Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 | Page 4

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