Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

party was in power he was sure of office and a salary, but it fettered his independence. At this juncture an opportunity presented itself which enabled him, by banishing himself from England for a few years, to earn a sum sufficient to yield him a comfortable income for the rest of his life. He was appointed a member of the Supreme Council of India, and early in 1834 he left England to enter upon his new duties as one of the five English rulers of a great empire.

The summer of 1838 saw him back in London. In his new-found leisure he began to plan his History of England. But his services were too valuable to his party to admit of his remaining in private life. Within a year he was elected to Parliament again as one of the members for Edinburgh, and soon after was taken into the Cabinet as Secretary of War. Macaulay was an ardent Whig, and always ready to do battle for his party. He was soon relieved from the cares of office, however, by the success of the Tories in 1841, and though he continued to sit as one of the representatives of Edinburgh, he was for the most part free to press forward the preparation of his greatest work. Five years later he again held office for a short time, but in the elections of 1847 he lost his seat in Parliament, and withdrew from public life. In 1852 he refused a place in the Cabinet; and though, in the same year, yielding to the wishes of his former constituents at Edinburgh, who were anxious to make amends for his earlier defeat and were proud of so distinguished a representative, he again entered Parliament, he never afterwards took a prominent part in the country's business. All his strength was given to the History.

In 1848 the first two volumes appeared. Its success was unprecedented. Macaulay had proposed to himself to write a work which should "supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies." The History proved to be the most popular book of its generation, both in England

and America. In his own country three thousand copies went in ten days, a record surpassing anything since Waverley, nearly forty years before; and four months later a New York publisher informed Macaulay that there were six editions on the market, with probably sixty thousand copies sold, adding, "No work, of any kind, has ever so completely taken our whole country by storm." The next two volumes, published in 1855, were still more popular. Within three months his publishers paid him £20,000 in a single check. With pecuniary reward came also the honors that belonged to the first English historian of his day. In 1849 he had declined the professorship of modern history at Cambridge. In 1853 he was elected a foreign member of the Institute of France, and the king of Prussia named him a knight of the Order of Merit. Learned societies all over Europe made him of their number; he held high offices at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge; and in 1857 he was elevated to the peerage, as Baron Macaulay of Rothley,

Not content with making himself the most popular and influential essayist and historian of his time, Lord Macaulay had aspired also to the poet's laurels. In 1842 he had published his well-known Lays of Ancient Rome. Full of fire and spirit, of rapid movement, vigor, and stateliness, they are as characteristic of their author as are his speeches or his History. Macaulay was not a poet of the kind of the greatest poets of our century. His imagination was rather historic than poetic; one of the tenderest-hearted of men, his feeling was social and sympathetic rather than lyric and impassioned; his delight was in objective activity, not in the companionship of his own moods; he loved the life of men. better than the life of nature; he was not an instinctive master of the secrets of the human heart. But he had the power of making the past seem present to him. He moved in other days or lands as easily as his own; London became

at will the London of Queen Anne or the capital of the Cæsars. He could reconstruct, from the material which his great reading supplied, all the life and color and movement of generations dead and gone. The Lays of Ancient Rome are not mere rhetoric in verse; they move us like martial music and the tread of marching men; they are genuine poetry, though not of the kind which our age values

most.

Lord Macaulay's life had always been intense. "When I do sit down to work," he said of himself, “I work harder and faster than any person that I ever knew"; and he played as hard as he worked. His tremendous intellectual energy, always active, and always applying itself in powerfully concentrated effort, had begun to wear out his body. In 1852 had developed serious trouble with his heart, and he never regained perfect health. As the History progressed, he applied himself to his task with increasing difficulty; after the publication of the second instalment his waning strength compelled him to resign his seat in Parliament; the fifth volume he did not live to see in print. Toward the close of the year 1859 his weakness grew upon him, and on December 28th death came, suddenly but painlessly, as he sat in his easy chair with open book beside him. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near to Johnson and Addison, the great representative prose writer of the first half of the nineteenth century beside the two great essayists of the eighteenth.

The most conspicuous trait in Macaulay's character, the trait which appears in all that he did, is his vigor, his energy of intellect. He is a kind of nineteenth-century Dr. Johnson, made fit for the drawing-room. But where Johnson was lazy, he was active; where Johnson was melancholy, he was cheerful; where Johnson was weak, he was strong. His exhaustless capacity for work, his incessant intellectual

activity, — he read with impartial avidity everything from the hardest Greek tragedy to the last bad novel, — his wonderful powers of memory, his brilliant conversation, his diversified interests and varied literary production, all attest the same trait. He wasted on trifles the intellectual force of half a dozen ordinary brains.

It is not strange that such a man should have been one of the most forcible writers that ever held a pen. Every sentence is crisp, clear, and strong. The boy or girl who studies Macaulay's style is taking a composition tonic. It is the best remedy that can be prescribed for the diffuseness and inaccuracy of thought, loose and ineffective sentencestructure, and feeble use of words, that beset the average untrained writer. Clearness and force in thinking, speaking, and writing are the qualities best worth cultivating. “The first rule of all writing," said Macaulay, “that rule to which every other is subordinate, is that the words used by the writer shall be such as most fully and precisely convey his meaning to the great body of his readers." It is a rule

which we may well make 'our motto.

The teacher who

makes the best use of Macaulay will not fail to direct continual attention to the style.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON.

(EDINBURGH REVIEW, JULY, 1843.)

SOME reviewers are of opinion that a lady who dares to publish a book renounces by that act the franchises appertaining to her sex, and can claim no exemption from the utmost rigor of critical procedure. From that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, that in a country which 5 boasts of many female writers, eminently qualified by their talents and acquirements to influence the public mind, it would be of most pernicious consequence that inaccurate history or unsound philosophy should be suffered to pass uncensured, merely because the offender chanced to be a 10 lady. But we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic would do well to imitate the courteous knight who found himself compelled by duty to keep the lists against Bradamante. He, we are told, defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion; but before the fight began, 15 exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted the point and edge.

6

Nor are the immunities of sex the only immunities which Miss Aikin may rightfully plead. Several of her works, and especially the very pleasing Memoirs of the 20 Reign of James the First,' have fully entitled her to the privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of those privileges we hold to be this, that such writers, when, either from the unlucky choice of a subject or from the indolence too often produced by success, they happen to fail, 25

« AnteriorContinuar »