He spoke first of all of his wife, whose grave in Avignon he had just
left. He had purchased a house in that city, where she had died, and
always passed half of the year there. Already in his introduction to
her essay on the "Enfranchisement of Women," which was the foundation
of his own book on "The Subjection of Women," he had given public
utterance to his enthusiastic admiration for the deceased. He had
there said, the loss of the authoress was one that, even from a purely
intellectual point of view, could never be repaired; he had declared
that he would rather see the essay remain "unacknowledged, than that
it should be read with the idea that even the faintest image could
be found in it of a mind and heart which, in their union of the
rarest, and what are deemed the most conflicting, excellences, were
unparalleled"; indeed, he had called "the highest poetry, philosophy,
oratory, or art," "trivial by the side of her," and had ended with the
prophecy, that if mankind continued to improve, its spiritual history
for ages to come would be nothing but "the progressive working out of
her thoughts and realization of her conceptions." In this tone, too,
he spoke of her in my room. We may well suppose that the man who could
thus express himself was no great portrait-painter, and we may doubt
the objective tendency of his judgment; we cannot, however, accuse him
of viewing marriage as a mere contract, a charge frequently brought
against him on account of his ultra-rationalistic standpoint on the
woman question. Great poets, like Dante and Petrarch, have erected
over the women who were fantastically beloved by them a fantastic
monument; but I do not know that ever a poet gave such true and such
warm expression to his loving veneration of a female character as
Mill, in the words in which his opinion of her worth and her enduring
significance to him was couched. The inscription he had cast on her
tombstone in Avignon is no evidence of an artistic talent for the
lapidary style; it has too many and too eulogistic words. How energetic
and beautiful, though, is the sentence with which it ends, "Were there
even a few hearts and intellects like hers, this earth would already
become the hoped-for heaven." I asked Mill if his wife had ever written
anything else than the essay edited by him. "No," he answered; "but all
through my writings you will find her ideas; the best passages in my
books are by her." "In your 'System of Logic' too?" I asked once more.
"No," he replied, half apologetically; "my Logic was written before I
was married." I could not avoid thinking that the contributions of Mrs.
Mill to the inductive logic, even in the opposite case, could scarcely
have been very considerable; a little thinking and reasoning would,
under all circumstances, have fallen to the lot of Mill himself. The
tone of reverential submissiveness apparent in his conversation was,
however, peculiar to the temperament of the great thinker.
His nature was endowed with a decided inclination to serve not a cause
alone, but its personal incarnation, and thus he was led to worship
one after the other, two individuals, who, rare and significant though
they may have been, were by no means his superiors,--his father and his
wife. To his father (and to Bentham) he looked up in his early youth,
to his wife all the rest of his life.
No one who has read Mill's "Autobiography" will have forgotten the
gloomy description he gives of the desperate state of languor which
ushered in his manhood. It was a long and painful crisis, during
which his nature reacted against the excessive development of his
faculties caused by his abnormal education. Instead of admiring the
perfect intellectual organization which enabled him to come forth
uninjured from the overfreighted and dangerous school of his father,
English mediocrity was fond of pronouncing him, because of this
hot-house culture, an abnormal being who was by no means fitted to be
a teacher and an example. In the incredibly large and varied store
of information imparted to him when he was a mere boy, the proof of
the unnaturalness of his teachings and the "inhumanity" of Stuart
Mill was found. What could be expected from a reading-machine that
had studied Greek at three years of age, and at thirteen had gone
through a course of political economy? The crisis which followed this
overloading has been no less misinterpreted than was the encyclopædic
education of the boy. Its symptoms were total indifference to all
objects that previously had seemed to the young man worth desiring,
and an unbroken state of joylessness, during which he asked himself
whether the complete realization of all his ideas, and the achievement
of the reforms for which he had been eager, would cause him genuine
satisfaction, and found himself compelled to answer the question in
the negative. Philosophers have discovered in this crisis nature's
contradiction of Mill's utilitarian theory, inasmuch as, according to
his own confession, the realization of the greatest possible happiness
for the greatest possible number would have failed to make him happy.
Theologians have found in it the stealthy approach of that secret
melancholy, that deep-seated despair, which is always experienced by
unbelievers, even when they themselves are not aware of it. Still, it
is scarcely evidence against utilitarianism that morality alone is not
sufficient for happiness, and it would be poor testimony, indeed, in
behalf of the indispensability of dogmatic belief that a highly gifted
and eminently critical youth of twenty years of age (who, moreover,
both earlier and later managed to make his way cheerfully through the
world without dogmatic belief) passed one whole winter in a state
of profound aversion to action, overwhelmed with that sense of the
misery of existence, with which every speculative mind is compelled to
contend, and which almost every one is forced to conquer at least once
in a lifetime. Among highly developed men there are but few who have
not known this self-abandonment; with some it is of short duration,
with others it becomes chronic: the exterior cause, as well as the
weapons to be used against it, alone differ. Every one has his armor
against discontent, one the impulse to work, another ambition, another
family life, another frivolity; but through the meshes of his coat of
mail weariness of life will occasionally find its way. With Stuart
Mill this armor was manifestly the certainty of being in harmony with
the mind of another person whom he esteemed more highly than himself.
We must not overlook his own utterance that if he had, during the
sorrowful crisis, "loved any one sufficiently to making confiding his
griefs a necessity, he should not have been in the condition he was."
Had Mill at that time been acquainted with his future wife, the crisis
would certainly not have assumed such an acute character: _she_ would
have helped him to conquer his profound dejection more surely than
dogmas and moral systems. This is very obvious from the pertinent words
with which he has described his condition, "I was thus, as I said to
myself, stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well equipped
ship and a rudder, but no sail." The sail of this ship, which bore so
rich and precious a freight, was and always remained his enthusiastic
tendency to bow in profound submission before a chosen idol. At that
period the influence of his father was markedly on the wane, that of
his wife had not yet begun; consequently he stood still.
So much, at least, was made very plain in my first conversation with
Mill, that the gain of this woman friend was the greatest boon of his
life. Only in one of the passages that he has written about her has
he succeeded in giving an exact idea of the peculiar nature of her
character, and that is where he compares her to Shelley. A female
Shelley--so she stood before him in his youth; later, even Shelley,
who was so early snatched away, seemed to him a child in thought and
intellectual maturity in comparison with what she became. He states
many times, in very decided terms, what he owes to her: the perception
of the region of ultimate aims, that is, the final consequences of
theory; and of that of the nearest means, that is, of the immediately
useful and practically attainable. The original endowment which he
himself acknowledges, was now directed to the fusion of these extremes,
to finding the medium course in political and moral truths.
Nevertheless, it does not seem to me probable that Mrs. Mill inspired
her husband with any direct new thought. The essential significance to
him must, I think, be sought in two other points. In the first place,
she strengthened his mental courage, and it is the boldness rather than
the novelty of thought that gives its character to such classic works,
as "On Liberty." Many times, even during our first conversation, he
returned with regret to the lack of courage that everywhere withholds
writers from supporting new ideas. He said, "There are writers of the
first rank, such as George Sand, whose actual originality consists in
courage. I leave out of consideration," he added, "her indescribably
beautiful style, whose music can only be compared with the pleasing
sounds of a symphony." The very confidence that a sense of harmony with
the thought of another arouses, had enabled the wife of Stuart Mill to
promote in him the courage he so extolled in George Sand.
In the second place, through her female universality, Mrs. Mill
prevented her husband from running into any prejudice whatsoever. She
confirmed in his mind a certain scepticism that led him to keep open
amid the ice of doctrine one spot that would never freeze; and in thus
inclining him to be sceptical, she became the cause of his progress.
While the majority of so-called freethinkers have almost always
purchased relative free thought in one point with double obduracy in
other respects, Mill was continually on his guard against conventional
prejudice; indeed, until the day of his death he carried on a sharp
warfare against it, ferreting it out in its stronghold with the utmost
intrepidity, in order to denounce and annihilate it.
Finally, there can be no doubt that Mrs. Mill was largely responsible
for the active part her husband took in advocating the elevation of
woman's social position. I felt interested to learn whether he had
ever replied to his assailants on the woman question. He had given
them no answer, nor did he purpose to pay any heed to them. "Why,"
said he, "forever keep repeating the same thing? Not one of them
has produced anything of value." I touched upon the opposition of
several physicians, whose objections were based on the necessities of
nature to which a woman is subjected. He spoke harshly and positively
against the prejudices of physicians in general. Long and tenderly he
lingered, on the contrary, on the pleasure women took in performing
the duties of the medical profession, and of the decided vocation they
not unfrequently manifested for it. He mentioned Miss Garrett, who had
recently taken a medical degree in Paris, and praised her as the first
woman who had had the courage to make such an attempt. In a letter
to me, he had once designated the woman question as "in his eyes the
most important of all political questions of the present day." At all
events, it was one of those which during the last years of his life
personally occupied him the most.
He did not hesitate, either in his written or in his spoken words, to
use the strongest expressions in order to place in the right light his
conception of the unnaturalness of women's state of dependence. Indeed,
he had not been afraid to challenge universal laughter through his
vehement assertion, that, as we had never seen woman in freedom, we
did know nothing whatever until now of her nature; as though Raphael's
Sistine Madonna, Shakespeare's young maidens, all the literature about
women, in fact, had taught us nothing of the feminine character. On
this point he was almost fanatical. He, who in all the relations
between man and woman was refinement and delicacy itself, allowed
himself to be positively insulting in his expressions when an opinion
differing from his own on his favorite topic was uttered in his
presence. One day I chanced to be visiting a celebrated French _savant_
when the mail brought him a letter from Stuart Mill. It was an answer
to a communication in which the Frenchman had expressed the opinion
that the change in the social status of women, demanded in Mill's essay
on "The Subjection of Women," might turn out well in England, where it
would harmonize with the character of the race, but that in France,
where the talents and tastes of the women were so contrary to it, there
could be no possibility of success. Mill's pithy reply, which was
handed to me with a smile, read as follows: "I see in your remarks that
contempt for woman which is so prevalent in France. All that I can say
on the subject is, that the French women pay this contempt back with
interest to the men of France."
The peculiarity of Mill's standpoint in this emancipation question
was, that it was based solely and entirely on a Socratic ignorance.
He refused to see in the accumulated experience of ages any proof in
regard to the boundaries of the so long enthralled feminine mind,
and insisted that _à priori_ we knew nothing at all about woman. He
proceeded from no doctrinal view of especial feminine faculties,
resting content with the simple proposition that man had no right to
deny woman any occupation to which she felt attracted; and he declared
everything like guardianship to be utterly useless as well as unjust,
since free competition would of itself exclude woman from every
occupation for which she was incapacitated, or in which man decidedly
surpassed her. He has repelled many people by immediately deducing the
final logical consequences of his theory the first time the question
was brought forward, and by advocating the immediate participation of
women in the affairs of government; but, as an Englishman, he had a too
matter-of-fact mind not to limit the practical agitation to a single
point. I remember asking him why--in utter disregard of what appeared
to me the first requisite of all, social emancipation--every effort in
England and America was concentrated on political suffrage, which was
so much more difficult to attain. He replied, "Because when that is
gained, all the rest will follow."