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Reading Greek Like a Man of the World: Reading Greek Like a Man of the World: Macaulay and the Classical Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Wynne Williams
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Extract

In his journal for December 31st, 1851, Thomas Babington Macaulay recorded an encounter with Thomas Love Peacock: ‘I met Peacock; a clever fellow and a good scholar. I am glad to have an opportunity of being better acquainted with him. We had out Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and several other old fellows, and tried each other's quality pretty well. We are both strong enough in these matters for gentlemen. But he is editing the Supplices: Aeschylus is not to be edited by a man whose Greek is only a secondary pursuit’ (Life II, 556). This encounter is an illustration of the fact that in nineteenth-century Britain the close study of the Greek and Latin languages was far from being the exclusive preserve of professional scholars and teachers of the classics. Macaulay once wrote that he read Greek ‘like a man of the world’ (Letters III, 111), that is, as someone actively involved in public life, not cloistered in a university or a school. This applied to Peacock as much as it did to Macaulay. By 1851 Peacock had already published six of the seven novels for which he is best known today, but he had also spent about thirty years in the service of the East India Company, during which he had risen to the rank of Examiner: he was in effect a very senior civil servant. His formal schooling had ended when he was twelve, so that he was largely self-taught as a classicist. It was perhaps characteristic of such an autodidact that ‘he delighted to ask an Oxford first-class man who Nonnus was, and to find he could get no information’, and that he should pepper his novels with recondite classical quotations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , October 1993 , pp. 201 - 216
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1993

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References

Notes

1. References to passages quoted from Macaulay's own words will be included in the main text, and the following abbreviations will be used:

Works: The Works of Lord Macaulay (Albany Edition of 1898, as reissued in 12 vols. in Longman's Silver Library)Google Scholar;

Letters: The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, Vols. I–VI, edited by Pinney, Thomas (Cambridge, 1974–1981)Google Scholar;

Life: The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay by his nephew Sir George Otto Trevelyan (enlarged and complete edition of 1908, as reissued in 2 vols. in Longman's Silver Library). Chap. 16Google Scholar of the 1908 edition contains some of Macaulay's marginalia, previously published separately. The passages from Macaulay's hitherto unpublished journal are drawn from Trevelyan's Life, but the reader should be warned that ‘it is wholly unreliable in its transcription of documents’ (Edwards, Owen Dudley, Macaulay [London, 1988], p. 173)Google Scholar.

2. ‘In 1865 a major commentator on Homer as well as a major translator of the poet (1), the chief critic and historian of Greek literature (2), the most significant political historians of Greece (3), and the authors of the then most extensive commentaries on Greek philosophy (4) either were or recently had been members of the House of Commons or of the House of Lords’ (Turner, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain [New Haven and London, 1981], p. 5)Google Scholar. Turner does not identify these persons at that point in his text. They were (1) Mr Gladstone and Lord Derby, both Prime Ministers, (2) Col. William Mure, M.P. 1846–55, (3) Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's 1840–74 and George Grote, M.P. 1832–1841, and (4) Grote and R. D. Hampden, Bishop of Hereford, 1848–68.

3. Priestley, J. B., Thomas Love Peacock (London, 1966), pp. 5–6, 8–10Google Scholar; Mills, Howard, Peacock, his Circle and his Age (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 12–13Google Scholar; Butler, Marilyn, Peacock Displayed (London, 1979), pp. 13, 19–21Google Scholar.

4. This passage is quoted from biographical notes by SirCole, Henry in Slater's, M. notes to the World's Classics edition of Headlong Halland Gryll Grange by Peacock, (Oxford, 1987), p. 383Google Scholar.

5. In his seventh and last novel, Gryll Grange, for example, the epigraphs to individual chapters are drawn from, among other authors, Alcaeus, Diphilus, Nonnus, Philetaerus, Anacreon, Palladas, and Alexis.

6. For Macaulay's career see, in addition to Trevelyan's Life and Pinney's annotation to the Letters (note 1), the masterly account of the years down to 1838 by Clive, John, Macaulay: the Shaping of the Historian (London, 1973)Google Scholar. For a short introduction see Edwards, cited in note 1.

7. In December 1855 Macaulay informed Dean Milman, who had recommended the work to him, that he had finished Photius', Bibliotheca (Letters V, 405 n. 1Google Scholar; 484).

8. Priestley, , Peacock, p. 98Google Scholar.

9. Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1 (London, 1886), pp. 255, 267, 271Google Scholar.

10. Stephen, , Hours in a Library, Third Series (London, 1879), p. 296Google Scholar; Arnold, ‘Joubert’ (Essays in Criticism), ad fin. For a rejoinder to Arnold and Stephen, see Edwards, , Macaulay, pp. 55–8Google Scholar.

11. The qualities of a gentleman were a recurrent theme in Anthony Trollope's novels: Letwin, S. R., The Gentleman in Trollope (London, 1982)Google Scholar. Trollope himself was very proud of having brushed up his Latin during a very busy life as civil servant and author: Autobiography (World's Classics edition), pp. 17,92–3,308–10. His airing of his classical knowledge once provoked a ferocious snub from Robert Browning: ‘my dear Trollope, this display of classical lore really reminds one of Thackeray's scholar who had earned fame and the promise of a bishopric by his masterly translation of Cornelius Nepos’ (Pope-Hennessy, J., Anthony Trollope [London, 1971], p. 354)Google Scholar.

12. Clive, , Macaulay, p. 498Google Scholar.

13. Winstanley, D. A., Early Victorian Cambridge (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 436–9Google Scholar. Macaulay's letter to Whewell, then Master of Trinity, is republished in Letters VI, 67–9. The subject eventually chosen for the statue was Isaac Barrow.

14. Trevelyan commented that ‘Macaulay read Greek and Latin for their own sake and not in order to use them for purposes of literary copy’, and that ‘these twelve or fifteen paragraphs (on Bentley), and the prefaces to the Lays of Ancient Rome are the sole visible fruit of the thousands of hours he spent over the classical writers during the last thirty years of his life’ (Life II, 706). Trevelyan may be implying that using the classics for purposes of literary copy was below the dignity of a gentleman classicist.

15. Daylight and Champaign (London, 1937), p. 143Google Scholar. As usual, Young provides no source for the anecdote.

16. Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th and 11th Centuries (Third ed., London, 1847), Vol. 2, p. 31Google Scholar.

17. Horae Sabbaticae (London, 1892), Vol. 1, p. 124Google Scholar.

18. In the chapters devoted to poetry, for example, there are separate sections on verse in Latin alongside those on the different vernacular languages: Part I, chap. 8, paras. 30–4; Part II, chap. 5, sect. 4. 5; Part III, chap. 5, sect. 6; Part IV, chap. 5, sect. 4.

19. Kinser, Samuel R., The Works of. A. de Thou (The Hague, 1966)Google Scholar.

20. Pitt's Parliamentary Orations (Everyman's Library ed.), p. 2. Pitt refers to ‘a great historian of France’, perhaps on the assumption that a considerable number of the Members would recognize the allusion. He was applying to the king's execution the lines of Statius (Silvae 5.2.88–90) which in Thuanus are applied to the Massacre of St Bartholomew's Day (Historiae Bk. 52, ch. 11).

21. Boswell's Life of Johnson (Oxford Standard Authors ed.), p. 1387.

22. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, ed. Murray, J. (London, 2nd ed. 1897)Google Scholar, Memoir, 104 (p. 2 of Bonnard's edition; p. 39 of the Penguin edition).

23. Gooch, G. P., History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century (London, 2nd ed. 1952), p. 87Google Scholar.

24. Trevor-Roper, H. R., Renaissance Essays (Fontana, ed., 1986), p. 127Google Scholar. Thuanus asked permission to consult Sarpi's unpublished history of the Interdict, but this was denied by the Venetian Senate: , G. and Cozzi, L. (edd.), Paolo Sarpi Opere (Milan, 1970), p. 1177Google Scholar.

25. Selecta poemata Italorum qui Latine scripserunt… iterum in lucent data… accurante A. Pope; Boswell's Life of Johnson(ed. cit.), p. 65.

26. Holmes, Richard, Coleridge: Early Visions (London, 1989), pp. 49, 57, 59Google Scholar.

27. Literature of Europe I, pp. xxv and 431. Between 1815 and 1820 Landor published verse only in Latin, but ‘after 1820 Landor submitted to pressure from his friends and publishers and abandoned any new major excursions in Latin’: Kelly, A. in Binns, J. W. (ed.), The Latin Poetry of the English Poets (London, 1974), p. 153Google Scholar.

28. Berlin, I., Vico and Herder (London, 1976), pp. 169, 180 et passimGoogle Scholar.

29. See Binns (cited in a 27).

30. A History of Western Literature (Harmondsworth, 1956), pp. 110, 145–6Google Scholar.

31. English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1954), p. 20Google Scholar.

32. Quoted from the Edinburgh Review by Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford, 1980), p. 155Google Scholar; this article was never included in Macaulay's collected essays.

33. This was probably not a conventional judgement. According to Young, G. M., in the ‘good old times’, the correct answer to the examination question, ‘which of the lost authors of antiquity would you most like to recover, and why?’ was Menander: Today and Yesterday (London, 1948), p. 244Google Scholar.

34. See, among many other works, Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, chap. 1; Buxton, J., The Grecian Taste (London, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crook, J. Mordaunt, The Greek Revival (London, 1972)Google Scholar; Irwin, D., English Neoclassical Art (London, 1966)Google Scholar.

35. As suggested by Millgate, Kate, Macaulay (London, 1973), pp. 20–1Google Scholar.

36. In 1820 Peacock had published an essay, ‘The Four Ages of Poetry’, in which he maintained that in the history of every society poetry passed through four successive ages, of iron, gold, silver, and brass. ‘The iron age of classical poetry may be called the bardic; the golden, the Homeric; the silver, the Virgilian; the brass, the Nonnic’: Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays, ed. Mills, Howard (London, 1970), p. 124Google Scholar. Critical theories which regarded ‘the arts as a by-product of a society in a particular phase of its culture’ were characteristic of the early nineteenth century: see Butler (cited in n. 3), p. 276 and chap. 8 passim.

37. With ‘romances founded in fact’ compare Woodman's, concise account of his view in The Blackwell Dictionary of Historians (Oxford, 1988), p. 85Google Scholar: ‘classical historiography in general was an elaborate medium which… has rather more in common with today's historical novel than with modern works of specialist history.’

38. Jenkyns (cited in n. 32), p. 282. Mr Gladstone, in his review of Trevelyan's Life, also expressed horror at Macaulay's dismissal of ancient philosophy: ‘can it really be that, in this nineteenth century, the writer who, as Mr. Trevelyan truly says, teaches men by millions, has gravely taught them that the study of the nature of good, of the end for which we live, of the discipline of pain, of the mastery to be gained over it by wisdom, of the character and limits of human knowedge, is a systematic misdirection of the mind, a course of effort doomed beforehand to eternal barrenness, a sowing of seed that is to produce only smut and stubble?’ He had, however, a charitable explanation for Macaulay's extravagant vagaries: ‘the truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like many more of us, to go out hobbyriding, but, from the portentous vigour of the animal he mounted, was liable, more than most of us, to be run away with’ (Gleanings of Past Years [London, 1879], Vol. II, pp. 309, 311)Google Scholar.