But not only has the ideal of history changed; the material from which it is written, old in one sense, is to a large extent new in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. The men of earlier times, even when they had the industry and the will for minute investigation, had seldom the means. The vast increase of accessible documents has caused history to be written afresh, to an extent best measured by the fact that, except those who rank as original authorities, Gibbon alone among historians prior to the present century still holds his ground.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
(1800-1859).
Thomas Babington Macaulay felt these modern influences, though not quite in their full force. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, celebrated for his exertions in the Anti-Slavery crusade. At Cambridge, whither he went in 1818, young Macaulay had for contemporaries a very brilliant set of young men, including Derwent and Henry Nelson Coleridge, Moultrie, Praed and Charles Austin, ‘the only man,’ says Sir George Trevelyan, ‘who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay,’ the man who weaned him from the Toryism in which he had been brought up, and ‘brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since.’ A constitutional incapacity for and hatred of mathematics was punished by the omission of his name from the Tripos list of 1822. He had been ‘gulfed.’ Nevertheless, in 1824, he was elected to a Fellowship of Trinity College. He was called to the bar in 1826, but never took seriously to the law as a profession. He had received an earlier call to another profession, and during his stay at Cambridge he had been a frequent contributor to Knights Quarterly Magazine. But we may date from 1825, when his essay on Milton appeared in the Edinburgh Review, the opening of his career in literature. For many years afterwards he was a frequent and certainly the most effective contributor to the review.
Macaulay’s connexion with Jeffrey’s review was profitable in several ways to himself as well as to it. He gained money, and fame, and political connexions which determined the course of his life for many years, and which by doing so unquestionably influenced his historical work. Through the influence of Lord Lansdowne, who had been struck by his articles on Mill, Macaulay became, in 1830, member for Calne. He soon made his mark, rather as a speaker of set speeches than as a debater. His speeches have much the character of his essays, the rhetorical style of which is not ill adapted to verbal utterance. The clearness which Macaulay never failed to give made the rhetoric effective. His great knowledge, and especially his wonderful command of historical illustration, enabled him often to clinch his argument where abstract discussion would have failed. The most telling passage in one of his best known speeches, the speech on copyright, is a long list of concrete instances of the effect of the proposal he was advocating as contrasted with that of the proposal he was combating. At the close, with well-founded confidence, he challenges his opponent to match it. While therefore Macaulay had but a small share of the highest faculty of the orator, the power to sway the passions of his audience, he had in a high degree the power to interest their intellect. For neat, crisp statement, apt and copious illustration, and effective rhetoric occasionally rising into eloquence, his speeches have few equals.
As a reward for his services in the cause of reform Macaulay was appointed a member of the Supreme Council of India. In 1834 he sailed from England, and he resided in India till the beginning of 1838. Soon after his return to England he was elected M.P. for Edinburgh, and in 1839 was raised to the Cabinet as Secretary at War. But he gradually became absorbed in his history and devoted less and less time to politics. His defeat in 1847 in the parliamentary election for Edinburgh contributed to wean him still more from public life. He was hurt, and the smart of wounded pride is apparent in the most beautiful verses he ever wrote. They were composed on the night of his defeat, and they declare that the writer’s true allegiance belongs to that Spirit of Literature who, when all the ‘wayward sprites’ of Gain, Fashion, Power and Pleasure have passed away, draws near to bless his first infant sleep. The verses are transparently sincere. Macaulay’s love for letters was the passion of his life; and, acting on such a character as his, the unmerited rebuff dealt by Edinburgh proved a turning point in his career. He retired into private life, and though after the repentance of Edinburgh in 1852 he sat again for his old constituency, it was with the fixed intention not to immerse himself in parliamentary work, and above all not to accept office. He was now completely absorbed in his history; and as he gradually became conscious of the greatness of his task, and felt that life was slipping away with only a fragment of it accomplished, he grudged more and more any deduction from the time which, he foresaw, must be too short at best. For his previously excellent health had broken down soon after his election, and he never fully recovered it. He resigned his seat in 1856. In the following year he was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley, and he died on December 28th, 1859, leaving his history a fragment.
The works of Macaulay are remarkably easy to classify and not very difficult to appraise. They fall under four heads,—speeches, essays, including the biographical articles contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the History of England, and poetry.
The speeches have been already noticed. The essays, which are described as ‘critical and historical,’ are only to a very minor degree critical. The well-known paper on Robert Montgomery, irresistibly amusing in its severity, is exceptional in the fact that, starting with a literary subject, it treats that subject throughout from a literary point of view. In most of his essays, as he himself confessed, Macaulay escapes as soon as possible from criticism and glides into history. This is the case even in the essay on Milton, who would have enchained him to criticism if anyone could. Where he is really critical, Macaulay always shows the qualities of good sense, sound judgment and extensive knowledge; but few will think that he shows any remarkable fineness of critical faculty. On occasion he could characterise a style exceedingly well. His contrast between the simple, nervous and picturesque expression of Johnson’s familiar letters and his Latinised pomposity when his sentences are done out of English into Johnsonese, cannot be forgotten; and his treatment of Bacon’s style is as sound and excellent as his treatment of Bacon’s philosophy is mistaken and false. But his mind was of too positive a type to admit of the finest kind of criticism. He saw nothing in half-light, and he was deficient in sympathy. His criticism of the Queen Anne writers, whom he knew best, will not bear comparison, in respect of insight and sensitive appreciation, with Thackeray’s criticism of them in the English Humourists.
Macaulay’s strength lay elsewhere; and though he carried into all he did the deficiencies revealed by his criticism, as well as deficiencies due to political prejudice and personal bias, yet all faults are forgotten, for the time at least, in admiration of wide knowledge, boundless energy and brilliant style. Macaulay’s extensive reading, backed by his wonderful memory, served him well. His knowledge was always at hand. If he wanted a reference or an allusion he could in a moment supply it. Yet his quotations, references and allusions are never pedantic, nor are they allowed to clog and weight his style. They serve their proper purpose of illustrating and enforcing his point. He defends his position by parallel after parallel, contrast after contrast. It was this wealth of illustration that forced acquiescence from men of less knowledge among his contemporaries; it is the suspicion that the parallels are not always accurate, and the contrasts not always sound, that has since caused so many of his conclusions to be regarded with suspicion. But frequently the historical illustrations are poured out, not to defend any thesis, but simply because they crowd spontaneously into the writer’s mind; and some of the most effective passages in Macaulay’s writings are of this character. Take, for example, the well-known passage from Warren Hastings beginning, ‘The place was worthy of such a trial,’ or the description in the History of the spot where the dust of Monmouth was laid. Less crowded with historical names and details, but still deriving most of its charm from the same cause, is the almost equally well-known paragraph in the essay on Ranke’s History of the Popes, beginning, ‘There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church.’ There is a rapidity, fire and vividness in such passages by which we may in great measure account for Macaulay’s popularity. He had no more marked literary gift. It shows itself even more spontaneously in his letters than in his formal writings; and the letters have sometimes moreover a touch of humour rare in the works he intended for publication. Few things of his are more purely delightful than the letter to his friend Ellis, describing the division in the House of Commons in 1831, when the Reform Bill was carried by a majority of one: ‘You might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then, again, the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation.’
It is true that the vivid colouring of the essays sometimes becomes too glaring, that the characters, especially when they have relation to politics, are apt to be too dark or too bright for human nature, and that the writing is throughout that of a partisan. But if this detracts from it is far from destroying their value; and Macaulay’s biographer is pardonably proud of their popularity, and insists, with justice, that it is an element in their greatness as well as an evidence of it.
The first two volumes of the History of England were published in 1848, and the third and fourth in 1855, while the fifth was left unfinished at Macaulay’s death. The history repeats in great measure both the merits and the defects of the essays. Written with a steady eye to permanence, it is far purer and more perfect, better proportioned, more restrained and more harmonious than they; but it is marked still by the same limitations. We find the writer’s strength in a great command of facts and in clearness and force of style. His weaknesses are partisan bias, exaggeration and a certain want of depth.