Critical Miscellanies | Page 2

post? Clearly the
author must be voluminous, for days on desert islands are many and

long; he must be varied in his moods, his topics, and his interests; he
must have a great deal to say, and must have a power of saying it that
shall arrest a depressed and dolorous spirit. Englishmen, of course,
would with mechanical unanimity call for Shakespeare; Germans could
hardly hesitate about Goethe; and a sensible Frenchman would pack up
the ninety volumes of Voltaire. It would be at least as interesting to
know the object of a second choice, supposing the tyrant in his
clemency to give us two authors. In the case of Englishmen there is
some evidence as to a popular preference. A recent traveller in
Australia informs us that the three books which he found on every
squatter's shelf, and which at last he knew before he crossed the
threshold that he should be sure to find, were Shakespeare, the Bible,
and Macaulay's Essays. This is only an illustration of a feeling about
Macaulay that has been almost universal among the English-speaking
peoples.
We may safely say that no man obtains and keeps for a great many
years such a position as this, unless he is possessed of some very
extraordinary qualities, or else of common qualities in a very
uncommon and extraordinary degree. The world, says Goethe, is more
willing to endure the Incongruous than to be patient under the
Insignificant. Even those who set least value on what Macaulay does
for his readers, may still feel bound to distinguish the elements that
have given him his vast popularity. The inquiry is not a piece of merely
literary criticism, for it is impossible that the work of so imposing a
writer should have passed through the hands of every man and woman
of his time who has even the humblest pretensions to cultivation,
without leaving a very decided mark on their habits both of thought and
expression. As a plain matter of observation, it is impossible to take up
a newspaper or a review, for instance, without perceiving Macaulay's
influence both in the style and the temper of modern journalism, and
journalism in its turn acts upon the style and temper of its enormous
uncounted public. The man who now succeeds in catching the ear of
the writers of leading articles, is in the position that used to be held by
the head of some great theological school, whence disciples swarmed
forth to reproduce in ten thousand pulpits the arguments, the opinions,
the images, the tricks, the postures, and the mannerisms of a single

master.
Two men of very different kinds have thoroughly impressed the
journalists of our time, Macaulay and Mr. Mill. Mr. Carlyle we do not
add to them; he is, as the Germans call Jean Paul, der Einzige. And he
is a poet, while the other two are in their degrees serious and
argumentative writers, dealing in different ways with the great topics
that constitute the matter and business of daily discussion. They are
both of them practical enough to interest men handling real affairs, and
yet they are general or theoretical enough to supply such men with the
large and ready commonplaces which are so useful to a profession that
has to produce literary graces and philosophical decorations at an hour's
notice. It might perhaps be said of these two distinguished men that our
public writers owe most of their virtues to the one, and most of their
vices to the other. If Mill taught some of them to reason, Macaulay
tempted more of them to declaim: if Mill set an example of patience,
tolerance, and fair examination of hostile opinions, Macaulay did much
to encourage oracular arrogance, and a rather too thrasonical
complacency; if Mill sowed ideas of the great economic, political, and
moral bearings of the forces of society, Macaulay trained a taste for
superficial particularities, trivial circumstantialities of local colour, and
all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-picturesque.
Of course nothing so obviously untrue is meant as that this is an
account of Macaulay's own quality. What is empty pretension in the
leading article, was often a warranted self-assertion in Macaulay; what
in it is little more than testiness, is in him often a generous indignation.
What became and still remain in those who have made him their model,
substantive and organic vices, the foundation of literary character and
intellectual temper, were in him the incidental defects of a vigorous
genius. And we have to take a man of his power and vigour with all his
drawbacks, for the one are wrapped up in the other. Charles Fox used to
apply to Burke a passage that Quintilian wrote about Ovid. 'Si animi sui
affectibus temperare quam indulgere maluisset,' quoted Fox, 'quid vir
iste præstare non potuerit!'