when dead; and yet have no notice from government, may never enter a royal palace, and may die untitled, and be buried in an ordinary family grave, leaving to his descendants no trace of his greatness but the fact and its natural results. Such is the view taken by a good many persons who ought to know something of literary life and literary men.
Others are of opinion that it would be a change for the worse, and a degradation of letters, to form an arbitrary connexion between authorship and office, between literary desert and conventional honours. They look towards France and America, and believe they see that great authors are by no means ennobled by a peerage, or truly rewarded by the possession of office. They believe that to make politicians and office-holders of men of letters is to spoil two vocations for no benefit whatever. The literary peer is out of his element at court or in council; and the student finds official business a sore burden—consuming his time and wearing out the energies he wants to devote to his own pursuit. It is no grace, these objectors say, to add a conventional, and therefore inferior, honour to the natural honour of popular homage; and it is no kindness to a man whose life is occupied by a favourite pursuit, requiring his whole mind, to impose upon him a different kind of business which must take just so much time from that which he prefers. Either the official place is a sinecure, and its emoluments a pension under a false name, or its business, which might as well be done by another man, deprives society of good books by breaking up the leisure and singleness of aim necessary to their production.
Such is the reply to the dissatisfied. For my part, I agree in the reply: and we ought to remember that Macaulay took the same view in his review of Fanny Burney’s Diary, expressing very plainly his disgust at the cruelty, vanity, and folly of placing her at court, as a reward for her novels, admirable in their day. The reviewer observed that Dr. Burney seems to have been as bad a father as a decently good man could be, in disregarding the natural tendencies and affections of his daughter, and that he seemed to think going to Court much the same thing as going to Heaven. So said Macaulay, wisely and truly, about a case which is only a strong example of what the dissatisfied are asking for—Macaulay himself being destined to afford a conspicuous illustration of the combination of literary and arbitrary distinction—of honours won by genius and those which are bestowed by state patronage and royal grace.
Persons who know that essay of Mrs. Barbauld on the “Inconsistency of Human Expectations,” which Charles James Fox declared to be the best essay in the English language, will inevitably be reminded of it as often as they hear any discussion on the subject of giving peerages or offices to illustrious authors. As the high-souled man who prefers self-respect to wealth ought not to grudge riches to the mean dirty fellow who made himself a mean and dirty fellow for the sake of riches; as the man of intellectual pursuits, refreshed by “a perpetual spring of fresh ideas,” ought not to be jealous of the fame and success of the man who lives in a crowd; so it is folly and want of spirit for the man of letters, and especially the author, to covet the objects of men who breathe a different atmosphere from his own, and do a very different kind of work, to earn the rewards they seek. So teaches Mrs. Barbauld’s essay; and, in the opinion of many wise men besides Fox, her doctrine is the true one. To each man his own work and its rewards. If the work be appointed by natural genius, its natural rewards will follow, transcending all others. If the work be conventional, let it win conventional rewards. The painful spectacle is seeing the winners of the higher recompense stooping to covet the lower, or their friends dishonouring them by complaining on their behalf.
In Lord Macaulay we have a very interesting illustration of the combination of the two orders of recompense; and it is one which we can contemplate and remark on without pain or reproach, because no sort of blame can attach to his memory on the score of infidelity to literature for the sake of ambition. Not only singularly gifted but singularly placed, his was a special case, and his honours had a double origin. The question hereafter will be,—as it is for us now,—not whether the illustrious man was lowered by his peerage and his state-offices, but whether he is not now, and will not always be, remembered for other things, when these incidents of his career drop out of sight. In an age when the rising generation of noblemen are not satisfied with being peers, but aspire to personal distinction of their own winning, as authors, statesmen, artists, or travellers, it cannot be but unreasonable to anticipate that society may forget that Macaulay was ever Secretary at War, or a peer, though his peerage is understood to have been a tribute to his literary eminence.
His case was complex, as his powers were diversified. He was descended from the noted Scotch clan which possessed the island of Lewis, the line being carried down to him through the Presbyterian church, of which his grandfather was a minister in the Highlands. The religious element was strong in his ancestry; and hence his keen knowledge of the Puritan struggle in Great Britain and elsewhere; and hence also, most probably, his failure in apprehending the various phases of religious belief and feeling in India, and the consequent ill-success of his labours there. In no ancestor was the religious element stronger than in his own father, the venerable Zachary Macaulay, a devout member of the Clapham church, and one of the very best of the anti-slavery band which issued from that sect. During a long life he worked diligently, suffered much, and sacrificed everything that stood in the way of his advocacy of human freedom as the right of all human beings. With him it was no work of imagination. What he saw with his own eyes in Jamaica, in his youth, induced him to go to Sierra Leone, and live there for several years, operating against the slave-trade with all his might; and when he came home, it was to follow up the same work, which he did to his latest day. It seems as if his son had heard too much about it at an early age,