The New Criterion

By the time he died in 1859, Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Victorian historian and parliamentarian, had meticulously plotted his posthumous fame. A founding trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, he sat for no fewer than twenty-one portraits now found in its collection. He served on the committee to decorate the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, the corridors of which were duly adorned with paintings based upon his histories. His Cambridge College, Trinity, immortalized him in marble. In 1876 his nephew George Otto Trevelyan published the stately Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, a virtually authorized biography that remained standard for generations. He was entombed at Westminster Abbey, one of the few historians to lie in Poet’s Corner.

Despite his best efforts, however, Macaulay’s reputation has ever remained decidedly middle-brow. Like many popular writers, he was scorned as a literary dandy by the elite of his day. John Stuart Mill considered him an “intellectual dwarf, rounded off and stunted.” Thomas Carlyle dismissed his “irremediably commonplace nature.” Matthew Arnold snickered that Macaulay diverted “all who are beginning to feel enjoyment in the things of the mind.” Modern historians have been no kinder. Since Herbert Butterfield vivisected Macaulay’s History of England in the 1930s, it has been derided as a canonical example of “Whig history”—that venerable sectarian mythology designed to champion liberalism and Protestantism as the twin engines of human progress.

These complaints are laced with more than a little jealousy of Macaulay’s stylistic gifts. G. M. Trevelyan (another of the brood and Macaulay’s grand-nephew) was on to something when he observed that “condemnation of him used to be the shibboleth of that school of English historians who destroyed the habit of reading history among their fellow country-men.” But in his day, T. B. Macaulay could laugh at them all. His fame approached that of Dickens.

Until 1962, the Trevelyans zealously guarded Macaulay’s papers, not hesitating to expunge awkward passages from his journals. Partly for this reason, modern studies of Macaulay are rarely worth mentioning. The exception was written by the Harvard historian John Clive. His elegant Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian won a National Book Award in 1974, but extended only into its subject’s thirty-seventh year. Clive died suddenly in 1990, and we have needed a full, updated biography. Now we have one. Father Robert Sullivan, a historian at Notre Dame, was a student of Clive’s. His Macaulay: The Tragedy of Power is a deeply researched book and, for this reason, likely to endure. If it does, it will be remembered for its virtues and its vices in equal measure.

T. B. Macaulay was born in 1800 into the bosom of the Clapham set, that worthy circle of reforming evangelicals. His father Zachary, a celebrated abolitionist, presided as one of community’s grandees. The family’s religiosity did not take with Tom, but his father’s intellectual rigor certainly did, and from a precocious age. (When scalded with hot coffee at the age of three, he calmed his hostess with the words: “Thank you, Madam, the agony has abated.”) Macaulay was educated as a gentleman, steeped in the classics, and then sent to Cambridge, where he dazzled as an oratorical and literary prodigy, capable of reciting Milton’s Paradise Lost from memory. At Cambridge his Christianity ebbed away. His irreligion was discreet, but pained his father as a “chastisement at the hand of God.”

Macaulay’s sparkling literary career was launched in the pages of the Edinburgh Review, the flagship publication of the Whig party and perfectly pitched to its manner of noblesse oblige. Though a life-long Whig, Macaulay maintained many Tory friendships and traditionalist views. Burke was one of his lifelong influences. But he distrusted the “rose-bushes and poor rates” politics of the “merry old England” set, and enthused over the dawning age of steam and steel. In 1830, he began his long career in parliament. His speeches—on causes such as franchise reform and the admission of Jews to parliament—were legendary. “I made my way in the world by haranguing,” he would recall. As a reformer, he was a classic liberal, devoted to liberty but warning his poorer constituents that government aid was a “great delusion.” He feared the “anarchy and plunder” of the “raving reds.” His politics developed a cynical edge. Of parliament, he wrote: “There are wheels within wheels, mines under mines—intrigues crossing intrigues.”

To an age enraptured with political oratory, a word wizard such as Macaulay was a valuable man. He was rewarded with the usual morsels of jobbery. A lucrative post in India made his fortune. Burke had excoriated such imperialists on the make as “birds of prey and passage, with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting.” Macaulay was less squeamish. He spent four years in India, and there repaid his lavish wages with a new penal code and a famous memo advocating English-language education. Macaulay could be rough with the local culture (“a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia”), but his law code and his native language have both endured on the subcontinent, to its benefit. While he was in India, Macaulay’s beloved youngest sister, Margaret, died of scarlet fever. For six months, unawares, he sent her elaborate letters. The news, when it reached him, shattered him. For the rest of his life he clung to the society of his sister Hannah, who had married into the house of Trevelyan. Of such connections was the liberal aristocracy of Victorian England made.

Returned from the Imperial frontier in 1838, Macaulay held several high flying political posts, but he chiefly occupied himself as a belletrist. He lived at Albany, Piccadilly, and read voraciously, while dining alone or while strolling the streets. His magazine essays and reviews continued to flow. In 1842, he produced his only remembered effort at verse, the Lays of Ancient Rome, an evocation of the Roman Empire’s grandeur meant to stir the ruling class of the British. For a century it was a staple of schoolboy memorization:

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods

Although histrionic, the Lays of Ancient Rome was deft in its way. It was a wild success, with sales goosed after the suppression of the Indian Mutiny in 1857. But Macaulay’s most popular work, as any peruser of an average American used book-shop will know, was his five-volume History of England from the Accession of James II. Macaulay composed his History laboriously over the course of two decades. The work established him as England’s finest narrative historian since Gibbon. Its narrow subject was the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and its aftermath; its broader subjects were England’s moderate constitution, its coolly rational Church, and its civilizing imperial mission. The History was lightly researched, but meticulously styled. It charmed and flattered the Victorians during the high summer of their confidence. Macaulay’s History became a national epic. It replaced, he boasted, “the latest fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.” It was read aloud to groups of illiterate working men. It made him famous and rich.

His run as a literary lion was a long one, but in his final years Macaulay suffered a series of heart attacks and all of the despondency that a failing heart can bring. The tender mercies of his physicians included poisonous purgatives of mercury chloride, blistering of the chest, and red meat. These remedies brought the predictable results. He died shortly after Christmas of 1859.

T. B. Macaulay lived a life of prominence and consequence, and Sullivan’s account of it is in many ways an able one. His biography is well paced and richly detailed. It quotes liberally and effectively from Macaulay’s prolific correspondence and diaries. Particularly when he was on the move—through Europe and the Empire—Macaulay recorded his doings and opinions with mordant wit. We follow him as he traveled to a mountain spa in India, borne for four hundred miles on the shoulders of a dozen natives, with ten more to carry his bags. (“I brought no more than absolutely necessary.” Journey was “agreeable on the whole.”) We spend languid afternoons with him in Rome, bumping into William Gladstone at a papal vespers. (“Lounged about the church discontentedly, heard mass said, saw several female penitents at Confession, and wished myself in the chair of the priest.”) We smirk as he weeps while reading Dickens, or dismisses Kant (“Sanskrit”) and Samuel Johnson (“the most ridiculous character in literary history”), or visits with Alexis de Tocqueville and Harriet Beecher Stowe (“invited herself to lunch”).

Biography, of all historical genres, is best when modest—a careful reconstruction of the past in all of its unfamiliar particularity. Sullivan boasts some writerly skills, and his book is an absorbing tour through the world of an elite Victorian liberal. Unfortunately, he strives for more, and does so clumsily. Too often, he mounts a high hobby horse, and seeks to flay the Victorians (through Macaulay) for their hypocrisies and failures. Sullivan appreciates Macaulay, but he never likes him, nor the intellectual and political world that he inhabited. Good biographers needs not adore their subjects, of course, and some of Sullivan’s shafts hit their mark. But the barrage is implausibly relentless.

The lowest blow is Sullivan’s effort to sabotage Macaulay’s propriety by presenting his affection for his sisters as latently incestuous. This scurrilous suggestion was first cautiously advanced by Thomas Pinney, the editor of Macaulay’s correspondence, but is no less forgivable here for that. Macaulay adored his sisters and was embarrassingly fond of being fawned over by them. His familial letters drip with overripe affection, but an experienced historian should know that “caresses,” “kisses,” and even “fondling” meant something less libidinous to the Victorians than they do today. Both Pinney and Sullivan concede that Macaulay was a life-long celibate, which makes their speculations as to his inner desires even more pointlessly calumnious. They have succumbed to what we might call the A. S. Byatt syndrome: an operative assumption that Victorian decorum merely veiled Gothic perversion. Hypocrisy-hunting among the Victorians has always been one of our shabbier intellectual diversions. Lytton Strachey set the terms of the game in 1918, when his Eminent Victorians held up a roster of nineteenth-century English eminences to the decadent scorn of Bloomsbury. The motif has been irresistible to historians and novelists ever since, but Sullivan’s use of it is particularly regrettable.

Fortunately, Sullivan does not dwell on this presumed sexual degeneracy. He is more concerned to condemn Macaulay as a racist apologist for Empire, and here Sullivan has more to say for himself. Macaulay (alongside J. S. Mill) has long been understood as a prime specimen of that paradoxical historical species: the liberal imperialist. Sullivan is instructive when explaining how Liberal England comfortably coexisted with the British Empire. Unlike the Lockean liberalism of the American constitutional tradition, Victorian liberalism dispensed with natural rights and natural law, and worshipped the profane idol of Utility. The Liberal agenda—small statism, franchise reform, free markets—was largely defended on Benthamite, consequentialist grounds. There was nothing sacrosanct about these things. They were not “rights.” They merely “worked” to maximize pleasure and profit. The value of freedom was not a first principle, but a factual proposition. Victorian liberals were distressingly casual about reserving liberty for their blessed plot. They found it less “useful” in the “savage” factual conditions of India or Ireland.

Sullivan valuably demonstrates just how saturated Macaulay was in the Utilitarian ethic. Without doubt, this narrowed the horizons of his political morality. He disliked Indians, and sought a “firm and impartial despotism” that would render them “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” His opinion of the Irish was perhaps more callous still. He daydreamed about sending the Duke of Wellington to scourge them as a latter-day Cromwell. Like many of his colleagues, he shrugged off the ghastly Irish famine as a “sharp and effective remedy” for Irish barbarity.

Macaulay viewed the poor and weak with indifference, and he had a taste for domination. There is no need to excuse these traits, which were not shared, after all, by Macaulay’s own father, or by his intellectual hero, Edmund Burke. But Sullivan’s brief against Macaulay’s imperialism loses all sense of proportion. He accuses him of embracing the “diabolic forces lurking in all violence,” and of espousing an ethic of “imperial slaughter.” He presents him as a “sinister prophet” of “genocide,” who died when the “atrophied emotional consciousness that had stunted his humanity ceased to sustain his will to power.”

All of this is absurd rhetorical excess. It undermines the considerable value of Sullivan’s book. Macaulay, to be sure, is as interesting for his flaws as for his merits. If he embodied the cultural attainments of the Victorians, he did as well the Godless disillusionment and philistine materialism that often impoverished their moral imagination. But he was no monster, and should not be presented as one in the interest of scoring rather insipid political points.

There is an irony in this. For all of his virtues as an historian, Macaulay himself was prone to cheap moralizing. Roman Catholics were his favorite target. He loathed them wherever and whenever they appeared in his sights, from the time of Henry VIII to that of Cardinal Newman. His portraits of them, as superstitious and effeminate foils to manly English rationalists, were grossly unfair. Father Sullivan quite rightly criticizes this slipshod bigotry, and one might forgive him for bearing a heated grudge on behalf of his co-religionists. The condescension of posterity tends to come full circle. One only wishes Sullivan had remembered that revenge is best served cool.