Our conversation turned one day on the then existing circumstances in
Rome. I compared the religious condition of Rome with that of France;
I reminded Stuart Mill of the phenomenon observed by both of us in
Paris of the _beau monde_ congregating in a church, and added: "In
your Dissertations and Discussions, you have written some words which
you will scarcely now defend. You say: 'So far as the upper ranks
are concerned, France may as properly be called a Buddhistic as a
Catholic country; the latter is not more true than the former.' Would
you still maintain this?" He answered: "It was at that time more true
than now. In our day a new reaction has taken place, the possibility
of which I could not conceive. In my youth I did not believe that man
could retrograde; now I know it." A portion of the blame for this
retrogression he ascribed to the French university philosophy. He spoke
with a deprecation which was not to be wondered at, coming from his
lips, of Cousin and his school. "But in spite of all," he concluded, "I
cling to my old conviction that the history of France in modern times
is the history of all Europe."
This view, which is reflected in all the works of Stuart Mill, is, in
my judgment, a one-sidedness which can easily be accounted for by his
ignorance of the German language and literature, and his undervaluation
of the English situation, in which he, as a matter of course, was well
able to detect the evils. He had visited France when he was very young;
he told me he had passed his fifteenth year there, and had during that
time learned all the French now at his command. As the French language
was the only foreign tongue he spoke fluently and frequently (even
though not without a strong English accent), and as through his whole
life he had exerted himself to introduce French ideas into England,
and to impart to his countrymen a love for the French national spirit,
France necessarily represented to him Europe almost as though he were a
native-born Frenchman.
Among all the Frenchmen whom Mill knew, Armand Carrel was, I believe,
the one whom he held in the highest esteem. The essay he has written
about this young French journalist is perhaps the most beautiful and
the most overflowing with sentiment of anything he has written. In
his great admiration for Armand Carrel, I find a partial explanation
of his vehement antipathy to Sainte-Beuve. He could never forgive
Sainte-Beuve for the fact that he, who had once been a collaborator
of the "National," and a friend of Carrel, had become friendly to
the Empire, and allowed himself to be elected senator. And yet this
isolated fact was scarcely sufficient to warrant the hard words Mill
dropped concerning Sainte-Beuve in my presence. Sainte-Beuve was
distasteful to him for the same reason that Carrel so greatly pleased
him. He had not thoroughly studied him; his "Port Royal," for instance,
he had never read; but a mind with such keenness and such firmly
rooted principles as Mill's, was naturally repelled by the pliant and
undulating temperament of Sainte-Beuve. Stuart Mill was a man of almost
metallic character, rigid, angular, and immovable; the spirit of
Sainte-Beuve, on the contrary, was like a lake, broad, tender, elastic,
and of great circumference, yet moving altogether in little ripples
of an undefined and varying size. Therefore Stuart Mill was, as it
were, created to be an authority; his tone was that of one accustomed
to command, and even when his demeanor was the boldest, he seemed,
through the very conciseness and confidence with which he substantiated
his results, to repulse every contradiction. Sainte-Beuve, on the
contrary, never closed a subject entirely and without reservation;
he was never quite catholic, nor quite romantic, nor quite imperial,
nor quite a naturalist; one thing alone he was absolutely and
entirely--Sainte-Beuve, in other words, the critic with feminine
sympathy and ever-lurking scepticism. He was of the tiger race, yet
was no tiger. He attached himself thoroughly to no one and to nothing,
but he rubbed against everything, and the inevitable friction produced
sparks. Mill's repugnance to him was like the antipathy of the dog for
the cat. It was impossible for Sainte-Beuve to write simply; he could
not pronounce a verdict without making it dependent on a whole system
of subordinate conditions; he could not utter ever so brief a eulogy
without spicing it with all kinds of malice. The greatest critic of
France, after the death of Saint-Beuve, once said to me, "A laudatory
sentence from Saint-Beuve is a veritable nest of leeches." Now, take
in comparison the character of the mind and the whole style of Stuart
Mill; his thoughts always on a grand scale, embracing the universal,
allowing the individual to slip from notice; his diction unadorned,
without artistic finish, naked as a landscape, whose sole beauty is the
simplicity and power of the position of the land.
On one of the last days of my stay in London the conversation with
Stuart Mill turned on the relation between literature and theatre in
England and in France. He expressed the opinion, so common in our day,
that the French who in the seventeenth century appropriated Spanish, in
the eighteenth century English, and in the nineteenth century German
ideas, in reality possess no other literary originality than that
which lay in the form. Stuart Mill, whose mind was pretty much devoid
of a sense of the purely æsthetic, and who cared more for the idea in
art than for art itself as art, apparently did not realize that the
poetic and artistic originality of the French would remain unaffected
even by this undue limitation of its inventive genius; for where form
and contents are inseparable, originality in form is identical with
originality in general. Without permitting myself to touch on this
point of view in my conversation with Mill, I merely replied, that
one characteristic commonly held up as a reproach to the French,
their so-called superficiality, was most highly useful to them when
they imitated, for their imitation is but a semblance. With a strong
tendency to be influenced by everything foreign, the French unite an
almost total lack of capacity to form an objective impression of the
foreign; consequently the national stamp is always plainly recognizable
beneath the thin coating of foreign gloss. By way of example, I
mentioned Victor Hugo, as an imitator of Shakespeare, and Alfred de
Musset, as an imitator of Byron. "However," I added, "I will heartily
admit the superiority of English poetry to the French if you will
reward me by conceding the superiority of French dramatic art over the
English." I had the previous evening attended the performance at the
Adelphi Theatre, of Molière's "Le malade imaginaire," under the title
of "The Robust Invalid," and having very often seen the play in Paris,
I had a fine opportunity to compare the English mode of acting with
the French. The invalid and the servant-girl were allowed all manner
of coarse exaggerations; they bawled aloud in the roughest conceivable
way, even had the audacity to end the second act with a _cancan;_ and
this while English prudery demanded that the scene with the syringe,
and all expressions supposed to violate decency, should be omitted.
"Yes," said Mill, "the theatre with us has fallen into decay. So far
as the comedy is concerned, this may be accounted for by the fact that
English nature is so devoid of form, and so untheatrical, and because
our gestures are so stiff and so rare, while the French, even in their
daily lives, always demean themselves like actors; yet in the direction
of tragedy we can show some great names. Who knows, though, but that in
our day reading may supplant theatre-going and compensate for it?"
He led the conversation from the theatre to English authors, and
discussed with warmth two men as totally different from himself as
Dickens and Carlyle. Thoroughly matter-of-fact as he was himself, he
could appreciate as well as any one the poet with the great, warm
heart, and the historian with the gushing, visionary imagination.
Dickens was at that time just deceased; a few days previous to our
conversation I had stood on the spot in Westminster Abbey where his
body had but recently been laid to rest. His grave was still covered
with living roses, while heavy, cold stone monuments covered the
surrounding graves; it had the effect of a symbol. I communicated
my impression to Mill, who expressed deep regret that he had not
known Dickens personally, and had only learned through others of his
amiability in private intercourse.
The last words we exchanged concerned the directly impending
Franco-German War, to which Mill looked forward with gloomy misgivings.
He considered it a misfortune for all humanity, for the entire European
civilization.
I gazed long into his deep, blue eyes, before I could prevail upon
myself to bid him a final farewell. It was my earnest desire to imprint
upon my mind this so earnest and so stem, yet at the same time so
bold, countenance, with all its youthful freshness. I wished to render
it impossible to me to forget the peculiar greatness stamped on the
man's form and on his every word. It is of considerable importance
in grasping the character of an author to learn in what relation the
impression of his human disposition stands to that of his disposition
as an author. I have never known a great man in whom these two
impressions were so thoroughly harmonious as in Mill. I have never
discovered any quality in him as an author that I have not rediscovered
in my personal intercourse with him, and I have found his different
characteristics in both spheres exalted above and subordinated to one
another in precisely the same order and manner. There are authors in
whose writings some definite quality--for instance, philanthropy, or
wit, or dignity--plays a more prominent rôle than in their lives;
others whose writings display not a trace of those qualities, such as
humor or free humanity, which render them amiable in their private
lives. Most authors are far inferior to their books. In Stuart Mill
no such inequality existed, for he was the very incarnation of
truthfulness. There occurs in Mill's "Autobiography" a situation which
affords an opportunity of measuring the degree of this truthfulness.
I have in mind his position when he, the social reformer, who was so
far removed from all demagogism, at a meeting of electors, comprised
chiefly of the working class, was asked if he had written and made
public the statement that the working classes of England were, as a
rule, liars. He answered at once, and briefly, "I did." "Scarcely," he
adds, "were these two words out of my mouth, when vehement applause
resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident that the working
people were so accustomed to expect equivocation and evasion from those
who sought their suffrages, that when they found, instead of that, a
direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable to them, instead
of being affronted, they concluded at once that this was a person whom
they could trust."
Mill gives the most modest interpretation of the proceeding, but the
reader surmises what a halo of truthfulness must at that moment have
hovered about him whose accusation of pervading falsehood was met with
storms of applause from men spoiled by the flatteries of demagogues.
In daily life, too, Mill bore that invisible nimbus of exalted love of
truth. His whole being radiated with purity of character. It is needful
to look back to the most sublime philosophic characters of antiquity,
to Marcus Aurelius and his peers, if peers he has, to find a parallel
to Mill. He was equally true and equally great, whether he addressed
his maturely considered thought in some renowned work to a circle of
readers spread over the whole globe, or whether, in his own home,
without any assumption of superiority, he dropped an accidental remark
to a chance visitor.
[Illustration: ERNEST RENAN.]