Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

Macaulay's 'Utilitarian' Indian Penal Code 157
the theoretical underpinnings. 56 Yet even without these formative influences,
Macaulay's highly distinctive style of composition and dialectical devices,
already well-entrenched before India, contributed enormously to the Code's
shape and form. As many contemporaries testified, style was the man.
Leslie Stephen captured one feature of Macaulay's style perfectly when
remarking that 'nobody can hit a haystack with more certainty' than Macaulay.
57 Pertinent to the use of illustrations is the comment by John Morley
(J.S. Mill's great acolyte and Liberal statesman) on Macaulay's 'quality of
taking his reader through an immense gallery of interesting characters and
striking situations . . . the style of great literary knowledge [used in a]
process of complete assimilation and spontaneous fusion'. 58 Furthermore,
says Morley, 'He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life' partly because
for Macaulay: 59
... the world was spread out clear before him, he read it as plainly and as certainly
as he read his books; life was all an affair of direct categoricals. This was at least one
secret of those hard modulations and shallow cadences.
These qualities, ill-favoured by critics of general literature, were clearly an
indirect recommendation for a legislator; something which did not escape
Fitzjames Stephen, who understood that the 'absence of shading, which is
unnatural and unpleasing in a picture, is indispensable in. a mathematical
diagram, and the sharp contrasts which sometimes pall upon the reader of
a history are just what are wanted in a penal code'. 60 Metaphorically uniting
general literary style and the law, Leslie Stephen suggested: 61
Clearness is the first of the cardinal virtues of style; and nobody every wrote more
clearly than Macaulay ... he proves that two and two make four, with a pertinacity
which would make him dull if it were not for his abundance of brilliant illustration.
He always renders the principle which should guide a barrister addressing a jury.
He has not merely to exhaust his proofs, but to hammer them into the heads of his
audience by incessant repetition.
Indeed, there are occasions in the Code where Macaulay went too far in
trying to 'anticipate captious objections' and over-defined elements of the
Code; a failing characterized by Fitzjames Stephen as akin to attempting
to 'rid a house of dust by mere sweeping. You make more dust than you
56 Report, 421. See Kadish, loc. cit., 1,099-106, for an excellent account of Livingston's code and
Bentham's influence on it. Also in 'The Model Penal Code's Historical Antecedents', Rutgers Law Jour.,
xix (1988), 521,523.
57 Hours in a Library (1892 ed.), ii, 352.
58 Critical Miscellanies, i (1913 ed., first published 1877), 253,265-67.
59 Ibid., 275 and 283. Similarly Walter Bagehot on Macaulay's literary style: 'It is too omniscient.
Everything is too plain. All is clear; nothing is doubtful', Literary Studies, R.H. Hutton, ed., 4th ed.
(1891), ii, 256. Matthew Arnold somewhat sniffily, attributed this to 'a dash of intellectual vulgarity'.
Quoted by S. Collini, Arnold (Oxford, 1988), 66.
60 H.C.L.,iii,302.
61 Hours in a Library, ii, 364.