WHIG HISTORIANS

Evening Star, Issue 20061, 29 December 1928, Page 14

WHIG HISTORIANS

MR FISHER'S DEFENCE OF MACAULAY ARDOUR AND INTEGRITY i Mi- H. A. L. Fisher, who has succeeded Lord Balfour as president of the British Academy, delivered at Burlington House the annual Raleigh lecture on history, taking as his subpject ‘ Ihe Whig Historians.’ Much of the lecture was devoted to Macaulay’s place as a historian. After describing the influences among which Macaulay passed his precocious childhood, Mr I isher said that the boy s imaginary .world.was made so fast and at so high a temperature of conviction that it environed him through life. What he felt about Oliver Cromwell at ten he felt at fifty. Jt was inevitable that a youth of his generous vehomeiipo should throw in his lot with the Whigs. Macaulay was thirty-eight years of age when he embarked on his History of England. He was then at the summit of his splendid powers and energies, and a rich experience of life and letters lay behind him. Politics claimed him, and the result was unfortunate for the History. When death came on him at the ago of fifty-nine, the period most congenial to his taste, had not been reached. How gladly would posterity exchange a dozen brilliant parliamentary speeches for Macaulay’s history of the reign of Queen Anne! The strong lights and shades of the book, said Mr Fisher, were not mainly duo to Macaulay’s politics, but to his perfervid Scottish nature, to that 1 vehemence and self-confidence ” which his father had reproved in him when ho was a boy. He was a man quick to take hearty likes and dislikes, the vigour of which was entirely unaffected by his distance in time from the object. High Churchmen deplored his handling of Laud, but even had ho known all that the Dean of Winchester know about that prelate, ho would still have disliked him, not for his opinions merely, but for what he was. There were certain qualities in a man, or a book, or a work of art from which he turned- with instinctive aversion, as from an evil smell. Anything morbid, anything mystical, anything dark or confused or tormented, anything grotesque or dreamy or out of perspective, he rejected at once. Whether natures 'which contained these elements were Whig or Tory did not matter; they were not pleasant to Macaulay. Ho condemned the morbid self-examination of Laud for the same reason that he was repelled by the wild enthusiasm of George Fox, by thb Chinese porcelain at Hampton Court, and by the whole range of Indian sacred literature. Jt was not Whiggism which made him thus, but the overflowing happiness of a wholesome, ardent, hardheaded, limited Scot. _ A tender compassion for inward spiritual torments was not among Macaulay’s spiritual graces; but ho was right to dislike the gloom and harsh intolerance of the Puritans. For all .forms of religious extravagance his distaste was such that he, the son of Zachary Macaulay, actually permitted himself to write of the “ bray of Exeter Hall.”

When Macaulay/ liked a play or a poem ho conceived a kind of animal rapture for it, and he would not diminish his enjoyment by attempting to assess the precise measure of his delight. But, if {esthetic criticism was not within his compass, political criticism was. Ho wiis the first writer fully to apprehend the significance of the history of the Licensing Act, and to note that “ from the day on which the emancipation of our literature was accomplished, the purification of cur literature began.” Considering the very strong opinions which ho entertained with' respect to the political problems of his own time, he was remarkably successful in his resistance to the temptation to apply the remedies of the nineteenth century to the ailments of the seventeenth.

There was a fallacy in the assumption that the more a man read the more nearly ho approached the truth. There was no such relation between the tiling that was and the number of words which had been written about it. It was even more probable that a good history would emerge from a few first-class authorities- cleverly interpreted by a fresh than from a vast and exhausting miscellany of unequal 'value. Macaulay did not explore the German archives, but from the evidence ho had he extracted with amazing skill a convincing image of the march of events. “ Beside his lifelike pictures of the men and women of that ago, the figures who move across the pages of Van Ranke are dim and bloodless phantoms.” The reputation of Macaulay as a historian had- suffered not a little from tho survival and republicatr i of his essays, more particularly of such essays as were written in youth before he went out to India. Ho should be judged not by the Edinburgh essays', in which he avowedly forced the note in order to make an impression during the short life of a periodical magazine, but by his History. All tho essays were brilliant, but in some accuracy was sacrificed to effect, while others were marred by blunders on the basis of temperament or party feeling. VIEW OE THE EMPIRE. Macaulay’s groat work was in the History. The determination of the Whigs to uphold the cause of just and humane government at all times and in all circumstances, and to tolerate no falling short of their ethical standard, had strengthened the integrity of English historical writing, prevented much practical evil, and helped to inscribe the sense of trusteeship for the weaker races among the unwritten conventions of tho British Empire. Tho ethical view of the Empire preached by Burke and Macaulay had become tho permanent possession of British statesmanship. Yet tho Whigs held the Austinian theory of indivisible sovereignty to be an impregnable axiom of political science. Macanlav thought that universal suffrage would be the end of civilisation and could not conceive how, sovereignty being indivisible, the Empire could be kept together if Colonial Parliaments were accorded independence. These Austinian doctrines were unequal to th subtlety of nature, and find been demonstrably falsified in the recent history of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The Whigs had no monopoly of prescience. There was this advantage in the central position of the Whigs, that they were able to estimate from personal knowledge or family tradition all the factors in national life which had been up to 1832 associated with the Government of the country. The late Sir George Trevelyan regarded the Ameri- - can revolution as an English act made by Englishmen acting upon; English traditions. It was this essentially English character of the American revolution against the fruits of the system of personal government which Sir George Trevelyan had been so successful in bringing before tho imagination of his readers. Ho regarded Hie American rebels as Englishmen whose effectual protst. against the methods of ties-, potism on American soil led to the protection and subsequent enlargement of our island liberties. The great figure of Washington was essentially British.