A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)

He was re-elected for Edinburgh in 1852, published the third and fourth volumes of his History in 1855 with success greater in pecuniary ways and otherwise than even that of their forerunners, was raised to the Upper House as Lord Macaulay of Rothley in 1857, and died two years later, on 28th December 1859, of heart disease. Some personal peculiarities of Macaulay's – his extraordinary reading and memory, his brilliant but rather tyrannical conversation, his undoubting self-confidence – were pretty well known in his lifetime, and did not always create a prejudice in his favour. But a great revolution in this respect was brought about by the Life of him, produced a good many years later by his nephew, Sir George Trevelyan – a Life, standing for the interest of its matter and the skill and taste of its manner, not too far below the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart.

The literary personality of Macaulay, though a great one in all respects, is neither complex nor unequally present, and it is therefore desirable to discuss all its manifestations together. In the order of importance and of bulk his work may be divided into verse, prose-essays, and history, for his speeches less directly concern us, and are very little more than essays adroitly enough adjusted so as not to be tedious to the hearer. In all three capacities he was eminently popular; and in all three his popularity has brought with it a sort of reaction, partly justified, partly unjust. The worst brunt of this reaction has fallen upon his verse, the capital division of which, the Lays of Ancient Rome, was persistently decried by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the critic of most authority in the generation immediately succeeding Macaulay's. A poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not; his way of thought was too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery or of dream, to command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to "make the common as if it were not common." His best efforts of this kind are in small and not very generally known things, the "Jacobite's Epitaph," "The Last Buccaneer." But his ballads earlier and later, Ivry, The Armada, Naseby, and the Roman quartet, exhibit the result of a consummate literary faculty with a real native gift for rhythm and metre, applying the lessons of the great Romantic generation with extraordinary vigour and success, and not without considerable eloquence and refinement. It is a gross and vulgar critical error to deem Macaulay's poetical effects vulgar or gross. They are popular; they hit exactly that scheme of poetry which the general ear can appreciate and the general brain understand. They are coin for general circulation; but they are not base coin. Hundreds and thousands of immature and 'prentice tastes have been educated to the enjoyment of better things by them; thousands and tens of thousands of tastes, respectable at least, have found in them the kind of poetry which they can like, and beyond which they are not fitted to go. And it would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciations which, while relishing things more exquisite and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savour the simple genuine fare of poetry which Macaulay offers. There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding "better bread than is made of wheat," and the poetical bread of the Lays of Ancient Rome is an honest household loaf that no healthy palate will reject.

In the second division, that of essay writing, Macaulay occupies a position both absolutely and relatively higher. That the best verse ranks above even the best prose is not easily disputable; that prose which is among the very best of its own particular kind ranks above verse which though good is not the best, may be asserted without any fear. And in their own kind of essay, Macaulay's are quite supreme. Jeffrey, a master of writing and a still greater master of editing, with more than twenty years' practice in criticism, asked him "where he got that style?" The question was not entirely unanswerable. Macaulay had taken not a little from Gibbon; he had taken something from a then still living contributor of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private and personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It had appeared early (it can be seen in things of his written when he was an undergraduate). It owed much to the general atmosphere of the century, to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, idea, not merely from the vernacular or from classical authorities, but from the great writers of earlier European literature. And it would probably have been impossible without the considerable body of forerunners which the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and other things of which some notice has been given in a former chapter, had supplied. But still the individual character reigns supreme.

Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary loose acceptation of the term a household word; and it cannot be necessary to single out individual instances where almost all are famous, and where all deserve their fame. The "Milton" and the "Southey," the "Pitt" and the "Chatham," the "Addison" and the "Horace Walpole," the "Clive" and the "Hastings," the "Frederick the Great" and the "Madame D'Arblay," the "Restoration Dramatists" and the "Boswell," the "Hallam" and the "Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits and the same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first place the system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he carried to perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less as a subject of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than as a mere starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views of the subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters of pure literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this latter kind, the crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, though well enough deserved in the particular case, escapes this condemnation only to fall under another, that of looking at the parts rather than at the whole. It is quite certain that, given their plan, the two famous critiques of Tennyson and Keats, in the Quarterly and in Blackwood, are well enough justified. The critic looks only at the weak parts, and he judges the weak parts only by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more apparently generous method, Macaulay was exposed to equal dangers, and succumbed to them less excusably. He had strong prejudices, and it is impossible for any one who reads him with knowledge not to see that the vindication of those prejudices, rather than the exposition and valuation of the subject, was what he had first at heart. He was too well informed (though, especially in the Indian Essays, he was sometimes led astray by his authorities), and he was too honest a man, to be untrustworthy in positive statement. But though he practised little in the courts, he had the born advocate's gift, or drawback, of inclination to suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, and he has a heavy account to make up under these heads. Even under them perhaps he has less to answer for than on the charge of a general superficiality and shallowness, which is all the more dangerous because of the apparently transparent thoroughness of his handling, and because of the actual clearness and force with which he both sees and puts his view. For a first draft of a subject Macaulay is incomparable, if his readers will only be content to take it for a first draft, and to feel that they must fill up and verify, that they must deepen and widen. But the heights and depths of the subject he never gives, and perhaps he never saw them.

Part of this is no doubt to be set down to the quality of his style; part to a weakness of his, which was not so much readiness to accept any conclusion that was convenient as a constitutional incapacity for not making up his mind. To leave a thing in half lights, in compromise, to take it, as the legal phrase of the country of his ancestors has it, ad avizandum, was to Macaulay abhorrent and impossible. He must "conclude," and he was rather too apt to do so by "quailing, crushing, and quelling" all difficulties of opposing arguments and qualifications. He simply would not have an unsolved problem mystery. Strafford was a "rancorous renegade"; Swift a sort of gifted Judas; Bacon a mean fellow with a great intellect; Dryden again a renegade, though not rancorous; Marlborough a self-seeking traitor of genius. And all these conclusions were enforced in their own style – the style of l'homme même. It was rather teasingly antithetical, "Tom's snip-snap" as the jealous smartness of Brougham called it; it was somewhat mechanical in its arrangement of narrative, set passages of finer writing, cunningly devised summaries of facts, comparisons, contrasts (to show the writer's learning and dazzle the reader with names), exordium, iteration, peroration, and so forth. But it observed a very high standard of classical English, a little intolerant of neologism, but not stiff nor jejune. It had an almost unexampled – a certainly unsurpassed – power (slightly helped by repetition perhaps) of bringing the picture that the writer saw, the argument that he thought, the sentiment that he felt, before the reader's eyes, mind, and feeling. And, as indeed follows from this, it was pre-eminently clear. It is perhaps the clearest style in English that does not, like those of Swift and Cobbett, deliberately or scornfully eschew rhetorical ornament. What Macaulay means you never, being any degree short of an idiot, can fail to understand; and yet he gives you the sense, equipped with a very considerable amount of preparation and trimming. It would not merely have been ungrateful, it would have been positively wrong, if his audience, specially trained as most of them were to his standpoint of Whig Reformer, had failed to hail him as one of the greatest writers that had ever been known. Nor would it be much less wrong if judges very differently equipped and constituted were to refuse him a high place among great writers.

The characteristics of the Essays reproduce themselves on a magnified scale so exactly in the History that the foregoing criticism applies with absolute fidelity to the later and larger, as well as to the earlier and more minute work. But it would not be quite fair to say that no new merits appear. There are no new defects; though the difference of the scope and character of the undertaking intensifies in degree, as well as magnifies in bulk, the faults of advocacy and of partiality which have caused the book to be dismissed, with a flippancy only too well deserved by its own treatment of opponents, as "a Whig pamphlet in four octavo volumes." Yet the width of study and the grasp of results, which, though remarkable, were not exactly extraordinary, in the compass and employed on the subject of a Review article, became altogether amazing and little short of miraculous in this enlarged field. One of the earliest and one of the best passages, the view of the state of England at the death of Charles the Second, may challenge comparison, as a clearly arranged and perfectly mastered collection of innumerable minute facts sifted out of a thousand different sources, with anything in history ancient or modern. The scale of the book is undoubtedly too great; and if it had been carried, as the author originally intended, to a date "within the memory of" his contemporaries, it would have required the life of Old Parr to complete it and the patience of Job to read it through. The necessity of a hero is a necessity felt by all the nobler sort of writers. But the choice of William of Orange for the purpose was, to say the least, unlucky; and the low morality which he had himself, in an earlier work, confessed as to the statesmen of the period imparted an additional stimulus to the historian's natural tendency to be unfair to his political opponents, in the vain hope, by deepening the blacks, to get a sort of whiteness upon the grays. It has further to be confessed that independent examination of separate points is not very favourable to Macaulay's trustworthiness. He never tells a falsehood; but he not seldom contrives to convey one, and he constantly conceals the truth. Still, the general picture is so vivid and stimulating, the mastery of materials is so consummate, and the beauty of occasional passages – the story of Monmouth's Conspiracy, that of James' insane persecution of Magdalen College, that of the Trial of the Seven Bishops, that of the Siege of Londonderry – so seductive, that the most hostile criticism which is not prepared to shut eyes and ears to anything but faults cannot refuse admiration. And it ought not to be omitted that Macaulay was practically the first historian who not merely examined the literature of his subject with unfailing care and attention, but took the trouble to inspect the actual places with the zeal of a topographer or an antiquary. That this added greatly to the vividness and picturesque character of his descriptions need hardly be said; that it often resulted in a distinct gain to historical knowledge is certain. But perhaps not its least merit was the putting down in a practically imperishable form, and in the clearest possible manner, of a vast number of interesting details which time is only too quick to sweep away. The face of England has changed more since Macaulay's time, though a bare generation since, than it had changed in the four or five generations between the day of his theme and his own; and thus he rescued for us at once the present and the past.

It is almost impossible to imagine a greater contrast between two contemporaries of the same nation, both men of letters of the first rank, than that which exists between Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. In the subjects to which both had affinity there was a rather remarkable connection. Macaulay's education rather than his sympathies made him something of a master of at least the formal part of poetry, in which Carlyle could do nothing. But essentially they were both writers of prose; they were both men in whom the historico-politico-social interests were much greater than the purely literary, the purely artistic, or the purely scientific – though just as Carlyle was a bad verse-writer or none at all, Macaulay a good one, so Carlyle was a good mathematician, Macaulay a bad one or none at all. But in the point of view from which they regarded the subjects with which they dealt, and in the style in which they treated them, they were poles asunder. Indeed it may be questioned whether "the style is the point of view" would not be a better form of the famous deliverance than that which, in full or truncated form, has obtained currency.

Carlyle was born on the 4th December 1795 at Ecclefechan (the Entepfuhl of the Sartor), in Dumfriesshire, being the son of a stone-mason. He was educated first at the parish school, then at that of Annan (the nearest town), and was about fifteen when he was sent, in the usual way of Scotch boys with some wits and no money, to the University of Edinburgh. His destination was equally of course the Church, but he very early developed that dislike to all fixed formularies which characterised him through life, and which perhaps was not his greatest characteristic. To mathematics, on the other hand, he took pretty kindly, though he seems to have early exhausted the fascinations of them. Like most men of no means who have little fancy for any of the regular professions, he attempted teaching; and as a schoolmaster at Annan, Haddington, and Kirkcaldy, or a private tutor (his chief experience in which art was with Charles Buller), he spent no small number of years, doing also some hack-work in the way of translating, writing for Brewster's Encyclopædia, and contributing to the London Magazine, that short-lived but fertile nurse of genius. The most remarkable of these productions was the Life of Schiller, which was published as a volume in 1825, his thirtieth year, at which time he was a resident in London and a frequenter – a not too amiable one – of Coleridge's circle at Highgate and of other literary places.

The most important event in his life took place in 1826, when he married Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady who traced her descent to John Knox, who had some property, who had a genius of her own, and who was all the more determined to marry a man of genius. She had hesitated between Irving and Carlyle, and, whatever came of it, there can be no doubt that she was right in preferring the somewhat uncouth and extremely undeveloped tutor who had taught her several things, – whether love in the proper sense was among them or not will always be a moot point. The Edinburgh Review was kind to Carlyle after its fashion, and he wrote for it; but Jeffrey, though very well disposed both to Carlyle and to his wife, could not endure the changes which soon came on his style, and might have addressed the celebrated query which, as mentioned, just at the same time he addressed in delighted surprise to Macaulay, "Where did you get that style," to Carlyle in the identical words but with a very different meaning. Even had it been different, it was impossible that Carlyle should serve anywhere or any one; and his mind, not an early ripening one, was even yet, at the age of thirty-two, in a very unorganised condition. He resolved to retire to his wife's farm of Craigenputtock in Nithsdale; and Mrs. Carlyle had the almost unparalleled heroism to consent to this. For it must be remembered that her husband, with the exception of the revenue of a few essays, was living on her means, that he undertook no professional duties, and that in the farmhouse she had to perform those of a servant as well as those of a wife. Whatever other opinions may be passed on this episode of Carlyle's life, which lasted from 1828 to 1834, there can be no doubt that it "made" him. He did much positive work there, including all his best purely literary essays. There he wrote Sartor Resartus, his manifesto and proclamation, a wild book which, to its eternal honour, Fraser's Magazine accepted, probably under the influence of Lockhart, with whom, strangely different as they were, Carlyle was always on good, though never on intimate terms. There too was written great part of the earlier form of the French Revolution. But the greatest thing that he did at Craigenputtock was the thorough fermentation, clearing, and settling of himself. When he went there, at nearly thirty-three, it was more uncertain what would come of him than it is in the case of many a man when he leaves the University at three and twenty. When he left it, at close on his fortieth year, the drama of his literary life was complete, though only a few lines of it were written.

That drama lasted in actual time for forty-seven years longer; and for more than the first thirty of them fresh and ever fresh acts and scenes carried it on. For the public his place was taken once and for all by the History of the French Revolution, which, after alarming vicissitudes (John Stuart Mill having borrowed the first volume in MS. and lent it to a lady, to be destroyed by her housemaid), appeared in 1837. From at least that time Mrs. Carlyle's aspiration was fulfilled. There were gain-sayers of course, – it may almost be said that genius which is not gainsaid is not genius, – there were furious decriers of style, temper, and so forth. But nine out of every ten men at least whose opinion was worth taking knew that a new star of the first magnitude had been added to English literature, however much they might think its rays in some respects baleful.

Lecturing, after the example set chiefly by Coleridge and Hazlitt, was at this time a favourite resource for those men of letters whose line of composition was not of the gainfulest; and Carlyle delivered several courses, some of which are unreported while others survive only in inadequate shapes. But Heroes and Hero-Worship was at first delivered orally, though it was not printed till 1841; and about the same time, or rather earlier, appeared the Miscellaneous Essays– a collection of his work at its freshest, least mannered, most varied, and in some respects best. Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843) reflected the political problems of the time and Carlyle's interest in them. But it was not till 1845 that a second, in the ordinary sense, great work, Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, was published. Five years passed without anything substantive from him, but in 1850 appeared Latter-Day Pamphlets, the most brilliantly satiric, and in 1851 the softest, most finished, and (save theologically) least debatable of all his books, the exquisite biography in miniature called the Life of Sterling. Then he engaged, it is difficult to say whether by ill-luck or not, on the last and largest of his great single undertakings, the History of Frederick the Great. Fourteen years were passed, as a matter of composition, in "the valley of the shadow of Frederick," as his wife put it: half the time (from 1858 to 1865) saw the actual publication. Shortly after the completion of this, Carlyle visited Edinburgh to receive the Lord Rectorship of his University, and soon after his wife died. He survived her fifteen years, but did nothing more of great importance; indeed, he was seventy-one when this loss happened. Some short things on "John Knox," on "The Early Kings of Norway," and a famous letter on "Shooting Niagara" (the Reform Bill of 1867), with a few more, appeared; but he was chiefly occupied (as far as he was occupied at all) in writing reminiscences, and arranging memorials of Mrs. Carlyle. The publication of these books after his death by the late Mr. Froude led to a violent conflict of opinion both as to the propriety of the publication and as to the character of Carlyle himself.

This conflict fortunately concerns us but little here. It is certain that Carlyle – springing from the lower ranks of society, educated excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but without attention to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife early remarked in him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a martyr from very early years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring spirit and not too social temper, thoroughly convinced that the times were out of joint and not at all thoroughly convinced that he or any one could set them right, finally possessed of an intensely religious nature which by accident or waywardness had somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion – was not a happy man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and to those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too often unkindly record, his bark was much worse than his bite. And it is further certain that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden drudge, but a woman of brains almost as alert as her husband's and a tongue almost as sharp as his, who had deliberately made her election of the vocation of being "wife to a man of genius," and who received what she had bargained for to the uttermost farthing. There will always be those who will think that Mr. Froude, doubtless with the best intentions, made a very great mistake; that, at any rate for many years after Carlyle's death, only a strictly genuine but judicious selection of the Reminiscences and Memorials should have been published, or else that the whole should have been worked into a real biography in which the frame and setting could have given the relief that the text required. But already, after more than the due voices, there is some peace on the subject; and a temporary wave of neglect, partly occasioned by this very controversy, was to be expected.

That this wave will pass may be asserted with a fulness and calmness of assurance not to be surpassed in any similar case. Carlyle's influence during a great part of the second and the whole of the third quarter of this century was so enormous, his life was so prolonged, and the general tone of public thought and public policy which has prevailed since some time before his death has been so adverse to his temper, that the reaction which is all but inevitable in all cases was certain to be severe in his. And if this were a history of thought instead of being a history of the verbal expression of thought, it would be possible and interesting to explain this reaction, and to forecast the certain rebound from it. As it is, however, we have to do with Carlyle as a man of letters only; and if his position as the greatest English man of letters of the century in prose be disputed, it will generally be found that the opposition is due to some not strictly literary cause, while it is certain that any competitor who is set up can be dislodged by a fervent and well-equipped Carlylian without very much difficulty.