The Real Macaulay

...In a narrative that is a model of biographical, historical and psychological reconstruction, Clive has disinterred the complex reality of Macaulay from his moribund reputation...

...It is also an especially appropriate achievement of Clive's marvelously readable book that he projects such a graphic idea of the contemporary historian at work...

...Macaulay's political achievements in India, if enduring, nevertheless reveal an aspect of his imperturbable faith in the inevitability of material progress that is considerably less attractive—his notion that progress was the generous gift of civilized Britain to idolatrous and primitive Hindus...

...He stubbornly refused to sail unless Hannah accompanied him, but within a year of their arrival she, too, wounded him cruelly by marrying Charles Trevelyan...

...His Scotch father, Zachary Macaulay, had in his youth spent some time in Jamaica as an overseer on a sugar plantation worked by slave labor...

...Writers & Writing THE REAL MACAU LAY BY PEARL K. BELL Among all the dusty figures that crowd the Victorian pantheon, none seems less likely to arouse intellectual curiosity or excitement in the waning 20th century than the historian and essayist Thomas Babing-ton Macaulay...

...Just how patronizingly wrongheaded these half-baked judgments are we can now understand, thanks to the publication of John Clive's splendid intellectual biography, Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian (Knopf, 499 pp., $15.00...

...On the obverse side of this imperialist prophecy, however, was his courageous attack, in a bigoted age, on the civil disabilities of the Jews...

...It unobtrusively illuminates the scholar's craft while offering us an affectionate portrait of Macaulay as the man who suffers, along with the mind that creates...

...The great-grandfathers of both E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf were prominent Clapha-mites...

...And his almost single-handed revision of the colony's penal code, Clive writes, "still largely in force today, has remained the most enduring monument to his efforts in India...

...About this blow the ornament of his age, the voice of common-sensical meliorism, wept in a self-pitying letter: "At 34 I am alone in the world...

...I have lost everything...

...John Stuart Mill wrote him off as an "intellectual dwarf . . . without a germ of principle of further growth in his whole being...

...Similarly, modern readers view Macaulay as altogether deficient in the eccentricity, neurosis and tragic sense of life that link the sensibility of the Carlyles and Ruskins and Arnolds to our own...

...Macaulay knew by heart all of Demosthenes and Milton, much of the Old Testament in English, and the New Testament in Greek...

...They were indefatigable toilers in the cause of abolition—first of the slave trade, then of slavery itself...

...There is nothing at all mechanical about John Clive's Macaulay...

...Born in 1800, he was by the age of three an omnivorous reader, and by six an epic poet and master of repartee, "hard at work on a compendium of universal history...

...Every volume of biography and history is presumably the result of a slow, painstaking labor of sifting, weighing, assessing the evidence of myriad, and conflicting, sources...

...Still, it is hard not to feel that Malcolm Muggeridge is closer to the truth when he writes: "Education was about the worst thing we did to India and, appropriately enough, contributed to our departure...

...Though Clive, a professor of history and literature at Harvard, limits the scope of his work to the first 38 years of Macaulay's life, bringing him to the eve of Victoria's coronation, as Macaulay was about to embark on his masterwork, The History of England from the Accession of James II, this multi-faceted portrait of the man and his thought is an astonishing revelation...

...Unlike the Utilitarians, who regarded the subcontinent as a giant testing-ground for their theories of political and human behavior, he played a vital practical role in the reform of Indian education...

...In fact, he lived with the Trevelyans until his death in 1859, thereby helping to found the dynasty of Trevelyan historians...

...Perhaps the most absorbing and generally unfamiliar section of Clive's study covers the five years Macaulay spent on the Supreme Council of India...

...He did not cany the idea of manifest British destiny as far as his brother-in-law Trevelyan, who had nothing but contempt for "the moral deficiencies of the Indian people," yet Macaulay, arguing in favor of making English the language of India, condescendingly envisioned a beneficent future populated with "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect...

...For those, like myself, whose teachers of "literary composition" crammed so many intimidatingly perfect chunks of Macaulay's exemplary prose down our throats—in vain, all in vain!—the very name brings on a vertigo swimming with double-columned anthologies in minuscule type...

...Clive describes the historian's extraordinary attachment to two of his sisters, Hannah and Margaret Like many child prodigies, Macaulay remained perpetually boyish throughout his life, and this stunted emotional growth made for an inordinate dependence on familial domesticity—not with a wife and children, but with adored and adoring sisters...

...Clive makes a thoughtful case for evaluating Macaulay's-—and Britain's—role in Asia with more sympathy than one usually allows...

...The two crucial roots of Macaulay's personality were his father's Evangelical zealotry and the fact that Tom, the eldest of nine children, was a child prodigy...

...But few convey the mechanics of the historian in action without becoming themselves mechanical...

...Macaulay the prodigy is, of course, far better known...

...After his religious conversion to the Evangelical faith, he became one of the "Saints" of the Clapham sect, a group of prosperous businessmen living in the same suburb of London, who believed that the glory of God was as much enhanced by good causes and social action as by individual redemption...

...At every age his legendary memory was so capacious that Sydney Smith, that viper-tongued jester in clerical clothing, called him "a book in breeches," adding maliciously that Macaulay not only overflowed with learning but stood in the slop...

...The material reward a superb polemical writer could expect in 19th-century England was such that Macaulay's consistently brilliant performance in the pages of the Edinburgh Review earned him a seat in the House of Commons...

...to Thomas Carlyle he was "the sublime of commonplace...

...There, his eloquent speeches in favor of the Reform Bill of 1832—rich with erudition and delivered with battering-ram oratory—brought an unprecedented excitement to the course of parliamentary debate...

...He was crushed by Margaret's engagement, announced shortly before he left for India, since it had been his fondest dream to live out his life in a snug and innocent menage a trois that would somehow, for his sisters, be a sufficient substitute for husbands and homes of their own...

...A few years later, with the publication of his dazzling essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review, the powerful intellectual organ of the Whig Party, this fat, short, and incurably untidy 25-year-old prodigy became the literary lion of Whig London, and a feted darling at Holland House, the social headquarters of the Whig aristocracy...

...At Cambridge he began to pull himself free from his father's censorious Evangelicalism...

...To present generations on both sides of the Atlantic, he is the embodiment of the 19th century's most discredited traits and pieties—pompous and complacent moralism, thunderous optimism about the triumphant march of humankind from barbarism to civilization, prodigious learning unleashing an avalanche of historical and literary examples with every loosened pebble of generality, a chillingly Olympian perspective that, as Walter Bagehot wrote, "regards existing men as painful prerequisites of great-grandchildren...

...Was it not predominantly enraged and unemployed graduates who chased us out, hurling after us curses and copies of the Oxford Book of English VerseT' More persuasively, Clive, primarily concerned with the shaping of Macaulay the historian, brilliantly elucidates his steady intellectual progression from Clapham to Cambridge to the House of Commons to Calcutta and back to London, ready at last to write the Whig interpretation of the Glorious Revolution that would finally supersede Hume's reigning Tory history, against which, as Hugh Trevor-Roper has put it, "successive Whig pens had squeaked in vain...

...In speculating on the reason Macaulay never married...

...In his day Macaulay was far better known and more widely read than any of the other Victorian titans?the essays and History of England were fantastic bestsellers—yet this did not stop some of his contemporaries, as well as the later Victorians, from treating him with exasperated contempt: Matthew Arnold branded him a Philistine...

...But Zachary's austere piety, with its stern emphasis on self-discipline and its dour suppression of intellectual and emotional self-indulgence, cast a bleak and lingering shadow on his gifted son—the "favourite of fortune" whose temperament was less harmonious than the successful face he presented to the world...