Critical Miscellanies | Page 8

of the diviner mind. Tacitus does all this, and
Burke does it, and that is why men who care nothing for Roman
despots or for Jacobin despots, will still perpetually turn to those
writers almost as if they were on the level of great poets or very
excellent spiritual teachers.
One secret is that they, and all such men as they were, had that of
which Macaulay can hardly have had the rudimentary germ, the faculty
of deep abstract meditation and surrender to the fruitful 'leisures of the
spirit.' We can picture Macaulay talking, or making a speech in the
House of Commons, or buried in a book, or scouring his library for
references, or covering his blue foolscap with dashing periods, or
accentuating his sentences and barbing his phrases; but can anybody
think of him as meditating, as modestly pondering and wondering, as
possessed for so much as ten minutes by that spirit of inwardness,
which has never been wholly wanting in any of those kings and princes

of literature, with whom it is good for men to sit in counsel? He seeks
Truth, not as she should be sought, devoutly, tentatively, and with the
air of one touching the hem of a sacred garment, but clutching her by
the hair of the head and dragging her after him in a kind of boisterous
triumph, a prisoner of war and not a goddess.
All this finds itself reflected, as the inner temper of a man always is
reflected, in his style of written prose. The merits of Macaulay's prose
are obvious enough. It naturally reproduces the good qualities I of his
understanding, its strength, manliness, and directness. That exultation
in material goods and glories of which we have already spoken, makes
his pages rich in colour, and gives them the effect of a sumptuous
gala-suit. Certainly the brocade is too brand-new, and has none of the
delicate charm that comes to such finery when it is a little faded. Again,
nobody can have any excuse for not knowing exactly what it is that
Macaulay means. We may assuredly say of his prose what Boileau says
of his own poetry--'Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque
chose.' This is a prodigious merit, when we reflect with what fatal
alacrity human language lends itself in the hands of so many
performers upon the pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity,
ambiguity, disguise, and pretentious mystification. Scaliger is supposed
to have remarked of the Basques and their desperate tongue: ''Tis said
the Basques understand one another; for my part, I will never believe
it.' The same pungent doubt might apply to loftier members of the
hierarchy of speech than that forlorn dialect, but never to English as
handled by Macaulay. He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life,
and this may seem a small merit, until we remember of how few writers
we could say the same.
Macaulay is of those who think prose as susceptible of polished and
definite form as verse, and he was, we should suppose, of those also
who hold the type and mould of all written language to be spoken
language. There are more reasons for demurring to the soundness of the
latter doctrine, than can conveniently be made to fill a digression here.
For one thing, spoken language necessarily implies one or more
listeners, whereas written language may often have to express
meditative moods and trains of inward reflection that move through the

mind without trace of external reference, and that would lose their
special traits by the introduction of any suspicion that they were to be
overheard. Again, even granting that all composition must be supposed
to be meant, by the fact of its existence, to be addressed to a body of
readers, it still remains to be shown that indirect address to the inner ear
should follow the same method and rhythm as address directly through
impressions on the outer organ. The attitude of the recipient mind is
different, and there is the symbolism of a new medium between it and
the speaker. The writer, being cut off from all those effects which are
producible by the physical intonations of the voice, has to find
substitutes for them by other means, by subtler cadences, by a more
varied modulation, by firmer notes, by more complex circuits, than
suffice for the utmost perfection of spoken language, which has all the
potent and manifold aids of personality. In writing, whether it be prose
or verse, you are free to produce effects whose peculiarity one can only
define vaguely, by saying that the senses have one part less in them
than in any other of the forms and effects of art, and the imaginary
voice one part more. But the question need not be laboured here,