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WHEN I entered the flat No. K-3 atop the first floor of Kings College, Cambridge, on January 7, 1957, I found the eminent novelist and writer E. M. Forster busy writing something. He told me that he was preparing his BBC talk on Macaulay’s speech in Parliament on the Somnath temple which was destroyed by Mahmud Ghazni. Forster added: "Here was a man full of integrity but absolutely lacking in sympathy." Forster’s perceptive comment forms the main theme of this book, which was published to mark the 150th death anniversary of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859).
An outstanding scholar, Sullivan presents a 615-page biography of Macaulay, divided into 12 chapters, with 87 pages of closely packed references, and a 24-page index. Regrettably, there is no bibliography. Macaulay’s devoted nephew and intellectual heir, Sir George Otto Trevelyan, the author of Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay (1916), and his more distinguished grandnephew, the late master of Trinity College, Cambridge, a Regius Professor of Modern History, Cambridge, willed that "Macaulay’s journals ought never be published or any large continuous section of them". Their object was to forestall the publication and sensationalising of Macaulay’s "unconsummated passion" for his younger sister, especially Hanna, G. M Trevelyan’s grandmother, the wife of Sir Charles Trevelyan, the resident of Delhi, and later a member of Governor-General Lord William Bentinck’s Council in Calcutta. When this writer consulted Macaulay’s journals in early 1953, he was astounded to notice in them Macaulay’s uncommon amorous entanglement with his sisters. The author points out in the preface that his object was to study "the tragedy of the power that killed him (Macaulay) and confounds us today". Whether the object is fulfilled or not is a moot point, but what emerges from this study is Macaulay’s "dualness in outlook and amorality in politics". Truly, this study presents Macaulay as a crypto-imperialist, too bookish a scholar, who is ever ready to bend his knees to seek power and authority for the enhancement of his literary and political career. The author’s breathtaking and wide-ranging efforts to deal with Macaulay’s multifaceted personality tend to make this biography diffuse, and relegate analysis and reflection to the background. Much of Macaulay’s life is well known. His father Zachary Macaulay, Governor of Sierra Leone, enjoyed an international reputation as a crusader against slavery. He despised his father for treating him harshly and subjecting him to physical punishment during his school education. Despite his enormous learning, prodigious memory and powerful command of the English language, Macaulay failed to make any path-breaking contribution to his literary and political life. His flights were short. That is why John Stuart Mill called him an "intellectual dwarf". In 1834, Macaulay agreed to serve on the recently created Supreme Council of India as a legal member headed by Lord William Bentinck. The fifty pages of Chapter III of this work are crucial for understanding his role as legislator and educational reformer. The author credits Macaulay for making the English language as a medium of instruction in India and preparing the ground for the Indian Penal Code. Recent research shows that Macaulay was only implementing what Jeremy Bentham (1745-1832), English philosopher and jurist, and Lord William Bentinck had set out to do. So both in legal and educational reforms, Macaulay was an accessory, not an innovator. Too much learning is the weariness of spirit. It seems that learning swallowed and drowned Macaulay, which incapacitated him from forming his independent judgment. He knew no Indian language, nor did he mix with Indians like Heber and William Jones. His educational minute of February 2, 1835, is too sweeping, which Gandhiji called "notorious". In his minute he wrote that "a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole literature of Asia and Arabia". This was exactly the thesis that James Mill had propounded in the first volume of his History of British India, which Macaulay uncritically accepted and used for the condemnation of Indian literature and culture.
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The
author of this work, Robert E. Sullivan, is Associate Professor of
History, and Associate Vice-President of Notre Dame. Sullivan was a
Ph.D student of John Clive, the author of the masterful biography of
Macaulay, The Shaping of the Historian, published in
1953. Macaulay was a prolific writer. He published his History of
England in four volumes. He wrote a series of long essays for the Edinburgh
Review. Eleven volumes of his journals lie closely watched in
Trinity College, Library, Cambridge. Another source-material is the
massive correspondence addressed to him from his father Zachary
Macaulay, his colleagues, and his sisters, Margaret and Henna.