What was worse, no one had a right to denounce the English as
wrong. Artistically their mind was scrappy, and every one knew
it, but perhaps thought itself, history, and nature, were
scrappy, and ought to be studied so. Turning from British art to
British literature, one met the same dangers. The historical
school was a playground of traps and pitfalls. Fatally one fell
into the sink of history -- antiquarianism. For one who nourished
a natural weakness for what was called history, the whole of
British literature in the nineteenth century was antiquarianism
or anecdotage, for no one except Buckle had tried to link it with
ideas, and commonly Buckle was regarded as having failed.
Macaulay was the English historian. Adams had the greatest
admiration for Macaulay, but he felt that any one who should even
distantly imitate Macaulay would perish in self-contempt. One
might as well imitate Shakespeare. Yet evidently something was
wrong here, for the poet and the historian ought to have
different methods, and Macaulay's method ought to be imitable if
it were sound; yet the method was more doubtful than the style.
He was a dramatist; a painter; a poet, like Carlyle. This was the
English mind, method, genius, or whatever one might call it; but
one never could quite admit that the method which ended in Froude
and Kinglake could be sound for America where passion and poetry
were eccentricities.
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