is fair to set down the autobiographic impulse as in all cases a
manifestation of vanity. Or if we call it vanity, must we not stretch
the meaning of the word beyond all bearing? The old psychologists
used to maintain that every passion was a special form of self-love;
and, if we may take such a license, we may call every man vain who
takes an interest in his own affairs, and expects that others may be
interested. He may hold that opinion even whilst sincerely believing
that his success in the game of life was more due to the cards he held
than to his intrinsic skill. If that still imply the presence of some
latent vanity, some bias to our judgment lying below the region of
conscious reflection, it is certainly of a scarcely perceptible kind.
Vanity in this sense is but the inverse side of a man's philosophy of
life. It is the value which he sets upon certain qualities of mind
and character, which is, no doubt, apt to be more or less connected
with the trifling circumstance that he takes them to be his own. But
in some cases this latter consideration has so little prominence that
we almost overlook it. The autobiography takes so much the form of a
philosophical sermon on the true principles of conduct, that we quite
forget that the preacher is his own text. He treats himself with
apparent impartiality, as if he were merely a scientific specimen
whose excellent adaptation to the general scheme of things deserves
the notice of an impartial inquirer. It happens to be the case
nearest at hand, but is interesting only in the light of the general
impersonal principle.
It is curious to trace this in one of the most interesting of
modern autobiographies. J. S. Mill begins his recollections by
disavowing—with obvious sincerity—any egoistic motive. He wishes
to show the effect of a particular mode of education, to trace
the influence upon a receptive mind of various currents of modern
thought; and, above all, to show how large a debt he owed to certain
persons who, but for this avowal, would not receive their due meed
of recognition. He is to give a lecture upon his own career as
dispassionately as Professor Owen might lecture upon a creature which
died in the palæozoic era. In pursuing this end, Mill made more
revelations as to his own character than he perhaps knew himself.
The book is much else, but it is also an exposition of a definite
theory of life. Some readers were astonished to find that, as Mill
puts it, a Benthamite might be something more than a mere 'reasoning
machine.' That description, he admits, was applicable in some cases,
and even to himself at one period of his life. But nothing could be
clearer to readers of the autobiography—as, indeed, it was clear
enough to the observers of his later career—that, so far from being
a mere reasoning machine, Mill was a man of strong affections, and
even feminine sensibility. And in this, as some critics have said,
consists the peculiar pathos of the book. It was the story of a man
of strong feelings, who had been put into a kind of moral and logical
strait-waistcoat and kept there till it had become a part of himself.
The diagnosis of the case showed it, upon this understanding, to be
one of partial atrophy of the affections—or rather—for the affections
clearly survived—illustrated the effect of depriving them of their
natural sustenance. To Mill himself, it was rather a record of the
means by which the strait-waistcoat had been forced to yield. Like
Bunyan, he had been locked up by Giant Despair, and had escaped
from the dungeons, though by a different method. The account of the
crisis in his moral development which corresponds to a conversion in
the case of Bunyan, gives the real key to his story. He had been put
into the strait-waistcoat by that tremendous old gentleman, James
Mill, whose force of mind produced less effect through his books
than by his personal influence upon his immediate surroundings. His
doctrine repelled most readers till it had been made more sympathetic
by passing through the more sensitive and emotional nature of his
son. The ultimate effect was not to suppress J. S. Mill's affections,
but to confine them to certain narrow channels. The primary effect,
however, was to produce that 'reasoning machine' period in which the
son was a simple logic-mill grinding out the materials supplied by the
father and Bentham. Now old Mill was not simply a kind of personified
'categorical imperative'—a rigid external conscience imposing a fixed
rule upon his filial disciple, but his doctrine was certainly a trying
one. He held that the sole end of morality was to produce happiness,
and at the same time he did not believe in happiness. 'He thought
human life a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and
unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.' He and his disciples denounced all
emotion as 'sentimentality,' and fully shared that English prejudice
which, as J. S. Mill declares, regards feeling, especially if it has
a touch of the romantic or exalted, to be something intrinsically
disgraceful. Here then was the uncomfortable dilemma into which
the younger Mill was driven, and which made him miserable. A rigid
sense of duty was the sole rule of life; duty meant the production
of happiness; and happiness was a mere illusion and unsubstantial
phantom. No wonder if a period followed during which the world seemed
to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. To feel that all that
is left for one is to be a machine grinding out theorems in political
economy is certainly not an exhilarating state of things.
The escape from this condition, as Mill represents, involved two
discoveries, which, like all such discoveries, are old enough in
the state of abstract theory, and new only in so far as they become
actual possessions and active principles of conduct. Happiness, he
discovered, was to be found by not aiming at happiness; by working
for some external end and not meditating upon your own feelings.
And, secondly, he discovered the importance of cultivating those
sympathies and sentiments which he had previously been inclined
to despise as mere encumbrances to his reasoning machinery. But
do not the two doctrines clash? Is not an æsthetic cultivation of
happiness a name for that introspective brooding of which Rousseau
is the great example, implying precisely that thirst for happiness
as an ultimate end and aim which his other principles showed to
be suicidal? Consciously to cultivate the emotions is to become a
sentimentalist—the very thing which he was anxious to renounce.
The apparent paradox was solved for him by the help of Wordsworth,
who taught him that the charm of tranquil contemplation might be
heightened instead of dulled by a vivid interest in the common
feelings and common destinies of human beings; and that æsthetic
delight in nature was perfectly compatible with scientific interest
in its laws. The famous ode proved to him that the first freshness
of youthful enjoyment could be replaced by a wider interest in our
fellows; and that the thoughts which gather round the setting sun
are not something distinct from, but really identical with, those
suggested by a watch over man's mortality. This teaching, he says,
dispersed for ever his youthful depression.
The problem seems a simple one when thus stated. How to cultivate
your feelings without becoming sentimental? Find your happiness in
the happiness of others; and regard even the grinding of that logical
mill as work done for the benefit of your kind. Problems, however,
which have to be worked out by modifying your own character take a
good deal more labour than is implied in putting together a couple
of syllogisms. And it is in this modification of character that the
peculiar interest of the autobiography consists. The aversion of
his mind from his own private interests, the intense devotion of
his mental energies to what he regarded as the great needs of his
fellow-men, the constant reference of his apparently most abstract
speculation to practical reforms, are obvious and most honourable
characteristics of Mill as a thinker. One may doubt whether women will
be as much improved by receiving votes as he anticipated; one cannot
doubt the generosity with which he revolted against their supposed
'subjection.' But there is another sense in which this theory of the
vast importance of 'extra-regarding' habits brings out some curious
results. We are all such adepts at self-deception that we need not
wonder if the very resolution not to think of oneself sometimes tends
to a more refined kind of self-consciousness. I have often fancied
that nobody can be so dogmatic as your thoroughly candid person. The
fact that he has listened to all sides gives him a kind of right in
his own opinion to speak with the authority of a judge. It has been
said that a tendency to be 'cock-sure' is a special characteristic of
Mill's school; and perhaps we may recognise it in their master not
the less because it is combined with a scrupulous desire to grant a
hearing to all antagonists. But another manifestation of character
is more interesting. No one could be more anxious than Mill to
arrogate nothing to himself. Nobody could state more explicitly that
his merit was less in original thought than in willingness to learn
from others, and thus that his true function was to mediate between
the public and the original thinkers. And therefore it is natural to
find him insisting with passionate eagerness upon the superlative
merits of the woman who was, according to him, the guide of his mature
years, as his father had been of his infancy and youth. Here was the
practical commentary on the text of cultivating the emotions. If he
withdrew from society and many social enjoyments, it was because his
whole emotional strength was concentrated upon a single object. We
listen with some mixture of feeling to his rather strained and exalted
eulogy. It may be true that Mrs. Mill was more of a poet than Carlyle,
and more of a thinker than Mill himself; that she was like Shelley,
but that Shelley was but a child to what she ultimately became;
that her wisdom was 'all but unrivalled,' and much more to the same
purpose. It may, I say, be true, for one cannot prove a negative in
regard to a person of whom the world knows so little. Yet it is a
weakness, though an amiable weakness, to attempt, by force of such
language, to overcome the inevitable decree of circumstances, and
to try to dictate to the world an opinion which it cannot receive
upon any single authority. It may be profoundly melancholy that such
exalted merit should vanish without leaving more tangible traces; but
it is useless to resent the fact, or to suppose that when such traces
are non-existent, the defect can be supplied by the most positive
assertions that they might have existed. And Mill would have seen
in any other case what was the inevitable suggestion to his readers.
He could not, he says, 'detect any mixture of errors' in the truths
which she struck out far in advance to him. What are the opinions in
which a man detects no mixture of error? Plainly his own. But these
were far in advance of him. That means that they were deductions from
his own. Is it possible, to speak it plainly, to resist a strong
impression that these extravagant expressions of admiration may have
been lavished upon a living echo—an echo, it is true, skilful enough
to anticipate as well as to repeat, but still essentially an echo?
We know, for Mill has told us, what he did alone, and we know what
he did in co-operation; and if the earlier work was not his best, it
certainly contained the whole sum and substance of his later teaching.
That his wife must have been a remarkable woman may be a fair
deduction from his admiration; that she was all that he then thought
her would be, to say the least of it, a very rash conjecture.
Happiness, says Mill, is to be found by aiming at something different
from happiness. And if we thus cheat ourselves into happiness, we
may attain to the vanity of self-esteem by a similar expedient. By
lavishing all our enthusiasm upon one who is but a second self,
we may deprive our appreciation of our own merits of its apparent
arrogance. This, indeed, is one of the many illusions which give a
peculiar interest to the unconscious confessions of autobiographers.
But neither is it to be roughly set down as an illusion, and still
less as an unworthy sentiment. It in no sort diminishes our interest
in discovering that this so-called reasoning machine was a man of the
most delicate fibre and most tender affections. It is easy to forgive
the illusions against which a thick cuirass of tough selfishness
is the only known safeguard of complete efficacy. Rather it helps
to convince us that Mill should be classed in some respects with
the unworldly enthusiasts of the Vicar of Wakefield type whose very
simplicity leads them to a harmless vanity which exaggerates their
own infallibility and importance to the world. He had the character,
though not the crotchets, of the life-long recluse. Though his
intellect was deeply interested in the great problems of contemporary
thought, and though he had been for many years in State affairs, there
was a wall of separation between himself and his contemporary society.
When he came into Parliament he came as re-entering the world from
a remote hermitage. Hermits, whether they come from deserts or from
the India Office, have a certain tendency to intolerance and contempt
for the social part of the species. They have lost some human feeling
and preach crusades with a reckless indifference to consequences. I
cannot determine how far Mill might be rightly accused of a want of
practical sense. But in any case he had nothing of the bitterness or
the harsh pedantry of the solitary theorist. Even his enemies could
see that his sympathies were fresh and generous, and that his impulses
were invariably generous. As a philanthropist, his philanthropy was
not of the merciless and inhuman variety. The discovery of the fact
was a surprise at the time to those who believed in the traditional
Benthamite and Malthusian. The autobiography, with its strange
bursts of emotion, perhaps reveals the true secret. If he naturally
exaggerated the merits of the partner of his hermitage, he did not
necessarily exaggerate her services to him. It is easily credible that
her company saved him from ossifying into a mere grinder of formulæ
and syllogisms. We shrink a little from certain over-strung phases,
but they reveal to us the pathos of the man's life. Admit that his
affection produced illusion, or that it covered and was combined with
a sort of vicarious self-conceit, yet at bottom it represents the
intense devotion which springs only out of simplicity and tenderness
of nature.
It would be tempting here to draw the obvious parallel between Mill
and Carlyle, which must just now be in everyone's mind; for certainly
whatever may be said of the 'Reminiscences' just published, they
contain one of the most remarkable self-revelations ever given to
the world, and the relations of the two men to vigorous fathers
and passionately adored wives have singular points of contrast and
resemblance. But I must be content to close this ramble through some
famous autobiographies by touching upon one which often seems to me
to be the most delightful of its class. I know, as everybody knows,
what may be said against Gibbon: against his want of high enthusiasm,
his deficient sympathy with the great causes and their heroes, the
provoking self-sufficiency and apparent cold-bloodedness of the fat
composed little man. And yet, when reading his autobiography and
contrasting it with some of those we have considered, I find myself
constantly led to a conclusion not quite in accordance with the
proper rules of morality. After all, one cannot help asking, did not
Gibbon succeed in solving the problem of life more satisfactorily
than almost anybody one knows? Other autobiographies are for the most
part records of hard struggles with fate, plaintive lamentations over
the inability to obtain any solid satisfaction out of life, appeals
of disappointed vanity to the judgment of an indifferent posterity,
vain-glorious braggings over successes which should rather have been
the cause of shame, weak regrets for the vanishing pleasures of youth
and hopeless attempts to make the might-have-been pass muster with the
actual achievement. The more a man prides himself upon his successes,
the more we feel how good a case a rival's advocate could make on
the other side: and when he laments over his failures, the more we
are inclined to say that after all it served him right. But when in
imagination we take that famous turn with Gibbon upon that terrace at
Lausanne beneath the covered walk of acacias, gaze upon the serene
moon and the silent lake, and hear him soliloquise upon the conclusion
of the 'Decline and Fall,' we feel that we are in presence of a man
who has a right to his complacency. He has not aimed, perhaps, at the
highest mark, but he has hit the bull's-eye. Given his conception of
life, he has done his task to perfection. With singular felicity, he
has come at the exact moment and found the exact task to give full
play to his powers. Nobody had yet laid the keystone in the great
arch of history; and he laid it so well that his work can never be
superseded. Somebody defines a life to be _une pensée de jeunesse
exécutée par l'âge mûr_. It was Gibbon's singular good fortune to
illustrate that saying as few men have done. Though his plan ripened
slowly and with all deliberation, he acted as if he had foreseen the
end from the beginning. If he had been told in his boyhood, You shall
live so long a life, with such and such means at your disposal, he
could hardly have laid out his life differently. To mistake neither
one's powers nor one's opportunities is a felicity which happens
to few; and Gibbon had the additional good fortune that even his
distractions seem to have been useful. The interruption to his Oxford
education made him a cosmopolitan; his service with the volunteers
helped him to be a military historian; and even his parliamentary
career, which threatened to absorb him, only gave to the student the
tone of a practical politician. It seems as though everything had been
expressly combined to make the best of him.
What more could be desired by a man of Gibbon's temperament?
Undoubtedly to be a man of Gibbon's temperament is to have a moderate
capacity for certain forms of happiness. In the lives of most great
men the history of a conversion is a record of heart-rending struggle,
ending in hard-won peace. Gibbon merely changed his religion as
he changed his opinion upon some antiquarian controversy; it is a
question as to the weight of historical evidence, like the question
about the sixth Æneid, or a dispute about the genealogy of the house
of Brunswick. Whatever pangs and raptures may require religious
susceptibility were clearly not within his range of feeling. And in
another great department of feeling we need not inquire into the
character of the author of the inimitable sentence, 'I sighed as a
lover, I obeyed as a son.' One is tempted to put it beside a remark
which he makes on another occasion, 'I yielded to the authority of
a parent, and complied, like a pious son, with the wish of my own
heart.' Perhaps the heart which sanctioned his filial obedience in the
latter case was not so opposed to it in the other as he would have us
believe. It is better worth noting, however, that, in spite of the
very tepid disposition illustrated by these familiar passages, Gibbon
has affections as warm as are compatible with thorough comfort. He
was not a passionate lover; and we cannot say, for he was not tried,
that his friendship was of an heroic strain; but he had a very good
supply of such affections as are wanted for the ordinary wear and
tear of life—to provide a man with enough interests and sympathies to
make society pleasant, and his family life agreeable. Nay, he seems
to have been really generous and considerate beyond the ordinary
pitch, and to have been a faithful friend, and excellent in some very
delicate relationships. For a statesman, a religious teacher, or a
poet, much stronger equipment in this direction might be desirable.
But Gibbon had warmth enough to keep up a pleasant fireside, if not
enough to fire the hearts of a nation. He clearly had enough passion
for his historical vocation. A more passionate and imaginative person
would hardly have written it at all. It requires a certain moderation
of character to be satisfied with a history instead of a wife, and
Gibbon was so great an historian because he could accept such a
substitute. No one capable of being a partisan could have preserved
that stately march and equable development of the vast drama of
human affairs which gives a monumental dignity to his great book.
Even if you do not want to write another 'Decline and Fall,' is not
such a disposition the most enviable of gifts? If such a life has
less vivid passages, is there not something fascinating about that
calm, harmonious existence, disturbed by no spasmodic storms, and yet
devoted to one achievement grand enough to extort admiration even from
the least sympathetic? Surely it is a happy mean; enough genius to be
in the front rank, if not in the highest class, and yet that kind of
genius which has no affinity to madness or disease, and virtue enough
to keep up to the respectable level which justifies a comfortable
self-complacency without suggesting any awkward deviations in the
direction of martyrdom. That is surely the kind of composition which
a man might desire if he were to calculate what character would give
him the best chance of extracting the greatest possible amount of
enjoyment out of life. Luckily for the world, if not for its heroes,
men's characters cannot be fixed by such calculations; and a certain
number of perverse people are even glad to possess vehement emotions
and restless intellects, however conscious that the fiery soul will
wear out the pigmy body. We try to persuade ourselves that they are
not only choosing the noblest part, but acting most wisely for their
own interests. It may be so; for the problem is a complex one. But
it has not yet been proved that a man can always make the best of
both worlds, and that the sacrifices imposed by virtue are always
repaid in this life. Certainly it seems doubtful, when we have studied
the self-written records of remarkable men, whether experience will
confirm that pleasant theory; whether it is not more probable that for
simple employment it is not best to have one's nature pitched in a key
below the highest. Most of us would make a very fair compromise if we
should abandon our loftier claims on condition of being no worse than
Gibbon.
_CARLYLE'S ETHICS_