On July 5th I saw John Stuart Mill for the first time. He had arrived
in Paris the night before, passing through from Avignon, and paid a
visit to me, unannounced, in my room in the Rue Mazarine; he stayed two
hours and won my affections completely. I was a little ashamed to
receive so great a man in so poor a place, but more proud of his
thinking it worth his while to make my acquaintance. None of the French
savants had ever had an opportunity of conversing with him; a few days
before, Renan had lamented to me that he had never seen him. As Mill
had no personal acquaintances in Paris, I was the only person he called
upon.
To talk to him was a new experience. The first characteristic that
struck me was that whereas the French writers were all assertive, he
listened attentively to counter-arguments; it was only when his
attitude in the woman question was broached that he would not brook
contradiction and overwhelmed his adversaries with contempt.
At that time Mill was without any doubt, among Europe's distinguished
men, the greatest admirer of French history and French intellectual
life to be found outside of France; but he was of quite a different
type from the French, even from those I esteemed most highly. The
latter were comprehensive-minded men, bold and weighty, like Taine, or
cold and agile like Renan, but they were men of intellect and thought,
only having no connection with the practical side of life. They were
not adapted to personal action, felt no inclination to direct
interference.
Mill was different. Although he was more of a thinker than any of them,
his boldness was not of the merely theoretic kind. He wished to
interfere and re-model. None of those Frenchmen lacked firmness; if,
from any consideration, they modified their utterances somewhat, their
fundamental views, at any rate, were formed independently; but their
firmness lay in defence, not in attack; they wished neither to rebuke
nor to instigate; their place was the lecturer's platform, rather than
the tribune. Mill's firmness was of another kind, hard as steel; both
in character and expression he was relentless, and he went to work
aggressively. He was armed, not with a cuirass, but a glaive.
Thus in him I met, for the first time in my life, a figure who was the
incarnation of the ideal I had drawn for myself of the great man. This
ideal had two sides; talent and character: great capacities and
inflexibility. The men of great reputation whom I had met hitherto,
artists and scientists, were certainly men richly endowed with talents;
but I had never hitherto encountered a personality combining talents
with gifts of character. Shortly before leaving home, I had concluded
the preface to a collection of criticisms with these words: "My
watchword has been: As flexible as possible, when it is a question of
understanding, as inflexible as possible, when it is a question of
speaking," and I had regarded this watchword as more than the motto of
a little literary criticism. Now I had met a grand inflexibility of
ideas in human form, and was impressed for my whole life long.
Unadapted though I was by nature to practical politics, or in fact to
any activity save that of ideas, I was far from regarding myself as
mere material for a scholar, an entertaining author, a literary
historian, or the like. I thought myself naturally fitted to be a man
of action. But the men of action I had hitherto met had repelled me by
their lack of a leading principle. The so-called practical men at home,
lawyers and parliamentarians, were not men who had made themselves
masters of any fund of new thoughts that they wished to reduce to
practical effect; they were dexterous people, well-informed of
conditions at their elbow, not thinkers, and they only placed an
immediate goal in front of themselves. In Mill I learnt at last to know
a man in whom the power of action, disturbance, and accomplishment were
devoted to the service of modern sociological thought.
He was then sixty-four years old, but his skin was as fresh and clear
as a child's, his deep blue eyes young. He stammered a little, and
nervous twitches frequently shot over his face; but there was a sublime
nobility about him.
To prolong the conversation, I offered to accompany him to the Windsor
Hotel, where he was staying, and we walked the distance. As I really
had intended to go over to England at about that time, Mill proposed my
crossing with him. I refused, being afraid of abusing his kindness, but
was invited to visit him frequently when I was in England, which I did
not fail to do. A few days afterwards I was in London.