A History of English Literature

oratorical balance of clauses and strong antithesis, or more illuminating
use of vivid resumes. The best of his essays, like those on the Earl of
Chatham and on the two men who won India for England, Clive and Warren
Hastings, are models of the comparatively brief comprehensive dissertation
of the form employed by Johnson in his 'Lives of the Poets.'
Macaulay, however, manifests the, defects even of his virtues. His
positiveness, fascinating and effective as it is for an uncritical reader,
carries with it extreme self-confidence and dogmatism, which render him
violently intolerant of any interpretations of characters and events except
those that he has formed, and formed sometimes hastily and with prejudice.
The very clearness and brilliancy of his style are often obtained at the
expense of real truth; for the force of his sweeping statements and his
balanced antitheses often requires much heightening or even distortion of
the facts; in making each event and each character stand out in the
plainest outline he has often stripped it of its background of qualifying
circumstances. These specific limitations, it will be evident, are
outgrowths of his great underlying deficiency--the deficiency in spiritual
feeling and insight. Macaulay is a masterly limner of the external side of
life, but he is scarcely conscious of the interior world in which the finer
spirits live and work out their destinies. Carlyle's description of his
appearance is significant: 'I noticed the homely Norse features that you
find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to myself, "Well, any
one can see that you are an honest, good sort of fellow, made out of
oatmeal." Macaulay's eminently clear, rapid, and practical mind
comprehended fully and respected whatever could be seen and understood by
the intellect; things of more subtle nature he generally disbelieved in or
dismissed with contempt. In dealing with complex or subtle characters he
cannot reveal the deeper spiritual motives from which their action sprang;
and in his view of history he does not include the underlying and
controlling spiritual forces. Macaulay was the most brilliant of those whom
the Germans have named Philistines, the people for whom life consists of
material things; specifically he was the representative of the great body
of middle-class early-Victorian liberals, enthusiastically convinced that
in the triumphs of the Liberal party, of democracy, and of mechanical
invention, the millennium was being rapidly realized. Macaulay wrote a
fatal indictment of himself when in praising Bacon as the father of modern
science he depreciated Plato, the idealist. Plato's philosophy, said
Macaulay, 'began in words and ended in words,' and he added that 'an acre
in Middlesex is better than a peerage in Utopia.' In his literary and
personal essays, therefore, such as the famous ones on Milton and Bacon,
which belong early in his career, all his immense reading did not suffice
to produce sympathetic and sensitive judgments; there is often more
pretentiousness of style than significance of interpretation. In later life
he himself frankly expressed regret that he had ever written these essays.
Macaulay's 'History of England' shows to some degree the same faults as the
essays, but here they are largely corrected by the enormous labor which he
devoted to the work. His avowed purpose was to combine with scientific
accuracy the vivid picturesqueness of fiction, and to 'supersede the last
fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.' His method was that of an
unprecedented fulness of details which produces a crowded pageant of events
and characters extremely minute but marvelously lifelike. After three
introductory chapters which sketch the history of England down to the death
of Charles II, more than four large volumes are occupied with the following
seventeen years; and yet Macaulay had intended to continue to the death of
George IV, nearly a hundred and thirty years later. For absolute
truthfulness of detail the 'History' cannot always be depended on, but to
the general reader its great literary merits are likely to seem full