The Victorian Age in Literature | Page 6

brilliancy; there he found Sydney Smith, bursting with
crackers of common sense, an admirable old heathen; there he found
Tom Moore, the romantic of the Regency, a shortened shadow of Lord
Byron. That he reached this platform and remained on it is, I say,
typical of a turning-point in the century. For the fundamental fact of
early Victorian history was this: the decision of the middle classes to
employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of aristocratical
compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution)
insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went
along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely
from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began:
the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions
have made the doubtful England of to-day; and Macaulay is typical of
them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The alliance is marked by his
great speeches for Lord Grey's Reform Bill: it is marked even more
significantly in his speech against the Chartists. Cobbett was dead.
Macaulay makes the foundation of the Victorian age in all its very
English and unique elements: its praise of Puritan politics and
abandonment of Puritan theology; its belief in a cautious but perpetual
patching up of the Constitution; its admiration for industrial wealth.
But above all he typifies the two things that really make the Victorian

Age itself, the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulæ; the
richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition. There were two
Macaulays, a rational Macaulay who was generally wrong, and a
romantic Macaulay who was almost invariably right. All that was small
in him derives from the dull parliamentarism of men like Sir James
Mackintosh; but all that was great in him has much more kinship with
the festive antiquarianism of Sir Walter Scott.
As a philosopher he had only two thoughts; and neither of them is true.
The first was that politics, as an experimental science, must go on
improving, along with clocks, pistols or penknives, by the mere
accumulation of experiment and variety. He was, indeed, far too
strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in
its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can
never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse. But he
did not see the flaw in his political theory; which is that unless the soul
improves with time there is no guarantee that the accumulations of
experience will be adequately used. Figures do not add themselves up;
birds do not label or stuff themselves; comets do not calculate their
own courses; these things are done by the soul of man. And if the soul
of man is subject to other laws, is liable to sin, to sleep, to anarchism or
to suicide, then all sciences including politics may fall as sterile and lie
as fallow as before man's reason was made. Macaulay seemed
sometimes to talk as if clocks produced clocks, or guns had families of
little pistols, or a penknife littered like a pig. The other view he held
was the more or less utilitarian theory of toleration; that we should get
the best butcher whether he was a Baptist or a Muggletonian, and the
best soldier whether he was a Wesleyan or an Irvingite. The
compromise worked well enough in an England Protestant in bulk; but
Macaulay ought to have seen that it has its limitations. A good butcher
might be a Baptist; he is not very likely to be a Buddhist. A good
soldier might be a Wesleyan; he would hardly be a Quaker. For the rest,
Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century in terms
of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and he
upheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded and
ringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst like tin.

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious
Macaulay was very different. His noble enduring quality in our
literature is this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a
warm, poetic and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour
and appetite for great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He
felt and used names like trumpets. The reader's greatest joy is in the
writer's own joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on
some resounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles
of Rome or the pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the
best things in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not
make. And it is remarkable to notice that