Famous Reviews, Selected and Edited with Introductory Notes by R. Brimley Johnson

by Unknown

MILL ON MACAULAY'S "LAYS"

[From The Westminster Review. February, 1843]

It is with the two great masters of modern ballad poetry (Campbell and Scott) that Mr. Macaulay's performances are really to be compared, and not with the real ballads or epics of an early age. The "Lays," in point of form, are not in the least like the genuine productions of a primitive age or people, and it is no blame to Mr. Macaulay that they are not. He professes imitation of Homer, but we really see no resemblance, except in the nature of some of the incidents, and the animation and vigour of the narrative; and the "Iliad," after all, is not the original ballads of the Trojan War, but these ballads moulded together, and wrought into the forms of a more civilised and cultivated age. It is difficult to conjecture what the form of the old Roman ballad may have been, and certain, that whatever they were, they could no more satisfy the aesthetic requirements of modern culture, than an ear accustomed to the great organs of Freyburg or Harlem could relish Orpheus's hurdy-gurdy, although the airs which Orpheus played, if they could be recovered, might perhaps be executed with great effect on the more perfect instrument.

The former of Mr. Macaulay's ballad poetry are essentially modern: they are those of the romantic and chivalrous, not the classical ages, and even in those they are a reproduction, not of the originals, but of the imitations of Scott. In this we think he has done well, for Scott's style is as near to that of the ancient ballad as we conceive to be at all compatible with real popular effect on the modern mind. The difference between the two may be seen by the most cursory comparison of any real old ballad, "Chevy Chase," for instance, with last canto of Marmion, or with any of these "Lays." Conciseness is the characteristic of the real ballad, diffuseness of the modern adaptation. The old bard did everything by single touches; Scott and Mr. Macaulay by repetition and accumulation of particulars. They produce all their effect by what they say; he by what he suggested; by what he stimulated the imagination to paint for itself. But then the old ballads were not written for the light reading of tired readers. To do the work in their way, they required to be brooded over, or had at least the aid of tune and of impassioned recitation. Stories which are to be told to children in the age of eagerness and excitability, or sung in banquet halls to assembled warriors, whose daily ideas and feelings supply a flood of comment ready to gush forth on the slightest hint of the poet, cannot fly too swift and straight to the mark. But Mr. Macaulay wrote to be only read, and by readers for whom it was necessary to do all.

These poems, therefore, are not the worse for being un-Roman in their form; and in their substance they are Roman to a degree which deserves great admiration. Mr. Macaulay's prose writings had not prepared us for the power which he has here manifested of identifying himself easily and completely, with states of feeling and modes of life alien to modern experience. Nobody could have previously doubted that he possessed fancy, but he has added to it the higher faculty of Imagination. We have not been able to detect, in the four poems, one idea or feeling which was not, or might not have been Roman; while the externals of Roman life, and the feelings characteristic of Rome and of that particular age, are reproduced with great felicity, and without being made unduly predominant over the universal features of human nature and human life.

Independently therefore of their value as poems, these compositions are a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers. This is no trifling matter, even in relation to present interests, for there is no estimating the injury which the cause of popular institutions has suffered, and still suffers from misrepresentations of the early condition of the Roman and Plebs, and its noble struggles against its taskmasters. And the study of the manner in which the heroic legends of early Rome grew up as poetry and gradually became history, has important bearings on the general laws of historical evidence, and on the many things which, as philosophy advances, are more and more seen to be therewith connected. On this subject Mr. Macaulay has not only presented, in an agreeable form, the results of previous speculation, but has, though in an entirely unpretending manner, thrown additional light upon it by his own remarks: as where he shows, by incontestible instances, that a similar transformation of poetic fiction into history has taken place on various occasions in modern and sceptical times….

We are more disposed to break a lance with our author on the general merits of Roman literature, which, by a heresy not new with him, he sacrifices, in what appears to us a most unfair degree, on the score of its inferior originality to the Grecian. It is true the Romans had no Aeschylus nor Sophocles, and but a secondhand Homer, though this last was not only the most finished but even the most original of imitators. But where was the Greek model of the noble poem of Lucretius? What, except the mere idea, did the Georgics borrow from Hesiod? and whoever thinks of comparing the two poems? Where, in Homer or the Euripides, will be found the original of the tender and pathetic passages in the Aeneid, especially the exquisitely told story of Dido? There is no extraordinary merit in the "Carmen Secculare" as we have it, the only production of Horace which challenges comparison with Pindar; although we are not among those who deem Pindar one of the brightest stars in the Greek heaven. But from whom are the greater part of Horace's Carmina borrowed (they should never be termed Odes), any more than those of Burns or Béranger, the analogous authors in modern times? and by what Greek minor poems are they surpassed? We say nothing of Catullus, whom some competent judges prefer to Horace. Does the lyric, then, or even the epic poetry of the Romans, deserve no better title than that of "a hot-house plant, which, in return for assiduous and skilful culture, yielded only scanty and sickly fruits?" The complete originality and eminent merit of their satiric poetry, Mr. Macaulay himself acknowledges. As for prose, we give up Cicero as compared with Demosthenes, but with no one else; and is Livy less original, or less admirable, than Herodotus? Tacitus may have imitated, even to affectation, the condensation of Thucydides, as Milton imitated the Greek and Hebrew poets; but was the mind of the one as essentially original as that of the other? Is the Roman less an unapprochable master, in his peculiar line, that of sentimental history, than the Grecian in his? and what Greek historian has written anything similar or comparable to the sublime peroration of the Life of Agricola? The Latin genius lay not in speculation, and the Romans did undoubtedly borrow all their philosophical principles from the Greeks. Their originality there, as is well said by a remarkable writer in the most remarkable of his works,[1] consisted in taking these principles au serieux. They did what the others talked about. Zeno, indeed, was not a Roman; but Poetus Thrasea and Marcus Antoninus were.

[1] Mr. Maurice, in the essay on the history of moral speculation and culture, which forms the article "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy" in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana.