Critical Miscellanies | Page 9

because there can be no dispute as to the quality of Macaulay's prose.
Its measures are emphatically the measures of spoken deliverance.
Those who have made the experiment, pronounce him to be one of the
authors whose works are most admirably fitted for reading aloud. His
firmness and directness of statement, his spiritedness, his art of
selecting salient and highly coloured detail, and all his other merits as a
narrator, keep the listener's attention, and make him the easiest of
writers to follow.
Although, however, clearness, directness, and positiveness are master
qualities and the indispensable foundations of all good style, yet does
the matter plainly by no means end with them. And it is even possible
to have these virtues so unhappily proportioned and inauspiciously
mixed with other turns and casts of mind, as to end in work with little
grace or harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening
purpose and vehement will. And it is overweeningness and
self-confident will that are the chief notes of Macaulay's style. It has no
benignity. Energy is doubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's
energy is perhaps energy without momentum, and he impresses us

more by a strong volubility than by volume. It is the energy of interests
and intuitions, which though they are profoundly sincere if ever they
were sincere in any man, are yet in the relations which they
comprehend, essentially superficial.
Still, trenchancy whether in speaker or writer is a most effective tone
for a large public. It gives them confidence in their man, and prevents
tediousness--except to those who reflect how delicate is the poise of
truth, and what steeps and pits encompass the dealer in unqualified
propositions. To such persons, a writer who is trenchant in every
sentence of every page, who never lapses for a line into the contingent,
who marches through the intricacies of things in a blaze of certainty, is
not only a writer to be distrusted, but the owner of a doubtful and
displeasing style. It is a great test of style to watch how an author
disposes of the qualifications, limitations, and exceptions that clog the
wings of his main proposition. The grave and conscientious men of the
seventeenth century insisted on packing them all honestly along with
the main proposition itself, within the bounds of a single period. Burke
arranges them in tolerably close order in the paragraph. Dr. Newmann,
that winning writer, disperses them lightly over his page. Of Macaulay
it is hardly unfair to say that he despatches all qualifications into outer
space before he begins to write, or if he magnanimously admits one or
two here and there, it is only to bring them the more imposingly to the
same murderous end.
We have spoken of Macaulay's interests and intuitions wearing a
certain air of superficiality; there is a feeling of the same kind about his
attempts to be genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandonment in
it. It has no deep root in moral humour, and is merely a literary form,
resembling nothing so much as the hard geniality of some clever
college tutor of stiff manners, entertaining undergraduates at an official
breakfast-party. This is not because his tone is bookish; on the contrary,
his tone and level are distinctly those of the man of the world. But one
always seems to find that neither a wide range of cultivation, nor
familiar access to the best Whig circles, had quite removed the stiffness
and self-conscious precision of the Clapham Sect. We would give
much for a little more flexibility, and would welcome ever so slight a

consciousness of infirmity. As has been said, the only people whom
men cannot pardon are the perfect. Macaulay is like the military king
who never suffered himself to be seen, even by the attendants in his
bed-chamber, until he had had time to put on his uniform and
jack-boots. His severity of eye is very wholesome; it makes his writing
firm, and firmness is certainly one of the first qualities that good
writing must have. But there is such a thing as soft and considerate
precision, as well as hard and scolding precision. Those most
interesting English critics of the generation slightly anterior to
Macaulay,--Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt,--were fully his
equals in precision, and yet they knew how to be clear, acute, and
definite, without that edginess and inelasticity which is so conspicuous
in Macaulay's criticisms, alike in their matter and their form.
To borrow the figure of an old writer, Macaulay's prose is not like a
flowing vestment to his thought, but like a suit of armour. It is often
splendid and glittering, and the movement of the opening pages of his
History is superb in its dignity. But that movement is exceptional. As a
rule