Part 13

Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been and probably much more will be said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is among the very rarest as well as the most precious of human virtues. But there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This during his lifetime was the belief of his friends, but was hardly admitted by opponents. His biographer has really lifted the question out of the range of controversy. He wrote for truth, but of course for truth such as he saw it; and his sight was colored from within. This color, once attached, was what in manufacture is called a mordant; it was a fast color: he could not distinguish between what his mind had received and what his mind had imparted. Hence, when he was wrong, he could not see that he was wrong; and of those calamities which are due to the intellect only, and not the heart, there can hardly be a greater....

However true it may be that Macaulay was a far more consummate workman in the manner than in the matter of his works, we do not doubt that the works contain, in multitudes, passages of high emotion and ennobling sentiment, just awards of praise and blame, and solid expositions of principle, social, moral, and constitutional. They are pervaded by a generous love of liberty; and their atmosphere is pure and bracing, their general aim and basis morally sound. Of the qualifications of this eulogy we have spoken, and have yet to speak. But we can speak of the style of the works with little qualification. We do not indeed venture to assert that his style ought to be imitated. Yet this is not because it was vicious, but because it was individual and incommunicable. It was one of those gifts of which, when it had been conferred, Nature broke the mold. That it is the head of all literary styles we do not allege; but it is different from them all, and perhaps more different from them all than they are usually different from one another. We speak only of natural styles, of styles where the manner waits upon the matter, and not where an artificial structure has been reared either to hide or to make up for poverty of substance.

It is paramount in the union of ease in movement with perspicuity of matter, of both with real splendor, and of all with immense rapidity and striking force. From any other pen, such masses of ornament would be tawdry; with him they are only rich. As a model of art concealing art, the finest cabinet pictures of Holland are almost his only rivals. Like Pascal, he makes the heaviest subject light; like Burke, he embellishes the barrenest. When he walks over arid plains, the springs of milk and honey, as in a march of Bacchus, seem to rise beneath his tread. The repast he serves is always sumptuous, but it seems to create an appetite proportioned to its abundance; for who has ever heard of the reader that was cloyed with Macaulay? In none, perhaps, of our prose writers are lessons such as he gives of truth and beauty, of virtue and of freedom, so vividly associated with delight. Could some magician but do for the career of life what he has done for the arm-chair and the study, what a change would pass on the face (at least) of the world we live in, what an accession of recruits would there be to the professing followers of virtue!...

The truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like many more of us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portentous vigor of the animal he mounted was liable more than most of us to be run away with. His merit is that he could keep his seat in the wildest steeple-chase; but as the object in view is arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting up the fields, spoiling the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the fences needful to secure for labor its profit, and to man at large the full enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering glow of color, such the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches which he draws, that when he has grown hot upon his work he seems to lose all sense of the restraints of fact and the laws of moderation; he vents the strangest paradoxes, sets up the most violent caricatures, and handles the false weight and measure as effectively as if he did it knowingly. A man so able and so upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He never for a moment consciously pursues anything but truth. But truth depends, above all, on proportion and relation. The preterhuman vividness with which Macaulay sees his object, absolutely casts a shadow upon what lies around; he loses his perspective; and imagination, impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of honesty in purpose, achieves the work of fraud. All things for him stand in violent contrast to one another. For the shadows, the gradations, the middle and transition touches, which make up the bulk of human life, character, and action, he has neither eye nor taste. They are not taken account of in his practice, and they at length die away from the ranges of his vision.

In Macaulay all history is scenic; and philosophy he scarcely seems to touch, except on the outer side, where it opens into action. Not only does he habitually present facts in forms of beauty, but the fashioning of the form predominates over, and is injurious to, the absolute and balanced presentation of the subject. Macaulay was a master in execution, rather than in what painting or music terms expression. He did not fetch from the depths, nor soar to the heights; but his power upon the surface was rare and marvelous, and it is upon the surface that an ordinary life is passed and that its imagery is found. He mingled, then, like Homer, the functions of the poet and the chronicler: but what Homer did was due to his time; what Macaulay did, to his temperament.

The 'History' of Macaulay, whatever else it may be, is the work not of a journeyman but of a great artist, and a great artist who lavishly bestowed upon it all his powers. Such a work, once committed to the press, can hardly die. It is not because it has been translated into a crowd of languages, nor because it has been sold in hundreds of thousands, that we believe it will live; but because, however open it may be to criticism, it has in it the character of a true and very high work of art....

Whether he will subsist as a standard and supreme authority is another question. Wherever and whenever read, he will be read with fascination, with delight, with wonder. And with copious instruction too; but also with copious reserve, with questioning scrutiny, with liberty to reject and with much exercise of that liberty. The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken by storm; but posterity, never. The tribunal of the present is accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt. The coming generations will not give Macaulay up; but they will probably attach much less value than we have done to his _ipse dixit_. They will hardly accept from him his net solutions of literary, and still less of historic problems. Yet they will obtain, from his marked and telling points of view, great aid in solving them. We sometimes fancy that ere long there will be editions of his works in which his readers may be saved from pitfalls by brief, respectful, and judicious commentary; and that his great achievements may be at once commemorated and corrected by men of slower pace, of drier light, and of more tranquil, broad-set, and comprehensive judgment. For his works are in many respects among the prodigies of literature; in some, they have never been surpassed. As lights that have shone through the whole universe of letters, they have made their title to a place in the solid firmament of fame. But the tree is greater and better than its fruit; and greater and better yet than the works themselves are the lofty aims and conceptions, the large heart, the independent, manful mind, the pure and noble career, which in this Biography have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote them.

EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN

(1831-)

Among the men in the United States who through the agency of the press have molded intelligent public opinion, Edwin Lawrence Godkin deserves an honorable place. In the columns of the New York Nation and the New York Evening Post, he has for a generation given editorial utterance to his views upon economic, civic, political, and international questions, this work being supplemented by occasional incisive and scholarly articles in the best periodicals. His clientele has been drawn mainly from that powerful minority which is made up of the educated, thoughtful men and women of the country. To this high function Mr. Godkin has contributed exceptional gifts and qualifications; and that in its exercise he has been a force for good, is beyond dispute.

Born in Moyne, Ireland, in 1831, he was educated at Queen's College, Belfast. Then came the more practical education derived from a familiarity with men and things, for in early manhood he began newspaper work as war correspondent, in Turkey and the Crimea, of the London Daily News. As correspondent of this paper he came to the United States and settled here, being admitted to the New York bar in 1858. But journalism was to be his life work; and in 1865 he became the editor of The Nation, a weekly,--succeeding the Round Table, but at once taking a much more important place as a journal of political and literary discussion,--and the next year its proprietor. In 1881 he also became one of the owners and the controlling editor of the New York Evening Post, a daily, and his contributions since then have appeared in both papers, which bear to each other the relation of a daily and weekly edition. Thus he has been in active journalistic service for more than thirty years.

From this slight biographical outline it may be seen that Mr. Godkin brought to the pursuit of his profession and to the study of American institutions some valuable qualifications. A college-bred man of wide experience, an adoptive American able to judge by the comparative method, a careful student of the philosophy of government, from Aristotle to Sir Henry Maine, his views combine in an unusual degree the practical and the theoretical. No doubt he has in his writings what to some will seem the defect of his quality. There is in him a certain haughtiness of temper, and what seems like impatient contempt for the opponent in argument, which, conjoined with a notable power of invective and satire in dealing with what he deems to be fallacious, are likely to arouse opposition. Hence the feeling in some quarters that Mr. Godkin is not at heart an American, but a captious critic, with sympathies ill suited to a democratic government.

This opinion is not justified by a fair examination of his writings. He has on the contrary and in the true sense proved himself a true American. He has spoken wise words upon many of the social and political problems of our day. He has defended democracy from the charge of failure, pointing out that here in the United States social defects, wrongly ascribed by foreign critics to the form of government, have been incidental to the settling of a vast new country. He has stated with clearness and cogency the inadvisability of allowing the government paternal power in finance and tariff legislation. He has preached the difference between cheap jingoism or political partisanship, and the enlightened Americanism which puts its finger upon weak points, criticizing in order to correct and purify. Mr. Godkin, in this, has been a consistent worker in a cause of which Lowell was a noble prophet. And in regard of literary excellence, his editorial writing is often a model of lucid, sinewy English style; while his more deliberated essays have been admirable for calm dignity, polish, and organic exposition, with an air of good breeding over it all. The influence of such a man, both as writer and thinker, especially in a land like the United States, has been most salutary.

THE DUTY OF CRITICISM IN A DEMOCRACY

From 'Problems of Modern Democracy.' Copyright 1896, by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York

No intelligent man can or ought to ignore the part which hope of better things plays in our present social system. It has largely, among the working classes, taken the place of religious belief. They have brought their heaven down to earth, and are literally looking forward to a sort of New Jerusalem, in which all comforts and many of the luxuries of life will be within easy reach of all. The great success of Utopian works like Bellamy's shows the hold which these ideas have taken of the popular mind. The world has to have a religion of some kind, and the hope of better food and clothing, more leisure, and a greater variety of amusements, has become the religion of the working classes. Hope makes them peaceful, industrious, and resigned under present suffering. A Frenchman saw a ragged pauper spend his last few cents on a lottery ticket, and asked him how he could commit such a folly. "In order to have something to hope for," he said. And from this point of view the outlay was undoubtedly excusable. It is literally hope which makes the world go round, and one of the hardest things an educated man who opens his mouth about public affairs has to do, is to say one word or anything to dampen or destroy it. Yet his highest duty is to speak the truth.

Luckily, there is one truth which can always be spoken without offense, and that is that on the whole the race advances through the increase of intelligence and the improvement of character, and has not advanced in any other way. The great amelioration in the condition of the working classes in Europe within this century, including the increasing power of the trades-unions, is the result not of any increase of benevolence in the upper classes, but of the growth of knowledge and self-reliance and foresight among the working classes themselves. The changes in legislation which have improved their condition are changes which they have demanded. When a workingman becomes a capitalist, and raises himself in any way above his early condition, it is rarely the result of miracle or accident. It is due to his superior intelligence and thrift. Nothing, on the whole, can be more delusive than official and other inquiries into the labor problem through commissions and legislative committees. They all assume that there is some secret in the relations of labor and capital which can be found out by taking testimony. But they never find anything out. Their reports during the last fifty years would make a small library, but they never tell us anything new. They are meant to pacify and amuse the laborer, and they do so; but to their constant failure to do anything more we owe some of the Socialist movement. The Socialists believe this failure due to want of will, and that Karl Marx has discovered the great truth of the situation, which is, that labor is entitled to the whole product. The great law which Nature seems to have prescribed for the government of the world, and the only law of human society which we are able to extract from history, is that the more intelligent and thoughtful of the race shall inherit the earth and have the best time, and that all others shall find life on the whole dull and unprofitable. Socialism is an attempt to contravene this law and insure a good time to everybody, independently of character and talents; but Nature will see that she is not frustrated or brought to naught, and I do not think educated men should ever cease to call attention to this fact; that is, ever cease to preach hopefulness, not to everybody, but to good people. This is no bar to benevolence to bad people or any people; but our first duty is loyalty to the great qualities of our kind, to the great human virtues which raise the civilized man above the savage.

There is probably no government in the world to-day as stable as that of the United States. The chief advantage of democratic government is, in a country like this, the enormous force it can command on an emergency. By "emergency" I mean the suppression of an insurrection or the conduct of a foreign war. But it is not equally strong in the ordinary work of administration. A good many governments, by far inferior to it in strength, fill the offices, collect the taxes, administer justice, and do the work of legislation with much greater efficiency. One cause of this inefficiency is that the popular standard in such matters is low, and that it resents dissatisfaction as an assumption of superiority. When a man says these and those things ought not to be, his neighbors, who find no fault with them, naturally accuse him of giving himself airs. It seems as if he thought he knew more than they did, and was trying to impose his plans on them. The consequence is that in a land of pure equality, as this is, critics are always an unpopular class, and criticism is in some sense an odious work. The only condemnation passed on the governmental acts or systems is apt to come from the opposite party in the form of what is called "arraignment," which generally consists in wholesale abuse of the party in power, treating all their acts, small or great, as due to folly or depravity, and all their public men as either fools or knaves. Of course this makes but small impression on the public mind. It is taken to indicate not so much a desire to improve the public service as to get hold of the offices, and has as a general rule but little effect. Parties lose their hold on power through some conspicuously obnoxious acts or failures; never, or very rarely, through the judgments passed on them by hostile writers or orators. And yet nothing is more necessary to successful government than abundant criticism from sources not open to the suspicion of particular interest. There is nothing which bad governments so much dislike and resent as criticism, and have in past ages taken so much pains to put down. In fact, a history of the civil liberty would consist largely of an account of the resistance to criticism on the part of rulers. One of the first acts of a successful tyranny or despotism is always the silencing of the press or the establishment of a censorship.

Popular objection to criticism is however senseless, because it is through criticism--that is, through discrimination between two things, customs, or courses--that the race has managed to come out of the woods and lead a civilized life. The first man who objected to the general nakedness, and advised his fellows to put on clothes, was the first critic. Criticism of a high tariff recommends a low tariff; criticism of monarchy recommends a republic; criticism of vice recommends virtue. In fact, almost every act of life, in the practice of a profession or the conduct of a business, condemns one course and suggests another. The word means _judging_, and judgment is the highest of the human faculties, the one which most distinguishes us from the animals.

There is probably nothing from which the public service of the country suffers more to-day than the silence of its educated class; that is, the small amount of criticism which comes from the disinterested and competent sources. It is a very rare thing for an educated man to say anything publicly about the questions of the day. He is absorbed in science, or art, or literature, in the practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his business; and if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is a languid one. He is silent because he does not much care, or because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or "hurt the party," or because he does not feel that anything he could say would make much difference. So that on the whole, it is very rarely that the instructed opinion of the country is ever heard on any subject. The report of the Bar Association on the nomination of Maynard in New York was a remarkable exception to this rule. Some improvement in this direction has been made by the appearance of the set of people known as the "Mugwumps," who are, in the main, men of cultivation. They have been defined in various ways. They are known to the masses mainly as "kickers"; that is, dissatisfied, querulous people, who complain of everybody and cannot submit to party discipline. But they are the only critics who do not criticize in the interest of party, but simply in that of good government. They are a kind of personage whom the bulk of the voters know nothing about and find it difficult to understand, and consequently load with ridicule and abuse. But their movement, though its visible recognizable effects on elections may be small, has done inestimable service in slackening the bonds of party discipline, in making the expression of open dissent from party programmes respectable and common, and in increasing the unreliable vote in large States like New York. It is of the last importance that this unreliable vote--that is, the vote which party leaders cannot count on with certainty--should be large in such States. The mere fear of it prevents a great many excesses.

But in criticism one always has hard work in steering a straight course between optimism and pessimism. These are the Scylla and Charybdis of the critic's career. Almost every man who thinks or speaks about public affairs is either an optimist or a pessimist; which he is, depends a good deal on temperament, but often on character. The political jobber or corruptionist is almost always an optimist. So is the prosperous business man. So is nearly every politician, because the optimist is nearly always the more popular of the two. As a general rule, people like cheerful men and the promise of good times. The kill-joy and bearer of bad news has always been an odious character. But for the cultivated man there is no virtue in either optimism or pessimism. Some people think it a duty to be optimistic, and for some people it may be a duty; but one of the great uses of education is to teach us to be neither one nor the other. In the management of our personal affairs, we try to be neither one nor the other. In business, a persistent and uproarious optimist would certainly have poor credit. And why? Because in business the trustworthy man, as everybody knows, is the man who sees things as they are: and to see things as they are, without glamor or illusion, is the first condition of worldly success. It is absolutely essential in war, in finance, in law, in every field of human activity in which the future has to be thought of and provided for. It is just as essential in politics. The only reason why it is not thought as essential in politics is, the punishment for failure or neglect comes in politics more slowly.