24 October: Boreham on Thomas Macaulay

A Faggot of Thunderbolts
A boy of wide-open eyes, excitable temperament, and swift impulsive movement, Lord Macaulay—the anniversary of whose death is tomorrow—was five when Nelson laid down his life amid the glories of Trafalgar and 15 when Wellington finally overthrew Napoleon at Waterloo. This explains everything. The atmosphere of his boyhood affected him as the atmosphere of a conservatory affects a sensitive plant. It led to an amazingly rapid intellectual development and, as a consequence, the most incredible stories are told of the boy's phenomenal precocity. By the time he went into long trousers he exhibited a superabundance of mental vitality that made his company extremely embarrassing. He electrified everything that he touched and startled everybody whom he met. He was as restless and as tumultuous as the falls of Niagara. Although as a young man he was considered one of the ornaments of London society, he never entered a drawing-room without giving the impression that an incarnate cyclone had suddenly burst upon the astonished company.

When Macaulay took up the thread of the conversation, nobody else could get a word in edgeways. Eclipse, was first and the rest nowhere; the field was simply left standing. Sydney Smith and Macaulay were often invited to the same table. The other guests were eager for the witticisms of the famous cleric, and Smith was bubbling over with a stream of quaint, whimsical, and grotesque observations. But, in the company of Macaulay, he had not the ghost of a chance. On one such occasion, when Smith drew back his chair at the end of the meal, he turned to Macaulay and observed, half-bitterly and half-laconically: "Macaulay, when I'm dead you'll be sorry that you never heard me talk!" It was not that Macaulay was self-centred, over-bearing, or rude. It was simply that he was extraordinarily well-informed and was overflowing with irrepressible energy. "I wish," exclaimed Lord Melbourne, "that I were as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything!"

A Frenzied Geyser In Ceaseless Eruption
The same breathless and tempestuous intensity marked even his hours of solitude. A short, stout, sturdy little man with big round face and large, staring hazel eyes, he invariably carried an umbrella which, as he declaimed the sentences he was secretly composing, he waved and flourished so energetically that other pedestrians left the pavement in consternation. Once he was seen at a table by himself at the Trafalgar Hotel at Greenwich. It was noticed that he was muttering away to himself in a mood of evident excitement. Suddenly, he seized the decanter, brandished it as he elaborated his argument and finally brought it with such force to the table that the fragments flew in all directions.

Is it any wonder that the pages that passed under his pen became infected by the fever of his inexhaustible virility? There is a throb in every sentence. The reader feels that the noble phrase was written in a kind of frenzy. One imagines him sitting at his desk, pondering the idea to which he is about to give expression. He bites his quill, flourishes his ruler, twists and twirls as if in pain, strikes strange attitudes, and then, pushing back his chair, and probably overturning it in the process, he springs violently to his feet. Gesticulating vehemently, he paces the room, declaiming the proposed sentence, first in this form and then in that. He likes each phrase to be as beautifully balanced, as well-poised, and as tellingly effective as he can possibly make it. At length, when the glowing period has assumed the stateliness, the rhythm, and the force he so fervently desires, he flings himself once more into his chair, commits the exquisitely-rounded passage to paper and chuckles audibly over the certainty of its immortality.

The Electrificaton Of Far-Off Yesterdays
For Macaulay confessed that he always had A.D. 5000 in the corner of his eye. He loved to feel that every syllable that trickled from his pen would be pondered, treasured, and quoted as long as the English language was intelligible to men. Empires might rise and fall, civilisations might assume dramatically new and unexpected forms, his own New Zealander might stand upon a shattered arch of London Bridge surveying the crumbling ruins of the city that was once the world's metropolis, but Macaulay had no doubt that all the centuries unborn would find a place in their hearts for the writings of Thomas Babington Macaulay! Composure was an art that he made no serious attempt to master. He could never tie a bow, could never shave without cutting himself, and could never recognise a tune, however popular or hackneyed. His mind was in too much of a ferment and he contrived to communicate to his manuscript the ardour of his soul.

Macaulay wrote with all the zest of a schoolboy dashing into a playground; with all the rapture of a lover on his way to his lady, with all the intensity and glow of a Red Indian on the warpath. As a result he made history a romance to thousands of people, young and old, who had always regarded it as a boredom. In his "Victorian Age in Literature," G. K. Chesterton says that a new age was born when a footman at Holland House opened a door and announced "Mr Macaulay!" There were, Chesterton avers, two Macaulays—the rational Macaulay who was generally wrong and the romantic Macaulay who was invariably right. Happily the rational Macaulay emerged so seldom that, for all practical purposes, he is a negligible quantity. That pale-blooded, flinty-hearted Macaulay was buried, once and for all, in Westminster Abbey and has never since been seen, but the real Macaulay, the red-blooded Macaulay, the romantic Macaulay—the Macaulay who, with flashing eyes, waved his hands, brandished his umbrella, and smashed the decanter—will live for centuries and will be loved as long as he lives.

F W Boreham

Image: Thomas Macaulay