had " fine translunary things " in him. His better
style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity
and purity of his life. We have said that his range
was narrow, but to be a master is to be a master.
He had caught his English at its living source,
among the poets and prose-writers of its best days;
his literature was extensive and recondite; his
quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore:
there are sentences of his as perfect as anything
in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallised;
his metaphors and images are always fresh from the
soil; he had watched Nature like a detective who
is to go upon the stand; as we read him, it seems
as if all out-of-doors had kept a diary and become
its own Montaigne; we look at the landscape as
in a Claude Lorraine glass; compared with his,
all other books of similar aim, even White's Sel-
bornej seem dry as a country clergyman's meteor-
ological journal in an old almanac. He belongs
with Donne and Browne and Novalis; if not with
the originally creative men, with the scarcely smaller
class who are peculiar, and whose leaves shed their
invisible thought-seed like ferns.



121



JOHN STUART MILL'S
"AUTOBIOGRAPHY "

By Richard Holt Hutton

That this curious volume delineates, on the whole,
a man marked by the most earnest devotion to
human good, and the widest intellectual sym-
pathies, no one who reads it with any discernment
can doubt. But it is both a very melancholy book
to read, and one full of moral paradoxes. It is very
sad, in the first instance, to read the story of the
over-tutored boy, constantly incurring his father's
displeasure for not being able to do what by no
possibility could he have done, and apparently
without any one to love. Mr. James Mill, viva-
cious talker, and in a narrow way powerful thinker
as he was, was evidently as an educator, on his
son's own showing, a hard master, anxious to reap
what he had not sown, and to gather what he had
not strawed, or as that son himself puts it, expecting
" effects without causes." Not that the father
did not teach the child with all his might, and
teach in many respects well; but then he taught
the boy far too much, and expected him to learn
besides a great deal that he neither taught him nor
showed him where to find. The child began Greek

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JOHN STUART MILL

at three years old, read a good deal of Plato at
seven, and was writing what he flattered himself
was " something serious," a history of the Roman
Government, — not a popular history, but a con-
stitutional history of Rome, — by the time he was
nine years old. He began logic at twelve, went
through a " complete course of political economy "
at thirteen, including the most intricate points of
the theory of currency. He was a constant writer
for the Westminster Review at eighteen, was
editing Bentham's Theory of Evidence and writing
habitual criticisms of the Parliamentary debates at
nineteen. At twenty he fell into a profound melan-
choly, on discovering that the only objects of life
for which he lived, — the objects of social and
political reformers, — would, if suddenly and com-
pletely granted, give him no happiness whatever.
Such a childhood and youth, lived apparently
without a single strong affection, — for his relation
to his father was one of deep respect and fear,
rather than love, and he tells us frankly, in de-
scribing the melancholy to which I have alluded,
that if he had loved any one well enough to confide
in him, the melancholy would not have been, —
resulting at the age of eighteen in the production
of what Mr. Mill himself says might, with as
little extravagance as would ever be involved in
the application of such a phrase to a human being,
be called "a mere reasoning machine," — are not
pleasant subjects of contemplation, even though
it be true, as Mr, Mill asserts, that the over-supply

123



RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

of study and under-supply of love, did not prevent
his childhood from being a happy one. Nor are
the other personal incidents of the autobiography
of a different cast. Nothing is more remarkable
than the fewness, limited character, and apparently,
so far as close intercourse was concerned, temporary
duration, of most of Mr Mill's friendships. The
one close and intimate friendship of his life, which
made up to him for the insufficiency of all others,
that with the married lady who, after the death of
her husband, became his wife, was one which
for a long time subjected him to slanders, the pain
of which his sensitive nature evidently felt very
keenly. And yet he must have been aware that
though in his own conduct he had kept free from
all stain, his example was an exceedingly dangerous
and mischievous one for others, who might be
tempted by his moral authority to follow in a track
in which they would not have had the strength
to tread. Add to this that his married life was very
brief, only seven years and a half, being unex-
pectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence
for his wife's memory and genius — in his own
words, " a religion " — was one which, as he must
have been perfectly sensible, he could not possibly
make to appear otherwise than extravagant, not to
say an hallucination, in the eyes of the rest of
mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an
irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all
the tender and enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is
so pathetic to find a man who gained his fame by

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JOHN STUART MILL

his " dry-light " a master, and it is impossible not
to feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill's
career are very sad. True, his short service in
Parliament, when he was already advanced in
years, was one to bring him much intellectual
consideration and a certain amount of popularity.
But even that terminated in a defeat, and was
hardly successful enough to repay him for the loss
of literary productiveness which those three years
of practical drudgerv imposed. In spite of the
evident satisfaction and pride with which Mr.
Mill saw that his school of philosophy had gained
rapid ground since the publication of his Logic,
and that his large and liberal view of the science
of political economy had made still more rapid
way amongst all classes, the record of his life which
he leaves behind him is not even in its own tone,
and still less in the effect produced on the reader,
a bright and happy one. It is " sicklied o'er with
the pale cast of thought," — and of thought that
has to do duty for much, both of feeling and of
action, which usually goes to constitute the full
life of a large mind.

And besides the sense of sadness which the
human incident of the autobiography produces,
the intellectual and moral story itself is full of
paradox which weighs upon the heart as well as
the mind. Mr. Mill was brought up by his father
to believe that Christianity was false, and that
even as regards natural religion there was no ground
for faith. How far he retained the latter opinion,

125



RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

— he evidently did retain the former, — it is under-
stood that some future work will tell us. But in
the meantime, he is most anxious to point out
that religion, in what he thinks the best sense, is
possible even to one who does not believe in God.
That best sense is the sense in which religion stands
for an ideal conception of a Perfect Being to which
those who have such a conception " habitually
refer as the guide of their conscience," an ideal,
he says, " far nearer to perfection than the objective
Deity of those who think themselves obliged to
find absolute goodness in the author of a world
so crowded with suffering and so deformed by
injustice as ours." Unfortunately, however, this
" ideal conception of a perfect Being " is not a
power on which human nature can lean. It is
merely its own best thought of itself; so that it
dwindles when the mind and heart contract, and
vanishes just when there is most need of help. This
Mr. Mill himself felt at one period of his life. At
the age of twenty he underwent a crisis which
apparently corresponded in his own opinion to the
state of mind that leads to " a Wesleyan's con-
version." I wish we could extract in full his eloquent
and impressive description of this rather thin moral
crisis. Here is his description of the first stage:

Froni the winter of 182 1, when first I read Bentham,
and especially from the commencement of the West-
minster Review, I had what might truly be called an
object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My con-
ception of my own happiness was entirely identified
with this object. The personal sympathies I wished

126



JOHN STUART MILL

for were those of fellow-labourers in this enterprise.
1 endeavoured to pick up as many flowers as I could
by the way: but as a serious and permanent personal
satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed
on this ; and I was accustomed to felicitate myself on
the certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through
placing my happiness in something durable and
distant, in which some progress might be always
making, while it could never be exhausted by com-
plete attainment. This did very well for several
years, during which the general improvement going
on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged
with others in struggling to promote it, seemed
enough to fill up an interesting and animated exist-
ence. But the time came when I awakened from this
as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I
was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is
occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment
or pleasurable excitement ; one of those moods when
what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or
indifferent; the state, I should think, in which con-
verts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by
their first "conviction of sin." In this frame of mind
it occurred to me to put the question directly to
myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were
realised ; that all the changes in institutions and
opinions which you are looking forward to could be
completely effected at this very instant ; would this
be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an
irrepressible self -consciousness distinctly answered,
" No ! " At this my heart sank within me: the whole
foundation on which my life was constructed fell
down. All my happiness was to have been found in
the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased
to charm, and how could there ever again be any
interest in the means ? I seemed to have nothing left
to hve for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass
away of itself ; but it did not. A night's sleep, the
sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life,
had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed conscious-

127



RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

ness of the woful fact. I carried it with me into all
companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything
had power to cause me even a few minutes' obUvion
of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow
thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's Dejection
— I was not then acquainted with them — exactly
describe my case:

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books ;
those memorials of past nobleness and greatness from
which I had always hitherto drawn strength and
animation. I read them now without feeling or
with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm;
and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind,
and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself
out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of
what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to
make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not
have been in the condition I was.

It is clear that Air. Mill felt the deep craving
for a more permanent and durable source of spiritual
life than any which the most beneficent activity
spent in patching up human institutions and labori-
ously recasting the structure of human society,
could secure him, — that he himself had a suspicion
that, to use the language of a book he had been
taught to make light of, his soul was thirsting for
God, and groping after an eternal presence, in which
he lived and moved and had his being. What is
strange and almost burlesque, if it were not so
melancholy, is the mode in which this moral crisis

128



JOHN STUART MILL

culminates. A few tears shed over Marmontel's
Memoir es^ and the fit passed away:

Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers
I have found a true description of what I felt, were
often in my thoughts, not at this time (for I had
never read them), but in a later period of the same
mental malady:

Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.

In all probabihty my case was by no means so peculiar
as I fancied it, and I doubt not that many others have
passed through a similar state; but the idiosyncrasies
of my education had given to the general pheno-
menon a special character, which made it seem the
natural effect of causes that it was hardly possible
for time to remove. I frequently asked myself, if
I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when life
must be passed in tlxis manner. I generally answered
to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear
it beyond a year. When, however, not more than
half that duration of time had elapsed, a small ray
of light broke in upon my gloom. I was reading,
accidentally, Marmontel's Memoires, and came to
the passage which relates his father's death, the
distressed position of the family, and the sudden
inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and
made them feel that he would be everything to them
— would supply the place of all that they had lost.
A vivid conception of the scene and its feelings came
over me, and I was moved to tears. From this
moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me,
was gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a
stock or a stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the
material out of which all worth of character, and all
capacity for happiness, are made. Relieved from
my ever present sense of irremediable wretchedness,
I gradually found that the ordinary incidents of life
I 129 K



RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

could again give me some pleasure; that I could
again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for
cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in con-
versation, in public affairs ; and that there was, once
more, excitement, though of a moderate kind, in
exerting myself for my opinions, and for the pubhc
good. Thus the cloud gradually drew off, and I again
enjoyed life: and though I had several relapses,
some of which lasted many months, I never again
was as miserable as I had been.

And the only permanent fruit which this experi-
ence left behind it seems to have been curiously
slight. It produced a threefold moral result, — first,
a grave alarm at the dangerously undermining
capacities of his own power of moral analysis,
which promised to unravel all those artificial moral
webs of painful and pleasurable associations with
injurious and useful actions, respectively, which
his father had so laboriously woven for him during
his childhood and youth; and further, two notable
practical conclusions, — one, that in order to attain
happiness (which he " never wavered " in regarding
as " the test of all rules of conduct and^the end of
life "), the best strategy is a kind of flank march,
— to aim at something else, at some ideal end, not
consciously as a means to happiness, but as an end
in itself, — so, he held, may you have a better chance
of securing happiness by the way, than you can
by any direct pursuit of it, — and the other, that it
is most desirable to cultivate the feelings, the passive
susceptibilities, as well as the reasoning and active
powers, if the utilitarian life is to be made enjoyable.
Surely a profound sense of the inadequacy of

130



JOHN STUART MILL

ordinary human success to the cravings of the human
spirit was never followed by a less radical moral
change. That it resulted in a new breadth of
sympathy with writers like Coleridge and Words-
worth, whose fundamental modes of thought and
faith Mr. Mill entirely rejected, but for whose
modes of sentiment, after this period of his life,
he somehow managed, not very intelligibly, to
make room, is very true; and it is also true that
this lent a new largeness of tone to his writings,
and gave him a real superiority in all matters of
taste to that of the utilitarian clique to which he
had belonged, — results which enormously widened
the scope of his influence, and changed him from
the mere expositor of a single school of psychology
into the thoughtful critic of many different schools.
But as far as I can judge, all this new breadth was
gained at the cost of a certain haze which, from
this time forth, spread itself over his grasp of the
first principles which he still professed to hold.
He did not cease to be a utilitarian, but he ceased
to distinguish between the duty of promoting your
own happiness and of promoting anybody else's,
and never could make it clear where he found his
moral obligation to sacrifice the former to the
latter. He still maintained that actions, and not
sentiments, are the true subjects of ethical dis-
crimination; but he discovered that there was a
significance which he had never before suspected
even in sentiments and emotions of which he con-
tinued to maintain that the origin was artificial

131



RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

and arbitrary. He did not cease to declaim against
the prejudices engendered by the intuitional theory
of philosophy, but he made it one of his peculiar
distinctions as an Experience-philosopher, that he
recommended the fostering of new prepossessions,
only distinguished from the prejudices he strove
to dissipate by being, in his opinion, harmless,
though quite as little based as those in ultimate or
objective truth. He maintained as strongly as ever
that the character of man is formed by circum-
stances, but he discovered that the will can act
upon circumstances, and so modify its own future
capability of willing; and though it is in his opinion
circumstances which enable or induce the will thus
to act upon circumstances, he thought and taught
that this makes all the difference between fatalism
and the doctrine of cause and effect as applied to
character. After his influx of new light, he re-
mained as strong a democrat as ever, but he ceased
to believe in the self-interest principle as universally
efficient to produce good government when applied
to multitudes, and indeed qualified his democratic
theory by an intellectual aristocracy of feeling
which to our minds is the essence of exclusiveness.
"A person of high intellect," he writes, "should
never go into unintellectual society, unless he can
enter it as an apostle; yet he is the only person with
high objects, who can ever enter it at all." You
can hardly have exclusiveness more extreme than
that, or a doctrine more strangely out of moral
sympathy with the would-be universalism of the

132



JOHN STUART MILL

Benthamite theory. In fact, as it seems to me, Mr,
Mill's unquestionable breadth of philosophic treat-
ment was gained at the cost of a certain ambiguity
which fell over the root-principles of his philosophy,
— an ambiguity by which he won for it a more
catholic repute than it deserved. The result of the
moral crisis through which Mr. Mill passed at
the age of twenty may be described briefly, in my
opinion, as this, — that it gave him tastes far in
advance of his philosophy, foretastes in fact of a
true philosophy; and that this moral flavour of
something truer and wider, served him in place of
the substance of anything truer and wider, during
the rest of his life.

The part of the ^Autobiography which I like least,
though it is, on the whole, that on which I am most
at one with Mr. Mill, is the section in which he
reviews his short, but thoughtful Parliamentary
career. The tone of this portion of the book is
too self-important, too minutely egotistic, for the
dry and abstract style in which it is told. It
adds little to our knowledge of the Parliamentary
struggles in which he was engaged, and nothing
to our knowledge of any of the actors in them
except himself. The best part of the Autobiography,
except the remarkable and masterly sketch of his
father, Mr. James Mill, is the account of the growth
of his own philosophic creed in relation to Logic
and Political Economy, but this is of course a
part only intelligible to the students of his more
abstract works.

^2>^



RICHARD HOLT HUTTON

On the whole, the book will be found, I think,
even by Mr. Mill's most strenuous disciples, a
dreary one. It shows that in spite of all Mr, Mill's
genuine and generous compassion for human misery
and his keen desire to alleviate it, his relation to
concrete humanity was of a very confined and
reserved kind, — one brightened by few personal
ties, and those few not, except in about two cases,
really hearty ones. The multitude was to him an
object of compassion and of genuine beneficence,
but he had no pleasure in men, no delight in actual
intercourse with this strange, various, homely
world of motley faults and virtues. His nature
was composed of a few very fine threads, but wanted
a certain strength of basis, and the general effect,
though one of high and even enthusiastic disin-
terestedness, is meagre and pallid. His tastes were
refined, but there was a want of homeliness about
his hopes. He was too strenuously didactic to be
in sympathy with man, and too incessantly analytic
to throw his burden upon God. There was some-
thing overstrained in all that was noblest in him,
this excess seeming to be by way of compensation,
as it were, for the number of regions of life in which
he found little or nothing where other men find
so much. He was strangely deficient in humour,
which, perhaps, we ought not to regret, for had he
had it, his best work would in all probability have
been greatly hampered by such a gift. Unique in
intellectual ardour and moral disinterestedness, of
tender heart and fastidious tastes, though narrow

134



JOHN STUART MILL

in his range of practical sympathies, his name will
long be famous as that of the most wide-minded
and generous of political economists, the most
disinterested of utilitarian moralists, and the most
accomplished and impartial of empirical philo-
sophers. But as a man, there was in him a certain
poverty of nature, in spite of the nobleness in him,
— a monotonous joylessness, in spite of the hectic
sanguineness of his theoretic creed, — a want of
genial trust, which spurred on into an almost
artificial zeal his ardour for philosophic recon-
struction; and these are qualities which will
probably put a well-marked limit on the future
propagation of an influence such as few writers
on such subjects have ever before attained within
the period of their own lifetime.



135



AN ENGLISH GNOSTIC
"The Spectator," 1867

Some strange, rather striking, and very reckless
papers, full of a sort of blasphemy — we use the word
not to convey any censure of ours, but in its strict
meaning, — which has scarcely been heard in any
tone but that of rebellious passion since the conflict
of Christian faith with Paganism first began, have
appeared in the Reader during the last two weeks,
purporting to be " Papers of a Suicide," — and in
the second of the series, termed " A Religious and
Autobiographical Romance," — reviving in lan-
guage that reminds one rather vividly of one of
the choruses in Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta, where
the maidens address " that Supreme evil God," one
of the most curious and most utterly obsolete dreams
of the oppressed Gnostic imagination. True, there
is a hint that the papers are partly, if not altogether
dramatic, and that they are supposed to be written
by a man with a germ of insanity in his blood;
but still this hypothesis would scarcely be resorted
to, to give a colour of probability to a very strange
form of evil dream, were there not a wish on the
part of the writer to revive that intellectual night-
mare of an age of religious nightmares, with express

136



AN ENGLISH GNOSTIC

reference to the position of modern faith and un-
belief. The Gnostic fancy to which we refer was,
— that the Jewish Scriptures were inspired by an
inferior and to some extent incapable god, — the
demiurgos, as the Gnostics called him, — who was