Select essays of Macaulay : Milton, Bunyan, Johnson, Goldsmith, Madame d'Arblay

Introduction

To be perfectly adapted for reading and study in the class-room, a selection from our literature must meet these conditions : it must be interesting, both in matter and in manner, to the young persons for whom it is intended ; it must have a genuinely important content, that is, its subject must be worthy of serious attention and must promise a substantial gain in knowledge ; it must be a masterpiece of English, a model of clearness, simplicity, and vigor.

The literary essays of Macaulay not only fulfil these conditions, but they offer other advantages for schoolroom study which render them, for a certain stage of the high-school course, perhaps the most eligible prose writings in our literature. Macaulay 's reading had been wonderfully comprehensive, and his memory retained the results of this reading in a manner unexampled among modern writers, ^ence he illustrates his meaning, as he develops his subject, with constant allusion and citation, challenging his reader with comparisons, and never suffering him to relax his attention. His paragraphs are full of names or of suggestions of names. He assumes that his reader has the same acquaintance with the older literature as himself. To catch instantly the entire pertinency and appositeness of every allusion of this writer would require that the reader should himiv Select Essays of Macaulay.

self be endowed with equal gifts and possessed of equal stores. The reader of Macaulay must often stop and think ; he must summon up all his historical and literary memories ; often he must inaugurate fresh reading under the stimulus of an off-hand citation that evidently was deemed by the author to throw a flood of light on the subject in hand.

While, therefore, many writers are interesting in their several ways, Macaulay's way lies peculiarly in the direction of provocation to further examination both of his main topics and of his incidental references. An interested reader always reads concentrically; that is, with some nucleus about which books and authors group themselves with more or less mutual relation. Such a centre is sure to be found in one or another essay of Macaulay. Each essay requires at once certain further research. The other essays are soon found to help wonderfully towards the understanding of the one first read. This reading must be done with pencil in hand. The reader's own notes thus become his all-sufficient guide in choosing his next books. Thus reading becomes organic, having a principle of structure, a clear aim and purpose, instead of being amorphous, with here a book and there a book picked up by chance or at the advice of another person. For example, the essays of Macaulay touching eighteenth-century themes suggest an immense range of possible reading of a most interesting character. The stimulus which these essays give to such reading is far more potent than the pages of histories of literature could be, for the reason that in the essays we see and feel the effects of reading upon the culture and the power of a writer, while the histories give us only exter-

Introduction. v

nal facts. The young reader is apt to ask for a list of books to read, and the okl adviser is often too willing to accede to the request. But prearranged lists of books are fatal to inner, spontaneous interest. No one reads through a list except under duress. Not a list of items to be checked off, but a centre, a starting-point, is the true gift of the school-room Mentor to his learners. The lines of progress that radiate from a good centre are infinite both in their number and in their extent. All good reading is gradually included within their reach. The atoms of acquisition come in this way to cohere and to take shape in well-rounded culture.

For yet another reason Macaulay is a writer peculiarly stimulating to youth : he is himself always a youth in the fervor and the intensity of his sympathies. What he admires he admires extremely, and what he hates he hates with most cordial hatred. It is usual to say that he goes too far, and praises too highly, or depreciates more than is fair. It is plain, however, that were Macaulay's feelings less ardently enlisted in his expositions, these expositions would tend to approach the commonplace, and would never have become the power in literature that they are. It is impossible to conceive an earnest and moving piece of writing whose chief concern should be to balance praise and blame, and show up merits and demerits in equal measure. Macaulay's function in literature was not cold criticism. He was far removed from indifference towards the persons and the things he describes. His service was to arouse in English readers an interest in the great events of their history and their literature. He is the most popular of writers. Nor will it be said that his judgments, though vi Select Essays of Macaulay,

often expressed in strong language, are wrong and perverted judgments. For youthful readers he may be accepted as a safe guide. His exaggerated expressions are never intended to conceal insufficiency of knowledge. He never indulges in mere conventional j)hrasing, the besetting sin of young and ambitious writers. He is absolutely sincere and original. Familiarity with such a writer during the period of life when habits are forming must be altogether wholesome.

The English teacher Avill naturally find an advantage in reading with his class selections that discuss his own especial theme. As lessons in literary history, as well as lessons in English composition, these studies will be fruitful and memorable. In connection with the incidental researches which they suggest, they will constitute an opportunity for the acquisition of knowledge, and for the general discipline of the taste that, from the pedagogic point of view, lacks absolutely no element of desirableness.

Such reading as is here offered the young student must be done as work, not as mere amusement. The pencil must be kept in constant use, and the note-book must be ahvays at hand. The student must be his own annotator. No more in reading a piece of English than in working out an algebra lesson should the learner expect to have his work done for him. Only what he earns will he ever possess, though what he borrows from another, or has given him, may meet the requirements/ of an examination.

No pedagogic maxim can be adduced that shall favor giving the learner results without leading him through the processes through which the results Avere obtained.

Introduction. vii

Results without research are dead and useless. Research without results is excellent and vital, because always accompanied with hope. Notes are usually a mere incubus upon interest. They put an obstacle in the way of the teacher, who would like to exercise his skill by leading his pupils through the various stages of growing curiosity and zealous search up to the consummation of successful finding. Those editors who steal from the teacher his opportunity of teaching are really his worst foes. Strange ideas of the pedagogic province seem to be lield by annotators who try to tell the pupil everything, as if all the teacher had to do was to ask questions and o^et thing's told ag^ain, — re-cited.

As there is appended to the present selection of the essays of Macaulay a body of " notes," the annotator desires to explain exactly what ground these notes cover, and for what purpose they were prepared. In nearly every case where a note appears, it will be found to ask a question or to suggest a bit of research, with a hint as to the direction in which the research must be made. In no instance is a note given Avhere the needed investigation is obvious and can be readily planned. That any notes at all of this kind are given is hereby confessed to be, so far forth, a trenching on the proper field of the teacher, whose duty it is to prescribe tasks and furnish the needful helps for their performance ; and the annotator accordingly offers his apologies to those teachers who find his f-uggestions superfluous, and he would rejoice to be able to think tliat all teachers belonged to this class. On the. proper field of the pupil, however, he has not trenched. If, like a visitor to the class-room, he has asked a few quesviii Select Essays of Macaiday.

tions that the teacher would soon have asked himself, he has not thwarted the teacher by whispering to the pupil his answers. The great bulk of the annotable matter has been left without annotation, in order that the activity of the student may find free play. Only where the possibility or the desirableness of incidental reading has been somewhat less obvious, has any question been asked, and only when the books to be consulted have been such as would not instantly suggest themselves, have hints been given as to what to read.

Occasionally the needed research has been a little troublesome to make. In a few such cases results liave been given, in view of the fact that the book is destined for use by young persons whose time is limited, and that investigable matter, in any Macaulay text, is already superabundant. The annotator believes that he has omitted no difficult point. Allusions not noted he has thought fairly within the reach of high-school classes. A considerable portion of the entire mass of the notes is occupied by quotations of interesting relevant passages that should be read in connection with the text.

It sometimes happens that Macaulay names an obscure and unimportant person with some epithet, or in connection Avith a context, that sufficiently explains this person's appearance, so that any note at all becomes needless. It is by no means always necessary to run to the biographical dictionaries when a name appears. Sometimes investigation will reveal only so much as the author himself tells in a word or two, and to find even this will cost time. If Macaulay says a writer is worthless, it is no increase of knowledge to find in what year

Introduction. ix

such a writer wrote his worthless book. Discrimination is necessary in reading pieces so overcharged with allusion. It is only the ancient classics whose every word is precious. The reader of English must reach the end of the chapter. Infinite other chapters await his eager attention. Hence the English reader must learn to recognize and set aside what is unimportant. Even tlie unimportant things will gradually gain significance as the reader's acquaintance with literature extends, and the young reader must not at the outset be too much loaded with erudition whose relation to what he is studying he cannot appreciate.

But by far the greater portion of Macaulay's allusions must be worked out with whatever labor of researcli is necessary to make them yield their meaning. This labor constitutes the getting of the lesson. A lesson in English literature should be got by a method analogous to that which, in the physical sciences, has already come fully into vogue, and is sometimes called the laboratory method. In physics it is no longer customary to let a student merely read a formula and Avitness an experiment. He must himself conduct the experiment, observe the phenomena, and deduce and formulate the law. In literature the entire mass of phenomena lies concealed in books. The art of research is here the art of using libraries. A beginner is bewildered as he confronts a large library. Graduall}^ he acquires skill and begins to find things with ease. The labor of this search is pleasant, and the successes give it zest, while the tantalizing failures pique and stimulate perseverance. The study of history, which the learner is carrying on at the same time with his English, is also a library

Select Essays of Macaulay.

study, and the same familiarity with books which he gains in the one helps him in the other. Thus these studies are manifestly such as cannot be carried on while the student sits motionless at a desk and pores over a single book. The method of explanatory notes presupposes a dead learning-by-heart, Avith the young people sitting in straight lines, their eyes fixed on their lessons, their thoughts bent on committing these lessons to memory. The library method assumes a collection of books and such freedom of movement as choice and consultation of them necessarily imply. It assumes, moreover, pleasant and free relations with the larger libraries outside the schoolroom that all American communities are rapidly coming to possess.

The present editor has had in view schools of secondary grade ; that is, high schools and academies. He has taken for granted that such schools have collections of books, just as, if he were preparing a text-book of physics, he would take for granted the presence in the schools of proper laboratories. There is no such thing as reading one book without the help of other books. There must be perpetual reference from book to book. This is the case even in easy reading. In reading that is perpetually setting tasks of elucidation and verification the presence of a good reference library becomes an absolute necessity. The best dictionaries, the best encyclopaedias, the standard histories and biographies, complete editions of the principal authors, must be always within reach of the student. It is not the business of a pedagogic editor to dispense readers from the necessity of procuring the means of research. Rather is it his province to show readers how to conduct research and what apparatus of research is most serviceable.

I

Introduction. xi

The custom prevalent in the schools of dwelling a long time on small portions of Latin and Greek text must not be allowed to establish itself in the English work also. An English piece must be read and got through with. If we adopt Professor Marcli's method of exhaustive questioning, we shall never arrive at any goal and shall never make English interesting. Work in English should be vigorous and rapid, taking many things for granted. The skilful teacher surmises when his pupils fail to understand a point riglitly, and halts the column of march only on such occasions. Tliat the reading of such selections as those here offered may go oft" smoothly and intelligently, due preparation should be made. The teacher should look over a few pages in advance and note the points at which special difficulties of any kind will arise. These points, as they require more elaborate investigation, he will separate from the text when he assigns the lesson, and he will exempt the class e.n masse from giving them attention. The text, thus temporarily cleared of the chief difficulties, is prescribed to all the class, who must work it out and be prepared on it at the next lesson. At the same time the special points of difficulty are dealt out to individuals, one to each, to be looked up and reported on. The interest of a class exercise is much enhanced if the individual pupils bring different contributions, so that each is listened to with curiosity on a fresh topic. Moreover, if all alike are required to make the same investigations, the reference books may not suffice to go round. All the obscure points are reported on, and all the pupils get the benefit of the explanation. Each pupil has had as much research to make as he had time and opportunity for.

xii Select Essays of Macaulay.

and the class can at once pass on to fresh woods and pastures new. In this way it is legitimately feasible to cover considerable ground in the class reading of English texts while pursuing strictly the method of research.

The points of special difficulty may well be looked up a few days in advance of the time when the class is to read as a lesson the passages where they occur, and these may in some cases be given to pupils as themes, which must be punctually written out, ready for reading at the precise moment when, being needed as elucidations, they will be appreciated and will be listened to with attention. The pupil who has such a theme to prepare will ordinarily need assistance in making his researches. To give this assistance is the teachei\s business. The teacher must, accordingly, be prepared, when he assigns such a theme to a pupil, to say where the desired matter can be found. He must know whether the books that will have to be used are in the school library or must be looked for in the public library of the town. If the books are absolutely inaccessible to the pupils, the themes whose elaboration depends on these books must not be given out at all. In such case it is the teacher's privilege to present as a downright gift the matter which, in better circumstances, it would be more proper to let the pupils work for and earn the right to possess.

The school should prepare for life, an-d not for examinations. The memorizing method, the cram method, the note method, is good only for examinations. The English that pupils are destined to read for their entertainment and culture as mature men and women will not be annotated. It is riglit to keep in view the con-

Introduction. xiii

ditions that will actually exist. The habit of depending on notes is enfeebling. Books in the ancient languages are always read with the help of notes, and books in the ancient languages have accordingly ceased tQ be read except by a caste of special devotees whose work in life continues to have some relation to the pedagogic function. But all men and women read English books. To read English books with intelligence, the habit of consulting the various collateral helps, of drawing upon the stores of related knowledge, is of all importance. It is doubtless a trouble and annoyance to use the dictionary. But only by using the dictionary can one attain to a command of the English language. He Avho cannot bring himself often to turn aside from the book he holds in his hand to the other books on his shelves finds himself limited in his reading to the weakest and shallowest books of the day. He can read no history, no biography, no travels ; he can read nothing whatever that is old, nothing that was produced from the stores of large and generously equipped minds, nothing that reflects the life and manners of its generation, nothing that employs a vocabulary richer and more varied than that which serves the petty uses of every day.

Some of the books of reference which a high-school library should contain for the use of its English classes are the following : —

Webster's International Dictionary. Among other usefiil things, the new International contains a revised edition of Wheeler's Dictionary of the Noted Names of Fiction.

A good encyclopaedia. The Britannica is not too large. Even the best will often be found to give no help.

Adams's Dictionary of English Literature.

xiv Select Ussat/s of Macaulay,

Brewer's Reader's Handbook of Allusions, References, Plots, and Stories.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, giving the derivation, source, or origin of common phrases, allusions, and words that have a tale to tell.

Taine's English Literature.

Cruden's Concordance to the English Bible.

Scoones's Four Centuries of English Letters.

Macaulay's Works, entire.

Knight's Popular History of England.

Hare's Walks in London.

Baedeker's London.

Ryland's Chronological Outlines of English Literature.

The books here named are given as specimens of reference books proper. Their number could be increased to any extent desirable. But reference will almost as often be fruitfully made to books that do not come under this denomination. Good editions should be procured, as fast as the means of the school allow, of the chief English writers. It is almost daily the case that an obscure point in the selection that is being studied can be explained by reference to some other work of the same writer. This often happens to readers of Macaulay. In works of history, moreover, the library cannot be too well stocked. Both the classes in history and those in English will find great furtherance in an abundance of the standard works of history.

As here printed, the essay on Milton is shortened by the omission of a portion that seemed to the editor somewhat less interesting to young students. Very slight omissions from the other essays will explain themselves.

SELECT ESSAYS OF MACAULAY.

>t«c

MILTON.

Towards the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon, deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course of his researches among the presses of his office, met with a large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected copies of the foreign despatches written by Milton while he filled the office of Secretary, and several papers relating to the Popish Trials and the Rye-house Plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope, superscribed To Mr. Skinner, Merchant. On examination, the large manuscript i:>roved to be the long lost essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, which, according to Wood and Toland, Milton finished after the Restoration, and deposited with Cyriac Skinner. Skinner, it is well known, held the same political opinions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have fallen under the suspicions of the Government during that persecution of the Whigs which followed the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, and that, in consequence of a general seizure of his papers, this work may have been brought to the office in which it has been found. But whatever the adventures of the manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it is a genuine relic of the great poet.

2 Se\'ct Essays of Macaulay.

Mr. Sumner, who was commanded by his Majesty to edit and translate the treatise, has acquitted himself of his task in a manner honorable to his talents and to his character. His version is not indeed very easy or elegant ; but it is entitled to the praise of clearness and fidelity. His notes abound wdth interesting quotations, and have the rare merit of really elucidating the text. The preface is evidently the work of a sensible and candid man, firm in his own religious opinions, and tolerant towards those of others.

The book itself will not add much to the fame of Milton. It is, like all his Latin works, well written, though not exactly in the style of the prize essays of Oxford and Cambridge. There is no elaborate imitation of classical antiquity, no scrupulous purity, none of the ceremonial cleanness which characterizes the diction of our academical Pharisees. The author does not attempt to polish and brighten his composition into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He does not, in short, sacrifice sense and spirit to pedantic refinements. The nature of his subject compelled him to use many words

" That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp."

But he writes with as much ease and freedom as if Latin were his mother-tongue ; and, where he is least happy, his failure seems to arise from the carelessness of a native, not from the ignorance of a foreigner. We may apply to him what Denham with great felicity says of Cowley. He wears the garb, but not the clothes, of the ancients.

We wish to avail ourselves of the interest, transient as it may be, which this work has excited. The dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him, a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood. On the same principle, we intend to take advantage of the late interesting discovery, and, while this memorial of a great and good man is still m the hands of all, to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities. Nor, we are convinced, wril the severest of our readers blame us if, on an occasion like the present, we turn for a short time from the topics of the day to commemorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion and the martyr of English liberty.

It is by his poetry that Milton is best known ; and it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By the general suffrage of the civilized world, his place has been assigned among the greatest masters of the art. His detractors, however, though outvoted, have not been silenced. There are many critics, and some of great name, who contrive in the same breath to extol the poems and to decry the poet. The works they acknowledge, considered in themselves, may be classed among the noblest productions of the human mind. But they will not allow the author to rank with those great men who, born in the infancy of civilization, supplied, by their own powers, the want of instruction, and, though destitute of models themselves, bequeathed to posterity models which defy imitation. Milton, it is said, inherited what his predecessors created ; he lived in an enlightened age ; he received a finished education ; and we must therefore, if we would form a just estimate of his powers, make large deductions in consideration of these advantages.

We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavorable circumstances than Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, whether he had not been born "an age too late." Eor this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him the butt of much clumsy ridicule. The poet, we believe, understood the nature of his art better than the critic. He knew that his poetical genius derived no advantage from the civilization which surrounded him, or from the learning which he had acquired ; and he looked back with something like regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.

We think that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Therefore, though we fervently admire those great works of imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand why those wdio believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely the uniformity of the jjhenomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause.

The fact is, that common observers reason from the progress of the experimental sciences to that of the imitative arts. The improvement of the former is gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting materials, ages more in separating and combining them. Even when a system has been formed, there is still something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages. In these pursuits, therefore, the first speculators lie under great disadvantages, and, even when they fail, are entitled to praise. Their pupils, with far inferior intellectual powers, speedily surpass them in actual attainments. Every girl who has read Mrs. Marcet's little dialogues on political economy could teach Montague or Walpole many lessons in finance. Any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation.

But it is not thus with music, with painting, or with sculpture. Still less is it thus with poetry. The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts with better objects of imitation. It may indeed improve the instruments which are necessary to the mechanical ox^erations of the musician, the sculptor, and the painter. But language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

This change in the language of men is partly the cause and partly the effect of a corresponding change in the nature of their intellectual operations, of a change by which science gains and poetry loses. Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge ; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems. They give us vague phrases instead of images, and personified qualities instead of men. They may be better able to analyze human nature than their predecessors. But analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral sense, like Shaftesbury; he may refer all human actions to self-interest, like Helvetius ; or he may never think about the matter at all. His creed on such subjects will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lachrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood, will affect the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shakspeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoninor on the subject as is to be fouud in the fable of the Bees. But could Mandeville have created an lago? Well as he knew how to resolve characters into their elements, would he have been able to combine those elements in such a manner as to make up a man, a real, living, individual man ?