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and fortuitous qualities, not essential and primitive, diverse forms which diverse streams trace in the same bed. So it is with other men. Doubtless moral qualities are of the first rank; they are the motive power of civilisation, and constitute the nobleness of the individual; society exists by them alone, and by them alone man is great. But if they are the finest fruit of the human plant, they are not its root; they give us our value, but do not constitute our elements. Neither the vices nor the virtues of man are his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to know him; approbation or disapprobation does not define him; the names of good or bad tell us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche in an Italian court of the fifteenth century; he would be a great statesman. Transport this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a shop; he will be an exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible probity, is in his drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a family, so humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of man is found concealed far below these moral badges; they only point out the useful or noxious effect of our inner constitution: they do not reveal our inner constitution. They are safety lamps or railway-lights attached to our names, to warn the passer-by to avoid or approach us; they are not the explanatory table of our being. Our true essence consists in the causes of our good or bad qualities, and these causes are discovered in the temperament, the species and degree of imagination, the amount and velocity of attention, the magnitude and direction of primitive passions. A character is a force, like gravity, weight, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of pernicious or profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise than by the amount of the weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It is therefore to ignore man, to reduce him, as Thackeray and English literature generally do, to an aggregate of virtues and vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element. You will find the same fault in English criticism, always moral, never psychological, bent on exactly measuring the degree of human honesty, ignorant of the mechanism of our sentiments and faculties; you will find the same fault in English religion, which is but an emotion or a discipline; in their philosophy, destitute of metaphysics; and if you ascend to the source, according to the rule which derives vices from virtues, and virtues from vices, you will see all these weaknesses derived from their native energy, their practical education, and that sort of severe and religious poetic instinct which has in time past made them Protestant and Puritan.

VOL. II.

20

CHAPTER III.

Criticism and History.-Macaulay.

I. The vocation and position of Macaulay in England.

II. His Essays- Agreeable character and utility of the style-Opinions— Philosophy. Wherein it is English and practical-His Essay on Bacon -The true object, according to him, of the sciences-Comparison of Bacon with the ancients.

III. His criticism-Moral prejudices-Comparison of criticism in France and England-Why he is religious-Connection of religion and Liberalism in England-Macaulay's Liberalism-Essay on Church and State.

IV. His passion for political liberty-How he is the orator and historian of the Whig party-Essays on the Revolution and the Stuarts.

V. His talent-Taste for demonstration-Taste for development-Oratorical character of his mind-Wherein he differs from classic orators-His estimation for particular facts, experiment on the senses, personal reminiscences-Importance of decisive phenomena in every branch of knowledge-Essays on Warren Hastings and Clive.

VI. English marks of his talent-Rudeness-Humour-Poetry.

VII. His work-Harmony of his talent, opinion, and work-Universality, unity, interest of his history-Picture of the Highlands-James 11. in Ireland -The Act of Toleration-The Massacre of Glencoc-Traces of amplification and rhetoric.

VIII. Comparison of Macaulay with French historians-Wherein he is classicalWherein he is English-Intermediate position of his mind between the Latin and the Germanic mind.

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SHALL not here attempt to write the life of Lord Macaulay. It can only be related after twenty years, when his friends shall have put together all their recollections of him. As to what is public now, it seems to me useless to recall it: every one knows that his father was an abolitionist and a philanthropist; that our Macaulay passed through a most brilliant and complete classical education; that at twenty-five his essay on Milton made him famous; that at thirty he entered Parliament, and took his standing there amongst the first orators; that he went to India to reform the law, and that on his return he was appointed to high offices; that on one occasion his liberal opinions in religious matters lost him the votes of his constituents; that he was re-elected amidst universal congratulations; that he continued to be the most celebrated

publicist and the most accomplished writer of the Whig party; and that on this ground, at the close of his life, the gratitude of his party and the public admiration, made him a peer of England. It will be a fine biography to write-a life of honour and happiness, devoted to noble ideas, and occupied by manly enterprises; literary in the first place, but sufficiently charged with action and immersed in business to furnish substance and solidity to his eloquence and style,-to create the observer side by side with the artist, and the thinker side by side with the writer. On the present occasion I will only describe the thinker and writer: I leave the life, I take his works; and first his Essays.

II.

His Essays are an assemblage of articles: I confess that I am fond of books such as these. In the first place, we can throw down the volume after a score of pages, begin at the end, or in the middle; we are not its slave, but its master; we can treat it like a newspaper: in fact, it is a journal of a mind. In the second place, it is varied; in turning over a page, we pass from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, from England to India: this diversity surprises and pleases. Lastly, involuntarily, the author is indiscreet; he displays himself to us, keeping back nothing; it is a familiar conversation, and no conversation is worth so much as that of England's greatest historian. We are pleased to mark the origin of this generous and powerful mind, to discover what faculties have nourished his talent, what researches have shaped his knowledge; what opinions he has formed on philosophy, religion, the state, literature; what he was, and what he has become; what he wishes, and what he believes.

Seated in our arm-chair, with our feet on the fender, we see little by little, as we turn over the leaves of the book, an animated and pensive face arise before us; the countenance assumes expression and clearness; his different features are mutually explained and lightened up; presently the author lives again for us, and before us; we perceive the causes and birth of all his thoughts, we foresee what he is going to say; his bearing and mode of speech are as familiar to us as those of a man whom we see every day; his opinions correct and affect our own; he enters into our thoughts and our life; he is two hundred leagues away, and his book stamps his image on us, as the reflected light paints on the horizon the object from which it is emitted. Such is the charm of books, which deal with all kinds of subjects, which give the author's opinion on all sorts of things, which lead us in all directions of his thoughts, and make us, so to speak, walk around his mind.

man.

Macaulay treats philosophy in the English fashion, as a practical He is a disciple of Bacon, and sets him above all philosophers; he decides that genuine science dates from him; that the speculations of old thinkers are only the sport of the mind; that for two thousand

years the human mind was on a wrong tack; that only since Bacon it has discovered the goal to which it must turn, and the method by which it must arrive there. This goal is utility. The object of knowledge is not theory, but application. The object of mathematicians is not the satisfaction of an idle curiosity, but the invention of machines calculated to alleviate human labour, to increase the power of dominating nature, to render life more secure, commodious, and happy. The object of astronomy is not to furnish matter for vast calculations and poetical cosmogonies, but to subserve geography and to guide navigation. The object of anatomy and the zoological sciences is not to suggest eloquent systems on the nature of organisation, or to set before the eyes the orders of the animal kingdom by an ingenious classification, but to conduct the surgeon's hand and the physician's prognosis. The object of every research and every study is to diminish pain, to augment comfort, to ameliorate the condition of man; theoretical laws are serviceable only in their practical use; the labours of the laboratory and the cabinet receive their sanction and value only, through the use made of them by the workshops and mills; the tree of knowledge must be estimated only by its fruits. If we wish to judge of a philosophy, we must observe its effects; its works are not its books, but its acts. The philosophy of the ancients produced fine writings, sublime phrases, infinite disputes, hollow dreams, systems displaced by systems, and left the world as ignorant, as unhappy, and as wicked as it found it. That of Bacon produced observations, experiments, discoveries, machines, entire arts and industries:

'It has lengthened life; it has mitigated pain; it has extinguished diseases; it has increased the fertility of the soil; it has given new securities to the mariner; it has furnished new arms to the warrior; it has spanned great rivers and estuaries with bridges of form unknown to our fathers; it has guided the thunderbolt innocuously from heaven to earth; it has lighted up the night with the splendour of the day; it has extended the range of the human vision; it has multiplied the power of the human muscles; it has accelerated motion; it has annihilated distance; it has facilitated intercourse, correspondence, all friendly offices, all despatch of business; it has enabled man to descend to the depths of the sea, to soar into the air, to penetrate securely into the noxious recesses of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl along without horses, and the ocean in ships which run ten knots an hour against the wind.'1

The first was consumed in solving unsolvable enigmas, fabricating portraits of an imaginary sage, mounting from hypothesis to hypothesis, tumbling from absurdity to absurdity; it despised what was practicable, promised what was impracticable; and because it despised the limits of the human mind, ignored its power. The other, measuring our force and weakness, diverted us from roads that were closed to us, to start us on roads that were open to us; it recognised facts and laws, because

1 1 Macaulay's Works, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols. 1866; Essay on Bacon, vi. 222.

it resigned itself to remain ignorant of their essence and principles; it has rendered man more happy, because it has not pretended to render him perfect; it has discovered great truths and great effects, because it had the courage and good sense to study small things, and to creep for a long time over petty vulgar experiments; it has become glorious. and powerful, because it has deigned to become humble and useful. Formerly, science furnished only vain pretensions and chimerical conceptions, whilst it held itself aloof, far from practical existence, and styled itself the sovereign of man. Now, science possesses acquired truths, the hope of loftier discoveries, an ever-increasing authority, because it has entered upon active existence, and it has declared itself the servant of man. Let her keep to her new functions; let her not try to penetrate the region of the invisible; let her renounce what must remain unknown; she does not contain her own issue, she is but a medium; man was not made for her, but she for man; she is like the thermometers and piles which she constructs for her own experiments; her whole glory, merit, and office, is to be an instrument:

'We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written, in which a disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be introduced as fellowtravellers. They come to a village where the small-pox has just begun to rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in terror over their children. The Stoic assures the dismayed population that there is nothing bad in the small-pox, and that to a wise man disease, deformity, death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian takes out a lancet and begins to vaccinate. They find a body of miners in great dismay. An explosion of noisome vapours has just killed many of those who were at work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the cavern. The Stoic assures them that such an accident is nothing but a mere oponyμivor. The Baconian, who has no such fine word at his command, contents himself with devising a safety-lamp. They find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his hands on the shore. His vessel with an inestimable cargo has just gone down, and he is reduced in a moment from opulence to beggary. The Stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness in things which lie without himself, and repeats the whole chapter of Epictetus, πρὸς τοὺς τὴν ἀπορίαν Sidoras. The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down in it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck. It would be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference between the philosophy of thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the philosophy of words and the philosophy of works.'1

It is not for me to discuss these opinions; it is for the reader to blame or praise them, if he sees fit: I do not wish to criticise doctrines, but to depict a man; and truly nothing could be more striking than this absolute scorn for speculation, and this absolute love for the practical. Such a mind is entirely suitable to the national genius: in England a barometer is still called a philosophical instrument; and philosophy is there a thing unknown. The English have moralists, psychologists, but no metaphysicians: if there is one-Hamilton, for instance

1 Macaulay's Works; Essay on Bacon, vi. 228.

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