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 French Revolution (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 Edinburgh 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 Scotland 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 Charles James Fox, 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 Edinburgh Review, which he had first vainly assailed at 24 (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 lawyer 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 London 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 .