VIII.
Thus, Sir James Mackintosh not only delivered some remarkable speeches in Parliament, but he connected his name with a great and memorable parliamentary triumph; nor is this all, he was true to his party, opposing the government, though with some internal scruples, in 1820; supporting Mr. Canning in 1827; and going again into opposition, to the Duke of Wellington, in 1828. And yet, notwithstanding the ability usually displayed in his speeches, notwithstanding the result of his efforts in criminal law reform, and, more than all, notwithstanding the constancy during late years of his politics, he held but a third-rate place with the Whigs, and when they came into office in 1830, was only made secretary at that board of which he had been offered the presidency twenty years before. It is easy to say that this was because he had not aristocratical connections. Mr. Poulett Thompson was not more highly connected, and yet, though thirty years his junior, and far his inferior in knowledge and mental capacity, received at the time a higher office, and rose in ten years to the first places and honours of the State. The one had much the higher order of intelligence, the other the more resolute practical character. What you expected from the first, he did not perform; the other went beyond your expectations. For this is to be remarked: a man’s career is formed of the number of little things he is always doing, whereas your opinion of him is frequently derived, as I have already said, from something which, under a particular stimulus, he has done once or twice, and may do now and then.
The fact is that Mackintosh was not fit for the daily toil and struggle of Parliament; he had not the quickness, the energy, the hard and active nature of those who rise by constant exertions in popular assemblies. He did very well to come out like the State steed, on great and solemn occasions, with gorgeous caparison and prancing action, but he did not do as the every-day hack on a plain road. He was, moreover, inclined by his nature rather to repose than to strife; and that which we do by effort we cannot be doing for ever—nor even do frequently well. His reason, which was acute, told him what he should be; but he had not the energy to be it. For instance, on returning to England, he exclaimed: “It is time to be something decided, and I am resolved to exert myself to the utmost in public life, if I have a seat in Parliament, or to condemn myself to profound retirement if the doors of St. Stephen’s are barred to me.”[94]
He had not, however, been many years a member before he accepted a professorship (year 1818) at Haileybury College, because it left him in the House of Commons; and refused the chair of moral philosophy at Edinburgh (1818), because, it would have withdrawn him from it. The great stream of public life thus passed for ever by him; he could neither commit himself to its waves nor yet avoid lingering on its shores. Now and then, in a moment of excitement, he would rush into it, but it was soon again to retire to some sunny reverie, or some shady regret, where he could quietly plot for the future, or mourn over the past, or indulge the scheme of lettered indolence which wooed him at the moment.
Part III.
MERITS AS A WRITER, DEATH, AND ESTIMATE OF GENERAL CAPACITY AND CHARACTER.
History of England.—Articles in “Edinburgh Review.”—Treatise on Ethical Philosophy.—Revolution of 1688.—Bentham’s system of morals and politics.—His own death.—Comparison with Montaigne.
I.
I have said that Sir James Mackintosh allowed himself to be lured from the strife of politics by the love of letters. And what was the species of learned labour on which his intervals of musing leisure were employed? He read at times—this he was always able and willing to do—for the future composition of a great historical work—the “History of England”—which his friends and the public, with a total ignorance of his sort of character and ability, always sighed that he should undertake, and considered that he would worthily accomplish. But while he read for the future composition of this work, he actually wrote but little for it. The little he did write was undertaken at the call of some particular impulse, and capable of being finished before that impulse was passed away. In such writings he followed the bent of his nature, and in them accordingly he best succeeded, as they who refer to his contributions to the “Edinburgh Review”[95] may be well disposed to acknowledge. At last, within a few yards of his grave, he made a start. Life was drawing to a close, the season for action was almost passed, and of all he had mused and read and planned for it, there existed nothing. This thought galled him to a species of exertion, and he is one of the very few men who, at an advanced age, crowded the most considerable and ambitious of their works into the last years of their life.