Critical Miscellanies | Page 3

But this is really not at all certain either of
Ovid, or Burke, or any one else. It suits moralists to tell us that
excellence lies in the happy mean and nice balance of our faculties and

impulses, and perhaps in so far as our own contentment and an easy
passage through life are involved, what they tell us is true. But for
making a mark in the world, for rising to supremacy in art or thought or
affairs--whatever those aims may be worth--a man possibly does better
to indulge, rather than to chide or grudge, his genius, and to pay the
penalties for his weakness, rather than run any risk of mutilating those
strong faculties of which they happen to be an inseparable accident.
Versatility is not a universal gift among the able men of the world; not
many of them have so many gifts of the spirit, as to be free to choose
by what pass they will climb 'the steep where Fame's proud temple
shines afar.' If Macaulay had applied himself to the cultivation of a
balanced judgment, of tempered phrases, and of relative propositions,
he would probably have sunk into an impotent tameness. A great
pugilist has sometimes been converted from the error of his ways, and
been led zealously to cherish gospel graces, but the hero's discourses
have seldom had the notes of unction and edification. Macaulay,
divested of all the exorbitancies of his spirit and his style, would have
been a Samson shorn of the locks of his strength.
Although, however, a writer of marked quality may do well to let his
genius develop its spontaneous forces without too assiduous or vigilant
repression, trusting to other writers of equal strength in other directions,
and to the general fitness of things and operation of time, to redress the
balance, still it is the task of criticism in counting up the contributions
of one of these strong men to examine the mischiefs no less than the
benefits incident to their work. There is no puny carping nor cavilling
in the process. It is because such men are strong that they are able to do
harm; they may injure the taste and judgment of a whole generation,
just because they are never mediocre. That is implied in strength.
Macaulay is not to be measured now merely as if he were the author of
a new book. His influence has been a distinct literary force, and in an
age of reading, this is to be a distinct force in deciding the temper, the
process, the breadth, of men's opinions, no less than the manner of
expressing them. It is no new observation that the influence of an
author becomes in time something apart from his books: a certain
generalised or abstract personality impresses itself on our minds, long
after we have forgotten the details of his opinions, the arguments by

which he enforced them, and even, what are usually the last to escape
us, the images by which he illustrated them. Phrases and sentences are
a mask: but we detect the features of the man behind the mask. This
personality of a favourite author is a real and powerful agency.
Unconsciously we are infected with his humours; we apply his methods;
we find ourselves copying the rhythm and measure of his periods; we
wonder how he would have acted, or thought, or spoken in our
circumstances. Usually a strong writer leaves a special mark in some
particular region of mental activity: the final product of him is to fix
some persistent religious mood, or some decisive intellectual bias, or
else some trick of the tongue. Now Macaulay has contributed no
philosophic ideas to the speculative stock, nor has he developed any
one great historic or social truth. His work is always full of a high spirit
of manliness, probity, and honour; but he is not of that small band to
whom we may apply Mackintosh's thrice and four times enviable
panegyric on the eloquence of Dugald Stewart, that its peculiar glory
consisted in having 'breathed the love of virtue into whole generations
of pupils.' He has painted many striking pictures, and imparted a certain
reality to our conception of many great scenes of the past. He did good
service in banishing once for all those sentimental Jacobite leanings
and prejudices which had been kept alive by the sophistry of the most
popular of historians, and the imagination of the most popular of
romance writers. But where he set his stamp has been upon style; style
in its widest sense, not merely on the grammar and mechanism of
writing, but on what De Quincey described as its organology; style,
that is to say, in its relation to ideas and feelings, its commerce with
thought, and its reaction on what one may