Thomas Babington Macaulay.
Thomas Babington Macaulay, born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, on 25 October, 1800, is an ideal representative of one mood of the English mind and character during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the Mac in his patronymic be Gaelic, he and his forefathers had little in them of the typical Celt. The name Macaulay means MacOlaf (Olafson) and the Norseman rather than the Celt predominated in Macaulay. His great grandfather, the Rev. Aulay, and his grandfather the Rev. John, are reported by Bishop Forbes (in "The Lyon in Mourning") to have been personally and peculiarly active in attempting to gain the prize of £30,000 offered by the English Government for Prince Charles. Their enterprise did not suit the Celtic character. Macaulay's father, Zachary, was a deeply religious man, a member of the so-called "Clapham Sect" of Evangelicals. Though he was at one time prosperous in business, so much of his time and energy were given to negro emancipation that misfortunes came, and Macaulay had to work hard for his livelihood.
There are no more delightful chapters in Biography than those in which Sir George Trevelyan describes Macaulay's childhood. His intelligence was precocious; his memory was a marvel. At the age of 9 he read once through "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and was able to repeat the whole of the poem. This exceeds even Scott's feat of repeating the whole of a ballad of eighty verses which he had heard read once by the author. Macaulay's memory lasted throughout his life, and gave him, naturally, that amazing readiness and richness in literary and historical allusions which have made his Essays and History popular beyond rivalry. No doubt like Scott he relied on memory too confidently; styling Claverhouse, for example, "James Graham". He read with a rapidity inconceivable; and he read everything, from Plato, Herodotus, and Æschylus to the worst novels, forgetting nothing in them that was accidentally good or exquisitely absurd. Even in childhood he was a copious and accomplished writer, his "Family Epic on Olaf, King and Saint," presents a remarkably successful imitation of Scott's style in "The Lady of the Lake". With these intellectual gifts he combined intense affection, good humour, and a turn for loud and vehement argument. Going from a private school to Trinity College, Cambridge, Macaulay regretted that he had not chosen Oxford; for mathematics were his abomination. He twice gained, as Tennyson did once, the Chancellor's medal for a prize poem, but in the Tripos of 1822 "Macaulay of Trinity was gulfed," by "the cross-grained Muses of the cube and square". They did not prevent him from obtaining a Fellowship at Trinity. He won a prize essay on William III., which is written in the very cadences of style that mark his History; and, at intervals, in the same short sentences. "He knew where to pause. He outraged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He altered no venerable name." Possibly it is a pity that these sentences do not describe William's conduct in Scottish affairs.
His early pieces, Macaulay contributed to "Knight's Quarterly Magazine". At the age of 25 he wrote in "The Edinburgh Review," that essay on poetry in general and on Milton as poet, man, and politician in particular, which took the world as suddenly and as completely as Byron's "Childe Harold" had done. "The family breakfast-table was covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter of London." To readers who in our day read the essay this enthusiasm seems creditable to the world, but rather surprising. Of Æschylus, Macaulay wrote: "considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as choruses, they are above all praise". Milton's admiration of Euripides reminds him of "Titania kissing the long ears of Bottom".
Grateful as every reader is to Macaulay for the vivid and lucid expression of his knowledge and thought in his essays, we must admit that, like Charles Lamb, he was a man of "imperfect sympathies". Miss Edgeworth, delighted to find her own name in a footnote to his "History of England," expressed to him her regret that Scott, who had written with entire impartiality about Macaulay's period, was not once mentioned. In truth, after reading Lockhart's "Life of Scott," with its magnificent and melancholy close in the "Journal" of a man working himself to death for honour's sake, Macaulay wrote thus of Sir Walter: "In politics a bitter and unscrupulous partisan; profuse and ostentatious in expense; agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler,... sacrificing the perfection of his compositions to his eagerness for money... in order to satisfy wants which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious speculations; this is the way in which he appears to me". Scott was a Tory: and from Macaulay's remarks we understand the justice of his studies of historical characters.
The rapacious speculator, in fact, had shown "extravagant waste" in publishing books (not his own) of disinterested research; when he was ruined he gave away his work, because he had not money to give; the "bitter and unscrupulous partisan" as a historian of his country was more than scrupulously fair. Of Brougham's essays Macaulay wrote: "All the characters are either too black or too fair. The passions of the writer do not suffer him even to maintain the decent appearance of impartiality." These are the very charges brought against Macaulay's own "characters" of William Penn the Quaker, and Claverhouse the Cavalier; while no historian, perhaps, can defend his account of Sir Elijah Impey. Had a Stuart King behaved as William III. did in the matter of the Darien enterprise, we can easily imagine the style in which Macaulay would have "dusted the varlet's jacket". But with lapse of time his bias, his prejudices, can be discounted. As early as 1828 he wrote "a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque". That power of imagination he possessed and exercised so delightfully that his History was at once purchased more eagerly than a poem or romance. Both as a collector of materials and as a traveller to the scenes of which he was to write, Macaulay toiled with his own unexampled energy and rapidity. It is well worth while to read his account of his own methods both in study and in composition.[1]
It is not the good fortune of most historians to possess even Macaulay's private means, the savings of five years passed in India as legal member of the Indian Council. Nor can his practical knowledge of politics and of the world be often found among students, while his natural gifts of imagination and of expression are almost unexampled. His intellect had the limits of his class, his age, and his robust and hasty temperament.
His poems, "The Lays of Ancient Rome," have been as popular as his prose. He tried at 40 to write such ballads as he conceived the folk-songs of republican Rome to have been, and nobody can deny that the "Lays" have abundance of spirit and "go". The ballad of the Armada, and of "The Last Buccaneer" possess the same virtues and will always be dear to young people of spirit. Arrived at the age of 50, Macaulay wrote, in the very words of the dying Hazlitt, "Well, I have had a happy life!" It was extended to 1859, he died on 28 December, leaving a name justly honourable and a cherished memory.
Thomas Carlyle.