Sivut kuvina
PDF
ePub

not gain arger views of the grand vocation of the historian, and new conceptions of the resources of language. Precisely in what the fascination consisted, it was not easy to say. It was not con. fined to any one quality of the work. The narrative was clothed with the interest of a novel; new facts were brought out, and those known before placed in a new light; the principles were liberal; the tone was manly; the personages lived and moved Defore our eyes; the language sparkled with beauties of style, which belonged to no other pen.

[ocr errors]

"For a numerous class of readers the third chapter on the State of England possessed a peculiar attraction. The idea of minutely portraying the condition of the country whose history was to be recorded; the state of manners, institutions, arts, and letters; in a word the collective life of the people, an idea so obvious in conception,- had never to anything like the same extent, been carried out by any of the distinguished historical writers of other times. No such chapter is found in any Greek or Roman history. We gather the social and intellectual condition of the great states of antiquity by inference from scanty data, scattered over the entire range of classical literature, orators, dramatists, philosophers, scholiasts. Thucydides, if I mistake not, alludes but once to the magnificent works of art, which adorned Athens, and were erected in the time of Pericles, and then only in connection with their cost. Macaulay, in the chapter alluded to, gives you a pre-Raphaelite painting of the country and the age.

"Another class of readers was struck and justly with the vitality of the characters, the wonderful discrimination and acuteness with which the personages are individualized; the magic with which the dry historic bones are clothed with human flesh; and the marble busts and statues that fill the galleries of the past,

dusty and cold and mutilated, - are converted into living men and women. Elaborate character-painting in reference to a few great personages was familiar to the old historians, but it was gen erally executed in a kind of obituary style, at the close of the ca reer. The living personification did not, as in Macaulay's pages pervade the narrative. A king was king and a general was general, with certain broad and vague qualities of character like the traditionary personages of the Pantomimic stage. In Macaulay we find the characters clothed with the individuality of Shakspeare's heroes, the result in both cases, not of an artistic

purpose to paint a set of characters and keep them in costume, but of a native clearness of conception; an inborn faculty of literary embodiment, as much sui generis, and as rare in its kind, as that which enables the sculptor or the painter to achieve the crea tions of his canvas or his chisel.

"That he was the most brilliant writer of the age, perhaps of any age, will be generally conceded by some even of those who deny him the possession of other qualities more important in an historian. It has been said of Sydney Smith that, if he had not been the wittiest, he would have been thought one of the wisest of men. In like manner it is possible, that the great brilliancy of Macaulay's manner has prevented his having all the credit to which he is justly entitled, for laborious research, skilful selection and arrangement of his materials, and conscientious accuracy of statement. Fully to appreciate these qualities requires something more than a cursory perusal of his volumes. Those who may be led by any motive to study, as well as to read, his chapters, to follow out themselves the development of any great topic in his history, will not fail to be struck by the range and minuteness of his investigations; the judgment and tact with which unessential particulars are dropped, and those which give character to the action or the individual are sifted out from the mass of antiquarian chaff and wrought into a continuous and flowing narrative; and the correctness and precision with which authorities are followed or cited, and the practical good sense with which a coherent and harmonious whole is fashioned out of seemingly discordant parts.

"Not that infallible accuracy is to be claimed for him;—it belongs to no mortal pen. There is perhaps no more accurate writer than our own beloved and lamented Prescott. When, on the publication of the first two volumes of Philip the Second, a friendly correspondent pointed out two or three inconsiderable errors, he accepted the correction as an act of kindness, and modestly said he was thankful the discerning critic had not found more and greater mistakes. Mr. Hallam was eminently an accurate writer; but when, in the latter part of his life, he published a volume supplemental to his History of the Middle Ages, Mr. Rogers wittily remarked that Hallam had been trying all his life to prove that everybody else was wrong, and had now written a book to prove that he was wrong himself.' There is no historian whose pages will stand a severe scrutiny better than those of Lord Macaulay.

"With reference to characters, it is scarcely possible that a writer, throwing himself as intensely as Macaulay does into the scenes which he narrates; mingling almost in person in the great contentions of the times, should not occasionally make an erroneous estimate of conduct and motive. This can be wholly escaped only through the entire absence of that living sympathy with the actors in the great world-drama of History, which forms the charmof Macaulay's volumes. He alone is never misled by the fervor of his emotions, who has no fervor. But if the writer is himself cold and tame, his page may be accurate, but it will be frigid and dull. He will sometimes be cited, but never read. The dust will settle on his faultless volumes, and cobwebs clasp their rarely opened leaves. Macaulay was, I think, first led into the error, which has been most keenly felt in this country — his unfavorable estimate of the character of William Penn by relying inadvertently on the accuracy of a citation made by Sir James Mackintosh, usually a safe guide. But that he was perfectly honest in this error who can doubt? What motive could he have for an intentional wrong to the memory of the peaceful Legislator?

"Who can estimate the loss to literature of such a writer? In the first sentence of his great work he says: 'I purpose to write the History of England from the accession of King James the Second down to a time within the memory of men still living.' These words, uttered in 1849, cannot well be supposed to go much further back than the year 1789; it may accordingly have been the original intention of Macaulay to bring down his history to the first outbreak of the French Revolution. He probably soon found that a plan so extensive, treated in the detail with which he commenced his work, was too vast for what, on the most hopeful supposition, could remain to him of life. The fourth volume brings the narrative down to the treaty of Ryswick and the year 1697. We may well suppose, however, that his materials were mainly collected at least for the reign of Queen Anne; and it is not at all unlikely that in the five years which have elapsed since the appearance of the fourth volume, much progress was made in their elaboration. Still, however, there is too much reason to fear that all this work of preparation is lost, for who can complete the unfinished work of a master? If there were one who could do it he would not; if there were one that would do it he could not.

"If the materials collected by Macaulay, the authorities ex

[ocr errors]

plored, and more or less digested; the summaries of events drawn out; the characters sketched in outline; if all these are indeed forever lost, and for a period so brilliant as that of Queen Anne, how much more have we not to lament that vast range of accumulated knowledge, of which no written memorial exists that boundless command of illustrative information - that treasure of fact and sentiment-in a word, that affluence of intel lect which lie buried with Lord Macaulay in Westminster Abbey and which, with a few years more of life and health, would hav enabled him to double the number at least of his precious vol umes!

"But it was otherwise ordered. His health began to fail some years before his death, but he bore the approaches of disease not only with equanimity but with cheerfulness.

“I have nothing to complain of,' he wrote in May, 1854. 'My health is indeed not good. But I suffer no pain; and though my pleasures are fewer than they were, I retain the great sources of happiness. My mind is as clear and my affections as warm as ever. Nothing can exceed the tenderness of those who are nearest and dearest to me. On the whole, I find life quite as pleas ant now, that I am confined many months every year to my room, as when I was in the vigor of youth.'

"The precise nature of his disease was for some time doubtful; but the atmosphere of London oppressed him. Writing in November, 1855, he says:

"We shall hardly meet in the Albany; [his lodgings at that time in London,] my lease expires in a few months, and as I am a much more wealthy and a much less healthy man than when I took up my abode here, I mean to change my quarters. I should like to settle very near London, within an easy distance of the clubs, of the British Museum, and above all of my sister and her children, and yet beyond the reach of the coal fog and the river fog, which during six months of the year, make it difficult for me to breathe. I must have room for near ten thousand volumes. I must have, if possible, an acre of green turf, where I can walk up and down among lilacs and laburnums, with a book in my hand I must also have a spare bed for a friend. *** Possibly before I settle, I may visit Italy again. I shall vacate my seat in Parliament on the first day of the approaching Session, and shall thus be free from a tie, which, though in my case singularly easy, nevertheless imposes some little restraint on my movements. I have

corrected the last proof-sheet of the second part of my History, and am fairly entitled to a holiday. You shall have a copy, which will sometimes remind you of a very sincere friend. I have not promised myself that the book will be popular. The public has extravagantly overpraised me; it expects miracles, and it will probably punish me for its own folly. In the mean time I am enjoying my newly recovered liberty. I have been reading two very much better historians than myself, Herodotus and Thucydides. I ought not to forget our friend Prescott, over whose volumes I passed a very pleasant day by the fireside, while London was covered with one of our orange-colored fogs.'

66

By the end of February, 1856, the third and fourth volumes of his book had appeared, and the rural retreat, of which he drew such a delightful picture in advance, had been found.

"The reception of my book,' says he, has been far more favorable than in my most sanguine moments I had expected. I have as yet heard little from the Continent, but the little that I have heard is encouraging. I attach great importance to the verdict of foreigners; for it indicates what the verdict of posterity is likely to be.

666

Thank God I have done forever with public business, and am free to enjoy letters and the society of those I love, without any restraint. I have determined to fix my abode in a place which seems to have been made for me. On the same rising ground on which Holland House stands, and at a distance of perhaps two hundred yards from that dear old building, is a villa with two acres of turf and flower-bed, called Holly Lodge. Even at this season it looks pretty; and in the summer I shall be able to hide myself among my rose-bushes, and to imagine that I am in a rural solitude, though, in truth, I shall be only two miles from Hyde Park Corner. I have ample room for my library, good air, a good gravel soil, and good water. I may add, good neighbors. * * * Here I hope to breathe more freely than in this great cloud of river fog and sea coal. How glad I shall be to have a walk with you on the grass before my library window; and I will not suffer myself to doubt that this pleasure is in store for me.'

"In 1857, he was raised to the peerage, the first person in the ancient Monarchy of Great Britain thus distinguished, not for political or military service, nor for wealth, but for surpassing talent and the most exalted literary merit. The peerage conferred no honor on Macaulay, but it was a great distinction to be the instru

« EdellinenJatka »