Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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21 LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW Р” d —— wi. Gul — ! Г um ч | mo | ри fi 8 СОУ нь ; Bs 0 i í ( peu ы. n Y || l = i WOCHEN, n

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW СЕ —2 | P S NN JI S T

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22 LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW How Macaulays New Zealander Grew The elaboration of a single sentence A lecture to First Year Arts, Loyola College, February, 1921 one, so vividly portráyed by his nephew and biographer, Sir George Otto Trevel- yan, nothing, to the student of character, is so remarkable as the combination of marvellous natural facility in memory and thought with painstaking diligence and continual polishing of style. Of this combination he himself was т. Lord Macaulay's life, a truly remarkable fully and proudly aware. In a letter to his sis-: ter Hannah he once wrote: “When I do sit. down to work I work harder and faster than, any person that І ever knew. But not always was his best work done fast. Some of it re- quired years of elaboration. When a great ог bright idea found lodgment in his mind he not ` only never forgot it, but he knew just where it lurked in his brain and could refurbish it at will. А striking instance of this patient chisel- ling of literary jewels is to be found in his various wordings of the thought that highly civi lized nations might some day relapse into savagery—a thought, by the way, which in our own time has become a reality in Russia. Macaulay had not yet completed his twenty- fourth year when he wrote, for Knight's Quar- terly Magazine, a bitter, one-sided criticism of Mitford's History of Greece. After finding fault with the main points of that first realistic English history of the conflicts of Sparta with Athens, he blames Mitford for overlooking that splendid literature from which has sprung all the strength, the wisdom, the free- dom, and the glory of the western world; then he devotes a metallically brilliant para- graph to the enumeration of the great writers of classical Rome, medieval Italy, modern France and England, who have been inspired by Greek genius; and finally concludes with all the fervor of his youthful exaggeration :— “This is the gift of Athens to man. Her free- dom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilization and knowledge shall have fixed their abode іп distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps travellers from distant regions shall in vain labor to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chanted to some misshapen idol over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;—her influence and her glory will still survive,—fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.” This last sentence seems to have been Mac- aulay’s first sketch of a future tragic change in the destinies of England. To such an extent does it reflect the exuberance of youth that we shall find him gradually pruning it down to: less than one-third of its present length and thereby giving to it more than three times its original force. Eu. 'The second sketch of this idea appears in Macaulay's essay “МІШ on Government, which was published for the first time—it has been reprinted innumerable times since—in the Edinburgh Review of March, 1829. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was then only twenty-eight years old, wrote: “The civilized part of the world has now nothing to fear from the hostility of savage nations . . . . . . But is it possible that in the bosom of civilization itself may be engendered the malady which will destroy it? Is it possible that institutions may be established which, without tlie help of earthquake, of famine, of pestilence, or of the foreign sword, may undo the work of so many ages of wisdom and glory, and gradually sweep away taste, literature, science, commerce, manufactures, everything but the rude arts necessary to the support of animal life? [Now comes the forecast to which I wish especially to draw your attention:] Is it possible that, in two or three hundred years, а few lean and half