Kitabı oku: «A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (1780-1895)», sayfa 16
Sir Francis Palgrave, another historian to whom the student of early English history is deeply indebted, was born in London in 1788, his paternal name being Cohen. He took to the law, and early devoted himself both within and outside his profession to genealogical and antiquarian research. Before much attention had been paid in France itself to Old French, he published a collection of Anglo-Norman poems in 1818, and from these studies he passed to that of English history as such. He was knighted in 1832, and made Deputy-Keeper of the Records in 1838; his tenure of this post being only terminated by his death in 1861. Palgrave edited many State documents (writs, calendars, rolls, and so forth), and in his last years executed a History of Normandy and England of great value. His considerable literary power became more considerable still in two of his sons: the eldest, for some time past Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, being still alive, and therefore merely to be mentioned; while the second, William Gifford, who was born in 1826 and died in 1888, Minister at Monte Video, was a man of the most brilliant talents and the most varied career. He was a soldier, a Jesuit, a traveller in the most forbidden parts of Arabia at the expense of a foreign country, and for nearly a quarter of a century a member of the consular and diplomatic service of his own. His Narrative of his Arabian journey, his Dutch Guiana, and some remarkable poems are only a few of his works, all of which have strong character.
Nearly contemporary with these was Dr. Thomas M'Crie (1772-1835), whose Lives of Knox (1812) and Melville (1819) entitle him to something like the title of Historian of Scotch Presbyterianism in its militant period. M'Crie, who was styled by Hallam (a person not given to nicknames), "the Protestant Hildebrand," was a worthy and learned man of untiring industry, and his subjects so intimately concern not merely Scottish but British history for nearly two centuries, that his handling of them could not but be important. But he was desperately prejudiced, and his furious attack on Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, by which he is perhaps known to more persons than by his own far from uninteresting works, argues a crass deficiency in intellectual and æsthetic comprehension.
The tenth decade of the eighteenth century was as much a decade of historians as the eighth had been a decade of poets; and with Milman and Tytler born in 1791, Alison in 1792, Grote in 1794, Arnold and Carlyle in 1795, Thirlwall in 1797, and Macaulay in 1800, it may probably challenge comparison with any period of equal length. The batch falls into three pretty distinct classes, and the individual members of it are also pretty widely separated in importance, so that it may be more convenient to discuss them in the inverse order of their merit rather than in the direct order of their births.
Patrick Fraser Tytler, son and grandson of historians (his grandfather William being the first and not the worst champion of Queen Mary against the somewhat Philistine estimates of Hume and Robertson, and his father Alexander a Professor of History, a Scotch Judge, and an excellent writer in various kinds of belles lettres), was a man of the finest character, the friend of most of the great men of letters at Edinburgh in the age of Scott and Jeffrey, and the author of an excellent History of Scotland from Alexander the Third to the Union of the Crowns. He was born in 1791, was called to the Scotch Bar in 1813, and died young for a historian (a class which has so much to do with Time that he is apt to be merciful to it) in 1849. He was perhaps hardly a man of genius, but he commanded universal respect. Sir Archibald Alison was the son of a clergyman of the same name, who, after taking orders in England and holding some benefices there, became known as the author of Essays on the Principles of Taste, which possess a good deal of formal and some real merit. Archibald the younger was highly distinguished at the University of Edinburgh, was called to the Scotch Bar, and distinguished himself there also, being ultimately appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire. Like most of the brighter wits among his immediate contemporaries in Scotland (we have the indisputable testimony of Jeffrey to the fact) Alison was an out-and-out Tory, and a constant contributor to Blackwood, while his literary activity took very numerous shapes. At last he began, and in the twenty years from 1839 to 1859 carried through, a History of Europe during the French Revolution, completed by one of Europe from the Fall of the First to the Accession of the Third Napoleon. He died in 1867. It was rather unfortunate for Alison that he did not undertake this great work until the period of Liberal triumph which marked the middle decades of the century had well set in. It was still more unlucky, and it could less be set down to the operations of unkind chance, that in many of the qualifications of the writer in general, and the historical writer in particular, he was deficient. He had energy and industry; he was much less inaccurate than it was long the fashion to represent him; a high sense of patriotism and the political virtues generally, a very fair faculty of judging evidence, and a thorough interest in his subject were his. But his book was most unfortunately diffuse, earning its author the sobriquet of "Mr. Wordy," and it was conspicuously lacking in grasp, both in the marshalling of events and in the depicting of characters. Critics, even when they sympathised, have never liked it; but contrary to the wont of very lengthy histories, it found considerable favour with the public, who, as the French gibe has it, were not "hampered by the style," and who probably found in the popular explanation of a great series of important and interesting affairs all that they cared for. Nor is it unlikely that this popularity rather exaggerated the ill-will of the critics themselves. Alison is not quotable; he is, even after youth, read with no small difficulty; but it would be no bad thing if other periods of history had been treated in his manner and spirit.
Henry Hart Milman belongs to very much the same class of historian as Hallam, but unlike Hallam he was a poet, and, though a Broad Churchman of the days before the nickname was given, more of an adherent to the imaginative and traditional side of things. His father was a King's Physician, and he was educated at Eton and Brasenose. He obtained the Newdigate, and after bringing out his best play Fazio (of which more will be said later), took orders and received the vicarage of St. Mary's, Reading. Some poems of merit in the second class, including some hymns very nearly in the first, followed, and in 1821 he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, where six years later he was Bampton Lecturer. It was in 1829 that Milman, who had been a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review, began the series of his works on ecclesiastical history with the History of the Jews, the weakest of them (for Milman was not a very great Hebraist, and while endeavouring to avoid rigid orthodoxy did not satisfy the demands of the newer heterodox criticism). The History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism was better (1840), and the History of Latin Christianity (1854) better still. This last indeed, based on an erudition which enabled Milman to re-edit Gibbon with advantage, is a great book, and will probably live. For Milman here really knew; he had (like most poets who write prose with fair practice) an excellent style; and he was able – as many men who have had knowledge have not been able, and as many who have had style have not tried or have failed to do – to rise to the height of a really great argument, and treat it with the grasp and ease which are the soul of history. That he owed much to Gibbon himself is certain; that he did not fail to use his pupilage to that greatest of historians so as to rank among the best of his followers is not less certain, and is high enough praise for any man. He received the Deanery of St. Paul's in 1849, and held it till his death in 1868, having worthily sustained the glory of this the most literary of all great preferments in the Church of England by tradition, and having earned among English ecclesiastical historians a place like that of Napier among their military comrades.
Hallam and Milman were both, as has been said, Oxford men, and the unmistakable impress of that University was on both, though less on Hallam than on Milman. It is all the more interesting that their chief historical contemporaries of the same class were, the one a Cambridge man, and one of the most distinguished, the other not a University man at all. Both Grote and Thirlwall, as it happens, were educated at the same public school, Charterhouse. George Grote, the elder of them, born in 1794, was the son of a banker, and himself carried on that business for many years of his life. He was an extreme Liberal, or as it then began to be called, Radical, and a chief of the Philosophical Radicals of his time – persons who followed Bentham and the elder Mill. He was elected member for the City in the first Reform Parliament and held the seat for nine years; though if he had not retired he would probably have been turned out. Leaving Parliament in 1841, he left business two years later, and gave himself up to his History of Greece, which was published in the ten years between 1846 and 1856. He died in 1871, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. So was, four years later, his school-fellow, fellow-historian of Greece, and junior by three years, Connop Thirlwall. Thirlwall was one of the rare examples of extraordinary infant precocity (he could read Latin at three and Greek at four) who have been great scholars and men of distinction in after life, and to a ripe age. He was of a Northumbrian family, but was born at Stepney. From Charterhouse he went rather early (in 1814) to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he had almost the most brilliant undergraduate career on record, and duly gained his fellowship. He entered Lincoln's Inn, was actually called to the Bar, but preferred the Church, and took orders in his thirtieth year. He had already shown a strong leaning to theology, and had translated Schleiermacher. He now returned to Cambridge, taking both tutorial work and cure of souls; but in 1834 his Liberal views attracted the disfavour of Christopher Wordsworth, Master of Trinity, and Thirlwall, resigning his tutorship, was consoled by Brougham with a Yorkshire living. Nor was this long his only preferment, for the Whigs were not too well off for clergymen who united scholarship, character, and piety, and he was made Bishop of St. David's in 1840. He held the see for thirty-four years, working untiringly, earning justly (though his orthodoxy was of a somewhat Broad character, and he could reconcile his conscience to voting for the disestablishment of the Irish Church) the character of one of the most exemplary bishops of the century, and seldom dining without a cat on his shoulder.
Thirlwall wrote many Charges, some of them famous, some delightful letters, part of a translation of Niebuhr, and some essays, while Grote, besides his historical work, produced some political and other work before it, with a large but not very good book on Plato, and the beginning of another on Aristotle after it. But it is by their Histories of Greece that they must live in literature. These histories (of which Grote's was planned and begun as early as 1823, though not completed till long afterwards, while Thirlwall's began to appear in 1835, and was finished just after Grote's saw the light) were both written with a certain general similarity of point of view as antidotes to Mitford, and as putting the Liberal view of the ever memorable and ever typical history of the Greek states. But in other respects they diverge widely; and it has been a constant source of regret to scholars that the more popular, and as the French would say tapageur, of the two, to a considerable extent eclipsed the solid worth and the excellent form of Thirlwall. Grote's history displays immense painstaking and no inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very nearly as much a "party pamphlet" as Macaulay's own, the advocate's client being in this case not merely the Athenian democracy but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet it to a great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes the subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books into theses of eager and stimulating interest. But it has absolutely no style; its scale is much too great; the endless discussions and arguments on quite minor points tend to throw the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student's eye and mind to impartial and judicial handling; and the reader constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, even for the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead of the perpetual singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.
It is possible, on the other hand, that Thirlwall may have sacrificed a little too much, considering his age and its demands, to mere dispassionate dignity. He is seldom picturesque, and indeed he never tries to be so. But to a scholarship naturally far superior to Grote's, he united a much fairer and more judicial mind, and the faculty of writing – instead of loose stuff not exactly ungrammatical nor always uncomely, but entirely devoid of any grace of style – an excellent kind of classical English, but slightly changed from the best eighteenth century models. And he had what Grote lacked, the gift of seeing that the historian need not – nay, that he ought not to – parade every detail of the arguments by which he has reached his conclusions; but should state those conclusions themselves, reserving himself for occasional emergencies in which process as well as result may be properly exhibited. It is fair to say, in putting this curious pair forward as examples respectively of the popular and scholarly methods of historical writing, that Grote's learning and industry were very much more than popular, while Thirlwall's sense and style might with advantage have put on, now and then, a little more pomp and circumstance. But still the contrast holds; and until fresh discoveries like that of the Athenian Polity accumulate to an extent which calls for and obtains a new real historian of Greece, it is Thirlwall and not Grote who deserves the first rank as such in English.
Intimately connected with all these historians in time and style, but having over them the temporary advantage of being famous in another way, and the, as some think, permanent disadvantage of falling prematurely out of public favour, was Thomas Arnold. He was born at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on 13th June 1795, and was educated at Winchester and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the age of twenty he was elected a fellow of Oriel – a distinction which was, and remained for two decades, almost the highest in the University – and he gained both Chancellor's Essay prizes, for Latin and English. Oriel was not in his time, as it was very shortly afterwards, a centre of ecclesiastical orthodoxy; but rather the home of a curious transition blend of thought which in different persons took the high-and-dry or the Rationalist direction, and was only generally opposed to Evangelicalism. Arnold himself inclined to the Liberal side, and had also strong personal gifts for teaching. He took orders, but neither became a tutor nor took a living, and established himself at Laleham, on the Thames, to take private pupils. After ten years' practice here he was elected to the Head-mastership of Rugby, a school then, after vicissitudes, holding little if anything more than a medium place among those English Grammar Schools which ranked below the great schools of Eton, Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, and Charterhouse. How he succeeded in placing it on something like an equality with these, and how on the other hand he became, as it were, the apostle of the infant Broad Church School which held aloof alike from Evangelicals and Tractarians, are points which do not directly concern us. His more than indirect influence on literature was great; for few schools have contributed to it, in the same time, a greater number of famous writers than Rugby did under his head-mastership. His direct connection with it was limited to a fair number of miscellaneous works, many sermons, an edition of Thucydides, and a History of Rome which did not proceed (owing to his death in 1842, just after he had been appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford) beyond the Second Punic War. Arnold, once perhaps injudiciously extolled by adoring pupils, and the defender of a theory of churchmanship which strains rather to the uttermost the principle of unorthodox economy, has rather sunk between the undying disapproval of the orthodox and the fact that the unorthodox have long left his standpoint. But his style is undoubtedly of its own kind scholarly and excellent; the matter of his history suffers from the common fault of taking Niebuhr at too high a valuation.
Thomas Babington Macaulay (who may be conveniently discussed before Carlyle, though he was Carlyle's junior by five years, inasmuch as, even putting relative critical estimate aside, he died much earlier and represented on the whole an older style of thought) was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25th October 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, though a very active agitator against the Slave Trade, was a strong Tory; and the son's conversion to Whig opinions was effected at some not clearly ascertained period after he had reached manhood. A very precocious child, he was at first privately educated, but entered Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. Here he fell in with a set somewhat but not much less distinguished than that of the famous time, about ten years later, of which Tennyson was the centre – a set the most brilliant member of which, besides Macaulay, was the poet Praed. Praed had been accustomed to journalism before he left Eton, and had made acquaintance at Windsor with the bookseller Knight, for whose Quarterly Magazine both he and Macaulay wrote some very good things. Macaulay himself obtained the Chancellor's prize for English poems on "Pompeii" and "Evening," in two successive years 1819 and 1820; and after a very distinguished undergraduate career was elected fellow of his college. He went to the Bar, and his father's fortune, which had been a good one, being lost, his chances were for a time uncertain. In 1825, however, he won the admiration of Jeffrey and a place on the Edinburgh Review by his well-known, and slightly gaudy, but wonderfully fresh and stimulating article on Milton; and literature, which had always been his ideal employment, seemed already likely to yield him a fair subsistence – for review-writing was at that time much more highly paid than it is at present. Moreover the Whigs, on the eve of their long postponed triumph, were looking out for young men of talent; and Macaulay, being recruited by them, was put into Lord Lansdowne's pocket-borough of Calne. In the Reform debates themselves he distinguished himself greatly, and after the Bill was carried, having been elected for Leeds, he was not long in receiving his reward. It was munificent, for he, a man of little more than thirty, who had made no reputation at the Bar, though much elsewhere, was appointed Legal Member of Council in India with a salary very much of which could in those days be saved by a careful man, especially if, like Macaulay, he was unmarried. Accordingly when, after between four and five years' stay, Macaulay in 1838 returned home, he was in possession of means sufficient to enable him to devote himself without fear or hindrance to literary and political pursuits, while his fame had been raised higher during his absence by his contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Indeed his Indian experiences furnished the information – erroneous in some cases and partisan in others, but brilliantly used – enabling him to write the famous essays on Clive and on Hastings, where his historical method is at almost its best. He was elected member for Edinburgh, a very high compliment, in 1839; and next year became Secretary for War. In 1842 and 1843 respectively he established his position in verse and prose by publishing the Lays of Ancient Rome and a collection of his Essays; and in 1846 he was made Postmaster-General. But his support of the Maynooth Grant offended the Protestantism of his constituents, and he lost his seat, and for the time his political opportunities, in 1847. The disaster was no disaster for literature: he had long been employed on a History of England from the Accession of James II., and being now able to devote his whole time to it, he published the first volumes in 1848 with astonishing success.
He was re-elected for Edinburgh in 1852, published the third and fourth volumes of his History in 1855 with success greater in pecuniary ways and otherwise than even that of their forerunners, was raised to the Upper House as Lord Macaulay of Rothley in 1857, and died two years later, on 28th December 1859, of heart disease. Some personal peculiarities of Macaulay's – his extraordinary reading and memory, his brilliant but rather tyrannical conversation, his undoubting self-confidence – were pretty well known in his lifetime, and did not always create a prejudice in his favour. But a great revolution in this respect was brought about by the Life of him, produced a good many years later by his nephew, Sir George Trevelyan – a Life, standing for the interest of its matter and the skill and taste of its manner, not too far below the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart.
The literary personality of Macaulay, though a great one in all respects, is neither complex nor unequally present, and it is therefore desirable to discuss all its manifestations together. In the order of importance and of bulk his work may be divided into verse, prose-essays, and history, for his speeches less directly concern us, and are very little more than essays adroitly enough adjusted so as not to be tedious to the hearer. In all three capacities he was eminently popular; and in all three his popularity has brought with it a sort of reaction, partly justified, partly unjust. The worst brunt of this reaction has fallen upon his verse, the capital division of which, the Lays of Ancient Rome, was persistently decried by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the critic of most authority in the generation immediately succeeding Macaulay's. A poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not; his way of thought was too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery or of dream, to command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to "make the common as if it were not common." His best efforts of this kind are in small and not very generally known things, the "Jacobite's Epitaph," "The Last Buccaneer." But his ballads earlier and later, Ivry, The Armada, Naseby, and the Roman quartet, exhibit the result of a consummate literary faculty with a real native gift for rhythm and metre, applying the lessons of the great Romantic generation with extraordinary vigour and success, and not without considerable eloquence and refinement. It is a gross and vulgar critical error to deem Macaulay's poetical effects vulgar or gross. They are popular; they hit exactly that scheme of poetry which the general ear can appreciate and the general brain understand. They are coin for general circulation; but they are not base coin. Hundreds and thousands of immature and 'prentice tastes have been educated to the enjoyment of better things by them; thousands and tens of thousands of tastes, respectable at least, have found in them the kind of poetry which they can like, and beyond which they are not fitted to go. And it would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciations which, while relishing things more exquisite and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savour the simple genuine fare of poetry which Macaulay offers. There are few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding "better bread than is made of wheat," and the poetical bread of the Lays of Ancient Rome is an honest household loaf that no healthy palate will reject.
In the second division, that of essay writing, Macaulay occupies a position both absolutely and relatively higher. That the best verse ranks above even the best prose is not easily disputable; that prose which is among the very best of its own particular kind ranks above verse which though good is not the best, may be asserted without any fear. And in their own kind of essay, Macaulay's are quite supreme. Jeffrey, a master of writing and a still greater master of editing, with more than twenty years' practice in criticism, asked him "where he got that style?" The question was not entirely unanswerable. Macaulay had taken not a little from Gibbon; he had taken something from a then still living contributor of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private and personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It had appeared early (it can be seen in things of his written when he was an undergraduate). It owed much to the general atmosphere of the century, to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, idea, not merely from the vernacular or from classical authorities, but from the great writers of earlier European literature. And it would probably have been impossible without the considerable body of forerunners which the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and other things of which some notice has been given in a former chapter, had supplied. But still the individual character reigns supreme.
Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary loose acceptation of the term a household word; and it cannot be necessary to single out individual instances where almost all are famous, and where all deserve their fame. The "Milton" and the "Southey," the "Pitt" and the "Chatham," the "Addison" and the "Horace Walpole," the "Clive" and the "Hastings," the "Frederick the Great" and the "Madame D'Arblay," the "Restoration Dramatists" and the "Boswell," the "Hallam" and the "Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits and the same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first place the system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he carried to perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less as a subject of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than as a mere starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views of the subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters of pure literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this latter kind, the crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, though well enough deserved in the particular case, escapes this condemnation only to fall under another, that of looking at the parts rather than at the whole. It is quite certain that, given their plan, the two famous critiques of Tennyson and Keats, in the Quarterly and in Blackwood, are well enough justified. The critic looks only at the weak parts, and he judges the weak parts only by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more apparently generous method, Macaulay was exposed to equal dangers, and succumbed to them less excusably. He had strong prejudices, and it is impossible for any one who reads him with knowledge not to see that the vindication of those prejudices, rather than the exposition and valuation of the subject, was what he had first at heart. He was too well informed (though, especially in the Indian Essays, he was sometimes led astray by his authorities), and he was too honest a man, to be untrustworthy in positive statement. But though he practised little in the courts, he had the born advocate's gift, or drawback, of inclination to suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, and he has a heavy account to make up under these heads. Even under them perhaps he has less to answer for than on the charge of a general superficiality and shallowness, which is all the more dangerous because of the apparently transparent thoroughness of his handling, and because of the actual clearness and force with which he both sees and puts his view. For a first draft of a subject Macaulay is incomparable, if his readers will only be content to take it for a first draft, and to feel that they must fill up and verify, that they must deepen and widen. But the heights and depths of the subject he never gives, and perhaps he never saw them.
Part of this is no doubt to be set down to the quality of his style; part to a weakness of his, which was not so much readiness to accept any conclusion that was convenient as a constitutional incapacity for not making up his mind. To leave a thing in half lights, in compromise, to take it, as the legal phrase of the country of his ancestors has it, ad avizandum, was to Macaulay abhorrent and impossible. He must "conclude," and he was rather too apt to do so by "quailing, crushing, and quelling" all difficulties of opposing arguments and qualifications. He simply would not have an unsolved problem mystery. Strafford was a "rancorous renegade"; Swift a sort of gifted Judas; Bacon a mean fellow with a great intellect; Dryden again a renegade, though not rancorous; Marlborough a self-seeking traitor of genius. And all these conclusions were enforced in their own style – the style of l'homme même. It was rather teasingly antithetical, "Tom's snip-snap" as the jealous smartness of Brougham called it; it was somewhat mechanical in its arrangement of narrative, set passages of finer writing, cunningly devised summaries of facts, comparisons, contrasts (to show the writer's learning and dazzle the reader with names), exordium, iteration, peroration, and so forth. But it observed a very high standard of classical English, a little intolerant of neologism, but not stiff nor jejune. It had an almost unexampled – a certainly unsurpassed – power (slightly helped by repetition perhaps) of bringing the picture that the writer saw, the argument that he thought, the sentiment that he felt, before the reader's eyes, mind, and feeling. And, as indeed follows from this, it was pre-eminently clear. It is perhaps the clearest style in English that does not, like those of Swift and Cobbett, deliberately or scornfully eschew rhetorical ornament. What Macaulay means you never, being any degree short of an idiot, can fail to understand; and yet he gives you the sense, equipped with a very considerable amount of preparation and trimming. It would not merely have been ungrateful, it would have been positively wrong, if his audience, specially trained as most of them were to his standpoint of Whig Reformer, had failed to hail him as one of the greatest writers that had ever been known. Nor would it be much less wrong if judges very differently equipped and constituted were to refuse him a high place among great writers.
