THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (BARON MACAULAY) (1800-1859) s AN essayist Macaulay constitutes a class of his own. He has had many imitators, but as his prose style depends for its success on the same ear for rhythm (musical time) he shows in his ballads, he can be successfully imitated only by those who, with his almost miraculous memory for detailed facts, have also the "ear" which will enable them to balance their clauses as he does in musical antithesis. What in him is a triumph over the natural becomes when others fail to achieve it, obviously disagreeable and unnatural. Whether or not we may agree with Morley that imitation of Macaulay and Carlyle has been a calamity to English literature, we cannot fail to recognize that Macaulay himself is one of the world's great masters of style. It may be denied with reason, that it is "English" style. In any strict or evolutionary sense it is not. The English of King Alfred, which is as good in its way as that of Macaulay, illustrates the genius of a language whose spirit expresses itself with greatest force in direct and independent sentences, each inclosing a single definite idea. English, however, has become very largely Latinized since Alfred's time, and it is in a Latin style that Macaulay expresses himself. He has been called the greatest nineteenth-century disciple of the school of Cicero, and he had no one to dispute the title with him except Taine, his younger contemporary and admirer. For flexibility, for capacity to marshal the largest possible number of facts, and to carry them through the most rapid military evolutions in the least possible compass, these great commanders of language have no superiors in modern times. An incident of their method is an almost irresistible tendency to sacrifice to the necessary manoeuvering of their clauses much that is valued by less brilliant writers. Macaulay, himself, seems to have recognized this, for he generally takes pains to sum up the evidence against his own position with a formidable showing of impartiality; but when all is said, he remains in his essays the most brilliant, admirable, and convincing of all special pleaders. Of his "History," it is only necessary to say here that he did not cease to be an essayist in becoming a historian, but used the same style and the same methods which he had developed as a critical reviewer. If we are to make the necessary distinction between a genuine essay and a critical review, we must look for Macaulay's essays as episodes of his reviews rather than in the completeness of the reviews themselves. Some of his most celebrated reviews consist of several essays, each complying with the Greek rule of completeness by having "a beginning, a middle, and an end," while the review itself begins nowhere in particular and ends only with the exhaustion of the space in the magazine he had to fill. Thus, if we take the review of Southey's edition of "Pilgrim's Progress," written by Macaulay for the Edinburgh Review in 1821, we have in it one of the most admirable essays in the English language or any other; but it does not begin until the fourth paragraph of the review - the whole introduction to which consists of a comment on the attractions of a particular edition of the book. Another incident of Macaulay's style as a critical reviewer is what becomes on occasion an almost intolerable insolence, as when he showed his unquestionable superiority over the unfortunate and by no means unmeritorious Montgomery, or when, perhaps, after refreshing his own memory from the Greek grammar, he proceeded to expose Croker's unguarded pretensions to extraordinary scholarship. Such peculiarities as this, however, are peculiarities of Macaulay's time and of the profession of the critical reviewer which he followed as an amateur. His idiosyncrasies are all amiable. He is good-natured as a rule and an admirer of everything that is most admirable, a hater of cant and sham, a lover of freedom and justice. He was a great Liberal, who might have been an extreme Conservative had he been born a lord; or the greatest Radical of the century, if the English aristocracy, always quick to recognize and conciliate menacing merit, had not adopted him as a favorite. He was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, October 25th, 1800. After leaving the University of Cambridge where he was educated, he was called to the bar in 1826, and four years later began a brilliant political career by entering Parliament, where he served for many years. At various times he was a member of the Supreme Council in India, Secretary-at-War in the English Cabinet, and Paymaster General. Two years before his death, which occurred December 28th, 1859, he was raised to the peerage as "Baron Macaulay." As a poet, orator, and essayist, he illustrates the extraordinary command of language which depends fundamentally on a high development, not merely of the intellectual faculties of co-ordination, but on a corresponding development of the musical sense which makes possible a knowledge of the intrinsic harmonies of language. Macaulay's ballads are closer in their music and in their form to the genuine |