But If He Were
Lecturing On Fish, He Would Stick To Fish; It Would Be
Essentially A JOUR MAIGRE.
With Huxley, the suggestion was worth more than the thing
said.
One thought of it afterwards, and wondered whether his
words implied all they seemed to imply. One knew that the
scientist was also a philosopher; and one longed to get at
him, at the man himself, and listen to the lessons which his
work had taught him. At one of these lectures I had the
honour of being introduced to him by a great friend of mine,
John Marshall, then President of the College of Surgeons. In
later years I used to meet him constantly at the Athenaeum.
Looking back to the days of one's plasticity, two men are
pre-eminent among my Dii Majores. To John Stuart Mill and to
Thomas Huxley I owe more, educationally, than to any other
teachers. Mill's logic was simply a revelation to me. For
what Kant calls 'discipline,' I still know no book, unless it
be the 'Critique' itself, equal to it. But perhaps it is the
men themselves, their earnestness, their splendid courage,
their noble simplicity, that most inspired one with
reverence. It was Huxley's aim to enlighten the many, and he
enlightened them. It was Mill's lot to help thinkers, and he
helped them. SAPERE AUDE was the motto of both. How few
there are who dare to adopt it! To love truth is valiantly
professed by all; but to pursue it at all costs, to 'dare to
be wise' needs daring of the highest order.
Mill had the enormous advantage, to start with, of an
education unbiassed by any theological creed; and he brought
exceptional powers of abstract reasoning to bear upon matters
of permanent and supreme importance to all men. Yet, in
spite of his ruthless impartiality, I should not hesitate to
call him a religious man. This very tendency which no
imaginative mind, no man or woman with any strain of poetical
feeling, can be without, invests Mill's character with a
clash of humanity which entitles him to a place in our
affections. It is in this respect that he so widely differs
from Mr. Herbert Spencer. Courageous Mr. Spencer was, but
his courage seems to have been due almost as much to absence
of sympathy or kinship with his fellow-creatures, and to his
contempt of their opinions, as from his dispassionate love of
truth, or his sometimes passionate defence of his own tenets.
My friend Napier told me an amusing little story about John
Mill when he was in the East India Company's administration.
Mr. Macvey Napier, my friend's elder brother, was the senior
clerk. On John Mill's retirement, his co-officials
subscribed to present him with a silver standish. Such was
the general sense of Mill's modest estimate of his own
deserts, and of his aversion to all acknowledgment of them,
that Mr. Napier, though it fell to his lot, begged others to
join in the ceremony of presentation. All declined; the
inkstand was left upon Mill's table when he himself was out
of the room.
Years after the time of which I am writing, when Mill stood
for Westminster, I had the good fortune to be on the platform
at St. James's Hall, next but one to him, when he made his
first speech to the electors. He was completely unknown to
the public, and, though I worshipped the man, I had never
seen him, nor had an idea what he looked like. To satisfy my
curiosity I tried to get a portrait of him at the
photographic shop in Regent Street.
'I want a photograph of Mr. Mill.'
'Mill? Mill?' repeated the shopman, 'Oh yes, sir, I know - a
great sporting gent,' and he produced the portrait of a
sportsman in top boots and a hunting cap.
Very different from this was the figure I then saw. The hall
and the platform were crowded. Where was the principal
personage? Presently, quite alone, up the side steps, and
unobserved, came a thin but tallish man in black, with a tail
coat, and, almost unrecognised, took the vacant front seat.
He might have been, so far as dress went, a clerk in a
counting-house, or an undertaker. But the face was no
ordinary one. The wide brow, the sharp nose of the Burke
type, the compressed lips and strong chin, were suggestive of
intellect and of suppressed emotion. There was no applause,
for nothing was known to the crowd, even of his opinions,
beyond the fact that he was the Liberal candidate for
Westminster. He spoke with perfect ease to himself, never
faltering for the right word, which seemed to be always at
his command. If interrupted by questions, as he constantly
was, his answers could not have been amended had he written
them. His voice was not strong, and there were frequent
calls from the far end to 'speak up, speak up; we can't hear
you.' He did not raise his pitch a note. They might as well
have tried to bully an automaton. He was doing his best, and
he could do no more. Then, when, instead of the usual
adulations, instead of declamatory appeals to the passions of
a large and a mixed assembly, he gave them to understand, in
very plain language, that even socialists are not infallible,
- that extreme and violent opinions, begotten of ignorance,
do not constitute the highest political wisdom; then there
were murmurs of dissent and disapproval. But if the ignorant
and the violent could have stoned him, his calm manner would
still have said, 'Strike, but hear me.'
Mr. Robert Grosvenor - the present Lord Ebury - then the
other Liberal member for Westminster, wrote to ask me to take
the chair at Mill's first introduction to the Pimlico
electors. Such, however, was my admiration of Mill, I did
not feel sure that I might not say too much in his favour;
and mindful of the standish incident, I knew, that if I did
so, it would embarrass and annoy him.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 87 of 105
Words from 87377 to 88396
of 106633
