High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  II

  Five years after Dickens had taken a sledgehammer to utilitarianism in Hard Times, Mill published his most celebrated work of philosophy, an altogether more subtle discourse. On Liberty supercharged the debate about the rights of those outside the traditional governing class. It developed Bentham’s idea of the greatest happiness principle by showing liberty as essential to that happiness. The following year Mill would publish his essay On Representative Government, which would deal with the pressure for democracy in even more specific terms. He wrote to Gladstone on 6 August 1859 that ‘in venturing to send you my last publication, I intended a mark of respect to one of the very few political men whose public conduct appears to me to be invariably conscientious, and in whom desire of the public good is an active principle, instead of, at most, a passive restraint.’11

  On Liberty has been described as ‘the first modern exposition of a theory of the secular state’.12 As well as taking for granted the end of inevitable obeisance to religion, the argument anticipates the end of the deferential society. Both ideas were consistent with the purpose of the treatise, as set out by Mill: ‘The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.’13 Only in those aspects of behaviour that impinged on others was the individual answerable to society. Otherwise, ‘over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.’ Ruskin, who largely disapproved of Mill, nonetheless saw the force of some of his arguments in On Liberty, though he told John Morley: ‘The degree of liberty you can rightly grant to a number of men is commonly in the inverse ratio of their desire for it.’14

  Such ideas would bring him into conflict with his most articulate critic, James Fitzjames Stephen, whose knowledge of human nature as a criminal lawyer had suggested to him that most people lacked the wit to be sovereign, without constituting a threat to society. Mill did, indeed, write that ‘despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end.’ However, he believed the British people were not barbarians; Stephen, suffused with Tory pessimism (even though he considered himself in politics to be a Liberal) disagreed.

  Mill’s desire for a State with free institutions could not be realised without complete intellectual liberty, and part of that was the right for men to shake off an imposed religion, if they felt the compulsion to do so. He protests in On Liberty about the Crown bringing a prosecution for blasphemy in 1857 against a man for writing anti-Christian graffiti on a gate in Cornwall, for which he received twenty-one months’ imprisonment (subsequently commuted); and about the discrimination against atheists who could not be sworn as jurymen, one of whom was ‘grossly insulted’ by the judge; and about another denied justice against a thief because he felt unable to give sworn evidence in a court of law.15 He felt the law as it stood put those exercising their conscience in the position of outlaws. To the still greater outrage of his critics, Mill defined the great hypocrisy of the age: people professing Christian principles but, in only the rarest cases, actually living by them. He claimed to spot a decline in observance over the history of Christianity. Speaking of the earliest Christians, he wrote that ‘when their enemies said “see how these Christians love one another” (a remark not likely to be made by anybody now) they assuredly had a much livelier feeling of the meaning of their creed than they have ever had since.’16

  The Church of England certainly, at that stage, still saw things differently. Christopher Wordsworth, the poet’s nephew and shortly to be Bishop of Lincoln, asked a Tory meeting in Reading in February 1865: ‘What, gentlemen, is Conservatism? It is the application of Christianity to civil government. And what is English Conservatism? It is the adoption of the principles of the Church of England as the groundwork of legislation. Gentlemen, I say it with reverence, the most Conservative book in the world is the Bible, and the next most Conservative book in the world is the Book of Common Prayer.’17 This showed how the influence religion had on the State trammelled individual liberty, in Mill’s view, and kept the proletariat in its place in Marx’s.

  The passage of the Reform Act two years after Wordsworth’s remarks confirmed a change in perceptions. Archbishop Manning wrote to his Oxford friend Gladstone, by then Prime Minister, in November 1871 to say that ‘I see no principle now but the will of the majority; the will of the majority is not either reason or right. My belief is that Society without Christianity is the Commune . . . what hope can you give me?’18 But the intellectual case for secularisation was being made more and more forcibly: not just by such as Mill and Butler, but also by John Morley, Gladstone’s disciple and eventual biographer, who published an assessment of Voltaire, and by the wider understanding among intellectuals of the German philosophers, such as Hegel, who challenged head on the existence of God. As Chadwick has put it, the 1840s were years in which individual intellectuals, such as Clough or Froude, had doubts. By the 1860s ‘Britain and France and Germany entered the age of Doubt, in the singular and with a capital D.’19

  Mill’s eminence as a thinker brought him the respect of Gladstone, with whom he frequently corresponded, and who became a conduit of his influence into the higher reaches of government. In January 1864 he sent Gladstone a pamphlet about the American Civil War. Gladstone was disappointed by it (though ‘I speak with unfeigned deference to your more competent judgment’20) but craved intellectual intercourse with Mill. His letter ends with a reminder ‘of my breakfast table on all Thursdays after Easter at ten, and to express the hope that you will sometimes send me a note to say you will give me, if in London, the honour and favour of your company.’ Writing to Gladstone on 23 July 1865, to congratulate him on his election in South Lancashire, Mill identified himself and his correspondent with ‘the cause of improvement’.21

  The relationship continued to develop as Gladstone turned his mind to reform: and Mill seems to have sensed the chance of influencing change that a relationship with so senior a politician gave him. Mill told Gladstone in March 1866 that ‘there are few things I more value than the opportunity of cultivating the degree of personal acquaintance to which you have done me the honour of admitting me’.22 Although Mill rarely went out he continued to send Gladstone his publications, and would join his breakfasts some Thursday mornings, with such great men as J. L. Motley, the historian, and the architect George Edmund Street.23 By such means did Mill help ensure that his views suffused British policy.

  III

  Mill’s ideal of an extension of liberty required, for its success, a level of self-awareness and responsibility on the part of the liberated; and that in turn required more education. For many adult Victorians the development of educational opportunities that would enable them to think better for themselves and take a more sceptical view of religion and politics came too late. Men with brains but with no means of developing them banded together to form working men’s institutes, to which public-spirited educated men would give lectures. Radicals such as Engels despised these associations, feeling they simply served as depots in which the working classes could be indoctrinated with bourgeois values. They did, however, improve many who went to them and who – not that Engels could grasp this – sometimes wanted bourgeois values and knowledge.

  The leading institution for educating the working classes was founded by F. D. Maurice and others in Red Lion Square in London in 1854, and became known as the Working Men’s College. Maurice called on a distinguished range of intellectuals to teach at the Co
llege, including Ruskin and Thomas Hughes. John Stuart Mill, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Charles Kingsley all lent their names and support to the enterprise. Maurice intended the college not merely to provide a route to improvement for men of ability who deserved an education, but to act as a further dissuasion from the temptation to violent protest. He had support from organised labour and the cooperative movement.

  Outside the metropolis, where leading intellectuals were not so readily available to lend glamour and gravitas to the education of artisans, attempts at similar projects were more modest. One such was in Leeds. It had started as a meeting in a workman’s cottage, between two or three men who resolved to meet in the evenings to exchange knowledge. In the summer, it moved into the garden, and others joined the group. Soon, the numbers became too large for the cottage, and the men sought premises. All they could afford was a room formerly used as a cholera hospital, cheap because it could find no tenants. The men spruced it up, and, their numbers now 100 strong, proceeded to invite speakers. In 1845, one whom they asked was Samuel Smiles.

  Smiles was then thirty-two. He was a Scotsman, son of a merchant in Haddington, where he had attended the grammar school. He was apprenticed to doctors before his fourteenth birthday, and by twenty had obtained a medical diploma at Edinburgh University. However, he was diverted from a career as a surgeon. In 1838 he had become editor of a radical newspaper, the Leeds Times, after answering an advertisement. Over the next few years he pursued some of the causes advocated by the paper, notably electoral reform and repeal of the Corn Laws. Smiles was, however, on a political journey from radicalism to conservatism. He was heavily influenced by Carlyle, not least in Carlyle’s belief in the almost religious quality of work. He came to distrust the Chartists precisely because he preferred, instinctively, the actions of individuals to those of the collective. Thus it was that he chose his topic for the Leeds working men: ‘Citing examples of what other men had done, as illustrations of what each might, in a greater or less degree, do for himself; and pointing out that their happiness and well-being in after life must necessarily depend mainly upon themselves – upon their own diligent self-culture, self-discipline and self-control – and above all, on that honest and upright performance of individual duty, which is the glory of individual character.’24

  The lecture went so well that Smiles was asked to give more. Using illustrations from the lives of the great men of his own and previous generations, he showed how diligence and perseverance had brought success and fortune. A few years later, one of his audience came back to see him and told him that he had prospered in his own business by taking to heart what he had learned from Smiles and acting upon his precepts. Smiles had kept notes of what he had said in his lectures; they formed the basis of a book that would become a bible in tens of thousands of working- and lower-middle-class houses: Self-Help, with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance, the first edition of which was published in 1859.

  Smiles set out his purpose at once: ‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’ are the opening words of the book.25 It is a maxim, he adds, that embodies ‘the results of vast human experience’. He continues: ‘The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.’ Self-Help is sometimes represented as work that extols selfishness: but Smiles’s intention was to marshal the strength and development of individuals for the good of the nation. The great purpose of the improvement of individuals was to improve Britain: to cement its place as the greatest nation in the world, put there by the efforts and ingenuity of its people.

  ‘National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice,’ he wrote.26 Hard work and perseverance are not enough: there has to be a moral dimension to self-improvement, which he characterises as ‘uprightness’. This is important, because Smiles addresses those lacking the good fortune to be brought up as gentlemen. Indeed, the appeal of his book, and one of the features of it that caused it to sell almost a quarter of a million copies by the end of the century, was Smiles’s showing how men of humble origins had risen to high positions in professions and in societies. Shakespeare’s father was a butcher and grazier, as was Wolsey’s; Captain Cook’s a day-labourer; Ben Jonson’s a mason; Inigo Jones’s a carpenter; Dr Livingstone’s a weaver; and Faraday’s a blacksmith. Britain was a land of social mobility that had had an aristocracy of talent for longer than it had had an aristocracy: Victorian snobbery about ‘trade’ was just that.

  In fashioning the book’s high moral tone Smiles takes his lead from the man he calls ‘the great Dr Arnold’, who had led the way in Smilesian philosophy by striving ‘to teach his pupils to rely on themselves, and to grow in character by effort.’ He recounts the story of Arnold upbraiding a boy who was not doing well in his lessons, who looked Arnold in the eye and asked: ‘Why do you speak angrily sir? Indeed, I am doing the best I can.’27 Arnold, he says, would tell the story to his children, in praise of the boy and, it seems, in deprecation of himself. Smiles also quotes with great approval a line from Stanley’s Life, which seems to enlist the Doctor in the higher ranks of the utilitarians: how Arnold communicated to boys when they arrived at Rugby that ‘a great and earnest work was going forward’ and how thereafter a boy would sense that ‘a strange joy came over him on discerning that he had the means of being useful, and thus of being happy.’28 This, he said, was the product of the force of Arnold’s character, not least in how it was rooted in his commitment to truth, and his respect for work.

  He also anticipated, in taking issue with its basic thesis, by a decade the work of Arnold’s eldest son in Culture and Anarchy. In conceding that a measure of ‘self-culture’ was important to the aspiring man, he warned that society might overestimate the importance of literary culture – ‘we are apt to imagine that because we possess many libraries, institutes and museums, we are making great progress’.29 Having a library meant being learned no more than having money meant one was generous. ‘Thus many indulge themselves in the conceit they are cultivating their minds, when they are only employed in the humbler occupation of killing time.’ In one of the book’s rare jokes, Smiles observes that killing time is something ‘of which perhaps the best that can be said is that it keeps them from doing worse things.’

  Smiles, like Matthew Arnold, understood the importance of the pursuit of perfection; but advocated a very different route. After all, as he points out, ‘there were wise, valiant and true-hearted men bred in England, long before the existence of a reading public.’ It depends on what one means by ‘perfection’: and Smiles and Arnold appear to have had two very different views of that. Where they would seem to have common ground is in Smiles’s assertion that ‘self-culture may be degraded’ if viewed ‘too exclusively as a means of “getting on”.’30 Smiles does, eventually, concede that self-culture ‘will at all events give one the companionship of elevated thoughts’, and with it the reflective mind that breeds a sense of civilisation.

  Character – which Smiles called ‘the crown and glory of life’ – he defined as ‘human nature in its best form.’31 Men of character were the conscience and ‘best motive power’ of society. It was a short step from this to the Smilesian definition of a gentleman, that particular facet of character that so obsessed the writers of Victorian fiction. ‘Truthfulness, integrity, and goodness’ were at the heart of the concept.32 These, together with politeness, were not exclusive to any rank or station, Smiles argued. ‘The True Gentleman is one whose nature has been fashioned after the highest models’, he rules. The true gentleman had also self-respect, a sense of honour, and high-mindedness. ‘He does not shuffle or prevaricate, dodge or skulk; but is honest, upright and straightforward.’33 Bravery is implicit in this. Smiles rounds off his paean to the gentleman by recalling what hap
pened in 1852 at the sinking of the Birkenhead, where the cry went up of ‘women and children first’. ‘The examples of such men never die,’ Smiles observed as he noted the upright deaths of those who had put the weak (or the supposed weak) first.34

  Lest Smiles’s audience imagine the ruling class led lives of sheer ease, he pointed out, too, the example of strivers such as Sir Robert Peel: ‘He possessed in an extraordinary degree the power of continuous intellectual labour, nor did he spare himself.’35 Palmerston (whose energies were sometimes expended in ways of which the upright Smiles would not have approved), Russell, Disraeli and, of course, Gladstone were also given honourable mentions as leaders of society who showed the lower orders the importance of effort. Smiles counselled those who strove against defeatism if results did not come quickly: he quoted Ruskin in his aid (‘patience is the finest and worthiest part of fortitude . . . patience lies at the root of all pleasures, as well as of all power’) and proclaimed that ‘patient perseverance’ was the key to achievement.36 It was exactly how Peel had become a fine orator, having been set extempore speaking exercises by his father as a boy: ‘By steady perseverance the habit of attention became powerful’.37 He learned to repeat verbatim sermons he had heard in church. He developed thereby ‘the extraordinary power of accurate remembrance’ that so wrong-footed his parliamentary opponents. Quoting de Maistre, he said this exemplified the notion that ‘to know how to wait is the great secret of success’.