6

intolerable weariness. Separate things get emphasis, but the nice gradations and relations are sacrificed.

After all, though we stigmatize these things as "devices,” intimating that they were mechanical

and arbitrary, we must regard 16. Dogmatism.

them as partly temperamental. Macaulay's mind was not subtle in its working and was not given to making nice distinctions. He cared chiefly for bold outlines and broad effects. Truth, to his mind, was sharply defined from falsehood, right from wrong, good from evil. Every. thing could be divided from everything else, labeled, and pigeon-holed.

And he was very certain, in the fields which he chose to enter, that he knew where to draw the dividing lines. Posi- . tiveness, self-confidence, are written all over his work. Set for a moment against his method the method of Matthew Arnold. This is how Arnold tries to point out a defect in modern English society: “And, owing to the same causes, does not a subtle criticism lead us to make, even on the good looks and politeness of our aristocratic class, and even of the most fascinating half of that class, the feminine half, the one qualifying remark, that in these charming gifts there should perhaps be, for ideal perfection, a shade more soul ?” Note the careful approach, the constant, anxious qualification, working up to a climax in the almost painful hesitation of “a shade-more--soul."

Imagine, if you can, Macaulay, the rough rider, he of the “stamping emphasis," winding into a truth like that. But indeed it is quite impossible to imagine Macaulay's having any truth at all to enunciate about so ethereal an attribute as this same soul.

We have come well into the region of Macaulay's defects. Clearness, we have seen, he had in a 17. Ornament,

remarkable degree. Force he also Rhythm. had in a remarkable degree, though he frequently abused the means of displaying it. But genuine beauty, it is scarcely too much to say, he had not at all. Of courso, much depends upon our definitions. We do not mean to deny to his writings all elements of charm. The very ease of his mastery over so many resources of composition gives pleasure to the reader. His frequent picturesqueness we have granted. He can be genuinely figurative, though his figures often incline to showiness. And above all he has a certain sense for rhythm. He can write long, sweeping sentences—periods that rise and descend with the feeling, and that come to a stately or graceful close. The sentence cited above about the learning of women in the sixteenth century may be taken as an example. Or read the sketch of the Catholic Church in the third paragraph of the essay on Von Ranke's History of the Popes, or the conclusion of the essay on Lord Holland, or better still the conclusion of the somewhat juvenile essay on Mitford's Greece, with its glowing tribute to Athens and its famous picture of the “single naked fisherman washing his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts.” But at best it is the rhythm of mere declamation, swinging and pompous. There is no fine flowing movement, nothing like the entrancing glides of a waltz or the airy steps of a minuet, but only a steady march to the interminable and monotonous beat of the drum. For real music, sweetness, subtle and involved harmony, lingering cadences, we turn to any one of a score of prose writers—Sir Thomas Browne, Addison, Burke, Lamb, De Quincey, Hawthorne, Ruskin, Pater, Stevenson-before we turn to Macaulay. Nor is there any other mere grace of composition in which he can be said to excel.

There is no blame in the matter. We are only trying to note dispassionately the defects as well 18. Tempora

as the excellences of a man who

was not a universal genius. It would be easy to point out much greater defects than any yet mentioned, defects that go deeper than style. One or two indeed we are obliged to mention. There is the strain of coarseness often to be noted in his writing, showing itself now in an abusive epithet, now in a vulgar catch-word, now in a sally of humor bordering on the ribald. It is never grossly offensive, but it is none the less wounding to a delicate sensibility. Then there is the Philistine attitude, which Mr. Arnold spent so

much of his life in combating, the attitude of the complacent, self-satisfied Englishman, who sees in the British constitution and the organization of the British empire the best of all possible governments, and in the material and commercial progress of the age the best of all possible civilizations. And there is the persistent refusal to treat questions of really great moral significance upon any kind of moral basis. The absolute right or wrong of an act Macaulay will avoid discussing if he possibly can, and take refuge in questions of policy, of sheer profit and loss. We shall not blame him severely for even these serious shortcomings. On the first point we remember that he was deliberately playing to his audience, consciously writing down to the level of his public. On the second we realize that he was a practical politician and that he never could have been such with the idealism of a Carlyle or a Ruskin. And on the third we remember that his own private life was one of affectionate sacrifice and his public lifo absolutely stainless. He could vote away his own income when moral conviction demanded it. Besides, even when he was only arguing, "policy” was always on the side of the right. What blame is left? Only this-that he should have pandered to any public, compromising his future fame for an ephemeral applause, and that he should have so far wronged the mass of his readers as to suppose that arguments based upon policy would be more acceptable to them than arguments based upon sound moral principles. That he was something of a Philistine and not wholly a “child of light,” may be placed to his discount but not to his discredit. The total indictment is small and is mentioned here only in the interests of impartial criticism.

It remains only to sum up the literary significance of Macaulay's work. Nearly all of that 19. Literary

work, we must remember, lies Significance. outside of the field of what we know as "pure literature.” Pure literaturepoetry, drama, fiction-is a pure artistic or imaginative product with entertainment as its chief aim. Though it may instruct incidentally, it does not merely inform. It is the work of creative genius. Macaulay's essays were meant to inform. Characters and situations are delineated in them, but not created. History and criticism are often not literature at all. They become literature only by revealing an imaginative insight and clothing themselves in artistic form. Macaulay's essays have done this; they engage the emotions as well as the intellect. They were meant for records, for storehouses of information; but they are also works of art, and therefore they live intact while the records of equally industrious but less gifted historians are revised and replaced. Thus by their artistic quality, style in a word, they are removed from the shelves of history to the shelves of literature.