Page:Imperialdictiona03eadi Brandeis Vol3a.pdf/287

MAC the charm of style and powers of vivid presentation, those on English history astonish by their extraordinary familiarity with all the personages who have played a part in English politics during the last two centuries This familiarity would not be wondered at in a French writer, who has a long series of lively and personal memoires to supply him with portraits. But Macaulay's political biographies, without any admixture of fiction or invention, display something almost creative in their delineations of men. With data the scantiest and the dullest, he constructs his Temples, Halifaxes, Carterets, and Newcastles, and paints them as vividly as if he had talked with them at Holland house, or read of them in the pages of an English St. Simon. This singular success he owed first of all of course to his lively curiosity respecting the personages of English history, and next to his multifarious reading. He had the eye of a lynx for detecting in the obscurest quarters any trait of a political or historical figure, and a memory which retained it like a vice. For the mere fulness and exactness of his information, those who knew him compared him to an encyclopædia—to many encyclopædias. He read everything; he forgot nothing. The most brilliant of English historians might have edited Notes and Queries, or supplied the answers to correspondents in a penny journal. From Homer to Catnach, all literature, high or humble, seems to have been familiar to him. There is a story, whether true or not, very characteristic of him, that he was once stopped by a crowd of urchins who had followed him expecting to hear him sing: he had just been buying a handful of ballads from some street-minstrels of Seven Dials. On better authority. Dean Milman's, we are told that "among the books which he carried with him to India were the many huge volumes of St. Chrysostom's works. Their still almost pure and harmonious Greek, and their importance in the history of religious opinion (always a subject of deep interest), carried him through a task which has been achieved by few professional theologians." Of all this varied knowledge, nothing was ever obtruded in his writings, and only by here and there an allusion could its existence be suspected by his readers. Were it not for the preface to the "Lays of Ancient Rome," we might not have known that he was as familiar with Niebuhr as with Burnet. Of the "Lays" themselves, published in 1842, the simplicity is as remarkable as the spirit. The master of prose-rhetoric proved that he could produce the most striking poetical effects by means the simplest.

On his return to England in 1838 he had at last the opportunity of leading the life of study and contemplation which he always preferred, or avowed that he preferred, to the noisy and agitating strife of politics. He declined the office of judge-advocate general offered him by the whigs. He was beginning to grapple with the great literary enterprise, his "History of England," which he had long meditated, when in 1839 he was unexpectedly invited by the leading liberals of Edinburgh to represent their city in parliament, the honour of representing Modern Athens overbalanced in Macaulay's mind his wish for studious repose; or perhaps—although for this suggestion we have not the slightest authority—his friends, the whig leaders, then struggling with the growing power of Sir Robert Peel, summoned their old champion to aid them and do battle for what seemed to be a falling cause. However this may be, he accepted the Edinburgh invitation. In the absence of any opposition worth the name, he was elected one of the members for Edinburgh in June, 1839. In the same year he was made secretary at war, and retained the office until in 1841 the whigs fell, and Peel once more acceded to power. After the dissolution of 1841 he was re-elected for Edinburgh without opposition. During Sir Robert Peel's second administration, and although his main work lay elsewhere, Macaulay did not neglect the house of commons. He spoke and voted with his party on most of the important questions of the time. On their return to power in the summer of 1846 he was appointed paymaster-general of the forces; and by accepting office vacated his seat. Again he was re-elected member for Edinburgh, but not this time without opposition. Since his first election the Free Church controversy had arisen, and Macaulay declined to advocate what he considered the undue claims of the new seceders. The other dissenters, too, were indignant at his support of the Maynooth grant. Sir Culling Eardley was brought forward in opposition; but Macaulay was returned by a large majority. He was less fortunate at the general election of 1847. On that occasion a coalition was formed between the Free Church and the other dissenters. The conservatives brought a candidate into the field. The spirit-dealers of the Modern Athens also were aggrieved, it would seem, because Macaulay did not take their view of the injustice of some legislative restrictions on their trade. At the election Macaulay was third on the poll. How much he felt the defeat has been revealed since his death, by the publication of some fine stanzas written after the election, and in which a Being symbolizing literature, and supposed to have smiled on him in his cradle, welcomes him back to her after his defeat. But of this feeling there was no trace in Macaulay's demeanour at the time. In a dignified letter he bade farewell to the electors, satisfied with adding, "The time will come when you will calmly review the history of my connection with Edinburgh." Two years after his defeat at Edinburgh he was elected, 1849, lord rector of the university of Glasgow. Five years later, in 1852—without offering himself as a candidate, almost without a promise to accept the honour if it were thrust upon him—he was returned at the general election in July as one of the members for Edinburgh, and stood at the head of the poll.

It was no longer the essayist and orator merely—it was the historian of England, for whose former rejection by them the citizens of Edinburgh thus made, or sought to make, amends. Four years before, towards the close of the stormy year of revolutions, 1849, appeared the first instalment of Macaulay's long-expected "History of England." It was a time to test literary popularity, and the work stood the test. The success of the first two volumes of the history had not been paralleled since the reading public waited for a new novel by Scott or a new poem of Byron's. The style was calmer, perhaps, than that which had fascinated in the "Essays," but knew no break in the flow of its steady music. In the two volumes there was not one dull page. But while all enjoyed the result, only the discerning or experienced few saw at what expense of labour, and by the exertion of what rare artistic gifts, continuous glow and life had been given to the narrative; what masses of obsolete print, of forgotten pamphlet and ballad dying with the day producing it, had been explored for the sake of here and there a sentence or a word that added a feature to a physiognomy, a stroke to a scene, that revealed some characteristic of the social life, or some phase of the feelings of the people. To those, moreover, who felt an interest in the historian as well as the history, the presence of something absent from almost all his former writings was visible in the new work. Since the burst of enthusiasm in the peroration of the young Macaulay's essay on Milton, there had been scarcely traceable, in all the brilliant writing that followed, any warmth of human affection. There had been enough of varied painting of character, incident, and scenery; of impartial discrimination; of vigilance in weighing virtues against vices: but it was not until he came to delineate William of Orange that Macaulay seemed to have met with a hero whom he loved. This sympathy with the central figure of his history was even stronger and more effective in the second instalment of the work, and the success of which was equal to that of its predecessor.

Constitutionally a strong man, Macaulay had not long reached, by the publication of his history, the pinnacle of his fame, when physical derangement, primarily we believe an affection of the heart, began to tell upon him. Excitement was forbidden him, and he had to forego joining in the debates of the house of commons, just when that assembly would have been proudest to listen to him. Twice only, both times in the June of 1853, did he speak, and no one present on either occasion can forget what interest and excitement his rising created, in not the most impressionable assembly in the world. The first of these speeches was against a proposal to exclude the judges from the house of commons, and the bill which he opposed was rejected, chiefly through his speech, by a large majority. The second speech was in support of the India bill of the government, and closed with a masterly defence of that competition for the appointments in the Indian civil service, which years before he had been among the first to advocate. At the beginning of 1856, the state of his health compelled him to resign his seat for Edinburgh. In the summer of 1857, he received the unexpected announcement that Lord Palmerston had recommended to her majesty his elevation to the peerage—the first time in the history of England, that such a distinction had been conferred in recognition of literary eminence. Men of all parties united in approval of the honour done to one of the most successful of English writers; a mere