[Controlcambios-bdoo] M and how nervous the phrases; and

Sun Aug 23 10:41:17 CEST 2009

Ification of it. We are interrogating our own impressions, and asking
ourselves among what kind of writers he ought to be placed. Rhetoric is
a good and worthy art, and rhetorical authors are often more useful,
more instructive, more really respectable than poetical authors. But it
is to be said that Macaulay as a rhetorician will hardly be placed in
the first rank, by those who have studied both him and the great
masters. Once more, no amount of embellishment or emphasis or brilliant
figure suffices to produce this intense effect of agitation rigorously
restrained; nor can any beauty of decoration be in the least a
substitute for that touching and penetrative music, which is made in
prose by the repressed trouble of grave and high souls. There is a
certain music, we do not deny, in Macaulay, but it is the music of a man
everlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a silver trumpet, never the
swelling diapasons of the organ, and never the deep ecstasies of the
four magic strings. That so sensible a man as Macaulay should keep clear
of the modern abomination of dithyrambic prose, that rank and sprawling
weed of speech, was natural enough; but then the effects which we miss
in him, and which, considering how strong the literary faculty in him
really was, we are almost astonished to miss, are not produced by
dithyramb but by repression. Of course the answer has been already
given; Macaulay, powerful and vigorous as he was, had no agitation, no
wonder, no tumult of spirit to repress. The world was spread out clear
before him; he read it as plainly and as certainly as he read his books;
life was all an affair of direct categoricals. This was at least one
secret of those hard modulations and shallow cadences. How poor is the
rhythm of Macaulay's prose we only realise by going with his periods
fresh in our ear to some true master of harmony. It is not worth while
to quote passages from an author who is in everybody's library, and
Macaulay is always so much like himself that almost any one page will
serve for an illustration exactly as well as any other. Let any one turn
to his character of Somers, for whom he had so much admiration, and then
turn to Clarendon's characte
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