Great Memorizer

When Thomas Babington Macaulay was four, a maid at Lady Waldegrave's spilled a cup of hot tea on his legs. Swallowing his pain, he quickly picked up the thread of his comments on his hostess' art collection. When a few minutes later she asked how he felt, little Thomas answered: "Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." At eight he wrote his Compendium of Universal History, a record of leading events from creation to the current year (1808). Next followed a long heroic poem, part of which celebrated the career of his father, Zachary, famed abolitionist and founder of the Bible Society (forerunner of the Gideon Society). At twelve, with little effort, he memorized Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress.

At Cambridge, fellow students, hopelessly out-argued, called him Thomas Babble-tongue. In his sos he was a leading contributor to the powerful Edinburgh Review. At 30 he was an M. P., the most effective speaker in Parliament. Two years later he was the hero of the bitterly fought Reform Bill. At 33 he was a member of the supreme council of India. (Resigning five years later, Macaulay left behind a new Indian penal code and educational system, had saved -L-30,000.) He became the most successful English essayist (sometimes so intoxicated with erudite digressions that he wound up lamely saying that space did not permit him to finish); and a historian whose publishers gladly sent him -L-20,000 advance royalties on the last volume of his History of England. Thus ugly, harsh-voiced Thomas Macaulay seemed, to all but a handful of his contemporaries, to have amply fulfilled the promise of his precocious beginnings.

But as any schoolboy of 14 now knows, Macaulay's genius was considerably overrated. His phenomenal, encyclopedic memory was too often a substitute for thinking. His wit borrowed its main punch from his universal spleen and political bias. (Said Macaulay, who loved only his sisters: "There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner.") Most of the writers and poets he demolished--Byron, Shelley, Keats, Thackeray, Gibbon,. Wordsworth, Tom Paine, Herman Melville, to name only a few-- have long survived him. And his History, while still exciting for its colorful narrative, is not noted for its accuracy.

Best (though not the best written) biography of Macaulay since George Otto Trevelyan's (Macaulay's nephew), published in 1876, is Lord Macaulay (University of Oklahoma Press, $3), by Richmond Croom Beatty, a 40-year-old professor at Vanderbilt University. Outstanding is its fairness, its reconstruction of Macaulay's times. Macaulay's spectacular progress, says Biographer Beatty, came mainly from a powerful tail wind: the hurricane force of the rising industrial middle class, with which he unequivocally aligned himself against the land-owning Tory aristocrats. His limitations came from the fact that he identified "material progress" with social heaven. His real genius lay in his power of blunt statement --a talent that would have taken him far in journalism today. "An acre in Middlesex," said he, "is better than a principality in Utopia."

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