A REMINISCENCE OF MACAULAY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4797, 7 August 1876, Page 3

A REMINISCENCE OF MACAULAY.

(From Lippincott's Magazine.) My place at table was just opposite to Macaulay, and I need not say with what keen interest I looked at him and watched his countenance as he became animated in conversation. His face was round and his complexion was colorless, one might almost say pallid ; his hair, which appeared to have been of a brownish hue, had become almost white. He was no doubt then beginning to break in health, and perhaps this, which could only be called a premature decay, was the penalty he was at length paying for the years he had spent in India. His neck was short, and his figure was short and ungainly. His eye had a quick flash, and his change of expression was rapid; his head, too, had a quick movement ; and altogether there was a look of vivacity which showed that his intellect was as keen as ever. He was always ready to speak, whatever the subject, but he showed no disposition to take all the talk. There was no moment of pause in the flowing afterdinner discussions, for our host, as well as several of his guests, was abundantly able to hold his own with this marvellous and every way delightful talker—this prince in the domain of London social life. There was some conversation about Nollekens, the sculptor, whose inordinate love of money was such a blemish in his character. Macaulay told one or two stories illustrating his parsimony. Then he came to speak of art in general, and said he did not think the faculty for it a high gift of mind. This opinion was strongly combated by Mr. Blere, the architect, and others ; but I remember Macaulay gave, as in some sort an illustration of his theory, a story of Grant, the portrait painter, then of chief eminence in London. Cornwall Lewis was to sit to him, and Grant, knowing- he had written books, desired to get at least a smattering of them before the sittings began. But some one, perhaps mischievously, told him Lewis was the author of " The Monk," and this book he accordingly read. He took an early opportunity to refer to it to his sitter, who to his no small discomfiture disclaimed it. As conclusive proof of the truth of this denial, Lewi3 stated further that the book was written before he was born. Everybody was amused that Cornwall Lewis, so famous for abstruse learning', should have deemed it necessary to apceal thus to dates to show he was not the author of a novel. Macaulay persisted in his theory that artistic power was not an intellectual faculty, but I could not quite determine whether he was not putting it forth as mere paradox. One could fancy the paroxysm of rage into which Haydon would have been thrown had such a theory been advanced in his presence ; or Fuseli, who, as Haydon reports, exclaimed on first seeing the Elgin Marlles, with his strange accent, "Those Greeks, they were godes." But the throught of Michael Angelo and of Leonardo was a sufficient answer to the theory. Macaulay, in further support of his general proposition, maintained that a man might be a great musical composer, and yet not in the true sense a man of genius. He instanced Mozart, who, he said, was not claimed to have been of high intellectual ability. Herbert Coleridge said he thought this a mistake, but he urged that full details were wanting in regard to his mental capacity as shown in other ways than in music. Macaulay replied that Mozart was the Raphael of Music, and was both a composer and a wonderful performer at the age of six. " Now," said he, "we cannot conceive of any one being a great poet at the age of six ; we hear nothing of Shakspere or Milton at the age of six." The conversation turned to Homer and the question whether the Homeric poems were the product of one mind. Macaulay maintained they were. It was inconceivable, he said, that there could have been at the Homeric period five or six poets equal to the production of the " Iliad" and the " Odyssey." Great poets appear at long intervals. As he reckoned them, there had been but six given to the world—Homer, Shakspere, Dante, Milton, Sophocles, and yEschylus. With the exception of the last two, there had been great spaces of time between these. Could it be supposed that at the very dawn of history there was a group, as it were, of men each in the highest degree gifted with " the vision and the faculty divine V' Then as to the " Iliad" and the " Odyssey" being both the production of Homer ; if we admitted one to be, that the other was would follow as a matter of course. It was the old test of Paley over again—the finding the watch, and the presumption from it of a maker ; and in this case there was the watchmaker's shop clo3e by. He urged, too, that Homer was the only great poet who did not, in narrating past events, use the present tense — speak of them as if happening at the moment. He quoted long passages from "Paradise Lost" to show how Milton would fall into the present tense, though he might have begun it in the past. The fact that throughout the many thousandlinesof Homernoinstance of this kind could be found, seemed to make it clear that but one mind produced them. It was very interesting to hear Macaulay recite Milton, for whom he had such passionate admiration. Pie made quotations also from Burns and from old ballads in illustration of some theory which I do not recall, but showing his wonderful memory. He had, indeed, an altogether marvellous facility in producing passages as he might need them for whatever subject he was discussing. _^__