Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, vol 1 by George Otto Trevelyan (reading the story of the TXT) 📕

July 9, 1823.

My dear Father,—I have seen the two last letters which you have sent to my mother. They have given me deep pain; but pain without remorse. I am conscious of no misconduct, and whatever uneasiness I may feel arises solely from sympathy for your distress.

You seem to imagine that the book is edited, or principally written, by friends of mine. I thought that you had been aware that the work is conducted in London, and that my friends and myself are merely contributors, and form a very small proportion of the contributors. The manners of almost all of my acquaintances are so utterly alien from coarseness, and their morals from libertinism, that I feel assured that no objection of that nature can exist to their writings. As to my own contributions I can only say that the Roman Story was read to my mother before it was published, and would have been read to you if you had happened to be at home. Not one syllable of censure was uttered.

The Essay on the Royal Society of Literature was read to you. I made the alterations which I conceived that you desired, and submitted them afterwards to my mother. As to the poetry which you parallel with Little’s, if anything vulgar or licentious has been written by myself, I am willing to bear the consequences. If anything of that cast has been written by my friends, I allow that a certain degree of blame attaches to me for having chosen them at least indiscreetly. If, however, a bookseller of whom we knew nothing has coupled improper productions with ours in a work over which we had no control, I cannot plead guilty to anything more than misfortune; a misfortune in which some of the most rigidly moral and religious men of my acquaintance have participated in the present instance.

I am pleading at random for a book which I never saw. I am defending the works of people most of whose names I never heard.

I am therefore writing under great disadvantages. I write also in great haste. I am unable even to read over what I have written.

Affectionately yours

T. B. M.

Moved by the father’s evident unhappiness, the son promised never to write again for the obnoxious periodical. The second number was so dull and decorous that Zachary Macaulay, who felt that, if the magazine went on through successive quarters reforming its tone in the same proportion, it would soon be on a level of virtue with the Christian Observer, withdrew his objection; and the young man wrote regularly till the short life of the undertaking ended in something very like a quarrel between the publisher and his contributors. It is not the province of biography to dilate upon works which are already before the world; and the results of Macaulay’s literary labour during the years 1823 and 1824 have been, perhaps, only too freely reproduced in the volumes which contain his miscellaneous writings. It is, however, worthy of notice that among his earlier efforts in literature his own decided favourite was “the Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton touching the great Civil War.” But an author, who is exempt from vanity, is inclined to rate his own works rather according as they are free from faults than as they abound in beauties; and Macaulay’s readers will very generally give the preference to two fragmentary sketches of Roman and Athenian society which sparkle with life, and humour, and a masculine vigorous fancy that had not yet learned to obey the rein. Their crude but genuine merit suggests a regret that he did not in after days enrich the Edinburgh Review with a couple of articles on classical subjects, as a sample of that ripened scholarship which produced the Prophecy of Capys, and the episode relating to the Phalaris controversy in the Essay on Sir William Temple.

Rothley Temple: October 7, 1824.

My dear Father,—As to Knight’s Magazine, I really do not think that, considering the circumstances under which it is conducted, it can be much censured. Every magazine must contain a certain quantity of mere ballast, of no value but as it occupies space.

The general tone and spirit of the work will stand a comparison, in a moral point of view, with any periodical publication not professedly religious. I will venture to say that nothing has appeared in it, at least since the first number, from the pen of any of my friends, which can offend the most fastidious. Knight is absolutely in our hands, and most desirous to gratify us all, and me in particular. When I see you in London I will mention to you a piece of secret history which will show you how important our connection with this work may possibly become.

Yours affectionately

T. B. M.

The “piece of secret history” above referred to was beyond a doubt the commencement of Macaulay’s connection with the Edinburgh Review. That famous periodical, which for three and twenty years had shared in and promoted the rising fortunes of the Liberal cause, had now attained its height—a height unequalled before or since—of political, social, and literary power. To have the entry of its columns was to command the most direct channel for the spread of opinions, and the shortest road to influence and celebrity. But already the anxious eye of the master seemed to discern symptoms of decline. Jeffrey, in Lord Cockburn’s phrase, was “growing feverish about new writers.” In January 1825 he says in a letter to a friend in London: “Can you not lay your hands on some clever young man who would write for us? The original supporters of the work are getting old, and either too busy or too stupid, and here the young men are mostly Tories.” Overtures had already been made to Macaulay, and that same year his article on Milton appeared in the August number.

The effect on the author’s reputation was instantaneous. Like Lord Byron, he awoke one morning and found himself famous. The beauties of the work were such as all men could recognise, and its very faults pleased. The redundance of youthful enthusiasm, which he himself unsparingly condemns in the preface to his collected essays, seemed graceful enough in the eyes of others, if it were only as a relief from the perverted ability of that elaborate libel on our great epic poet which goes by the name of Dr. Johnson’s Life of Milton. Murray declared that it would be worth the copyright of Childe Harold to have Macaulay on the staff of the Quarterly. The family breakfast table in Bloomsbury was covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter of London, and his father groaned in spirit over the conviction that thenceforward the law would be less to him than ever. A warm admirer of Robert Hall, Macaulay heard with pride how the great preacher, then wellnigh worn out with that long disease, his life, was discovered lying on the floor, employed in learning by aid of grammar and dictionary enough Italian to enable him to verify the parallel between Milton and Dante. But the compliment that of all others came most nearly home,—the only commendation of his literary talent which even in the innermost domestic circle he was ever known to repeat,—was the sentence with which Jeffrey acknowledged the receipt of his manuscript: “The more I think, the less I can conceive where you picked up that style.”

Macaulay’s outward man was never better described than in two sentences of Praed’s Introduction to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine.

“There came up a short manly figure, marvellously upright, with a bad neckcloth, and one hand in his waistcoat pocket. [“I well remember,” writes Sir William Stirling Maxwell, “the first time I met him,—in 1845 or ‘46, I think,—at dinner at the house of his old friend, Sir John Macleod. I did not know him by sight, and, when he came into the room with two or three other guests, I supposed that he was announced as General—I forget what. The party was large, and I was on the other side of the table, and a good way off, and I was very soon struck by the amazing number of subjects on which he seemed at home;—politics, home and foreign,—French literature, and Hebrew poetry;—and I remember thinking, ‘This is a General with a singularly well-stored mind and badly tied neckcloth.’ Till, at last, a remark on the prose of Dryden led me to conclude that it could be no one but the Great Essayist.”] Of regular beauty he had little to boast; but in faces where there is an expression of great power, or of great good humour, or both, you do not regret its absence.” This picture, in which every touch is correct, tells all that there is to be told. He had a massive head, and features of a powerful and rugged cast, but so constantly lit up by every joyful and ennobling emotion that it mattered little if, when absolutely quiescent, his face was rather homely than handsome. While conversing at table no one thought him otherwise than good-looking; but, when he rose, he was seen to be short and stout in figure. “At Holland House, the other day,” writes his sister Margaret in September 1831, “Tom met Lady Lyndhurst for the first time. She said to him: ‘Mr. Macaulay, you are so different to what I expected. I thought you were dark and thin, but you are fair, and really, Mr. Macaulay, you are fat.”’ He at all times sat and stood straight, full, and square; and in this respect Woolner, in the fine statue at Cambridge, has missed what was undoubtedly the most marked fact in his personal appearance.

He dressed badly, but not cheaply. His clothes, though ill put on, were good, and his wardrobe was always enormously overstocked.

Later in life he indulged himself in an apparently inexhaustible succession of handsome embroidered waistcoats, which he used to regard with much complacency. He was unhandy to a degree quite unexampled in the experience of all who knew him. When in the open air he wore perfectly new dark kid gloves, into the fingers of which he never succeeded in inserting his own more than half way.

After be had sailed for India there were found in his chambers between fifty and sixty strops, hacked into strips and splinters, and razors without beginning or end. About the same period he hurt his hand, and was reduced to send for a barber. After the operation, he asked what was to pay. “Oh, Sir,” said the man, “whatever you usually give the person who shaves you.” “In that case,” said Macaulay, “I should give you a great gash on each cheek.”

During an epoch when, at our principal seats of education, athletic pursuits are regarded as a leading object of existence rather than as a means of health and recreation, it requires some boldness to confess that Macaulay was utterly destitute of bodily accomplishments, and that he viewed his deficiencies with supreme indifference. He could neither swim, nor row, nor drive, nor skate, nor shoot. He seldom crossed a saddle, and never willingly. When in attendance at Windsor as a cabinet minister he was informed that a horse was at his disposal. “If her Majesty wishes to see me ride,” he said, “she must order out an elephant.” The only exercise in which he can be said to have excelled was that of threading crowded streets with his eyes fixed upon a book. He might be seen in such thoroughfares as Oxford Street, and Cheapside, walking as fast as other people walked, and reading a great deal faster than anybody else could read. As a pedestrian he was, indeed, above the average. Till he had passed fifty he thought nothing of going on foot from the