SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.

501

(OCTOBER, 1835.)

Memoirs of the Life of the Right Honourable Sir James Mackintosh. Edited by his Son, ROBERT JAMES MACKINTOSH, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1835.*

THERE cannot be, we think, a more delightful book than this: whether we consider the attraction of the Character it brings so pleasingly before us—or the infinite variety of original thoughts and fine observations with which it abounds. As a mere narrative there is not so much to be said for it. There are but few incidents; and the account which we have of them is neither very luminous nor very complete. If it be true, therefore, that the only legitimate business of biography is with incidents and narrative, it will not be easy to deny that there is something amiss, either in the title or the substance of this work. But we are humbly of opinion that there is no good ground for so severe a limitation.

Biographies, it appears to us, are naturally of three

This was my last considerable contribution to the Edinburgh Review; and, indeed, (with the exception of a slight notice of Mr. Wilberforce's Memoirs,) the only thing I wrote for it, after my advancement to the place I now hold. If there was any impropriety in my so contributing at all, some palliation I hope may be found in the nature of the feelings by which I was led to it, and the tenor of what these feelings prompted me to say. I wrote it solely out of affection to the memory of the friend I had lost; and I think I said nothing which was not dictated by a desire to vindicate and to honour that memory. At all events, if it was an impropriety, it was one for which I cannot now submit to seek the shelter of concealment: And therefore I here reprint the greater part of it: and think I cannot better conclude the present collection, than with this tribute to the merits of one of the most distinguished of my Associates in the work out of which it has been gathered.

A considerable part of the original is omitted in this publication; but consisting almost entirely in citations from the book reviewed, and incidental remarks on these citations.

502

DIFFERENT SORTS OF BIOGRAPHY.

kinds and please or instruct us in at least as many different ways. One sort seeks to interest us by an account of what the individual in question actually did or suffered in his own person: another by an account of what he saw done or suffered by others; and a third by an account of what he himself thought, judged, or imagined for these too, we apprehend, are acts of a rational being—and acts frequently quite as memorable, and as fruitful of consequences, as any others he can either witness or perform.

Different readers will put a different value on each of these sorts of biography. But at all events they will be in no danger of confounding them. The character and position of the individual will generally settle, with sufficient precision, to which class his memoirs should be referred; and no man of common sense will expect to meet in one with the kind of interest which properly belongs to another. To complain that the life of a warrior is but barren in literary speculation, or that of a man of letters in surprising personal adventures, is about as reasonable as it would be to complain that a song is not a sermon, or that there is but little pathos in a treatise on geometry.

The first class, in its higher or public department, should deal chiefly with the lives of leaders in great and momentous transactions - men who, by their force of character, or the advantage of their position, have been enabled to leave their mark on the age and country to which they belonged, and to impress more than one generation with the traces of their transitory existence. Of this kind are many of the lives in Plutarch; and of this kind, still more eminently, should be the lives of such men as Mahomet, Alfred, Washington, Napoleon. There is an inferior and more private department under this head, in which the interest, though less elevated, is often quite as intense, and rests on the same general basis, of sympathy with personal feats and endowments we mean the history of individuals whom the ardour of their temperament, or the caprices of fortune, have involved in strange adventures, or conducted through a

THAT OF MEN OF GENIUS THE BEST.

503

series of extraordinary and complicated perils. The memors of Benvenuto Cellini, or Lord Herbert of Cherbury, are good examples of this romantic sort of biography; and many more might be added, from the chronicles of ancient paladins, or the confessions of modern malefactors.

The second class is chiefly for the compilers of Diaries and journals-autobiographers who, without having themselves done any thing memorable, have yet had the good luck to live through long and interesting periods; and who, in chronicling the events of their own unimportant lives, have incidentally preserved invaluable memorials of contemporary manners and events. The Memoirs of Evelyn and Pepys are the most obvious instances of works which derive their chief value from this source; and which are read, not for any great interest we take in the fortunes of the writers, but for the sake of the anecdotes and notices of far more important personages and transactions with which they so lavishly present us; and there are many others, written with far inferior talent, and where the design is more palpably egotistical, which are perused with an eager curiosity, on the strength of the same recommendation.

The last class is for Philosophers and men of Genius and speculation-men, in short, who were, or ought to have been, Authors; and whose biographies are truly to be regarded either as supplements to the works they have given to the world, or substitutes for those which they might have given. These are histories, not of men, but of Minds; and their value must of course depend on the reach and capacity of the mind they serve to develope, and in the relative magnitude of their contributions to its history. When the individual has already poured himself out in a long series of publications, on which all the moods and aspects of his mind have been engraven (as in the cases of Voltaire or Sir Walter Scott), there may be less occasion for such a biographical supplement. But when an author (as in the case of Gray) has been more chary in his communications with the public, and it is yet possible to recover the

504 BEST MATERIALS, PRIVATE CORRESPONDENCE.

precious, though immature, fruits of his genius or his studies, thoughts, and speculations, which no intelligent posterity would willingly let die, it is due both to his fame and to the best interests of mankind, that they should be preserved, and reverently presented to after times, in such a posthumous portraiture as it is the business of biography to supply.

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The best and most satisfactory memorials of this sort are those which are substantially made up of private letters, journals, or written fragments of any kind, by the party himself; as these, however scanty or imperfect, are at all events genuine Relics of the individual, and generally bearing, even more authentically than his publications, the stamp of his intellectual and personal character. We cannot refer to better examples than the lives of Gray and of Cowper, as these have been finally completed. Next to these, if not upon the same level, we should place such admirable records of particular conversations, and memorable sayings gathered from the lips of the wise, as we find in the inimitable pages of Boswell, a work which, by the general consent of this generation, has not only made us a thousand times better acquainted with Johnson than all his publications put together, but has raised the standard of his intellectual character, and actually made discovery of large provinces in his understanding, of which scarcely an indication was to be found in his writings. In the last and lowest place-in so far, at least, as relates to the proper business of this branch of biography, the enlargement of our knowledge of the genius and character of individuals we must reckon that most common form of the memoirs of literary men, which consists of little more than the biographer's own (generally most partial) description and estimate of his author's merits, or of elucidations and critical summaries of his most remarkable productions. In this division, though in other respects of great value, must be ranked those admirable dissertations which Mr. Stewart has given to the world under the title of the Lives of Reid, Smith, and Robertson, the real interest of which consists almost entirely

GREAT VALUE OF SUCH MATERIALS.

505

in the luminous exposition we there meet with of the leading speculations of those eminent writers, and in the candid and acute investigation of their originality

or truth.

We know it has been said, that after a man has himself given to the public all that he thought worthy of its acceptance, it is not fair for a posthumous biographer to endanger his reputation by bringing forward what he had withheld as unworthy,- -either by exhibiting the mere dregs and refuse of his lucubrations, or by exposing to the general gaze those crude conceptions, or rash and careless opinions, which he may have noted down in the privacy of his study, or thrown out in the confidence of private conversation. And no doubt there may be (as there have been) cases of such abuse. Confidence is in no case to be violated; nor are mere trifles, which bear no mark of the writer's intellect, to be recorded to his prejudice. But wherever there is power and native genius, we cannot but grudge the suppression of the least of its revelations; and are persuaded, that with those who can judge of such intellects, they will never lose any thing by the most lavish and indiscriminate disclosures. Which of Swift's most elaborate productions is at this day half so interesting as that most confidential Journal to Stella? Or which of them, with all its utter carelessness of expression, its manifold contradictions, its infantine fondness, and all its quick-shifting moods, of kindness, selfishness, anger, and ambition, gives us half so strong an impression either of his amiableness or his vigour? How much, in like manner, is Johnson raised in our estimation, not only as to intellect but personal character, by the industrious eavesdroppings of Boswell, setting down, day by day, in his notebook, the fragments of his most loose and unweighed conversations? Or what, in fact, is there so precious in the works, or the histories, of eminent men, from Cicero to Horace Walpole, as collections of their private and familiar letters? What would we not give for such a journal such notes of conversations, or such letters, of Shakspeare, Chaucer, or Spenser? The mere drudges