It is true that Carlyle's determination to force Oliver upon us as perfect saint and infallible hero is irritating and sometimes laughable; it is true that his zeal to be-dwarf every one but Cromwell himself is unjust and untrue; and the depreciation of every man who declines to play into Oliver's hands is too often manifest. But, on the whole, the judgments are so sound, the supporting authorities are so overwhelming, the work of verification is so thorough, so scrupulous, so perfectly borne out by all subsequent research—that the future will no doubt look on the Cromwell, not only as the most extraordinary, but the most satisfactory and effective of all Carlyle's work; although for the reasons stated, it can never have the largest measure of his literary charm or possess the full afflatus of his poetic and mystical genius.
By the time that Cromwell was published, Thomas Carlyle was turned of fifty, and had produced nearly two-thirds of his total work. It may be doubted if any later book will be permanently counted amongst his masterpieces. Friedrich, for reasons set forth, was an attempt in late life to repeat the feat of the Cromwell: it was a much less urgent task: and it was not so well performed. The Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850) do not add much that is new to Past and Present (1843) or to Sartor (1831); and little of what they add is either needful or true. The world had been fully enlightened about Wind-bags, Shams, the approach to Tophet, Stump-orators, Palaver-Parliaments, Phantasm-Captains, and the rest of the Sartorian puppet-pantomime. There was a profound truth in all of these invectives, warnings, and prophecies. But the prophet's voice at last got so shrieky and monotonous, that instead of warning and inspiring a second generation, these terrific maledictions began to pall upon a practical world. An ardent admirer of the prophet has said that, when he first heard Carlyle speak face to face, he could hardly resist the impression that he was listening to an actor personating the Sage of Chelsea, and mimicking the stock phrases of the Latter-Day Pamphlets. Certainly no man of sense can find any serious guidance on any definite social problem from these "Pamphlets" of his morbid decline. Carlyle at last sat eating his heart out, like Napoleon on St. Helena. His true friends will hasten to throw such a decent covering as Japhet and Shem threw around Noah, over the latest melancholy outbursts about Negroes, Reformers, Jamaica massacres, and the anticipated conflagration of Paris by the Germans. It is pitiful indeed to find in "the collected and revised works," thirty-six volumes, the drivel of his Pro-Slavery advocacy, and of ill-conditioned snarling at honest men labouring to reform ancient abuses.
It is perilous for any man, however consummate be his genius, to place himself on a solitary rock apart from all living men and defiant of all before him, as the sole source of truth out of his own inner consciousness. It is fatal to any man, however noble his own spirit, to look upon this earth as "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books. Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper. All that a "man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit, could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as the "supreme man of letters" of his time he will ever be honoured and long continue to be read. He deliberately cultivated a form of speech which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them. He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott, Byron—even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue to drink inspiration from the two or three masterpieces of the Annandale peasant-poet.
III
LORD MACAULAY
Macaulay, who counted his years of life by those of this century, may fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy years since his first brilliant essay on "Milton" took the world by storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series of Essays was closed, and little short of that time since his famous History appeared. The editions of it in England and in America are counted by thousands; it has six translations into German, and translations into ten other European languages. It made him rich, famous, and a peer. Has it given him a foremost place in English literature?
Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of experts is in striking contrast. The readers both of the Old and of the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally good. Essays, Lays, History, Lives—all are read by millions: as critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay has achieved world-wide renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste, or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene judgment. They say he is always more declaimer than thinker—more advocate than judge. The poets deny that the Lays are poetry at all. The modern school of scientific historians declare that the History is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which it is constructed. The purists in style shake their heads over his everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force of these defects, which they usually speak of as his "limitations" or his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those long-drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he would himself have revelled in the paradox—"that books which were household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every Baboo in Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine and a mannerist"; "how ballads which were the delight of every child were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a prize in a public school"; "how the most famous of all modern reviewers scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subtle analysis"; how it comes about "that the most elaborate of modern histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a crammer's textbook"—and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style which is so clear and so familiar. But let us beware of applying to Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis which he so often applied to others. Boswell, he says, was immortal, "because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb." It would be a feeble parody to retort that Macaulay became a great literary power "because he had no philosophy, little subtlety, and a heavy hand." For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan. No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious knowledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has rarely been surpassed; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance. These are all very great and sterling qualities. And it is right to acknowledge them with no unstinted honour—even whilst we are fully conscious of the profound shortcomings and limitations that accompanied but did not destroy them.
In a previous paper we discussed the permanent contribution to English literature of Thomas Carlyle; and it is curious to note how complete a contrast these two famous writers present. Carlyle was a simple, self-taught, recluse man of letters: Macaulay was legislator, cabinet minister, orator, politician, peer—a pet of society, a famous talker, and member of numerous academies. Carlyle was poor, despondent, morbid, and cynical: Macaulay was rich, optimist, overflowing with health, high spirits, and good nature. The one hardly ever knew what the world called success: the other hardly ever knew failure. Carlyle had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle, the social philosopher. In Macaulay these were singularly wanting; he was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the ultimate triumph of all that is practical and commonplace, and in the final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The Teufelsdröckhian dialect is obscure even to its select students: the Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift himself. Carlyle's gospel is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems. Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is; on the contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its ancestors.
The great public, wherever English books penetrate, from the White Sea to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and with the apocalyptic spirit of Sartor, it is certain that millions would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they did. And if the only books were such "purple patches" of history as Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style—this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philosopher, or master. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion.
In one thing all agree—critics, public, friends, and opponents. Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity, affection, and manly perseverance, almost without a stain or a defect. His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable egoism of the opulent middle classes; the religion of comfort, laisser-faire, and social order was infused into his bones. But, so far as his traditions and temper would permit, his life was as honourable, as unsullied, and as generous, as ever was that of any man who lived in the fierce light that beats upon the famous. We know his nature and his career as well as we know any man's; and we find it on every side wholesome, just, and right. He has been fortunate in his biographers, and amply criticised by the best judges. His nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, has written his life at length in a fine book. Dean Milman and Mark Pattison have given us vignettes; Cotter Morison has adorned the Men of Letters series with a delightful and sympathetic sketch; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one voice in all this company. It was a fine, generous, honourable, and sterling nature. His books deserve their vast popularity and may long continue to maintain it. But Macaulay must not be judged amongst philosophers—nor even amongst the real masters of the English language. And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students astray and his imitators into an obtrusive mannerism.