To define a Whig and to define Macaulay is pretty much the same thing. Let us trace some of the qualities which enabled one man to become so completely the type of a vast body of his compatriots.
The first and most obvious power in which Macaulay excelled his neighbours was his portentous memory. He could assimilate printed pages, says his nephew, more quickly than others could glance over them. Whatever he read was stamped upon his mind instantaneously and permanently, and he read everything. In the midst of severe labours in India, he read enough classical authors to stock the mind of an ordinary professor. At the same time he framed a criminal code and devoured masses of trashy novels. From the works of the ancient fathers of the Church to English political pamphlets and to modern street-ballads, no printed matter came amiss to his omnivorous appetite. All that he had read could be reproduced at a moment's notice. Every fool, he said, can repeat his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards; and he was as familiar with the Cambridge Calendar as the most devoted Protestant with the Bible. He could have re-written "Sir Charles Grandison" from memory if every copy had been lost. Now it might perhaps be plausibly maintained that the possession of such a memory is unfavourable to a high deve lopment of the reasoning powers. The case of Pascal, indeed, who is said never to have forgotten anything, shows that the two powers may coexist: and other cases might of course be mentioned. But it is true that a powerful memory may enable a man to save himself the trouble of reasoning. It encourages the indolent propensity of deciding difficulties by precedent instead of principles. Macaulay, for example was once required to argue the point of political casuistry as to the decree of independent action permissible to members of a Cabinet. An ordinary mind would have to answer by striking a rough balance between the conveniences and inconveniences likely to arise. It would be forced, that is to say, to reason from the nature of the case. But Macaulay had at his fingers' end every instance from the days of Walpole to his own in which ministers had been allowed to vote against the general policy of the government. By quoting them, he seemed to decide the point by authority, instead of taking the troublesome and dangerous road of abstract reasoning. Thus to appeal to experience is with him to appeal to the stores of a gigantic memory; and is generally the same thing as to deny the value of all general rules. This is the true Whig doctrine of referring to precedent rather than to theory. Our popular leaders were always glad to quote Hampden and Sidney instead of venturing upon the dangerous ground of abstract rights.
Macaulay's love of deciding all points by an accumulation of appropriate instances, is indeed characteristic of his mind. It is connected with a curious defect of analytical power. It appears in his literary criticism as much as in his political speculations. In an interesting letter to Mr. Napier, he states the case himself as an excuse for not writing upon Scott. "Hazlitt used to say, 'I am nothing if not critical.' The case with me," says Macaulay, "is precisely the reverse. I have a strong and acute enjoyment of works of the imagination, but I have never habituated myself to dissect them. Perhaps I enjoy them the more keenly for that very reason. Such books as Lessing's 'Laocoon,' such passages as the criticism on 'Hamlet' in 'Wilhelm Meister,' fill me with wonder and despair." If we take any of Macaulay's criticisms, we shall see how truly he had gauged his own capacity. They are either random discharges of superlatives or vigorous assertions of sound moral principles. He compares Miss Austen to Shakespeare—one of the most random applications of the universal superlative ever made—or shows conclusively that Wycherley was a corrupt ribald. But he never makes a fine suggestion as to the secrets of the art whose products he admires or dislikes. His mode, for example, of criticising Bunyan is to give a list of the passages which he remembers, and, of course, he remembers everything. He observes, what was tolerably clear, that Bunyan's allegory is as vivid as a concrete history, though strangely comparing him in this respect to Shelley—the least concrete of poets; and he makes the discovery which did not require his vast stores of historical knowledge, that "it is impossible to doubt that" Bunyan's trial of Christian and Faithful is meant to satirize the judges of Charles II. That is as plain as that the last cartoon in Punch is meant to satirize Mr. Disraeli. Macaulay can draw a most vivid portrait, so far as that can be done by a picturesque accumulation of characteristic facts, but he never gets below the surface or details the principles whose embodiment he describes from without.
