Chapter L: Sterne.’ (6)

We see these men setting forth or assembling to defend their King and Church; and we see it without surprise; a rich daring loves danger; a deep excitability likes excitement. If we look around us, we may see what is analogous. Some say that the battle of the Alma was won by the ‘uneducated gentry;’ the ‘uneducated gentry’ would be Cavaliers now. The political sentiment is part of the character. The essence of Toryism is enjoyment. Talk of the ways of spreading a wholesome Conservatism throughout this country: give painful lectures, distribute weary tracts (and perhaps this is as well—you may be able to give an argumentative answer to a few objections, you may diffuse a distinct notion of the dignified dulness of politics); but as far as communicating and establishing your creed are concerned—try a little pleasure. The way to keep up old customs is, to enjoy old customs; the way to be satisfied with the present state of things is, to enjoy that state of things. Over the ‘Cavalier’ mind this world passes with a thrill of delight; there is an exultation in a daily event, zest in the ‘regular thing,’ joy at an old feast. Sir Walter Scott is an example of this. Every habit and practice of old Scotland was inseparably in his mind associated with genial enjoyment. To propose to touch one of her institutions, to abolish one of those practices, was to touch a personal pleasure—a point on which his mind reposed, a thing of memory and hope. So long as this world is this world, will a buoyant life be the proper source of an animated Conservatism. The ‘Church-and-King’ enthusiasm has even a deeper connection with the Cavaliers. Carlyle has said, in his vivid way, ‘Two or three young gentlemen have said, “Go to, I will _make_ a religion.”’ This is the exact opposite of what the irregular, enjoying man can think or conceive. What! is he, with his untrained mind and his changeful heart and his ruleless practice, to create a creed? Is the gushing life to be asked to construct a cistern? Is the varying heart to be its own master, the evil practice its own guide? Sooner will a ship invent its own rudder, devise its own pilot, than the eager being will find out the doctrine which is to restrain him. The very intellect is a type of the confusion of the soul. It has little arguments on a thousand subjects, hearsay sayings, original flashes, small and bright, struck from the heedless mind by the strong impact of the world. And it has nothing else. It has no systematic knowledge; it has a hatred of regular attention. What can an understanding of this sort do with refined questioning or subtle investigation? It is obliged in a sense by its very nature to take what comes; it is overshadowed in a manner by the religion to which it is born; its conscience tells it that it owes obedience to something; it craves to worship something; that something, in both cases, it takes from the past. ‘Thou hast not chosen me, but I have chosen thee,’ might his faith say to a believer of this kind. A certain bigotry is altogether natural to him. His creed seems to him a primitive fact, as certain and evident as the stars. The political faith (for it is a faith) of these persons is of a kind analogous. The virtue of loyalty assumes in them a passionate aspect, and overflows, as it were, all the intellect which belongs to the topic. This virtue, this need of our nature, arises, as political philosophers tell us, from the conscious necessity which man is under of obeying an external moral rule. We feel that we are by nature and by the constitution of all things under an obligation to conform to a certain standard, and we seek to find or to establish in the sphere without, an authority which shall enforce it, shall aid us in compelling others and also in mastering ourselves. When a man impressed with this principle comes in contact with the institution of civil government as it now exists and as it has always existed, he finds what he wants—he discovers an authority; and he feels bound to submit to it. We do not, of course, mean that all this takes place distinctly and consciously in the mind of the person; on the contrary, the class of minds most subject to its influence are precisely those which have in general the least defined and accurate consciousness of their own operations, or of what befalls them. In matter of fact, they find themselves under the control of laws and of a polity from the earliest moment that they can remember, and they obey it from habit and custom years before they know why. Only in later life, when distinct thought is from an outward occurrence forced upon them, do they feel the necessity of some such power; and in proportion to their passionate and impulsive disposition they feel it the more. The law has in a less degree on them the same effect which military discipline has in a greater. It braces them to defined duties, and subjects them to a known authority. Quieter minds find this authority in an internal conscience; but in riotous natures its still small voice is lost if it be not echoed in loud harsh tones from the firm and outer world:

‘Their breath is agitation, and their life
A storm whereon they ride.’

From without they crave a bridle and a curb. The doctrine of non-resistance is no _accident_ of the Cavalier character, though it seems at first sight singular in an eager, tumultuous disposition. So inconsistent is human nature, that it proceeds from the very extremity of that tumult. They know that they cannot allow themselves to question the authority which is upon them; they feel its necessity too acutely, their intellect is untrained in subtle disquisitions, their conscience fluctuating, their passions rising. They are sure that if they once depart from that authority, their whole soul will be in anarchy. As a riotous state tends to fall under a martial tyranny, a passionate mind tends to subject itself to an extrinsic law—to enslave itself to an outward discipline. ‘That is what the king says, boy, and that was ever enough for Sir Henry Lee.’ An hereditary monarch is, indeed, the very embodiment of this principle. The authority is so defined, so clearly vested, so evidently intelligible; it descends so distinctly from the past, it is imposed so conspicuously from without. Anything free refers to the people; anything elected seems self-chosen. ‘The divinity that doth hedge a king’ consists in his evidently representing an unmade, unchosen, hereditary duty.

The greatness of this character is not in Macaulay’s way, and its faults are. Its license affronts him; its riot alienates him. He is for ever contrasting the dissoluteness of Prince Rupert’s horse with the restraint of Cromwell’s pikemen. A deep enjoying nature finds no sympathy. The brilliant style passes forward: we dwell on its brilliancy, but it is cold. Macaulay has no tears for that warm life, no tenderness for that extinct joy. The ignorance of the Cavalier, too, moves his wrath: ‘They were ignorant of what every schoolgirl knows.’ Their loyalty to their sovereign is the devotion of the Egyptians to the god Apis, who selected ‘a calf to adore.’ Their non-resistance offends the philosopher: their license is commented on with the tone of a precisian. Their indecorum does not suit the dignity of the narrator. Their rich free nature is unappreciated; the tingling intensity of their joy is unnoticed. In a word, there is something of the schoolboy about the Cavalier—there is somewhat of a schoolmaster about the historian.

It might be thought, at first sight, that the insensibility and coldness which are unfavourable to the appreciation of the Cavalier would be particularly favourable to that of the Puritan. Some may say that a natural aloofness from things earthly would dispose a man to the doctrines of a sect which enjoins above all other commandments abstinence and aloofness _from_ those things. In Macaulay’s case it certainly has had no such consequence. He was bred up in the circle which more than any other has resembled that of the greatest and best Puritans—in the circle which has presented the evangelical doctrine in its most influential and celebrated, and not its least genial form. Yet he has revolted against it. The bray of ‘Exeter Hall’ is a phrase which has become celebrated: it is an odd one for his father’s son. The whole course of his personal fortunes, the entire scope of his historical narrative, show an utter want of sympathy with the Puritan disposition. It would be idle to quote passages; it will be enough to recollect the contrast between the estimate—say, of Cromwell—by Carlyle and that by Macaulay, to be aware of the enormous discrepancy. The one’s manner evinces an instinctive sympathy, the other’s an instinctive aversion.

We believe that this is but a consequence of the same impassibility of nature which we have said so much of. M. de Montalembert, in a striking _éloge_ on a French historian—a man of the Southey type—after speaking of his life in Paris during youth (a youth cast in the early and exciting years of the first Revolution, and of the prelude to it), and graphically portraying a man subject to scepticism, but not given to vice; staid in habits, but unbelieving in opinion; without faith and without irregularity,—winds up the whole by the sentence, that ‘_he was hardened at once against good and evil_.’ In his view, the insensibility which was a guard against exterior temptation was also a hindrance to inward belief: and there is a philosophy in this. The nature of man is not two things, but one thing. We have not one set of affections, hopes, sensibilities, to be affected by the present world, and another and a different to be affected by the invisible world: we are moved by grandeur, or we are not; we are stirred by sublimity, or we are not; we hunger after righteousness, or we do not; we hate vice, or we do not; we are passionate, or not passionate; loving, or not loving; cold, or not cold; our heart is dull, or it is wakeful; our soul is alive, or it is dead. Deep under the surface of the intellect lies the _stratum_ of the passions, of the intense, peculiar, simple impulses which constitute the heart of man; there is the eager essence, the primitive desiring being. What stirs this latent being we know. In general it is stirred by everything. Sluggish natures are stirred little, wild natures are stirred much; but all are stirred somewhat. It is not important whether the object be in the visible or invisible world: whoso loves what he has seen, will love what he has not seen; whoso hates what he has seen, will hate what he has not seen. Creation is, as it were, but the garment of the Creator: whoever is blind to the beauty on its surface, will be insensible to the beauty beneath; whoso is dead to the sublimity before his senses, will be dull to that which he imagines; whoso is untouched by the visible man, will be unmoved by the invisible God. These are no new ideas; and the conspicuous evidence of history confirms them. Everywhere the deep religious organisation has been deeply sensitive to this world. If we compare what are called sacred and profane literatures, the depth of human affection is deepest in the sacred. A warmth as of life is on the Hebrew, a chill as of marble is on the Greek. In Jewish history the most tenderly religious character is the most sensitive to earth. Along every lyric of the Psalmist thrills a deep spirit of human enjoyment; he was alive as a child to the simple aspects of the world; the very errors of his mingled career are but those to which the open, enjoying character is most prone; its principle, so to speak, was a tremulous passion for that which he had seen, as well as that which he had not seen. There is no paradox, therefore, in saying that the same character which least appreciates the impulsive and ardent Cavalier is also the most likely not to appreciate the warm zeal of an overpowering devotion.

Some years ago it would have been necessary to show at length that the Puritans had such a devotion. The notion had been that they were fanatics, who simulated zeal, and hypocrites, who misquoted the Old Testament. A new era has arrived; one of the great discoveries which the competition of authors has introduced into historical researches has attained a singular popularity. Times are changed. We are rather now, in general, in danger of holding too high an estimate of the puritanical character than a too low or contemptuous one. Among the disciples of Carlyle it is considered that having been a Puritan is the next best thing to having been in Germany. But though we cannot sympathise with everything that the expounders of the new theory allege, and though we should not select for praise the exact peculiarities most agreeable to the slightly grim ‘gospel of earnestness,’ we acknowledge the great service which they have rendered to English history. No one will now ever overlook, that in the greater, in the original Puritans—in Cromwell, for example—the whole basis of the character was a passionate, deep, rich, religious organisation.

This is not in Macaulay’s way. It is not that he is sceptical; far from it. ‘Divines of all persuasions,’ he tells us, ‘are agreed that there is a religion;’ and he acquiesces in their teaching. But he has no passionate self-questionings, no indomitable fears, no asking perplexities. He is probably pleased at the exemption. He has praised Bacon for a similar want of interest. ‘Nor did he ever meddle with those enigmas which have puzzled hundreds of generations, and will puzzle hundreds more. He said nothing about the grounds of moral obligation, or the freedom of the human will. He had no inclination to employ himself in labours resembling those of the damned in the Grecian Tartarus—to spin for ever on the same wheel round the same pivot. He lived in an age in which disputes on the most subtle points of divinity excited an intense interest throughout Europe; and nowhere more than in England. He was placed in the very thick of the conflict. He was in power at the time of the Synod of Dort, and must for months have been daily deafened with talk about election, reprobation, and final perseverance. Yet we do not remember a line in his works from which it can be inferred that he was either a Calvinist or an Arminian. While the world was resounding with the noise of a disputatious philosophy and a disputatious theology, the Baconian school, like Allworthy seated between Square and Thwackum, preserved a calm neutrality,—half-scornful, half-benevolent,—and, content with adding to the sum of practical good, left the war of words to those who liked it.’ This may be the writing of good sense, but it is not the expression of an anxious or passionate religious nature.

Such is the explanation of Macaulay’s not prizing so highly as he should prize the essential excellences of the Puritan character. He is defective in the one point in which they were very great; he is eminent in the very point in which they were most defective. A spirit of easy cheerfulness pervades his writings, a pleasant geniality overflows his history: the rigid asceticism, the pain for pain’s sake, of the Puritan is altogether alien to him. Retribution he would deny; sin is hardly a part of his creed. His religion is one of thanksgiving. His notion of philosophy—it would be a better notion of his own writing—is _illustrans commoda vitæ_.

The English Revolution is the very topic for a person of this character. It is eminently an unimpassioned movement. It requires no appreciation of the Cavalier or of the zealot; no sympathy with the romance of this world; no inclination to pass beyond, and absorb the mind’s energies in another. It had neither the rough enthusiasm of barbarism nor the delicate grace of high civilisation; the men who conducted it had neither the deep spirit of Cromwell’s Puritans nor the chivalric loyalty of the enjoying English gentleman. They were hard-headed sensible men, who knew that politics were a kind of business, that the essence of business is compromise, of practicality concession. They drove no theory to excess; for they had no theory. Their passions did not hurry them away; for their temperament was still, their reason calculating and calm. Locke is the type of the best character of his era. There is nothing in him which a historian such as we have described could fail to comprehend, or could not sympathise with when he did comprehend. He was the very reverse of a Cavalier; he came of a Puritan stock; he retained through life a kind of chilled Puritanism; he had nothing of its excessive, overpowering, interior zeal, but he retained the formal decorum which it had given to the manners, the solid earnestness of its intellect, the heavy respectability of its character. In all the nations across which Puritanism has passed you may notice something of its indifference to this world’s lighter enjoyments; no one of them has been quite able to retain its singular interest in what is beyond the veil of time and sense. The generation to which we owe our Revolution was in the first stage of the descent. Locke thought a zealot a dangerous person, and a poet little better than a rascal. It has been said, with perhaps an allusion to Macaulay, that our historians have held that ‘all the people who lived before 1688 were either knaves or fools.’ This is, of course, an exaggeration; but those who have considered what sort of person a historian is likely to be, will not be surprised at his preference for the people of that era. They had the equable sense which he appreciates; they had not the deep animated passions to which his nature is insensible.

Yet, though Macaulay shares in the common temperament of historians, and in the sympathy with, and appreciation of, the characters most congenial to that temperament, he is singularly contrasted with them in one respect—he has a vivid fancy, they have a dull one. History is generally written on the principle that human life is a transaction; that people come to it with defined intentions and a calm self-possessed air, as stockjobbers would buy ‘omnium,’ as timber-merchants buy ‘best middling;’ people are alike, and things are alike; everything is a little dull, every one a little slow; manners are not depicted, traits are not noticed; the narrative is confined to those great transactions which can be understood without any imaginative delineation of their accompaniments. There are two kinds of things—those which you need only to _understand_, and those which you need also to _imagine_. That a man bought nine hundredweight of hops is an intelligible idea—you do not want the hops delineated or the man described; that he went into society suggests an inquiry—you want to know what the society was like, and how far he was fitted to be there. The great business transactions of the political world are of the intelligible description. Macaulay has himself said:

‘A history, in which every particular incident may be true,
may on the whole be false. The circumstances which have
most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of
manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty
to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to
humanity,—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions.
Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are
pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by
armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no
treaties, and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in
every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at
ten thousand firesides. The upper current of society presents
no certain criterion by which we can judge of the direction
in which the under current flows. We read of defeats and
victories; but we know that nations may be miserable amidst
victories, and prosperous amidst defeats. We read of the fall
of wise ministers, and of the rise of profligate favourites;
but we must remember how small a proportion the good or evil
effected by a single statesman can bear to the good or evil of
a great social system.’

But of this sluggishness of imagination he has certainly no trace himself. He is willing to be ‘behind ten thousand counters,’ to be a guest ‘at ten thousand firesides.’ He is willing to see ‘ordinary men as they appear in their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures.’ He has no objection to ‘mingle in the crowds of the Exchange and the coffee-house.’ He would ‘obtain admittance to the convivial table and the domestic hearth.’ So far as his dignity will permit, ‘he will bear with vulgar expressions.’ And a singular efficacy of fancy gives him the power to do so. Some portion of the essence of human nature is concealed from him; but all its accessories are at his command. He delineates any trait; he can paint, and justly paint, any manners he chooses.

‘A perfect historian,’ he tells us, ‘is he in whose work the
character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He
relates no fact, he attributes no expression to his characters,
which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony; but, by
judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he gives to
truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. In
his narrative a due subordination is observed—some transactions
are prominent, others retire; but the scale on which he
represents them is increased or diminished, not according to
the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to
the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society
and the nature of man. He shows us the court, the camp, and
the senate; but he shows us also the nation. He considers no
anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too
insignificant for his notice, which is not too insignificant
to illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of
education, and to mark the progress of the human mind. Men will
not merely be described, but will be made intimately known
to us. The changes of manners will be indicated, not merely
by a few general phrases, or a few extracts from statistical
documents, but by appropriate images presented in every line.
If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of
England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges,
the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes; but
with these he would intersperse the details which are the
charm of historical romances. At Lincoln Cathedral there is
a beautiful painted window, which was made by an apprentice
out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his
master. It is so far superior to every other in the church,
that, according to the tradition, the vanquished artist killed
himself from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same
manner, has used those fragments of truth which historians have
scornfully thrown behind them in a manner which may well excite
their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings works
which, even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable
than theirs. But a truly great historian would reclaim those
materials which the novelist has appropriated. The history
of the Government, and the history of the people, would be
exhibited in that mode in which alone they can be exhibited
justly, in inseparable conjunction and intermixture. We should
not then have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in
Clarendon, and for their phraseology in _Old Mortality_; for
one half of King James in Hume, and for the other half in the
_Fortunes of Nigel_.’

So far as the graphic description of exterior life goes, he has completely realised his idea.

This union of a flowing fancy with an insensible organisation is very rare. In general, a delicate fancy is joined with a poetic organisation. Exactly why, it would be difficult to explain. It is for metaphysicians in large volumes to explain the genesis of the human faculties; but, as a fact, it seems to be clear that, for the most part, imaginative men are the most sensitive to the poetic side of human life and natural scenery. They are drawn by a strong instinct to what is sublime, grand, and beautiful. They do not care for the coarse business of life. They dislike to be cursed with its ordinary cares. Their nature is vivid; it is interested by all which naturally interests; it dwells on the great, the graceful, and the grand. On this account it naturally runs away from history. The very name of it is too oppressive. Are not all such works written in the _Index Expurgatorius_ of the genial satirist as works which it was impossible to read? The coarse and cumbrous matter revolts the soul of the fine and fanciful voluptuary. Take it as you will, human life is like the earth on which man dwells. There are exquisite beauties, grand imposing objects, scattered here and there; but the spaces between these are wide; the mass of common clay is huge; the dead level of vacant life, of commonplace geography, is immense. The poetic nature cannot bear the preponderance; it seeks relief in selected scenes, in special topics, in favourite beauties. History, which is the record of human existence, is a faithful representative of it, at least in this: the poetic mind cannot bear the weight of its narrations and the commonplaceness of its events.

This peculiarity of character gives to Macaulay’s writing one of its most curious characteristics. He throws over matters which are in their nature dry and dull,—transactions—budgets—bills,—the charm of fancy which a poetical mind employs to enhance and set forth the charm of what is beautiful. An attractive style is generally devoted to what is in itself specially attractive; here it is devoted to subjects which are often unattractive, are sometimes even repelling, at the best are commonly neutral, not inviting attention, if they do not excite dislike. In these new volumes there is a currency reform, pages on Scotch Presbyterianism, a heap of Parliamentary debates. Who could be expected to make anything interesting of such topics? It is not cheerful to read in the morning papers the debates of yesterday, though they happened last night; one cannot like a Calvinistic divine when we see him in the pulpit; it is awful to read on the currency, even when it concerns the bank-notes which we use. How, then, can we care for a narrative when the divine is dead, the shillings extinct, the whole topic of the debate forgotten and passed away? Yet such is the power of style, so great is the charm of very skilful words, of narration which is always passing forward, of illustration which always hits the mark, that such subjects as these not only become interesting, but very interesting. The proof is evident. No book is so sought after. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said, ‘all members of Parliament had read it.’ What other books could ever be fancied to have been read by them? A county member—a real county member—hardly reads two volumes _per_ existence. Years ago Macaulay said a History of England might become more in demand at the circulating libraries than the last novel. He has actually made his words true. It is no longer a phrase of rhetoric, it is a simple fact.

The explanation of this remarkable notoriety is, the contrast of the topic and the treatment. Those who read for the sake of entertainment are attracted by the one; those who read for the sake of instruction are attracted by the other. Macaulay has something that suits the readers of Mr. Hallam; he has something which will please the readers of Mr. Thackeray. The first wonder to find themselves reading such a style; the last are astonished at reading on such topics—at finding themselves studying by casualty. This marks the author. Only a buoyant fancy and an impassive temperament could produce a book so combining weight with levity.

Something similar may be remarked of the writings of a still greater man—of Edmund Burke. The contrast between the manner of his characteristic writings and their matter is very remarkable. He too threw over the detail of business and of politics those graces and attractions of manner which seem in some sort inconsistent with them; which are adapted for topics more intrinsically sublime and beautiful. It was for this reason that Hazlitt asserted that ‘no woman ever cared for Burke’s writings.’ The matter, he said, was ‘hard and dry,’ and no superficial glitter or eloquence could make it agreeable to those who liked what is, in its very nature, fine and delicate. The charm of exquisite narration has, in a great degree, in Macaulay’s case, supplied the deficiency; but it may be _perhaps_ remarked, that some trace of the same phenomenon has again occurred, from similar causes, and that his popularity, though great among both sexes, is in some sense more masculine than feminine. The absence of this charm of narration, to which accomplished women are, it would seem, peculiarly sensitive, is very characteristic of Burke. His mind was the reverse of historical. Although he had rather a coarse, incondite temperament, not finely susceptible to the best influences, to the most exquisite beauties of the world in which he lived, he yet lived in that world thoroughly and completely. He did not take an interest, as a poet does, in the sublime because it is sublime, in the beautiful because it is beautiful; but he had the passions of more ordinary men in a degree, and of an intensity, which ordinary men may be most thankful that they have not. In no one has the intense faculty of intellectual hatred—the hatred which the absolute dogmatist has for those in whom he incarnates and personifies the opposing dogma—been fiercer or stronger; in no one has the intense ambition to rule and govern,—in scarcely any one has the daily ambition of the daily politician been fiercer and stronger: he, if any man, cast himself upon his time. After one of his speeches, peruse one of Macaulay’s: you seem transported to another sphere. The fierce living interest of the one contrasts with the cold rhetorical interest of the other; you are in a different part of the animal kingdom; you have left the viviparous intellect; you have left products warm and struggling with hasty life; you have reached the oviparous, and products smooth and polished, cold and stately.

In addition to this impassive nature, inclining him to write on past transactions—to this fancy, enabling him to adorn and describe them—Macaulay has a marvellous memory to recall them; and what we may call the Scotch intellect, enabling him to conceive them. The memory is his most obvious power. An enormous reading seems always present to him. No effort seems wanted—no mental excogitation. According to his own description of a like faculty, ‘it would have been strange indeed if you had asked for anything that was not to be found in that immense storehouse. The article you required was not only there, it was ready. It was in its own compartment. In a moment it was brought down, unpacked, and explained.’ He has a literary illustration for everything; and his fancy enables him to make a skilful use of his wealth. He always selects the exact likeness of the idea which he wishes to explain. And though it be less obvious, yet his writing would have been deficient in one of its most essential characteristics if it had not been for what we have called his Scotch intellect, which is a curious matter to explain. It may be thought that Adam Smith had little in common with Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter was always making fun of him; telling odd tales of his abstraction and singularity; not obscurely hinting, that a man who could hardly put on his own coat, and certainly could not buy his own dinner, was scarcely fit to decide on the proper course of industry and the mercantile dealings of nations. Yet, when Sir Walter’s own works come to be closely examined, they will be found to contain a good deal of political economy of a certain sort,—and not a very bad sort. Any one who will study his description of the Highland clans in _Waverley_; his observations on the industrial side (if so it is to be called) of the Border-life; his plans for dealing with the poor of his own time,—will be struck not only with a plain sagacity, which we could equal in England, but with the digested accuracy and theoretical completeness which they show. You might cut paragraphs, even from his lighter writings, which would be thought acute in the _Wealth of Nations_. There appears to be in the genius of the Scotch people—fostered, no doubt, by the abstract metaphysical education of their Universities, but also, by way of natural taste, supporting that education, and rendering it possible and popular—a power of reducing human actions to formulæ or principles. An instance is now in a high place. People who are not lawyers,—rural people, who have sense of their own, but have no access to the general repute and opinion which expresses the collective sense of the great world,—never can be brought to believe that Lord Campbell is a great man. They read his speeches in the House of Lords—his occasional flights of eloquence on the bench—his attempts at pathos—his stupendous _gaucheries_—and they cannot be persuaded that a person guilty of such things can have really first-rate talent. If you ask them how he came to be Chief Justice of England, they mutter something angry, and say ‘Well, Scotchmen _do_ get on somehow.’ This is really the true explanation. In spite of a hundred defects, Lord Campbell has the Scotch faculties in perfection. He reduces legal matters to a sound broad principle better than any man who is now a judge. He has a steady, comprehensive, abstract, distinct consistency, which elaborates a formula and adheres to a formula; and it is this which has raised him from a plain—a very plain—Scotch lawyer to be Lord Chief Justice of England. Macaulay has this too. Among his more brilliant qualities, it has escaped the attention of critics; the more so, because his powers of exposition and expression make it impossible to conceive for a moment that the amusing matter we are reading is really Scotch economy.

‘During the interval,’ he tells us, ‘between the Restoration
and the Revolution, the riches of the nation had been rapidly
increasing. Thousands of busy men found every Christmas that,
after the expenses of the year’s housekeeping had been defrayed
out of the year’s income, a surplus remained; and how that
surplus was to be employed was a question of some difficulty.
In our time, to invest such a surplus, at something more than
three per cent., on the best security that has ever been
known in the world, is the work of a few minutes. But in the
seventeenth century, a lawyer, a physician, a retired merchant,
who had saved some thousands, and who wished to place them
safely and profitably, was often greatly embarrassed. Three
generations earlier, a man who had accumulated wealth in a
profession generally purchased real property, or lent his
savings on mortgage. But the number of acres in the kingdom
had remained the same; and the value of those acres, though
it had greatly increased, had by no means increased so fast
as the quantity of capital which was seeking for employment.
Many, too, wished to put their money where they could find
it at an hour’s notice, and looked about for some species of
property which could be more readily transferred than a house
or a field. A capitalist might lend on bottomry or on personal
security; but, if he did so, he ran a great risk of losing
interest and principal. There were a few joint-stock companies,
among which the East India Company held the foremost place;
but the demand for the stock of such companies was far greater
than the supply. Indeed, the cry for a new East India Company
was chiefly raised by persons who had found difficulty in
placing their savings at interest on good security. So great
was that difficulty, that the practice of hoarding was common.
We are told that the father of Pope the poet, who retired from
business in the City about the time of the Revolution, carried
to a retreat in the country a strong box containing nearly
twenty thousand pounds, and took out from time to time what
was required for household expenses; and it is highly probable
that this was not a solitary case. At present the quantity of
coin which is hoarded by private persons is so small, that it
would, if brought forth, make no perceptible addition to the
circulation. But in the earlier part of the reign of William
the Third, all the greatest writers on currency were of opinion
that a very considerable mass of gold and silver was hidden in
secret drawers and behind wainscots.

‘The natural effect of this state of things was, that a crowd
of projectors, ingenious and absurd, honest and knavish,
employed themselves in devising new schemes for the employment
of redundant capital. It was about the year 1688 that the
word stockjobber was first heard in London. In the short
space of four years a crowd of companies, every one of which
confidently held out to subscribers the hope of immense gains,
sprang into existence: the Insurance Company, the Paper
Company, the Lutestring Company, the Pearl-Fishery Company,
the Glass-Bottle Company, the Alum Company, the Blythe Coal
Company, the Swordblade Company. There was a Tapestry Company,
which would soon furnish pretty hangings for all the parlours
of the middle class and for all the bedchambers of the higher.
There was a Copper Company, which proposed to explore the
mines of England, and held out a hope that they would prove
not less valuable than those of Potosi. There was a Diving
Company, which undertook to bring up precious effects from
shipwrecked vessels, and which announced that it had laid in
a stock of wonderful machines, resembling complete suits of
armour. In front of the helmet was a huge glass eye, like that
of a Cyclop; and out of the crest went a pipe, through which
the air was to be admitted. The whole process was exhibited
on the Thames. Fine gentlemen and fine ladies were invited
to the show, were hospitably regaled, and were delighted by
seeing the divers in their panoply descend into the river,
and return laden with old iron and ship’s tackle. There was a
Greenland Fishing Company, which could not fail to drive the
Dutch whalers and herring-busses out of the Northern Ocean.
There was a Tanning Company, which promised to furnish leather
superior to the best that was brought from Turkey or Russia.
There was a society which undertook the office of giving
gentlemen a liberal education on low terms, and which assumed
the sounding name of the Royal Academies Company. In a pompous
advertisement it was announced that the directors of the
Royal Academies Company had engaged the best masters in every
branch of knowledge, and were about to issue twenty thousand
tickets at twenty shillings each. There was to be a lottery:
two thousand prizes were to be drawn; and the fortunate
holders of the prizes were to be taught, at the charge of the
Company, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, conic sections,
trigonometry, heraldry, japanning, fortification, bookkeeping,
and the art of playing the theorbo. Some of these companies
took large mansions, and printed their advertisements in gilded
letters. Others, less ostentatious, were content with ink,
and met at coffee-houses in the neighbourhood of the Royal
Exchange. Jonathan’s and Garraway’s were in a constant ferment
with brokers, buyers, sellers, meetings of directors, meetings
of proprietors. Time-bargains soon came into fashion. Extensive
combinations were formed, and monstrous fables were circulated,
for the purpose of raising or depressing the price of shares.
Our country witnessed for the first time those phenomena with
which a long experience has made us familiar. A mania, of which
the symptoms were essentially the same with those of the mania
of 1720, of the mania of 1825, of the mania of 1845, seized the
public mind. An impatience to be rich, a contempt for those
slow but sure gains which are the proper reward of industry,
patience, and thrift, spread through society. The spirit of
the cogging dicers of Whitefriars took possession of the grave
senators of the City, wardens of trades, deputies, aldermen.
It was much easier and much more lucrative to put forth a
lying prospectus announcing a new stock, to persuade ignorant
people that the dividends could not fall short of twenty per
cent., and to part with five thousand pounds of this imaginary
wealth for ten thousand solid guineas, than to load a ship
with a well-chosen cargo for Virginia or the Levant. Every day
some new bubble was puffed into existence, rose buoyant, shone
bright, burst, and was forgotten.’

You will not find the cause of panics so accurately explained in the dryest of political economists—in the Scotch M’Culloch.

These peculiarities of character and mind may be very conspicuously traced through the _History of England_, and in the _Essays_. Their first and most striking quality is the _intellectual entertainment_ which they afford. This, as practical readers know, is a kind of sensation which is not very common, and which is very productive of great and healthy enjoyment. It is quite distinct from the amusement which is derived from common light works. The latter is very great; but it is passive. The mind of the reader is not awakened to any independent action: you see the farce, but you see it without effort; not simply without painful effort, but without any perceptible mental activity whatever. Again, entertainment of intellect is contrasted with the high enjoyment of consciously following pure and difficult reasoning; such a sensation is a sort of sublimated pain. The highest and most intense action of the intellectual powers is like the most intense action of the bodily on a high mountain. We climb and climb: we have a thrill of pleasure, but we have also a sense of effort and anguish. Nor is the sensation to be confounded with that which we experience from the best and purest works of art. The pleasure of high tragedy is also painful: the whole soul is stretched; the spirit pants; the passions scarcely breathe: it is a rapt and eager moment, too intense for continuance—so overpowering, that we scarcely know whether it be joy or pain. The sensation of intellectual entertainment is altogether distinguished from these by not being accompanied by any pain, and yet being consequent on, or being contemporaneous with, a high and constant exercise of mind. While we read works which so delight us, we are conscious that we are delighted, and are conscious that we are not idle. The opposite pleasures of indolence and exertion seem for a moment combined. A sort of elasticity pervades us; thoughts come easily and quickly; we seem capable of many ideas; we follow cleverness till we fancy that we are clever. This feeling is only given by writers who stimulate the mind just to the degree which is pleasant, and who do not stimulate it more; who exact a moderate exercise of mind, and who seduce us to it insensibly. This can only be, of course, by a charm of style; by the inexplicable _je ne sais quoi_ which attracts our attention; by constantly raising and constantly satisfying our curiosity. And there seems to be a further condition. A writer who wishes to produce this constant effect must not appeal to any single, separate faculty of mind, but to the whole mind at once. The fancy tires, if you appeal only to the fancy; the understanding is aware of its dulness, if you appeal only to the understanding; the curiosity is soon satiated unless you pique it with variety. This is the very opportunity for Macaulay. He has fancy, sense, abundance; he appeals to both fancy and understanding. There is no sense of effort. His books read like an elastic dream. There is a continual sense of instruction; for who had an idea of the transactions before? The emotions, too, which he appeals to are the easy admiration, the cool disapprobation, the gentle worldly curiosity, which quietly excite us, never fatigue us,—which we could bear for ever. To read Macaulay for a day, would be to pass a day of easy thought, of pleasant placid emotion.

Nor is this a small matter. In a state of high civilisation it is no simple matter to give multitudes a large and healthy enjoyment. The old bodily enjoyments are dying out; there is no room for them any more; the complex apparatus of civilisation cumbers the ground. We are thrown back upon the mind, and the mind is a barren thing. It can spin little from itself: few that describe what they see are in the way to discern much. Exaggerated emotions, violent incidents, monstrous characters, crowd our canvas; they are the resource of a weakness which would obtain the fame of strength. Reading is about to become a series of collisions against aggravated breakers, of beatings with imaginary surf. In such times a book of sensible attraction is a public benefit; it diffuses a sensation of vigour through the multitude. Perhaps there is a danger that the extreme popularity of the manner may make many persons fancy they understand the matter more perfectly than they do: some readers may become conceited; several boys believe that they too are Macaulays. Yet, duly allowing for this defect, it is a great good that so many people should learn so much on such topics so agreeably; that they should feel that they _can_ understand them; that their minds should be stimulated by a consciousness of health and power.

The same peculiarities influence the style of the narrative. The art of narration is the art of writing in hooks-and-eyes. The principle consists in making the appropriate thought follow the appropriate thought, the proper fact the proper fact; in first preparing the mind for what is to come, and then letting it come. This can only be achieved by keeping continually and insensibly before the mind of the reader some one object, character, or image, whose variations are the events of the story, whose unity is the unity of it. Scott, for example, keeps before you the mind of some one person,—that of Morton in _Old Mortality_, of Rebecca in _Ivanhoe_, of Lovel in _The Antiquary_,—whose fortunes and mental changes are the central incidents, whose personality is the string of unity. It is the defect of the great Scotch novels that their central figure is frequently not their most interesting topic,—that their interest is often rather in the accessories than in the essential principle—rather in that which surrounds the centre of narration than in the centre itself. Scott tries to meet this objection by varying the mind which he selects for his unit; in one of his chapters it is one character, in the next a different; he shifts the scene from the hero to the heroine, from the ‘Protector of the settlement’ of the story to the evil being who mars it perpetually: but when narrowly examined, the principle of his narration will be found nearly always the same,—the changes in the position—external or mental—of some one human being. The most curiously opposite sort of narration is that of Hume. He seems to carry a _view_, as the moderns call it, through everything. He forms to himself a metaphysical—that perhaps is a harsh word—an intellectual conception of the time and character before him; and the gradual working out or development of that view is the principle of his narration. He tells the story of the conception. You rise from his pages without much remembrance of or regard for the mere people, but with a clear notion of an elaborated view, skilfully abstracted and perpetually impressed upon you. A critic of detail should scarcely require a better task than to show how insensibly and artfully the subtle historian infuses his doctrine among the facts, indicates somehow—you can scarcely say how—their relation to it; strings them, as it were, upon it, concealing it in seeming beneath them, while in fact it altogether determines their form, their grouping, and their consistency. The style of Macaulay is very different from either of these. It is a diorama of political pictures. You seem to begin with a brilliant picture,—its colours are distinct, its lines are firm; on a sudden it changes, at first gradually, you can scarcely tell how or in what, but truly and unmistakably,—a slightly different picture is before you; then the second vision seems to change,—it too is another and yet the same; then the third shines forth and fades; and so without end. The unity of this delineation is the identity—the apparent identity—of the picture; in no two moments does it seem quite different, in no two is it identically the same. It grows and alters as our bodies would appear to alter and grow, if you could fancy any one watching them, and being conscious of their daily little changes. The events are picturesque variations; the unity is a unity of political painting, of represented external form. It is evident how suitable this is to a writer whose understanding is solid, whose sense is political, whose fancy is fine and delineative.

To this merit of Macaulay is to be added another. No one describes so well what we may call the _spectacle_ of a character. The art of delineating character by protracted description is one which grows in spite of the critics. In vain is it alleged that the character should be shown dramatically; that it should be illustrated by events; that it should be exhibited in its actions. The truth is, that these homilies are excellent, but incomplete; true, but out of season. There is a utility in verbal portrait, as Lord Stanhope says there is in painted. Goethe used to observe, that in society—in a _tête-à-tête_, rather—you often thought of your companion as if he was his portrait: you were silent; you did not care what he said; but you considered him as a picture, as a whole, especially as regards yourself and your relations towards him. You require something of the same kind in literature; _some_ description of a man is clearly necessary as an introduction to the story of his life and actions. But more than this is wanted; you require to have the object placed before you as a whole, to have the characteristic traits mentioned, the delicate qualities drawn out, the firm features gently depicted. As the practice which Goethe hints at is, of all others, the most favourable to a just and calm judgment of character, so the literary substitute is essential as a steadying element, as a summary, to bring together and give a unity to our views. We must see the man’s face. Without it, we seem to have heard a great deal about the person, but not to have known him; to be aware that he had done a good deal, but to have no settled, ineradicable notion what manner of man he was. This is the reason why critics like Macaulay, who sneer at the practice when estimating the works of others, yet make use of it at great length, and, in his case, with great skill, when they come to be historians themselves. The kind of characters whom Macaulay can describe is limited—at least we think so—by the bounds which we indicated just now. There are some men whom he is too impassive to comprehend; but he can always tell us of such as he does comprehend, what they looked like, and what they were.