Critical Miscellanies, (Vol. 3 of 3), Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill; Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Critical Miscellanies, (Vol. 3 of 3), Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill; Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography
John Stuart Mill · en
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.'
* * * * *