Loyola College - Review Yearbook (Montreal, Quebec Canada)

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LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW 23. x. naked fishermen may divide with owls and foxes, the ruins of the greatest European cities—may wash their nets amidst the relics of her gigantic docks, and build their huts out of the capitals of her stately cathedrals? И the principles of Mr. Mill be sound, we say, without hesitation, that the form of government which he recommends will assuredly produce all this.” The third expression of this dream of relapse into barbarism, occurs in Macaulay’s Journal, quoted in Trevelyan’s famous biography of his celebrated uncle. In that personal record, under date of November 22, 1838, we read this. А propos of а. relicof antiquity, then recently unearthed in the city of Rome, and called The Baker’s Tomb,” and of the learned discussions thereanent, whether ‘ap- paret’ is a shortened form of ‘apparitoris,’ Macaulay writes: “To indulge in a sort of reflection which I often fall into here, the day may come when London, then dwindled to the dimensions of the parish of St: Martin's, and supported in its decay by the expenditure: of wealthy Patagonians and New Zealanders, may have no more important questions to decide than the arrangement of ‘A fflictions sore, Long time I bore’ on the gravestone of the wife of some baker in Houndsditch. Here we have the confession that this general idea of ruined splendor was familiar to him, for he says it is а sort of re- flection which I often fall into here. We have, moreover, the actual New Zealander support- ing London in its decay. The fact that. New Zealanders -are bunched with Patagonians must be rather galling to the former, who now are among the most advanced legislators in the world, whereas Patagonians, 82 years after Macaulay’s forecast, are still in a semi-savage state, and of the original race not more than one hundred are left. Bearing in mind that the first effort was written by Macaulay in 1824, the second. in 1829, and the third in 1838, we now come to the completed hypothetical prophecy. It occurs, as everyone knows, at the beginning of Macaulay’s Essay on Von Ranke’s History of the Popes. That essay was first published in the Edinburgh Review of October, 1840. After describing the unrivalled antiquity and unparalled success, growth and permanency of the Catholic Church, Macaulay says in his ріс- turesque way :—''She was great and respected. before the Saxon had set foot on Britain, be-: fore the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian eloquence still flourished in Antioch, when idols were still worshipped in the temple of Mecca. And shé may still exist in undimin- ished vigor when some traveller from New Zea- land shall, in the midst of a vast solitude táke his sténd on a bréken arch of London Bridge to: skétch the ruins of St. Paul's. Observe how the gradual development: of one idea was affected. by the circumstances surrounding each date. The idea first took shape from the political aspect of England... Macaulay was always an echo of his day, what : we should now call an up-to-date man. Writing . in November, 1824, he could not help fore- seeing the financial crash that came the next. year, 1825, and spread desolation and anxiety over England after the ten years of prosperity which followed the victory of Waterloo. The year 1829 was full of prognostications of а Reform Bill near at hand, which actually be- came the law three years later іп 1832, and added 500,000 to the voters' list, abolishing at the same time the aristocratic privilege of one nobleman controlling an entire constituency. Whig and Liberal though Macaulay was, he foresaw: with alarm- this inundation of: the democratic and at that time illiterate element. Hence it із по wonder that, writing-against Mill whose utilitarianism he successfully. re- futed, he should -have :envisaged as possible the complete ruin of the civilized: world; and so we Вауе а picture of semi-savagery covering the entire world, that is to say, the hopeless wiping out of civilization, unrelieved by: any. transoceanic prosperity. But,-in the nine years between 1829 and 1838 the world had moved and Macaulay with it. In 1833, the steamship Royal William, built at Quebec, was reported to have crossed the Atlantic in 21 days. In 1837, Captain Ericsson’s screw steamer Francis Bogden had made ten miles an hour. So, in that same year 1837, Macaulay, writing in the July Edinburgh, Review, represents Bacon describing the future triumphs of science and speaking of ships which run ten knots an houragainst the wind. Thus Macaulay, foreseeing the development of steam navigation, is quite ready to intro- duce into his third sketch the Patagonians, who at that time figured in several romances ` as the tallest and strongest race in the world;

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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

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24. LOYOLA COLLEGE REVIEW and arguing rashly, asevents havesince proved, from. the body to the mind, he prophesied for them a commercial success which has never even reached the embryonic stage. With his New Zealanders he had more facts to back him: for in 1838 their country had already had twenty-four years' experience as a progressive British colony. Hence the tone of his prophecy is more hopeful. Two years more and he was ready for that perfect picture which, with its almost poetic cadence, sings its way into our memories. [Read again the italicized words at the end, emphasizing the marked iambic accents.] Note, by the way, how much shorter this finished product is than the two preceding attempts. The first contained 127 words; the second, 53; the third 60; the fourth and best, only 39; but not one of these 39 words can be altered with- out marring the effect. Then consider what an appropriate and sonorous ending it provides for a long passage written in the full maturity of his unrivalled talent for broad historical contrasts. To be sure, the underlying prin- ciple, enunciated at the outset in these words, “There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving ofexamination as the Roman Catholic Church,” is ridiculously wrong and absurdly illogical. The undeniable facts which he marshals in such a brilliantarray ought to have made Mac- aulay suspect that the Catholic Church is not “а work of human policy, but a marvel of Divine Providence. Nevertheless, the art of the picture, crowned with its unforgettable conclusion, irradiates the souls of all those who, having received the true faith, know that it must be lived to be understood. Well and good, I hear some learned liter- ary critic object, ‘‘but what if this famous New Zealander was not an original idea? What if Macaulay copied from Shelley? This is a serious objection. Let us examine it. The con- cluding paragraph of Shelley's dedication of Peter Bell the Third, to Thomas Brown, Esq., is as follows: “Hoping that the immortality which you have given to the Fudges, you will receive from them; and in the firm expecta- tion that, when London shall be an habitation | of bitterns; when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh; when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers, and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the solitary stream, some transatlantic com- mentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism, the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges, and their historians, I remain, dear Tom, yours sincerely, MICHING MALLECHO.” At first sight, I admit, there is here in Shelley, as well as in Macaulay, the desolate aspect of London; some of the words even—St. Paul's, a London bridge, ruins, and broken arches—are exactly the same in both. Granting, for the nonce, that one of the two writers has pla- giarized the other, the culprit cannot be Shel- ley and must therefore be Macaulay. Not Shelley, because he died in 1822, two years before Macaulay wrote his first forecast of England made desolate. In order to find out whether or not Macaulay could have seen the Shelley passage before writing his own finished picture we must compare dates. Shelley’s widow wrote a ‘‘Postscript in the Second Edi- tion, 1839,” of her late husband’s works and announced therein the first publication of Peter Bell the Third. Her postscript is dated No- vember 6, 1839. This, therefore, is also the approximate date of the first publication of Shelley's humorous Dedication to Thomas Brown, the conclusion of which has just been read. Now, remembering that Macaulay’s perfected New Zealander appeared in October, 1840, we see that he had ample time—at least eight or nine months—to read Shelley's fore- cast and to take from it a lesson in startling imagery. Very likely, then, he did borrow from it six words, St. Paul's, bridge, ruins and broken arch. The whole thing may be summed up in this way. Shelley's Peter Bell the Third is dated by Shelley himself December 1, 1819, five years before Macaulay wrote of a ruined civilization; but Shelley's work was not printed till the end ot 1839, twenty years after it was written. Then Macaulay saw that four expressions, contain- ing six words, in Shelley's rather long and unpolished effusion—it contains over one hun- dred words—would suit his own definite, clear- cut picture. So he borrowed them, and, in borrowing them, lifted them into impassioned prose and made them immortal.