What reason does he give for this work of supererogation? None. He does not (as we shall see more fully by and by) take the slightest notice of Mackintosh's history, no more than if it had never existed. Has he produced a new fact? Not one. Has he discovered any new materials? None, as far as we can judge, but the collections of Fox and Mackintosh, confided to him by their families.[1] It seems to us a novelty in literary practice that a writer raised far by fame and fortune above the vulgar temptations of the craft should undertake to tell a story already frequently and recently told by masters of the highest authority and most extensive information, without having, or even professing to have, any additional means or special motive to account for the attempt.
[1] It appears from two notes of acknowledgments to M. Guizot and the keepers of the archives at The Hague, that Mr. Macaulay obtained some additions to the copies which Mackintosh already had of the letters of Ronquillo the Spanish and Citters the Dutch minister at the court of James. We may conjecture that these additions were insignificant, since Mr. Macaulay has nowhere, that we have observed, specially noticed them; but except these, whatever they may be, we find no trace of anything that Fox and Mackintosh had not already examined and classed.
We suspect, however, that we can trace Mr. Macaulay's design to its true source—the example and success of the author of Waverley. The historical novel, if not invented, at least first developed and illustrated by the happy genius of Scott, took a sudden and extensive hold of the public taste; he himself, in most of his subsequent novels, availed himself largely of the historical element which had contributed so much to the popularity of Waverley. The press has since that time groaned with his imitators. We have had historical novels of all classes and grades. We have had served up in this form the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses, the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London, Darnley and Richelieu—and almost at the same moment with Mr. Macaulay's appeared a professed romance of Mr. Ainsworth's on the same subject— James II. Nay, on a novelist of this popular order has been conferred the office of Historiographer to the Queen.
Mr. Macaulay, too mature not to have well measured his own peculiar capacities, not rich in invention but ingenious in application, saw the use that might be made of this principle, and that history itself would be much more popular with a large embroidery of personal, social, and even topographical anecdote and illustration, instead of the sober garb in which we had been in the habit of seeing it. Few histories indeed ever were or could be written without some admixture of this sort. The father of the art himself, old Herodotus, vivified his text with a greater share of what we may call personal anecdote than any of his classical followers. Modern historians, as they happened to have more or less of what we may call artistic feeling, admitted more or less of this decoration into their text, but always with an eye (which Mr. Macaulay never exercises) to the appropriateness and value of the illustration. Generally, however, such matters have been thrown into notes, or, in a few instances—as by Dr. Henry and in Mr. Knight's interesting and instructive "Pictorial History"—into separate chapters. The large class of memoir-writers may also be fairly considered as anecdotical historians—and they are in fact the sources from which the novelists of the new school extract their principal characters and main incidents.
Mr. Macaulay deals with history, evidently, as we think, in imitation of the novelists—his first object being always picturesque effect—his constant endeavour to give from all the repositories of gossip that have reached us a kind of circumstantial reality to his incidents, and a sort of dramatic life to his personages. For this purpose he would not be very solicitous about contributing any substantial addition to history, strictly so called; on the contrary, indeed, he seems to have willingly taken it as he found it, adding to it such lace and trimmings as he could collect from the Monmouth-street of literature, seldom it may be safely presumed of very delicate quality. It is, as Johnson drolly said, "an old coat with a new facing—the old dog in a new doublet." The conception was bold, and—so far as availing himself, like other novelists, of the fashion of the day to produce a popular and profitable effect—the experiment has been eminently successful.
But besides the obvious incentives just noticed, Mr. Macaulay had also the stimulus of what we may compendiously call a strong party spirit. One would have thought that the Whigs might have been satisfied with their share in the historical library of the Revolution:—besides Rapin, Echard, and Jones, who, though of moderate politics in general, were stout friends to the Revolution, they have had of professed and zealous Whigs, Burnet, the foundation of all, Kennett, Oldmixon, Dalrymple, Laing, Brodie, Fox, and finally Mackintosh and his continuator, besides innumerable writers of less note, who naturally adopted the successful side; and we should not have supposed that the reader of any of those historians, and particularly the later ones, could complain that they had been too sparing of imputation, or even vituperation, to the opposite party. But not so Mr. Macaulay. The most distinctive feature on the face of his pages is personal virulence—if he has at all succeeded in throwing an air of fresh life into his characters, it is mainly due, as any impartial and collected reader will soon discover, to the simple circumstance of his hating the individuals of the opposite party as bitterly, as passionately, as if they were his own personal enemies— more so, indeed, we hope than he would a mere political antagonist of his own day. When some one suggested to the angry O'Neil that one of the Anglo-Irish families whom he was reviling as strangers had been four hundred years settled in Ireland, the Milesian replied, "I hate the churls as if they had come but yesterday." Mr. Macaulay seems largely endowed with this (as with a more enviable) species of memory, and he hates, for example, King Charles I as if he had been murdered only yesterday. Let us not be understood as wishing to abridge an historian's full liberty of censure—but he should not be a satirist, still less a libeller. We do not say nor think that Mr. Macaulay's censures were always unmerited—far from it—but they are always, we think without exception, immoderate. Nay, it would scarcely be too much to say that this massacre of character is the point on which Mr. Macaulay must chiefly rest any claims he can advance to the praise of impartiality, for while he paints everything that looks like a Tory in the blackest colours, he does not altogether spare any of the Whigs against whom he takes a spite, though he always visits them with a gentler correction. In fact, except Oliver Cromwell, King William, a few gentlemen who had the misfortune to be executed or exiled for high treason, and every dissenting minister that he has or can find occasion to notice, there are hardly any persons mentioned who are not stigmatized as knaves or fools, differing only in degrees of "turpitude" and "imbecility". Mr. Macaulay has almost realized the work that Alexander Chalmers's playful imagination had fancied, a Biographia Flagitiosa, or The Lives of Eminent Scoundrels. This is also an imitation of the Historical Novel, though rather in the track of Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard than of Waverley or Woodstock; but what would you have? To attain the picturesque—the chief object of our artist—he adopts the ready process of dark colours and a rough brush. Nature, even at the worst, is never gloomy enough for a Spagnoletto, and Judge Jeffries himself, for the first time, excites a kind of pity when we find him (like one to whom he was nearly akin) not so black as he is painted.
From this first general view of Mr. Macaulay's Historical Novel, we now proceed to exhibit in detail some grounds for the opinion which we have ventured to express.
We premise that we are about to enter into details, because there is in fact little to question or debate about but details. We have already hinted that there is absolutely no new fact of any consequence, and, we think we can safely add, hardly a new view of any historical fact, in the whole book. Whatever there may remain questionable or debatable in the history of the period, we should have to argue with Burnet, Dalrymple, or Mackintosh, and not with Mr. Macaulay. It would, we know, have a grander air if we were to make his book the occasion of disquisitions on the rise and progress of the constitution—on the causes by which the monarchy of the Tudors passed, through the murder of Charles, to the despotism of Cromwell—how again that produced a restoration which settled none of the great moral or political questions which had generated all those agitations, and which, in return, those agitations had complicated and inflamed—and how, at last, the undefined, discordant, and antagonistic pretensions of the royal and democratical elements were reconciled by the Revolution and the Bill of Rights—and finally, whether with too much or too little violence to the principles of the ancient constitution—all these topics, we say, would, if we were so inclined, supply us, as they have supplied Mr. Macaulay, with abundant opportunities of grave tautology and commonplace; but we decline to raise sham debates on points where there is no contest. We can have little historic difference, properly so called, with one who has no historical difference on the main facts with anybody else: instead, then, of pretending to treat any great questions, either of constitutional learning or political philosophy, we shall confine ourselves to the humbler but more practical and more useful task above stated.
Our first complaint is of a comparatively small and almost mechanical, and yet very real, defect—the paucity and irregularity of his dates, and the mode in which the few that he does give are overlaid, as it were, by the text. This, though it may be very convenient to the writer, and quite indifferent to the reader, of an historical romance, is perplexing to any one who might wish to read and weigh the book as a serious history, of which dates are the guides and landmarks; and when they are visibly neglected we cannot but suspect that the historian will be found not very solicitous about strict accuracy. This negligence is carried to such an extent that, in what looks like a very copious table of contents, one of the most important events of the whole history— that, indeed, on which the Revolution finally turned—the marriage of Princess Mary to the Prince of Orange, is not noticed; nor is any date affixed to the very cursory mention of it in the text. It is rather hard to force the reader who buys this last new model history, in general so profuse of details, to recur to one of the old-fashioned ones to discover that this important event happened in the year 1675, and on the 4th of November—a day thrice over remarkable in William's history—for his birth, his marriage, and his arrival with his invading army on the coast of Devon.
Our second complaint is of one of the least important, perhaps, but most prominent defects of Mr. Macaulay's book—his Style—not merely the choice and order of words, commonly called style, but the turn of mind which prompts the choice of expressions as well as of topics. We need not repeat that Mr. Macaulay has a great facility of language, a prodigal copia verborum—that he narrates rapidly and clearly—that he paints very forcibly,—and that his readers throughout the tale are carried on, or away, by something of the sorcery which a brilliant orator exercises over his auditory. But he has also in a great degree the faults of the oratorical style. He deals much too largely in epithets—a habit exceedingly dangerous to historical truth. He habitually constructs a piece of what should be calm, dispassionate narrative, upon the model of the most passionate peroration—adhering in numberless instances to precisely the same specific formula of artifice. His diction is often inflated into fustian, and he indulges in exaggeration till it sometimes, unconsciously no doubt, amounts to falsehood. It is a common fault of those who strive at producing oratorical effects, to oscillate between commonplace and extravagance; and while studying Mr. Macaulay, one feels as if vibrating between facts that every one knows and consequences which nobody can believe. We are satisfied that whoever will take, as we have been obliged to do, the pains of sifting what Mr. Macaulay has produced from his own mind with what he has borrowed from others, will be entirely of our opinion. In truth, when, after reading a page or two of this book, we have occasion to turn to the same transaction in Burnet, Dalrymple, or Hume, we feel as if we were exchanging the glittering agility of a rope-dancer for gentlemen in the attire and attitude of society. And we must say that there is not one of those writers that does not give a clearer and more trustworthy account of all that is really historical in the period than can be collected from Mr. Macaulay's more decorated pages. We invite our readers to try Mr. Macaulay's merits as an historian by the test of comparison with his predecessors.