ABSTRACT
As has just been seen, Freud sought to illustrate the ‘great, often mysterious attraction’ the long-distant past exerts on human beings discontented with their present, by invoking the poems Thomas Macaulay devoted to subjects from the history of ancient Rome. Unlike any of the other British poets treated in the last chapter, Macaulay figures in the list of favourite writers Freud sent to Hugo Heller on 1 November 1906; he does so, however, not as the bard of The Lays of Ancient Rome, but as the author of the Critical and Historical Essays of which an edition published by Tauchnitz in 1850 remained among Freud’s books until his death. Freud had, indeed conceived an enthusiasm for these writings early in his life, and a letter to Eduard Silberstein, dated 7 September 1877, had singled out two of them for especial praise:
In an earlier letter to the same correspondent he had called the essay on Bacon ‘the most perfect in existence’.2 It met, as has already been seen, a pre-existing interest in Bacon, especially his Novum Organum; it also, however, strengthened Freud’s respect for the achievements of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, and encouraged forays into new intellectual as well as geographic regions. Moreover, the essay reinforced Freud’s sense of the complexities of authorship by setting Bacon’s world-historic contribution to scientific induction and experiment, clarity and elegance of style, and admirable maxims for the conduct of life, against his less admirable personal traits and political manoeuvrings.
