Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 | Page 6

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