



Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher





THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Contributions To The Edinburgh Review

By Thomas Babington 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