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

Parliament adjourned over Christmas; and on the 1st of March 1831

Lord John Russell introduced the Reform Bill amidst breathless silence, which was at length broken by peals of contemptuous laughter from the Opposition benches, as he read the list of the hundred and ten boroughs which were condemned to partial or entire disfranchisement. Sir Robert Inglis led the attack upon a measure that he characterised as Revolution in the guise of a statute. Next morning as Sir Robert was walking into town over Westminster Bridge, he told his companion that up to the previous night he had been very anxious, but that his fears were now at an end, inasmuch as the shock caused by the extravagance of the ministerial proposals would infallibly bring the country to its senses. On the evening of that day Macaulay made the first of his Reform speeches. When he sat down the Speaker sent for him, and told him that in all his prolonged experience he had never seen the House in such a state of excitement. Even at this distance of time it is impossible to read aloud the last thirty sentences without an emotion which suggests to the mind what must have been their effect when declaimed by one who felt every word that he spoke, in the midst of an assembly agitated by hopes and apprehensions such as living men have never known, or have long forgotten. [“The question of Parliamentary Reform is still behind. But signs, of which it is impossible to misconceive the import, do most clearly indicate that, unless that question also be speedily settled, property, and order, and all the institutions of this great monarchy, will he exposed to fearful peril. Is it possible that gentlemen long versed in high political affairs cannot read these signs? Is it possible that they can really believe that the Representative system of England, such as it now is, will last to the year 1860? If not, for what would they have us wait? Would they have us wait, merely that we may show to all the world how little we have profited by our own recent experience? Would they have us wait, that we may once again hit the exact point where we can neither refuse with authority, nor concede with grace? Would they have us wait, that the numbers of the discontented party may become larger, its demands higher, its feelings more acrimonious, its organisation more complete? Would they have us wait till the whole tragicomedy of 1827 has been acted over again? till they have been brought into office by a cry of ‘No Reform,’ to be reformers, as they were once before brought into office by a cry of ‘No Popery’, to be emancipators? Have they obliterated from their minds—gladly, perhaps, would some among them obliterate from their minds—the transactions of that year? And have they forgotten all the transactions of the succeeding year? Have they forgotten how the spirit of liberty in Ireland, debarred from its natural outlet, found a vent by forbidden passages? Have they forgotten how we were forced to indulge the Catholics in all the license of rebels, merely because we chose to withhold from them the liberties of subjects? Do they wait for associations more formidable than that of the Corn Exchange, for contributions larger than the Rent, for agitators more violent than those who, three years ago, divided with the King and the Parliament the sovereignty of Ireland? Do they wait for that last and most dreadful paroxysm of popular rage, for that last and most cruel test of military fidelity? Let them wait, if their past experience shall induce them to think that any high honour or any exquisite pleasure is to be obtained by a policy like this. Let them wait, if this strange and fearful infatuation be indeed upon them, that they should not see with their eyes, or hear with their ears, or understand with their heart. But let us know our interest and our duty better. Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve. Now, therefore, while everything at home and abroad forebodes ruin to those who persist in a hopeless struggle against the spirit of the age, now, while the crash of the proudest throne of the Continent is still resounding in our ears, now, while the roof of a British palace affords an ignominious shelter to the exiled heir of forty kings, now, while we see on every side ancient institutions subverted, and great societies dissolved, now, while the heart of England is still sound, now, while old feelings and old associations retain a power and a charm which may too soon pass away, now, in this your accepted time, now, in this your day of salvation, take counsel, not of prejudice, not of party spirit, not of the ignominious pride of a fatal consistency, but of history, of reason, of the ages which are past, of the signs of this most portentous time. Pronounce in a manner worthy of the expectation with which this great debate has been anticipated, and of the long remembrance which it will leave behind. Renew the youth of the State. Save property, divided against itself. Save the multitude, endangered by its own ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular power. Save the greatest, the fairest, and most highly civilised community that ever existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage of so many ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is terrible. The time is short. If this bill should he rejected, I pray to God that none of those who concur in rejecting it may ever remember their votes with unavailing remorse, amidst the wreck of laws, the confusion of ranks, the spoliation of property, and the dissolution of social order.”] Sir Thomas Denman, who rose later on in the discussion, said, with universal acceptance, that the orator’s words remained tingling in the ears of all who heard them, and would last in their memories as long as they had memories to employ. That sense of proprietorship in an effort of genius, which the House of Commons is ever ready to entertain, effaced for a while all distinctions of party. “Portions of the speech,” said Sir Robert Peel, “were as beautiful as anything I have ever heard or read. It reminded one of the old times.” The names of Fox, Burke, and Canning were during that evening in everybody’s mouth; and Macaulay overheard with delight a knot of old members illustrating their criticisms by recollections of Lord Plunket. He had reason to be pleased; for he had been thought worthy of the compliment which the judgment of Parliament reserves for a supreme occasion. In 1866, on the second reading of the Franchise Bill, when the crowning oration of that memorable debate had come to its close amidst a tempest of applause, one or two veterans of the lobby, forgetting Macaulay on Reform,—forgetting, it may be, Mr. Gladstone himself on the Conservative Budget of 1852,—pronounced, amidst the willing assent of a younger generation, that there had been nothing like it since Plunket.

The unequivocal success of the first speech into which he had thrown his full power decided for some time to come the tenor of Macaulay’s career. During the next three years he devoted himself to Parliament, rivalling Stanley in debate, and Hume in the regularity of his attendance. He entered with zest into the animated and manysided life of the House of Commons, of which so few traces can ordinarily be detected in what goes by the name of political literature. The biographers of a distinguished statesman too often seem to have forgotten that the subject of their labours passed the best part of his waking hours, during the half of every year, in a society of a special and deeply marked character, the leading traits of which are at least as well worth recording as the fashionable or diplomatic gossip that fills so many volumes of memoirs and correspondence. Macaulay’s letters sufficiently indicate how thoroughly he enjoyed the ease, the freedom, the hearty good-fellowship, that reign within the precincts of our national senate; and how entirely he recognised that spirit of noble equality, so prevalent among its members, which takes little or no account of wealth, or title, or indeed of reputation won in other fields, but which ranks a man according as the value of his words, and the weight of his influence, bear the test of a standard which is essentially its own.

In February 1831 he writes to Whewell: “I am impatient for Praed’s debut. The House of Commons is a place in which I would not promise success to any man. I have great doubts even about Jeffrey. It is the most peculiar audience in the world. I should say that a man’s being a good writer, a good orator at the bar, a good mob-orator, or a good orator in debating clubs, was rather a reason for expecting him to fail than for expecting him to succeed in the House of Commons. A place where Walpole succeeded and Addison failed; where Dundas succeeded and Burke failed; where Peel now succeeds and where Mackintosh fails; where Erskine and Scarlett were dinner-bells; where Lawrence and Jekyll, the two wittiest men, or nearly so, of their time, were thought bores, is surely a very strange place. And yet I feel the whole character of the place growing upon me. I begin to like what others about me like, and to disapprove what they disapprove.

Canning used to say that the House, as a body, had better taste than the man of best taste in it, and I am very much inclined to think that Canning was right.”

The readers of Macaulay’s letters will, from time to time, find reason to wish that the young Whig of 1830 had more frequently practised that studied respect for political opponents, which now does so much to correct the intolerance of party among men who can be adversaries without ceasing to regard each other as colleagues. But this honourable sentiment was the growth of later days; and, at an epoch when the system of the past and the system of the future were night after night in deadly wrestle on the floor of St. Stephen’s, the combatants were apt to keep their kindliness, and even their courtesies, for those with whom they stood shoulder to shoulder in the fray. Politicians, Conservative and Liberal alike, who were themselves young during the Sessions of 1866 and 1867, and who can recall the sensations evoked by a contest of which the issues were far less grave and the passions less strong than of yore, will make allowances for one who, with the imagination of a poet and the temperament of an orator, at thirty years old was sent straight into the thickest of the tumult which then raged round the standard of Reform, and will excuse him for having borne himself in that battle of giants as a determined and a fiery partisan.

If to live intensely be to live happily, Macaulay had an enviable lot during those stirring years; and, if the old songwriters had reason on their side when they celebrated the charms of