Victorian Bust

MACAULAY: THE SHAPING OF THE HISTORIAN by JOHN CLIVE 499 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $15.

Thomas De Quincey's mother, who ought to have known one when she saw one, called the infant Thomas Babington Macaulay a "baby genius." From the age of three, "Clever Tom" was a compulsive reader whose idea of a wild childhood game was to act out Homer, reserving for himself the role of Achilles. At six, the future author of the five-volume History of England was at work on a compendium of world history.

Prodigies are seldom lovable, and Macaulay was no exception. As a boy he was "loudmouthed and conceited," with a visible "neglect of cleanliness." As an adult he was variously described as a "mean, whitey-looking man" and "an ugly, cross-made, splayfooted, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow." He had two qualities that make a human being a menace at any party--a phenomenal memory and inexhaustible energy. An exasperated hostess once grew so desperate that she switched the conversation to dolls, hoping to shut him up. Alas, Macaulay turned out to be an authority on them too.

Heavy Odds. Macaulay can be as hard to take in retrospect as he often must have been in person. Born in 1800, he seems to exemplify almost everything about the 19th century that the 20th century cannot forgive. He was an optimist who summed up history thus: "The great progress goes on." Against heavy odds, John Clive, a professor of history and literature at Harvard, manages to build a respectable case for a respectable Macaulay. Ten years ago Clive's Macaulay might have earned equally admiring reviews in the back pages of literary periodicals, then sunk like a Victorian bust in the Thames. Today it stands massively in all the best bookstore windows, a nominee for this year's National Book Awards in not one but two categories--history and biography.

Why is this potential doorstop winning such acclaim? Are readers in 1974 really that willing to plow through 25 pages of hearsay evidence on Macaulay's eloquence as a parliamentary orator from 1832 to 1834? Or, for that matter, the more than 50 pages that Clive uses to summarize Macaulay's revision of the Indian penal code? And then, after half a thousand pages, Macaulay's masterpiece plus 20 years of his life still lie ahead--for this is only the first volume from an academic biographer who knows everything and tells all, not ungracefully but sometimes twice.

Clive dutifully livens his exposition by suggesting the obligatory sinister Victorian flaw. Macaulay, a lifelong bachelor, loved his younger sisters Margaret and Hannah more than a brother should. Working from this clue of psychological incest, Clive submits that Macaulay was a suppressed romantic, smoldering behind a mask of rationality. He even labors to make him a man of our time: asserting the intellectual capabilities and working performance of the black race, and defending the rights of Roman Catholics and Jews.

There are limits to the selling of Macaulay. A biographer can no more make this preacher of "middlingness" very heroic than he can make him very wicked. Men can do only what the norms of their times permit, declared Macaulay the historian. And Macaulay the man proved his own rule all too well. He was every inch a Victorian, and that fact finally provides the best explanation of the book's success. We loving-hating children of the Victorians read on, often irritated but seldom bored. For we find between all those lines an obituary on that soul of respectability that is fast fading but still not quite dead within ourselves. Melvin Maddocks

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