The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay. Vol 2

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This etext was prepared by Dr Mike Alder and Sue Asscher
from the book made available by Dr Mike Alder.

THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES

OF

LORD MACAULAY.

VOLUME II.

CONTENTS.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

John Dryden. (January 1828.)

History. (May 1828.)

Mill on Government. (March 1829.)

Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill. (June 1829.)

Utilitarian Theory of Government. (October 1829.)

Sadler's Law of Population. (July 1830.)

Sadler's Refutation Refuted. (January 1831.)

Mirabeau. (July 1832.)

Barere. (April 1844.)

MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF LORD MACAULAY.

CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

JOHN DRYDEN.

(January 1828.)

"The Poetical Works of John Dryden". In 2 volumes. University
Edition. London, 1826.

The public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the
second rank of our poets,--no mean station in a table of
intellectual precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is
allowed that, even of the few who were his superiors in genius,
none has exercised a more extensive or permanent influence on the
national habits of thought and expression. His life was
commensurate with the period during which a great revolution in
the public taste was effected; and in that revolution he played
the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the lead in its
wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it. By
trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By
signalising himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels,
he raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He
commenced his career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated
it in the repose of established sovereignty,--the author of a new
code, the root of a new dynasty.

Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who has been
distinguished either in the literary or in the political world,
it may be said that the course which he pursued, and the effect
which he produced, depended less on his personal qualities than
on the circumstances in which he was placed. Those who have read
history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics
and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great
moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established
systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The
difference between one man and another is by no means so great as
the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in
ancient Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in
modern Rome the canonisation of a devout prelate, lead men to
cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore.
By a law of association, from the operation of which even minds
the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly exempt,
misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, although
there may be no person to whom our misery or our happiness can be
ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents itself even on
those who alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man elated by
success often displays itself towards enemies. In the same
manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the
contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where
they do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of
Egyptian idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles--Sacheverells
and Wilkeses. They even fall prostrate before a deity to which
they have themselves given the form which commands their
veneration, and which, unless fashioned by them, would have
remained a shapeless block. They persuade themselves that they
are the creatures of what they have themselves created. For, in
fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms
the age. Great minds do indeed re-act on the society which has
made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what
they have received. We extol Bacon, and sneer at Aquinas. But,
if their situations had been changed, Bacon might have been the
Angelical Doctor, the most subtle Aristotelian of the schools;
the Dominican might have led forth the sciences from their house
of bondage. If Luther had been born in the tenth century, he
would have effected no reformation. If he had never been born at
all, it is evident that the sixteenth century could not have
elapsed without a great schism in the church. Voltaire, in the
days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most
of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent
among the defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of
the lax morality of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of
the Sorbonne. If Pascal had entered on his literary career when
intelligence was more general, and abuses at the same time more
flagrant, when the church was polluted by the Iscariot Dubois,
the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, and the nation
sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see a
dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an
army formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a
priesthood just religious enough to be intolerant, he might
possibly, like every man of genius in France, have imbibed
extravagant prejudices against monarchy and Christianity. The
wit which blasted the sophisms of Escobar--the impassioned
eloquence which defended the sisters of Port Royal--the
intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by Papal
authority--might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the
Philosophical Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of
inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to
Leibnitz. It is now generally allowed that these great men made
the same discovery at the same time. Mathematical science,
indeed, had then reached such a point that, if neither of them
had ever existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to
some person within a few years. So in our own time the doctrine
of rent, now universally received by political economists, was
propounded, almost at the same moment, by two writers unconnected
with each other. Preceding speculators had long been blundering
round about it; and it could not possibly have been missed much
longer by the most heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think
that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to
the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that
without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans,--that without
Columbus America would have been discovered,--that without Locke
we should have possessed a just theory of the origin of human
ideas. Society indeed has its great men and its little men, as
the earth has its mountains and its valleys. But the
inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface
of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in
calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected.
The sun illuminates the hills, while it is still below the
horizon, and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little
before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent
of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a
light, which, without their assistance, must, in a short time, be
visible to those who lie far beneath them.

The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on
which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and
sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which
regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility
and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste are, in
general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is
spontaneously pursuing. Without a just apprehension of the laws
to which we have alluded the merits and defects of Dryden can be
but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we
conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been
produced have by no means been those in which taste has been most
correct. It seems that the creative faculty, and the critical
faculty, cannot exist together in their highest perfection. The
causes of this phenomenon it is not difficult to assign.

It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to
pieces, and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all
its wheels and springs conduce to its general effect, will be the
man most competent to form another machine of similar power. In
all the branches of physical and moral science which admit of
perfect analysis, he who can resolve will be able to combine.
But the analysis which criticism can effect of poetry is
necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its
researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is
poetry. In the description of nature, for example, a judicious
reader will easily detect an incongruous image. But he will find
it impossible to explain in what consists the art of a writer
who, in a few words, brings some spot before him so vividly that
he shall know it as if he had lived there from childhood; while
another, employing the same materials, the same verdure, the same
water, and the same flowers, committing no inaccuracy,
introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced
superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced
necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of
a capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take
another example: the great features of the character of Hotspur
are obvious to the most superficial reader. We at once perceive
that his courage is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his
animal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary, and
petulant; that he indulges his own humour without caring whose
feelings he may wound, or whose enmity he may provoke, by his
levity. Thus far criticism will go. But something is still
wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other
quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his
catalogue of the virtues and faults of Hotspur, and yet he would
not be Hotspur. Almost everything that we have said of him
applies equally to Falconbridge. Yet in the mouth of
Falconbridge most of his speeches would seem out of place. In
real life this perpetually occurs. We are sensible of wide
differences between men whom, if we were required to describe
them, we should describe in almost the same terms. If we were
attempting to draw elaborate characters of them, we should
scarcely be able to point out any strong distinction; yet we
approach them with feelings altogether dissimilar. We cannot
conceive of them as using the expressions or the gestures of each
other. Let us suppose that a zoologist should attempt to give an
account of some animal, a porcupine for instance, to people who
had never seen it. The porcupine, he might say, is of the class
mammalia, and the order glires. There are whiskers on its face;
it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five behind, two
fore teeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with hair
and quills. And, when all this has been said, would any one of
the auditors have formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would any
two of them have formed the same idea? There might exist
innumerable races of animals, possessing all the characteristics
which have been mentioned yet altogether unlike to each other.
What the description of our naturalist is to a real porcupine,
the remarks of criticism are to the images of poetry. What it so
imperfectly decomposes it cannot perfectly reconstruct. It is
evidently as impossible to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by
reversing an analytical process so defective, as it would be for
an anatomist to form a living man out of the fragments of his
dissecting-room. In both cases the vital principle eludes the
finest instruments, and vanishes in the very instant in which its
seat is touched. Hence those who, trusting to their critical
skill, attempt to write poems give us, not images of things, but
catalogues of qualities. Their characters are allegories--not
good men and bad men, but cardinal virtues and deadly sins. We
seem to have fallen among the acquaintances of our old friend
Christian: sometimes we meet Mistrust and Timorous; sometimes Mr
Hate-good and Mr Love-lust; and then again Prudence, Piety and
Charity.

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets, is
generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets,
is not perhaps equally evident; but the fact is, that poetry
requires not an examining but a believing frame of mind. Those
feel it most, and write it best, who forget that it is a work of
art; to whom its imitations, like the realities from which they
are taken, are subjects, not for connoisseurship, but for tears
and laughter, resentment and affection; who are too much under
the influence of the illusion to admire the genius which has
produced it; who are too much frightened for Ulysses in the cave
of Polyphemus to care whether the pun about Outis be good or bad;
who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, while
they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the
creations of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by
treating those creations as deceptions, and by resolving them, as
nearly as possible, into their elements, that he becomes a
critic. In the moment in which the skill of the artist is
perceived, the spell of the art is broken.

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the
greatest writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give
general rules for composition, or to pronounce judgment on the
works of others. They are unaccustomed to analyse what they
feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes
which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them.
They feel pleasure in reading a book. They never consider that
this pleasure may be the effect of ideas which some unmeaning
expression, striking on the first link of a chain of
associations, may have called up in their own minds--that they
have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they
admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every
school-boy thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his
romance, and knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the
broad cheeks of the Squire, as well as the faces of his own
playfellows. The most experienced and fastidious judges are
amazed at the perfection of that art which extracts
inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human calamities
without once violating the reverence due to it; at that
discriminating delicacy of touch which makes a character
exquisitely ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace,
or its dignity. In Don Quixote are several dissertations on the
principles of poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in the
whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour and attention; and no
passages in any work with which we are acquainted are more
worthless and puerile. In our time they would scarcely obtain
admittance into the literary department of the Morning Post.
Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the
veneration which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to
himself. He will not lift up his eyes from the ground in the
presence of Brunetto, all whose works are not worth the worst of
his own hundred cantos. He does not venture to walk in the same
line with the bombastic Statius. His admiration of Virgil is
absolute idolatry. If, indeed, it had been excited by the
elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman poet, it
would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is rather as
an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of
imagination, that he values the Aeneid. The most trivial
passages he regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of
the most recondite meaning. He describes his conductor as the
sea of all wisdom--the sun which heals every disordered sight.
As he judged of Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century
judged of him; they were proud of him; they praised him; they
struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled for the honour of
possessing his remains; they maintained professors to expound his
writings. But what they admired was not that mighty imagination
which called a new world into existence, and made all its sights
and sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said
little of those awful and lovely creations on which later critics
delight to dwell--Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil brow
from his couch of everlasting fire--the lion-like repose of
Sordello--or the light which shone from the celestial smile of
Beatrice. They extolled their great poet for his smattering of
ancient literature and history; for his logic and his divinity;
for his absurd physics, and his most absurd metaphysics; for
everything but that in which he pre-eminently excelled. Like the
fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold,
which, as he had dreamed, was concealed under its foundations,
they laid waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by
seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom which existed only
in their own wild reveries. The finest passages were little
valued till they had been debased into some monstrous allegory.
Louder applause was given to the lecture on fate and free-will,
or to the ridiculous astronomical theories, than to those
tremendous lines which disclose the secrets of the tower of
hunger, or to that half-told tale of guilty love, so passionate
and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with
less emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the
wasted corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the
tremulous kiss and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We
believe that they admired these things less than ourselves, but
that they felt them more. We should perhaps say that they felt
them too much to admire them. The progress of a nation from
barbarism to civilisation produces a change similar to that which
takes place during the progress of an individual from infancy to
mature age. What man does not remember with regret the first
time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable
to appreciate the powers of the writer; or, rather, he neither
knew nor cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably
thought it not half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about
dark-browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strinadona. He now values
Fingal and Temora only as showing with how little evidence a
story may be believed, and with how little merit a book may be
popular. Of the romance of Defoe he entertains the highest
opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand
touches which formerly he passed by without notice. But, though
he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly,
he is far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty
Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe
which could not be brought down to the water edge, the tent with
its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and the den where
the old goat died, can never again be to him the realities which
they were. The days when his favourite volume set him upon
making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon digging caves and fencing
huts in the garden, can never return. Such is the law of our
nature. Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot
at once enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of
its autumn, the pleasures of close investigation and those of
agreeable error. We cannot sit at once in the front of the stage
and behind the scenes. We cannot be under the illusion of the
spectacle, while we are watching the movements of the ropes and
pulleys which dispose it.

The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of
Partridge at the theatre affords so complete an illustration of
our proposition, that we cannot refrain from quoting some parts
of it.

"Partridge gave that credit to Mr Garrick which he had denied to
Jones, and fell into so violent a trembling that his knees
knocked against each other. Jones asked him what was the matter,
and whether he was afraid of the warrior upon the stage?--'O, la,
sir,' said he, 'I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not
afraid of anything, for I know it is but a play; and if it was
really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance and in
so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the only
person.'--'Why, who,' cries Jones, 'dost thou take to be such a
coward here besides thyself?'--'Nay, you may call me a coward if
you will; but if that little man there upon the stage is not
frightened, I never saw any man frightened in my life'...He sat
with his eyes fixed partly on the ghost and partly on Hamlet, and
with his mouth open; the same passions which succeeded each other
in Hamlet, succeeding likewise in him...

"Little more worth remembering occurred during the play, at the
end of which Jones asked him which of the players he liked best?
To this he answered, with some appearance of indignation at the
question, 'The King, without doubt.'--'Indeed, Mr Partridge,'
says Mrs Miller, 'you are not of the same opinion with the town;
for they are all agreed that Hamlet is acted by the best player
who was ever on the stage.'--'He the best player!' cries
Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; 'why I could act as well as
he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked
in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then to be
sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his
mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why any man, that is,
any good man, that had such a mother, would have done exactly the
same. I know you are only joking with me; but indeed, madam,
though I never was at a play in London, yet I have seen acting
before in the country, and the King for my money; he speaks all
his words distinctly, and half as loud again as the other.
Anybody may see he is an actor.'"

In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad
theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess
the tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He
admires in the wrong place; but he trembles in the right place.
It is indeed because he is so much excited by the acting of
Garrick, that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthing
performer, who personates the King. So, we have heard it said
that, in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who should
represent a depraved character finely, instead of calling down
the applauses of the audience, is hissed and pelted without
mercy. It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment,
thought that Shylock or Iago was standing before us. While the
dramatic art was in its infancy at Athens, it produced similar
effects on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is said
that they blamed Aeschylus for frightening them into fits with
his Furies. Herodotus tells us that, when Phyrnichus produced
his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a penalty
of a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by so
pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great
artist, but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they
woke from the distressing illusion, they treated the author of it
as they would have treated a messenger who should have brought
them fatal and alarming tidings which turned out to be false. In
the same manner, a child screams with terror at the sight of a
person in an ugly mask. He has perhaps seen the mask put on.
But his imagination is too strong for his reason; and he entreats
that it may be taken off.

We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced
in us by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But
in us these emotions are comparatively languid. They rarely
affect our appetite or our sleep. They leave us sufficiently at
ease to trace them to their causes, and to estimate the powers
which produce them. Our attention is speedily diverted from the
images which call forth our tears to the art by which those
images have been selected and combined. We applaud the genius of
the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility; and we
are comforted.

Yet, though we think that in the progress of nations towards
refinement the reasoning powers are improved at the expense of
the imagination, we acknowledge that to this rule there are many
apparent exceptions. We are not, however, quite satisfied that
they are more than apparent. Men reasoned better, for example,
in the time of Elizabeth than in the time of Egbert; and they
also wrote better poetry. But we must distinguish between poetry
as a mental act, and poetry as a species of composition. If we
take it in the latter sense, its excellence depends not solely on
the vigour of the imagination, but partly also on the instruments
which the imagination employs. Within certain limits, therefore,
poetry may be improving while the poetical faculty is decaying.
The vividness of the picture presented to the reader is not
necessarily proportioned to the vividness of the prototype which
exists in the mind of the writer. In the other arts we see this
clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with all the genius of
Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction as to the
management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of the
human body, he would produce something compared with which the
Highlander at the door of a snuff shop would deserve admiration.
If an uninitiated Raphael were to attempt a painting, it would be
a mere daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say that the early works of
Raphael are little better. Yet, who can attribute this to want
of imagination? Who can doubt that the youth of that great
artist was passed amidst an ideal world of beautiful and majestic
forms? Or, who will attribute the difference which appears
between his first rude essays and his magnificent Transfiguration
to a change in the constitution of his mind? In poetry, as in
painting and sculpture, it is necessary that the imitator should
be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to imitate, and
expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not
furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word
most exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey
it to others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet,
till he has looked with attention on the face of nature; or a
great dramatist, till he has felt and witnessed much of the
influence of the passions. Information and experience are,
therefore, necessary; not for the purpose of strengthening the
imagination, which is never so strong as in people incapable of
reasoning--savages, children, madmen, and dreamers; but for the
purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his conceptions to
others.

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