Critical Miscellanies | Page 5

though it is quite true that in many portions of his too elaborated
History of William the Third he describes a large number of events
about which, I think, no sensible man can in the least care either how
they happened, or whether indeed they happened at all or not.
Another reason why people have sought Macaulay is, that he has in one
way or another something to tell them about many of the most striking
personages and interesting events in the history of mankind. And he
does really tell them something. If any one will be at the trouble to
count up the number of those names that belong to the world and time,

about which Macaulay has found not merely something, but something
definite and pointed to say, he will be astonished to see how large a
portion of the wide historic realm is traversed in that ample flight of
reference, allusion, and illustration, and what unsparing copiousness of
knowledge gives substance, meaning, and attraction to that resplendent
blaze of rhetoric.
Macaulay came upon the world of letters just as the middle classes
were expanding into enormous prosperity, were vastly increasing in
numbers, and were becoming more alive than they had ever been
before to literary interests. His Essays are as good as a library: they
make an incomparable manual and vade-mecum for a busy uneducated
man, who has curiosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know a
little about the great lives and great thoughts, the shining words and
many-coloured complexities of action, that have marked the journey of
man through the ages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance both
with the imaginative literature and the history of Greece and Rome,
with the literature and the history of modern Italy, of France, and of
England. Whatever his special subject, he contrives to pour into it with
singular dexterity a stream of rich, graphic, and telling illustrations
from all these widely diversified sources. Figures from history, ancient
and modern, sacred and secular; characters from plays and novels from
Plautus down to Walter Scott and Jane Austen; images and similes
from poets of every age and every nation, 'pastoral, pastoral-comical,
historical-pastoral, tragical-historical;' shrewd thrusts from satirists,
wise saws from sages, pleasantries caustic or pathetic from humorists;
all these throng Macaulay's pages with the bustle and variety and
animation of some glittering masque and cosmoramic revel of great
books and heroical men. Hence, though Macaulay was in mental
constitution one of the very least Shakesperean writers that ever lived,
yet he has the Shakesperean quality of taking his reader through an
immense gallery of interesting characters and striking situations. No
writer can now expect to attain the widest popularity as a man of letters
unless he gives to the world multa as well as multum. Sainte-Beuve, the
most eminent man of letters in France in our generation, wrote no less
than twenty-seven volumes of his incomparable Causeries. Mr. Carlyle,
the most eminent man of letters in England in our generation, has

taught us that silence is golden in thirty volumes. Macaulay was not so
exuberantly copious as these two illustrious writers, but he had the art
of being as various without being so voluminous.
There has been a great deal of deliberate and systematic imitation of
Macaulay's style, often by clever men who might well have trusted to
their own resources. Its most conspicuous vices are very easy to imitate,
but it is impossible for any one who is less familiar with literature than
Macaulay was, to reproduce his style effectively, for the reason that it
is before all else the style of great literary knowledge. Nor is that all.
Macaulay's knowledge was not only very wide; it was both thoroughly
accurate and instantly ready. For this stream of apt illustrations he was
indebted to his extraordinary memory, and his rapid eye for contrasts
and analogies. They come to the end of his pen as he writes; they are
not laboriously hunted out in indexes, and then added by way of
afterthought and extraneous interpolation. Hence quotations and
references that in a writer even of equal knowledge, but with his wits
less promptly about him, would seem mechanical and awkward, find
their place in a page of Macaulay as if by a delightful process of
complete assimilation and spontaneous fusion.
* * * * *
We may be sure that no author could have achieved Macaulay's
boundless popularity among his contemporaries, unless his work had
abounded in what is substantially Commonplace. Addison puts fine
writing in sentiments that are natural without being obvious, and this is
a true account of the 'law' of the exquisite literature of the Queen Anne
men. We may perhaps add to Addison's definition, that the great secret
of the best kind of popularity is always the noble or