1896

JOHN STUART MILL

ALMOST a generation has passed since a most strenuous and magnanimous spirit was laid to rest in the cemetery of Avignon along the Rhone. In that majestic and melancholy spot, beneath dark pines and beside his beloved wife, lies John Stuart Mill, one of the most intense workers, one of the most upright spirits of our age. The age itself, we must admit, has been flowing on, like the Rhone to the sea, and has left the philosopher at peace in his distant grave. His work was completed, he himself said with his dying breath; and his most devoted friends will not dare to claim for him the influence and the reputation he undoubtedly possessed some thirty years ago. They are few to-day who will re-echo quite literally all that John Morley said in the two fine pieces written on the death of Mill in 1873, now to be read in the third volume of his Miscellanies. His tribute, if deepened into rare passion and pathos by the unexpected loss of a friend and master, was substantially just and true. He did not say too much when he wrote: A strong and pure light is gone out, the radiance of a clear vision and a beneficent purpose;' 'We have lost a great teacher and example of knowledge and virtue.'

It is, however, obvious that the influence of John Stuart Mill has been waning in the present generation. They who would use the language just cited are not so many as they were, nor are they themselves in so strong a force. It was said at the time of his death that with the reputation of Mill would stand or fall the reputation of a whole generation of Englishmen. Something of that kind has already happened. The young lions of to-day, whether in politics, literature, or philosophy, are very far from caring much for what was said by them of old time,' i.e. in the early manhood of their own fathers. Their motto is, ἡμεῖς μὲν πατέρων μέγ. ἀμύμονες εὐχόμεθ' sivat. They are not familiar with the reputations of the last generaεἶναι. tion, and are apt to wonder how these were made. If the reputation of Mill has waned, the reputation of a whole school of leading minds of his generation has waned also. It was the dominant school of the 'sixties' it is dominant no more.

For this reason it is much to be wished that John Morley would now give us that estimate of Mill which in 1873 he said would one 487

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day have to be made, and that Life which we have so long awaited. But since he is otherwise employed (alas! for letters, alas! for philosophy), a few words may be permitted to tell the younger generation wherein lay the influence over us elders of Mill's character and mind some thirty years ago. For my own part, I can pretend to none of the qualifications which so eminently meet in Mr. Morley. Though I knew Mill in the later years of his life, I could not in any sense lay claim to his intimacy. With very deep respect for him, I was in no way his disciple. My own education, habits, tastes, and temperament were so utterly different from his as to awaken in me the interest of contrast and surprise. I felt, and I still feel, vehement aversion to some of Mill's cherished ideals and doctrines. And so far from his being my master, he has attacked my own master with unsparing, and I hold unjust, criticism in an important volume. I can, therefore, pretend to no claim to speak of him except it may be some knowledge of his life, nature, and writings; a deep reverence for his noble qualities; and, I think, a sympathetic, but real, impartiality of mind.

These few pages will, of course, not admit of any proper criticism of Mill's philosophy, social and moral teaching, or his political theories, much less any estimate of his character, example, and life. To attempt such a task would be to compile a treatise on Logic, another on Political Economy, a third on Ethic, a fourth on Politics, to say nothing of Metaphysics, Natural Theology, and Positivism. No such high aim is mine. We shall have this in good time, we all trust, when Unionists and Nationalists, Imperialists and Englishmen shall have lain down together at last. In the meantime, I wish to say a few words (caret quia vate sacro) as to the influence of John Stuart Mill upon his own generation-what of it is left and is destined to remain-what of it lies silent beneath the pine trees and cypresses at Avignon-into what form some of the best of it has matured.

Those who are familiar with the sermon on the death of Mill I have cited, will remember how['deeply it is charged with enthusiasm for the character of the man, more than with praise of the work of the teacher. It is, perhaps, not easy for those who did not personally know him to do justice to all that was great and good in Mill's nature. By education and by temperament alike he was one of the most reserved and self-contained of men, formally and externally not very sympathetic, a Stoic by birth and training, cramped from childhood by an unnatural and almost inhuman type of discipline, a man to whom the ordinary amusements, humours, and passions of life were as utterly unknown as were its follies and its vices. His punctilious courtesy was such as to seem somewhat pedagogic to the ordinary man of the world; as his generosity was so methodically rational as to seem almost ungracious to the idle good fellow. Infinitely patient, just, tolerant as he was, he was always dominated by the

desire to strike the balance of right and wrong, of the weight of evidence, the force of argument, pro and contra every act under observation and every proposition that he heard. This produced on the ordinary and casual observer an impression of pedantic formalism most undeserved by a nature that was the very soul of compassion, benevolence, and honour. As his books are curiously devoid of anything like literary grace or mastery of the 'pathetic fallacy,' the ordinary reader does not easily perceive how much enthusiasm, what magnanimity, what tenderness underlies the precise statements even of such pieces as the Autobiography, the Subjection of Women, and Liberty: pieces which are red-hot within with affection, pity, and passion. Some of us were always more attracted by Mill's character than by his intellect: we rated his heart above his brain: and his failures seemed to us mental, not moral perversities. But of his fine and exemplary nature it is indeed needless for me to speak. It has had full justice done to it by John Morley, who has so well placed Mill's distinction in the 'union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous hope.' We listened to him just because we found in him a most systematic intellect in a truly great heart.

It must always be borne in mind that Mill essentially belonged to a school, that he was peculiarly the product of a very marked order of English thinkers, and gave their ideas a new development. Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, can hardly be said to have been either the sons or the founders of any school of thought. John Mill was a singularly systematic product of a singularly systematic school of philosophers. And he was himself at one time the recognised head of a group of men of a more or less kindred type, with more or less similar aims in mental and social science. Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Malthus, James Mill, Austin, Grote, Bowring, Roebuck, the philosophic Radicals of the first Reform era, maintained a real filiation of central ideas which reached their complete general systematisation in the earlier writings of John Stuart Mill. He in turn worked on general lines with Professor Bain, T. Hare, G. H. Lewes, Professor Cairnes, W. E. Forster, and Henry Fawcett. John Morley and Leonard Courtney still maintain erect the standard of their former chief. And Herbert Spencer, building on an analogous general ground-plan, has raised a yet more encyclopædic system of his own.

John Morley hardly over-stated the intellectual authority of Mill when he wrote, in 1873, that the leading men of that day bore traces of his influence, whether as disciples or as opponents. The universities (he said), journalism, popular reading, and foreign opinion concurred in the same testimony. Mill held, moreover, a very unusual position -at once head of a school of philosophy, and also a most active social reformer, a politician of mark, and the inspirer of many practical movements, moral, economic, or religious. Hume, Adam Smith,

Carlyle, Spencer, have each poured forth very pregnant ideas upon social problems: but they did not discuss Bills in Parliament or found Leagues. It was the essence of John Stuart Mill, which he inherited with his Benthamite blood and his Utilitarian nurture, to unite 'stern science with infinite aspiration,' to regard social philosophy as the instrument of social regeneration. If he was far more the philosopher than Bentham, he was quite as much as Bentham the social reformer -far more than was any other follower of Bentham and his school. Mill indeed was a compound of Bentham corrected by the ideals and thinkers of modern France, especially by Auguste Comte.

Those who admit that the influence of Mill has been waning in the last generation have also to admit that the whole school of thought which came to its flower in Mill has been waning also in the same time and for the same cause. John Mill is not to-day what he was a generation ago, because Utilitarianism, Benthamism, Political Economy, Radicalism, the Philosophy of experience, moral and social Utopias have somewhat gone out of fashion. It is rather the school than the man which has lost vogue. It is not so much Mill as social science, which ceases to absorb the best of the rising generation. We live in an age of reversion to more early types-theologicometaphysico-dilemmas and aristocratic incarnations of the beautiful, the wise, and the good. To-day our aspirations are imperial, our summum bonum is national glory. War, armaments, athletic triumphs fill the souls of our patriotic and heroic youth. Philosophy retires into a higher region of mist and invisibility. Philosophy must wait and possess its soul in peace.

If the larger doctrinal treatises of Mill have a wider teaching power, his distinctive ideas and the keynote of his mind and nature are to be found rather in the three short popular essays to which he gave his whole soul in later life, and whereon he placed his chief claim to leadership. These are Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869). They are all summaries of his beliefs, manifestoes, appeals, almost sermons in their inward fervour, addressed to the people, condensed and published in sternly popular form. To reach the essence of Mills's nature and influence we must always go straight to these short but typical works of his mellow and widowed age.

The literary history of the Liberty has no small interest. It was planned and written as an essay in 1855; in the following year, he tells us, whilst mounting the steps of the Capitol at Rome, he conceived (like Gibbon) the idea of making it a book. For two years his wife and he worked at it, writing it twice over, and then revising every sentence separately and criticising it with their joint labour. After years of thought it is published with a magnificent dedication to his dead wife as part author of the work, inspired by her all but unrivalled wisdom.' And it may be bought, in sixty

eight pages, for sixteen-pence, in which form it has found an immense circulation. None of his writings, he says, have been so carefully composed or so sedulously corrected; and he believes it destined to survive longer than anything else that he has written, with the possible exception of the Logic. It is designed to be, in his own words, a philosophic text-book of a single truth': 'the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.' But this single truth' covers the whole field of the relation of the individual to society, i.e. Ethic, Sociology, Education, Politics, Law, Manners, and Religion. It was, therefore, not strange that a code of maxims thereon should absorb the thoughts of two thinkers for many years, and, when formulated with a sort of stern passion, should strike fire in some millions of brains.

The simple principle' on which the Liberty expends so deep a passion and so much logic is this: that self-protection is the sole end for which society is warranted in interfering with the liberty of action of the individual. This principle is absolute, and includes all intervention, physical force, or moral coercion. The independence of the individual is absolute, of right, implies the sovereignty of the individual over his own mind and body. The only part of his conduct for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others. And this liberty includes liberty of conscience, liberty of tastes and pursuits, liberty of combination. No society can be called free in which freedom in all these forms does not exist, absolute and unqualified. On this great theme John Mill has composed a truly monumental manual of acute and impressive thoughts.

It would be futile to attempt in these few pages either a defence or a criticism of these far-reaching dogmas. The only purpose of this slight essay is to consider how far the book of Mill impressed his own age, and how far it can be said to have a growing or permanent influence. It is certain that the little book produced a profound impression on contemporary thought, and had an extraordinary success with the public. It has been read by hundreds of thousands, and, to some of the most vigorous and most conscientious spirits amongst us, it became a sort of gospel-much as for a time did. Rousseau's Social Contract or Bentham's Principles of Legislation. It was the code of many thoughtful writers and several influential politicians. It undoubtedly contributed to the practical programmes of Liberals and Radicals for the generation that saw its birth; and the statute book bears many traces of its influence over the sphere and duties of government. But in the present generation, or broadly speaking, since the great Franco-German war, that influence has been waning, and is now at its lowest point. The book is still read, it is still admired, it has not been refuted or superseded. But much