joyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is to
mistake boisterousness for unction. Was the life of Christ himself,
then, so particularly joyful? Can the life of any man be joyful who sees
and feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of the
earth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that are
done under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed and
had no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead more
than the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both,
which hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done
under the sun. Those who are willing to trick their understandings and
play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves
with the fatuous commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with
eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all
possible worlds, or discerning all the anguish that may be compressed
into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox
that pain is not an evil. Or, most wonderful and most common of all,
they may find this joy of which they talk, in meditating on the moral
perfections of the omnipotent Being for whose diversion the dismal
panorama of all the evil work done under the sun was bidden to unfold
itself, and who sees that it is very good. Those who are capable of a
continuity of joyous emotion on these terms may well complain of Mr.
Mill's story as dreary; and so may the school of Solomon, who commended
mirth because a man hath no better thing than to eat and to drink and to
be merry. People, however, who are prohibited by their intellectual
conditions from finding full satisfaction either in spiritual raptures
or in pleasures of sense, may think the standard of happiness which Mr.
Mill sought and reached, not unacceptable and not unworthy of being
diligently striven after.
Mr. Mill's conception of happiness in life is more intelligible if we
contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his
son now tells us (pg. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in
pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid
for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life
as due to an excessive estimate of them. 'He thought human life a poor
thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity
had gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it
might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth
having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that
possibility.' We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary,
associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtues
of temperance and moderation, and the strenuous and careful bracing up
of every faculty to face the inevitable and make the best of it. At
bottom it is the theory of many of the bravest souls, who fare grimly
through life in the mood of leaders of forlorn hopes, denying pleasures,
yet very sensible of the stern delight of fortitude. We can have no
difficulty in understanding that, when the elder Mill lay dying, 'his
interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life
was undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallest
wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that it
should), in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principal
satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the
thought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it;
and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had time to
do more' (p. 203).[5]
[Footnote 5: For the mood in which death was faced by another person who
had renounced theology and the doctrine of a future state of
consciousness, see Miss Martineau's _Autobiography_, ii. 435, etc.]
Mr. Mill, however, went beyond this conception. He had a belief in
pleasures, and thought human life by no means a poor thing to those who
know how to make the best of it. It was essential both to the stability
of his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his own
temperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated, and he
did both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement that
should have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regarded
the two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity and some
excitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimately
attainable by very many more. The ingredients of this satisfaction he
set forth as follows:--a willingness not to expect more from life than
life is capable of bestowing; an intelligent interest in the objects of
mental culture; genuine private affections; and a sincere interest in
the public good. What, on the other hand, are the hindrances which
prevent these elements from being in the possession of every one born in
a civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man or
woman from the sources of happiness within reach; and 'the positive
evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering--such
as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature
loss of objects of affection.'[6] But every one of these calamitous
impediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some of
them of final removal. Mr. Mill had learnt from Turgot and
Condorcet--two of the wisest and noblest of men, as he justly calls them
(113)--among many other lessons, this of the boundless improvableness of
the human lot, and we may believe that he read over many a time the
pages in which Condorcet delineated the Tenth Epoch in the history of
human perfectibility, and traced out in words of finely reserved
enthusiasm the operation of the forces which should consummate the
progress of the race. 'All the grand sources of human suffering,' Mr.
Mill thought, 'are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely,
conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is
grievously slow--though a long succession of generations will perish in
the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all
that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be
made--yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a
part, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw a
noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any
bribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without'
(_Utilitarianism_, 22).
[Footnote 6: For this exposition see _Utilitarianism_, pp. 18-24.]
We thus see how far from dreary this wise and benign man actually found
his own life; how full it was of cheerfulness, of animation, of
persevering search, of a tranquillity lighted up at wholesome intervals
by flashes of intellectual and moral excitement. That it was not seldom
crossed by moods of despondency is likely enough, but we may at least be
sure that these moods had nothing in common with the vulgar despondency
of those whose hopes are centred in material prosperity in this world
and spiritual prosperity in some other. They were, at least, the
dejection of a magnanimous spirit, that could only be cast down by some
new hindrance to the spread of reason and enlightenment among men, or
some new weakening of their incentives to right doing.
* * * * *
Much has been said against Mr. Mill's strictures on society, and his
withdrawal from it. If we realise the full force of all that he says of
his own purpose in life, it is hard to see how either his opinion or his
practice could have been different. He ceased to be content with
'seconding the superficial improvements' in common ways of thinking, and
saw the necessity of working at a fundamental reconstitution of accepted
modes of thought. This in itself implies a condemnation of a social
intercourse that rests on the base of conventional ways of looking at
things. The better kind of society, it is true, appears to contain two
classes; not only the class that will hear nothing said hostile to the
greater social conventions, including among these the popular theology,
but also another class who will tolerate or even encourage attack on
the greater social conventions, and a certain mild discussion of
improvements in them--provided only neither attack nor discussion be
conducted in too serious a vein. A new idea about God, or property, or
the family, is handed round among the company, as ladies of quality in
Queen Anne's time handed round a black page or a China monster. In
Bishop Butler's phrase, these people only want to know what is said, not
what is true. To be in earnest, to show that you mean what you say, to
think of drawing blood in the encounter, is thought, and perhaps very
naturally thought, to be a piece of bad manners. Social intercourse can
only exist either pleasantly or profitably among people who share a
great deal of common ground in opinion and feeling. Mr. Mill, no doubt,
was always anxious to find as much common ground as he honestly could,
for this was one of the most characteristic maxims of his propagandism.
But a man who had never been brought up in the popular religion, and who
had been brought up in habits of the most scrupulous fair dealing with
his own understanding; who had never closed his mind to new truths from
likely sources, but whose character was formed, and whose mind was made
up, on the central points of opinion, was not in a position to derive
much benefit from those who in all respects represent a less advanced
stage of mental development. On the other hand, all the benefit which
they were in a position to derive from him could be adequately secured
by reading what he wrote. Perhaps there is nothing wiser among the wise
things written in the Autobiography than the remarks on the fact that
persons of any mental superiority, who greatly frequent society, are
greatly deteriorated by it. 'Not to mention loss of time, the tone of
their feelings is lowered: they become less in earnest about those of
their opinions respecting which they must remain silent in the society
they frequent: they come to look on their most elevated objects as
unpractical, or at least too remote from realisation to be more than a
vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they retain their
higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the persons and
affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the modes of feeling and
judgment in which they can hope for sympathy from the company they keep'
(p. 228). That a man loses something, nay, that he loses much, by being
deprived of animating intercourse with other men, Mr. Mill would
probably have been the first to admit. Where that intercourse can be
had, nothing is more fit to make the judgment robust, nothing more fit
to freshen and revive our interests, and to clothe them with reality.
Even second-rate companionship has some clear advantages. The question
is, whether these advantages outweigh the equally clear disadvantages.
Mr. Mill was persuaded that they do not.
Those whom disgust at the aimlessness and insignificance of most of our
social intercourse may dispose to withdrawal from it--and their number
will probably increase as the reaction against intellectual flippancy
goes on--will do well to remember that Mr. Mill's retirement and his
vindication of it sprang from no moral valetudinarianism. He did not
retire to gratify any self-indulgent whim, but only in order to work the
more uninterruptedly _and definitely_. The Autobiography tells us what
pains he took to keep himself informed of all that was going on in every
part of the world. 'In truth, the modern facilities of communication
have not only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer in
tolerably easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of political
action, but have converted them into advantages. The immediate and
regular receipt of newspapers and periodicals keeps him _au courant_ of
even the most temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct view
of the state and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal
contact with individuals; for every one's social intercourse is more or
less limited to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and no
others reach him through that channel; and experience has taught me that
those who give their time to the absorbing claims of what is called
society, not having leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the
organs of opinion, remain much more ignorant of the general state either
of the public mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a
recluse who reads the newspapers need be. There are, no doubt,
disadvantages in too long a separation from one's country--in not
occasionally renewing one's impressions of the light in which men and
things appear when seen from a position in the midst of them; but the
deliberate judgment formed at a distance, and undisturbed by
inequalities of perspective, is the most to be depended on, even for
application in practice. Alternating between the two positions, I
combined the advantages of both.' Those who knew him will perhaps agree
that he was more widely and precisely informed of the transactions of
the day, in every department of activity all over the world, than any
other person of their acquaintance. People should remember, further,
that though Mr. Mill saw comparatively little of men after a certain
time, yet he was for many years of his life in constant and active
relations with men. It was to his experience in the Indian Office that
he attributed some of his most serviceable qualities, especially this:
'I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain
everything; instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not
have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have
the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with
complete equanimity the being overruled altogether' (pp. 85, 86). In
these words we seem almost to hear the modest and simple tones of the
writer's own voice.