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| John Stuart Mill |
John Stuart Mill
(1806–73). Autobiography.
Vol. 25, pp. 116-120,
149 of The Harvard Classics
John Stuart Mill in his
autobiography boldly tells of his love for his friend's wife. After
twenty years, she was freed from her first husband and was happily
married to John Stuart Mill. Read the account of Mill's courtship.
Chapter
VI
Commencement
of the Most Valuable Friendship of My Life. My Father’s Death.
Writings and Other Proceedings up to 1840
IT was the period of my
mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship
which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well
as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or
hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first
introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years,
consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my
twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year. With her husband’s
family it was the renewal of an old acquaintanceship. His grandfather
lived in the next house to my father’s in Newington Green, and I
had sometimes when a boy been invited to play in the old gentleman’s
garden. He was a fine specimen of the old Scotch puritan; stern,
severe, and powerful, but very kind to children, on whom such men
make a lasting impression. Although it was years after my
introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my acquaintance with her became at
all intimate or confidential, I very soon felt her to be the most
admirable person I had ever known. It is not to be supposed that she
was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be,
all that she afterwards became. Least of all could this be true of
her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the highest and in all
senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally from the ardour
with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of
faculties which could not receive an impression or an experience
without making it the source or the occasion of an accession of
wisdom. Up to the time when I first saw her, her rich and powerful
nature had chiefly unfolded itself according to the received type of
feminine genius. To her outer circle she was a beauty and a wit, with
an air of natural distinction, felt by all who approached her: to the
inner, a woman of deep and strong feeling, of penetrating and
intuitive intelligence, and of an eminently meditative and poetic
nature. Married at a very early age, to a most upright, brave, and
honourable man, of liberal opinions and good education, but without
the intellectual or (3*) artistic tastes which would have made him a
companion for her, though a steady and affectionate friend, for whom
she had true esteem and the strongest affection through life, and
whom she most deeply lamented when dead; shut out by the social
disabilities of women from any adequate exercise of her highest
faculties in action on the world without; her life was one of inward
meditation, varied by familiar intercourse with a small circle of
friends, of whom (4*) one only (long since deceased) was a person of
genius, or of capacities of feeling or intellect kindred with her
own, but all had more or less of alliance with her in sentiments and
opinions. Into this circle I had the good fortune to be admitted, and
I soon perceived that she possessed in combination, the qualities
which in all other persons whom I had known I had been only too happy
to find singly. In her, complete emancipation from every kind of
superstition (including that which attributes a pretended perfection
to the order of nature and the universe), and an earnest protest
against many things which are still part of the established
constitution of society, resulted not from the hard intellect, but
from strength of noble and elevated feeling, and co-existed with a
highly reverential nature. In general spiritual characteristics, as
well as in temperament and organisation, I have often compared her,
as she was at this time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect,
Shelley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, was
but a child compared with what she ultimately became. Alike in the
highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns
of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to
the very heart and marrow of the matter; always seizing the essential
idea or principle. The same exactness and rapidity of operation,
pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental faculties,
would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to
be a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous
eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator, and her
profound knowledge of human nature and discernment and sagacity in
practical life, would, in the times when such a carrière was
open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind. Her
intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the
noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in life. Her
unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a
heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others,
and often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively
investing their feelings with the intensity of its own. The passion
of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but
for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour
itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving
the smallest feeling in return. The rest of her moral characteristics
were such as naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart:
the most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a
simplicity and sincerity which were absolute, towards all who were
fit to receive them; the utmost scorn of whatever was mean and
cowardly, and a burning indignation at everything brutal or
tyrannical, faithless or dishonourable in conduct and character,
while making the broadest distinction between mala in se and
mere mala prohibita—between acts giving evidence of
intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those which are only
violations of conventions either good or bad, violations which
whether in themselves right or wrong, are capable of being committed
by persons in every other respect lovable or admirable.
To be admitted into any degree of
mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not but
have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect
was only gradual, and many years elapsed before her mental progress
and mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last
attained. The benefit I received was far greater than any which I
could hope to give; though to her, who had at first reached her
opinions by the moral intuition of a character of strong feeling,
there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be derived from
one who had arrived at many of the same results by study and
reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her mental
activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless drew
from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials. What I
owe, even intellectually, to her, is in its detail, almost infinite;
of its general character a few words will give some, though a very
imperfect, idea. With those who, like all the best and wisest of
mankind, are dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose
feelings are wholly identified with its radical amendment, there are
two main regions of thought. One is the region of ultimate aims; the
constituent elements of the highest realizable ideal of human life.
The other is that of the immediately useful and practically
attainable. In both these departments, I have acquired more from her
teaching, than from all other sources taken together. And, to say
truth, it is in these two extremes principally, that real certainty
lies. My own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery
intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and political science:
respecting the conclusions of which, in any of the forms in which I
have received or originated them, whether as political economy,
analytic psychology, logic, philosophy of history, or anything else,
it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to her that I have
derived from her a wise scepticism, which, while it has not hindered
me from following out the honest exercise of my thinking faculties to
whatever conclusions might result from it, has put me on my guard
against holding or announcing these conclusions with a degree of
confidence which the nature of such speculations does not warrant,
and has kept my mind not only open to admit, but prompt to welcome
and eager to seek, even on the questions on which I have most
meditated, any prospect of clearer perceptions and better evidence. I
have often received praise, which in my own right I only partially
deserve, for the greater practicality which is supposed to be found
in my writings, compared with those of most thinkers who have been
equally addicted to large generalizations. The writings in which this
quality has been observed, were not the work of one mind, but of the
fusion of two, one of them as pre-eminently practical in its
judgments and perceptions of things present, as it was high and bold
in its anticipations for a remote futurity.
At the present period, however, this
influence was only one among many which were helping to shape the
character of my future development: and even after it became, I may
truly say, the presiding principle of my mental progress, it did not
alter the path, but only made me move forward more boldly, and, at
the same time, more cautiously, in the same course. The only actual
revolution which has ever taken place in my modes of thinking, was
already complete. My new tendencies had to be confirmed in some
respects, moderated in others: but the only substantial changes of
opinion that were yet to come, related to politics, and consisted, on
one hand, in a greater approximation, so far as regards the ultimate
prospects of humanity, to a qualified Socialism, and on the other, a
shifting of my political ideal from pure democracy, as commonly
understood by its partizans, to the modified form of it, which is set
forth in my “Considerations on Representative Government.”
This last change, which took place
very gradually, dates its commencement from my reading, or rather
study, of M. de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” which
fell into my hands immediately after its first appearance. In that
remarkable work, the excellences of democracy were pointed out in a
more conclusive, because a more specific manner than I had ever known
them to be, even by the most enthusiastic democrats; while the
specific dangers which beset democracy, considered as the government
of the numerical majority, were brought into equally strong light,
and subjected to a masterly analysis, not as reasons for resisting
what the author considered as an inevitable result of human progress,
but as indications of the weak points of popular government, the
defences by which it needs to be guarded, and the correctives which
must be added to it in order that while full play is given to its
beneficial tendencies, those which are of a different nature may be
neutralized or mitigated. I was now well prepared for speculations of
this character, and from this time onward my own thoughts moved more
and more in the same channel, though the consequent modifications in
my practical political creed were spread over many years, as would be
shown by comparing my first review of “Democracy in America,”
written and published in 1835, with the one in 1840 (reprinted in the
“Dissertations”), and this last, with the “Considerations on
Representative Government.”
Chapter VII
General View of the Remainder of
My Life
[…]
Between the time of
which I have now spoken, and the present, took place the most
important events of my private life. The first of these was my
marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incomparable worth had
made her friendship the greatest source to me both of happiness and
of improvement, during many years in which we never expected to be in
any closer relation to one another. Ardently as I should have aspired
to this complete union of our lives at any time in the course of my
existence at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my wife,
would far rather have foregone that privilege for ever, than have
owed it to the premature death of one for whom I had the sincerest
respect, and she the strongest affection. That event, however, having
taken place in July, 1849, it was granted to me to derive from that
evil my own greatest good, by adding to the partnership of thought,
feeling, and writing which had long existed, a partnership of our
entire existence. For seven and a half years that blessing was mine;
for seven and a half only! I can say nothing which could describe,
even in the faintest manner, what that loss was and is. But because I
know that she would have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of
what life I have left, and to work on for her purposes with such
diminished strength as can be derived from thoughts of her, and
communion with her memory. […]
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