The Press. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1913. "MACAULAY, ESSAYIST AND HISTORIAN."

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14830, 22 November 1913, Page 10

The Press. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1913. "MACAULAY, ESSAYIST AND HISTORIAN."

Carlyle once sat opposite to Macaulav at dinner, meeting him then for tho first time. As Masaulay held forth dogmatically, absorbing the table, in his usual fashion, Carlyle kept droning to himself in an audible voice:—"Eh, so that's the Honourable Tom, it is? That's the Honourable Tom? Well, there's a stone-wall between his mind and the truth." A piece of Chelsea exaggeration, no doubt. But, in thus soliloquising, Carlyle probably remembered at least two things?. One was that Macaulay had written r. very bad essay on Frederick the Great, the other, that he never hesitated (at least when treating political opponents) to sacrifice truth to a brilliant sentence or a flashy piece of vituperation. At another time, in more moderate vein, he spoko of him as "an emphatic, really forcible person, but without the divine idea." That is it: emphatic, forcible, brilliant, of vast learning, ar. astounding memory,' and a mental energy almost super-human; but devoid of tho finer instincts, literary, moral, or spiritual. While to Carlyle the "divine idea" was embodied in the Heroic in Man, to 'vlacaulay it was embodied in Whiggiem. Beyond that ideal of political, social, and moral aspiration his thoughts seldom soared. He writes with pity of the squalid past of England, before the Whigs had come to regenerate the earth and bring about the ago of gold. Ho is the most splendid of all Philistines.

Our attention has been drawn to Macaulay by the appcaranco of a book, bearing the title which heads this article, from tho Hon. Albert Canning, a scholarly gentleman, bearer of an illustrious name, who devotee his leisure to producing books of a quiet, meditative, and rather prosy character on some leading British, authors. Wo cannot say that we have derived much illumination from the book. Where Mr Canning's comments are not purely conventional, they are generally wrong. In his laboured way he accumulates instances to prove thafc Macaulay was not a strictly impartial writer: rather a superfluous task. He recurs more than oncp to the fact that in his fervid eulogy of Milton as an anostlo of liberty, .Macaulay quite ignored tho vehement party spirit, the scurrility, and the invective, which marred Milton's controversial writings. . These things are all quite true, and the reiteration of them is harmless. But .wficn Mr Canning gets ~ beyond his depth, . he flounders badly- Orcr the- Essay on Bacon he purrs with pleasure ai & brilliantly successful attempt to interpret in lucid language for the benefit of the multitude what : was in ita original form crabbed, abstruse, and repellant. Now,' this sort of thing speaks a critic's doom. The Essay on Bacon, as an exposition of his inductive philosophy, ie simply grotesque. 'Macaulay had no faculty at all for that sort of work; his mind was not east in the speculative or philosophic mould. . And . for his distortion of the facts of Bacon's career, things that were • concrete enough even for. hire, we may refer our readers to Spedding'e ."Evenings With a Reviewer."

But it is futile to go on with Mr Canning., Macaulay'e reputation is neither enhanced nor impaired by books of this kind. A few pages of Mr Gooch's "History and Historians" (which we recently reviewed) aro worth the whole thing, and a great deal more. The fact is that- Macaulay is too big to be twaddled over. A writer who does not realise that he is a literary phenomenon of the highest significance had better not touch him at all. His style in itself was an achievement of genius. It was quite a unique thing entirely of his own invention, absolutely unlike that of other Edinburgh Reviewers or the historians who had preceded him. It was the natural product of a sense of mastery, of unlimited self-con-fidence, which works with ease and freedom, and has no need to swathe its operations in ' ambiguity or circumlocutions. Perhaps the flash, and snap, and antithesis have worn a little thin now; but it was an achievement all the same. And how it could swell and rise to great occasions: the Warren, Hastings trial, the crowning of Petrarch, Glencoe, tho siege of Derry, etc. It was a wonderful thing to write history with an ease and brilliance ■ that I "superseded the last sensation novel." But all the labour had gone before. Macaulay never knew the patient toil, the unwearied research, the scientific weighing of evidence, which mark the modern school of historians. But he threw all his colossal eneray and ardour into the task of collecting rr.aterials for his history. He declined the Chair of Modern History at Cambridge. He scoured libraries, and he rushed over the scenes of William's "operations in Ireland. Of course it vas all seen through a temperament. Hie prejudices were intensely strong, and his intuitions were vehemently rapid; and there was no alembic of self-criticism for them to pass through. Even his 'earning was curiously unbalanced; but ho seemed aware of no defects. Lord Melbourne used to say that ho wished he could be as cocksure of anything as Macaulay was of cvei}-

thing. The old Oxford skit on Jowetfc

seemed to be realised in him: "What "I don't know is not knowledge." He knew the Greek and Latin classics as a man knows his own house. But hu\ •knowledge of early English history was not beyond the ordinary; and he had no sympathy whatever with those halflighted regions of mediaeval legend, in which spirits of another calibre love to grope. He had no deep knowledge of German literature. Wβ doubt if the name of Goethe occurs in his Essays; he certainly seldom alludes to Shakespeare. In conclusion, perhaps two points might be urged in explanation, if non-extenuation, of some of the worst faults of the Essays. In t"-.e first place, some at least of the brutality of criticism, such as that showered on Croker and Robert Montgomery, must be credited to the "Edinburgh Review" tradition, as inaugurated by Jeffrey. In tho next place, Macaulay was, more than any other writer whom wo know, the slave of a style. He had created a brilliant thing, and it held him by the throat. Lights and shades of truth were all very well; but, whatever became of them, the sentence must have its snap, the poised antithesis must stand out, and every paragraph must have its own little peroration.