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CRITICAL
MISCELLANIES
BY
JOHN MORLEY
VOL. III.
ESSAY 2: THE DEATH OF MR MILL
ESSAY 3: MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
London
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1904
CONTENTS
THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.
Peculiar office of the Teacher 37
Mill's influence in the universities and the press 39
His union of science with aspiration 40
And of courage with patience 42
His abstinence from society 45
Sense of the tendency of society to relapse 46
Peculiar trait of his authority 47
The writer's last day with him 48
MR MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
The spirit of search 53
Key to Mill's type of character and its value 54
Sensibility of his intellect 56
Yet no reaction against his peculiar education 57
Quality of the Autobiography 58
One of its lessons--[Greek: memnêso apistein] 60
Mill's aversion to the spirit of sect 60
Not a hindrance to systematisation 61
Criticism united with belief 63
Practical difficulties in the union of loyalty with tolerance 64
Impressiveness of Mill's self-effacement 65
His contempt for socialistic declamation 68
Yet the social aim paramount in him 69
Illustrated in his attack on Hamilton 71
And in the Logic 72
The book on the Subjection of Women 75
The two crises of life 77
Mill did not escape the second of them 78
Influence of Wordsworth 79
Hope from reformed institutions 79
This hope replaced by efforts in a deeper vein 80
Popular opinion of such efforts 81
Irrational disparagement of Mill's hope 82
Mill's conception of happiness contrasted with his father's 84
Remarks on his withdrawal from society 88
It arose from no moral valetudinarianism 91
THE DEATH OF MR. MILL.
(_May 1873._)
The tragic commonplaces of the grave sound a fuller note as we mourn for
one of the greater among the servants of humanity. A strong and pure
light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent
purpose. One of those high and most worthy spirits who arise from time
to time to stir their generation with new mental impulses in the deeper
things, has perished from among us. The death of one who did so much to
impress on his contemporaries that physical law works independently of
moral law, marks with profounder emphasis the ever ancient and ever
fresh decree that there is one end to the just and the unjust, and that
the same strait tomb awaits alike the poor dead whom nature or
circumstance imprisoned in mean horizons, and those who saw far and felt
passionately and put their reason to noble uses. Yet the fulness of our
grief is softened by a certain greatness and solemnity in the event. The
teachers of men are so few, the gift of intellectual fatherhood is so
rare, it is surrounded by such singular gloriousness. The loss of a
powerful and generous statesman, or of a great master in letters or art,
touches us with many a vivid regret. The Teacher, the man who has
talents and has virtues, and yet has a further something which is
neither talent nor virtue, and which gives him the mysterious secret of
drawing men after him, leaves a deeper sense of emptiness than this; but
lamentation is at once soothed and elevated by a sense of sacredness in
the occasion. Even those whom Mr. Mill honoured with his friendship, and
who must always bear to his memory the affectionate veneration of sons,
may yet feel their pain at the thought that they will see him no more,
raised into a higher mood as they meditate on the loftiness of his task
and the steadfastness and success with which he achieved it. If it is
grievous to think that such richness of culture, such full maturity of
wisdom, such passion for truth and justice, are now by a single stroke
extinguished, at least we may find some not unworthy solace in the
thought of the splendid purpose that they have served in keeping alive,
and surrounding with new attractions, the difficult tradition of patient
and accurate thinking in union with unselfish and magnanimous living.
* * * * *
Much will one day have to be said as to the precise value of Mr. Mill's
philosophical principles, the more or less of his triumphs as a
dialectician, his skill as a critic and an expositor. However this trial
may go, we shall at any rate be sure that with his reputation will
stand or fall the intellectual repute of a whole generation of his
countrymen. The most eminent of those who are now so fast becoming the
front line, as death mows down the veterans, all bear traces of his
influence, whether they are avowed disciples or avowed opponents. If
they did not accept his method of thinking, at least he determined the
questions which they should think about. For twenty years no one at all
open to serious intellectual impressions has left Oxford without having
undergone the influence of Mr. Mill's teaching, though it would be too
much to say that in that gray temple where they are ever burnishing new
idols, his throne is still unshaken. The professorial chairs there and
elsewhere are more and more being filled with men whose minds have been
trained in his principles. The universities only typify his influence on
the less learned part of the world. The better sort of journalists
educated themselves on his books, and even the baser sort acquired a
habit of quoting from them. He is the only writer in the world whose
treatises on highly abstract subjects have been printed during his
lifetime in editions for the people, and sold at the price of railway
novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as
his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own
questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An
eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought him
into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe, said
to the present writer:--'The man who impressed me most of them all was
Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought his
opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they might
fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and then
handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mind
worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with raw
material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product.' Of such a
man England has good reason to be very proud.
He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is
the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in
which, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and
Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of
succession--the school whose method subordinates imagination to
observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in
experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one
of his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his
constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social
speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and
ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by social
arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present
beyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinction
lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of
rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous
hope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that
in his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was
in the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without
recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed
something comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissal
of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:--'I never
received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Turgot;
it is indeed an honour to me that such an assimilation should have
occurred to you.' Those who have studied the character of one whom even
the rigid Austin thought worthy to be called 'the godlike Turgot,' know
both the nobleness and the rarity of this type.
Its force lies not in single elements, but in that combination of an
ardent interest in human improvement with a reasoned attention to the
law of its conditions, which alone deserves to be honoured with the high
name of wisdom. This completeness was one of the secrets of Mr. Mill's
peculiar attraction for young men, and for the comparatively few women
whose intellectual interest was strong enough to draw them to his books.
He satisfied the ingenuous moral ardour which is instinctive in the best
natures, until the dust of daily life dulls or extinguishes it, and at
the same time he satisfied the rationalistic qualities, which are not
less marked in the youthful temperament of those who by and by do the
work of the world. This mixture of intellectual gravity with a
passionate love of improvement in all the aims and instruments of life,
made many intelligences alive who would otherwise have slumbered, or
sunk either into a dry pedantry on the one hand, or a windy, mischievous
philanthropy on the other. He showed himself so wholly free from the
vulgarity of the sage. He could hope for the future without taking his
eye from the realities of the present. He recognised the social
destination of knowledge, and kept the elevation of the great art of
social existence ever before him, as the ultimate end of all speculative
activity.
Another side of this rare combination was his union of courage with
patience, of firm nonconformity with silent conformity. Compliance is
always a question of degree, depending on time, circumstance, and
subject. Mr. Mill hit the exact mean, equally distant from timorous
caution and self-indulgent violence. He was unrivalled in the difficult
art of conciliating as much support as was possible and alienating as
little sympathy as possible, for novel and extremely unpopular opinions.
He was not one of those who strive to spread new faiths by brilliant
swordplay with buttoned foils, and he was not one of those who run amuck
among the idols of the tribe and the market-place and the theatre. He
knew how to kindle the energy of all who were likely to be persuaded by
his reasoning, without stimulating in a corresponding degree the energy
of persons whose convictions he attacked. Thus he husbanded the
strength of truth, and avoided wasteful friction. Probably no English
writer that ever lived has done so much as Mr. Mill to cut at the very
root of the theological spirit, yet there is only one passage in the
writings published during his lifetime--I mean a well-known passage in
the Liberty--which could give any offence to the most devout person. His
conformity, one need hardly say, never went beyond the negative degree,
nor ever passed beyond the conformity of silence. That guilty and
grievously common pusillanimity which leads men to make or act
hypocritical professions, always moved his deepest abhorrence. And he
did not fear publicly to testify his interest in the return of an
atheist to parliament.
His courage was not of the spurious kinds arising from anger, or
ignorance of the peril, or levity, or a reckless confidence. These are
all very easy. His distinction was that he knew all the danger to
himself, was anxious to save pain to others, was buoyed up by no rash
hope that the world was to be permanently bettered at a stroke, and yet
for all this he knew how to present an undaunted front to a majority.
The only fear he ever knew was fear lest a premature or excessive
utterance should harm a good cause. He had measured the prejudices of
men, and his desire to arouse this obstructive force in the least degree
compatible with effective advocacy of any improvement, set the single
limit to his intrepidity. Prejudices were to him like physical
predispositions, with which you have to make your account. He knew,
too, that they are often bound up with the most valuable elements in
character and life, and hence he feared that violent surgery which in
eradicating a false opinion fatally bruises at the same time a true and
wholesome feeling that may cling to it. The patience which with some men
is an instinct, and with others a fair name for indifference, was with
him an acquisition of reason and conscience.
The value of this wise and virtuous mixture of boldness with tolerance,
of courageous speech with courageous reserve, has been enormous. Along
with his direct pleas for freedom of thought and freedom of speech, it
has been the chief source of that liberty of expressing unpopular
opinions in this country without social persecution, which is now so
nearly complete, that he himself was at last astonished by it. The
manner of his dialectic, firm and vigorous as the dialectic was in
matter, has gradually introduced mitigating elements into the atmosphere
of opinion. Partly, no doubt, the singular tolerance of free discussion
which now prevails in England--I do not mean that it is at all
perfect--arises from the prevalent scepticism, from indifference, and
from the influence of some of the more high-minded of the clergy. But
Mr. Mill's steadfast abstinence from drawing wholesale indictments
against persons or classes whose opinions he controverted, his generous
candour, his scrupulous respect for any germ of good in whatever company
it was found, and his large allowances, contributed positive elements to
what might otherwise have been the negative tolerance that comes of
moral stagnation. Tolerance of distasteful notions in others became
associated in his person at once with the widest enlightenment, and the
strongest conviction of the truth of our own notions.
* * * * *
His career, beside all else, was a protest of the simplest and loftiest
kind against some of the most degrading features of our society. No one
is more alive than he was to the worth of all that adds grace and
dignity to human life; but the sincerity of this feeling filled him with
aversion for the make-believe dignity of a luxurious and artificial
community. Without either arrogance or bitterness, he stood aloof from
that conventional intercourse which is misnamed social duty. Without
either discourtesy or cynicism, he refused to play a part in that dance
of mimes which passes for life among the upper classes. In him, to
extraordinary intellectual attainments was added the gift of a firm and
steadfast self-respect, which unfortunately does not always go with
them. He felt the reality of things, and it was easier for a workman
than for a princess to obtain access to him. It is not always the men
who talk most affectingly about our being all of one flesh and blood,
who are proof against those mysterious charms of superior rank, which do
so much to foster unworthy conceptions of life in English society; and
there are many people capable of accepting Mr. Mill's social
principles, and the theoretical corollaries they contain, who yet would
condemn his manly plainness and austere consistency in acting on them.
The too common tendency in us all to moral slovenliness, and a lazy
contentment with a little flaccid protest against evil, finds a constant
rebuke in his career. The indomitable passion for justice which made him
strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public
official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one of
the stoutest patriots in our seventeenth-century history. The same moral
thoroughness stirred the same indignation in him on a more recent
occasion, when he declared it 'a permanent disgrace to the Government
that the iniquitous sentence on the gas-stokers was not remitted as soon
as passed.'
* * * * *
Much of his most striking quality was owing to the exceptional degree in
which he was alive to the constant tendency of society to lose some
excellence of aim, to relapse at some point from the standard of truth
and right which had been reached by long previous effort, to fall back
in height of moral ideal. He was keenly sensible that it is only by
persistent striving after improvement in our conceptions of duty, and
improvement in the external means for realising them, that even the
acquisitions of past generations are retained. He knew the intense
difficulty of making life better by ever so little. Hence at once the
exaltation of his own ideas of truth and right, and his eagerness to
conciliate anything like virtuous social feeling, in whatever
intellectual or political association he found it. Hence also the
vehemence of his passion for the unfettered and unchecked development of
new ideas on all subjects, of originality in moral and social points of
view; because repression, whether by public opinion or in any other way,
may be the means of untold waste of gifts that might have conferred on
mankind unspeakable benefits. The discipline and vigour of his
understanding made him the least indulgent of judges to anything like
charlatanry, and effectually prevented his unwillingness to let the
smallest good element be lost, from degenerating into that weak kind of
universalism which nullifies some otherwise good men.
* * * * *
Some great men seize upon us by the force of an imposing and majestic
authority; their thoughts impress the imagination, their words are
winged, they are as prophets bearing high testimony that cannot be
gainsaid. Bossuet, for instance, or Pascal. Others, and of these Mr.
Mill was one, acquire disciples not by a commanding authority, but by a
moderate and impersonal kind of persuasion. He appeals not to our sense
of greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble, but to our love of
finding and embracing truth for ourselves, which is still nobler. People
who like their teacher to be as a king publishing decrees with herald
and trumpet, perhaps find Mr. Mill colourless. Yet this habitual
effacement of his own personality marked a delicate and very rare shade
in his reverence for the sacred purity of truth.
* * * * *
Meditation on the influence of one who has been the foremost instructor
of his time in wisdom and goodness quickly breaks off, in this hour when
his loss is fresh upon us; it changes into affectionate reminiscences
for which silence is more fitting. In such an hour thought turns rather
to the person than the work of the master whom we mourn. We recall his
simplicity, gentleness, heroic self-abnegation; his generosity in
encouraging, his eager readiness in helping; the warm kindliness of his
accost, the friendly brightening of the eye. The last time I saw him was
a few days before he left England.[1] He came to spend a day with me in
the country, of which the following brief notes happened to be written
at the time in a letter to a friend:--
'He came down by the morning train to Guildford station, where I
was waiting for him. He was in his most even and mellow humour. We
walked in a leisurely way and through roundabout tracks for some
four hours along the ancient green road which you know, over the
high grassy downs, into old chalk pits picturesque with juniper and
yew, across heaths and commons, and so up to our windy promontory,
where the majestic prospect stirred him with lively delight. You
know he is a fervent botanist, and every ten minutes he stooped to
look at this or that on the path. Unluckily I am ignorant of the
very rudiments of the matter, so his parenthetic enthusiasms were
lost upon me.
[Footnote 1: April 5, 1873.]
'Of course he talked, and talked well. He admitted that Goethe had added
new points of view to life, but has a deep dislike of his moral
character; wondered how a man who could draw the sorrows of a deserted
woman like Aurelia, in _Wilhelm Meister_, should yet have behaved so
systematically ill to women. Goethe tried as hard as he could to be a
Greek, yet his failure to produce anything perfect in form, except a few
lyrics, proves the irresistible expansion of the modern spirit, and the
inadequateness of the Greek type to modern needs of activity and
expression. Greatly prefers Schiller in all respects; turning to him
from Goethe is like going into the fresh air from a hothouse.
'Spoke of style: thinks Goldsmith unsurpassed; then Addison comes.
Greatly dislikes the style of Junius and of Gibbon; indeed, thinks
meanly of the latter in all respects, except for his research, which
alone of the work of that century stands the test of nineteenth-century
criticism. Did not agree with me that George Sand's is the high-water
mark of prose, but yet could not name anybody higher, and admitted that
her prose stirs you like music.
'Seemed disposed to think that the most feasible solution of the Irish
University question is a Catholic University, the restrictive and
obscurantist tendencies of which you may expect to have cheeked by the
active competition of life with men trained in more enlightened systems.
Spoke of Home Rule.
'Made remarks on the difference in the feeling of modern refusers of
Christianity as compared with that of men like his father, impassioned
deniers, who believed that if only you broke up the power of the priests
and checked superstition, all would go well--a dream from which they
were partially awakened by seeing that the French revolution, which
overthrew the Church, still did not bring the millennium. His radical
friends used to be very angry with him for loving Wordsworth.
"Wordsworth," I used to say, "is against you, no doubt, in the battle
which you are now waging, but after you have won, the world will need
more than ever those qualities which Wordsworth is keeping alive and
nourishing." In his youth mere negation of religion was a firm bond of
union, social and otherwise, between men who agreed in nothing else.
'Spoke of the modern tendency to pure theism, and met the objection that
it retards improvement by turning the minds of some of the best men from
social affairs, by the counter-proposition that it is useful to society,
apart from the question of its truth,--useful as a provisional belief,
because people will identify serviceable ministry to men with service of
God. Thinks we cannot with any sort of precision define the coming
modification of religion, but anticipates that it will undoubtedly rest
upon the solidarity of mankind, as Comte said, and as you and I believe.
Perceives two things, at any rate, which are likely to lead men to
invest this with the moral authority of a religion; first, they will
become more and more impressed by the awful fact that a piece of conduct
to-day may prove a curse to men and women scores and even hundreds of
years after the author of it is dead; and second, they will more and
more feel that they can only satisfy their sentiment of gratitude to
seen or unseen benefactors, can only repay the untold benefits they have
inherited, by diligently maintaining the traditions of service.
'And so forth, full of interest and suggestiveness all through. When he
got here, he chatted to R---- over our lunch, with something of the
simple amiableness of a child, about the wild flowers, the ways of
insects, and notes of birds. He was impatient for the song of the
nightingale. Then I drove him to our little roadside station, and one of
the most delightful days of my life came to its end, like all other
days, delightful and sorrowful.'
Alas, the sorrowful day which ever dogs our delight followed very
quickly. The nightingale that he longed for fills the darkness with
music, but not for the ear of the dead master: he rests in the deeper
darkness where the silence is unbroken for ever. We may console
ourselves with the reflection offered by the dying Socrates to his
sorrowful companions: he who has arrayed the soul in her own proper
jewels of moderation and justice and courage and nobleness and truth, is
ever ready for the journey when his time comes. We have lost a great
teacher and example of knowledge and virtue, but men will long feel the
presence of his character about them, making them ashamed of what is
indolent or selfish, and encouraging them to all disinterested labour,
both in trying to do good and in trying to find out what the good
is,--which is harder.
MR. MILL'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
_Chercher en gémissant_--search with many sighs--that was Pascal's
notion of praiseworthy living and choosing the better part. Search, and
search with much travail, strikes us as the chief intellectual ensign
and device of that eminent man whose record of his own mental nurture
and growth we have all been reading. Everybody endowed with energetic
intelligence has a measure of the spirit of search poured out upon him.
All such persons act on the Socratic maxim that the life without inquiry
is a life to be lived by no man. But it is the rare distinction of a
very few to accept the maxim in its full significance, to insist on an
open mind as the true secret of wisdom, to press the examination and
testing of our convictions as the true way at once to stability and
growth of character, and thus to make of life what it is so good for us
that it should be, a continual building up, a ceaseless fortifying and
enlargement and multiplication of the treasures of the spirit. To make a
point of 'examining what was said in defence of all opinions, however
new or however old, in the conviction that even if they were errors
there might be a substratum of truth underneath them, and that in any
case the discovery of what it was that made them plausible would be a
benefit to truth,'[2]--to thrust out the spirit of party, of sect, of
creed, of the poorer sort of self-esteem, of futile contentiousness, and
so to seek and again seek with undeviating singleness of mind the right
interpretation of our experiences--here is the genuine seal of
intellectual mastery and the true stamp of a perfect rationality.
[Footnote 2: Mill's _Autobiography_, 242.]
The men to whom this is the ideal of the life of the reason, and who
have done anything considerable towards spreading a desire after it,
deserve to have their memories gratefully cherished even by those who do
not agree with all their positive opinions. We need only to reflect a
little on the conditions of human existence; on the urgent demand which
material necessities inevitably make on so immense a proportion of our
time and thought; on the space which is naturally filled up by the
activity of absorbing affections; on the fatal power of mere tradition
and report over the indifferent, and the fatal power of inveterate
prejudice over so many even of the best of those who are not
indifferent. Then we shall know better how to value such a type of
character and life as Mr. Mill has now told us the story of, in which
intellectual impressionableness on the most important subjects of human
thought was so cultivated as almost to acquire the strength and quick
responsiveness of emotional sensibility. And this, without the too
common drawback to great openness of mind. This drawback consists in
loose beliefs, taken up to-day and silently dropped to-morrow;
vacillating opinions, constantly being exchanged for their contraries;
feeble convictions, appearing, shifting, vanishing, in the quicksands of
an unstable mind.
Nobody will impute any of these disastrous weaknesses to Mr. Mill. His
impressionableness was of the valuable positive kind, which adds and
assimilates new elements from many quarters, without disturbing the
organic structure of the whole. What he says of one stage in his growth
remained generally true of him until the very end:--'I found the fabric
of my old and taught opinions giving way in many fresh places, and I
never allowed it to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in
weaving it anew. I never in the course of my transition was content to
remain, for ever so short a time, confused and unsettled. When I had
taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its
relations to my old opinions, and ascertained exactly how far its effect
ought to extend in modifying or superseding them' (p. 156). This careful
and conscientious recognition of the duty of having ordered opinions,
and of responsibility for these opinions being both as true and as
consistent with one another as taking pains with his mind could make
them, distinguished Mr. Mill from the men who flit aimlessly from
doctrine to doctrine, as the flies of a summer day dart from point to
point in the vacuous air. It distinguished him also from those
sensitive spirits who fling themselves down from the heights of
rationalism suddenly into the pit of an infallible church; and from
those who, like La Mennais, move violently between faith and reason,
between tradition and inquiry, between the fulness of deference to
authority and the fulness of individual self-assertion.
All minds of the first quality move and grow; they have a susceptibility
to many sorts of new impressions, a mobility, a feeling outwards, which
makes it impossible for them to remain in the stern fixity of an early
implanted set of dogmas, whether philosophic or religious. In stoical
tenacity of character, as well as in intellectual originality and
concentrated force of understanding, some of those who knew both tell us
that Mr. Mill was inferior to his father. But who does not feel in the
son the serious charm of a power of adaptation and pliableness which we
can never associate with the hardy and more rigorous nature of the
other? And it was just because he had this sensibility of the intellect,
that the history of what it did for him is so edifying a performance for
a people like ourselves, among whom that quality is so extremely
uncommon. For it was the sensibility of strength and not of weakness,
nor of mere over-refinement and subtlety. We may estimate the
significance of such a difference, when we think how little, after all,
the singular gifts of a Newman or a Maurice have done for their
contemporaries, simply because these two eminent men allowed
consciousness of their own weakness to 'sickly over' the spontaneous
impulses of their strength.
The wonder is that the reaction against such an education as that
through which James Mill brought his son,--an education so intense, so
purely analytical, doing so much for the reason and so little for the
satisfaction of the affections,--was not of the most violent kind. The
wonder is that the crisis through which nearly every youth of good
quality has to pass, and from which Mr. Mill, as he has told us, by no
means escaped, did not land him in some of the extreme forms of
transcendentalism. If it had done so the record of the journey would no
doubt have been more abundant in melodramatic incidents. It would have
done more to tickle the fancy of 'the present age of loud disputes but
weak convictions.' And it might have been found more touching by the
large numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that a history of
a careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to have
all the rapid movements and unexpected turns of a romance, and that a
book without rapture and effusion and a great many capital letters must
be joyless and disappointing. Those of us who dislike literary hysteria
as much as we dislike the coarseness that mistakes itself for force, may
well be glad to follow the mental history of a man who knew how to move
and grow without any of these reactions and leaps on the one hand, or
any of that overdone realism on the other, which may all make a more
striking picture, but which do assuredly more often than not mark the
ruin of a mind and the nullification of a career.
If we are now and then conscious in the book of a certain want of
spacing, of changing perspectives and long vistas; if we have perhaps a
sense of being too narrowly enclosed; if we miss the relish of humour or
the occasional relief of irony; we ought to remember that we are busy
not with a work of imagination or art, but with the practical record of
the formation of an eminent thinker's mental habits and the succession
of his mental attitudes. The formation of such mental habits is not a
romance, but the most arduous of real concerns. If we are led up to none
of the enkindled summits of the soul, and plunged into none of its
abysses, that is no reason why we should fail to be struck by the pale
flame of strenuous self-possession, or touched by the ingenuousness and
simplicity of the speaker's accents. A generation continually excited by
narratives, as sterile as vehement, of storm and stress and spiritual
shipwreck, might do well, if it knew the things that pertained to its
peace, to ponder this unvarnished history--the history of a man who,
though he was not one of the picturesque victims of the wasteful
torments of an uneasy spiritual self-consciousness, yet laboured so
patiently after the gifts of intellectual strength, and did so much
permanently to widen the judgments of the world.
If Mr. Mill's Autobiography has no literary grandeur, nor artistic
variety, it has the rarer merit of presenting for our contemplation a
character that was infested by none of the smaller passions, and warped
by none of the more unintelligent attitudes of the human mind. We have
to remember that it is exactly these, the smaller passions on the one
hand, and slovenliness of intelligence on the other, which are even
worse agencies in spoiling the worth of life and the advance of society
than the more imposing vices either of thought or sentiment. Many have
told the tale of a life of much external eventfulness. There is a rarer
instructiveness in the quiet career of one whose life was an incessant
education, a persistent strengthening of the mental habit of 'never
accepting half-solutions of difficulties as complete; never abandoning a
puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up;
never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored,
because they did not appear important; never thinking that I perfectly
understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole' (p. 123).
It is true that this mental habit is not so singular in itself, for it
is the common and indispensable merit of every truly scientific thinker.
Mr. Mill's distinction lay in the deliberate intention and the
systematic patience with which he brought it to the consideration of
moral and religious and social subjects. In this region hitherto, for
reasons that are not difficult to seek, the empire of prejudice and
passion has been so much stronger, so much harder to resist, than in the
field of physical science.
Sect is so ready to succeed sect, and school comes after school, with
constant replacement of one sort of orthodoxy by another sort, until
even the principle of relativity becomes the base of a set of absolute
and final dogmas, and the very doctrine of uncertainty itself becomes
fixed in a kind of authoritative nihilism. It is, therefore, a signal
gain that we now have a new type, with the old wise device, [Greek:
memnêso apistein]--_be sure that you distrust_. Distrust your own bias;
distrust your supposed knowledge; constantly try, prove, fortify your
firmest convictions. And all this, throughout the whole domain where the
intelligence rules. It was characteristic of a man of this type that he
should have been seized by that memorable passage in Condorcet's Life of
Turgot to which Mr. Mill refers (p. 114), and which every man with an
active interest in serious affairs should bind about his neck and write
on the tablets of his heart.
'Turgot,' says his wise biographer, 'always looked upon anything like a
sect as mischievous.... From the moment that a sect comes into
existence, all the individuals composing it become answerable for the
faults and errors of each one of them. The obligation to remain united
leads them to suppress or dissemble all truths that might wound anybody
whose adhesion is useful to the sect. They are forced to establish in
some form a body of doctrine, and the opinions which make a part of it,
being adopted without inquiry, become in due time pure prejudices.
Friendship stops with the individuals; but the hatred and envy that any
of them may arouse extends to the whole sect. If this sect be formed by
the most enlightened men of the nation, if the defence of truths of the
greatest importance to the common happiness be the object of its zeal,
the mischief is still worse. Everything true or useful which they
propose is rejected without examination. Abuses and errors of every kind
always have for their defenders that herd of presumptuous and mediocre
mortals, who are the bitterest enemies of all celebrity and renown.
Scarcely is a truth made clear, before those to whom it would be
prejudicial crush it under the name of a sect that is sure to have
already become odious, and are certain to keep it from obtaining so much
as a hearing. Turgot, then, was persuaded that perhaps the greatest ill
you can do to truth is to drive those who love it to form themselves
into a sect, and that these in turn can commit no more fatal mistake
than to have the vanity or the weakness to fall into the trap.'
Yet we know that with Mr. Mill as with Turgot this deep distrust of sect
was no hindrance to the most careful systematisation of opinion and
conduct. He did not interpret many-sidedness in the flaccid watery sense
which flatters the indolence of so many of our contemporaries, who like
to have their ears amused with a new doctrine each morning, to be held
for a day, and dropped in the evening, and who have little more
seriousness in their intellectual life than the busy insects of a summer
noon. He says that he looked forward 'to a future which shall unite the
best qualities of the critical with the best qualities of the organic
periods; unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual
action in all modes not hurtful to others; but also convictions as to
what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the
feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so
firmly grounded in reason and the true exigencies of life, that they
shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, and
political, require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others'
(p. 166). This was in some sort the type at which he aimed in the
formation of his own character--a type that should combine organic with
critical quality, the strength of an ordered set of convictions, with
that pliability and that receptiveness in face of new truth, which are
indispensable to these very convictions being held intelligently and in
their best attainable form. We can understand the force of the eulogy on
John Austin (p. 154), that he manifested 'an equal devotion to the two
cardinal points of Liberty and Duty.' These are the correlatives in the
sphere of action to the two cardinal points of Criticism and Belief in
the sphere of thought.
We can in the light of this double way of viewing the right balance of
the mind, the better understand the combination of earnestness with
tolerance which inconsiderate persons are apt to find so awkward a
stumbling-block in the scheme of philosophic liberalism. Many people in
our time have so ill understood the doctrine of liberty, that in some of
the most active circles in society they now count you a bigot if you
hold any proposition to be decidedly and unmistakably more true than any
other. They pronounce you intemperate if you show anger and stern
disappointment because men follow the wrong course instead of the right
one. Mr. Mill's explanation of the vehemence and decision of his
father's disapproval, when he did disapprove, and his refusal to allow
honesty of purpose in the doer to soften his disapprobation of the deed,
gives the reader a worthy and masculine notion of true tolerance. James
Mill's 'aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded as
such, partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling....
None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with
intolerance. Those, who having opinions which they hold to be immensely
important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any
deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class
and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right, and
right what they think wrong: though they need not be, nor was my father,
insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their
estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the
whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no more
infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of
opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither himself does
them any ill office, nor connives at its being done by others, he is not
intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense
of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is the
only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order of
minds, possible' (p. 51). This is another side of the co-ordination of
Criticism and Belief, of Liberty and Duty, which attained in Mr. Mill
himself a completeness that other men, less favoured in education and
with less active power of self-control, are not likely to reach, but to
reach it ought to be one of the prime objects of their mental
discipline. The inculcation of this peculiar morality of the
intelligence is one of the most urgently needed processes of our time.
For the circumstance of our being in the very depths of a period of
transition from one spiritual basis of thought to another, leads men not
only to be content with holding a quantity of vague, confused, and
contradictory opinions, but also to invest with the honourable name of
candour a weak reluctance to hold any one of them earnestly.
Mr. Mill experienced in the four or five last years of his life the
disadvantage of trying to unite fairness towards the opinions from which
he differed, with loyalty to the positive opinions which he accepted.
'As I had showed in my political writings,' he says, 'that I was aware
of the weak points in democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems,
had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as I
was able to see the Conservative side of the question, they presumed
that like them I could not see any other side. Yet if they had really
read my writings, they would have known that after giving full weight to
all that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments against
democracy, I unhesitatingly decided in its favour, while recommending
that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent
with its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences' (p.
309). This was only one illustration of what constantly happened, until
at length, it is hardly too much to say, a man who had hitherto enjoyed
a singular measure of general reverence because he was supposed to see
truth in every doctrine, became downright unpopular among many classes
in the community, because he saw more truth in one doctrine than
another, and brought the propositions for whose acceptance he was most
in earnest eagerly before the public.
In a similar way the Autobiography shows us the picture of a man uniting
profound self-respect with a singular neutrality where his own claims
are concerned, a singular self-mastery and justice of mind, in matters
where with most men the sense of their own personality is wont to be so
exacting and so easily irritated. The history of intellectual eminence
is too often a history of immoderate egoism. It has perhaps hardly ever
been given to any one who exerted such influence as Mr. Mill did over
his contemporaries, to view his own share in it with such discrimination
and equity as marks every page of his book, and as used to mark every
word of his conversation. Knowing as we all do the last infirmity of
even noble minds, and how deep the desire to erect himself Pope and Sir
Oracle lies in the spirit of a man with strong convictions, we may value
the more highly, as well for its rarity as for its intrinsic worth, Mr.
Mill's quality of self-effacement, and his steadfast care to look
anywhere rather than in his own personal merits, for the source of any
of those excellences which he was never led by false modesty to
dissemble.
Many people seem to find the most interesting figure in the book that
stoical father, whose austere, energetic, imperious, and relentless
character showed the temperament of the Scotch Covenanter of the
seventeenth century, inspired by the principles and philosophy of France
in the eighteenth. No doubt, for those in search of strong dramatic
effects, the lines of this strenuous indomitable nature are full of
impressiveness.[3] But one ought to be able to appreciate the
distinction and strength of the father, and yet also be able to see that
the distinction of the son's strength was in truth more really
impressive still. We encounter a modesty that almost speaks the language
of fatalism. Pieces of good fortune that most people would assuredly
have either explained as due to their own penetration, or to the
recognition of their worth by others, or else would have refrained from
dwelling upon, as being no more than events of secondary importance, are
by Mr. Mill invariably recognised at their full worth or even above it,
and invariably spoken of as fortunate accidents, happy turns in the
lottery of life, or in some other quiet fatalistic phrase, expressive of
his deep feeling how much we owe to influences over which we have no
control and for which we have no right to take any credit. His saying
that 'it would be a blessing if the doctrine of necessity could be
believed by all _quoad_ the characters of others, and disbelieved in
regard to their own' (p. 169), went even further than that, for he
teaches us to accept the doctrine of necessity _quoad_ the most marked
felicities of life and character, and to lean lightly or not at all
upon it in regard to our demerits. Humility is a rationalistic, no less
than a Christian grace--not humility in face of error or arrogant
pretensions or selfishness, nor a humility that paralyses energetic
effort, but a steadfast consciousness of all the good gifts which our
forerunners have made ready for us, and of the weight of our
responsibility for transmitting these helpful forces to a new
generation, not diminished but augmented.
[Footnote 3: In an interesting volume (_The Minor Works of George
Grote_, edited by Alexander Bain. London: Murray), we find Grote
confirming Mr. Mill's estimate of his father's psychagogic quality. 'His
unpremeditated oral exposition,' says Grote of James Mill, 'was hardly
less effective than his prepared work with the pen; his colloquial
fertility in philosophical subjects, his power of discussing himself,
and stimulating others to discuss, his ready responsive inspirations
through all the shifts and windings of a sort of Platonic dialogue,--all
these accomplishments were to those who knew him, even more impressive
than what he composed for the press. Conversation with him was not
merely instructive, but provocative to the observant intelligence. Of
all persons whom we have known, Mr. James Mill was the one who stood
least remote from the lofty Platonic ideal of Dialectic--[Greek: tou
didonai kai dechesthai logon] (the giving and receiving of
reasons)--competent alike to examine others or to be examined by them in
philosophy. When to this we add a strenuous character, earnest
convictions, and single-minded devotion to truth, with an utter disdain
of mere paradox, it may be conceived that such a man exercised powerful
intellectual ascendancy over youthful minds,' etc.--_Minor Works of
George Grote_, p. 284.]
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