by no means tlxe stolid English indifference to aerial and unearthly beauty. Such beauty did not make his heart beat and his style glow, as it would have made the heart of a genuine poet beat, and his style glow. But in his own cut-and-dried Whiggish fashion, Macaulay took note of all the most characteristic phenomena of British literature, and could have told you very accurately where to find the noblest lyrics even in so unsubstantial a poet as Shelley. Turn to his essay on " Southey's edition of Bunyan's Progress,' " and though we shall find what seems to the present writer a very poor analysis of Shelley's power, we shall certainly find what "the typical John Bull" could never by any possibility have conceived and recorded, a very positive and keen sense of the reality of that power. Shelley is swept into the current of the rather oracular criticism on Bunyan in a curiously insensible and inappropriate fashion, but Macaulay ends with a few words which show how genuinely be had felt, after his own kind, the genius of Shelley, though he dragged him into the midst of his panegyric on Bunyan almost by head and shoulders. "The genius of Bunyan," he says, bore in one respect " a great resemblance to that of a man who had very little else in common with him " (and we should say, had least of all in common with him of that which Macaulay asserts), " Percy Bysshe Shelley. , The strong imagination of Shelley made him an idolator in his own despite. Out of the most indefinite terms of a hard, cold, dark metaphysical system, he made a gorgeous Pantheon full of beautiful, majestic, and lifelike forms. He turned Atheism itself into a mythology rich with visions as glorious as the gods that live in the marble of Phidias or the virgin saints that smile on us from the canvas of Murillo. The Spirit of Beauty, the Principle of Good, the Principle of Evil, when he treated of them, ceased to be abstractions. They took shape and colour ; they were no longer mere words, but intelligible forms;' ` fair humanities;' objects of love, of adoration, or of fear. As there can be no stronger sign of a mind destitute of the poetical faculty than that tendency which was so common among the writers of the French school to turn images into abstractions,—Venus, for example, into Love, Minerva into Wisdom, Mars into War, and Bacchus into Festivity,—so there can be no stronger sign of a mind truly poetical than a disposition to reverse this abstracting process, and to make individuals out of generalities. Some of the metaphysical and ethical theories of Shelley were certainly most absurd and pernicious. But we should doubt whether any modern poet has possessed in an equal degree, some of the highest qualities of the great ancient masters. The words bard and inspiration, which seem so cold and affected when applied to other modern writers, have a perfect propriety when applied to him. He was not an author, but a bard. His poetry seems not to have been an art, but an inspiration." The greater part of that passage is bad criticism. We will venture to say that Shelley's metaphysical incarnations are as unreal and indistinguishable as the emptiest allegories in our literature. Who can distinguish Asia from Panthea ? or Panthea, from Ione ? or the Spirit of the Hour from the Spirit of the Earth ? or the language of the Chorus of Hours from the language of the Chorus of Spirits ? The bulk of
that passage in Macaulay's essay is full of lifeless criticism ; but it ends with a touch which shows how genuinely Macaulay had, in his own cold way, appreciated Shelley, when he said that more than any other poet of the age, he realised the old notion of a bard, and realised the meaning of poetic inspiration. And how much that is when it comes from a sententious, period-balancing writer of Macaulay's calibre ! Assuredly no "typical John Bull" would in 1830 have been willing to say anything good of Shelley's poetry, least of all anything so true of his lyric genius as that it, more than any other poetry. of the day, seemed to well from some fountain which could never run dry,—from some pure Castalian spring of intellectual melody.
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