till after his death, that he was a little and not a large man. So many of the admirers of Dickens have been so dazzled by the elegance of his proportions, the fairy beauty of his features, the minute grace of his motions, and the small sweet smile which plays about his mouth, that they have imagined him to be a Scott, or even a Shakspeare. To do him justice, he himself has never fallen into such an egregious mistake. He has seldom, if ever, sought to alter, by one octave, the note Nature gave him, and which is not that of an eagle nor of a nightingale, nor of a lark, but of a happy, homely, gleesome "Cricket on the Hearth." Small almost as his own Tiny Tim, dressed in as dandyfied a style as his own Lord Frederick Verisoft, he is as full of the milk of human kindness as his own Brother Cheeryble; and we cannot but love the man who has first loved all human beings, who can own Newman Noggs as a brother, and can find something to respect in a Bob Sawyers, and something to pity in a Ralph Nickleby. Never was a monarch of popular literature less envied or more loved; and while rather wondering at the length of his reign over such a capricious domain as that of Letters, and while fearlessly expressing our doubts as to his greatness or permanent dominion, we own that his sway has been that of gentleness-of a good, wide-minded, and kindly man; and take this opportunity of wishing long life and prosperity to "Bonnie Prince Charlie." To such gifts, indeed, he does not pretend, and never has pretended. To roll the raptures of poetry, without emulating its speciosa miracula-to write worthily of heroes, without aspiring to the heroic--to write history without enacting it-to furnish to the utmost degree his own mind, without leading the minds of others one point farther than to the admiration of himself and of his idols, seems, after all, to have been the main object of his ambition, and has already been nearly satisfied. He has played the finite game of talent, and not the infinite game of genius. His goal has been the top of the mountain, and not the blue profound beyond; and on the point he has sought he may speedily be seen, relieved against the heights which he cannot reach-a marble fixture, exalted and motionless. Talent stretching itself out to attain the attitudes and exaltation of genius is a pitiable and painful position, but it is not that of Macaulay. With piercing sagacity he has, from the first, discerned his proper intellectual powers, and sought, with his whole heart, and soul, and mind, and strength, to cultivate them. Macaulay the Lucky" he has been called; he ought rather to have been called Macaulay the Wise. 66 With a rare combination of the arts of age and the fire of youth, the sagacity of the worlding and the enthusiasm of the scholar, he has sought selfdevelopment as his principal, if not only end. He is a gifted but not, in a high sense, a great man. He possesses all those ornaments, accomplishments, and even natural endowments, which the great man requires for the full emphasis and effect of his power, (and which the greatest alone can entirely dispense with;) but the power does not fill, possess, and shake the drapery. The lamps are In a different region, and on a higher and haughtier seat, is Thomas Macaulay exalted. In general literature, as Dickens in fiction, is he held to be facile princeps. He is, besides, esteemed a rhetorician of a high class a statesman of no ordinary calibre-a lyrical poet of much mark and likelihood—a scholar ripe and good-and, mount-lit in gorgeous effulgence; the shrine is modestly, ed on this high pedestal, he "has purposed in his heart to take another step,' ," and to snatch from the hand of the Historic Muse one of her richest laurels. To one so gifted in the prodigality of Heaven, can we approach in any other attitude but that of prostration? or dare we hope for sympathy, while we proceed to make him the subject of free and fearless criticism? Before proceeding to consider his separate claims upon public admiration, we will sum up, in a few sentences, our impressions of his general character. He is a gifted but not, in a high sense, a great man. He is a rhetorician without being an orator. He is endowed with great powers of perception and acquisition, but with no power of origination. He has deep sympathies with genius, without possessing genius of the highest order itself. He is strong and broad, but not subtle or profound. He is not more destitute of original genius than he is of high principle and purpose. He has all common faculties developed in a large measure, and cultivated to an intense degree. What he wants is the gift that cannot be given the power that cannot be counterfeited-the wind that bloweth where it listeth—the vision, the joy, and the sorrow with which no stranger intermeddleth-the "light which never was on sea or shore-the consecration and the poet's dream.” yet magnificently, adorned; there is everthing to tempt a god to descend; but the god descends not-or if he does, it is only Maia's son, the Eloquent, and not Jupiter, the Thunderer. The distinction between the merely gifted and the great is, we think, this-the gifted adore greatness and the great; the great worship the infinite, the eternal, and the god-like. The gifted gaze at the moon like reflections of the Divinethe great, with open face, look at its naked sun, and each look is the principle and prophecy of an action. He has profound sympathies with genius, without possessing genius of the highest order itself. Genius, indeed, is his intellectual god. It is (contrary to a common opinion) not genius that Thomas Carlyle worships. The word genius he seldom uses, in writing or in conversation, except in derision. We can conceive a savage cachinnation at the question, if he thought Cromwell or Danton a great genius. It is energy in a certain state of powerful precipitation that he so much admires. With genius, as existing almost undiluted in the person of such men as Keats, he cannot away. It seems to him only a long swoon or St. Vitus' dance. It is otherwise with Macaulay. If we trace him throughout all his writings, we will find him watching for genius with as much care and fond ness as a lover uses in following the footsteps of his mistress. This, like a golden ray, has conducted him across all the wastes and wildernesses of history. It has brightened to his eye each musty page and worm-eaten volume. Each morning has he risen exulting to renew the search; and he is never half so eloquent as when dwelling on the achievements of genius, as sincerely and rapturously as if he were reciting his own. His sympathies are as wide as they are seen. Genius, whether thundering with Chatham in the House of Lords, or mending kettles and dreaming dreams with Bunyan in Elstowe-whether reclining in the saloons of Holland House with De Stael and Byron, or driven from men as on a new Nebuchadnezzar whirlwind, in the person of poor wandering Shelly-whether in Coleridge, "With soul as strong as a mountain river, Pouring out praise to the Almighty giver;" times, nor has it descended from the seventh heaven. Consequently, he has no power of origination. We despise the charge of plagiarism, in its low and base sense, which has sometimes been advanced against him. He never commits conscious theft, though sometimes he gives all a father's welcome to thoughts to which he has not a father's claim. But the rose which he appropriates is seldom more than worthy of the breast which it is to adorn; thus, in borrowing from Hall the antithesis applied by the one to the men of the French Revolution, and by the other to the restored Royalists in the time of Charles the Second, "dwarfish virtues and gigantic crimes," he has taken what he might have lent, and, in its application, has changed it from a party calumny into a striking truth. The men of the Revolution were not men of dwarfish virtues and gigantic vices; both were stupendous when either were possessed: it was otherwise with the minions of Charles. When our hero lights his torch it is not at the chariot of the sun; he ascends seldom higher than Hazlitt or or in Voltaire shedding its withering smile across the universe, like the grin of death-whether singing in Milton's verse, or glittering upon Cromwell's sword-is the only magnet which can draw forth all the riches of his mind, and the pre-Hall-Coleridge, Schiller, and Goethe are unsence of inspiration alone makes him inspired. touched. But without re-arguing the question But this sympathy with genius does not amount of originality, that quality is manifestly not his. to genius itself; it is too catholic and too pros- It were as true that he originated Milton, Dryden, trate. The man of the highest order of genius, Bacon, or Byron, as that he originated the views after the enthusiasm of youth is spent, is rarely which his articles develope of their lives or its worshipper, even as it exists in himself. He genius. A search after originality is never sucworships rather the object which genius contem-cessful. Novelty is even shyer than truth, for if plates, and the ideal at which it aims. He is you search after the true, you will often, if not rapt up to a higher region, and hears a mightier always, find the new; but if you search after voice. Listening to the melodies of Nature, to the new, you will, in all probability, find neither the march of the eternal hours, to the severe the new nor the true. In seeking for paradoxes, music of continuous thought, to the rush of his Macaulay sometimes stumbles on, but more freown advancing soul, he cannot so complacently quently stumbles over truth. His essays are bend an ear to the minstrelsies, however sweet, masterly treatises, written learnedly, carefully of men, however gifted. He passes, like the true conned, and pronounced in a tone of perfect painter, from the admiration of copies, which he assurance; the Pythian pantings, the abrupt and may admire to error and extravagance, to that stammering utterances of the seer, are awanting. great original which, without blame, excites an infinite and endless devotion. He becomes a personification of Art, standing on tip-toe in contemplation of mightier Nature, and drawing from her features with trembling pencil and a joyful awe. In connexion with this defect, we find in him little metaphysical gift or tendency. There is no "speculation in his eye." If the mysterious regions of thought, which are at present attracting so many thinkers, have ever possessed any Macaulay has not this direct and personal charm for him, that charm has long since passed communication with the truth and the glory of away. If the "weight, the burden and the things. He sees the universe not in its own rich mystery, of all this unintelligible world," have and divine radiance, but in the reflected light ever pressed him to anguish, that anguish seems which poets have shed upon it. There are in his now forgotten as a nightmare of his youth. The writings no oracular deliverances, no pregnant serpents which strangle other Laocoons, or else hints, no bits of intense meaning-broken, but keep them battling all their life before high broken off from some supernal circle of thought-heaven, have long ago left, if indeed they had ever no momentary splendours, like flashes of midnight approached him. His joys and sorrows, sympalightning, revealing how much-no thoughts beckoning us away with silent finger, like ghosts, into dim and viewless regions-and he never even nears that divine darkness which ever edges the widest and loftiest excursions of imagination and of reason. His style and manner may be compared to crystal, but not to the "terrible crystal" of the prophets and apostles of literature. There is the sea of glass, but it is not mingled with fire, or at least the fire has not been heated seven VOL. XIV-NO. CLXVII. thies and inquiries, are entirely of the "earth, earthy," though it is an earth beautified by the smile of genius, and by the midnight Sun of the Past. It may appear presumptuous to criticise his creed, where not an article has been by himself indicated, except perhaps the poetical first principle that," Beauty is truth and truth beauty;' but we see about him neither the firm grasp of one who holds a dogmatic certainty, nor the vast and vacant stretch of one who has failed after 3 A much effort to find the object, and who says, "I clasp-what is it that I clasp?" Toward the silent and twilight lands of thought, where reside, half in glimmer and half in gloom, the dread questions of the origin of evil, the destiny of, man, our relation to the lower animals, and to the spirit world, he never seems to have been powerfully or for any length of time impelled. We might ask with much more propriety at him the question which a reviewer asked at Carlyle, "Can you tell us, quite in confidence, your private opinion as to the place where wicked people go?" And, besides, what think you of God? or of that most profound and awful Mystery of Godliness? Have you ever thought deeply on such subjects at all? Or if so, why does the language of a cold conventionalism, or of an unmeaning fervour, distinguish all your allusions to them? It was not, indeed your business to write on such themes, but it requires no more a wizard to determine from your writings whether you have adequately thought on them, than to tell from a man's eye whether he is or is not looking at the sun. We charge Macaulay, as well as Dickens, with a systematic shrinking from meeting in a manful style those dread topics and relations at which we have hinted, and this, whether it springs, as Humboldt says in his own case, from a want of subjective understanding, or whether it springs from a regard for, or fear of popular opinion, or whether it springs from moral indifference, argues, on the first supposition, a deep mental deficiency, on the second, a cowardice unworthy of their position, or on the third, a state of spirit which the age, in its professed teachers, will not much longer endure. An earnest period, bent on basing its future progress upon fixed principles, fairly and irrevocably set down, to solve the problem of its happiness and destiny, will not long refrain from bestowing the name of brilliant trifler on the man, however gifted and favoured, who so slenderly sympathises with it, in this high though late and difficult calling. expect realised in Macaulay. His history, in all likelihood, will be the splendid cenotaph of his party. It will be brilliant in parts, tedious as a whole-curiously and minutely learned-written now with elaborate pomp, and now with elaborate negligence-heated by party spirit whenever the fires of enthusiasm begin to pale-it will abound in striking literary and personal sketches, and will easily rise to and above the level of the scenes it describes, just because few of those scenes, from the character of the period, are of the highest moral interest or grandeur. But a history forming a transcript, as if in the short-hand of a superior being, of the leading events of the age, solemn in spirit, subdued in tone, grave and testamentary in language, profound in insight, judicial in im partiality, and final as a Median law in effect, we might have perhaps expected from Mackintosh, but not from Macaulay. "Broader and deeper," says Emerson, "must we write our annals." The true idea of history is only as yet dawning on the world; the old almanac form of history has been generally renounced, but much of the old almanac spirit remains. The avowed partisan still presumes to write his special pleading, and to call it a history. The romance writer still decorates his fancypiece, and, for fear of mistake, writes under it, "This is a history." The bald retailer of the dry bones of history is not yet entirely banished from our literature-nor is the hardy, but onesided Iconoclast, who has a quarrel with all estab lished reputation, and would spring a mine against the sun if he could-nor is the sagacious philoso phiste, who has access to the inner thoughts and motives of men who have been dead for centuries, and often imputes to deep deliberate purpose what was the result of momentary impulse, fresh and sudden as the breeze, who accurately sums up and ably reasons on all calculable principles, but omits the incalculable, such as inspiration and frenzy. We are waiting for the full avatar of the ideal historian, who to the intellectual qualities of clear sight, sagacity, picturesque power, and for truth only equalled by a love for man-a belief in and sympathy with progress, thorough inde pendence and impartiality, and an all-embracing charity and after Macaulay's History of England has seen the light, may still be found waiting. It follows almost as a necessity from these re-learning, shall add the far rarer qualities of a love marks, that Macaulay exhibits no high purpose. Seldom so much energy and eloquence have been more entirely divorced from a great uniting and consecrating object; and in his forthcoming history we fear that this deficiency will be glaringly manifest. History, without the presence of high purpose, is but a series of dissolving views as brilliant it may be, but as disconnected, and not so impressive. It is this, on the contrary, that gives so profound an interest to the writings of Arnold, and invests his very fragments with a certain air of greatness; each sentence seems given in on oath. It is this which glorifies even D'Aubigne's Romance of the Reformation, for he seeks at least to shew God in history, like a golden thread, pervading, uniting, explaining, and purifying it all. No such passion for truth as Arnold's, no such steady vision of those great outshining laws of justice, mercy, and retribution, which pervade all human story, as D'Aubigne's, and in a far higher degree as Carlyle's, do we The real purpose of a writer is perhaps best concluded from the effect he produces on the minds of his readers. And what is the boon which Macaulay's writings do actually confer upon their millions of readers? Much informa tion, doubtless-many ingenious views are given and developed, but the main effect is pleasureeither a lulling, soothing opiatic, or a rousing and stimulating gratification. But what is their mental or moral influence ? What new and great truths do they throw like bomb-shells into nascent spirits, disturbing for ever their repose ? What sense of the moral sublime have they ever infused into the imagination, or what thrilling and strange joy "beyond the name of pleasure" have they ever circulated through the heart? What long, deep trains of thought have his thoughts ever started, and to what melodies in other minds have his words struck the key-note? Some authors mentally "beget children-they travail in birth with children;" thus from Coleridge sprang Hazlitt, but who is Macaulay's eldest born? Who dates any great era in his history from the reading of his works, or has received from him even the bright edge of any Apocalyptic revelation? Pleasure, we repeat, is the principal boon he has conferred on the age; and without under-estimating this (which, indeed, were ungrateful, for none have derived more pleasure from him than ourselves), we must say that it is comparatively a trivial gift-a fruiterer's or a confectioner's office-and, moreover, that the pleasure he gives, like that arising from the use of wine, or from the practice of novel-reading, requires to be imbibed in great moderation, and needs a robust constitution to bear it. Reading his papers is employment but too delicious-the mind is too seldom irritated and provoked the higher faculties are too seldom appealed to the sense of the infinite is never given there is perpetual excitement, but it is that of a game of tennis-ball, and not the Titanic play of rocks and mountains-there is constant exercise, but it is rather the swing of an easy chair than the grasp and tug of a strong rower striving to keep time with one stronger than himself. Ought we ask a grave and solid reputation, as extensive as that of Shakspere or Milton, to be entirely founded on what is essentially a course of light reading? We do not venture on his merits as a politician or statesman. But, as a speaker, we humbly think he has been over-rated. He is not a sublime orator, who fulminates, and fiercely, and almost contemptuously, sways his audience; he is not a subtle declaimer, who winds around and within the sympathies of his hearers, till, like the damsel in the "Castle of Indolence," they weaken as they warm, and are at last sighingly but luxuriously lost. He is not a being piercing a lonely way for his own mind, through the thick of his audience-wondered at, looked after, but not followed-dwelling apart from them even while rivetting them to his lips-still less is he an incarnation of moral dignity, whose slightest sentence is true to the inmost soul of honour, and whose plain, blunt speech is as much better than oratory, as oratory is better than rhetoric. He is the primed mouth-piece of an elaborate discharge, who presents, applies the linstock, and fires off. He speaks rather before than to his audience. We felt this strongly when hearing him at the opening of the New Philosophical Institution in Edinburgh; that appearance had on us the effect of disenchantment; our lofty ideal of Macaulay the orator—an ideal founded on the perusal of all sorts of fulsome panegyrics-sank like a dream. Macaulay the orator? Why had they not raved as well of Macaulay the beauty? He is, indeed, a master of rhetorical display; he aspires to be a philosopher; he is a brilliant literateur; but, besides not speaking oratorically, he does not speak at all, if speaking means free communi cation with the souls and hearts of his hearers. If Demosthenes, Fox, and O'Connell were orators, he is none. It was not merely that we were disappointed with his personal appearance-that is sturdy and manlike, if not graceful-it is, besides, hereditary, and cannot be helped; but the speech was an elaborate and ungraceful accommodation to the presumed prejudices and tastes of the hearers-a piece of literary electioneering—and the manner, in its fluent monotony, shewed a heart untouched amid all the palaver. Here is one, we thought, whose very tones prove that his success has been far too easy and exulting, and who has never known by experience the meaning of the grand old words, "perfect through suffering." Here is one in public sight selling his birthright for a mess of pottage and worthless praise, and who may live bitterly to rue the senseless bargain, for that applause is as certainly insincere as that birthright is high. Here is one who, ingloriously sinking with compulsion and laborious flight, consciously confounds culture with mere knowledge-speaking as if a boardingschool Miss, who had read Ewing's Geography, were therein superior to Strabo. There, Thomas Macaulay, we thought thou art contradicting thy former and better self, for we well remember thee speaking in an article with withering contempt of those who prefer to that "fine old geography of Strabo" the pompous inanities of Pinkerton. And dost thou deem thyself, all accomplished as thou art, nearer to the infinite mind than Pythagoras or Plato, because thou knowest more? And when he spoke again extempore, he sounded a still lower deep, and we began almost to fancy that there must be some natural deficiency in a mind so intensely cultivated, which could not shake as good, or better speeches, than even his first, "out of his sleeve." But the other proceedings and harangueings of that evening were not certainly fitted to eclipse his brightness, though they were calculated, in the opinion of many, to drive the truly eloquent to the woods, to find in the old trees a more congenial audience. The House of Commons, we are told, hushes to hear him, but this may arise from other reasons than the mere power of his eloquence. He has a name, and there is far too much even in Parliament of that base parasitical element, which, while denying ordinary courtesy to the untried, has its knee delicately hinged to bend in supplé homage to the acknowledged. He avoids, again, the utterance of all extreme opinions-never startles or offends-never shoots abroad forked flashes of truth; and besides, his speaking is, in its way, a very peculiar treat. Like his articles, it generally gives pleasure; and who can deny themselves an opportunity of being pleased, any more than a dish of strawberries and cream in summer time. Therefore, the House was silentits perpetual undersong subsided-even Roebuck's bristles were wont to lower, and Joseph Hume's careful front to relax when the right honourable member for Edinburgh was on his legs. But he is, in our idea, the orator who fronts the storm and crushes it into silence-who snatches the prejudice from three hundred frowning foreheads, the stern Roundhead. He could have acted as and binds it as a crown unto him--and who, not poet-laureate to Hannibal as well as to the reon some other and less difficult arena, but on public, and his "Lays of Carthage" would have that very field, wins the laurels which he is to been as sweet, as strong, and more pathetic than wear. Those are the eloquent sentences which, his "Lays of Rome." "How happy could he be though hardly heard above the tempest of oppo- with either, were t' other dear charmer away.” sition, yet are heard-and felt as well as heard- Not thus could Carlyle pass from his "Life of and obeyed as well as felt, which bespeak the Cromwell" to a panegyric on the "Man of surges at their loudest, and immediately there is Blood," whose eyes— a great calm. We are compelled, therefore, as our last general remark on Macaulay, to call him rather a large and broad, than a subtle sincere, or profound spirit. A simple child of Nature, trembling before the air played by some invisible musician behind him, what picture could be more exactly his antithesis? But neither has he, in any high degree, either the gift of philosophic analysis, or the subtle idealising power of the poet. Clear, direct, uncircumspective thought-vivid vision of the characters he describes an eye to see, rather than an imagination to combine-strong, but subdued enthusiasm-learning of a wide range, and information still more wonderful in its minuteness and accuracy a style limited and circumscribed by mannerism, but having all power and richness possible within its own range-full of force, though void of freedom-and a tone of conscious mastery, in his treatment of every subject, are some of the qualities which build him up-a strong and thoroughly furnished man, fit surely for more massive deeds than either a series of sparkling essays, or what shall probably be a one-sided history. "Could bear to look on torture, but durst not look on war." But Macaulay is the artist, sympathising more with the poetry than with the principles of the great Puritanic contest. His Roman Lays, though of a later date, fall naturally under the same category of consideration. These, when published, took the majority of the public by surprise, who were nearly as astonished at this late flowering of poetry, in the celebrated critic, as were the Edinburgh people, more recently, at the portentous tidings that Patrick Robertson, also, was among the poets. The initiated, however, acquainted with his previous effusions, hailed the phenomenon (not as in Patrick's case, with shouts of spurting laughter,) but with bursts of applause, which the general voice more than confirmed. The day when the Lays appeared, though deep in autumn, seemed a belated dog-day, so frantic did their admirers become. Homer, Scott, Wordsworth, and Byron, were now to hide their diminished heads, for an old friend under a new face had arisen to eclipse them all. And, for martial spirit, we are free to confess the Lays have never been surpassed, save by Homer, Scott, and by Burns, whose one epithet "red wat shod," whose one description of the dying Scotch soldier in the "Earnest Cry,” and whose one song, "Go fetch for me a pint of In passing from his general characteristics to his particular works, there is one circumstance in favour of the critic. While many authors are much, their writings are little known; but if ever any writings were published, it is Macaulay's. A glare of publicity, as wide almost as the sun-wine," are enough to stamp him among the foremost shine of the globe, rests upon them; and it is always easier to speak to men of what they know perfectly, than of what they know in part. To this there is perhaps an exception in his contributions to "Knight's Quarterly Magazine." That periodical, some of our readers may be aware, was of limited circulation, and limited life. "It sparkled-was exhaled, and went to ;" yet Professor Wilson has been known to say, that its four or five volumes are equal in talent to any four or five in the compass of periodical literature. To this opinion we must respectfully demur-at least we found the reading of two or three of them rather a hard task, the sole relief being in the papers of Macaulay, and would be disposed to prefer an equal number of " Blackwood," "Tait,” or the "Old London Magazine." Macaulay's best contributions to this are a series of poems, entitled, "Lays of the Roundheads." These, though less known than his "Lays of the League," which also appeared in "Knight," are, we think, superior. They are fine anticipations of the "Lays of Ancient Rome." Like Scott, vaulting between Claverhouse and Burley, and entering with equal gusto into the souls of both, Macaulay sings with equal spirit the song of the enthusiastic Cavalier and that of of martial poets. Macaulay's ballads sound in parts like the thongs of Bellona. Written, it is said, in the war office, the Genius of Battle might be figured bending over the author, sternly smiling on her last poet, and shedding from her wings a ruddy light upon his rapidly and furiously-filling page. But the poetry of war is not of the highest order. Seldom, except when the war is ennobled by some great cause, as when Deborah uttered her unequalled thanksgiving, can the touch of the sword extract the richest life's blood of poetry. Selfish is the exultation over victory, selfish the wailing under defeat. The song of the sword must soon give place to the song of the bell; and the pastoral ditty pronounced over the reaping hook shall surpass all lyrical baptisms of the spear. As it is, the gulph between the Laysamazingly spirited though they be--and intellectual, imaginative, or moral poetry, is nearly as wide as between Chevy Chase and Laodamia. Besides, the Lays are in a great measure centos; the images are no more original than the facts, and the poetic effect is produced through the singular rapidity, energy, and felicity of the narration, and the breathless rush of the verse, “which rings to boot and saddle." One of the finest touches, for example, is imitated from Scott. |