Macaulay

[Dominic Goodall]

A quibble:

I think I can see what you mean about "Anglosaxon matter-of-factness",  
but I wonder whether it is really best illustrated by Macaulay's  
monstrous purple prose.  Macaulay gets so carried away by the power of  
his own rhetoric, it seems to me, that he no longer knows himself when  
he is being entirely sincere.  Here's another passage, tending in the  
opposite direction, which may be very seductive as a piece of  
magniloquent oratory, but which again seems to me (particularly when  
laid beside the infamous "Minute...") somewhat hollow.

``The people of India, when we subdued them, were ten times as  
numerous as the Americans whom the Spaniards vanquished, and were at  
the same time quite as highly civilised as the victorious Spaniards.  
They had reared cities larger and fairer than Saragossa or Toledo, and  
buildings more beautiful and costly than the cathedral of Seville.  
They could show bankers richer than the richest firms of Barcelona or  
Cadiz, viceroys whose splendour far surpassed that of Ferdinand the  
Catholic, myriads of cavalry and long trains of artillery which would  
have astonished the Great Captain. It might have been expected, that  
every Englishman who takes any interest in any part of history would  
be curious to know how a handful of his countrymen, separated from  
their home by an immense ocean, subjugated, in the course of a few  
years, one of the greatest empires in the world.''

[From Macaulay's review of : The Life of Robert Lord Clive; collected  
from the Family Papers, communicated by the Earl of Powis. By MAJOR- 
GENERAL SIR JOHN MALCOLM, K.C.B. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1836.]

What Macaulay rather illustrates, I think, is brilliant parliamentary  
bombast disguised as "matter-of-factness".

Dominic Goodall
Pondicherry Centre,
Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient ("French School of Asian Studies"),
Pondicherry
>
> Now, like all other objects, India is different — was opened up  
> different — in the different worlds. While I don’t want to belabour  
> this point (who does not admire the pioneering work of the English  
> fathers of indology?) I certainly would not like to give up — just  
> as an example — a world envisioning India as a “Land der  
> Sehnsucht... [ein] Wunderreich... eine verzauberte Welt... [ein]  
> gesuchtes Land,  ein wesentliches Moment der ganzen  
> Geschichte” (Hegel), in favour of another, where we are made to ask  
> ourselves whether “we shall countenance, at public expense”,  
> preserving the culture of a land with an “Astronomy, which would  
> move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, History,  
> abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand  
> years long, and Geography, made up of seas of treacle and seas of  
> butter” (English politician, historian and /poet/ Macaulay, only  
> some fifteen-twenty years later). Of course, it would be unfair to  
> the extreme to put a Macaulay up against Hegel (and a politician up  
> against a philosopher); still, apart from the two personalities in  
> themselves, I suspect there is as much typically Anglosaxon matter- 
> of-factness speaking in Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian  
> Education” as there is  typically German longing for the ineffable  
> transfactual in Hegel’s winged eulogy of India. (By the way,  
> Macaulay would have seconded the motion that indologists should give  
> up writing in their respective mother tongues in favour of English,  
> a language which in his opinion “stands pre-eminent even among the  
> languages of the west”, embodying a literature “of far greater value  
> than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in  
> all the languages of the world together”).
>
> --
> Paolo Magnone
> Lingua e letteratura sanscrita
> Università Cattolica di Milano
>
> Jambudvipa  - Indology and Sanskrit Studies (www.jambudvipa.net)