Томас Бабингтон Маколей - Critical and Historical Essays. Volume 1

By A. J. Grieve

A French student of English letters (M. Paul Oursel) has written the following lines:

“Depuis deux siècles les Essais forment une branche importante de la littérature anglaise; pour designer un écrivain de cette classe, nos voisins emploient un mot qui n’a pas d’équivalent en francais; ils disent: un essayiste. Quo’est-ce qu’un essayiste? L’essayiste se distingue du moraliste, de l’historien, du critique littéraire, du biographe, de l’écrivain politique; et pourtant il emprunte quelque trait a chacun d’eux; il ressemble tour a tour a l’un ou a l’autre; il est aussi philosophe, il est satirique, humoriste a ses heures; il remit en sa personne des qualités multiples; il offre dans ses écrits un spécimen de tous les genres. On voit qu’il n’est pas facile de définir l’essayiste; mais l’exemple suppléera a la définition. On connaîtra exactement le sens du mot quand on aura étudie l’écrivain qui, d’après le jugement de ces compatriotes, est l’essayiste par excellence, ou, comme on disait dans les anciens cours de littérature, le Prince des essayistes.”

Macaulay is indeed the prince of essayists, and his reign is unchallenged. “I still think—says Professor Saintsbury (Corrected Impressions, p. 89 f.)—that on any subject which Macaulay has touched, his survey is unsurpassable for giving a first bird’s-eye view, and for creating interest in the matter.... And he certainly has not his equal anywhere for covering his subject in the pointing-stick fashion. You need not—you had much better not—pin your faith on his details, but his Pisgah sights are admirable. Hole after hole has been picked in the “Clive” and the “Hastings,” the “Johnson” and the “Addison,” the “Frederick” and the “Horace Walpole,” yet every one of these papers contains sketches, summaries, precis, which have not been made obsolete or valueless by all the work of correction in detail.

Two other appreciations from among the mass of critical literature that has accumulated round Macaulay’s work may be fitly cited, This from Mr. Frederic Harrison:—

“How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a sealed book, or a book in an unknown tongue! If he were a sciolist or a wrongheaded fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of saying common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable services on the readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant.”

And this from Mr. Cotter Morison

“Macaulay did for the historical essay what Haydn did for the sonata, and Watt for the steam engine; he found it rudimentary and unimportant, and left it complete and a thing of power.... To take a bright period or personage of history, to frame it in a firm outline, to conceive it at once in article-size, and then to fill in this limited canvas with sparkling anecdote, telling bits of colour, and facts, all fused together by a real genius for narrative, was the sort of genre-painting which Macaulay applied to history.... And to this day his essays remain the best of their class, not only in England, but in Europe.... The best would adorn any literature, and even the less successful have a picturesque animation, and convey an impression of power that will not easily be matched. And, again, we need to bear in mind that they were the productions of a writer immersed in business, written in his scanty moments of leisure, when most men would have rested or sought recreation. Macaulay himself was most modest in his estimate of their value.... It was the public that insisted on their re-issue, and few would be bold enough to deny that the public was right.”

It is to Mr. Morison that the plan followed in the present edition of the Essays is due. In his monograph on Macaulay (English Men of Letters series) he devotes a chapter to the Essays and “with the object of giving as much unity as possible to a subject necessarily wanting it,” classifies the Essays into four groups, (1)English history, (2)Foreign history, (3)Controversial, (4)Critical and Miscellaneous. The articles in the first group are equal in bulk to those of the three other groups put together, and are contained in the first volume of this issue. They form a fairly complete survey of English history from the time of Elizabeth to the later years of the reign of George III, and are fitly introduced by the Essay on Hallam’s History, which forms a kind of summary or microcosm of the whole period.

The scheme might be made still more complete by including certain articles (and especially the exquisite biographies contributed by Macaulay to the Encyclopaedia Britannica) which are published in the volume of “Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches.” Exigencies of space have, however, compelled the limitation of the present edition to the “Essays” usually so-called. These have also been reprinted in the chronological arrangement ordinarily followed (see below) in The Temple Classics (5 vols. 1900), where an exhaustive bibliography, etc., has been appended to each Essay.

Chief dates in the life of Thomas Babington Macaulay, afterwards Baron Macaulay:—

1800 (Oct. 25). Birth at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire. 1818-1825. Life at Cambridge (Fellow of Trinity, 1824). 1825. Essay on Milton contributed to Edinburgh Review. 1826. Joined the Northern Circuit. 1830 M.P. for Calne (gift of the Marquis of Lansdowne). 1833. M.P. for Leeds. 1834-38. Legal Adviser to the Supreme Council of India. Work at the Indian Penal Code. 1839. M.P. for Edinburgh, and Secretary at War In Melbourne’s Cabinet. 1842. Lays of Ancient Rome. 1843. Collected edition of the Essays. 1847. Rejected at the Election of M.P. for Edinburgh. 1848. England from the Accession of James II. vols. i. and ii. 1852. M.P. for Edinburgh; serious illness. 1855. History of England, vols. iii. and iv. 1857. Raised to the peerage. 1859 (Dec. 28). Death at Holly Lodge, Kensington. (Buried in Westminster Abbey, 9th January 1860.)

The following are the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay:

Pompeii (Prize poem), 1819; Evening (prize poem), 1821; Lays of Ancient Rome (1842); Ivry and the Armada (Quarterly Magazine), added to Edition of 1848; Critical and Historical Essays (Edinburgh Review), 1843.

The Essays originally appeared as follows:

Milton, August 1825; Machiavelli, March 1827; Hallam’s “Constitutional History,” September 1828; Southey’s “Colloquies,” January 1830; R. Montgomery’s Poems, April 1830; Civil Disabilities of Jews, January 1831; Byron, June 1831; Croker’s “Boswell,” September 1831; Pilgrim’s Progress, December 1831; Hampden, December 1831; Burleigh, April 1832; War of Succession in Spain, January 1833; Horace Walpole, October 1833; Lord Chatham, January 1834; Mackintosh’s “History of Revolution,” July 1835; Bacon, July 1837; Sir William Temple, October 1838; “Gladstone on Church and State,” April 1839; Clive, January 1840; Ranke’s “History of the Popes,” October 1840; Comic Dramatists, January 1841; Lord Holland, July 1841; Warren Hastings, October 1841; Frederick the Great, April 1842; Madame D’Arblay, January 1843; Addison, July 1843; Lord Chatham (2nd Art.), October 1844.