Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay Part 11

With political distinction came social success, more rapid and more substantial, perhaps, than has ever been achieved by one who took so little trouble to win or to retain it. The circ.u.mstances of the time were all in his favour. Never did our higher circles present so much that would attract a new-comer, and never was there more readiness to admit within them all who brought the honourable credentials of talent and celebrity. In 1831 the exclusiveness of birth was pa.s.sing away, and the exclusiveness of fas.h.i.+on had not set in. The Whig party, during its long period of depression, had been drawn together by the bonds of common hopes, and endeavours, and disappointments; and personal reputation, whether literary, political, or forensic, held its own as against the advantages of rank and money to an extent that was never known before, and never since. Macaulay had been well received in the character of an Edinburgh Reviewer, and his first great speech in the House of Commons at once opened to him all the doors in London that were best worth entering. Brought up, as he had been, in a household which was perhaps the strictest and the homeliest among a set of families whose creed it was to live outside the world, it put his strength of mind to the test when he found himself courted and observed by the most distinguished and the most formidable personages of the day. Lady Holland listened to him with unwonted deference, and scolded him with a circ.u.mspection that was in itself a compliment. Rogers spoke of him with friendliness, and to him with positive affection, and gave him the last proof of his esteem and admiration by asking him to name the morning for a breakfast-party. He was treated with almost fatherly kindness by the able and worthy man who is still remembered by the name of Conversation Sharp. Indeed, his deference for the feelings of all whom he liked and respected, which an experienced observer could detect beneath the eagerness of his manner and the volubility of his talk, made him a favourite among those of a generation above his own. He bore his honours quietly, and enjoyed them with the natural and hearty pleasure of a man who has a taste for society, but whose ambitions lie elsewhere. For the s.p.a.ce of three seasons he dined out almost nightly, and spent many of his Sundays in those suburban residences which, as regards the company and the way of living, are little else than sections of London removed into a purer air.

Before very long his habits and tastes began to incline in the direction of domesticity, and even of seclusion; and, indeed, at every period of his life he would gladly desert the haunts of those whom Pope and his contemporaries used to term "the great," to seek the cheerful and cultured simplicity of his home, or the conversation of that one friend who had a share in the familiar confidence which Macaulay otherwise reserved for his nearest relatives. This was Mr. Thomas Flower Ellis, whose reports of the proceedings in King's Bench, extending over a whole generation, have established and perpetuated his name as that of an acute and industrious lawyer. He was older than Macaulay by four years.

Though both Fellows of the same college, they missed each other at the university, and it was not until 1827, on the Northern circuit, that their acquaintance began. "Macaulay has joined," writes Mr. Ellis; "an amusing person; somewhat boyish in his manner, but very original." The young barristers had in common an insatiable love of the cla.s.sics; and similarity of character, not very perceptible on the surface, soon brought about an intimacy which ripened into an attachment as important to the happiness of both concerned as ever united two men through every stage of life and vicissitude of fortune. Mr. Ellis had married early; but in 1839 he lost his wife, and Macaulay's helpful and heartfelt partic.i.p.ation in his great sorrow riveted the links of a chain that was already indissoluble.

The letters contained in this volume will tell, better than the words of any third person, what were the points of sympathy between the two companions, and in what manner they lived together till the end came.

Mr. Ellis survived his friend little more than a year; not complaining or lamenting but going about his work like a man from whose day the light has departed.

Brief and rare were the vacations of the most hard-worked Parliament that had sat since the times of Pym and Hampden. In the late autumn of 1831, the defeat of the Reform Bill in the House of Lords delivered over the country to agitation, resentment, and alarm; and gave a short holiday to public men who were not Ministers, magistrates, or officers in the yeomanry. Hannah and Margaret Macaulay accompanied their brother on a visit to Cambridge, where they met with the welcome which young Masters of Arts delight in providing for the sisters of a comrade of whom they are fond and proud.

"On the evening that we arrived," says Lady Trevelyan, "we met at dinner Whewell, Sedgwick, Airy, and Thirlwail and how pleasant they were, and how much they made of us two happy girls, who were never tired of seeing, and hearing and admiring! We breakfasted, lunched, and dined with one or the other of the set during our stay, and walked about the colleges all day with the whole train. [A reminiscence from that week of refined and genial hospitality survives in the Essay on Madame d'Arblay.

The reception which Miss Burney would have enjoyed at Oxford, if she had visited it otherwise than as an attendant on Royalty, is sketched off with all the writer's wonted spirit, and more than his wonted grace.]

Whewell was then tutor; rougher, but less pompous, and much more agreeable, than in after years; though I do not think that he ever cordially liked your uncle. We then went on to Oxford, which from knowing no one there seemed terribly dull to us by comparison with Cambridge, and we rejoiced our brother's heart by sighing after Trinity."

During the first half of his life Macaulay spent some months of every year at the seat of his uncle, Mr. Babington, who kept open house for his nephews and nieces throughout the summer and autumn. Rothley Temple, which lies in a valley beyond the first ridge that separates the flat unattractive country immediately round Leicester from the wild and beautiful scenery of Charnwood Forest, is well worth visiting as a singularly unaltered specimen of an old English home. The stately trees; the grounds, half park and half meadow; the cattle grazing up to the very windows; the hall, with its stone pavement rather below than above the level of the soil, hung with armour rude and rusty enough to dispel the suspicion of its having pa.s.sed through a collector's hands; the low ceilings; the dark oak wainscot, carved after primitive designs, that covered every inch of wall in bedroom and corridor; the general air which the whole interior presented of having been put to rights at the date of the Armada and left alone ever since;--all this antiquity contrasted quaintly, but prettily enough, with the youth and gaiety that lit up every corner of the ever-crowded though comfortable mansion. In wet weather there was always a merry group sitting on the staircase, or marching up and down the gallery; and, wherever the noise and fun were most abundant, wherever there was to be heard the loudest laughter and the most vehement expostulation, Macaulay was the centre of a circle which was exclaiming at the levity of his remarks about the Blessed Martyr; disputing with him on the comparative merits of Pascal, Racine, Corneille, Moliere, and Boileau or checking him as he attempted to justify his G.o.dparents by running off a list of all the famous Thomases in history. The place is full of his memories. His favourite walk was a mile of field-road and lane which leads from the house to a lodge on the highway; and his favourite point of view in that walk was a slight acclivity, whence the traveller from Leicester catches his first sight of Rothley Temple, with its background of hill and greenwood. He is remembered as sitting at the window in the hall, reading Dante to himself, or translating it aloud as long as any listener cared to remain within ear-shot. He occupied, by choice, a very small chamber on the ground floor, through the window of which he could escape un.o.bserved while afternoon callers were on their way between the front door and the drawing-room. On such occasions he would take refuge in a boat moored under the shade of some fine oaks which still exist, though the ornamental water on whose bank they stood has since been converted into dry land.

A journal kept at intervals by Margaret Macaulay, some extracts from which have here been arranged in the form of a continuous narrative, affords a pleasant and faithful picture of her brother's home-life during the years 1831 and 1832. With an artless candour, from which his reputation will not suffer, she relates the alternations of hope and disappointment through which the young people pa.s.sed when it began to be a question whether or not he would be asked to join the Administration.

"I think I was about twelve when I first became very fond of my brother, and from that time my affection for him has gone on increasing during a period of seven years. I shall never forget my delight and enchantment when I first found that he seemed to like talking to me. His manner was very flattering to such a child, for he always took as much pains to amuse me, and to inform me on anything I wished to know, as ho could have done to the greatest person in the land. I have heard him express great disgust towards those people who, lively and agreeable abroad, are a dead weight in the family circle. I think the remarkable clearness of his style proceeds in some measure from the habit of conversing with very young people, to whom he has a great deal to explain and impart.

"He reads his works to us in the ma.n.u.script, and, when we find fault, as I very often do with his being too severe upon people, he takes it with the greatest kindness, and often alters what we do not like. I hardly ever, indeed, met with a sweeter temper than his. He is rather hasty, and when he has not time for an instant's thought, he will sometimes return a quick answer, for which he will be sorry the moment he has said it. But in a conversation of any length, though it may be on subjects that touch him very nearly, and though the person with whom he converses may be very provoking and extremely out of temper, I never saw him lose his. He never uses this superiority, as some do, for the purpose of irritating another still more by coolness; but speaks in a kind, good-natured manner, as if he wished to bring the other back to temper without appearing to notice that he had lost it.

"He at one time took a very punning turn, and we laid a wager in books, my Mysteries of Udolpho against his German Theatre, that he could not make two hundred puns in one evening. He did it, however, in two hours, and, although they were of course most of them miserably bad, yet it was a proof of great quickness.

"Sat.u.r.day, February 26, 1831--At dinner we talked of the Grants. Tom said he had found Mr. Robert Grant walking about in the lobbies of the House of Commons, and saying that he wanted somebody to defend his place in the Government, which he heard was going to be attacked. 'What did you say to him?' we asked. 'Oh, I said nothing; but, if they'll give me the place, I'll defend it. When I am Judge Advocate, I promise you that I will not go about asking anyone to defend me.'

"After dinner we played at capping verses, and after that at a game in which one of the party thinks of something for the others to guess at.

Tom gave the slug that killed Perceval, the lemon that Wilkes squeezed for Doctor Johnson, the pork-chop which Thurtell ate after he had murdered Weare, and Sir Charles Macarthy's jaw which was sent by the Ashantees as a present to George the Fourth.

"Some one mentioned an acquaintance who had gone to the West Indies, hoping to make money, but had only ruined the complexions of his daughters. Tom said:

Mr. Walker was sent to Berbice By the greatest of statesmen and earls.

He went to bring back yellow boys, But he only brought back yellow girls.

"I never saw anything like the fun and humour that kindles in his eye when a repartee or verse is working in his brain.

"March 3, 1831.--Yesterday morning Hannah and I walked part of the way to his chambers with Tom, and, as we separated, I remember wis.h.i.+ng him good luck and success that night. He went through it most triumphantly, and called down upon himself admiration enough to satisfy even his sister. I like so much the manner in which he receives compliments. He does not pretend to be indifferent, but smiles in his kind and animated way, with 'I am sure it is very kind of you to say so,' or something of that nature. His voice from cold and over-excitement got quite into a scream towards the last part. A person told him that he had not heard such speaking since Fox. 'You have not heard such screaming since Fox,'

he said.

"March 24, 1831.--By Tom's account, there never was such a scene of agitation as the House of Commons presented at the pa.s.sing of the second reading of the Reform Bill the day before yesterday, or rather yesterday, for they did not divide till three or four in the morning.

When dear Tom came the next day he was still very much excited, which I found to my cost, for when I went out to walk with him he walked so very fast that I could scarcely keep up with him at all. With sparkling eyes he described the whole scene of the preceding evening in the most graphic manner.

"'I suppose the Ministers are all in high spirits,' said Mamma. 'In spirits, Ma'am? I'm sure I don't know. In bed, I'll answer for it.'

Mamma asked him for franks, that she might send his speech to a lady [This lady was Mrs. Hannah More.] who, though of high Tory principles, is very fond of Tom, and has left him in her will her valuable library.

'Oh, no,' he said, 'don't send it. If you do, she'll cut me off with a prayer-book.'

"Tom is very much improved in his appearance during the last two or three years. His figure is not so bad for a man of thirty as for a man of twenty-two. He dresses better, and his manners, from seeing a great deal of society, are very much improved. When silent and occupied in thought, walking up and down the room as he always does, his hands clenched and muscles working with the intense exertion of his mind, strangers would think his countenance stern; but I remember a writing-master of ours, when Tom had come into the room and left it again, saying, 'Ladies, your brother looks like a lump of good-humour!'

"March 30, 1831--Tom has just left me, after a very interesting conversation. He spoke of his extreme idleness. He said: 'I never knew such an idle man as I am. When I go in to Empson or Ellis their tables are always covered with books and papers. I cannot stick at anything for above a day or two. I mustered industry enough to teach myself Italian.

I wish to speak Spanish. I know I could master the difficulties in a week, and read any book in the language at the end of a month, but I have not the courage to attempt it. If there had not been really something in me, idleness would have ruined me.'

"I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been. 'My accuracy as to facts,' he said, 'I owe to a cause which many men would not confess.

It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance.' He then went on to describe the way in which from his childhood his imagination had been filled by the study of history. 'With a person of my turn,' he said, 'the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events.

Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys's Diary formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall.

I go in at Hans Holbein's gate, and come out through the matted gallery.

The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long, and sufficiently animated; in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their part in my stories.' He spoke, too, of the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, weaving tales of the Revolution, and he thought that he owed his command of language greatly to this habit.

"I am very sorry that the want both of ability and memory should prevent my preserving with greater truth a conversation which interested me very much.

"May 21, 1831.--Tom was from London at the time my mother's death occurred, and things fell out in such a manner that the first information he received of it was from the newspapers. He came home directly. He was in an agony of distress, and gave way at first to violent bursts of feeling. During the whole of the week he was with us all day, and was the greatest comfort to us imaginable. He talked a great deal of our sorrow, and led the conversation by degrees to other subjects, bearing the whole burden of it himself and interesting us without jarring with the predominant feeling of the time. I never saw him appear to greater advantage--never loved him more dearly.

"September 1831.--Of late we have walked a good deal. I remember pacing up and down Brunswick Square and Lansdowne Place for two hours one day, deep in the mazes of the most subtle metaphysics;--up and down Cork Street, engaged over Dryden's poetry and the great men of that time;--making jokes all the way along Bond Street, and talking politics everywhere.

"Walking in the streets with Tom and Hannah, and talking about the hard work the heads of his party had got now, I said:

"'How idle they must think you, when they meet you here in the busy part of the day!' 'Yes, here I am,' said he, 'walking with two unidea'd girls. [Boswell relates in his tenth chapter how Johnson scolded Langton for leaving "his social friends, to go and sit with a set of wretched unidea'd girls."] However, if one of the Ministry says to me, "Why walk you here all the day idle?" I shall say, "Because no man has hired me."'

"We talked of eloquence, which he has often compared to fresco-painting: the result of long study and meditation, but at the moment of execution thrown off with the greatest rapidity; what has apparently been the work of a few hours being destined to last for ages.

"Mr. Tierney said he was sure Sir Philip Francis had written Junius, for he was the proudest man he ever knew, and no one ever heard of anything he had done to be proud of.

"November 14, 1831, half-past-ten.--On Friday last Lord Grey sent for Tom. His note was received too late to be acted on that day. On Sat.u.r.day came another, asking him to East Sheen on that day, or Sunday.

Yesterday, accordingly, he went, and stayed the night, promising to be here as early as possible to-day. So much depends upon the result of this visit! That he will be offered a place I have not the least doubt.

He will refuse a Lords.h.i.+p of the Treasury, a Lords.h.i.+p of the Admiralty, or the Masters.h.i.+p of the Ordnance. He will accept the Secretarys.h.i.+p of the Board of Control, but will not thank them for it; and would not accept that, but that he thinks it will be a place of importance during the approaching discussions on the East Indian monopoly.

"If he gets a sufficient salary, Hannah and I shall most likely live with him. Can I possibly look forward to anything happier? I cannot imagine a course of life that would suit him better than thus to enjoy the pleasures of domestic life without its restraints; with sufficient business, but not, I hope, too much.

"At one o'clock he came. I went out to meet him. 'I have nothing to tell you. Nothing. Lord Grey sent for me to speak about a matter of importance, which must be strictly private.'

"November 27.--I am just returned from a long walk, during which the conversation turned entirely on one subject. After a little previous talk about a certain great personage, [The personage was Lord Brougham, who at this time was too formidable for the poor girl to venture to write his name at length even in a private journal.] I asked Tom when the present coolness between them began. He said: 'Nothing could exceed my respect and admiration for him in early days. I saw at that time private letters in which he spoke highly of my articles, and of me as the most rising man of the time. After a while, however, I began to remark that he became extremely cold to me, hardly ever spoke to me on circuit, and treated me with marked slight. If I were talking to a man, if he wished to speak to him on politics or anything else that was not in any sense a private matter, he always drew him away from me instead of addressing us both. When my article on Hallam came out, he complained to Jeffrey that I took up too much of the Review; and, when my first article on Mill appeared, he foamed with rage, and was very angry with Jeffrey for having printed it.'

"'But,' said I,' the Mills are friends of his, and he naturally did not like them to be attacked.'

"'On the contrary,' said Tom, 'he had attacked them fiercely himself; but he thought I had made a hit, and was angry accordingly. When a friend of mine defended my articles to him, he said: "I know nothing of the articles. I have not read Macaulay's articles." What can be imagined more absurd than his keeping up an angry correspondence with Jeffrey about articles he has never read? Well, the next thing was that Jeffrey, who was about to give up the editors.h.i.+p, asked me if I would take it. I said that I would gladly do so, if they would remove the headquarters of the Review to London. Jeffrey wrote to him about it. He disapproved of it so strongly that the plan was given up. The truth was that he felt that his power over the Review diminished as mine increased, and he saw that he would have little indeed if I were editor.

"'I then came into Parliament. I do not complain that he should have preferred Denman's claims to mine, and that he should have blamed Lord Lansdowne for not considering him. I went to take my seat. As I turned from the table at which I had been taking the oaths, he stood as near to me as you do now, and he cut me dead. We never spoke in the House, excepting once, that I can remember, when a few words pa.s.sed between us in the lobby. I have sat close to him when many men of whom I knew nothing have introduced themselves to me to shake hands, and congratulate me after making a speech, and he has never said a single word. I know that it is jealousy, because I am not the first man whom he has used in this way. During the debate on the Catholic claims he was so enraged because Lord Plunket had made a very splendid display, and because the Catholics had chosen Sir Francis Burdett instead of him to bring the Bill forward, that he threw every difficulty in its way. Sir Francis once said to him: "Really, Mr.-- you are so jealous that it is impossible to act with you." I never will serve in an Administration of which he is the head. On that I have most firmly made up my mind. I do not believe that it is in his nature to be a month in office without caballing against his colleagues. ["There never was a direct personal rival, or one who was in a position which, however reluctantly, implied rivalry, to whom he has been just; and on the fact of this ungenerous jealousy I do not understand that there is any difference of opinion."--Lord c.o.c.kburn's Journal.]

"'He is, next to the King, the most popular man in England. There is no other man whose entrance into any town in the kingdom would be so certain to be with huzzaing and taking off of horses. At the same time he is in a very ticklish situation, for he has no real friends. Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, Mackintosh, all speak of him as I now speak to you. I was talking to Sydney Smith of him the other day, and said that, great as I felt his faults to be, I must allow him a real desire to raise the lower orders, and do good by education, and those methods upon which his heart has been always set. Sydney would not allow this, or any other, merit.

Now, if those who are called his friends feel towards him, as they all do, angry and sore at his overbearing, arrogant, and neglectful conduct, when those reactions in public feeling, which must come, arrive, he will have nothing to return upon, no place of refuge, no hand of such tried friends as Fox and Canning had to support him. You will see that he will soon place himself in a false position before the public. His popularity will go down, and he will find himself alone. Mr. Pitt, it is true, did not study to strengthen himself by friends.h.i.+ps but this was not from jealousy. I do not love the man, but I believe he was quite superior to that. It was from a solitary pride he had. I heard at Holland House the other day that Sir Philip Francis said that, though he hated Pitt, he must confess there was something fine in seeing how he maintained his post by himself. "The lion walks alone," he said. "The jackals herd together."'"

This conversation, to those who have heard Macaulay talk, bears unmistakable signs of having been committed to paper while the words,--or, at any rate, the outlines,--of some of the most important sentences were fresh in his sister's mind. Nature had predestined the two men to mutual antipathy. Macaulay, who knew his own range and kept within it, and who gave the world nothing except his best and most finished work, was fretted by the slovenly omniscience of Brougham, who affected to be a walking encyclopaedia, "a kind of semi-Solomon, half knowing everything from the cedar to the hyssop." [These words are extracted from a letter written by Macaulay.] The student, who, in his later years, never left his library for the House of Commons without regret, had little in common with one who, like Napoleon, held that a great reputation was a great noise; who could not change horses without making a speech, see the Tories come in without offering to take a judges.h.i.+p, or allow the French to make a Revolution without proposing to naturalise himself as a citizen of the new Republic. The statesman who never deserted an ally, or distrusted a friend, could have no fellows.h.i.+p with a free-lance, ignorant of the very meaning of loyalty; who, if the surfeited pen of the reporter had not declined its task, would have enriched our collections of British oratory by at least one Philippic against every colleague with whom he had ever acted. The many who read this conversation by the light of the public history of Lord Melbourne's Administration, and still more the few who have access to the secret history of Lord Grey's Cabinet, will acknowledge that seldom was a prediction so entirely fulfilled, or a character so accurately read.

And that it was not a prophecy composed after the event is proved by the circ.u.mstance that it stands recorded in the handwriting of one who died before it was accomplished.

"January 3, 1832.--Yesterday Tom dined at Holland House, and heard Lord Holland tell this story. Some paper was to be published by Mr. Fox, in which mention was made of Mr. Pitt having been employed at a club in a manner that would have created scandal. Mr. Wilberforce went to Mr. Fox, and asked him to omit the pa.s.sage. 'Oh, to be sure,' said Mr. Fox; 'if there are any good people who would be scandalised, I will certainly put it out!' Mr. Wilberforce then preparing to take his leave, he said: 'Now, Mr. Wilberforce, if, instead of being about Mr. Pitt, this had been an account of my being seen gaming at White's on a Sunday, would you have taken so much pains to prevent it being known?' 'I asked this,'

said Mr. Fox, 'because I wanted to see what he would say, for I knew he would not tell a lie about it. He threw himself back, as his way was, and only answered: "Oh, Mr. Fox, you are always so pleasant!"'

"January 8, 1832.--Yesterday Tom dined with us, and stayed late. He talked almost uninterruptedly for six hours. In the evening he made a great many impromptu charades in verse. I remember he mentioned a piece of impertinence of Sir Philip Francis. Sir Philip was writing a history of his own time, with characters of its eminent men, and one day asked Mr. Tierney if he should like to hear his own character. Of course he said 'Yes,' and it was read to him. It was very flattering, and he expressed his gratification for so favourable a description of himself.

'Subject to revision, you must remember, Mr. Tierney,' said Sir Philip, as he laid the ma.n.u.script by; 'subject to revision according to what may happen in the future.'