Volume 20, Number 7 · May 3, 1973
Conquered by Macaulay
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian
by John Clive
Knopf, 576 pp., $15.00
Thomas Babington Macaulay: Selected Writings
edited by John Clive, edited by Thomas Pinney
Chicago, 454 pp., $15.00
It is very difficult to be fair to Macaulay. He was seldom fair to other people. He survives as a brilliant Whig historian, but Whig history is now out of fashion, and his particular historical judgments seem to us partisan, complacent, and unjust. His writing is indeed marvelously vigorous and clear, but it lacks the gentler virtues of flexibility, sensitivity, warmth. We are overborne by his prose as his contemporaries were overborne by his conversation. He cannot make a point quickly and allow it to sink in by its own force: he must always hammer it home. His dogmatism can be repellent. He does not reason, he 'pronounces'; and he will pronounce even when he is ignorant or wrong. For all his genuine love of literature and his vast reading, he lacked a discriminating taste and his range of sympathy was limited. His mind, said Carlyle, was 'intrinsically common,' 'the sublime of commonplace'; and the features which it informed (contemporaries observed) were common too. He was essentially plebeian, said Lady Holland; 'uncouth and not a man of the world,' Lord Melbourne said to Queen Victoria.
Review, 2827 words
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