Critical Miscellanies | Page 4

call the temper or conscience
of the intellect.
Let no man suppose that it matters little whether the most universally
popular of the serious authors of a generation--and Macaulay was
nothing less than this--affects style coupé or style soutenu. The critic of
style is not the dancing-master, declaiming on the deep ineffable things
that lie in a minuet. He is not the virtuoso of supines and gerundives.
The morality of style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose.' When
Comte took pains to prevent any sentence from exceeding two lines of
his manuscript or five of print; to restrict every paragraph to seven

sentences; to exclude every hiatus between two sentences, or even
between two paragraphs; and never to reproduce any word, except the
auxiliary monosyllables, in two consecutive sentences; he justified his
literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and
intelligence of submission to artificial institutions. He felt, after he had
once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source of
continual and unforeseeable improvements even in thought, and he
perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary
perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of
rigorous forms. We may add that verse itself is perfected, in the hands
of men of poetic genius, in proportion to the severity of this mechanical
regulation. Where Pope or Racine had one rule of metre, Victor Hugo
has twenty, and he observes them as rigorously as an algebraist or an
astronomer observes the rules of calculation or demonstration. One,
then, who touches the style of a generation acquires no trifling
authority over its thought and temper, as well as over the length of its
sentences.
* * * * *
The first and most obvious secret of Macaulay's place on popular
bookshelves is that he has a true genius for narration, and narration will
always in the eyes, not only of our squatters in the Australian bush, but
of the many all over the world, stand first among literary gifts. The
common run of plain men, as has been noticed since the beginning of
the world, are as eager as children for a story, and like children they
will embrace the man who will tell them a story, with abundance of
details and plenty of colour, and a realistic assurance that it is no mere
make-believe. Macaulay never stops to brood over an incident or a
character, with an inner eye intent on penetrating to the lowest depth of
motive and cause, to the furthest complexity of impulse, calculation,
and subtle incentive. The spirit of analysis is not in him, and the divine
spirit of meditation is not in him. His whole mind runs in action and
movement; it busies itself with eager interest in all objective particulars.
He is seized by the external and the superficial, and revels in every
detail that appeals to the five senses. 'The brilliant Macaulay,' said
Emerson, with slight exaggeration, 'who expresses the tone of the

English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that good
means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity.' So ready a
faculty of exultation in the exceeding great glories of taste and touch, of
loud sound and glittering spectacle, is a gift of the utmost service to the
narrator who craves immense audiences. Let it be said that if Macaulay
exults in the details that go to our five senses, his sensuousness is
always clean, manly, and fit for honest daylight and the summer sun.
There is none of that curious odour of autumnal decay that clings to the
passion of a more modern school for colour and flavour and the
enumerated treasures of subtle indulgence.
Mere picturesqueness, however, is a minor qualification compared with
another quality which everybody assumes himself to have, but which is
in reality extremely uncommon; the quality, I mean, of telling a tale
directly and in straightforward order. In speaking of Hallam, Macaulay
complained that Gibbon had brought into fashion an unpleasant trick of
telling a story by implication and allusion. This provoking obliquity has
certainly increased rather than declined since Hallam's day. Mr. Froude,
it is true, whatever may be his shortcomings on the side of sound moral
and political judgment, has admirable gifts in the way of
straightforward narration, and Mr. Freeman, when he does not press too
hotly after emphasis, and abstains from overloading his account with
super-abundance of detail, is usually excellent in the way of direct
description. Still, it is not merely because these two writers are alive
and Macaulay is not, that most people would say of him that he is
unequalled in our time in his mastery of the art of letting us know in an
express and unmistakable way exactly what it was that happened;