Through the Magic Door | Page 3

fit to be
placed in Lady Jerningham's vase." Those were the kind of sentences
which used to fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords
which linger in the musician's ear. A man likes a plainer literary diet as
he grows older, but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled with
admiration and wonder at the alternate power of handling a great
subject, and of adorning it by delightful detail--just a bold sweep of the
brush, and then the most delicate stippling. As he leads you down the
path, he for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks which branch away
from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned, literary and
historical education night be effected by working through every book
which is alluded to in the Essays. I should be curious, however, to
know the exact age of the youth when he came to the end of his studies.
I wish Macaulay had written a historical novel. I am convinced that it
would have been a great one. I do not know if he had the power of
drawing an imaginary character, but he certainly had the gift of
reconstructing a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look at the
simple half-paragraph in which he gives us Johnson and his atmosphere.
Was ever a more definite picture given in a shorter space--
"As we close it, the club-room is before us, and the table on which
stand the omelet for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. There are

assembled those heads which live for ever on the canvas of Reynolds.
There are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin form of Langton, the
courtly sneer of Beauclerk and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon
tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with his trumpet in his ear. In the
foreground is that strange figure which is as familiar to us as the figures
of those among whom we have been brought up--the gigantic body, the
huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the
black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the
dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see the eyes and
mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form rolling;
we hear it puffing, and then comes the 'Why, sir!' and the 'What then,
sir?' and the 'No, sir!' and the 'You don't see your way through the
question, sir!'"
It is etched into your memory for ever.
I can remember that when I visited London at the age of sixteen the
first thing I did after housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage to
Macaulay's grave, where he lies in Westminster Abbey, just under the
shadow of Addison, and amid the dust of the poets whom he had loved
so well. It was the one great object of interest which London held for
me. And so it might well be, when I think of all I owe him. It is not
merely the knowledge and the stimulation of fresh interests, but it is the
charming gentlemanly tone, the broad, liberal outlook, the general
absence of bigotry and of prejudice. My judgment now confirms all
that I felt for him then.
My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the right
of the Essays. Do you recollect the third chapter of that work--the one
which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century? It has
always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers,
with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. The
population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic facts of life
are all transmuted into wonder and interest by the handling of the
master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the
multiplication table had he set himself to do so. Take a single concrete
example of what I mean. The fact that a Londoner in the country, or a
countryman in London, felt equally out of place in those days of
difficult travel, would seem to hardly require stating, and to afford no
opportunity of leaving a strong impression upon the reader's mind. See

what Macaulay makes of it, though it is no more than a hundred other
paragraphs which discuss a hundred various points--
"A cockney in a rural village was stared at as much as if he had
intruded into a kraal of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the lord of
a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor appeared in Fleet Street, he was as
easily distinguished from the resident population as a Turk or a Lascar.
His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazed at the
shops, stumbled into gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under
the waterspouts, marked him out as