The last words we exchanged concerned the directly impending Franco-German War, to which Mill looked forward with gloomy misgivings. He considered it a misfortune for all humanity, for the entire European civilization.
I gazed long into his deep, blue eyes, before I could prevail upon myself to bid him a final farewell. It was my earnest desire to imprint upon my mind this so earnest and so stem, yet at the same time so bold, countenance, with all its youthful freshness. I wished to render it impossible to me to forget the peculiar greatness stamped on the man's form and on his every word. It is of considerable importance in grasping the character of an author to learn in what relation the impression of his human disposition stands to that of his disposition as an author. I have never known a great man in whom these two impressions were so thoroughly harmonious as in Mill. I have never discovered any quality in him as an author that I have not rediscovered in my personal intercourse with him, and I have found his different characteristics in both spheres exalted above and subordinated to one another in precisely the same order and manner. There are authors in whose writings some definite quality—for instance, philanthropy, or wit, or dignity—plays a more prominent rôle than in their lives; others whose writings display not a trace of those qualities, such as humor or free humanity, which render them amiable in their private lives. Most authors are far inferior to their books. In Stuart Mill no such inequality existed, for he was the very incarnation of truthfulness. There occurs in Mill's "Autobiography" a situation which affords an opportunity of measuring the degree of this truthfulness. I have in mind his position when he, the social reformer, who was so far removed from all demagogism, at a meeting of electors, comprised chiefly of the working class, was asked if he had written and made public the statement that the working classes of England were, as a rule, liars. He answered at once, and briefly, "I did." "Scarcely," he adds, "were these two words out of my mouth, when vehement applause resounded through the whole meeting. It was evident that the working people were so accustomed to expect equivocation and evasion from those who sought their suffrages, that when they found, instead of that, a direct avowal of what was likely to be disagreeable to them, instead of being affronted, they concluded at once that this was a person whom they could trust."
Mill gives the most modest interpretation of the proceeding, but the reader surmises what a halo of truthfulness must at that moment have hovered about him whose accusation of pervading falsehood was met with storms of applause from men spoiled by the flatteries of demagogues. In daily life, too, Mill bore that invisible nimbus of exalted love of truth. His whole being radiated with purity of character. It is needful to look back to the most sublime philosophic characters of antiquity, to Marcus Aurelius and his peers, if peers he has, to find a parallel to Mill. He was equally true and equally great, whether he addressed his maturely considered thought in some renowned work to a circle of readers spread over the whole globe, or whether, in his own home, without any assumption of superiority, he dropped an accidental remark to a chance visitor.
ERNEST RENAN.