Liberals

"If you see the Morning Chronicle you must have observed a Speech lately made at the Anti-Slavery Meeting. It was the Maiden Speech of Macaulay's Son, a youth who has just left College. I have it under the hand of Mr. Wilberforce and other grave senators that it was equal to any speech of Pitt or Fox. This seems a bold assertion but it is supported by Brougham, &c. This young Man was my pet at six years old, and we then manfully fought Homer's battles; and he could descant on the heroes of both sides with no little discrimination. He was the firm Trojan."

"Randolph, who is writing a life of the late Lord Derby for Longman's, brought to luncheon a young man of that name. His talk interested the P[rime] M[inister] [Winston Churchill] ... Macaulay, Longman went on, was not read now; there was no demand for his books. The P.M. grunted that he was very sorry to hear this. Macaulay had been a great influence in his young days."

"I wish I were as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything."

"The most influential contribution to siege historiography was made not by a Derryman, but by Macaulay's epic History of England from the Accession of James the Second (1848–55), perhaps the most celebrated work of English history of all time. Often regarded as the chief exemplar of the whig interpretation of history, Macaulay located the central thread of English experience in the gradual triumph of constitutional liberty and representative government. In the evolution of English liberty from Magna Carta to limited monarchy and the rule of law it was the Glorious Revolution which provided the real landmark in sorting out the relationship between crown and parliament, and King William was the hero of Macaulay's work. More than any other single text, Macaulay's brief, vivid description of the Siege of Derry strengthened the emotional and historical links between Great Britain and the Protestants of Ulster, achieving a massive public relations coup for the loyalist cause."

"The discipline of history does not evolve through the abrupt and complete replacement of one type of history by another. Political history, with its emphasis on government and leadership, is alive and well today, and conversely, social history has appeared at various points in the past, most notably in the nineteenth century. In France from the 1820s on, historians inspired by the Revolution, like Adolphe Thiers and Jules Michelet, wrote histories in which groups like “the bourgeoisie” or “the people” were the main movers in an epic struggle against a selfish aristocracy, which led to the nation’s revolutionary birth in 1789. Leading English historians wrote “social history” long before the 1960s: Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1848 History of England from the Accession of James the Second, a landmark chronicle of the nation’s progress through political emancipation, includes a section on England in 1685 that covers everything from social classes to coffeehouses, street lighting, and newspapers. Nearly a century later, in the midst of World War II, Macaulay’s great-nephew, the Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, wrote a highly successful volume entitled English Social History. First published in 1942, Trevelyan’s book is a six-hundred-page account of social conditions in England from the Middle Ages to 1901, which like Macaulay’s covers a breadth of topics, from trade routes and population trends to marriage customs and diets. Leafing through Trevelyan you may come across stories of young girls in the age of Chaucer being beaten into accepting unattractive marriage partners, reports on upper-class drinking and smoking habits in the late seventeenth century, or a vividly imagined account of what life felt like (extremely damp, among other things) in a peasant home around 1750. The type of social history written by Macaulay and Trevelyan, which has equivalents in other national traditions, was clearly subordinate and accessory to political history. In Macaulay’s History of England the lengthy opening section on “the state of England in 1685” serves as a scenic backdrop to the significant action taking place center-stage, the political maneuverings of James II, William of Orange, and their associates. Trevelyan wrote his English Social History as a late-career outtake from his previous works of political history; it was intended to boost wartime morale in the country at large as a sort of Shakespearean paean to the land of thatched cottages and “stout yeomen.” The volume aptly illustrates Trevelyan’s much-quoted, controversial, and pithy description of social history as “the history of a people with the politics left out.” The older “customs and living conditions” tradition of social history epitomized by Trevelyan’s book is indeed notable for the assumption that “politics” is purposeful activity that happens only in the highest realm and is therefore absent from society at large. The poor and middling are presumed not to affect historical change; as a result, a book like English Social History reads like a series of picturesque descriptions rather than an argument or a story."

"The man is a humbug—a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…"

"In the evening I dined quietly at the Athenaeum with Herbert Spencer... We talked much about style in writing, he being strong about the uselessness of knowing the derivation of words, about the bad writing of Addison, about the especial atrocity of Macaulay, whose style “resembles low organisations, being a perpetual repetition of similar parts. There are savages,” &c."

"This book, therefore, has already, in the course of three little months, scattered to the winds, and swept finally from the minds of all thinking Englishmen, those lingerings of Jacobite prejudice, which the eloquence and perversions of Hume, and the popular talents of Scott and other writers of fiction, had restored to our literature, and but too much familiarised to our feelings, in the last fifty years. This is a great work, and a great triumph, and ought, I think, so to be hailed and rejoiced in. All convertible men must now be disabused of their prejudices, and all future generations grow up in a light, round which no cloud can again find means to gather."

"[N]o historian of any age has been so prodigal of original and profound reflective suggestion, aye and weighty and authoritative decision also, on innumerable questions of great difficulty and general interest; though these precious contributions are not ostentatiously ticketed and labelled, as separate gifts to mankind, but woven, with far better grace and effect, into the net tissue of the story."

"Matthew Arnold was unjust to Macaulay's style. Its external characteristic, he said, was “a hard metallic movement, with nothing of the soft play of life.” ... But there are other styles more especially adapted to the historical presentation of facts, and to the conduct of argument, not as among intimates, but in the forum. Such styles, as distinguished from the others, may be called objective; and in these we do not look for “the soft play of life.” Gibbon's is such a style; Macaulay's is another. It suited his subjects; it also suited his temperament, which, though imaginatively dreamy, was not reflective, and still less introspective. It is a style, of course, which has its limitations; but it has also its own sphere, its own virtues, its own beauty and grandeur; yes, and its own play of life too—but not that which Matthew Arnold calls a soft play of life."

"[I]t remains true that Macaulay gave a new life and meaning to the historical Essay. He made it a vehicle through which thousands of people, who would never have read history at all, have acquired in a pleasurable way some acquaintance with great characters and events. These essays are probably the best of their kind in Europe. And there can be no doubt that they will live. Only it is much to be desired that, when they are used for purposes of education, students should be warned against the errors which many of them contain. On a higher level than any but the very best of the Essays, stand those five biographies which Macaulay wrote for the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica,’—those of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and the younger Pitt. All these are mature and careful pieces of work, quieter and more restrained in style than the Essays, but hardly less attractive. They show Macaulay as a master of artistic condensation. Taking into account their merits both of matter and of form, we should be safe in affirming that, as a writer of short biographies, Macaulay has not been surpassed, if he has been equalled, by any English writer. The life of the younger Pitt, in particular, calls for unqualified admiration. It was written in the January of 1859, the year of his death; and he never wrote anything better. It is a sample of what he could have done in the History if he had reached that period, and it must enhance our regret that the History remained a fragment."

"It may be granted that Macaulay would have been a still greater historian than he is, if he had possessed more aptitude for speculative thought,—if his mind had been more philosophic; but the fact that he was not a philosopher is no reason for denying that he was, in his own way, a great historian."

"Macaulay's success in making the achievement of the constitutional struggles of the past once more a living possession of every educated Englishman is now rarely remembered."

"Political history indeed has lost much of the power and fascination it had in the nineteenth century; and it is doubtful whether any historical work of our time has had a circulation or direct influence comparable with, say, Macaulay's History of England."

"History, Macaulay believed, should serve politics by teaching politicians and citizens how to maintain a moderate, constitutional regime in which both liberty and order are preserved, each balanced against the other, and neither promoted to the neglect of the other. This meant that the political centre had to be protected by politicians who opposed extremist parties on both sides of the political spectrum, for at the extremes one found doctrinairism, zeal, and fanaticism on behalf of policies that would lead, in one direction, to anarchy, or, in the other, to despotism. The extremes could be diminished and the centre defended, Macauay held, by making adjustments in institutions in response to demands for change, and by making concessions to those who had grievances."

"The justice of the historian surmounted the habits of the politician; he is much more impartial in his history of the reign of William the Third, than in that of James the Second, or above all, than in the summary of those of Charles the First and Charles the Second. He judges the Whigs of 1692 more severely than the Republicans of 1648; and if I am correctly informed, his new-born impartiality won for him from several interested or ardent Whigs, animated reproaches."

"When I personally knew Lord Macaulay, I still more enjoyed my disposition to admire him. The harmony was perfect between the man and the artist, the talker and the writer. Nothing bore a closer resemblance to Lord Macaulay's works than his conversation. There was the same richness and readiness of memory, the same unaffected ardour in the thought, the same vivacity of imagination, the same clearness of language, the same natural and pointed turn in the reflections. There was as much pleasure and almost as much instruction in listening to as in reading him. And when after so many remarkable and charming Essays, he published his great work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, the same qualities developed themselves therein with even increased abundance and effect. I know no history in which the past and the historian who relates it live so intimately or familiarly together."

"Macaulay's History is the best ethical study for forming the mind and character of a young man, for it is replete with maxims of the highest practical value. It holds up in every page to hatred and scorn all the vices which can stain, and to admiration and emulation all the virtues which can adorn, a public career. It is impossible for anyone to study that great work without sentiments of profound admiration for the lessons it inculcates, and they who become thoroughly imbued with its spirit, no matter whether they coincide or not with his opinions, will be strengthened in a profound veneration for truth and justice, for public and private integrity and honour, and in a genuine patriotism and desire for the freedom, prosperity, and glory of their country."

"I must embrace the opportunity of expressing, not what I felt, (for language could not express it,) but of making an attempt to convey to the House my sympathy with it in its admiration of the speech of my honourable and learned friend: a speech which, I will venture to assert, has never been exceeded within these walls for the development of statesmanlike policy and practical good sense. It exhibited all that is noble in oratory; all that is sublime, I had almost said, in poetry; all that is truly great, exalted, and virtuous in human nature. If the House at large felt a deep interest in this magnificent display, it may judge of what were my emotions when I perceived in the hands of my honourable friend the great principles which he expounded glowing with fresh colours, and arrayed in all the beauty of truth."

"His style...was one of those gifts of which, when it had been conferred, Nature broke the mould... It is paramount in the union of ease in movement with perspicuity of matter, of both with real splendour, and of all with immense rapidity and striking force. From any other pen, such masses of ornament would be tawdry; with him they are only rich... In none, perhaps, of our prose writers are lessons such as he gives of truth and beauty, of virtue and of freedom, so vividly associated with delight."

"However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more consummate workman in the manner than in the matter of his works, we do not doubt that the works contain, in multitudes, passages of high emotion and ennobling sentiment, just awards of praise and blame, and solid expositions of principle, social, moral, and constitutional. They are pervaded by a generous love of liberty; and their atmosphere is pure and bracing, their general aim and basis morally sound."

"Macaulay once remarked that if the law of gravity were unfavorable to any substantial financial interest, there would soon be no lack of arguments against it."

"I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm ."

"The speeches made by Mr. Macaulay on the spur of the moment...are generally, when thus the spontaneous product of the moment, most able and vigorous arguments on the subject under discussion, which is, in most cases, placed in an entirely new light. After he has spoken on such occasions as these, the debate usually takes a new turn. Members on both sides of the House, and of all ranks, are to be found shaping their remarks, either in confirmation or refutation of what Mr. Macaulay has said; so influential is his bold, vigorous, uncompromising mode of handling a question; so acute his analysis; so firm his grasp."

"The intellectual expression of Macaulay's countenance was magnificent—never on a nobler forehead, piled up with sagacity & depth. He was a splendid orator; a writer of the first class, both in originality of treatment & power of expression; his learning was very extensive & very various. No man ever had a memory at the same time so prodigious, & so cultivated."

"If, as criticism in the 1970s suggests, condescending treatments of Macaulay are no longer fashionable, he may be seen to rank among the greatest English prose writers, with Addison and Johnson, the subjects of two of his finest essays."

"What Macaulay did was to infuse the liberal creed with the spacious and sanguine spirit of humanism and history."

"But above all, he typified the two things that really make the Victorian Age itself; the cheapness and narrowness of its conscious formulae; the richness and humanity of its unconscious tradition."

"The real villains of Macaulay's piece are the extremists of right and left, those on the right who refused to accept the Revolutionary Settlement, and those on the left who would go so far toward Dissent, latitudinarianism, restricted monarchy, and even republicanism as to jeopardize the Revolutionary Settlement. The villains of the right are the Nonjurors and the Jacobites, open and secret... And as so often happens in politics, left and right frequently worked together in common opposition to the center—in this case the Revolutionary center—and this was a fact Macaulay never forgot. Macaulay's History, then, becomes a classic defense of the middle of the road. Make progress, as much as practicable, within the framework of the Revolutionary Settlement, but never do anything to jeopardize that Settlement."

"[T]here is no denying that Macaulay's historical sympathies were strongly enlisted in support of limited and constitutional government, parliamentary and cabinet government, the extension of civil liberties, the expansion of religious toleration, the broadening of intellectual freedom, the curbing of mercantilistic restrictions, the elimination of trading barriers, the widening of free trade. Since the rising middle class was an exponent of many of these policies, Macaulay in a sense may be said to be an apologist of that class. And since the Whig party was frequently an advocate of many of these policies, Macaulay, in his role of historian, often appears friendly to that party. But this is about as far as Macaulay went in writing from the Whig point of view."

"Macaulay's so-called Whig prejudices, so far as they influence his historical judgments, are greatly exaggerated. The Whigs actually come off worse than one has been led to expect, and conversely the Tories come off better. The Revolution of 1688 and the Revolutionary Settlement, not the Whigs, are the central themes of the History. Macaulay is an apologist for the Revolution, and it is well to remember that both Tories and Whigs made that Revolution possible. To preserve the Revolution required a nice and constant moderation, and with this in view, Macaulay becomes a defender of the middle-roaders, the trimmers, whose cautious policies protected the Revolution and made impossible a counter-revolution. If there is extreme partisanship in Macaulay, it is the partisanship of English nationalism, not of Whiggery."

"He can, in fact, be seen as in many ways the last great neoclassical historian, writing history after a successful public career. His own culture was above all classical, broadened by a love of eighteenth-century novels and drama, as well as by his reading of Burke, whom he revered, and Scott. Where he was exceptional was not in being a social historian, which he certainly was not, but in the emotional range and depth, the almost pictorial vividness and concreteness, and the dramatic intensity of his historical writing. None of this was exactly new — it was foreshadowed in Robertson and Hume — but in no other historian was it so copiously and even extravagantly displayed. His own model historians were Tacitus and Thucydides."

"During these visits to Cambridge, I became acquainted with Macaulay. I remember well walking with him, Praed, Ord and some others of the set, along the College Gardens, listening with wonder to that full and opulent converse, startled by knowledge so various, memory so prodigious. That walk left me in a fever of emulation. I shut myself up for many days in intense study, striving to grasp at an equal knowledge: the trophies of Miltiades would not suffer me to sleep."

"[T]he greatest display of eloquence I ever witnessed at the Club was made by a man some years our senior, and who twice came up during my residence to grace our debates—the now renowned Macaulay. The first of these speeches was on the French Revolution, and it still lingers in my recollection as the most heart-stirring effort of that true oratory which seizes hold of the passions, transports you from yourself, and identifies you with the very life of the orator, that it has ever been my lot to hear, saving, perhaps, one speech by O'Connell, delivered to an immense crowd in the open air. Macaulay, in point of power, passion, and effect, never equalled that speech in his best day in the House of Commons. His second speech, upon the Liberty of the Press, if I remember rightly, was a failure."

"On several subjects I should venture to differ from Mr. Macaulay; but I cannot refrain from expressing my admiration of his unwearied diligence, of the consummate skill with which he has arranged his materials, and of the noble love of liberty which animates his entire work. These are qualities which will long survive the aspersions of his puny detractors,—men who, in point of knowledge and ability, are unworthy to loosen the shoe-latchet of him they foolishly attack."

"Mr. Macaulay's Erastian support of State Churches, his calm toleration of Dissent in its various forms, down to the zero of belief, and worst of all, his toleration of Popery, were from the first against him in earnest Edinburgh. He had a provoking lack, also, of that accommodating pliability which enables many candidates for parliamentary honours to pledge, or appear to pledge, themselves to anything that seems popular. He was too well informed and fixed in principles to be unprepared or indefinite on any question of importance. He was too honest to conceal any of his opinions, or to abstain from arguing in support of them, instead of listening deferentially to objections, and cautiously saying that he would give them his best consideration. He had no electioneering tact, no political diplomacy, but argued and acted as if all men were as free from prejudice and open to conviction as he was himself."

"The immense popularity of Macaulay is due to his being pre-eminently fitted to give pleasure to all who are beginning to feel enjoyment in the things of the mind."

"“Explain yourself,” said I; “why do you call Mr. Hepworth Dixon's style middle-class Macaulayese?” “I call it Macaulayese,” says the pedant, “because it has the same internal and external characteristics as Macaulay's style; the external characteristic being a hard metallic movement with nothing of the soft play of life, and the internal characteristic being a perpetual semblance of hitting the right nail on the head without the reality. And I call it middle-class Macaulayese, because it has these faults without the compensation of great studies and of conversance with great affairs, by which Macaulay partly redeemed them.”"

"I finished the Iliad to-day... I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a bypath, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead two thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Caesar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings Anno Domini 4551!"

"It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science—the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter—should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900."

"But Coraggio – and think of A.D. 2850. Where will your Carlyles and Emersons be then? But Herodotus will still be read with delight. We must do our best to be read too."

"On the left side goes Remus, With wrists and fingers red, And in his hand a boar-spear, And on the point a head— A wrinkled head and aged, With silver beard and hair, And holy fillets round it, Such as the pontiffs wear— The head of ancient Camers, Who spake the words of doom: "The children to the Tiber; The mother to the tomb.""

"Let no man stop to plunder, But slay, and slay, and slay; The gods who live forever Are on our side to-day."

"From where the Witch's fortress O'er hangs the dark-blue seas; From the still glassy lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia's trees— Those trees in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain."

"These be the great Twin Brethren To whom the Dorians pray."

"Gay are the Martian Kalends, December's Nones are gay, But the proud Ides, when the squadron rides, Shall be Rome's whitest day."

"When the goodman mends his armor, And trims his helmet's plume; When the goodwife's shuttle merrily Goes flashing through the loom; With weeping and with laughter Still is the story told, How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old."

"No sound of joy or sorrow Was heard from either bank; But friends and foes in dumb surprise, With parted lips and straining eyes, Stood gazing where he sank; And when above the surges, They saw his crest appear, All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry, And even the ranks of Tuscany Could scarce forbear to cheer."

""Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber! To whom the Romans pray, A Roman's life, a Roman's arms, Take thou in charge this day!" So he spake, and speaking sheathed The good sword by his side, And with his harness on his back, Plunged headlong in the tide."

"Was none who would be foremost To lead such dire attack; But those behind cried, "Forward!" And those before cried, "Back!""