Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 | Page 7

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