CHAPTER VI
THE HISTORIANS AND BIOGRAPHERS
Carlyle was so much besides being a historian, and seems, when we look back from a distance of sixty years, so clearly the leader of thought in the early part of this period, that it has been deemed advisable to treat him by himself. But even without him the volume and the quality of historical work accomplished during those forty years is very great. Besides Macaulay, who surpassed Carlyle in popular estimation, Thomas Arnold, Grote, Thirlwall and Froude were all men who, in most periods, might well have filled the first place in historical literature.
Several reasons may be assigned for the concentration of talent upon history. In the first place, the circumstances of the time made an examination of the foundations of society imperative. This necessity reveals itself everywhere, in poetry, in philosophy, and in theology, as well as in history. The cry is on all sides for reconstruction; and there is a growing sense that the reconstruction must take place upon a groundwork of fact, discoverable only by a study of the past. The pre-Revolutionary writers had relied upon a priori theory, but the immediate results were so different from their anticipations that their successors were little disposed to repeat the mistake. Modern history teaches above all things the lesson of continuity. Institutions change and grow, but they never spring up suddenly like a Jonah’s gourd; and even revolutions only modify, they do not annul the past.
Science too has had a powerful influence, and the success of the scientific method has encouraged the application of a method similar in principle, though necessarily different in minor points, to the facts of history. The last two generations have witnessed a great extension of the principle of induction in the sphere of history; and as the first step in a complex process of induction is the accumulation of masses of facts, we have here perhaps an explanation of some of the weaknesses of the modern school of history. It is apt to lose itself in detail. The reach of Tacitus or of Gibbon seems no longer attainable, because their successors must know everything, and can with difficulty restrain themselves from stating everything. Some one, doubtless, whether he be called a philosopher or a historian, will ultimately assimilate the masses of information thus laboriously compiled, and the world will once more have the principal results compactly stated and in orderly sequence. Buckle’s experiment proves that it is possible to attempt this too soon; but at the same time the welcome that experiment received is an indication that we shall not be permanently satisfied with the fragments and aspects of history which alone the new method as yet yields. Unity of treatment is ultimately as essential in history as codification is in law; and it is essential for much the same reason. The old proverb tells us that the wood may be invisible by reason of the trees.
We may trace the influence of science also in the greatly deepened sense of the importance of origins. In science the chief triumphs have been won by tracing things to their beginnings; in physical structure to atoms and molecules, in animal life to nerve cells, protoplasm, or whatever is simplest and most primitive. Exactly the same effort is made in modern history; and nothing is more distinctive of it, in contrast with the comparatively superficial historical school of the eighteenth century, than the determination to trace the starting-point and original meaning of institutions. Ages which had been previously left to legend and myth have been patiently investigated, and it is to them that we are now referred for the explanation of our own times.
But not only has the ideal of history changed; the material from which it is written, old in one sense, is to a large extent new in the sense that it is now for the first time accessible. The men of earlier times, even when they had the industry and the will for minute investigation, had seldom the means. The vast increase of accessible documents has caused history to be written afresh, to an extent best measured by the fact that, except those who rank as original authorities, Gibbon alone among historians prior to the present century still holds his ground.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
(1800-1859).
Thomas Babington Macaulay felt these modern influences, though not quite in their full force. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, celebrated for his exertions in the Anti-Slavery crusade. At Cambridge, whither he went in 1818, young Macaulay had for contemporaries a very brilliant set of young men, including Derwent and Henry Nelson Coleridge, Moultrie, Praed and Charles Austin, ‘the only man,’ says Sir George Trevelyan, ‘who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay,’ the man who weaned him from the Toryism in which he had been brought up, and ‘brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since.’ A constitutional incapacity for and hatred of mathematics was punished by the omission of his name from the Tripos list of 1822. He had been ‘gulfed.’ Nevertheless, in 1824, he was elected to a Fellowship of Trinity College. He was called to the bar in 1826, but never took seriously to the law as a profession. He had received an earlier call to another profession, and during his stay at Cambridge he had been a frequent contributor to Knights Quarterly Magazine. But we may date from 1825, when his essay on Milton appeared in the Edinburgh Review, the opening of his career in literature. For many years afterwards he was a frequent and certainly the most effective contributor to the review.
Macaulay’s connexion with Jeffrey’s review was profitable in several ways to himself as well as to it. He gained money, and fame, and political connexions which determined the course of his life for many years, and which by doing so unquestionably influenced his historical work. Through the influence of Lord Lansdowne, who had been struck by his articles on Mill, Macaulay became, in 1830, member for Calne. He soon made his mark, rather as a speaker of set speeches than as a debater. His speeches have much the character of his essays, the rhetorical style of which is not ill adapted to verbal utterance. The clearness which Macaulay never failed to give made the rhetoric effective. His great knowledge, and especially his wonderful command of historical illustration, enabled him often to clinch his argument where abstract discussion would have failed. The most telling passage in one of his best known speeches, the speech on copyright, is a long list of concrete instances of the effect of the proposal he was advocating as contrasted with that of the proposal he was combating. At the close, with well-founded confidence, he challenges his opponent to match it. While therefore Macaulay had but a small share of the highest faculty of the orator, the power to sway the passions of his audience, he had in a high degree the power to interest their intellect. For neat, crisp statement, apt and copious illustration, and effective rhetoric occasionally rising into eloquence, his speeches have few equals.
As a reward for his services in the cause of reform Macaulay was appointed a member of the Supreme Council of India. In 1834 he sailed from England, and he resided in India till the beginning of 1838. Soon after his return to England he was elected M.P. for Edinburgh, and in 1839 was raised to the Cabinet as Secretary at War. But he gradually became absorbed in his history and devoted less and less time to politics. His defeat in 1847 in the parliamentary election for Edinburgh contributed to wean him still more from public life. He was hurt, and the smart of wounded pride is apparent in the most beautiful verses he ever wrote. They were composed on the night of his defeat, and they declare that the writer’s true allegiance belongs to that Spirit of Literature who, when all the ‘wayward sprites’ of Gain, Fashion, Power and Pleasure have passed away, draws near to bless his first infant sleep. The verses are transparently sincere. Macaulay’s love for letters was the passion of his life; and, acting on such a character as his, the unmerited rebuff dealt by Edinburgh proved a turning point in his career. He retired into private life, and though after the repentance of Edinburgh in 1852 he sat again for his old constituency, it was with the fixed intention not to immerse himself in parliamentary work, and above all not to accept office. He was now completely absorbed in his history; and as he gradually became conscious of the greatness of his task, and felt that life was slipping away with only a fragment of it accomplished, he grudged more and more any deduction from the time which, he foresaw, must be too short at best. For his previously excellent health had broken down soon after his election, and he never fully recovered it. He resigned his seat in 1856. In the following year he was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley, and he died on December 28th, 1859, leaving his history a fragment.
The works of Macaulay are remarkably easy to classify and not very difficult to appraise. They fall under four heads,—speeches, essays, including the biographical articles contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the History of England, and poetry.
The speeches have been already noticed. The essays, which are described as ‘critical and historical,’ are only to a very minor degree critical. The well-known paper on Robert Montgomery, irresistibly amusing in its severity, is exceptional in the fact that, starting with a literary subject, it treats that subject throughout from a literary point of view. In most of his essays, as he himself confessed, Macaulay escapes as soon as possible from criticism and glides into history. This is the case even in the essay on Milton, who would have enchained him to criticism if anyone could. Where he is really critical, Macaulay always shows the qualities of good sense, sound judgment and extensive knowledge; but few will think that he shows any remarkable fineness of critical faculty. On occasion he could characterise a style exceedingly well. His contrast between the simple, nervous and picturesque expression of Johnson’s familiar letters and his Latinised pomposity when his sentences are done out of English into Johnsonese, cannot be forgotten; and his treatment of Bacon’s style is as sound and excellent as his treatment of Bacon’s philosophy is mistaken and false. But his mind was of too positive a type to admit of the finest kind of criticism. He saw nothing in half-light, and he was deficient in sympathy. His criticism of the Queen Anne writers, whom he knew best, will not bear comparison, in respect of insight and sensitive appreciation, with Thackeray’s criticism of them in the English Humourists.
Macaulay’s strength lay elsewhere; and though he carried into all he did the deficiencies revealed by his criticism, as well as deficiencies due to political prejudice and personal bias, yet all faults are forgotten, for the time at least, in admiration of wide knowledge, boundless energy and brilliant style. Macaulay’s extensive reading, backed by his wonderful memory, served him well. His knowledge was always at hand. If he wanted a reference or an allusion he could in a moment supply it. Yet his quotations, references and allusions are never pedantic, nor are they allowed to clog and weight his style. They serve their proper purpose of illustrating and enforcing his point. He defends his position by parallel after parallel, contrast after contrast. It was this wealth of illustration that forced acquiescence from men of less knowledge among his contemporaries; it is the suspicion that the parallels are not always accurate, and the contrasts not always sound, that has since caused so many of his conclusions to be regarded with suspicion. But frequently the historical illustrations are poured out, not to defend any thesis, but simply because they crowd spontaneously into the writer’s mind; and some of the most effective passages in Macaulay’s writings are of this character. Take, for example, the well-known passage from Warren Hastings beginning, ‘The place was worthy of such a trial,’ or the description in the History of the spot where the dust of Monmouth was laid. Less crowded with historical names and details, but still deriving most of its charm from the same cause, is the almost equally well-known paragraph in the essay on Ranke’s History of the Popes, beginning, ‘There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church.’ There is a rapidity, fire and vividness in such passages by which we may in great measure account for Macaulay’s popularity. He had no more marked literary gift. It shows itself even more spontaneously in his letters than in his formal writings; and the letters have sometimes moreover a touch of humour rare in the works he intended for publication. Few things of his are more purely delightful than the letter to his friend Ellis, describing the division in the House of Commons in 1831, when the Reform Bill was carried by a majority of one: ‘You might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then, again, the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation.’
It is true that the vivid colouring of the essays sometimes becomes too glaring, that the characters, especially when they have relation to politics, are apt to be too dark or too bright for human nature, and that the writing is throughout that of a partisan. But if this detracts from it is far from destroying their value; and Macaulay’s biographer is pardonably proud of their popularity, and insists, with justice, that it is an element in their greatness as well as an evidence of it.
The first two volumes of the History of England were published in 1848, and the third and fourth in 1855, while the fifth was left unfinished at Macaulay’s death. The history repeats in great measure both the merits and the defects of the essays. Written with a steady eye to permanence, it is far purer and more perfect, better proportioned, more restrained and more harmonious than they; but it is marked still by the same limitations. We find the writer’s strength in a great command of facts and in clearness and force of style. His weaknesses are partisan bias, exaggeration and a certain want of depth.
The story of Macaulay’s ambition to write a history which every young lady should read in preference to the latest novel has been often repeated and often ridiculed. The ridicule is ill judged. To aim at popularity is in itself innocent and even laudable; in truth it is universal. Carlyle himself with reason felt aggrieved that he remained so long unrecognised. The desire for popularity becomes vicious only when it leads the man who cherishes it to pander to a taste which he knows to be depraved, or to write something worse than his best, because he knows that his best would not be as popular. There is no trace of such conduct in Macaulay. His faults were inherent in his nature, and could have been eradicated only by making him anew.
Of late years Macaulay’s history has been often challenged on the score of inaccuracy and untruth. The charge is brought against every historian in turn; and we must remember, on the other hand, that Freeman, one of the most competent of judges, warmly praised Macaulay for his command of facts. It is necessary to distinguish three things: falsity of statement, incompleteness of statement, and the drawing of disputable conclusions. In the first respect Macaulay was rarely, in the second and third he was frequently, at fault. His omissions are often indefensible. The whole evidence of his character is against the supposition that they were due to conscious dishonesty. It is far more probable that, approaching his subject with a strong prepossession, he was positively blind to anything that told against his own view. Partly for the same reason, and partly because his philosophic endowment was not equal to his literary talent, his inferences too are often questionable. And this perhaps will prove in the end a more serious objection to his history than his partisanship; for, after all, there are worse things, even in historical writing, than partisanship. The man who is free from all temptation to take a side, if not from political affinity then from moral sympathy, must run some risk of being dull and colourless.
Macaulay did much to enlarge and liberalise the conception of history. More than any of his predecessors, he attempted to base his views on a wide consideration of the literature and life of the people, as well as on their constitution and campaigns and treaties. He cast all pseudo-dignity to the winds. His method was sound; and herein Carlyle, though he applied the principle differently, was quite at one with Macaulay. Another honourable characteristic, wherein the two historians likewise agreed, was their care in visiting the scenes about which they had to write; and both have gained in vividness and in topographical accuracy from this habit. Macaulay’s notes on the scenes of the Irish war were ‘equal in bulk to a first-class article in the Edinburgh or Quarterly Review.’
The style of Macaulay is at its best in the History, where it is more chastened, more varied and sonorous than in the Essays. The same tricks and mannerisms reappear, but they are softened and restrained. The trick of a rapid succession of curt sentences, at times so effective, but also at times monotonous and jarring, is kept within bounds. Short and simple are mingled with comparatively long and complex sentences; for Macaulay, scornful of ‘the dignity of history’ when it is merely cramping and obstructive, is scrupulously mindful of it when the phrase has a legitimate application. He rejects as meretricious ornament and illustration which, as he himself declared, he would have considered not only admissible but desirable in a review. The just censure that his style is hard and metallic applies with far more force against the Essays than against the History. Greater care and higher finish deepen and enrich the tone.
Macaulay’s verse must be dismissed with few words. He is best known by his Lays of Ancient Rome, compositions which, like his prose writings, are historical in principle. They neither are nor pretend to be great, but they rank high among the modern imitations of popular poetry. At the same time, they display no such sympathetic genius as, for example, Scott’s ballad of Harlaw, no such loftiness of mind as his Cadyow Castle. They are clear, rapid and vigorous, like their author’s prose. The generous judgment of Elizabeth Barrett, quoted in Ward’s English Poets, is essentially just: ‘He has a noble, clear, metallic note in his soul, and makes us ready by it for battle.’ That he makes us ready by it for battle is eminently true of the splendidly martial Battle of Naseby, the most stirring piece of verse Macaulay ever wrote. It is interesting to note that the historian of England thus, at the age of twenty-four, reached his highest point in ballad verse in a subject taken from the country and the century which all his life long attracted his most serious study.
In several respects Macaulay is the natural antithesis to Carlyle: to some extent they may even be regarded as complementary. We may correct the excess of the one by the opposite excess of the other. Macaulay was an optimist, Carlyle a pessimist; Macaulay was the panegyrist of his own time, Carlyle was its merciless critic; Macaulay devoutly believed all the formulas of the Whig creed, and had great faith in Reform Bills and improvements in parliamentary machinery, Carlyle accepted no formulas whatsoever, and set small store by any reforms that were merely parliamentary; Macaulay was orthodox in his literary tastes and methods, Carlyle was revolutionary and scornful of rule. The contrast applies equally to their personal history and character. Macaulay was sunny, genial and healthy, Carlyle dyspeptic, irascible, ‘gey ill to deal wi’;’ Macaulay suddenly sprang into fame, Carlyle slowly and with difficulty fought his way to it. They are contrasted in their very biographies. Macaulay’s is one of the pleasantest in the language; Carlyle’s awoke an acrimonious discussion, due in part certainly to the sins of the subject, but in part also to his injudicious treatment by the biographer.
The truth lay between them. If Macaulay was too easily optimistic, Carlyle was too gloomy. To paint a picture all shadow is as untrue to art, and generally to fact, as it is to paint one all light. It is true that the great problem of society, wise government, cannot be solved by franchises and ballot-boxes; but proper regulations as to these may help to solve it. Carlyle sometimes forgot that the practical problem usually is, not to secure that complex and difficult thing, wise government, but to effect some little improvement which will conduce to the comparative, wiser government, if it does not lead us to the unattainable positive.
The example of German thoroughness had no small influence in fostering the new movement in history. It acted most directly on the students of ancient history, and Niebuhr was the channel through which it was transmitted to England. Before the middle of the century his authority was hardly questioned, though a little later we can trace the reaction in the works of Sir George Cornewall Lewis and others; and now it is no longer possible to conjure with the Pelasgians. But whatever doubts may cloud some of the conclusions of Niebuhr, it was he who enabled the English historians to breathe life into the dry bones of ancient history. Thomas Arnold, Thirlwall and Grote were all inspired by him. Taking these writers as a group, we may remark one important difference between them and the writers of modern history. The historians of the ancient world are wider in their range, and in their works it is still possible to trace the whole life of a people. Thirlwall and Grote embrace all the history of Greece down to the period of decay, and only Arnold’s early death prevented him from being equally comprehensive. The reason is that there is a certain finality about ancient history. The materials are manageable in quantity, and there neither have been nor can be such additions to them as to those on which modern history is based.
Thomas Arnold
(1795-1842).
Thomas Arnold was a man of untiring energy, and he found for his energies three channels, two of them practical and one literary. It is as a schoolmaster that he has won his widest, and what will probably prove his most enduring fame. Some unfavourable critics have insisted that Arnold’s Rugby boy could only be described by the slang term, prig. But such criticism is merely the revolt against excessive praise. There may have been some intellectual and moral coxcombry developed in early years by many of Arnold’s pupils; but that is not the mature characteristic of men like Clough and Stanley and Dean Vaughan. Moreover, Thomas Arnold was emphatically one of those men from whom virtue goes out; and a result due to affectation can hardly have come from a character so simple and so sincere.
But Arnold was ambitious likewise to have a hand in determining the doctrines and shaping the thought of England. He, a clergyman, naturally took an ecclesiastical view of what would do that; but it was at the same time a broad view. His position was singularly interesting. The two great evils of the age, in his eyes, were that materialism which he believed to be centred in the University of London, and the Catholic revival associated with the University of Oxford. He stood upon a ground of rationalism, but it was a rationalism which he firmly believed to be consistent with faith. He hated materialism because it left no room for a religious creed; he hated Tractarianism because it was irreconcilable with reason, and he was convinced that whatever was irrational must and ought to go to ruin. He would have accepted the aphorism of a living writer, ‘Nothing that is intellectually unsound can be morally sound.’ ‘It is,’ says he, ‘because I so earnestly desire the revival of the Church that I abhor the doctrine of the priesthood.’ It was this, the combination of faith with fearless loyalty to reason, that gave him his peculiar interest in the eyes of observers. The keenest of these however thought the permanent maintenance of that position impossible; and Dr. Arnold’s son, Matthew, in his Letters expresses in another way an opinion substantially identical with that which Carlyle had expressed before.
Arnold’s History of Rome, published between the years 1838 and 1843, has in great part lost its importance through the researches of Mommsen and other German scholars; but there are portions which can never lose their importance. The point of view is essentially Arnold’s own. The impulse to write came to him because he found in Rome the ancient analogue to the ‘kingly commonwealth of England.’ He found in the great republic lessons both of encouragement and of warning to his own country; but he sinned less than some others, notably Grote, in the way of drawing these lessons direct from the ancient state to the modern. In another respect, dignity of style, he had an immense advantage over his more widely-read contemporary. Arnold’s English is always forcible, and in the best passages it is eloquent. He is strongest in his account of military operations, and his description of the campaigns of the Second Punic War remains still the most vivid and readable in our language, and probably in modern literature. Certainly Mommsen, powerful as his work is, cannot rival Arnold as a military historian. It is rather in depth of scholarship, in mastery of facts, in comprehension of the early history, and consequently of the subsequent working, of the constitution, that Arnold has been surpassed.
Connop Thirlwall
(1797-1875).
The other two historians of the ancient world both chose Greece for their subject. The more interesting and abler man of the two, and the profounder scholar, had the singular ill fortune to see his work superseded, almost as soon as he had written it, by that of his rival. Connop Thirlwall was celebrated in his day as one of the best of English scholars; but no man was ever less of the mere grammarian. Trenchant intellect and sound judgment were his characteristics. He impressed all who encountered him with his capacity to be a leader of men; and his early enterprises seemed a guarantee that he would redeem his promise. As one of the translators of Niebuhr he moulded English historical thought; and his translation of Schleiermacher’s essay on St. Luke made an equally deep impression on English theology. It almost stopped his professional advancement. When, in 1840, Thirlwall was suggested to Lord Melbourne for the bishopric of St. David’s, Melbourne, with the characteristic oath, objected: ‘He is not orthodox in that preface to Schleiermacher.’ After some investigation the pious minister convinced himself that the writer of the preface was sufficiently orthodox for the purpose. Thirlwall, perhaps to the cost of his permanent fame, became Bishop of St. David’s, and held the office till the year before his death. As Bishop he was bold and independent in judgment. On two memorable occasions he stood alone among his order. He was the solitary bishop who refused to sign the address calling upon Colenso to resign, and he alone voted for the disestablishment of the Irish Church. Nevertheless he was in a position unfortunate for himself. His nature demanded unfettered freedom of thought; and the controversy with Rowland Williams over the question of Essays and Reviews proved that such freedom was not to be found on a bishop’s throne.
Thirlwall’s principal contribution to literature is his History of Greece (1835-1847). The completed work is unfortunately marred by traces of the original design. It had been meant for Lardner’s Cyclopædia, but overflowed the limits set. Thirlwall thereupon revised the scheme; but he never attained the freedom he would have had if he had begun to write on his own plan and his own scale. His profound scholarship, penetrating judgment, nervous though severe style, and critical acumen, all show to advantage in the History. He is far more concentrated than Grote; and though the latter caught the meaning of certain movements and certain institutions which Thirlwall neglected or misinterpreted, he presents a more luminous and a less prejudiced view of Greek history than his successful rival.
But if the History of Greece is Thirlwall’s most solid contribution to literature, that which gives the best impression of the man, regarded by contemporaries as a rival of the greatest, is his Letters to a Young Friend.3 Few collections of letters give a more charming view of a relation of pure friendship between two people of widely different age. They are weighty too because they touch at many points on questions of universal interest. It has been said that the letters a man writes ought to be ascribed to his correspondent in equal measure with himself; and it is certain that from the sympathy he found in this friendship Thirlwall drew an inspiration nothing else in his life ever gave him.
George Grote
(1794-1871).
George Grote, the schoolfellow, friend and rival of Thirlwall, was a man in most respects widely different from the great Bishop. Thirlwall’s thought was German in origin, though it was coloured by English ecclesiastical opinion. Grote was a Benthamite, and had all the hardness without quite all the force of that school. It was the rising school, and part of Grote’s success was due to the fact that he was moving along the line of least resistance. He was a persevering, clear-sighted, determined man. As a historian of Greece he was patient and thorough. He had marked out the subject as his own more than twenty years before the publication, in 1846, of his first two volumes; and ten years more passed before the work was finished. Indeed, we may say that his whole life was devoted to it; for, according to his conception of history, Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates (1865), and the incomplete Aristotelian studies issued posthumously in 1872, were parts and appendages of the history.