But, great as was his enjoyment of literary society and books, they only formed his recreation. In these years he was working with unflagging industry at the composition of his History. His composition was slow, his corrections both of matter and style endless; he spared no pains to ascertain the facts. He sacrificed to the prosecution of his task a political career, House of Commons fame, the allurements of society. The first two volumes of the History of England appeared in December 1848. The success was in every way complete beyond expectation. The sale of edition after edition, both in England and the United States, was enormous.
In 1852, when his party returned to office, he refused a seat in the cabinet, but he could not bring himself to decline the compliment of a voluntary amende which the city of Edinburgh paid him in returning him at the head of the poll at the general election in July of that year. He had hardly accepted the summons to return to parliamentary life before fatal weakness betrayed itself in deranged action of the heart; from this time forward till his death his strength continued steadily to sink. The process carried with it dejection of spirits as its inevitable attendant. The thought oppressed him that the great work to which he had devoted himself would remain a fragment. Once again, in June 1853, he spoke in parliament, and with effect, against the exclusion of the master of the rolls from the House of Commons, and at a later date in defence of competition for the Indian civil service. But he was aware that it was a grievous waste of his small stock of force, and that he made these efforts at the cost of more valuable work.
In November 1855 vols. iii. and iv. of the History appeared and obtained a vast circulation. Within a generation of its first appearance upwards of 140,000 copies of the History were printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone; and in the United States the sales were on a correspondingly large scale. The History was translated into German, Polish, Danish, Swedish, Hungarian, Russian, Bohemian, Italian, French, Dutch and Spanish. Flattering marks of respect were heaped upon the author by foreign academies. His pecuniary profits were (for that time) on a scale commensurate with the reputation of the book: the cheque he received for £20,000 has become a landmark in literary history.
In May 1856 he quitted the Albany, in which he had passed fifteen happy years, and went to live at Holly Lodge, Campden Hill, then, before it was enlarged, a tiny bachelor’s dwelling, but with a lawn whose unbroken slope of verdure gave it the air of a considerable country house. In the following year (1857) he was raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley. “It was,” says Lady Trevelyan, “one of the few things that everybody approved; he enjoyed it himself, as he did everything, simply and cordially.” It was a novelty in English life to see eminence which was neither that of territorial opulence nor of political or military services recognized and rewarded by elevation to the peerage.
But Macaulay’s health, which had begun to give way in 1852, was every year visibly failing. In May 1858 he went to Cambridge for the purpose of being sworn in as high steward of the borough, to which office he had been elected on the death of Earl Fitzwilliam. When his health was given at a public breakfast in the town-hall he was obliged to excuse himself from speaking. In the upper house he never spoke. Absorbed in the prosecution of his historical work, he had grown indifferent to the party politics of his own day. Gradually he had to acquiesce in the conviction that, though his intellectual powers remained unimpaired, his physical energies would not carry him through the reign of Anne; and, though he brought down the narrative to the death of William III., the last half-volume wants the finish and completeness of the earlier portions. The winter of 1859 told on him, and he died on the 28th of December. On the 9th of January 1860 he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets’ Corner, near the statue of Addison.
Lord Macaulay never married. A man of warm domestic affections, he found their satisfaction in the attachment and close sympathy of his sister Hannah, the wife of Sir Charles Trevelyan. Her children were to him as his own. Macaulay was a steadfast friend, and no act inconsistent with the strictest honour and integrity was ever imputed to him. When a poor man, and when salary was of consequence to him, he twice resigned office rather than make compliances for which he would not have been severely blamed. In 1847, when his seat in parliament was at stake, he would not be persuaded to humour, to temporize, even to conciliate. He had a keen relish for the good things of life, and desired fortune as the means of obtaining them; but there was nothing mercenary or selfish in his nature. When he had raised himself to opulence, he gave away with an open hand, not seldom rashly. His very last act was to write a letter to a poor curate enclosing a cheque for £25. The purity of his morals was not associated with any tendency to cant.
The lives of men of letters are often records of sorrow or suffering. The life of Macaulay was eminently happy. Till the closing years (1857-1859), he enjoyed life with the full zest of healthy faculty, happy in social intercourse, happy in the solitude of his study, and equally divided between the two. For the last fifteen years of his life he lived for literature. His writings were remunerative to him far beyond the ordinary measure, yet he never wrote for money. He lived in his historical researches; his whole heart and interest were unreservedly given to the men and the times of whom he read and wrote. His command of literature was imperial. Beginning with a good classical foundation, be made himself familiar with the imaginative, and then with the historical, remains of Greece and Rome. He went on to add the literature of his own country, of France, of Italy, of Spain. He learnt Dutch enough for the purposes of his history. He read German, but for the literature of the northern nations he had no taste, and of the erudite labours of the Germans he had little knowledge and formed an inadequate estimate. The range of his survey of human things had other limitations more considerable still. All philosophical speculation was alien to his mind; nor did he seem aware of the degree in which such speculation had influenced the progress of humanity. A large—the largest—part of ecclesiastical history lay outside his historical view. Of art he confessed himself ignorant, and even refused a request to furnish a critique on Swift’s poetry to the Edinburgh Review. Lessing’s Laocoon, or Goethe’s criticism on Hamlet, “filled” him “with wonder and despair.”
Of the marvellous discoveries of science which were succeeding each other day by day he took no note; his pages contain no reference to them. It has been told already how he recoiled from the mathematical studies of his university. These deductions made, the circuit of his knowledge still remains very wide—as extensive perhaps as any human brain is competent to embrace. His literary outfit was as complete as has ever been possessed by any English writer; and, if it wants the illumination of philosophy, it has an equivalent resource in a practical acquaintance with affairs, with administration, with the interior of cabinets, and the humour of popular assemblies. Nor was the knowledge merely stored in his memory; it was always at his command. Whatever his subject, he pours over it his stream of illustration, drawn from the records of all ages and countries. His Essays are not merely instructive as history; they are, like Milton’s blank verse, freighted with the spoils of all the ages. As an historian Macaulay has not escaped the charge of partisanship. He was a Whig; and in writing the history of the rise and triumph of Whig principles in the latter half of the 17th century he identified himself with the cause. But the charge of partiality, as urged against Macaulay, means more than that he wrote the history of the Whig revolution from the point of view of those who made it. When he is describing the merits of friends and the faults of enemies his pen knows no moderation. He has a constant tendency to glaring colours, to strong effects, and will always be striking violent blows. He is not merely exuberant but excessive. There is an overweening confidence about his tone; he expresses himself in trenchant phrases, which are like challenges to an opponent to stand up and deny them. His propositions have no qualifications. Uninstructed readers like this assurance, as they like a physician who has no doubt about their case. But a sense of distrust grows upon the more circumspect reader as he follows page after page of Macaulay’s categorical affirmations about matters which our own experience of life teaches us to be of a contingent nature. We inevitably think of a saying attributed to Lord Melbourne: “I wish I were as cocksure of any one thing as Macaulay is of everything.” Macaulay’s was the mind of the advocate, not of the philosopher; it was the mind of Bossuet, which admits no doubts or reserves itself and tolerates none in others, and as such was disqualified from that equitable balancing of evidence which is the primary function of the historian.
Macaulay, the historian no less than the politician, is, however, always on the side of justice, fairness for the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor. But though a Liberal in practical politics, he had not the reformer’s temperament. The world as it is was good enough for him. The glories of wealth, rank, honours, literary fame, the elements of vulgar happiness, made up his ideal of life. A successful man himself, every personage and every cause is judged by its success. “The brilliant Macaulay,” says Emerson, “who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that ‘good’ means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity.” Macaulay is in accord with the average sentiment of orthodox and stereotyped humanity on the relative values of the objects and motives of human endeavour. And this commonplace materialism is one of the secrets of his popularity, and one of the qualities which guarantee that that popularity will be enduring.
(M. P.)