by Phyllis Rose
Almost everyone who talked to Mill agreed that his mind was one of the amazing phenomena of the age, so clear, so productive, so just, so inexorable. (In fact, his skull is reported to have the largest brain size known to science.) But it had a defect which Mill alone perceived. It initiated nothing. He was like an automaton which functioned perfectly when set on course, but could not set its own course or turn itself on. So Harriet, spontaneous, imperious, intellectually passionate, without self-doubt, put the logic machine into motion. She was his starter button. She was ‘Feeling’, mysteriously energising, required to mobilise ‘Thought’. She served as the part of himself that cared. She might change her mind. She might advocate capitalism one year and socialism the next. But she always cared. When she died he would say that the spring of his life was broken, and the metaphor was absolutely right. She wound him up. She set him off. Sharing interests and a general dedication to human improvement, but differing so much in the ways their minds worked, they were a perfect intellectual team.
The world does not take kindly to a successful collaboration between a married couple. When John Lennon insisted on making records with Yoko Ono, he was accused of deifying an inferior artist and she was accused of destroying a great artistic unit. Alice Rossi’s feminist explanation of the hostility Harriet Taylor evoked might account for some of the passion aroused by Yoko Ono, too. But cases exist in which men are resented for intruding on women’s careers. Opera-lovers will perhaps recall the initial resistance to Joan Sutherland’s demand that her husband, Richard Bonynge, conduct whenever she sang, and – at the other end of the cultural spectrum – the resistance to Barbra Streisand’s elevation of her lover from hairdresser to producer. What is at work here seems to be a collective jealousy. The public, whose relationship with any celebrity (writer, philosopher, or film star) is partly erotic, resents another person’s coming between it and the object of its attention, and any artist who insists on giving more credit to a loved one than the public thinks is appropriate risks bringing down upon him or her the public’s wrath.
Such was the tactical blunder John Stuart Mill committed in writing his autobiography. His purpose, when he decided three years after his marriage to write the story of his life, was to fix in words for posterity the record of his debt to ‘one whose intellect is as much profounder than mine as her heart is nobler’. At the time he was suffering badly from consumption. He thought he was dying. It was his last chance to make the world see and appreciate Harriet as he saw and appreciated her. Most autobiographies are written as a defence of self; Mill’s was written as a defence of his wife. Usually read as a conversion story or political testament, The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill seems instead a monument in the annals of Victorian domesticity. It demands comparison with a narrative like David Copperfield, which asks in its opening sentence whether David will turn out to be the hero of his own life and makes it clear by the end that he has not, that his wife plays that role.
Attempting to win recognition for Harriet, Mill overstated the case and evoked only disbelief and scorn. Alexander Bain believed that if Mill had scrupulously listed the ways in which his wife collaborated with him, he would have been believed and Harriet respected. Unfortunately, ‘he outraged all reasonable credibility in describing her matchless genius, without being able to supply any corroborating testimony’.49 Reading proofs of The Autobiography in 1873, Bain begged Helen Taylor, Mill’s executor, to remove some of the more fulsome references to her mother. The incredulous world, he said, would be startled enough by what remained. Bain had in mind passages like the following, in which Mill describes Harriet Taylor as she was in 1832, and which her daughter allowed to stand:
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.50
Bain also found distressing the assertion that James Mill, in his impact on progressive thought, had no equal among men and but one among women. Nor did he like the passage about Carlyle which ends with Mill calling Harriet ‘one greatly the superior of us both – who was more a poet than he, and more a thinker than I – whose mind and nature included his and infinitely more’.
It is possible to create a context in which such passages seem less glaring. Mill over-estimated Harriet’s mental qualities, I have suggested, because they were so different from his own. Also, he tended to allegorise people, to make them Thinkers or Feelers, and to such a man the highest praise would naturally be to say that the eulogised one combined both virtues. Since Mill thought of poetry as a mode of feeling rather than a feat of writing, he did not perceive the ludicrousness of comparing Harriet to Shelley as a poet. He meant that she felt as deeply as Shelley did, not that her poems were as good as his. But the most outrageous of all Mill’s hyperboles about Harriet fortunately did not make its way into his autobiography or present itself to the attention of that dry Scotsman, Alexander Bain: in 1855, writing from Italy, Mill sent New Year’s greetings to ‘the only person living who is worthy to live’.51
It is pointless to read Harriet’s scraps of verse looking for a mute, inglorious Shelley. It is pointless to compare the fragmentary essays left us with the prose of Carlyle. Even her surviving letters – most of them were destroyed at her request – offer no convincing evidence of her genius. They are often confused, contradictory, bossy, intolerant of other people’s faults but unaware of her own. Mill’s contemporaries could see no resemblance between the genius described in the autobiography and the woman they knew. Some said that Mill was literally the only person in the least impressed with her. Some said she wasn’t even bright. Some said she parroted back to Mill his own thoughts and words, and that was why he thought she was so brilliant. All agreed there was a great gap between the reality of the woman and John’s vision of her, and his autobiography, insofar as it described Harriet, has generally been taken to represent the strength of his feelings rather than to portray accurately the object of them.
Of course he made her up, as we all make up the people we love. Bain called it an ‘extraordinary hallucination’. Diana Trilling considered it evidence of neurosis.52 But one person’s hallucination or neurosis is another person’s love, which is nothing if not an inspired and happy warping of one’s perceptual mechanism in favour of the person perceived. Mill’s delusion about Harriet is his love for her and, written all over his autobiography, it makes that book, sympathetically read, one of the most touching love stories of the nineteenth century. The more ordinary Harriet Taylor was in fact, the more impressive the spectacle of a man projecting upon the world the lineaments of an inner need.
If Mill’s Autobiography fails to make us see the woman he saw, the chapters describing his childhood enable us to understand why he saw her that way. The blueprint for loving was drawn, and drawn powerfully, by his father, who at one level was teaching his son to think for himself but at another was training him in exactly the opposite behaviour, drilling into him with every lesson the feel of domination, the surrender of will to a being stronger than himself. How well Mill understood the experience of subjection would become clear in his sympathy for the subjection of women. His early experience led him to resent subjection but also to experience it as the most intense connection between two people. It seems therefore inevitable that Mill would be drawn to a woman who made lavish use of rebuke and reproach, someone stronger than himself, someone controlling, whom he endowed with all the qualities he felt himself to lack: deep feeliof subjection would become clear in his sympathy for the subjection of women. His early experience led him to resent subjection but also to experience it as the most intense connection between two people. It seems therefore inevitable that Mill would be drawn to a woman
who made lavish use of rebuke and reproach, someone stronger than himself, someone controlling, whom he endowed with all the qualitiesng, intuitiveness, passion.
Mill may have been like most people in creating imaginatively the person he then fell in love with, but he differed in being able to present her to the world as both philosophically and politically significant. Philosophically, Harriet represented the cure for the spiritual emptiness of eighteenth-century rationalism. Politically, she represented the fate of intelligent women, under-utilised, under-respected, prevented from achieving what she might have if positions were determined by talent and not by an accident of birth. If circumstances had been encouraging, Harriet could have been a great artist. She could have been a great orator. Her knowledge of human nature and her cleverness about practical life ‘would, in times when such a carrière was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of the world’.53
If the French Revolution allowed and the example of Napoleon encouraged men of humble birth to achieve high station (la carrière ouverte aux talents), one kind of chain on humanity had been broken and one form of slavery overthrown. But it remained for women to enjoy the same opening of opportunity brought to the base-born by the Revolution and, more remotely, to blacks by the Emancipation. (Mill would develop this analogy between women and other disadvantaged classes in The Subjection of Women.) In his exorbitant praise of his wife, Mill seems at times to be apologising for the collective disadvantage of the female sex, assuming the collective guilt of the male. And if the outrageous statements about Mrs Mill’s genius are not quite a tactical manoeuvre, designed to suggest women’s potential and their systematic discouragement, they may be calculated in a way that does not wholly represent the effusions of love. As one of the keenest students of power in modern times, Mill could not have been unaware that he was, in his dealings with Harriet, altering the usual allocation of power between the sexes. He must have realised it was unusual for a man of his stature to claim that he had merely written down what a woman had told him to write.
Mill believed that nothing is innate, that character is formed by circumstance, and that therefore no class, sex or race is ‘naturally’ superior to the other. Women provided his central example. Until little girls were brought up in exactly the same fashion as little boys, with the same expectations, the same encouragements, even the same toys, you could make no statement about what women were like. They would merely continue to turn themselves into the decorative and dependent creatures they have historically been rewarded for being. Feminism was in this way at the centre of Mill’s beliefs, and his conviction that, cultural circumstances apart, women could be men’s equals in ability and accomplishment became for him a touchstone of philosophic worth.54
The nineteenth century’s most important theorist of feminism was concerned not to reproduce in his own life the historical iniquities of his sex. He would not be the conventional husband, assuming his own dominance within the family, the ruler of a microcosmic state with Harriet as his subject – the situation which Dickens, in his role of apologist for the patriarchal family, idealised in his novels. In the Mill family, power would be shared, the reins held jointly. The Mills were embarked upon a great experiment, something new in the history of relations between men and women – a true marriage of equals. But so unusual was this situation that for Harriet to be anywhere near equal she had to be ‘more than equal’. Think of it as a domestic case of affirmative action. To achieve equality, more power had to go to Harriet, in compensation for the inequality of their conditions.
Mill intended both the fact and the written portrait of their friendship – and later of their marriage – to be an acte provocateur. However, in attempting to perform a revolutionary act, setting up woman as ruler, he was tracing an ancient pattern more accessible to ordinary minds, the man besotted by love into yielding his rule to a woman, Hercules with a distaff, a figure of fun for centuries. What Mill saw as a daring political gesture seemed to others no more than a grievous case of uxoriousness. Bain’s words emphasise the political infraction at the heart of the offensive spectacle: ‘Such a state of subjection to the will of another, as he candidly avows and glories in, cannot be received as a right state of things. It violates our sense of due proportion, in the relationship of human beings.’55 One wonders if a similar subjection of a woman’s will to a man’s would have violated Bain’s sense of due proportion to the same degree. And if a woman wrote about her husband as extravagantly as Mill wrote about his wife, would she be so violently accused of hallucination about her husband’s personal qualities? Nevertheless, Bain has a point. ‘Such a state of subjection … cannot be received as a right state of things.’ How splendid it would be if we could find in the Mills’ marriage what they hoped we would find, an exemplary model. But in practice, Harriet made the decisions. Harriet ran the show. A female autocrat merely replaced the usual male.
In their daily life as in their collaboration, he obeyed her in all things. If he was willing to change his mind at her request on such issues as the relative merits of socialism and capitalism, the secret ballot and capital punishment, he was certainly willing to drop Mrs Grote and Mrs Austin when Harriet asked him to. He had been close to them in his youth. He would see them again after Harriet’s death. But she did not like them, and that was enough to keep Mill from them during her lifetime. When his mother’s property was divided among her children at the time of her death, Mill thought to refuse his share since he had been on such bad terms with his mother and sisters since his marriage. But Harriet rebuked him. To refuse four or five hundred pounds was a species of vanity only a rich man could afford. Of course he should take the money. Of course. ‘As your feeling is so directly contrary, mine is wrong and I give it up entirely,’ he said.56
The pattern of rebuke and abdication repeats itself in the most minute of their household affairs. Once, in Harriet’s absence, their neighbour informed Mill that rats were infesting their shared garden wall. Mill ventured to reply with a noncommittal, bland acknowledgment of receipt of the note and reported his action to Harriet. She was furious. Mill ought to have replied aggressively, throwing the rats back upon the neighbour, making them his responsibility. And so, in his next note, Mill did. He never knew how Harriet would react; that was part of her fascination. Expecting reproach, he was praised; expecting praise, he was rebuked. ‘Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ Shakespeare wrote of Cleopatra, who also had the gift of contrariness.
When they were apart, they questioned and instructed each other minutely on the state of their health. ‘How is it my darling,’ Mill enquired, ‘that you say you have broken the habit of expectoration? When you cough are you not obliged to swallow something if you do not spit it up?’57 ‘I cannot but think,’ replied Harriet with her characteristic note of self-righteousness, ‘that if you tried as earnestly as I have done since October to avoid any expectoration that you would lose the habit altogether as I have done.’58 It was her idea that Mill was bothered by phlegm because he was in the habit of spitting, not that he was forced to spit because he was bothered by phlegm. Perhaps she was right.
The matter was not a small one, because Mill’s spit was tinged with blood. He had tuberculosis, consumption, contracted in all likelihood (although Mill thought it was inherited) from his father, who had died of it, as had or would many of their friends and relatives. Within two years of their marriage the Mills were serially or concurrently so sick and treatment so imperative that the happiest and most self-sufficient of couples was forced to separate repeatedly in order to pursue individual health. First Harriet had to spend a winter in the milder climate of southern France while John, because of business, had to stay in London. Then his health deteriorated so badly that the East India Company gave him a medical leave to spend the winter of 1854–55 out of England. But at that time, Harriet was too fragile to undertake a journey abroad, and Mill was forced to leave her in the seaside town of Torquay, whose climate was the
mildest to be found in England. That winter he sent her forty-nine letters, written a few pages a day, which make a volume in themselves. Theirs was the kind of intimacy that could be maintained – however frustratingly to them – at a distance, and they continued, as Mill toured Rome, Sicily, then Greece, to consult on their household and to conduct his career together.
She died first and a mere seven years after their marriage. But since Harriet was to such an extent a character in his imagination, their marriage did not have to end with her passing. Mill proved to be a grave fetishist. Like Queen Victoria, who continued to set out Albert’s shaving water after his death, he couldn’t let go. Harriet had died in Avignon, on one of her yearly removals to the south of France in search of health. Mill bought a house overlooking the cemetery where she was buried and spent more and more time there every year. He hired an architect to design a tomb, for which Carrara marble was especially imported. The vast and perfect piece of stone which made its way slowly by ship to Marseille and then up the Rhone to Avignon proved big enough only for the covering slab, and more marble had to be ordered for the sides. When finished in March 1860, the tomb had cost about £1,500, or an entire year’s salary for Mill.