Carlyle Versus Macaulay?— A Study in History

Owen Dudley Edwards

homas Carlyle and Thomas Babington Macaulay were necessarily in unwritten agreement on much, but Tperhaps nowhere more than in their mutual contempt. They never took public literary notice of one another, although Carlyle for some weeks fumed in 1840 under the delusion that Macaulay had reviewed The (1837), and none too charitably (CL 12: 193). Their derogatory asides in their journals and letters evidently masked at least a modicum of respect for one another: Macaulay privately offered help to Carlyle on his Cromwell research in 1845 and Carlyle seems to have been really sorrowful at a report of Macaulay’s suffering from what in 1852 sounded like a terminal illness. They had common friends—Harriet, Lady Ashburton (1805–57; ODNB); Richard Monckton Milnes, Lord Houghton (1809–85; ODNB); Philip Henry, Lord Mahon (1805–75; ODNB); Samuel Rogers (1763–1855; ODNB); and posthumously (for Macaulay), George Otto Trevelyan (1835–1928; ODNB)—who spent false labor seeking to bring them together and greater travail keeping them apart; they had common admirers who synthesized cultural legacies in far greater harmony than the testators would have conceded. Carlyle and Macaulay ended up being ruthlessly classified in historiographical surveys under Romanticism: they were made creatures of a Victorian age to which each of them contributed far more intellectually than Victoria, and later, they were labeled with academic health warnings for being too readable. What has gone unnoticed is that their ideological allegiances were more fluid than either

CSA 27  2011 178 Carlyle Studies Annual would ever admit. Whatever their subsequent mutations, it needs to be asserted that as historians—great historians—what- ever they wrote about they felt passionately.1 The admirable editions of Carlyle’s and Macaulay’s letters conveniently provide contours, however incomplete, for their progressive responses to one another. Carlyle was born into obscure Ecclefechan poverty in 1795, Macaulay in 1800 into the most prominent literary evangelical circle in England. They first became aware of one another through the Review (ER), when Carlyle read with delight Macaulay’s second essay on Milton in August 1825. It was also the last time he admitted to admiring anything that Macaulay wrote. Until November of the same year, when he discovered its authorship, “Milton” was a beacon of faith, hope, and charity to Carlyle. His own growing devotion to Milton was not unusual for either the or the England of his day. But his much slower devel- opment of fascination with Cromwell was very lonely, what with Royalist horror at the great regicide, and republican disgust

1 The starting-point for a comparative and interactive study of Carlyle and Macaulay is David R. Sorensen’s study of their “Dignity of History” debate. See also his entry on Macaulay in The Carlyle Encyclopedia. Despite its antiquity, Raymond Croom Beatty’s “Macaulay and Carlyle” remains an important exploration of Macaulay’s sources. George Gilfillan’sThird Gallery is also still worth consulting. Of the many introductions to reprints of Macaulay’s essay “Frederic the Great,” the most interesting is H. W. C. Davis’s. George Levine touches on the debate between Carlyle and Macaulay, though perhaps too delicately. John Clive’s Macaulay is essential, but so are his essays Not by Fact Alone, which individually contain valuable commentary on the areas of ill- concealed agreement between Carlyle and Macaulay. Readers may savor an interesting form of interaction between Carlyle and Macaulay in George Otto Trevelyan’s biography of his uncle, and in his son George Macaulay Trevelyan’s anthology of Carlyle. For a richly comic example of Carlyle being engulfed by Macaulay, see George Otto Trevelyan’s Early History of , in which the Carlylean hero must receive Macaulayan disapproval of his politics within the period. The hilarity is intended, and seldom if ever has eighteenth-century political corruption been served up with such piquant sauce (in all senses). E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform 1815–1870 (1938) offers stimulating contrasts, though his conclusion that “Few writers have had so great a fame [as Macaulay], and yet left so small a mark upon the development of English thought or upon the work of their intellectual equals” (542) may in fact testify to the depth of his influence. It was much easier to see when one was being influenced by Carlyle, and take evasive action if desired. Owen Dudley Edwards 179 at his defection to become Lord Protector. Here now was an unknown, in a journal Carlyle had been vainly attempting to enter for five years, fearlessly revering not only Milton but also Cromwell in his own right.2 The essay condemned the execu- tion of Charles I, while denying that the King was above the law or that the trial’s judgment was unjust. In Macaulay’s verdict, “we are convinced that the measure was most injurious to the cause of freedom.” It aided the cause of Charles II in ways that his father might have appreciated. Macaulay was prepared to criticize Cromwell, but he treated his shortcomings as the product of his time and circumstances: “[H]e will not lose by comparison with Washington or Bolivar. Had his moderation been met by corresponding moderation, there is no reason to think he would have overstepped the lines which had traced for himself. . . . Cromwell was evidently laying, though in an irregular manner, the foundations of an admirable system. Never before had religious liberty and the freedom of discus- sion been enjoyed to a greater degree” (Essays 1: 46). Certainly Carlyle had not come this far in vindication of Cromwell by 1825. Macaulay had lit up the path for him to take. While Carlyle would never again admit respect for Macaulay’s work, it would continue to dictate his agenda time after time, whether in open repudiation or in silent acquiescence. Yet Carlyle proved an ungrateful emulator, equal in his resistance as Hobbes of Machiavelli and Marx of Hegel.3 Writing to his brother Thomas on 21 November 1825, John A. Carlyle reported that a “young man of the name of Macauly . . . wrote the article on ‘Milton.’ Macauly it seems is a favou- rite or protégé of Brougham” (CL 3: 421). Carlyle was now 30 and had yet to appear in the , which he had first vainly assailed at24 (coincidentally Macaulay’s age when “Milton” first appeared). Carlyle himself had been a “protégé” of Professor David Brewster (1781–1868; ODNB), whose services to posterity have proved more enduring than those

2 The last notable defense of Milton in English Literature had been Wordsworth’s sonnet of 1792, published 1807, and Byron’s as yet unpublished homage to Milton in the Dedication to Don Juan, which was added to the published text in 1833. 3 See Connor Cruise O’Brien, The Suspecting Glance; for Marx and Hegel, see Edmund Wilson. 180 Carlyle Studies Annual of the brilliant Whig Henry Brougham (1778–1868; ODNB), but Brewster himself had been inspired by Brougham, (his fellow-student at Edinburgh University) to take up the diffusion of light and thus the life-time scientific investiga- tion that brought his unrivalled mastery of optics. Brewster was useful to Carlyle as a literary patron in Edinburgh. But Brougham in was now a famous name and one with unrivalled claims on the Edinburgh Review, which may have owed its infant survival to his near-hundred engaging, brilliant essays. Brougham had become a passionate enemy of the slave trade in which the father of Carlyle’s rival, Zachary Macaulay (1768–1838; ODNB), was his most formidable evangelical ally. The antislavery crusade would never win favor in Carlyle’s eyes, whose hostility to the movement may have owed something to its retardation of his fortunes in the Edinburgh Review behind those of Zachary Macaulay’s son, whose first essay in the journal in January 1825 had been an antislavery view of the West Indies. Carlyle eventually published “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter” in the Edinburgh in 1827, and began a friendship with its editor Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850; ODNB). But the latter’s encouragement for Carlyle was all too often mingled with hosannas for the young Englishman. In the margin of a letter that he sent to his brother on 16 April 1828, Carlyle remarked that “Jeffrey says ‘Macaulay’ is coming hither; and thus we shall see that ‘rising Sun.’ He has been writing on Dryden lately; but of true Poetry the man has no glimpse or forecast” (CL 4: 362). By 16 April Macaulay had already visited Jeffrey, who may have decided that a meeting of his two young London critics might unduly disturb the harmony of their respective launches. The two would not meet at table for another ten years. The “Dryden” essay appeared in the Edinburgh Review for January 1828, and perhaps Macaulay’s opinion of it was no more generous than Carlyle’s, since he would exclude it from the first edition of Critical and Historical Essays (1843). “Dryden” opened with the startling thesis that poetry degenerates as civilization increases and imagination thereby declines. Certainly many poems win success by divesting themselves of sophistication and invoking the freedoms of former ages; Macaulay himself wrote poetry on that principle, inventing imaginary bards of Owen Dudley Edwards 181 bygone times to speak or sing his compositions.4 But his case rested on natural creativity and his examples were ominous from Carlyle’s perspective: “The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are, almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a time when persons of quality translated French romances . . . a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim’s Progress. And thus a ploughman star- tled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets, with the adventures of Tam O’Shanter” (Miscellaneous Writings 116).5 For Carlyle, this was too much. He had many wares to sell to the Edinburgh, but what were his hopes when the very poet who visited his parish in the year of his birth was appropriated by this Cockney Cicero? “Dryden” may have contained the first public intimation that Macaulay’s Scottish identity had a being beyond his surname. Zachary Macaulay was born in Inveraray, the year before Burn’s birth and at no remote distance.6 Implicit in the argu- ment of Macaulay’s son was the assumption that true art could only be found in the soil which had produced Burns, and perhaps true religion was best preserved in his father Zachary. This was a highly Scottish prophecy, as yet unrealized by the prophet, that England would yet find her best history told twenty years later by a bard of Gaelic-speaking paternity. G. K. Chesterton in The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) modified a view of Macaulay as prophet of progress to acknowledge: “He was, indeed, far too strong-minded a man to accept the hazy modern notion that the soul in its highest sense can change: he seems to have held that religion can never get any better and that poetry rather tends to get worse” (32). Meanwhile, there was Carlyle who had been brooding about Burns for years even to the point of having lengthy conversations with Burns’s brother Gilbert. It was bad enough that Burns’s biographers could come nowhere near Carlyle in awareness of what agrarian poverty meant, but at least Burns’s native land was familiar to

4 For Macaulay and poetry, see ch. 2 of my study. 5 Macaulay had anticipated the thesis in “Milton,” Essays 1: 9–10. For the literary and historical context of the argument, see David J. DeLaura, “The Future of Poetry,” 152–61, especially his joint consideration of Macaulay and Carlyle, 159. 6 For Zachary Macaulay and his son’s Scottish identity, see Ian Whyte, 242–48. 182 Carlyle Studies Annual

John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854; ODNB), a well-to-do literary thug whose life of Burns was published in 1828, hot on the heels of Macaulay’s allusion to the Scottish poet in “Dryden.” Carlyle immediately contracted with Jeffrey to review Lockhart’s Life of Burns, fighting tenaciously to retain the stylistic infelicities and rural prejudices that Jeffrey sought to delete. Macaulay had followed a conventional furrow to Burns on which posterity was pleased to agree, namely the “Heaven-taught ploughman” (qtd. in Low 70) as originally proclaimed by the Edinburgh novelist Henry Mackenzie (1745–1851; ODNB) in a review in the Lounger (1786). Carlyle was receptive to this thesis, aware that his own career demonstrated the benefits of education by the written word. The “Heaven-taught ploughman” was in fact a surrogate honorific for the very Christian Scottish fathers of both Macaulay and Carlyle. God might make their fathers, the better for them to make themselves. But they were less comfort- ably remote from a self-made Burns, and they knew that not all the contrasts with him might be in their favor. Macaulay’s formula meant that he himself could never be Burns and nobody could expect it of him. Macaulay’s declaration that the ploughman had revived poetry as the tinker Bunyan had revived prose, was as formi- dable a claim for the virtue of the lowest classes as ever Marx and his followers might utter.7 Carlyle made similar claims in his 1828 review-essay on Lockhart’s Life and later in Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841). But both essayists conscripted Burns for a role that Marx would indict as irretrievably bourgeois—the promoter of self-help—which was subsumed by Macaulay into the gospel of laissez-faire and by Carlyle into secularized Sunday school. Carlyle’s summary of Burns’s highest virtue could have been written by Macaulay: “It reflects credit on the manliness

7 Macaulay asserted in his essay, “Southey’s Editions of the Pilgrim’s Progress” (ER, Dec. 1830), “There is no book in our literature on which we would so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed” (Essays 1: 286). See also his essay “Bunyan” for the Encyclopædia Britannica (May 1854), reprinted in Biographies Contributed by Lord Macaulay to the Encyclopædia Britannica, 27–49. Owen Dudley Edwards 183 and sound sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possibilities” (Works 26: 302). Carlyle had wooed his Edinburgh audience well, which may account for some of the strength of conviction Macaulay himself evinced when preaching against state intervention in his reviews of Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829; ER, Jan. 1830) and two collections of poetry by Robert Montgomery (ER, April 1830). Though he probably cherished such sentiments well before reading the anonymous Carlyle on Burns, Macaulay would have been impressed by the main argument of the essay. Yet neither Carlyle nor Macaulay were doing Burns any favors. As Nigel Leask has shrewdly observed in his recent study, and the Pastoral (2010), what they achieved was misrepresentation. Carlyle may have been closer to his subject than the “Edinburgh Whig literatus”— his background lent greater weight to “his pronouncements concerning the realities of a Scottish peasant’s life”—but in Leask’s estimate, Carlyle “is less concerned to credit [the poetry’s] spirited engagement with its historical age, than to celebrate the transcontinental genius of the ‘Heaven-taught Ploughman’” (298). Macaulay’s essay “History” (ER, May 1828) was followed in 1830 by Carlyle’s on the same topic in Fraser’s. The interval is meaningless: the Edinburgh hardly wanted a second essay on history so soon and Fraser’s began its life in the year it would publish “Thoughts on History” (“Thoughts” austerely pared from the title on book republication). Historiographical prejudice against Macaulay and Carlyle, partly resentment and suspicion aroused by their literary stature, meant that these essays have not been fully recognized as the landmarks that they were. But the leading documentary history of historical writing, Fritz Stern’s The Varieties of History from Voltaire to the Present (1956) led off its British historian’s definition of history with the two. Britain had a graceful litany of previous great historians on any reasonable classification, from Bede to Robertson, but Macaulay and Carlyle divide earliest honors for telling the self-intellectualizing Anglophones what history ought to be. Neither Macaulay nor Carlyle seem to have 184 Carlyle Studies Annual thought of themselves as historians at this stage: Macaulay’s first major essays were literary and sociological, while Carlyle’s were interpretations and evangelization of German studies. The nineteenth century would see the professionalization of history in the universities, but neither definer was impressed by the state of the art among theirs. In a review of April 1832, Macaulay referred to the Regius Professor of history at Oxford, the Reverend Edward Nares (1762–1841; ODNB), as “a man of great industry and research; but he is also utterly incompetent to arrange the materials which he has collected that he might as well have left them in their original repositories” (“Burleigh and his Times,” Essays 1: 456). Carlyle summed up all such professionals under the label “Dryasdust,” whom he baptized in the introduction to Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (1845): “There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber- mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, does the Age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our Heroic Ones in memory. By way of sacred poet they have found voluminous Dryasdust, and his Collections and Philosophical Histories” (Works 6: 3). Macaulay in 1828 and Carlyle in 1830, declared that history without art lacked humanity. Neither man was ready to call himself a historian, and in Macaulay’s case, the term itself signified an impossibility: “A historian, such as we have been attempting to describe, would indeed be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers scarcely compatible with each other must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner see another Shakespeare or another Homer” (Miscellaneous Writings 159). His essay surveyed historical writing by ancient Greeks and Romans, and climaxed in the great demand that social history, as established in the novels of Walter Scott, must now be incorporated into history proper: “[A] truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist had appropriated. The history of the government, and the history of the people, would be exhibited in that mode in which alone they can be exhibited justly, in inseparable conjunction and intermixture. We should not then have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in Clarendon, and for their phraseology in Old Mortality; for one half of King James in Hume, and for Owen Dudley Edwards 185 the other half in The Fortunes of Nigel” (158). This social history should seethe with human ideas and beliefs, above all in revolutionary contexts: “As the history of states is generally written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and which originally proceed far before their progress is indicated by any public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events” (Miscellaneous Writings 159). In the internal world of the people lay the secret causes of external cataclysms. Macaulay’s thought and its expression showed the crucial influence of his Argyll-born father. A conventional English Protestant would think of the Reformation being set in motion by the King or Queen, their governments, ministers and servants clerical or lay. A Scot thought much more in terms of changes in religious outlook among ordinary people. Macaulay was feeding Carlyle’s mind in ways that Carlyle could most naturally and least consciously absorb. As David R. Sorensen has convincingly demonstrated, both were opposed to Bolingbroke’s conception of the “dignity of history.” Part of their strategy as practicing historians was to focus on obscure but symbolic figures to highlight broader themes. Carlyle learned from Macaulay how such an enterprise must recruit its evidence from all society, not simply from politics and he put these lessons to good use in The French Revolution (1837). In this work he tried to say what happened without feeling any obligation to denounce this or defend that. The reader might respond in joy, laughter, horror, or grief, but the narrative followed the course of events judging men and women insofar as description of appearance and conduct passed judgment, while recording a world out of control. Only one real Carlylean hero rose above the tumult, now battling, now overawing, now negotiating the Zeitgeist, and he fell under medical calamity unhappily not metaphorical. Mirabeau not only played that part in Carlyle’s narrative, but in the season of its publication he produced a 50-page essay on Mirabeau for the London and Westminster Review which closed awestruck at the flawed and 186 Carlyle Studies Annual doomed giant. Macaulay had written very much the same conclusion in exceptionally briefer compass five years earlier in the Edinburgh Review of July 1832. In an assessment of the piece that was neither honest nor heroic, Carlyle commented to Macvey Napier (1776 –1847; ODNB), “Macaulay is always spir- ited and emphatic, worth reading even on a worn out matter” (25 Aug. 1832; CL 6: 207). If Carlyle meant this grudging compliment diplomatically, it was wasted on Napier, professor of conveyancing at the , and editor of the Edinburgh since June 1829. Napier had the look of a hard man, and Macaulay initially found him as dubious a prospect as Carlyle was to do. Francis Jeffrey had taken on Carlyle, as he had taken on Macaulay, to redden the journal’s pages with blood fresh and new enough to draw a rising generation of readers. The seemingly endless Tory night was breaking with faint rays of what might at last prove a Whig dawn. What matter if the new recruits were more radical than Jeffrey’s own cautious Whiggism? The Tory government in 1827 was disintegrating as Prime Minister Liverpool retired silenced by a stroke and Prime Minister Canning died in office. A Whig ministry would once more have to think of all the talents, particularly after the Old Guard made its last stand under the Duke of Wellington’s bleak command in 1828–30. It must also consider Brougham, brilliant, erratic, arrogant, prickly, pompous, jealous, a man ready to commend a young Macaulay today and stab his back tomorrow. Jeffrey wanted Napier’s Edinburgh Review to remain a sparkling wellspring of Whig intellect, not simply a schoolroom whipped into deference by a self-obsessed Brougham. And Brougham did not extend his patronage in Carlyle’s direction when Jeffrey besought his influence to put Carlyle in the Chair of Moral Philosophy at the in September 1827. Carlyle’s regard for Macaulay would not have increased when learning that Brougham’s patronage could get Macaulay into the Edinburgh Review but not Carlyle into the London Chair. Macaulay’s frequent fulminations in the journal— December, 1828 on Hallam and June 1829 on ’s Essay on Government—only served to remind Carlyle of the privileges of insiders. Jeffrey somewhat gingerly reassured him Owen Dudley Edwards 187 on 3 November 1829 that “Napier—though his nose may have a tyrannical expression—has a high opinion of your talents, and is anxious to avail himself of them—But he is more alarmed at your mystical propensities even than I am and would naturally feel more shy and awkward in remonstrating ag[ainst] them— What I have to suggest therefore is, that you should indulge those propensities as little as possible, in the beginning at least of your intercourse with him” (Christie, Jeffrey Letters 38). This left Carlyle fairly obviously dependent on what he could get from Napier, who had to contend with the fairly large and prickly egos of Macaulay, Brougham, and Napier. A little tactlessly, Jeffrey alluded to Carlyle’s “mystical propensities” in letter to Napier following his departure from the Review in October 1829: “Macaulay I think admirable. The beginning is too merely controversial, and as it were personal, but after he enters on the matter, he is excellent. It is out of sight the clearest and most striking thing in the Number. . . . [The reviewer of the philosopher Victor Cousin] I pronounce, beyond all doubt, the most unreadable thing that has ever appeared in the Review. . . . It is ten times more mystical than anything my friend Carlyle ever wrote and not half so agreeably written” (23 Nov. 1829; Napier Letters 69–70). Meanwhile Carlyle wrote morosely to his brother Jack on 27 October, “However Jeffrey has paid me; and we must try to struggle thro’” (CL 5: 23). What was genteel culture to the editors and even to Macaulay was a matter of life and death to the Carlyles. Moreover, as Jeffrey liked to instruct Carlyle, genteel thought liked to keep its feet on the ground. Referring to Sir William Hamilton’s essay in the same issue, Jeffrey assumed that it would give his young friend “particular pleasure—being genuine German and mystical.—and altogether unintelligible to ordinary mortals” (9 Dec. 1829; Christie, Jeffrey Letters 41). But Carlyle refused to take the bait. Instead, he wrote to Napier directly and robustly defended Hamilton’s paper, which “gave proof of much metaphysical reading and meditation” (27 Jan. 1830; CL 5: 64). If Napier and Jeffrey preferred the English mind of Macaulay to Scotch metaphysics, Carlyle would not truckle to dumbing down. But suddenly the Napier nose began to tilt in Carlyle’s direction. Carlyle had written to him recommending his 188 Carlyle Studies Annual brother Jack, on medical subjects. In early November 1830, he received a positive reply, coupled with the “wish that I would write something for you in the Edinburgh Review.” Carlyle pointedly combined his acceptance with a reminder that he was familiar to readers of the journal: “I have already written in that Review, and should be very happy to write in it again. . . . My respected Friend, your Predecessor had some difficulty with me in adjusting the respective prerogatives of Author and Editor: for tho’ not, as I hope, insensible to fair reason, I used to rebel against what I reckoned mere authority. . . . In what degree the like diffi- culties might occur between you and me I cannot pretend to guess: however, if you are willing, then I am also willing, to try” (23 Nov. 1830; CL 5: 195–96). Had Carlyle known of Napier’s circumstances, he might have been less abrasive. Brougham had addressed Napier with horrid condescension as “My dear Professor” in a letter he wrote on 23 July 1830: “I had meant today to send you my Colonial Speech,” delivered during his election from Yorkshire. Continued Brougham, “T. Macaulay is to prepare a leading article on it and the subject for the next Number” (Napier Letters 80–81). Macaulay informed Napier on 19 August that Brougham “must be out of his wits” (Macaulay Letters 1: 281) and that he himself had no intention of doing anything of the kind. His real objective, he explained, was to have Napier commission an essay from him on France since the Bourbon Restoration, to be researched on a visit to Paris drawing on his father’s antislavery colleagues, the duc de Broglie and Guizot, now ministers in the government of Louis Philippe installed in the July Revolution. Napier agreed. But on 8 September, he was told by Brougham that “I must beg, and indeed, make a point of giving you my thoughts on the Revolution, and, therefore, send off your countermand to Macaulay” (Napier Letters 88). Macaulay wrote to Napier from Paris on 16 September 1830, sympathizing with his predica- ment and his necessary subservience to Brougham: “I do not blame you in the least. . . . But on the other hand I do not see why I should make any efforts or sacrifices for a review which lies under an intolerable dictation. Whatever my writings may be worth, it is not for want of strong solicitations and tempting offers from other quarters that I have continued to send them to the Edinburgh Review. I adhered to the connection solely Owen Dudley Edwards 189 because I took pride and pleasure in it. It has now become a source of humiliation and mortification” Macaulay( Letters 1: 299). Thanks to Macaulay, Napier’s door was open to Carlyle. A month elapsed before Napier heard again from Macaulay, whose invalid sister Jean died on 22 September 1830. From Paris, Macaulay wrote to his father Zachary, confessing that the “news has broken my heart. I am fit neither to go nor to stay. I can do nothing but sit in my room and think of poor Jane’s kindness and affection” ([26 Sept.]). He again wrote to Zachary on 28 September, declaring that “To grieve as I have grieved is mere selfishness” Macaulay( Letters 1: 307). If Carlyle had known that, it might have given him a very different view of Macaulay. It was the kind of sympathy and honesty he would seek in a hero. Returning from Paris, Macaulay did not receive Napier’s reply for some time, and when he did write, he was particularly anxious to repent any hurt he might have caused the editor. The Whigs came into government with Brougham as Lord Chancellor receiving office on 22 November. The following day John Wilson Croker (1780 –1857; ODNB) in the Commons denounced Brougham, now in the Lords, for “shuf- fling intrigue” Hansard( 1 [1830]: 637) when he had previously spoken of staying clear of a ministerial post. Macaulay answered Croker so vehemently—he referred to him as a coward—that he was reprimanded for extreme language. No doubt he recalled his bereaved father’s long and cordial collaboration with Brougham in the cause of antislavery. Brougham, perhaps also thinking of bereavement, made his first donation of a clerical benefice in the Church of England, which as Lord Chancellor, he was entitled to bestow. Macaulay reported to Napier on 17 December, “He has given my brother a living of £300 a year in Warwickshire without the least solicitation direct or indirect” (Macaulay Letters 1: 314). Peace had broken out. On 23 November 1830 Carlyle wrote Napier that he wanted to write a review-essay for the Edinburgh on the second volume of Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (1830), and sketched out his proposal at some length. Napier replied on 9 December that Jeffrey would review the book, and if his new duties as Lord Advocate of Scotland made this impossible, then the job would be assigned to “one of two other men who wanted to write it” (CL 5: 203). Napier was lying. He probably did not offer it to 190 Carlyle Studies Annual

Jeffrey, and was refused. But Macaulay had not asked it of him, and wrote on 12 February 1831: “I shall not, I fear, be able to do much for the next Number. But I will try to do something. I do not like to review Moore—in the first place becauseI am no great admirer of his hero; and in the next place because the topic is a little hackneyed” (Macaulay Letters 1: 319). Carlyle would therefore have a grievance against Macaulay for seeking and obtaining preferential treatment, when the latter had merely given way in his anxiety to oblige Napier after having imagined himself to have offended the beleaguered editor. On 8 March 1831 Macaulay enquired, “What arrangement have you made about Byron? If you have not as yet engaged any body, I will try my hand” (Macaulay Letters 2: 7). His next sentence was less altruistically motivated: “I will certainly review Croker’s Boswell when it comes out” (Macaulay Letters 2: 7). Here was another cause for Carlyle’s resentment, since his own request from Craigenputtoch to review Croker was destined to receive a very belated refusal. Napier’s explanation was truth, but not tactful: “I ought to have written, on receiving your letter in regard to Croker[’s] edition of Boswell[’s] Johnson, to say, that soon after the first announcement of the work, I had agreed to put it in the hands of a distinguished friend, who is now, I hope, at work upon it” (4 Aug. 1831; CL 5: 311–12n). Carlyle would have been little surprised when the Edinburgh Review dissection of Croker proved unmistakably the work of Croker’s recent adversary in the House of Commons. But at least he could have some balm in Gilead in the form of a review of Croker in Fraser’s for May 1832, by which point he had written for the Edinburgh for the last time. He did have the pleasure of considering a request of Napier’s to write for it once again some ten years later, toyed with it, and dropped it. By that time he had met Macaulay, who had talked incessantly through the breakfast hosted for them and several other guests by the aged Samuel Rogers. If Macaulay did not know his somewhat unwilling audi- ence included Carlyle, Carlyle had to be told that Astur had cleared the way of all conversational competitors. The dating is uncertain, but it must have been after 30 September 1839, when Macaulay, now in the Melbourne cabinet as Secretary at War, was sworn of the Privy Council, given Carlyle’s comment to Richard Monckton Milnes as he left the breakfast and Milnes told him Owen Dudley Edwards 191 who had usurped his role as sage: “‘What,’ he said in the accent of Annandale, ‘was that the Right Honorable Tom? I had no idea that it was the Right Honourable Tom. Ah, weel, I under- stand the Right Honorable Tom now’” (Wemyss Reid, Milnes 1: 190–91).8 This then supplies us with a satisfactory explanation for Carlyle’s dislike of Macaulay, and if not heroic, it was at least human. It also enabled the antipathy to coexist with far greater concord, especially as historians, than either would admit. But why did Macaulay dislike and despise Carlyle? We know of no wrong Carlyle did Macaulay, not even of the involuntary kind with which the young Macaulay blocked Carlyle. One immediate cause of conflict was the fact (if known) that Carlyle had joined Macaulay’s enemies and possibly had authored or aided a personal attack. Macaulay’s most venomous Tory enemy was the brilliant, drunken Irishman William Maginn (1794–1842; ODNB), formerly of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (for which he had wished to recruit the young Macaulay in May 1824) and now of Fraser’s (from its foundation in February 1830), and good for endless envenomed darts at “Mr. Thomas Babbletongue Macaulay” (or “Macauley,” spelling not a strong point with either Maginn or his printers).9 If the fuel with which he sustained himself would rapidly destroy him, its effects would enable him to fuel others, such as “Christopher North” of Blackwood’s—Professor John Wilson (1785–1854; ODNB), currently if improbably holding the Edinburgh Chair of Moral Philosophy in considerable descent from Adam Ferguson and . “North,” with or without the immediate aid of the self-alienated Maginn, denounced Macaulay’s demolition of Sadler’s Law of Population (ER, July 1830) and his rejoinder, “Mr. Sadler and the Edinburgh Reviewer” (ER, Feb. 1831). “Is it possible such stuff can be Wilson’s?” (Macaulay Letters 1: 319) asked Macaulay incredulously of Napier on 12 February, aware that professors could be bores, like Cambridge’s Nares, but unprepared for intellectuals whose answer to him termed “a

8 Wemyss Reid conscientiously dated the story as following Macaulay’s return from India in the summer of 1838, but he forgot that the punch-line depended on Macaulay’s becoming a Privy Counselor, which was for cabinet office in his case 1( : 190). 9 For Maginn at Fraser’s, see Miriam Thrall and Gordon N. Ray’s Uses of Adversity. 192 Carlyle Studies Annual tawdry bedizenment of flower, froth, fume, foam, flash, flutter and feather of speech” and affected to distinguish between the Reviewer and “his friend Thomas Babington Macauley [who] had written and spoken against all sorts of slavery, and in favour of all sorts of liberty all over the world,” in spite of whom the Reviewer “may become himself a Slave Proprietor” (qtd. in Macaulay Letters 2: 318–19n). It employed a transparently self-protective avoidance of libel while charging an opponent with potential treachery to all principles for which his father was famous. Macaulay was thus prepared for lower depths as when for August 1831 “North” told readers of Blackwood’s that he was “an ugly, cross-made, splay-footed, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow, with a featureless face too—except indeed a good expansive forehead—sleek puritanical sandy hair—large glimmering eyes—and a mouth from ear to ear” (Blackwood’s 30 [1831]: 410). Grinned Macaulay to his sister Hannah on 30 July, “Conceive how such a charge must affect a man so enamoured of his own beauty as I am” (Life and Letters, ed. Otto Trevelyan 1: 244). But a fresh attack in Blackwood’s for November 1831 in reply to Macaulay’s savagery against Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson showed that Macaulay was familiar with Wilson’s world, telling Napier that “a contest with your grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing, Professor of Moral Philosophy would be too degrading” (19 Jan. 1832; Macaulay Letters 2: 111). Maginn had made himself at home in Fraser’s adopting the Blackwood’s style of literary critique in his attack against Macaulay’s review of Southey’s Colloquies (1829) in January 1830. Macaulay’s mockery of Southey’s ideological Odyssey from left to right and his allusion to Southey’s opposition to Catholic Emancipation enraged Maginn. Observed Macaulay dryly, “We should have expected that the only measure which all the great statesmen of two generations have agreed with each other in supporting would be the only measure which Mr. Southey agreed with himself in opposing” (ER 1: 212) Maginn retorted that “it behoves not Mr Macauley to bring the charge of inconsistency against the Laureate in particular—but rather against those members of his own House [of Commons] who have wantonly and impudently forfeited their pledged faith to their country . . . for base worldly emolument and a Owen Dudley Edwards 193 hireling stipend.” Maginn concluded by explaining that Macaulay was jealous of Southey, a verdict unhappily more revealing of Maginn than of either: “The Laureate has made for himself a fair reputation—the Cantab has made for himself no reputation at all for anything fair or manly—the moral beggar, therefore, hates his richer neighbour, and that hatred is manifested in [this] exquisite piece of criticism. . . . Well hast thou spoken, O son of Laius!” (Fraser’s 1: 595, 600). Maginn’s last sentence was an atrocious insult, implying as it did that Macaulay was his mother’s paramour (she died less than a year after this attack was published) and that his father was a murderer. A scurrilous diatribe against the anti-slavery society, whose mention of Daniel O’Connell may indicate Maginn, was published in the same issue. In it the author singled out the exertions of Macaulay and his father. By the time of Macaulay’s dismissal of Carlyle to Napier, 1 February 1832, Carlyle was well entrenched in Fraser’s, and through his friendship with Jeffrey, Macaulay would have known it. Membership of Fraser’s regular group of scribes did not mean total agreement between the hermit of Craigenputtoch and the lord of the London literary stews. Carlyle later told his brother Jack on 12 January 1835 that Fraser the publisher, tied as he was to “the poor drunken scrub of a Doctor,” was “like to get (commercially) drowned one day in that ‘drunk man’s vomit’ of an (Irish) magazine of his” (CL 8: 13). Nor were the honors entirely on Macaulay’s side. In its structure and in many of its doctrines, it merited the laughs Macaulay turned against them. But as Raymond Williams showed in Culture and Society (1958), Southey’s “comprehensive indictment” (24) in the Colloquies of commercial amorality harmonized with Carlyle’s thunder against Whig laissez-faire, to which Macaulay gave such firm allegiance.10 And Carlyle’s review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson— delayed by Napier’s failure to tell him that the Edinburgh’s reviewer had been fixed as Macaulay from the start—finally reached a two- installment life in Fraser’s for April and May 1832, and from any objective assessment was the more sober assessment. Macaulay’s hatred of Croker started him off in a sputterment of corrigenda,

10 For Southey, see also Geoffrey Carnall’s study. 194 Carlyle Studies Annual elevating pedantry, petulance, and passion above authoritative judgment. Both Macaulay and Carlyle agreed that Croker was a bad editor, and that his intentions were even more destructive than his errors. Both held Boswell supreme as a biographer, Macaulay in pursuit of a paradox of Boswell’s smallness making his biography a great success, and Carlyle by definition of biog- raphy and measurement of Boswell’s achievement. Carlyle had to build on Macaulay’s work, and for all the wisdom of his lightning portraiture (“Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James” [Works 28: 79]), he had to be content to be conventional in contrast to Macaulay’s wild proto-impressionism, roles reversed from what Carlyle liked to think them. Macaulay’s essay reached a higher stature because of his paradox, though he failed to follow it through: “[Boswell] . . . had . . . a quick observation and a retentive memory. These quali- ties, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal” (“Croker’s Edition,” Essays 1: 369). Macaulay’s error lay in his failure to see that Boswell was those things in relation to Johnson’s biography because his method required that he be a dunce, parasite, and coxcomb, and anything else, provided it make grit whence Johnson would make pearls. Boswell was the supreme biographer because he took the supreme artistic decision to sacrifice self-respect in the cause of his art. Carlyle established this point in slightly sentimental language: “Boswell wrote a good Book because he had a heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it forth; because of his free insight, his lively talent, above all, of his Love and child-like Open-mindedness” (“Boswell’s Life,” Works 28: 76–77). Macaulay thought Boswell “was perfectly frank, because his weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous” (“Boswell’s Johnson,” Essays 1: 369). On the contrary, Boswell’s understanding was strong and his spirits carried out their tumult under his direction. He knew exactly when to make himself ridiculous, and he measured the amount of absurdity required in action and in writing with the precision of a master scientist. Carlyle captured the high chem- istry necessary to crown the process: “In fact, the so copious Owen Dudley Edwards 195 terrestrial dross that welters chaotically . . . does but render for us more remarkable . . . the celestial spark of goodness, of light, and Reverence for Wisdom, which dwelt in the interior [of Boswell’s character]” (“Boswell’s Life,” Works 28: 73–74). The beneficiaries of this combined analysis were all future readers of Boswell’s biography, which makes Johnson live as no other biographical subject lives. The torches held in its honor by Macaulay and Carlyle give us the better light by which to enjoy and revere the book. The nineteenth century progressed whether or not its progress was progress, as Macaulay often claimed and Carlyle equally often denied. Macaulay went to India and Carlyle to London, in 1834. Occasionally an almost unintentional half-compliment found its startled way into their letters. In sending Napier his “interminably long article on Lord Bacon’s life” on 28 November 1836, Macaulay in his grief managed a watery smile: “I will repay you some day or other by writing reviews of German books more readable than Carlyle’s used to be, if not so profound” (Macaulay Letters 3: 196). Carlyle had seen though not met Macaulay in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1832: “[He] is a short squat thickset man of vulgar but resolute energetic appearance. . . . I likened him to a managing ironmaster with vigorous talent for business (and) little look of talent for anything else. . . . He is the only young man of any gift, at this period, who is a whig; another char- acteristic. He may be heard of, and loudly; but what is being heard of?” (Wilson, Carlyle 279–80).11 Both were determined to be “heard” above the other, particularly in relation to the contested field of history. Either each was inspired to better the other’s performance, as with Johnson, or one—usually Carlyle—lost the wish to canonize a hero whom the other had published. For example, John Hampden of the “dauntless

11 Carlyle was in London from August 1831 to March 1832 on this occasion, but February was probably the month for this non-encounter. Possibilities include Macaulay’s speech for the Committee on Parliamentary Reform, 28 February, or on the Anatomy Bill, 27 February, which Carlyle as an Edinburgh graduate may have been interested in. During this session Macaulay declared that the two greatest evils intended for remedy were “Burking and bad surgery . . . to both these the poor alone are exposed” (Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches 528) 196 Carlyle Studies Annual breast” was so great a hero to the young Carlyle that he told his friend James Johnston on 8 January 1819 that emigration to America was unthinkable because it would “snap asunder for ever, the associations that bind us to our native soil; to forget the Hampdens, the Sydneys, the Lockes, the Stewarts the Burnses” (CL 1: 156). It was notable at this stage that Cromwell was not in the mix and that Carlyle continued doubtful about him for several years. The turning-point occurred when Macaulay singled out Hampden above all the rest in his essay “Lord Nugent’s Memorials of Hampden” in December 1831: “[I]n Hampden, and in Hampden alone, were united all the qualities which, at such a crisis, were necessary to save the state . . . when to the sullen tyranny of Laud and Charles had succeeded the fierce conflict of sects and factions, ambitious of ascendency and burning for revenge, it was when the vices and ignorance which the old tyranny had generated threatened the new freedom with destruction, that England missed . . . the self-command, the perfect soundness of judgment . . . to which the history of revolutions furnishes no parallel, or furnishes a parallel in Washington alone” (Essays 1: 451). By the time he lectured on “The Hero as King” (22 May 1840), Carlyle was ready to relegate Hampden, all the more because Macaulay was back in town. “The Hero as King” was obliged, covertly, to follow Macaulay in one particular, namely in echoing his declaration in his essay “Hallam’s Constitutional History” (ER, Sept. 1828) that the author was wrong in rating Cromwell below instead of above . But since Carlyle wished to claim pioneer status for his vindication of Cromwell, it was important as well as gratifying to show Macaulay (without naming him) as the champion of Hampden, whom Cromwell would eclipse. If readers remembered Macaulay’s early defense of Cromwell, they would be distracted by reminder of the more recent Hampden essay. In Heroes Carlyle plunged on relentlessly: Eliot, Hampden, Pym, nay Ludlow, Hutchinson, Vane himself, are admitted to be a kind of Heroes. . . . One Puritan, I think, and almost he alone, our poor Cromwell, seems to hang yet on the gibbet, and find no hearty apologist anywhere. . . . Selfish ambition, dishonesty, duplicity; a fierce, coarse, hypocriticalTartufe ; turning all that noble Struggle for constitutional Liberty into Owen Dudley Edwards 197

a sorry farce played for his own benefit. . . . And then there come contrasts with Washington and others; above all, with these noble Pyms and Hampdens, whose noble work he stole for himself, and ruined into a futility and deformity” (179). Macaulay is unlikely to have missed this passage. It was both exaggerative and unfair, and there was no way the aggrieved author could reply without appearing ludicrous. Unsurprisingly, his subsequent allusions to Carlyle were dry and cold. The next stage in their literary relations was initially complementary on Carlyle’s part, although Macaulay never knew of it. When the April 1842 issue of the Edinburgh Review was published, containing Macaulay’s review essay of ’s Frederic the Great and his Times (1842), Carlyle told John Forster, “I set my wife on reading one of those Macaulay things, as actually worth reading” (17 May 1842; CL 14: 189). Up to this point Frederick had meant little enough in Carlyle’s literary life. His Teutonophilia, with which he had so gallantly sought to infect his countrymen, rested on two great foundations, German literature and German religion, both of which Frederick heartily despised. The one notable event in the Carlyle-Macaulay relations between Macaulay’s essay on Frederick in 1842 and the commencement of Carlyle’s history of Frederick in 1852 took place in 1845. However low Macaulay’s view of Carlyle, he would have sympathized fully with the idea of popularizing the study of Cromwell’s docu- ments. A curious anecdote suddenly prompted correspondence between the two rivals. In a letter of 7 April 1845, Carlyle explained to his German friend Karl Varnhagen von Ense that an “old foolish story circulates concerning Oliver Cromwell: how when the king, in 1647, was negotiating between the Army and the Parliament, he had promised to make Oliver an Earl and Knight of the Garter; how Oliver did not entirely believe him; got to understand that he was writing a letter to his Queen, which was to go off on a certain afternoon, sewed into the panel of a saddle, by a Courier . . . [;] how Oliver . . . and his son-in-law . . . disguised themselves as troopers, proceeded to the specified Inn, gave the Courier a cup of liquor, slit open the saddle, found the Letter, and there read,—‘Fear not, my Heart, the garter I mean to give him is a hemp rope.’” Robert Mackintosh (1806–64), son of Sir James, wrote “a long memoir 198 Carlyle Studies Annual on the subject” to Carlyle, and assured him that he would “get evidence [about the anecdote]” in his father’s papers. In turn Carlyle had written to Macaulay, enclosing this memoir and “requesting him to burn it, if, as I conclude, he has and can have no evidence to confirm the story” CL( 19: 52). The name of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832; ODNB) was sufficiently venerable to Macaulay that any request connected to his son was treated seriously and reverentially. Macaulay’s response to Carlyle on 31 March 1845 was generous and courteous, going well beyond the requirements in fulfilling his obligations to his mentor and his patron. He explained that Robert Mackintosh had erred in his assumption that the anecdote was accurate: “He is under the impression that the famous saddle letter got into Sir Edward Harley’s hands, and that [he] shewed it to Sir Harry Vane. This, he thought, was mentioned in the extracts which Sir James Mackintosh made from the Welbeck papers. . . . In truth the story is incredible. For Sir Edward was a strong Presbyterian, bitterly hostile to the military Saints, and closely connected with Denzil Hollis. If Cromwell had found such a letter, the last man to whom he would have given it would have been Harley; and, if Harley got hold of such a letter, the last man to whom he would have shown it would have been Vane.” He then asked Carlyle whether he would like to “look over the Welbeck papers or any other part of Sir James Mackintosh’s collection,” and he offered to “give . . . any help in my power,” including sending (with Robert Mackintosh’s permis- sion) “any volume which you might have occasion to examine” (Last Words 232–33). This was an exceptionally generous offer coming from a historian who knew his way around the Civil War period, and who also knew its minor as well as major protagonists. Carlyle fool- ishly spurned the offer, and instead, sent the letter to von Ense, an autograph-hunter, prefacing the enclosure with a description of Macaulay as a “conspicuous Politician, Edinburgh-Reviewer, Rhetorician, and what not.” His only comment on a letter that might have led him rich new fields of manuscript resources was perversely dismissive: “This is his answer.—It is astonishing what masses of dry and wet rubbish do lie in one’s way towards the smallest particle of valuable truth on such matters!” (CL 19: 52). No trace has survived of any reply to Macaulay. Such a letter could have been burnt as Carlyle had suggested that Macaulay burn Owen Dudley Edwards 199

Robert Mackintosh’s epistle, if it proved chimerical, as it did. From the date that Macaulay sent this offer of assistance, every single allusion to Carlyle in his letters and journals was contemptuous in the extreme. When they met he varied between coolness in acknowledgement and heat in argument. Macaulay noted Carlyle’s gullibility in swallowing the Squire forgeries as genuine Cromwell for insertion in the third edition of the Letters and Speeches, and he produced seemingly endless lists of anachronistic words that any specialist in seventeenth-century documents should have spotted at once (Espinasse 216). The relapse into hostility was so marked, and its continuation so pitiless, that we must infer either that Carlyle never replied to Macaulay’s offer of help, or that what Carlyle wrote infuriated Macaulay by obvious enmity or ingrati- tude. But the absence of any answer is far the likelier. By 1852 when he began researching Frederick, Carlyle knew that every British reader he could imagine would know what they knew about the Prussian king from Macaulay’s essay. He wanted to refute it, probably in every particular if possible, but he had to rely on its having created a foundation he might seek to repudiate but that he also needed. His reverent friend the diarist Francis Espinasse (1823–1912) recalled mentioning Macaulay’s name to him in this period: “Carlyle turned on me rather fiercely, aver- ring that Macaulay had never said anything that was ‘not entirely commonplace;’ but he had the grace to add, ‘he is a very brilliant fellow. Flow on thou shining river!” Espinasse wisely discerned the creative benefits of this hostility, which “had something personal in it.” In Frederick the Great (1858–65), Carlyle aimed to finish the job that Carlyle’s rivalry with Macaulay had started in his review. Noted Espinasse, “[I]t is very probable that Carlyle was first attracted to Frederick the Great, as the subject for a book, by Macaulay’s brilliant essay in the Edinburgh Review, in which he ‘left half told the story’ of that singular hero” (216 –17).12 Macaulay dictated an agenda to Carlyle that began with the rehabilitation of Frederick William, on the ground that he was building his son and

12 Nominally reviewing Thomas Campbell, Macaulay was somewhat influenced by the latter’s book having ended in 1756, hence having thrown in the Seven Years War he may have thought his audience had enough to go on with. But if Macaulay ended his essay with the peace of 1763, Carlyle—proving for good and all that his kick start was rivalry with Macaulay—huddled the last 22 years of Friedrich’s life into a single chapter. 200 Carlyle Studies Annual his state for succession. The basis of their grand confrontation is Macaulay’s indictment of the Prussian king for throwing the world into slaughter in 1840, versus Carlyle’s insistence that he asserted order. Macaulay was grandly unequivocal about the violent legacy of Frederick’s actions: “The evils produced by his wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America” (Essays 3: 196). The case against Macaulay here is one of grasping Frederick to exculpate Britain. Macaulay’s is a sudden anger at the slaughter of his own kinfolk on either side at Culloden, and at what should have been quiescent and relatively contented British subjects—Irish Catholics and English soldiers—killing each other at Fontenoy. Irish exiles and Scots insurgents took arms against British rule. And Macaulay was quite right in assuming the slave trade and the eradication of native Americans would be greatly exacerbated by the impetus of global war, whoever began it. But if Macaulay used Frederick to get Britain off the moral hook, Carlyle defended the Prussian king with even worse logic: a schoolboy proved to have robbed an orchard claims innocence because he has been assisted by another boy living farther away and thus not under perpetual temptation for that robbery. As for Carlyle’s claim that Frederick had ancient historical rights in Silesia, Macaulay’s history repeatedly stressed the mortal peril of English settlers in Ireland faced by insurrection half-encouraged by Stuart government, peril from the Gaelic tribes displaced by British troops so long ago. If ancient historical grievances be the arbiter, there can be no end to vengeful massacres, whether in Ireland, Scotland, North America, Europe, or Africa. Carlyle might have wooed his British readers more easily had it merely been a matter of denying the charges made by Macaulay, whether on father’s treatment of son, or son’s treatment of Silesia. The conscientious reader armed with Macaulay’s Critical and Historical Essays might have enjoyed playing the texts off against one another. But it is important to remember that a formidable third competitor had established a claim in 1847 in the person of Leopold von Ranke, whose Neun bücher preussischer Geschichte (1848) was soon after translated by Sir Alexander and Lady Duff Gordon as Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg and History of Owen Dudley Edwards 201

Prussia during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1848–49). In his anxiety to chip away the credibility of Macaulay’s horrific portrait of King Frederick William, Carlyle was obliged to make the best of any subsequent confirmation of it emanating from Ranke, whom he equated with “Dryasdust.” At times in Frederick he adopted a pseudo-deferential mode of allusion to the German historian that seemed to prefigure Scots music- hall. For example, referring to “Professor Ranke’s” claim that at the “Pleasure-Camp of Mühlberg . . . the Crown-Prince was treated like a disobedient boy [by his father], and one time even with strokes, to make him feel he was only considered as such,” Carlyle loudly demands, “why did not the Professor give us time, occasion, circumstance, and name of some eye-witness? For the fact, which stands reported in the like fashion in all manner of Histories, we shall otherwise find to be abundantly certain” (Works 13: 252–53). Naturally Carlyle did not here repeat compa- rable instances of paternal assault on Prince Frederick that had Rankean documentation and Carlylean acquiescence. Ranke was a professional historian, and if that licensed Carlyle’s repetitive sneers at “Dryasdust,” it also divided him from Macaulay, who employed the arguments of the conscien- tious objector throughout his History of England (1848–61). The Prussian state historian, hired in part because of his proven hostility to , could not indict Frederick the Great on the plea that war was a crime. He was professionally obliged to like the war of the Austrian Succession, and in this context, the famous Rankean commitment to the past as it really was had to operate under strictly limited terms. The Prussian past, as it were, was preserved under licenses and was policed by game- keepers. Ranke scorned self-exposure as the naked partisan or the enthusiast, like Carlyle building up another hero or Macaulay taking fire from the combustible topic under his solar scrutiny. As a government propagandist no less than a civil servant, Ranke knew well that open unfairness to an opponent of Prussia left Prussia’s case even more vulnerable than before its historian had written. Therefore he confirmed, for instance, what part of Maria Theresa’s actions he found to be true, and omitted those he did not. In contrast, Carlyle conscripted his reader, not despite any suspicions of partisanship but by their clear assertion. Having shown so well how to train and attract 202 Carlyle Studies Annual readers in the delight of documents in Cromwell, he continued this discussion in Frederick the Great with far more geniality than Ranke could muster. Carlyle and Macaulay were both oratorical historians, with inspirational strength and critical weakness inevitable. One can see some of Macaulay’s great moments having been mentally rehearsed with a self-vision on his feet in the House of Commons. In the same way, Carlyle’s appar- ently less formal climaxes reflect challenges to a lecture-room public. He was so tenacious an advocate and so fascinated with documents, that he equipped his audience with critical instinct and iconoclastic perception to doubt his conclusions. Macaulay’s “Frederic the Great” preached the moral lesson that one violation of honor may take over twenty years of blood to still, and that while much of Frederick’s career was warfare for the defense of his own dominions (now including Silesia), it could not gainsay the original sin. Carlyle preached the hard road to achieve European order but his logic was so clearly that of the clever but guilty schoolboy as to leave the impartial observer grinning but unconvinced. In both cases the danger existed that the thrill of Frederick’s adventures might lose sight of the moral swamp in which they had originated. But neither Macaulay nor Carlyle had the dangers of the cold, fact-upon- fact Ranke. His account would be impervious to correction on factual grounds or on pleas of specious argument. And therefore when at the close he declared that Frederick’s wars were a necessity for the remaking of Europe along best German lines, he was far more dangerous to the future than the faintly chauvinistic Macaulay or the transparent Carlyle: “In Prussia, and in Prussia only, was founded a mighty and self-supporting power, at once German and European, which, for the first time since ages, brought back into the minds of its subjects the full feeling of independence, blended with the proud consciousness of being foremost in the developement of the world” (Brandenburg 3: 467). Hitler may have cried when Goëbbels read him excerpts from Carlyle’s Frederick the Great, but it was not Carlyle who had brought the Führer there in the first place. Macaulay and Carlyle induced moods; Ranke created convictions.

University of Edinburgh Owen Dudley Edwards 203

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