Historical Characters

It contained, doubtless, other passages more striking in the delivery, but the one which follows is peculiarly pleasing to me – considering the argument it answered and the audience to which it was addressed:

“Much has been said of the motives by which the merchants of England are actuated as to this question. A noble lord, the other night, treated these persons with great and unjust severity, imputing the solicitude which they feel for the success of the South American cause to interested motives. Without indulging in commonplace declamations against party men, I must considerately say that it is a question with me whether the interest of merchants do not more frequently coincide with the best interests of mankind than do the transient and limited views of politicians. If British merchants look with eagerness to the event of the struggle in America, no doubt they do so with the hope of deriving advantage from that event. But on what is such hope founded? On the diffusion of beggary, on the maintenance of ignorance, on the confirmation, on the establishment of tyranny in America? No; these are the expectations of Ferdinand. The British merchant builds his hopes of trade and profit on the progress of civilization and good government; on the successful assertion of freedom – of freedom, that parent of talent, that parent of heroism, that parent of every virtue. The fate of America can only be necessary to commerce as it becomes accessory to the dignity and the happiness of the race of man.”

VI

As a parliamentary orator, Sir James Mackintosh never before or afterwards rose to so great a height as in this debate; but he continued at intervals, and on great and national questions, to deliver what may be called very remarkable essays up to the end of his career. I myself was present at his last effort of this description; and most interesting it was to hear the man who began his public life with the “Vindiciæ Gallicæ,” closing it with a speech in favour of the Reform Bill. During the interval, nearly half a century had run its course. The principles which, forty years before, had appeared amidst the storm and tempest of doubtful discussion, and which, since that period, had been at various times almost totally obscured, were now again on the horizon, bright in the steady sunshine of matured opinion. The distinguished person who was addressing his countrymen on a great historical question was himself a history, – a history of his own time, of which, with the flexibility of an intelligent but somewhat feeble nature, he had shared the enthusiasm, the doubt, the despair, the hope, the triumph.

The speech itself was remarkable. Overflowing with thought and knowledge, containing sound general principles as to government, undisfigured by the violence of party spirit, it pleased and instructed those who took the pains to listen to it attentively; but it wanted the qualities which attract or command attention.

It were vain to seek in Mackintosh for the playful fancy of Canning, the withering invective of Brougham, the deep earnestness of Plunkett. The speaker’s person, moreover, was gaunt and ungainly, his accent Scotch, his voice monotonous, his action (the regular and graceless vibration of two long arms) sometimes vehement without passion, and sometimes almost cringing through good nature and civility. In short, his manner, wanting altogether the quiet concentration of self-possession, was peculiarly opposed to that dignified, simple, and straightforward style of public speaking, which may be characterised as “English.”

Still, it must be remembered that he was then at an advanced age, and deprived, in some degree, of that mental, and yet more of that physical, energy, which at an earlier period might possibly have concealed these defects. I have heard, indeed, that on previous occasions there had been moments when a temporary excitement gave a natural animation to his voice and gestures, and that then the excellence of his arguments was made strikingly manifest by an effective delivery.

His chief reputation in Parliament, nevertheless, is not as an orator, but as a person successfully connected with one of those great movements of opinion which are so long running their course, and which it is the fortune of a man’s life to encounter and be borne up upon when they are near their goal.

VII

Sir Thomas More, in his “Utopia” (1520), says of thieving, that, “as the severity of the remedy is too great, so it is ineffectual.” In Erasmus, Raleigh, Bacon, are to be found almost precisely the same phrases and maxims that a few years ago startled the House of Commons as novelties. “What a lamentable case it is,” observes Sir Edward Coke (1620), “to see so many Christian men and women strangled on that cursed tree of the gallows, the prevention of which consisteth in three things:

‘Good education,

‘Good laws,

‘Rare pardons.’”

Evelyn, in his preface to “State Trials” (1730), observes, “that our legislation is very liberal of the lives of offenders, making no distinction between the most atrocious crimes and those of a less degree.”

“Experience,” says Montesquieu, “shows that in countries remarkable for the lenity of their laws, the spirit of its inhabitants is as much affected by slight penalties as in other countries by severe punishments.”93

This feeling became general amongst reflecting men in the middle and towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Johnson displays it in the “Rambler” (1751). Blackstone expressly declares that “every humane legislator should be extremely cautious of establishing laws which inflict the penalty of death, especially for slight offences.” Mr. Grose, in writing on the Criminal Laws of England (1769), observes: “The sanguinary disposition of our laws, besides being a national reproach, is, as it may appear, an encouragement instead of a terror to delinquents.”

At this time also appeared the pamphlet of “Beccaria” (1767), which was followed by an almost general movement in favour of milder laws throughout Europe. The Duke of Modena (1780) abolished the Inquisition in his states; the King of France, in 1781, the torture; in Russia, capital punishment – never used but in cases of treason – may be said, for all ordinary crimes, to have been done away with.

In England, where every doctrine is sure to find two parties, there was a contest between one set of men who wished our rigorous laws to be still more rigorously executed, and another that considered the rigour of those laws to be the main cause of their inefficiency. A pamphlet, called “Thoughts on Executive Justice,” which produced some sensation at the moment, represented the first class of malcontents, and the author declaimed vehemently against those juries, who acquitted capital offenders because it went against their conscience to take away men’s lives. Sir Samuel Romilly, then a very young man, replied to this pamphlet with its own facts, and contended that the way of insuring the punishment of criminals was to make that punishment more proportionate to their offences.

From this pamphlet dates the modern battle which the great lawyer, whose public career commenced with it, carried subsequently to the floor of the House of Commons.

His exertions, however, were less fortunate than they deserved to be. To him, indeed, we owe, in a great measure, the spreading of truths amongst the many which had previously been confined to the few; but he never enjoyed the substantial triumph of these truths, for the one or two small successes which he obtained are scarcely worth mentioning.

His melancholy death took place in 1819, and Sir James Mackintosh, who had just previously called the attention of Parliament to the barbarous extent to which executions for forgery had been carried, now came forward as the successor of Romilly in the general work of criminal law reformation.

In March, 1819, accordingly, he moved for a committee to inquire into the subject, and obtained, such being the result in a great measure of his own able and temperate manner, a majority of nineteen. Again, in 1822, though opposed by the ministers and law-officers of the Crown, he carried a motion which pledged the House to increase the efficiency by diminishing the rigour of our criminal jurisprudence; and, in 1823, he followed up this triumph by Nine Resolutions, which, had they been adopted, would have taken away the punishment of death in the case of larceny from shops, dwelling-houses, and on navigable rivers, and also in those of forgery, sheep-stealing, and other felonies, made capital by the “Marriage and Black Act;” in short, he proposed that sentences of death should only be pronounced when it was intended to carry them into execution. Mr. Peel, then home secretary, opposed these resolutions, and obtained a majority against them; but he pledged himself at the same time to undertake, on behalf of the government, a plan of law reform, which, although less comprehensive than that which Sir James Mackintosh contended for, was a great measure in itself, and an immense step towards further improvement.

Mackintosh’s success, throughout these efforts, was mainly due to the plain unpretending manner in which he stated his case. “I don’t mean,” he said, “to frame a new criminal code; God forbid I should have such an idle and extravagant pretension. I don’t mean to abolish the punishment of death; I believe that societies and individuals may use it as a legitimate mode of defence. Neither do I mean to usurp on the right of pardon now held by the Crown, which, on the contrary, I wish, practically speaking, to restore. I do not even hope that I shall be able to point out a manner in which the penalty of the law should always be inflicted and never remitted. But I find things in this condition – that the infliction of the law is the exception, and I desire to make it the rule. I find two hundred cases in which capital punishment is awarded by the statute-book, and only twenty-five in which, for seventy years, such punishment has been executed. Why is this? Because the code says one thing, and the moral feeling of your society another. All I desire is that the two should be analogous, and that our laws should award such punishments as our consciences permit us to inflict.”

It was this kind of tone which reassured the House that it was not perilling property by respecting life, and brought about more quickly than less prudent management would have done that reform to which the general spirit of the time was tending, and which must necessarily, a few years sooner or later, have arrived.

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.

The volumes on “English History” brought out in Dr. Lardner’s “Encyclopædia,” the “Life of Sir Thomas More,” which appeared in the same publication, a “Treatise on Ethical Philosophy,” and a commencement of the “History of the Revolution of 1688,” delivered to the world after his death, are these works.

They all exhibit the author’s defects and merits; third-rate in themselves, and yet at various times persuading us that he who wrote them was a first-rate man. Let us take up, for instance, the volumes on “English History.” The narrative is languid, and interrupted by disquisitions: the style is in general prolix, cumbrous, cold, profuse; nevertheless, these volumes are full of thought and knowledge; they contain many curious anecdotes, many scattered observations of profound wisdom, while here and there burst upon us, by surprise it must be confessed, passages which, written under a temporary excitement, display remarkable spirit and power. Such is the description of Becket’s murder:

II

“Provoked by these acts of extraordinary imprudence, Henry is said to have called out before an audience of lords, knights, and gentlemen, ‘To what a miserable state am I reduced, when I cannot be at rest in my own realm, by reason of only one priest; is there no one to deliver me from my troubles?’ Four knights of distinguished rank, William de Tracy, Hugh de Moreville, Richard Briths, and Reginald Fitz-Urse (December 28), interpreted the King’s complaints as commands. They repaired to Canterbury, confirmed in their purpose by finding that Becket had recommenced his excommunications by that of Robert de Broe, and that he had altered his course homeward to avoid the royalist bishops on their way to court, in Normandy; they instantly went to his house, and required him, not very mildly, to withdraw the censures of the prelates, and take the oath to his lord-paramount. He refused. John of Salisbury, his faithful and learned secretary, ventured at this alarming moment to counsel peace. The primate thought that nothing was left to him but a becoming death.

“The knights retired to put on their armour, and there seems to have been sufficient interval either for negotiation or escape. At that moment, indeed, measures were preparing for legal proceedings against him.

“But the visible approach of peril awakened his sense of dignity, and breathed an unusual decorum over his language and deportment. He went through the cloisters into the church, whither he was followed by his enemies, attended by a band of soldiers, whom they had hastily gathered together. They rushed into the church with drawn swords. Tracy cried out, ‘Where is the traitor? Where is the archbishop?’ Becket, who stood before the altar of St. Bennet, answered gravely, ‘Here am I, no traitor, but the archbishop.’ Tracy pulled him by the sleeve, saying: ‘Come hither, thou art a prisoner.’ He pulled back his arm with such force as to make Tracy stagger, and said: ‘What meaneth this, William? I have done thee many pleasures; comest thou with armed men into my church?’ ‘It is not possible that thou shouldst live any longer,’ called out Fitz-Urse. The intrepid primate replied: ‘I am ready to die for my God, in defence of the liberties of the Church.’

“At that moment, either by a relapse into his old disorders, or to show that his non-resistance sprung not from weakness, but from duty, he took hold of Tracy by the habergeon, or gorget, and flung him with such violence as had nearly thrown him to the ground. He then bowed his head, as if he would pray, and uttered his last words: ‘To God and St. Mary I commend my soul, and the cause of the Church!’ Tracy aimed a heavy blow at him, which fell on a bystander. The assassins fell on him with many strokes, and though the second brought him to the ground, they did not cease till his brains were scattered over the pavement.”96

III

The characters of Alfred, of William I., of Henry VII., are superior to any sketches of the same persons with which I am acquainted. The summing up of events into pictures of certain epochs is frequently done with much skill, and I particularly remember a short description of the commencement of the Crusades, concluding with the capture of Jerusalem; – the state of Europe in the thirteenth century, comprising a large portion of history in two pages; and the death of Simon de Montfort, with the establishment of the English Constitution. In a true spirit of historical philosophy, Sir James Mackintosh says:

“The introduction of knights, citizens, and burgesses into the Legislature, by its continuance in circumstances so apparently inauspicious, showed how exactly it suited the necessities and demands of society at that moment. No sooner had events brought forward the measure, than its fitness to the state of the community became apparent. It is often thus that in the clamours of men for a succession of objects, society selects from among them the one that has an affinity with itself, and which most easily combines with its state at the time.”

The condition of Europe, also, just prior to the wars of the Roses, is rapidly, picturesquely, and comprehensively sketched.

“The historian who rests for a little space between the termination of the Plantagenet wars in France and the commencement of the civil wars of the two branches of that family in England, may naturally look around him, reviewing some of the more important events which had passed, and casting his eye onward to the preparations for the mighty changes which were to produce an influence on the character and lot of the human race. A very few particulars only can be selected as specimens from so vast a mass. The foundations of the political system of the European commonwealth were now laid. A glance over the map of Europe, in 1453, will satisfy an observer that the territories of different nations were then fast approaching to the shape and extent which they retain at this day. The English islanders had only one town of the continent remaining in their hands. The Mahometans of Spain were on the eve of being reduced under the Christian authority. Italy had, indeed, lost her liberty, but had yet escaped the ignominy of a foreign yoke. Moscovy was emerging from the long domination of the Tartars. Venice, Hungary, and Poland, three states now placed under foreign masters, guarded the eastern frontier of Christendom against the Ottoman barbarians, whom the absence of foresight, of mutual confidence, and a disregard of general safety and honour, disgraceful to the western governments, had just suffered to master Constantinople and to subjugate the eastern Christians. France had consolidated the greater part of her central and commanding territories. In the transfer of the Netherlands to the house of Austria originated the French jealousy of that power, then rising in South-Eastern Germany. The empire was daily becoming a looser confederacy under a nominal ruler, whose small remains of authority every day continued to lessen. The internal or constitutional history of the European nations threatened, in almost every continental country, the fatal establishment of an absolute monarchy, from which the free and generous spirit of the northern barbarians did not protect their degenerate posterity. In the Netherlands an ancient gentry, and burghers, enriched by traffic, held their still limited princes in check. In Switzerland, the patricians of a few towns, together with the gallant peasantry of the Alpine valleys, escaped a master. But Parliaments and Diets, States-General and Cortes, were gradually disappearing from view, or reduced from august assemblies to insignificant formalities, and Europe seemed on the eve of exhibiting nothing to the disgusted eye but the dead uniformity of imbecile despotism, dissolute courts, and cruelly oppressed nations.

“In the meantime the unobserved advancement and diffusion of knowledge were preparing the way for discoveries, of which the high result will be contemplated only by unborn ages. The mariner’s compass had conducted the Portuguese to distant points on the coast of Africa, and was about to lead them through the unploughed ocean to the famous regions of the East. Civilized men, hitherto cooped up on the shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, now visited the whole of their subject planet and became its undisputed sovereigns. The great adventurer97 was then born, who, with two undecked boats and one frail sloop, containing with difficulty a hundred and twenty persons, dared to stretch across an untraversed ocean, which had hitherto bounded the imaginations as well as the enterprises of men; and who, instead of that India renowned in legend and in story, of which he was in quest, laid open a new world which, under the hands of the European race, was one day to produce governments, laws, manners, modes of civilization and states of society almost as different as its native plants and animals from those of ancient Europe.

“Who could then – who can even now – foresee all the prodigious effects of these discoveries on the fortunes of mankind?”

IV

No one will deny that what I have just quoted might have been written by a great historian; yet no one will say that the work I quote from is a great history.