MACAULAY.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19813, 28 December 1929, Page 11

MACAULAY.

♦ THE SPIRIT OF ENGLAND. vSSEUAI.LT WBITTEB FVB TH! FS.S3-.1 !By R. G. C. McNab/ There was once a professor of English in the I'niversity of New Zealami who devoted to composition—to which great importance is attached- fifty minutes annually, the first lecture ot the year. Full thirty of these hfty niinutes were spent in denunciation one whom the speaker delighted to call the Rev.. Mr Macaulay. This, may have been the relic of an olscure "Times" joke or a flank attaik at the orthodoxy of Macaulay's style. Macaulay was held up as an exponent oi all that was naoty in English writing. The content of his works was airily tlismissed. The intransigeant members of the class, glumly enduring these diatribes, were occasionally led to read ati essay or to dip into the 'History," with the result that, teasing to worry about "mechanical parallels" and 'inevitable antitheses,"' they became interested in what the man had to say and how he said it. One such, passing over "The Anatomy of Melancholy - ' and "The World's Best Forty-Five Mvstery Stories," has chosen the works of Macaulay as his bedside books. He and the converts he has made have unending relish in the sanity. the briskness, and forthrightness of then' hero. There are great snatches to lie found merely by a glance at the "Essays," particularly the "Critical Essays." where Macaulay's fluency and satire found readiest scope. ■ To dip into them is to be unfair, as no essayist of the polemic kind ever wrote more definitely to destroy with wellmeasured blows every half-baked brick of some jerry-built hovel or to build, stone bv stone, a wall to defend some shrine from sacrilege. In any ease such dipping soon becomes a careful reading. It is truo that you will not find so frequently such phrases of delight a.s you meet on every third page of Johnson, such pieces of sophistication as "He petulantly placed himself between the company and the fire and soon after kicked down the table. This produced a ciuarrel." Set beside this a sentence or two from "'The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration" : The s;ini- p»r.<uns « Im. a i'i>v> mm.His lie fore, with mpek voices nnd demnm lonk?. h:id consulted divines about tlie state of their r.oiils. now surrounded the midni&lit tah'.c "Here, amidst the hounding: of champasne corks, a drunken prince, enthronpd bcticpcn Dubois and Madame de I'arobere, hiccoughed out atheistical arguments and obscene jest*. Or turn to the hcsiinning ol Macaulay's attack on Mr Robert Montgomery's PVienis: We have no enmity lo Mr Robert Montgomery. We know nothing whatever abonl him. except what we have learned from lii.i books, and from the portrait prefixed to one of them, in which he appears to be dnfng his very best to look like a man of genius and sensihility, though «-ith less success than- luh strenuous exertions deserve. . . . There are colours in a Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There aro words in Mr Montgomery's writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations, have made, and will again make, good poetry. But. as they now rtand. they seem to tie put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything "in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth."' Where will you find such sword-and-bludgeon work to-day? Oecasionally in Blackwood's "Musings without Method" are there reminiscences of this grand style; the earlier Montague had the gift: sometimes the genial invective of Mencken faintly suggests rhe, critical methods of the 'thirties and 'forties. Where, further, will you find such portraits? Portraits of the iiving man, his looks, his dress, his manners. Certainly the historians of today, writing like novelists, are attempting something of the sort. Tn his early and serious work Philip Guedalla practised the art, Emil Ludwig is developing it. It is not merely of Macrrnlay's full-length tensitting studies that one is thinking, but of sketches dashed off in a moment. Read the account of the arrest of Jeff revs:

The Trimmer was walking through WappiPtf. when he saw- a well known face looking out of the window of an ale-house. He could not be deceived. The eyebrows, indeed, had been shaved away. The dress was that of a common sailor from Newcastle, and was black with coal dust: but there was no mistaking the savage eye and mouth of. Jeffreys.

Macaulay's history is all wrong, we are told. An investiture that happened in July, 1693, he placed in February, 1694; it was not Sarsfield who led the attack on the bastion at Deny; Soniers was not the chief spokesman in the Whig cabals. Macaulay could not forget that he was a Whig, he had no perspective. Let it all be said. However inexact the details, however passionate the attitude, it remains that not even in Defoe or the "Spectator" will you find such a picture of Augustan England ; nowhere else do you feel eo strongly that statesmen and warriors were men of flesh nnd blood, that the growth of English freedom was not merely a spreading of knowledge and a matter of leadership, but a conflict. If "The History of England" is not history, it is an attempt to represent the English spirit and to teach Englishmen to draw comfort from their forefathers' work. Here is a glimpse of a Lincolnshire squire making his wav through the streets of London in 168-5: His dress, his gait, his accent, the manner in which he gazod at the shops, stumbled into the gutters, ran against the porters, and stood under the water-spouts, marked him out as an excellent subject for the operations of swindlers and banterers. Bullies jostled dim into the kennel. Hackney coachmen aplash->d him from head to foot. Thieves explored with perfect security the huge pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood entranced by the splendour of the bord Mayor's show. Moneydroppers, sore from the cart's tail, introduced themselves to him. and appeared to him the most honest, friendly gentlemen that he had ever seen. His criticism is on the side of sanity, of literary and public morality. No doubt his sincere aims gave him a sense of Tightness; certainly they added to the strength of his blows." One of the most useful works he did, as he says without apology, was done at the expense of the famous Mr Montgomery, to put an end to the pernicious "puffing" of the early nineteenth century, to show his "honest countrymen what that sort of poetrv is which puffing can drive through eleven editions and how easily anv hellman might, if a bellman would, stoop to the necessary degree of meanness, become 'a master-spirit of the age.' " A few paragraphs of this essay might well he read annually by every editor to his reviewers. Macaulay thought nothing human alien to him, and brought history, criticism, and biography into some relation with life. The'humanity, the heat and cold of his work are its charm. The real Macaulay. showing himself more plainly than usual, is revealed in the last few paragraphs of" the third chapter of his ■History."