The Writing of Mill's Autobiography

Abstract

W HEN John Stuart Mill's Autobiography was published, in i873, it caused sensation.' Following close upon his death, at time when his eminence was unquestioned and his esteem world-wide, it provided fascinating account of the intellectual history of an age and its clearest mind. True, it contained nothing of the bombast of Carlyle, the verve of Dickens, or the romanticism of Kingsley. Generally it was accepted upon its own terms-the sober intuitions of sober self. seemed to be document unencumbered with passion or emotional exorbitance; there was little in it of love, anxiety, guilt, fear, or desire. But it seemed no less interesting for that fact. Indeed, John Morley specifically took to task those hypothetical large numbers of talkers and writers who seem to think that history of careful man's opinions on grave and difficult subjects ought to have all the rapid movements and unexpected turns of romance and he made it clear that he himself despised the belief that a book without rapture and effusion and great many capital letters must be joyless and disappointing.2 All in all it was recognized that the Autobiography was more the record of succession of mental attitudes and of the development of convictions than the lament of an elderly man who had suffered much or the lyrical release of heart full to overflowing. Subsequent generations have been less kind. Leslie Stephen found the Autobiography seriously deficient in just those characteristics which give to autobiography its sensuously human appeal, and even so sympathetic an admirer of Mill as the late Harold Laski found it, if not completely unmoving, at least without magic. Doubtless it is without the magic of the deeply religious nature-that which causes the pages of Augustine to haunt the memory. Also it lacks the obsessive egoism of Rousseau, whose passionate expressions of the sentimental self at once hold and repel with their excesses. Nor does it strike us with the simple pathos of those few pages of David Hume written but few months before his death and beginning in all simplicity: It is difficult for man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore I shall be short. But although the Autobiography is neither religious, sentimental, nor pathetic, it is by no means, I think, the purely intellectual exercise for which it is often mistaken. Men have turned to it for the impersonal account of the miraculous education which began with Greek at three and had gotten to the Posterior Analytics at twelve, for its description of the younger Benthamites who clustered around the Westminster Review in the i820'S, and for the scattered hints which it throws out concerning the production of Mill's own influential writings in economics, politics, and philosophy. But they have seldom turned to it with an interest in Mill's life rather than in his thought, or with the intention of discovering just those emotional sources from which all philosophizing flows.