Critical Miscellanies | Page 6

imaginative
handling of Commonplace. Shakespeare may at first seem an example
to the contrary; and indeed is it not a standing marvel that the greatest
writer of a nation that is distinguished among all nations for the
pharisaism, puritanism, and unimaginative narrowness of its judgments
on conduct and type of character, should be paramount over all writers
for the breadth, maturity, fulness, subtlety, and infinite variousness of
his conception of human life and nature? One possible answer to the

perplexity is that the puritanism does not go below the surface in us,
and that Englishmen are not really limited in their view by the too strait
formulas that are supposed to contain their explanations of the moral
universe. On this theory the popular appreciation of Shakespeare is the
irrepressible response of the hearty inner man to a voice, in which he
recognises the full note of human nature, and those wonders of the
world which are not dreamt of in his professed philosophy. A more
obvious answer than this is that Shakespeare's popularity with the many
is not due to those finer glimpses that are the very essence of all poetic
delight to the few, but to his thousand other magnificent attractions,
and above all, after his skill as a pure dramatist and master of scenic
interest and situation, to the lofty or pathetic setting with which he
vivifies, not the subtleties or refinements, but the commonest and most
elementary traits of the commonest and most elementary human moods.
The few with minds touched by nature or right cultivation to the finer
issues, admire the supreme genius which takes some poor Italian tale,
with its coarse plot and gross personages, and shooting it through with
threads of variegated meditation, produces a masterpiece of penetrative
reflection and high pensive suggestion as to the deepest things and
most secret parts of the life of men. But to the general these finer
threads are indiscernible. What touches them in the Shakesperean
poetry, and most rightly touches them and us all, are topics eternally
old, yet of eternal freshness, the perennial truisms of the grave and the
bride-chamber, of shifting fortune, of the surprises of destiny, and the
emptiness of the answered vow. This is the region in which the poet
wins his widest if not his hardest triumphs, the region of the noble
Commonplace.
A writer dealing with such matters as principally occupied Macaulay,
has not the privilege of resort to these great poetic inspirations. Yet
history, too, has its generous commonplaces, its plausibilities of
emotion, and no one has ever delighted more than Macaulay did, to
appeal to the fine truisms that cluster round love of freedom and love of
native land. The high rhetorical topics of liberty and patriotism are his
readiest instruments for kindling a glowing reflection of these
magnanimous passions in the breasts of his readers. That Englishman is
hardly to be envied who can read without a glow such passages as that

in the History, about Turenne being startled by the shout of stern
exultation with which his English allies advanced to the combat, and
expressing the delight of a true soldier when he learned that it was ever
the fashion of Cromwell's pikemen to rejoice greatly when they beheld
the enemy; while even the banished cavaliers felt an emotion of
national pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen,
outnumbered by foes and abandoned by friends, drive before it in
headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a
counterscarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the
ablest of the marshals of France. Such prose as this is not less thrilling
to a man who loves his country, than the spirited verse of the Lays of
Ancient Rome. And the commonplaces of patriotism and freedom
would never have been so powerful in Macaulay's hands, if they had
not been inspired by a sincere and hearty faith in them in the soul of the
writer. His unanalytical turn of mind kept him free of any temptation to
think of love of country as a prejudice, or a passion for freedom as an
illusion. The cosmopolitan or international idea which such teachers as
Cobden have tried to impress on our stubborn islanders, would have
found in Macaulay not lukewarm or sceptical adherence, but
point-blank opposition and denial. He believed as stoutly in the
supremacy of Great Britain in the history of the good causes of Europe,
as M. Thiers believes in the supremacy of France, or Mazzini believed
in that of Italy. The thought of the prodigious industry, the
inventiveness, the stout enterprise, the free government, the wise and
equal laws, the noble literature, of this fortunate island and its majestic
empire beyond the seas, and the discretion, valour, and tenacity by
which all these