habits--all seemed to mark out Mr. Mill as a man destined to close his
career, as he had so long conducted it--in almost absolute seclusion. He
is a silent, shy, shrinking man, of feeble frame and lonely ways. Until
the general election of three years back, Mr. Mill was to his countrymen
but as an oracle--as a voice--almost as a myth. The influence of his
writings was immense. Personally he was but a name. He never came into
any public place; he knew nobody. When the promoters of the movement to
return him to Parliament came to canvass the Westminster electors, the
great difficulty they had to contend with was, that three out of every
four of the honest traders and shopkeepers had never heard of him; and
the few who knew anything of his books had a vague impression that the
author was dead years before. The very men who formed the executive of
his committee could not say that they knew him, even by sight. Half in
jest, half for a serious purpose, some of the Tories sent abroad over
Westminster an awful report that there was no such man in existence as
John Stuart Mill. "Did you ever see him?" was the bewildering question
constantly put to this or that earnest canvasser, and invariably
answered with an apologetic negative. I believe the services of my
friend Dr. Chapman, editor of the "Westminster Review," were brought
into pressing requisition, because he was one of the very few who really
could boast a personal acquaintance with Stuart Mill. The day when the
latter first entered the House of Commons was the first time he and
Bright ever saw each other. I believe Cobden and Mill never met. Mill
had no university acquaintances--he had never been to any university. He
had no school friends--he had never been to a school. Perhaps the best
educated man of his time in England, he owes his education to the
personal care and teaching of his distinguished father, James Mill, who
would have been illustrious if his son had not overshadowed his fame.
Assuredly, to know James Mill intimately was, if I may thus apply Leigh
Hunt's saying, in itself a liberal education. Following his father's
steps at the India House, John Mill worked there methodically and
quietly, until he rose to the highest position his father had occupied;
and then he resigned his office, declined an offer of a seat at the
Indian Council Board, subsequently made by Lord Stanley, and lapsed
wholly into private life. Of late he rarely met even his close and
early friends. Some estrangement, not necessary to dwell on, had taken
place, I believe, between him and his old friend Thomas Carlyle, and I
suppose they ceased to meet. After the death of the wife whom he so
loved and revered, Mill lived almost always at Avignon, in the south of
France, where she died, and where he raised a monument over her remains,
which he visits and tends with a romantic devotion and constancy worthy
of a Roland.
Only a profound sense of duty could drag such a man from his scholarly
and sacred seclusion into the stress and storm of a parliamentary life.
But it was urged upon Mill that he could do good to the popular cause by
going into Parliament; and he is not a man to think anything of his
personal preference in such a case. He accepted the contest and won.
Some of his warmest admirers regretted that he had ever given his
consent. They feared not so much that he might damage his reputation as
that he might weaken the influence of his authority, and with it the
strength of every great popular cause. Certainly those who thought thus,
and who met Mr. Mill for the first time during the progress of the
Westminster contest, did not feel much inclined to take a more
encouraging view of the prospect.
Mr. Mill seems cut out by nature not to be a parliamentary success. He
has a thin, fragile, awkward frame; he has a nervous, incessant
twitching of the lips and eyes; he has a weak voice and a sort of
stammer; he is over sixty years of age; he had never, so far as I know,
addressed a political meeting of any kind up to the time of the
Westminster contest. Yet with all these disadvantages, Mill has, as a
political leader and speaker, been an undoubted success with the
country, and a sort of success in the House. An orator of any kind he
never could be. One might call him a wretchedly bad speaker, if his
speaking were not so utterly unlike anybody else's, as to refuse to be
classified with any other speaking, good or bad. But, so far as the best
selection of words, the clearest style, the most coherent and convincing
argument can constitute eloquence, Mill's speeches are eloquent. They
are, of course, only spoken essays. They differ in no wise from the
speaker's writings; and I need hardly say that a speech, to be
effective, must never be just what the speaker would have written if it
were to be consigned at once to print as a letter or an essay. As
speeches, therefore, Mr. Mill's utterances in the House have little or
no effect. Indeed, they are only listened to by a very few men of real
intelligence and judgment on both sides. Some of the more boisterous of
the Tories made many attempts to cough and laugh Mill into silence;
indeed, there was obviously a deliberate plan of this kind in operation
at one time. But Mill is a man whom nothing can deter from saying or
doing what he thinks right. A more absolutely fearless being does not
exist. He is even free from that fear which has sometimes paralyzed the
boldest spirits, the fear of becoming ridiculous. So the Tory trick
failed. Mill went on with patient, imperturbable, proud good-humor,
despite all interruption--now and then paying off his Tory enemies by
some keen contemptuous epigram or sarcasm, made all the more pungent by
the thin, bland tone in which it was uttered. So the Tories gave up
shouting, groaning and laughing; the more quickly because one at least
of their chiefs, the Marquis of Salisbury (then in the House of Commons
as Lord Cranbourne) had the spirit and sense to express openly and
loudly his anger and disgust at the vulgar and brutal behaviour of some
of his followers. Therefore Mr. Mill ceased to be interrupted; but he is
not much listened to. That supreme, irrefutable evidence that a man
fails to interest the House--the fact that a hum and buzz of
conversation may be heard all the time he is speaking--is always fatally
manifest when Mr. Mill addresses the Commons. But the House, after all,
is only a platform from which a man endeavors to speak to the country,
and if Mill does not always get the ear of the House, he never fails to
be heard by the nation. I have no doubt that even the Tory members of
the House read Mill's speeches when they appear in print; assuredly all
intelligent Tories do. These speeches, in any case, are never lost on
the country. They form at once a part of the really successful
literature of each session. They always excite controversy of some
kind--not even the great orations of Bright and Gladstone are more
talked of.
So far they are a success, and there is something in the personal
character of Mr. Mill himself, which makes him specially popular with
the working classes of England. I doubt if there is now any Englishman
whose name would be received with a more cordial outburst of applause at
a popular meeting. Working-men, in fact, are very proud of Mr. Mill's
scholarship, culture, and profundity. They can perceive easily enough
that he is remarkable for just those intellectual qualities which the
conventional demagogue never has. Tory newspapers and the "Saturday
Review" sometimes affect to regard Mr. Bright as a man of defective
education, but it is impossible to pretend to think that Mill is
ignorant of Greek or superficial in his knowledge of history. When such
a man makes himself especially the champion of working-men, the
working-men think of him very much as the Irish peasants of '98 and '48
did of Edward Fitzgerald and Smith O'Brien, the aristocrats of birth and
rank, who stepped down from their high places and gave themselves up to
the cause of the unlettered and the poor.
There is something fascinating, moreover, about the singular blending of
the emotional, and even the romantic, with the keen, vigorous, logical
intellect, which is to be observed in Mill. Even political economy, in
Mill's mind, is strangely guided and governed by mere feeling. Somebody
said he was a combination of Ricardo and Tom Hughes--somebody else said,
rather more happily, I think, that he is Adam Smith and Fenelon revived
and rolled into one. The "Pall Mall Gazette" found his picture well
painted in Lord Macaulay's analysis of the motives which influenced
Edmund Burke, when he flung his soul into the impeachment of Warren
Hastings. The mere eccentricities, the very defects of such a nature
have in them something captivating. The admirers of Mr. Mill are
therefore not unusually somewhat given to exalting admiration into
idolatry. The classes who most admire him are the scholarly and
adventurous young Radicals, who have a dash of Positivism in them; the
extreme Radicals, who are prepared to go any and all lengths for the
mere sake of change; and the working-men.
This is the Triumvirate of the English Liberal Party. Combined they
represent, guide, and govern every section and fraction of that party
that is worth taking into any consideration. Mr. Gladstone represents
official Liberalism; Mr. Bright speaks for and directs the
old-fashioned, robust, popular Liberalism of which Manchester was the
school; Mr. Mill is the exponent of the new Liberalism, the Liberalism
of Idea and Logic. Bright's programme is a little ahead of Gladstone's,
but Gladstone will probably be easily pulled up to it. Mill goes far
beyond either, far beyond any point at which either is ever likely to
arrive. Indeed, Mr. Mill may be fairly described by a phrase, which I
believe is German, as a man in advance of every possible future--at
least in England. But he is quite prepared to act loyally and steadily
with his party and its leader on all momentous issues. On some minor
questions he has lately gone widely away from them, and given thereby
much offence; and indeed I am sure there are not a few of the
old-fashioned Liberals and the Manchester men who would rather Mr. Mill
had never come into Parliament and sat at their side. But on nearly all
questions of Parliamentary Reform, and on that of the Irish Church, Mill
and his Liberal colleagues will pull cordially together. So, too, on
most economic questions, reduction of taxation, imposition of duties and
the like. Where a sharp difference is likely to arise will only be in
relation to some subject having an idea behind it--some question of
foreign policy perhaps, something not at present imminent; and, let us
hope, not destined in any case to be vital to the interests of the
party. Only where an idea is involved will Mr. Mill refuse to allow his
own judgment to bend to the general necessities of the party. It was his
objection (a very unwise one, I think) to the idea behind the system of
the ballot, which led him to separate himself sharply from Bright and
other Liberals on that subject; it was the idea which lies at the bottom
of a representation of minorities, which beguiled him into lending his
advocacy to that most chimerical, awkward, and absurd piece of political
mechanism which we know in England as the three-cornered constituency.
The cohesion of Gladstone and Bright is decidedly more close and likely
to endure than that between Bright and Mill. But on all immediate
questions of great importance, these two men are sure to be found side
by side. Mill has a deep and earnest admiration for Bright, who is
sometimes, perhaps, a little impatient of the Politics of Idea.
During the session of 1868, I attended a meeting of a few representative
Liberals of all classes, brought together to decide on some course of
agitation with regard to Ireland. Mr. Mill was there, so were Professor
Fawcett, Mr. Thomas Hughes, Lord Amberley, and other members of
Parliament; Mr. Frederick Harrison, with some of his Positivist
colleagues, and several representative working men. Mr. Bright was
unable to attend. A certain course of action being recommended, Mr. Mill
expressed his own approval of it, but emphatically declared that he
considered Mr. Bright's judgment was entitled to be regarded as
authoritative, and that should Mr. Bright recommend the meeting not to
go on, the scheme had better be given up. Mr. Bright subsequently
discouraged the scheme, and it was, on Mr. Mill's recommendation, at
once abandoned. I mention this fact to illustrate the loyalty which Mr.
Mill, with all his tendency to political eccentricity, usually displays
toward the men whom he regards as the leaders of the party.
Mill and Bright are alike warm admirers of Gladstone and believers in
him. Indeed one sometimes feels ashamed to doubt for a moment the
steadfastness of a man in whom Bright and Mill put so full a faith.
Certainly the English Liberal has reason to congratulate himself, and
feel proud when he remembers what sort of men his party's leaders used
to be, and sees what men they are to-day. It will not do to study too
closely the private characters of the chiefs of any political band in
the House of Commons, from the days of Bolingbroke to those of Fox. The
man who was not a sinecurist or a peculator was pretty sure to be a
profligate or a gambler. Not a few eminent men were sinecurists,
peculators, profligates, and gamblers. The political purity of the
English Liberal leaders to-day is absolutely without the faintest shade
of suspicion--it never even occurs to any one to suspect them, while
their private lives, it may be said without indelicacy, are in pure and
perfect accord with the noble principles they profess. Not often has
there been a political triumvirate of greater men; of better men, never.
THE ENGLISH POSITIVISTS.
Some few months ago, a little bubble of interest was made on the surface
of London life, by a course of Sunday lectures of a peculiar kind.
These lectures were given in a small room in Bouverie street, off Fleet
street--Bouverie street, sacred to publishing and newspaper offices--and
only a very small stream of persons was drawn to the place. There was
something very peculiar, however, about the lectures, the lecturer, and
the audience, which might well have repaid a stranger in London for the
trouble of going there. I doubt whether such a proportion of
intellectual faces could have been seen among the congregation of any
London church on these Sunday mornings; and I know one, at least, who
attended the lectures, less for the sake of what he heard than because
such listeners as the authoress of "Romola" were among the audience. The
lecturer was Mr. Richard Congreve, and the subject of his discourses was
the creed of Positivism.
I do not know how familiar Mr. Congreve and his writings and his
doctrines are to the American public. In London, Mr. Congreve is, in a
quiet way, a sort of celebrity or peculiarity. He is the head of the
small, compact band of English Positivists. It is understood that he
goes as far in the direction of the creed which was the dream of Auguste
Comte's later years as any sane human creature can well go. I have,
however, very little to say here of Mr. Congreve, individually; and I
take his recent course of Sunday lectures only as a convenient starting
point from which to begin a few remarks on the political principles,
character, and influence of that small, resolute, aggressive body of
intellectual, highly-educated and able men who are beginning to be known
in the politics and society of England as the London Positivists.
A discourse on the principles of Positivism would be quite out of place
here; but even those who understand the whole subject will, perhaps,
allow me, for the benefit of those who do not, to explain very briefly
what an English Positivist is. Positivism, it is known to my readers, is
the name given to the philosophy which Auguste Comte, more than any
other man, helped to reduce to a system. Regarded as a philosophy of
history and human society, its grand and fundamental doctrine merely is
that human life evolves itself in obedience to certain fixed laws, of
which we could obtain a knowledge if only we applied ourselves to this
study as we do to all other studies in practical science, by the patient
observation of phenomena. Auguste Comte's reduction of this
philosophical theory to a scientific system is undoubtedly one of the
grandest achievements of human intellect. The philosophy did not begin
with him or his generation, or, indeed, any generation of which we have
authentic record. Whenever there were men capable of thinking at all,
there must have been some whose minds were instinct with this doctrine;
but Comte made it a system at once simple, grand, and fascinating, and
he will always remain identified with its development, in the memory of
the modern world. Unfortunately, Comte, in his later years, set to
founding a _religion_ also--a religion which has, perhaps, called down
upon its founder and its followers more ridicule, contempt, and
discredit than any vagary of human imagination in our day. I speak of
all this only to explain to my readers that there is some little
difficulty in defining what is meant by a Positivist. If we mean merely
a believer in the philosophical theory of history, then Positivists
are, indeed, to be named as legion, and their captains are among the
greatest intellects of the world to-day. In England, we regard Mr. John
Stuart Mill as, in this sense, the greatest Positivist, and undoubtedly
he is so regarded here. But Mill utterly rejects and ridicules the
fantastic religion which Comte, in his days of declining mental power,
sought to graft on his grand philosophy. In his treatise on Comte, Mr.
Mill showed no mercy to the Positivist religion, and, indeed, bitterly
offended many of its votaries by his contemptuous exposure of its
follies. What is said of Mill may be said of nineteen out of every
twenty, at least, of the English followers of Comte. They accept the
philosophy as grand, scientific, inexorable truth; they reject the
religion with pity or with scorn, as a fantastic and barren chimera. Mr.
Congreve is, in London, the leader of the small school who go for taking
all or nothing, and to whom Auguste Comte is the prophet of a new and
final religion, as well as the teacher of a new philosophy. Now this
little school is the nucleus of the body of Englishmen of whom I write.
When I speak, therefore, of English Positivists, I do not mean the men
who go no farther than John Stuart Mill does. These men are to be found
everywhere; they are of all schools, and all religions. I mean the much
smaller body of votaries who go, or feel inclined to go, much farther,
and accept Comte's religious teaching as a law of life. It is quite
probable that, even among the men who are now identified more or less,
in the public mind, with Mr. Congreve and his school, there may be some
who do not adopt, or even concern themselves about the religion of
Positivism. A community of sentiment on historical and political
questions, the habit of meeting together, consulting together, writing
for publication together, might naturally bring into the group men who
may not go the length of adopting the Comte worship. It is quite
possible, therefore, that, in mentioning the names of English
Positivists, I may happen to speak of some who have no more to do with
that worship than I have.
I mean, then, only the group of men, most of whom are young, most of
whom are highly cultured, many of whom are endowed with remarkable
ability, who are to be found in a literary and political phalanstery
with Mr. Congreve, and of whom the majority are understood to be actual
votaries of the religion of Comte. Of course I have nothing to do here
with their faith or their practices. If they adopt the worship of woman
I think they do a better thing after all than the increasing and popular
class of writers, whose principal business in life is to persuade us
that our wives and sisters are all Messalinas in heart and nearly all
Messalinas in practice. If, when they pray, they touch certain cranial
bumps at certain passages of the prayer, I do not see that they
institute anything worse than the genuflections of the Ritualist or the
breast-beating of the Roman Catholics. If, finally, one is sometimes a
little puzzled when he receives a letter from a Positivist friend, and
finds it dated "5th Marcus Aurelius," or "12th Auguste Comte," instead
of July or December, as the case may be, one must remember that there
never yet was a young sect which did not delight in puzzling outsiders
by a new and peculiar nomenclature. I never heard anything worse charged
against the Positivists than that they worship woman, touch their
foreheads when they pray, and arrange the calendar according to a plan
of their own invention; except, of course, the general charge of
Atheism; but as that is made in England against anybody whom all his
neighbors do not quite understand, I hardly think it worth discussing in
this particular instance. We are all Atheists in England in the
estimation of our neighbors, whose political opinions are different from
our own.
The English Positivists, then, are beginning to stand out sharply
against the common background of political life. They are a little
school; as distinctly a school for their time and chances as the
Girondists were, or the Manchester school, or the Massachusetts
Abolitionists, or the Boston Transcendentalists. They are Radical, of
course, but their Radicalism has a curious twist in it. On any given
question of Radicalism they go as far as any practical politician does;
but then they also go in most cases so very much farther that they often
alarm the practical politician out of his ordinary composure. They are
generally incisive of speech, aggressive of purpose, defiant of
political prudery, and even of political prudence. Their politics are
always politics of idea.
Some three or four years ago the Positivists published a large and
ponderous volume of essays on subjects of international policy. Each man
who contributed an essay signed his name, and although a general
community of idea and principle pervaded the book, it was not understood
that everybody who wrote necessarily adopted all the views of his
associates. The book, in fact, was constructed on the model of the
famous "Essays and Reviews" which had sent such a thrill through the
religious world a few years before. The political essays naturally
failed to create anything like the sensation which was produced by their
theological predecessors; but they did excite considerable attention,
and awoke the echoes. They astonished a good many Liberal politicians of
the steady old school, and they set many men thinking. What surprised
people at first was the singular combination of literary culture and
ultra-Radical opinion. Literary young men in England, of late, are
generally to be divided into two classes--the smart writers for
periodicals, the minor novelists and dramatists, and so forth, who know
no more and care no more about politics than ballet girls do, and the
University men, the men of "culture," who affect Toryism as something
fine and distinguished, and profess a patrician horror of democracy and
the "mob." If at the time this volume was published one had taken aside
some practical politician in London and said, "Here is a collection of
practical essays written by a cluster of young men who all have
University degrees after their names--will you read it?" the answer
would certainly have been--"Not I, it's sure to be some contemptible
sham Tory rubbish; some 'blood-and-culture' trash; some schoolboy
impertinence about demagoguism and the mob." Therefore the surprise was
not slight to such men when they read the book and found that its
central idea, its connecting thread, was a Radicalism which might well
be called thorough; a Radicalism which made Bright look like a steady
old Conservative; invited Mill to push his ideas a little farther; and
poured scorn upon the Radical press for its slowness and its timidity. A
simple, startling foreign policy was prescribed to England. Its gospel,
after all, was but an old one--so old that it had been forgotten in
English politics. It was merely--Be just and fear not. Renounce all
aggression; give back the spoils of conquest. Give Gibraltar back to the
Spaniards who own it; prepare to cast loose your colonial dependencies;
prepare even to quit your loved India; ask the Irish people fairly and
clearly what they want, and if they desire to be free of your rule, bid
them go and be free and Godspeed. All the old traditional policies
seemed to these men only obsolete and odious superstitions. They would
have England, the State, to stand up and act precisely as an Englishman
of honor and conscience would do, and they treated with utter contempt
any policy of expediency or any policy whatever that aimed at any end
but that of finding out the right thing to do and then doing it at once.
This seemed to me, studying the school quite as an outside observer, its
one great central idea; and it would of course be impossible not to
honor the body of writers who proposed to show how it was to be
accomplished.