JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES O F AUTOBIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM T H O M A S Christ Church, Oxford

I

HOW FAR CAN THE HISTORIAN of nineteenth century politics and opinion rely upon J. S . Mill’s Autobiography? Is its fascination as a human document matched by its value as a historical source? The questions may seem almost impertinent, but they are, I believe, worth asking.

For one thing, it is well known that Mill changed his views between youth and old age. He tells us that he was bred in the ambition to be a reformer of the world, that his father was an extreme democrat, and that he and his friends took the French Encyclopaedists as their model. But he ended his life advocating political liberty for a minority of the intelligent and cultivated, uneasy about extending the franchise lest it bring the tyranny of mass opinion, in favour of plural voting and against the ballot. Can it be that, while his political opinions changed, his views of his own past life did not?

It is true that he implies these changes in his opinions were made coolly and rationally, that he never allowed ‘the fabric of my old and taught opinions . . . to fall to pieces, but was incessantly engaged in making it anew’.’ But beneath the dry precision of the prose, it is clear that he was a person of warm emotions and loyalties, whose mental progress was accompanied by pain and unhappiness. If we discount the Ploge of his wife, which many readers would think forced: the Autobiography may be said to hinge upon the famous description of the ‘mental crisis’ of 1826, when Mill wondered whether he would really feel glad if all the changes he thought desirable were at once realized, and found to his horror that he would not. His account of his feelings of dejection at this discovery, and of his slow recovery from a sense of purposelessness, is by common consent the most arresting part of the book, and is too familiar to need lengthy quotation here.3 It is an account which has provoked many interpretations, from that day to this. The more modern those interpretations are, the more they tend to stress the emotional

‘ J. S. Mill, Autobiography: Oxford Paperbacks ed. by J. Stillinger (1971), p. 94. This is an improvement on the ed. of J. J. Coss (Columbia, 1924, repr. 1960) which has hitherto been the best text. This essay was completed before the publication, in Britain, of Prof. Stillinger’s edition, and for convenience E have given references to both eds., Prof. Stillinger’s as ‘O.P.’ and the Columbia ed. as ‘Col.’. ’ O.P. pp. 11 1-14; Col. pp. 129-33. The most flattering view of Harriet Mill’s r61e is in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: their Friendship and Subsequent Marrkge, ed. F. A. Hayek (1951). For other views of the matter, see H. 0. PapH, John Stwrrt MiII Md the Harriet Taylor Myth (Cambridge, 1960) and F. E. Mineka, ‘The Autobiography and the Lady’, University of Toronto Quarterly, xxxii, no. 3, April 1963.

341 O.P. pp. 80-5; Col. pp. 93-9.

342 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

elements in the crisis, at the expense of the intellectual ones. Mill’s nine- teenth-century readers took Mill’s account of the crisis rather literally? But in our time the crisis has been presented as an escape from the harsh regimen of utility into the sensuous appreciation of nature through p ~ e t r y ; ~ as an emotional revolt against James Mill’s scheme of turning his son into a ‘Utilitarian robot’;6 and as the subconscious expression of a hatred of paternal domii~ance.~ The curious thing about these interpretations is, that none of them is carried to the point of casting doubt upon the accuracy of Mill’s recollections. They are treated as if Mill had correctly described the experience, but missed its meaning. So great is the respect for Mill the thinker that his own account of the crisis has been quoted in preference to that of his most exhaustive biographer.s

In what follows I want to suggest (leaning heavily on the work of others, published and unpublished) that these different interpretations have obscured Mill’s aims in writing the Autobiography, and by diverting attention from his own careful language to motives supposedly more revealing, have been seriously misleading about the character of Mill’s crisis, and made it harder to assess where the real value of the book as a historical source lies.

I1

One reason why so much writing about the mental crisis must remain largely speculative is that there is little evidence about Mill’s state in 1826-7 to set against his recollection of it. The letters, sparse before 1829, are wholly lacking for 1826, and little information of a personal kind can be derived from his periodical writings? So it may be as well to begin where there is evidence to corroborate the Autobiography, with the details of the education itself.

It must be admitted that the case against James Mill as a harsh and unsympathetic teacher who tried to shape his son in his own image, has a lot to commend it. The elder Mill was not an attractive man. Once a candidate for the ministry, he retained the fervour and moral certainty of Scottish Calvinism after he had rejected its temporal and most of its intellectual claims on his allegiance. He was insular, unworldly, and intolerant of people’s

J. Morley, Critical Miscellan!es (1886), p. 58; A. Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism (1882) pp. 37-8; Leslie Stephen in D.N.B. S.V. J. S. Mill: Hours in u Library (1892), iii, pp. 258-66. In Vol. 111 of The English Utilitarians, Stephen was more guarded, relating the crisis to the editing of Ekntham (p. 19) but otherwise following Mill’s own account.

T. Woods, Poetry and Philosophy: a Study in the Thought of John Stuart Mill (1961), p. 68.

F. A. Cavenagh (ed.), James and John Stuart Mill on Education (Cambridge, 1931), p. x. Cavenagh prints the account of the education of the son after the father’s Essay on Education, as if the Essay were a programme for the education.

A. W. Levi, ‘The “Mental Crisis” of John Stuart Mill’, Psychoanalytic Review, xxxii (1945), p. 98; cited by Hayek, op. cit., p. 285, and T. Woods, Poetry and Philosophy, p. 43.

E.g. Lord Robbms, The Evolution of Modern Economic Theory and other Papers on the History of Economic Thoughr (1970), pp. 97-110.

For Mill’s early writings, see N. Macminn, J. R. Hainds, J. M. McCrimmon, Biblio- graphy of the Published Writings of J. S. Mill (Evanston, Ill. 1945). So much work has been done on Mill’s works since, however, that this should be supplemented with J. M. Robson’s Mill News Letter and the same author’s The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thoughr of John Stuart Mill (1968).

WILLIAM THOMAS 343 opinions when they differed from his own. In artistic matters he was a philis- tine, and he expected his family to observe even in increasing affluence the same scale of values to which he had habituated himself in poverty. During John Mill’s boyhood they were in fact poor, and James Mill had constantly to write articles for money, deferring and delaying the completion of the History of British India which he hoped would secure his reputation. For the younger children, especially the girls, this meant occasional freedom from the constraints of lessons; but for John Mill it meant that while his father wrote and read, he had to become the instrument of paternal discipline. Francis Place has left an account of the severity of the punishment which followed when John let his father down and the younger children made mistakes in their lessons. They were all sent upstairs without dinner, Place was shocked to note, for a mistake in one word.l0

Place was then submitting himself late in life to lessons in Latin from James Mill, and he admired the result even if he thought the means unduly severe. A more penetrating observer was Lady Anne Romilly, wife of the Whig politician and law reformer, who in 1817 visited Ford Abbey., where the Mill family used to spend the summer with Bentharn. As she was writing her account to Maria Edgeworth, the novelist and author of Practical Education, she was particularly concerned with the efects of the educational system she observed. Of John Mill she wrote:

Really if he were my child I should be very uneasy about him. When anything does not particularly interest him he seems inclined to sleep. Sophie observed twice when he came out of a room where he had been shut up with Newton’s principia [sic] before him, that he was but just awake. He is only I1 years old, and he has the care of the learned part of the education of his two eldest sisters who are making great progress in Latin and Greek under his tuition. They are all nice well behaved children, but they are literally cram’d with knowledge, and I should fear that much of it may turn to indigestion rather than healthy nourish- ment. They are unlike other children. They do not know what a game of Play is. They have never heard of Trap Ball, or Cricket. . .

She fears that without more exercise John Mill may have water on the brain, and doubts if a system which would ‘make prodigies’ of the children could also make them ‘Men of Judgement, sense, or talents’. And she adds:

Then the system of cramming makes them so disagreeable, so pedantic. They are always on stilts. Little Mill makes more observations than almost any child I ever saw who was crammed, but they are always in slow measured terms, and deliver’d with the air of a person who is conscious of his superiority, and if you hazard an observation in return you are perhaps assured that ‘the authorities will not bear you out in what you have asserte8.l’

It is easy to share Lady Romilly’s indignation when we read the account John Mill gives of his lessons in the Autobiography. But before we conclude that the 1826 crisis was the dreadful reckoning she feared, it is worth looking at some evidence of the effect of the education which she describes, and which

lo G. Wallas, The Life of Francis Place (2nd ed. 1918), p. 74. l’ S. H. Romilly (ed.), The Romilly-Edgeworth Letters, 1813--1818 (1936), pp. 177-9.

344 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

dates from three years after her visit. In 1820, John Mill went to France to stay near Montpellier with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, the philo- sopher’s brother. He wrote letters home in the form of a journal in which he entered a day-to-day account of his reading and other activities.12 It is clearly a record made for his father’s eye, and it is punctilious about times and carefully accounts for every hour filled up. Some of the items on his programme are given to the quarter hour, in a way which suggests that he had many distractions, and had to find short periods here and there for the study he wanted to do. There is also a nervous voraciousness about his reading which suggests he had had more recommended him than he could well get through. He reads in the Latin and Greek classics, in French classical drama, with periods of mathematics, geography and chemistry. Besides this he attends (and notes much more briefly) fencing and dancing lessons, and frequently goes bathing in the river. The first noteworthy feature of the journal is that, in spite of such distractions, and a variety of new experiences, the boy did not need to be goaded to work. At fourteen, when perhaps most boys need driving, he drove himself.

The journal also shows why this was so. James Mill was a busy man, who had not time to supervise his son’s work very closely. John Mill recalls how they sat opposite one another, the father working on his History of British India, the son on his lessons, and how at the end of the day they would go for a walk and the boy would have to recapitulate what he had learned during the day. His son gained two great benefits from this method, and they too appear in the journal of 1820. The first was that being launched on difficult subjects, by himself or with the minimum of guidance, gave him great confidence in tackling new fields of knowledge. James Mill’s custom was

in the case of everything which could be found out by thinking, to make me strive and struggle to find out for myself giving me no more help than was positively indispensable . . .I3

He goes on to say that he ‘acquitted himself lamely’ in this, but the journal is more illuminating. While John was away in France seeing new sights and ways of living, it seems to have occurred to James Mill that the time had come for the boy to write something on political economy and logic. We have the boy’s reply to the suggestion:

With regard to Political Economy and Logic I shall certainly follow your direc- tions. The best exercise in both these branches of knowledge would perhaps be to write treatises on particular subjects appertaining to both. This I have not yet commenced doing, but I shall certainly do ~ 0 . l ~

Before John went abroad father and son had together begun to compile an elementary textbook on the subject, James Mill ‘expounding’ it daily on their walks, John writing at each instalment a compte rendu which served as text for further refinements. On John’s return it was revised by them and

l2 Anna J. Mill (ed.), John Mill’s Boyhood Visit to France . . . 1820-1821 (1960), cited hereafter as French Journal.

l3 The Early Drafi ofJohn Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, ed. J. Stillinger (Urbana, 1961),

l4 French Journal, p. 43. pp. 54-5, hereafter cited as E.D.; O.P. p. 20; cf. Col. p. 22.

WILLIAM THOMAS 345 publi~hed.’~ This illustrates the second benefit. The daily walk with its compte rendu gave the boy an exercise in systematic inquiry and clear exposition. His training here had begun before the French visit, that is, before his four- teenth year; and an amusing and rather priggish entry in a letter written from France shows that the method had taken hold on the boy and he trusted to it when he had to teach the younger children. He writes that he is pleased Wilhelmina and Clara

make progress in History, . . as, with Geography and Arithmetic, it is the most necessary of all studies for young people of both sexes . . . [and then his didacticism gets the better of him] . . . The thing most necessary is to interrogate both, but Clara in particular, on what they have some time finished, as they are extremely apt to forget; and this I have found the chief difficulty in teaching them Arithmetic.16

Not only could the father take pride in his son’s taking advice across the distances that separated them; the boy thought he might give advice to his little sisters in return.

In the Autobiography Mill makes emphatic mention of both these benefits. His father’s habit of expecting too much of him unaided, he says, made him a thinker in both logic and political economy.

I thought for myself from the first, and occasionally thought differently from him, though for a long time only on minor points, and making his opinion the ultimate standard.’’

and later he explicitly denies he was ‘crammed’ : My father never permitted anything which I learnt, to degenerate into a mere

exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, precede it.18 But if we accept these assertions as true on the evidence of the Journal,

what can we say of Mill’s claim in the same passage, that in quickness of apprehension and retentiveness of memory he was ‘rather below than above par’, so that what achievements he had to his credit were due to his father’s so training him that he had ‘an advantage of a quarter of a century’lg over his contemporaries?

The Journal also suggests that the habits of the compte rendu had one less beneficial effect. John Mill’s enthusiasms were, it seems, already being channelled into matters on which he might expect his father’s approval. Already, at 14, he sounds the note of moral censure which is such a prominent feature of James Mill’s writings. On the subjects on which he trusts his own judgement he is very outspoken, and on others in which he may have been accustomed to take his opinions from others he is not observant at all. He comments on a dialogue of Lucian, that it is ‘a masterpiece of ingenious reasoning’,2O and he discovers an error in the arrangement of a French geometry which, he says sternly, ‘takes away a good deal of my opinion of the merit of the book as an elementary work‘.Z1 But the people around

O.P. pp. 18-19; Col. pp. 19-20,44. l6 French Journal, p. 41.

O.P. p. 20; Col. p. 22. 2o French Journal, p. 50.

l7 O.P. p. 19; Col. p. 20. l9 O.P. p. 20; Col. p. 21. 21 Ibid. p. 36.

€I-DD

346 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

him are mentioned as if they affected him only as remote authorities for the changes in his programme. He makes scarcely any judgements of value on art or literature. There is a brief comment on a statue in the Louvre, but nothing on the French poetry he is constantly reading, nothing on the mountains which he later recalled gave him his taste for natural scenery. Already the childish impressionableness seems to be hampered by a premature taste for generality and abstract statement. Mill’s friends were later to note the absence in his intellectual equipment of that unsifted store of remembered images which the Coleridgeans called ‘fancy’. ‘His fancy is not rich,’22 Carlyle observed, and John Sterling told Caroline Fox that he thought Mill had ‘singularly little sense of the concrete’ and in spite of strong feeling, little poetry.23 Whatever the qualities of Mill’s actual observations, the impression which the Journal gives is that already in his adolescence he had lost the inclination to give them appropriate expression, and the generally meagre imagery of his later writings suggests that he never made good the loss.

It is at this point that some commentators protest that James Mill’s authority lay too heavily on the boy’s shoulders; that no child brought prematurely to an understanding of logic and political economy, under a guide who was (on the victim’s own evidence)24 harshly and unimaginatively demanding, can have experienced no resentment and no subconscious urge to break out of the confinement of a regimen at once so strenuous and so narrow. If John Mill made no mention of this urge, they imply, he deceived himself and us. This claim seems to be strengthened by two considerations. The first is the evidence of the deliberate omission (perhaps one should say suppression) from the published Autobiography. The second concerns Mill’s statements about his debt to Wordsworth.

John Mill wrote the Autobiography as we know it in the published edition, from an earlier draft. For a long time this draft was not available for study. It contained leaves which Mill rejected when writing the final version, and Professor Levi, who was able to see the manuscript while it was still in private hands, claimed the rejected leaves provided the ‘hidden thread‘ in the explana- tion of the mental crisis. Mill says his depression began to lift when he found he shed tears at a passage in Marmontel’s Memoirs. In this passage Mar- monte1 describes how, while still at his seminary, he was told of his father’s death, and how he hurried home to his family, where, in a moving scene, he comforted the mourners and offered to supply his dead parent’s place. Levi argued that this passage moved Mill because Marmontel was describing a situation which Mill subconsciously wished repeated in his own case. Marmontel released in Mill ‘the latent, though still present dread that never now should he be free of his father’s domination’. The rejected leaves corroborated this with their candid admission of childhood unhappiness, which Mill later judged to be ‘too frank and imprudent for publicati~n’.~~

22 J. A. Froude, Carlyle’s Early Life (1891), ii, p. 205. 23 Memories of Old Friends: being extractsfrom the Journals andletters of Caroline Fox . . .,

ed. H. N. Pym (1882), p. 77. 24 O.P. pp. 20-2; Col. pp. 22-4. 25 Levi, ‘The “Mental Crisis” of J. S. Mill’, pp. 93, 98.

WILLIAM THOMAS 347 Since Levi wrote, the manuscript of the early draft has been published in Mr. Stillinger’s which reproduces the ‘rejected leaves’ in full. Con- sidered together they do not seem to represent ‘guilty’ suppressions. They do not tell us very much more than the final draft tells us, and what they do add does little to confirm Levi’s ‘Freudian’ interpretation of the Mar- monte1 passage.

There are in the Early Drcifi three sets of rejected leaves. Of these we may at once discount the last, a draft, corrected by Harriet Mill, of Mill’s account of her effect upon him. The other two require a closer look. The first refers to John Mill’s physical clumsiness, what he calls his ‘inaptness in the common affairs of everyday life’. He writes first of how he took longer than most children to learn how to dress himself. ‘I know not how many years passed before I could tie a knot.’ He considers whether this was the result of his father’s scheme of education, and says that it cannot have been, for his father constantly strove to correct him, warning him that he would ‘grow up a mere oddity, looked down upon by everybody, and unfit for the common purposes of life. . . .’27 But John Mill was evidently not satisfied with this description (which c o n h s Anne Romilly’s point about physical exercise), for he rewrote it, and added a conclusion much more kind to his father. His lack of ‘bodily dexterity or practical skill and contrivance’ was, he says, ‘not owing to the mode of my education but to natural slowness and to a certain mental and moral indolence which, but for the immense amount of mental cultivation my father gave me, would probably have prevented me from either being or doing anything worthy of note’. In short, the listlessness Anne Romilly attributed to his long hours with his books, Mill says might have been worse, but for the books. In other words, the boy would have grown up a nonentity without his father’s education, and if Mill was ashamed of this observation, it is odd that it is to be found in the final version as well.**

The second rejected passage presents a rather more difficult problem. It is the section which Levi quotes most fully and it amounts to a description of the family life of the Mills. Mill seems to have gone through three stages writing it, the last being the one he approved for publication. In the first stage he writes that he thought his father had greater capacity for feeling than was developed in him. ‘In an atmosphere of tenderness and affection he would have been tender and affectionate; but his ill-assorted marriage and his asperities of temper disabled him from making such an atm~sphere.’~~ He goes on to describe his mother’s failure to be more than a drudge or to evoke the respect and affection of her children. He describes his own growth ‘in the absence of love and in the presence of fear’ and how it stunted his moral growth, making him lacking in spontaneity and frankness and sapping his strength of will.30 In the second stage, he retains his point about his father’s undeveloped capacity for feeling, but cuts out any reference to his mother and his family, muting into a general phrase the cause of his father’s

26 See n. 13. ” E.D. pp. 178-80. E.D. p. 182; and O.P. pp. 22-3; Col. pp. 24-5.

29 E.D. p. 183. E.D. p. 184-5.

348 JOHN ST~JART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

asperity, and adding some general considerations on how much fear as an instrument of discipline can be dispensed In the final stage, he replaces the reason for his father’s asperity with another, more specific one, that is his role as ‘sole teacher’; but he adds that the younger children loved him, and that he himself was always ‘loyally devoted’ to him, and he closes with the comments on discipline in education as before.32

The observation about the effect of fear in an education goes through three changes; from a moving account of how being brought up in the presence of fear ‘stunted’ his ‘moral to more general reflections about the effects of fear in an ed~ca t ion?~ and finally to a brisk assertion that he had had a happy childhood and that fear was an element which could not be dispensed with in an education.35 This revision shows a rather different concern to that suggested by Levi. Mill is not jettisoning the experience of fear, but retaining it in a generalized form, sinking his personal recollection in considerations of a wider educational import. He might be applying to his history the stern maxim against too much introspection which he says he got from Carlyle; and the editing of this section is deliberate enough to provoke the larger question: what did Mill write and then re-write the Autobiography for?

The same question arises from a close reading of the passage in which Mill discusses his debt to Wordsworth, where the element of retrospective revision overlays the original experience. Of course Mill recalls that one thing that attracted him to Wordsworth’s poetry, and the Ode ‘Intimations of Im- mortality’ in particular, was the discovery that Wordsworth had had a crisis similar to his own, and that he too had ‘felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment was not lasting’.36 The mention of the Ode, of which perhaps the best-known lines are ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy’, makes it easy to conclude that Mill’s reading of Wordsworth was incompatible with his father’s teaching, that as he read the poetry, utilitarianism fell away, and he was released from the confinement of an unpoetic o~tlook.~’ Mill does, it is true, speak of Wordsworth as a ‘medicine’ for his state of mind, a phrase which seems to echo his earlier remark that, during the depression, Macbeth’s words to the physician (‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased?) were often in his But there are objections to treating the Wordsworth passage as if it were an extension of the crisis itself.

For one thing, the appreciation Mill gives of his state before his account of reading Wordsworth is strictly in terms of the psychological theory he had learnt from his father. The depression of 1826 had threatened to recur,

31 E.D. pp. 65-6 32 Col. pp. 36-7; O.P. pp. 32-4. 33 E.D. p. 184. 35 O.P. pp. 324; Col. p. 37. 36 O.P. p. 90; Col. p. 105. 37 Cf. Woods, Poetry and Philosophy, p. 68. Even Miss Himmelfarb comes close to

treating Wordsworth as if he meant a release for Mill, in her Introduction to her ed. of J. S. Mill, Essays on Politics and Culture (1963), p. xi.

38 O.P. pp. 89, 82; Col. pp. 104,95.

34 E.D. p. 66.

WILLIAM THOMAS 349 Mill says, as long as he had been unable to resolve a problem, that it seemed ‘the natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible for time to remove’.39 He had accepted the associationist theory of Hartley ‘that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were theresults of association; that we love one thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action and pain in another sort, through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of e~perience’.~~ This was also James Mill’s theory, as expounded in the Essay on Education and later in the Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. Given the truth of the associationist theory, the business of education was (as James Mill said) to impart notions of good or bad, right or wrong, by making associations of pleasure with the good and of pain with the bad. But now John Mill thought that the reason he could feel no genuine emotion for the things which he had hitherto been in the habit of thinking admirable and desirable, was that ‘the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings’.“l Apparently the process of association worked for the mental pro- cesses, but could do nothing to restore the emotions. The self-questioning Mill is describing does not centre round the character of his emotional problem, but around the theoretical one : what happens to the emotions in an educa- tion in which analytical training predominates? The tears shed over Marmontel were important evidence that in John Mill’s case the capacity for feeling had not been killed by analysis. After that it was a question of keeping that capacity as alert as possible. Mill’s own account suggests that far from throwing over, or revolting from his education, he was using what his education had led him to believe was the correct psychological theory to solve his dilemma.

The speech delivered in January 1829 at the Debating Society confirms this, for he had by then so far recovered from his indifference to reforming causes as to claim Wordsworth as one of the restoratives.

I have learned from W. that it is possible by dwelling on certain ideas and proper regulations of the associations to keep up a constant freshness in the emotions which objects excite and which else they would cease to excite as we grow older -to connect cheerful and joyous states of mind with almost every object, to make everything speak to us of our own enjoyments or those of other sentient beings, and to multiply ourselves as it were in the enjoyments of other creatures: to make the good parts of human nature afford us more pleasure than the bad parts afford us pain, and to rid ourselves entirely of all feelings of hatred or scorn for our fellow creatures.4a

The language here is associationist. Wordsworth was not incompatible with James Mill’s teaching but supplemented it.

Those who suppose Wordsworth led Mill away from utilitarianism and his old studies have one excuse in Mill’s very confusing narrative of his own development. It has been pointed out that the Wordsworth passage in

39 O.P. p. 85; Col. pp. 98-9. 40 O.P. p. 82; Col. pp. 95-6. 42 As noted by Karl Britton, ‘John Stuart Mill: A Debating Speech on Wordsworth,

41 O.P. p: 83; Col. p. 96.

1829’, Cambridge Review, lxxviii (8 March 1958), p. 420. MS at L.S.E.

350 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

the Autobiography telescopes two views of the poet which Mill held at different times.43 But this is not the only difliculty which faces the student of Mill’s development from 1826. Mill’s early draft contained no chapter headings. The titles ‘Youthful Propagandism’ and ‘A Crisis in my Mental History’ in Chapters IV and V seem to have been put in by Helen Taylor, Mill’s step- daughter, to whom he gave the task of preparing the MS for publication after his death.44 The separation of the two chapters interrupts the flow of the narrative and helps obscure Mill’s reason for taking the story in Ch. IV to 1830 and then in Ch. V returning to 1826 for an account of the mental crisis. In Ch. IV he describes the utilitarians’ contributions to the Westminster Review, the discussion group on logic and political economy in Threadneedle Street, and finally the formation of the London Debating Society in 1826 and how this diverted his energies away from the much-mismanaged West- minster under Bowring. He mentions his last article for Bowring, a review of Scott’s Napoleon, as costing him ‘more labour than any previous; but it was a labour of love’, but he makes no mention of its contents, nor why it cost more labour. The first paragraph of Ch. V explains the last of Ch. IV. After the Scott article, Mill says, he wrote little, and valued the intermission in which ‘the important transformation in my opinions and character’ went on undisturbedP5 Then folZows his reading of Bentham in 1821, the crisis of 1826-7, the Wordsworth passage, and the debates with Roebuck and Sterling. His own arrangement is even odder than Helen Taylor’s chapters. The year-long task of editing Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence in 1825-6, which cannot have been unconnected with the crisis, is left far behind it in Ch. IVP6 But Macaulay’s attack on James Mill’s Essay on Government, the first instalment of which appeared in the Edinburgh Review for March 1829, is mentioned after Mill’s withdrawal from the Debating Society, which was probably after November 1829, and may not have been final till 1830.”’ The discussions of James Mill’s Analysis which must surely have affected the composition of the speech on Wordsworth already mentioned, are not given alongside the passage on Wordsworth but tucked away before the account of the debates with the Owenites in 1825P8 It may be said that one should not cavil at a philosopher’s indifference to chronology ; but besides these oddities, there are changes of focus which argue an indifference not merely to chronology, but to whole portions of the writer’s intellectual development.

To take a trivial example first. Mill tells us that his difference with Roebuck

43 Cambridge Review, lxxviii (8 March 1958)’ p. 420. The passage in the Autobiography should be compared with Mill’s two essays, ‘What is Poetry? and ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’ reprinted by J. W. M. Gibbs in f i r l y Essaysof JohnStuart Mill(1897). For a dis- cussion of Mill’s views on poetry taken as a whole, see J. M. Robson, ‘J. S. Mill’s Theory of Poetry’, University of Toronto Quarterly,vol. xxix, no. 4, July 1960, pp. 420-38.

44 For the history of the MS after Mill’s death, see J. Stillinger, ‘The Text of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, xliii (1960).

45 O.P. p. 80; Col. pp. 92.

47 O.P. pp. 94-5; Col. pp. 110-11. For the dating of Mill’s last speech in the Debating Society, see the list of his speeches in Mill News Letter, i, no. 1 (Fall, 1965), pp. 4-5.

46 O.P. pp. 69-70; Col. pp. 80-1.

48 O.P. pp. 74-5; Col. p. 86.

WILLIAM THOMAS 351 began with their debate over the merits of Words~orth.4~ Roebuck’s account is quite Werent. He says he remonstrated with Mill over the damage which might be done to his reputation by his connection with Harriet Taylor, and that Mill indicated after this that their friendship was at an end.50 Roebuck‘s journalism during the 1830s suggests another reason still, that they disagreed over the nature of democracy and the extension of the franchise in England ; and there is more than a hint that Roebuck disapproved of the way Mill was conducting the London Review.51 In both matters, Roebuck was radical, Mill moderate; the exact reverse of their respective positions in the 1 8 6 0 ~ ~ ~ On a more abstract issue, Mill tells us that he was not at all satisfied with

his father’s reaction to Macaulay’s attack, which James Mill treated as ‘an attack on the reasoning faculty’. He adds that his father’s reply ought to have been ‘I was not writing a scientific treatise on politics, I was writing an argument for parliamentary reform’.53 Now John Mill’s writings soon after the attack seem to betray the very charge against Macaulay which he attributes to his father; while a little consideration of the case Macaulay was making shows that, if James Mill had really offered the reply his son suggests was the right one, it would have delivered him into Macaulay’s hands. Macaulay’s aim in the attack was precisely to show that the Essay on Government, which its admirers regarded as the foundation of a new science of politics, contained a democratic message quite inconsistent with other elements (their belief, for instance, in political economy) in their thought. The success of Macaulay’s assault was mainly due to the fact that the utilitarians could not make the reply John Mill says his father should have made.54

Now this emphasis is repeated elsewhere in the Autobiography, in a way which looks more like a systematic reinterpretation than an indulgent and filial lapse from accuracy. James Mill’s views on politics are presented throughout the Autobiography as extremely democratic. In fact, between the publication of the Essay on Government (1920) and the introduction of the Reform Bill, his political associations became more and more Whig. As Bentham noted, he needed someone to admire, and in the twenties this allegiance was transferred from Bentham to Brougham, with whom he co- operated closely in the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.55

49 O.P. pp. 90-1 ; Col. pp. 1 0 5 4 .

st Tait’s Magazine, i, pp. 515-25 and 6 5 1 6 (August and September) which criticize John Mill’s articles on ‘Pledges’ in the Examiner for 1 and 15 July 1832. In Oct. 1835 Roebuck published a pamphlet on Democracy in AmeriFa in his Pamphlets for the People in which he disagreed with Mill for his review of Tocqueville: ‘He [Mill] believes, if I mistake not, in the advantages t? be derived from an Aristocracy of intellect. I have no faith in an such Aristocracy . . . pp. 3-4. yz In E.D. p. 129 Mill admitted that Roebuck‘s pugnacity became alien to him when he himself had begun to tend to eclecticism, but this passage was omitted from the final draft.

54 I have made this suggestion at greater length in the Historical Journal, XII, 2 (1969),

55 A fact rather understated by James Mill’s biographer Bain, who Seems to have seen no letters from James Mill to Brougham before the latter became lard Chancellor. A. Bain, James Mill: a biography (1882).

R. E. Leader, Life and Letters of John Arthur Roebuck (1897), p. 39.

53 O.P. p. 95; col. p. 111.

pp. 249-84.

352 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Like Brougham he regretted the collapse of the Canning ministry in 1827,56 and early in 1830 he published in the Westminster an article which advocated the ballot as more important than the other radical measures of shorter parliaments and an extended franchi~e.~’ This article gets only a passing reference in the Autobiography, and its subject is not specified.58 On the other hand, if the political impact of the Essay on Government is blurred, James Mill’s originality as a thinker and especially one on the principles of educa- tion are given great prominence. His hostility to the established church is blown up into a rejection of religious belief of any sort, but the influence of Bentham’s own scepticism in shaping James Mill’s views is not mentioned. Rather, James Mill is presented as deserving the real credit for any disciples Bentham might have seemed to the outside world to have acquired; the Benthamites were really the young men who came to James Mill for the vigour and instructiveness of his con~ersat ion.~~ We have seen how any harm suffered under his instruction by the most famous of his pupils is care- fully softened and qualified. Can we trace any reason for this reinterpretation ?

I11

Thanks to Stillinger’s edition, and much recent work by Mill scholars, the history of the MSS of the Autobiography is now very well documented.60 It was begun two years after Mill’s marriage to Harriet Taylor in 1851. He recognized this event was a turning point in his life, and he seems all along to have meant to put down some autobiographical thoughts which would be a fitting judgement upon his life up to that time. There was also the need to place on record some denial of the scandal that had been accumulating around his name and Harriet’s since the early ‘forties’, and this was a stronger motive with her than with him for writing the memoir. Two years after their marriage, Mill’s health declined sharply. He had caught consumption from his father (though he was not aware of having done so) and he seems to have given it to his wife. But at first he was, or appeared to be, much more seriously ill than she. At one period he thought he would die, and from a rather morbid journal he kept at the time, w e know that this thought was the spur to the writing of the first draft of the Autobiography. This draft was completed in 1854, between Nice, where he had gone with his wife the previous year, and their house in Blackheath. Most probably the bulk of it was written in the first three months of 1854, when Mill was alone at Blackheath, while Harriet stayed abroad. His letters to her during this separation show a preoccupation with the works he had meant to write and might have to leave unwritten. In January 1854 he wrote to her that he thought two years would be enough

56 James Mill to Brougham, 9 Aug. 1827 (Brougham MSS, University College, London). In a letter of the following month Mill tells Brougham: ‘You already hold such a station in the minds of men, that office can add nothing to your dignity.’ (Zbid., 24 Sept. 1827.)

57 Westminster Review, xiii, no. 25 (July 1830). 5 8 O.P. p. 79; Col. p. 91. 5 9 0.P. DD. 61-2: Col. DD. 7&2. 6o See &hinger’s Intr6duction to the Early Draft. and A. W. Levi, ‘The Writing of

Mill’s Autobiography’, Ethics, Ixi (1951), pp. 248 -96.

WILLIAM THOMAS 353 ‘to get most of it into a state fit for printing-if not in the best form for popular effect, yet in the state of concentrated thought-a sort of mental pemican, which thinkers, when there are any after us, may nourish themselves with &then dilute for other people’?’

One of these projects never was written. This was the outline of the science of Ethology, which is sketched in Book VI of the System of Logic. This project went back to the conception outlined in his father’s Essay on Education. There James Mill had declared that the end of education could not be agreed on until a correct psychology had been formulated. Locke and Hartley had laid down the elements, ‘that the character of the human mind consists in the sequences of its ideas’; but a thorough knowledge of those sequences, and above all, that task of ‘theorizing the whole’ which philosophers could per- form, had yet to be done.62 This was the task James Mill set himself in the Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind. John Mill differed from his father in believing, with Comte, that different epochs produced different phases in the development of man’s mental outlook. The disagreement here can be exaggerated. Both father and son held to the associationist analysis because they thought that advocates of ‘innate ideas’ or ‘intuitionists’ were in the last resort supporters of the establishment and enemies of social reform. If men were admitted to possess capacities which could not be accounted for in terms of the association of ideas, if the differences between men and between classes could not be analysed into differences of education and environment, there was no hope for the reforming cause. John Mill was aware that the historicism he learnt from Comte carried conservative implications, particularly in its insistence on explaining men’s institutions, habits and opinions in terms of the historical stage which their society had reached. Ethology was designed to combat this conservatism: it was James Mill’s projected psychology added to a theory of historical change.

If. . . we employ the name Psychology for the science of the elementary laws of mind, Ethology will serve for the subordinate science which determines the kind of character produced, in conformity to those general laws, by any set of circumstances, physical and moral. According to this definition, Ethology is the science which corresponds to the art of education. . . When the circumstances of an individual or of a nation are in any considerable degree under our control, we may, by our knowledge of tendencies, be enabled to shape those circumstances in a manner much more favourable to the ends we desire, than the shape which they would of themselves assume.63

Ethology was to stand to education in the same relation as physics to mech- anics. Mill’s conviction of its essential foundation in associationism accounts, I think, for the care already noted in the description of the crisis of 1826, of which the early draft differs little from the final one.

On Harriet Mill’s return to England in 1854 the manuscript seems to

F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, p. 191. 62 James Mill, Essays reprinted from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (n.d. [1825]), art.

‘Education’, pp. 12-13, 17,34; and Cavenagh, op. cit., pp. 17, 25, 34. The former edition has each essay separately paginated.

63 A System ofLogic (1843), ii, pp. 522-3.

354 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

have been laid aside. From 1855 her health began to decline and she died in 1858. Mill was utterly desolate at her death, and it was not till 1861 that he was able to look at the manuscript again, when he rewrote it, making his own excisions and adding some of his wife’s suggested alterations, but leaving scarcely touched the section in which he had written of her influence upon him, apparently because he could not bear to alter it. The first part of the book, dealing with his education, however, he did alter, and he added a short section to bring the story up to The rejected leaves already discussed may have been taken out then, or else in 1869, when after a brief public career had ended with his failure to gain re-election to Parliament, he wrote the concluding section, which is the most fragmentary and perfunctory part of the book.65

From the death of Harriet Mill to 1869, Mill’s thoughts turned increasingly to the philosophy in which he had been brought up. One reason for this was that the social and intellectual isolation of his married years came to an end, and he was again received by his old friends like the Grotes, and even acquired a small coterie of admirers, like John Morley and Alexander Bain. He also returned to some of his old reforming militancy. He had already written the essay On Liberty, which was ready for publication when Harriet Mill died, though it came out in 1859. This contained a vigorous defence of the Socratic method in education in tones which resemble the Auto- biography.66 But though On Liberty was written with a strong indignation at the tendency Mill saw around him to persecute minority opinions, it does not represent so full a return to James Mill’s thought as later writings. For example, it seems unlikely Mill could have written his paragraphs against Calvinism upon a full reconsideration of his own intellectual heritage. (‘No theory can possibly be right,’ J. F. Stephen later objected, ‘which requires us to believe that such a man as John Knox was a poor heartbroken creature with no will of his But later in the same year Mill welcomed the revival of the psychology of Locke and Hartley, in a review of his friend Bain’s two books, The Senses and the Intellect (1855) and The Emotions and the Will (1859).6* He partly hoped that Bain would write on Ethology, for which he said he was not sufficiently prepared hirn~elf.6~ After Representative Government (1860) and Utilitarianism (1861) he returned to the assault on innate ideas, with some notes on Sir William Hamilton, intended first for an article, but growing into a book. ‘The great recommendation of this project’, he told Bain, ‘is that it will enable me to supply what was prudently left deficient in the Logic, and to do the kind of service which I am capable

64 O.P. p. 143; Col. p. 168.- 65 O.P. pp. 145-85; Col. pp. 170-221. Helen Taylor’s editing of these latter sections,

however, makes the World’s Classics ed. (Oxford, 1920) quite unsatisfactory. For her motives, see J. Stillinger, ‘The Text of J. S. Mill’s Autobiography’, pp. 235-7.

66 Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Representative Government (Everyman ed.), pp. 104-5. 67 James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. R. J. White (Cambridge,

19671, p. 83. 68 Mill’s review is reprinted in Dissertations and Discrrssions, iii (1867), pp. 97-152. 69 J. S. Mill to A. Bain, 14 Nov. 1859, H. S. Elliott, the Letters ofJohn Stuart MiIl(1910),

i, p. 226.

WILLIAM THOMAS 355 of to rational psychology, namely, to its Polemik.’70 The Exaniination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865) was written in the spirit of James Mill’s Fragment on Mackintosh, and in defence of the tradition of Locke and Hartley. Then came Mill’s parliamentary career, in the middle of which he was elected to be Lord Rector of St. Andrew’s. He wrote his Inaugural Address in the parliamentary recess of 1866-7, and it represents the fullest consideration he gave to education outside the Autobiography. Finally, in 1869, he wrote The Subjection of Women, and edited, with Bain, his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind.

These writings supply the key to the re-writing of the Autobiography; and even if it is hard to be certain whether the additions and excisions were made when he took up the MS in 1861 or when he added the final section in 1869-70, the bulk of the evidence (which is too detailed for more than a quick summary to be given here) seems to me to point to the latter date for most of them. Thus the respectful notes Mill made to the Analysis parallel an insertion in the Autobiography about its author’s claim to fame. In the Early Draft, James Mill’s death is followed by an explanation of the eclipse of his reputation: this was due, John Mill writes, to ‘a marked opposi- tion between his spirit and that of the present time’.71 Later, he added that this was because his father had been overshadowed by Bentham, but that

in a province in which Bentham had done nothing, that of analytic psychology, he will be known to posterity as one of the greatest names in that important branch of speculation, on which all the moral and political sciences ultimately rest, and will mark one of the essential stages in its progres~.~a

Any account of an education conducted by such a thinker, however, aimed as it must have been at society’s as well as the pupil’s progress, could not be clouded by admissions of failure, or signs of a deviation from philosophic principle. So John Mill went through the account giving the excuses for his father’s harshness which we have noted in connection with the first rejected leaves, and even adding, to the passage following these, the supposition that his father must have intended to keep him from the company of other boys so as to protect him from ‘vulgar modes of thought and feeling’.73 This was some way from the opinion he had expressed in 1840 to Caroline Fox: ‘I never was a boy, never played at cricket: it is better to let Nature have her own way.’74 In those days he had been harassed by the thought that compared to his contemporaries he was in some way deficient of a faculty. He was, he thought, ‘fitted to be a mere logical expounder’ of the truths that came intuitively to higher natures than his But the attack on Hamilton drove out intuition; and if associationism laid down that even differences between men and women were environmental, as between young men there was no room for doubt. ‘In what consists the principal and most characteristic

70 A. Bain, J. S. Mill: A Criticism, p. 118. 71 E.D. p. 160. 72 O.P. p. 122; Col. p. 143. 73 O.P. p. 22; Col. p. 25. 74 Memories of Old Friends, p. 85. 7 5 The Earlier Letters of J . S. Mill, 1812-1848, ed. F. E. Mineka (1963), i , pp. 113, 163.

356 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

difference between one human intellect and another?’ he asked his St. Andrew’s audience.

In their ability to judge correctly of evidence. Our direct perceptions of truth are so limited; we know so few things by immediate intuition, or, as it used to be called, by simple apprehension-that we depend for almost all our valuable knowledge, on evidence external to itself; and most of us are very unsafe hands at estimating evidence, where an appeal cannot be made to actual eyesight. The intellectual part of our education has nothing more important to do, than to correct or mitigate this almost universal infirmity-this summary and sub- stance of nearly all purely intellectual weakness.76

The learning of logic, even the school logic, therefore bulked large in the course Mill wanted studied in the university, in fact, as large as it does in the Autobiography. Next to it in importance were the Latin and Greek classics, in which Mill held that boys could attain fluency before they had left Modern languages and history on the other hand could be acquired by travel and by private reading.78 Mill speaks of university life as if its main value lay in the rapid assimilation of classical, philosophical and scientific informa- tion, and he confessed himself ‘amazed at the limited conception which many educational reformers have formed to themselves of a human being’s powers of acqui~i t ion’ .~~ Bain thought the St. Andrews address a failure because he had demanded too much of a university curriculum, since he was only drawing on his own example, ‘and that did not support his position’.80 But Mill himself thought he was in no way exceptional, and at some stage in the revision of his account of his own education, he prefixed a paragraph saying what he conceived the value of the Autobiography to be.

. . . I have thought, that in an age in which education, and its improvement, are the subject of more if not of profounder study than at any former period in English history, it may be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable, and which, whatever else it may have done, has proved how much more than is commonly supposed may be taught, and taught thoroughly, in those early years which, in the common modes of instruc- tions, are little better than wasted.81

What he had done, the St. Andrews students could do; or perhaps he had himself done no more than he had recommended to them.

Having decided to turn the Autobiography into an associationist tract, Mill found some of his earlier expressions either irrelevant or wrong. He had written with some feelings of bitterness against his family, whom he had accused of wilfully insulting his wife. These he softened or excluded.82 As he returned to society he found himself more kindly disposed to old friends and becoming more intimate with others. He had originally written a sharp paragraph on Sarah and comments hardly less acid on her husband.

76 Cavenagh, James and J. S. Mill on Education, p. 161. 7 7 Zbid. p. 140. 7 8 Zbid. v. 144. 79 Zbid. v. 138.

Bain,.J. S. Mill: A Criticism, pp. 127-8. s t E.D. p. 35; O.P. p. 3; Col. p. 1 . 8 2 For Mill’s break with his family, see Hayek, J. S. Mill arid Harriet Taylor, pp. 165-81. 83 E.D. pp. 147-8.

WILLIAM THOMAS 357 These he cut out. Roebuck too was honoured, though no longer a radical.84 Grote, who was in the EarZy Draft given a large part of the blame for the collapse of the Philosophic Radical party in parliament in the late 1830s, was in the revised version of the same section not mentioned by name. Here his revision is very interesting. Mill had in 1864 settled his accounts with Comte, in two articles in which he acknowledged his own debts, but elaborated the charge he had made in passing in On Liberty, that Comte aspired to establish an intellectual despotism of unprecedented severity.8s In the final draft of the Autobiography he added (oddly enough between his account of the resumption of the Logic in 1837, and that of the Durham Mission in 1838) two paragraphs in the same spirit.86 However, he seems to have continued to think highly of Comte’s classification of human history into the three stages of theological, metaphysical and positive, and to express his own views on the past in a very historicist phraseology derived from him. The use he makes of this historicism in the Autobiography has not, as far as I know, been noticed. He agreed with Comte, he says, that ‘the moral and intellectual ascendancy, once exercised by priests, must in time pass into the hands of philosophers’,8’ even if he did not want philosophers organized into a corporation such as Comte envisaged. But as he now identified his own thought more and more with that of his father (a figure of the eighteenth century, and of course all that was best in it, indeed the Voltaire of his age)s8 he must present all the intellectual contacts of his youth who had diverged from, and indeed done much to dislodge his own utilitarianism, as historically pre-destined to oppose it. This theory now offered a way out of the difficulty of explaining who was to blame for the decline of the parliamentary party nominally led by Grote. ‘On a calm retrospect’, runs Mill’s later addition,

I can perceive that the men were less in fault than we supposed, and that we had expected too much from them. They were in unfavourable circumstances. Their lot was cast in the years of inevitable reaction, when, the Reform excitement being over, and the few legislative improvements which the public really called for having been rapidly effected, power gravitated back in its natural direction, to those who were for keeping things as they were; when the public mind desired rest, and was less disposed than at any other period since the peace, to let itself be moved by attempts to work up the reform feeling into fresh activity in favour of new things. It would have required a great political leader, which no one is to be blamed for not being, to have effected really great things by parliamentary discussion when the nation was in this mood. My father and I had hoped that some competent leader might arise; some man of philosophic attainments and popular talents, who would have put heart into the many younger or less distin- guished men that would have been ready to join him. . .a9

There is no suggestion here that the party’s failure was due to sharp diver- gences of opinion, which John Mill’s editorial policy on the London and

84 Cf. E.D. pp. 128-9 with O.P. p. 117; and Col. pp. 136-7. 85 Utilitarianism, On Liberty . . . etc. (Everyman ed.) p. 76. 86 O.P. pp. 126-8; Col. pp. 147-9. 8 7 O.P. p. 127; Col. p. 148. 88 O.P. u. 123: Col. 11. 143. c- --- z - - - - r - - - - 89 6:P: pp. 117-18; COl . p. 137.

0 .P.p. 118;Col.p. 138.TheLoridorzReviewwasmergedwith the Wesfririnstevin 1836.

358 JOHN STUART MILL AND THE USES OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Westminster helped to widen. Rather, Mill claims that he ‘put ideas into their heads, and purpose into their hearts’, as if the party had never split over the Durham Mission?O

This, and other errors of omission like it, are not the effect of conscious disingenuousness. But Mill’s was, for all its power and severe application, a rather pliant mind. ‘Persons around him’, Roebuck said in 1838, ‘lead his opinions to what point they please.’g1 He was very liable to suppose people he knew and liked were more capable than they were, but too ingenuous to be any wiser when he was disappointed by them. Mill had his own character- istic way of accounting for the various turns and twists of his intellectual allegiance which can be misread as proof of a strong historical sense. Always loyal to his father’s psychology, he spoke of them as extraneous influences acting upon his own mind (or when numerous and unsettling, ‘streaming in’ upon it), which laid hold of ‘a portion of the truth‘ when it could find it, but summoned up ‘the will’ to detach any associations of pleasure from an erroneous view. There is a strong autobiographical element in Mill’s picture of the wise man in On Liberty, as one who observes ‘the steady habit of correcting and completing his own opinion by collating it with those of others’ (a habit which he oddly holds will lead to a reliance upon one’s judgement)B2 This is no doubt what he thought he was doing, but a political theory which ‘made common cause . . . with heretics generally’,93 and a psychological theory which gave so large a place to the will, could hardly be reconciled with an admission that he had had an education unfavourable to strength of will.

It is rather harder to explain why a psychology which stressed the forma- tion of correct ideas by the keeping up of particular ‘trains’ of sensation, should not have led Mill to be more expansive on the effects upon him of the surroundings of his youth. He does speak of mountain scenery, it is true, but mainly as an exercise of his emotions under the threat of analysis. But why, for instance, after a boyhood associated with one of the most romantic- ally beautiful houses in the West Country, did he never develop any feeling for architecture? And here he hardly realized the worst effect of his educa- tion. For it is not that his experiences had been confined, but that he had not been encouraged to articulate more than a fraction of them, and that fraction had been drawn from him by the severe and demanding Socratic dialogue, which had taught him tenacity and clarity but left undeveloped more spon- taneous forms of expression. Along with this, he had as the eldest of a large family, charged with ‘the learned part’ of his sisters’ education, been burdened with a sense of responsibility which set him apart from the fun of the younger children. So that what those duties left of a boyish capacity for simple joy, the compte rendu further impoverished, by draining his imaginative life. That modern Wordsworthian, Herbert Read, in his own reminiscences of his childhood, has left a vivid account of the formation of his imagination in

91 Brougham MSS, U.C.L. J. A. Roebuck to Ld. Brougham, 31 Aug. 1838; cf. also Henry Reeve’s opinion in Edinburgh Review, cxxxix (Jan. 1874), p. 117.

92 Utilitarianism, On Liberty. . . etc. p. 82. 93 Zbid. p. 71.

WILLIAM THOMAS 359 contact with ordinary, natural objects, which conveniently expresses the sort of loss which I believe Mill’s education involved. He describes how certain of his childhood impressions, places where he had walked, doors he had gone through, were later called up to supply the deficiencies in whatever story he was reading. ‘Even today’, he goes on, ‘my first memories easily usurp the function of the imagination, and clothe in familiar dimensions and patterns, exact and objective, the scenes which the romancer has purposely left vague.’94 Mill’s mind was in this sense without memories-the memories of trivial, everyday objects registered with the unreflecting sensibility of a child who observes more than he can give a name to. When later in life he reached back to recall some experience of his youth, or the impression made upon him by an acquaintance, he could not recapture or render them vividly, but only set out a theoretical position or summarize (not without the benefit of hindsight) the main points of a debate.

Between his youthful experiences and the time he strove to write them down moreover, there was an arid tract of some twenty years, in which he had struggled against ill health, against the unhappiness and frustration of a love affair which combined mutual absorption and platonic rectitude, and against the isolation he felt as his devotion to Harriet estranged his family and friends. Not surprisingly he came to admire and to adopt some of his father’s stoicism, the industry and self-denial that had kept the family in comfort during his boyhood, and to quell introspection with the grave rule: ‘Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be The objection to this as a rule is not merely that a man without curiosity about his own feelings will make a poor autobiographer. A weightier objection is that a man who believes that ‘the conscious ability to do without happiness gives the best prospect of realizing such happiness as is attainable’96 is likely to offer the unhappiness of his life more as a vindication than as a criticism of his training for social good. Mill’s commitment to utilitarianism not only gives a humourless and priggish cast to his own account of his life. His interpretation of his early motives is subordinated in the Autobiography to his later aims. As he returned to the opinions of his father, he seems to have tried to make the peculiar oppressiveness of his early education appear part of a plan, and his later emergence from its restrictions the result of a con- scious application of its benefits. If that is what he intended, then it is ironic that his pious revisions in favour of his father’s views have led his readers to pity the pupil rather than admire the teacher.

94 Herbert Read, The Contrary Experience (1963), p. 19. g5 O.P. p. 86; Col. p. 100. 96 lJtilitqriaqism, Oq Liberty . . . etc. p. 15,