The Beauty of Nature

It is customary to view Macaulay as a conspicuously unpoetic writer, who viewed nature and animals only through the lens of an instrumental historicizing outlook, emphasizing scientific and technological utilization of natural resources meant for social and economic progress. This is a concomitant of the “Whig interpretation of history” critiques of Macaulay. Like most imprecise observations, this is partly true, but only to a limited extent. Nevertheless, this depiction of Macaulay has persisted for many years. According to his nephew he did not like riding horses or shooting, though he did walk long distances, often while reading. Trevelyan claimed that Macaulay knew how to observe the characteristics of the landscapes he saw, but was not inclined to poetical depictions. “He viewed the works, both of man, and of nature, with the eye of an historian, and not of an artist… his stock of epithets applicable to mountains, seas, and clouds was singularly scanty; and he had no ambition to enlarge it.” Trevelyan also quoted his mother, Macaulay’s beloved sister Hannah, who had claimed, according to him, “that he [Macaulay] did not care for scenery, merely as scenery.”

Despite Hannah’s authority as one who probably knew Macaulay better than anyone else, we are not constrained to automatically agree with her, and from a twenty-first-century perspective, more attuned to the theme of human–nature relations, we are able to read his writings from a different perspective. Even her son, implicitly contradicting his mother, continued to give quotes from Macaulay’s journals which rather proved the opposite of her assertion, and included descriptions of the beauty of nature. Modern scholars, however, have not always been equally discerning. The Clapham Sect, for example, has been noted as one of the influences which taught Macaulay indifference to natural beauty early on. Nature for Macaulay, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, was beautiful only when exhibiting the influence of advanced civilization, not when it was in its wild and unembellished state. According to John Burrow, Macaulay did not excel in picturesque descriptions of natural or man-made landscapes. He had an essentially urban sensibility, and landscapes provided him mainly associations with names or events.