John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

142 MEMORY FOR LANGUAGE AND DETAIL. 1849-1872.
presented to his mind ; and, while he imbibed something of all,
it soon became evident that science was his forte. He had an
intellect for the abstract and the logical, out of all proportion
to his hold of the concrete, and the poetical. His attempts at
writing poetry could be little more than memory working upon
the books that he had read, while their impression was fresh.
He never attained to picturesqueness in the smallest degree ;
he could no doubt have succeeded by set purpose, but he had
other matters to attend to. He was but moderately endowed
with the faculty of language as such ; the undoubted excellence
of his mature style was arrived at by a series of efforts that
may well be celebrated among triumphs of perseverance.
I think it perhaps a fortunate adjustment, to have possessed
merely enough verbal power to give adequate expression to his
thoughts, and not enough to make an artist to the extent
occasionally realized even with great philosophers. That the
thinking faculty, pure and simple, should have the predomi
nating share of his intellectual force, was the condition of his
peculiar subtlety as a thinker. Plato, Bacon, Berkeley, Hume,
Ferrier, and others, paid for the goodness of their style, by
some inferiority of their thoughts. Aristotle and Kant were
perhaps at the other extreme ; their gifts of style were unequal
to the adequate presentation of their ideas.
Mill had not much memory for detail of any kind. He had
read a vast quantity of history, of fiction, of travels and inci
dents ;
but you would not be aware of the fact from his conver
sation or from his writings. Neither in the illustration of
doctrines, nor for figurative allusions, was he ready at repro
ducing facts in the concrete. He was, as a youth, well read in
the Greek and Roman classics, but he scarcely ever made a
happy original quotation. By express study, and frequent
reference, he had amassed a store of facts bearing on political
and these he had at full command.
or sociological doctrines ;
The enormous devotion of his early years to book study
interfered with his activity as an observer of facts at first hand,