2	Mediated Involvement: John Stuart Mill’s Partial Sociability

The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.

John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties”

Though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more.

Mill, Autobiography

REFLECTION, RECEPTION, IMAGINATION

This chapter explores the underpinnings of John Stuart Mill’s notion of the forms of sociability available to the ideal liberal subject, focusing on the debt that even the most autonomous form of reasoning owes, by his account, to an imaginative faculty that conceives of other minds in various imperfect ways. Mill’s central liberal tenets inhere in his conception of aesthetic judgment—and in his notion of what it means to read works of literature. The model of sociability Mill proposes involves a new way of conceptualizing how one’s ideas and judgments are transformed by the immediate or the mediated presence of other minds; in effect, we are defined by our semi-detached relationship to those around us. We might call this a theory of mediated involvement. That idea of mediated involvement is rooted in Mill’s conception of the powers of art and of the aesthetics of reading. The underpinnings of Mill’s ideas about political communities are laid bare in his accounts of the ways in which aesthetic experience make human beings available to one another, graspable and tangible.

Mill’s uncertainties about his relationship to Benthamite utilitarianism and Coleridge’s romanticism lead him to experiment with new models for understanding how social interaction and subjective experience shape any individual’s grasp of universal truths. To see why this is so requires the examination of antecedents crucial to his conceptions of aesthetic judgment and the capacity of imagination: Kant and post-Kantian romantics. Woven through his career is an innovative approach to a set of problems about aesthetic judgment inherited from Kant, but crucially filtered through romantic historicism.

The role aesthetic judgment has to play in the Kantian pathway between the sensuous (Lockean empiricism) and the purely categorical or conceptual (Leibnizian idealism) has long been in dispute. At stake in that debate is the question of how aesthetic judgment—or aesthetic experience generally—shapes received sensations; what role reflection plays in turning that initial reception into an experience.1 The answer to that question depends in part upon whether imagination is understood as one self-contained aspect of a larger cognitive capacity that subsumes it, or whether it is a reflective pathway all its own, productive of a qualitatively distinct form of knowledge.

Fiona Hughes stresses the distinctive role Kant assigns to imagination in the Critique of Judgment:

We are complex beings bound to the world by a sensory or aesthetic capacity to take things in, namely receptivity. But we are also able to stand back from our environment in a reflective capacity. That which joins aesthetic receptivity with reflection is a third capacity, Kant tells us, imagination. Imagination makes possible a unification of what is ineliminably different—that is, our capacity to be affected and our capacity to reflect on the world.²

For Hughes, the crux of Kantian imagination is the role it plays in making sense of receptivity (the sensuous, empirical apprehension of the world) and reflection, which understanding brings to bear on that sensory data. The imagination forms the basis of aesthetic judgment, which “allows us to reflect on the process of synthesis” between reception and reflection. According to Hughes, “We can only be receptive, and we can only be reflective insofar as we are both at one and the same time. Aesthetics allows for an insight into the plural constitution of our experience in general.”³ Hughes emphasizes what it means to recognize immanent plurality in our sensory and cognitive natures: that recognition is achievable via aesthetics because the aesthetic experience helps us to recognize that our sensory (receptive) and cognitive (reflective) capacities are at once distinct from and reliant upon one another.

In exploring the same congeries of problems around the distinctiveness of aesthetic judgment, Hannah Arendt stresses the absence of the world at the moment that the imagination goes to work.

Imagination, that is, the faculty of having present what is absent, transforms an object into something that I do not have to be directly confronted with but that I have in some sense internalized, so that now I can be affected by it as though it were given to me by a nonobjective sense. 4

Arendt understands Kant’s aesthetics as the implicit basis for his political conception of enlightenment by virtue of an aesthetic “enlarged mentality.” Whatever we feel about that secondary turn, Arendt is right to stress the importance of the role that imagination has to play in grounding aesthetic judgment in Kant. The crux of the aesthetic operation in Kant, argues Arendt, is to hold in mind a representation that both is and is not the object it represents. The object itself is gone: hence the materiality that a purely empirical account would demand no longer obtrudes, but the representation is in some profound sense determined by that original object. This is not mere idealism, nor a subjectivism that reads the impression as a purely psychological projection, a Paterian account of insulated subjectivity that exists apart from the empirical impressions that intermittently reach it but cannot be verifiably linked to the actual outside world. That tack away from both idealism and empiricism charts the course that Mill, too, follows.

SENTIMENTAL DREAMS

The evolution of Mill’s distinctive idea of intimacy via mediated involvement is the result of developments in the four decades between the appearance of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Mill’s 1833 “What Is Poetry?” Perhaps the quickest way to trace developments in romantic thought germane to the Millian uptake of Kantian conceptions of judgment is, first, via Schiller’s 1795 On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature, and then through a Charles Lamb piece in which both Kant’s and Schiller’s ideas are refracted in a British milieu.⁵

Schiller’s conception of the aesthetic diverges in many ways from the Kantian conception of a judgment that partakes of an aesthetic sensis communis, but like much of his thought, his conception of “modern” (as opposed to “classical”) poetry has Kantian roots. On the Naïve and Sentimental in Literature argues that while the poetry of the ancients “moves us through nature, through sensuous truth, through living presence the [poetry of the moderns] move[s] us through ideas.” The modern (sentimental) poet differs from the ancient (naïve) in the capacity not simply to receive but also to reflect upon impressions:

Since the naïve poet only follows simple nature and simple emotions and restricts himself solely to the imitation of nature, so can he only have a single relationship with his subject-matter. . . . Things are quite different with the sentimental poet. He reflects on the impression which objects make on him, and the emotion into which he himself is transposed and into which he transposes us is based only on that reflection.6

Schiller therefore credits the modern with an awareness of the distinction between reflection and reception: “The sentimental poet therefore is constantly dealing with two opposing concepts and emotions, with reality as boundary and with his idea as the infinite.”⁷

By Schiller’s account, the sentimental poet is capable of abiding with the uncertainty of the line that divides the actual from the true. Modern poetry offers us thought, but with a tremendous price to be paid: uncertainty, yearning, and abstraction understood as the failure of that empirical and sensuously rooted materiality that the naïve, ancient poet could have provided. Poetry becomes modern by abiding with thought—infinitely incomplete, perennially dissatisfying but potentially limitless—rather than with the sensuous world, which is tangible, satisfying, and innately limited.

Schiller departs from the logic of Kantian aesthetic judgment because what in Kant had been a simple positive attribute of imagination—that it can take place, as Arendt puts it, in the absence of its object—has become an almost paradoxical quandary. The completion of any imaginative act hinges on aporia and absence, a mourning that is integral to the aesthetic experience. In Kant, imagination functions even in absence, because it dwells in the mind’s capacity to make sense of reception and reflection alike and to make sense of the doubled quality of cognition that follows from that mental doubleness. In Schiller, however, absence has become a new kind of conceptual presence, one that is historicized and made the harbinger of modernity itself. To be the offspring of abstractedness, from the perspective of semi-detachment, is to understand any moment of presence as shot through with the possibility of absence—which also makes moments of absence potentially replete with this other, abstracted sort of presence.

Mill’s classification of poetry according to its capacity to spur feeling, or thought, or finally “thought mixed with feeling,” bears traces of Schiller’s insistence on sentimental modern poetry’s relationship to thought in contradistinction to naïve ancient poetry. The way in which absence turns into a stronger kind of conceptual presence continues to ramify in the romantic era. It proves central to one of Charles Lamb’s most memorable Elia essays, “Dream Children: a Reverie” (1822). That essay begins with its speaker, Elia, seemingly mourning his beloved wife, Alice. Though grieving, Elia still takes solace in the ways that, though absent, she yet remains present in their still living children, Alice and John. Thus far, the essay seems to be an elegy, but with a physical memento (the children) replacing the grave or cenotaph where mourning might be expected to take place. Elia has been telling the children “some stories about their pretty dead mother.”8 In the essay’s much elongated final sentence (a sentence interrupted by interpolated speech), however, a striking inversion occurs:

suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech: “We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name”—and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor armchair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side—but John L. (or James Elia) was gone forever.

Solidity and evanescence suddenly switch places: the dream children are revealed as only a visionary glimpse of “what might have been”—had Elia married Alice rather than losing her to Bartrum. It is easy to overlook, though, a slightly earlier moment of unease, when the solidity of the reveries first starts to tremble: “the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was.” This too is an account of absence encoded in presence, albeit a more conventional one: the speaker glimpsing the older Alice looming spectrally through a solid personage, the younger Alice. It is a familiar Shakespearean trope: your essence in your offspring, with the implication that those who knew the older generation well can be forgiven if their reception of the physical attributes of the younger generation activate a process of reflection, making those nostalgic viewers think of an earlier generation peeping through.9

The essay’s peripety is the discovery that rather than the child Alice sparking a thought of the now-absent mother Alice, it is the other way around; Elia’s still unquenched thought of unattainable Alice (happily married to someone else) has generated this evanescent dream child. The reader has been forced initially to think of this scene as a more conventional sort of mourning and substitution where a younger generation stands in for the past one. That substitution of substitutions directs readerly attention to the commonness of this kind of absence-in-presence as a part of ordinary life. (Chapter 9 explores Buster Keaton’s deployment of a similar strategy.) Think of the effect Eliot produces with the narrator’s forearms in Mill on the Floss, making them present on both the bridge and the armchair. The “soul” of Lamb’s first Alice, glimpsed through the eyes of that wholly imaginary second Alice, resembles the elbows that actually exist on the actual armchair back in the narrator’s study—they are the anchor that connects the (fictional) actual world of the narrator to his reverie world, where Alice has left behind her a second Alice to make an (imaginary) actual residue after her death.

The regress between dream and actuality may seem dizzying or infinite; perhaps it is enough to say the essay summons up a “true” world that contains both imagination and actuality. Or even, in Schiller’s terms, with “two opposing concepts and emotions, with reality as boundary and with his idea as the infinite.”¹⁰ Lamb’s conception of the way in which imaginative truth intersects with actuality raises, in romantic form, the same problem that Hughes identifies as central to Kant’s conception of the imagination: that making sense of the dual presence of reception and reflection also involves identifying a capacity (the imagination) whereby we can grapple with the tension, or confusion, or the spectral, oneiric overflow that those double cognitive capacities create. And just as the Kantian quandary endures, so too does the need for an account of the imagination that explains how we may seem to be simultaneously experiencing two different realities, only one of which can be actual. Sometimes, those elbows are simply going to have to rest on two surfaces at once.

MILL: READING AS RECEPTION

Society . . . practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression . . . penetrating much more deeply into the details of life and enslaving the soul itself . . . and compel[ling] all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own [character].11

“Dream Children” suggests a Schillerian notion of thought haunting a limited, knowable “reality.” It emphasizes the ways in which the coexistence of the two become the basis not only for aesthetic experience but also for reveries that reveal how much even the ordinary world is shot through with problems of the imperceptible presence of ideas that persist even in the absence of any material substrate—or that precisely propagate because they lack actuality. The persistence of that way of thinking about the work of modern poetry up through the 1820s is an important indicator that Mill is not simply heir to a Kantian approach to aesthetics that emphasizes the potential of imagination to provide a distinctive framework for understanding our thought as defined both by reception and the capacity to reflect on that reception. Schiller and Lamb alike mark intervening romantic developments that prove crucial in shaping Mill’s slippery, elusive, nearly paradoxical account of how the thoughts of others can become present to an individual.

Mill struggled throughout his career to find a meaningful space for individual autonomy and self-determination within a universe—and a human community—operating by indisputable rational laws.¹² Mill’s perennial worry that “society” threatens to “compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own [character]” can make his work seem deeply suspicious of all social structures, be they enabling or constricting.¹³ Yet his systematic approach to the “moral sciences” reveals that at the root of his fear of social coercion is a comprehensive and nuanced sense of how strongly all human action is shaped by well-nigh inescapable norms that cultures inevitably generate and from which no individual can ever be entirely free.

Mill grew up devoted to a Benthamite strain of Enlightenment reason, but a turn toward romanticism in early adulthood led him both to a more historical conception of Enlightenment universals and also to a distinctive conception of the role that individuated experience had to play in assembling a coherent society,¹⁴ arguably engendering a duality that hovers over Anglo-American liberalism still.¹⁵ Mill’s unsettled attitude toward the various forms through which the individual receives a society’s impress is striking. Far from having forged a perfect union between the demands of social cohesion and those of free action, Mill’s work reveals a constant search for new or reconfigured structures that might be able to shape—without rigidly fixing—individual character.¹⁶ The fraught space that reading creates—somehow at once presence and absence, much like thought in Schiller’s account of sentimental poetry—proves crucial to Mill’s effort to reconcile individual liberty with the necessity, or even the onus, of interpersonal contact.

Erving Goffman, a century later, understood the individual’s proper role within an omnipresent and inescapable social network as defined by facework—that is, by the inescapable duty of preparing one’s face to fit one’s world: “Face is an image of self delineated in terms of approved social attributes.”17 In Goffman’s account, society is not formed out of autonomous agents but rather out of an incessant flow of social transactions: “Not, then, men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men.”¹⁸ Mill by contrast is in search of a formal alternative to such facework—a search that takes him through a variety of genres (among them lyric poetry, personal correspondence, the publicly circulating essay, and the dedication) in an attempt to locate the sorts of writing, and of reading, that best achieve print-borne intimacy.

In the 1850s and 1860s, Mill moves away from the sharp distinction in “What Is Poetry?” between poetic solitude and public ratiocination. He instead begins to construct a political philosophy that aims to preserve, concurrently, the best features of social cohesion and individualism. On Liberty, rather than choosing public reason over poetic reverie or demonstrating a split within Mill’s notions of sociability and solitude, finds for the first time a way to align his commitment to the power of impersonal reason with the importance of “interpersonal relationships” that Mary Lyndon Shanley has identified as Mill’s “important contribution to the liberal understanding of individual autonomy.”¹⁹ That alignment, however, can come about only through the mediating intervention of the written word. Mill’s new ideas about semi-detachment relate to the post-Kantian thinking about presence and absence briefly explored above by way of his views on the role that reading can—and should—play in crafting character. Mill’s view of reading elucidates his debt to the Schillerian conception of thought defined by absence—and beyond that, his debt to the Kantian notion of imagination triggered only by what is absent.

NO NIGHTINGALE

Mill’s liberalism stands or falls on its capacity to navigate a tension between autonomy and solidarity. It is this tension that makes Mill acutely aware of the threat of “compulsion and control” over an individual posed not simply by the state monopoly on “physical force in the form of legal penalties,” but also—more ominously because less openly—by “the moral coercion of public opinion.”²⁰ Kwame Anthony Appiah has described Mill as arguing for “the unsociability of individualism”; Mill suggests, by Appiah’s account, “that political institutions, which develop and reflect the value of sociability, are always sources of constraint on our individuality.”21 I propose a different formulation: Mill is interested in grounding his defense of individualism in semi-detached sociability. Mill wants to explore works that make others crucially present on paper in place of face-to-face contact; something like excusing oneself from a dinner with Bentham to go upstairs and read some Bentham. The role Mill envisions for reading is not a substitute for sociability but a new form of social interaction.

Mill’s passionate condemnation of the tyrannical qualities of the everyday social realm certainly does not put him in a Victorian majority—but neither does it make him a complete outlier. We might compare him to another vehement opponent of social facework: Florence Nightingale. Nightingale’s 1860 “Cassandra” (Mill acknowledges a debt to it in his 1869 The Subjection of Women) memorably describes the suffocating effect of the empty social rituals women must perform when they could instead be pursuing their real work elsewhere. The gap between Mill and Nightingale around the question of what reading offers and what it threatens helps clarify the power of written words to constitute a social network—a kind of absent presence or presence-in-absence—that direct contact fails to produce.

With a few notable exceptions, “Cassandra” depicts reading as mere escapism. The chief fare for benumbed ladies is novels, which offer romantic fantasies of escape, while, in actuality, playing a key role in the gothic confinement that ladies suffer at the hands of their immediate families and society as a whole. Cultivated women trapped in the drawing room, she says, are “exhausted like those who live on opium or on novels, all their lives—exhausted with feelings which lead to no action.”²² More than that, Nightingale loathes the vicarious escape into shared feeling that novels offer: being read to, she opines “is like lying on one’s back, with one’s hands tied, and having liquid poured down one’s throat.”²³

Mill does not give up on a wide range of avenues to aesthetic experience—among them the reading of poetry and of novels—because he is searching for a way to retain all the benefits of solidarity and of community interaction in forms that will not impinge on individual freedom. “Cassandra” is permeated with disgust, horrified by the social world; it desperately seeks ways to forsake the world of facework. Moreover, Mill’s late political works envision alternatives to social conformity that do not involve, as Nightingale’s ideal vision does, a simple plunge into hard work in the public world. Instead, in the 1850s and 1860s, Mill returns to what in the 1830s had only seemed to him a feature of poetic texts and discovers aspects of that same “feeling thought” in a range of speculative writing.

The distinction Mill implicitly erects between face-to-face interactions and those mediated by reading shapes his memorable discussion in On Liberty of the different ways an opinion may circulate:

An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard.24

Mill posits a form of latent resistance built into printed opinions, a way that the medium encourages reasoned judgment by discouraging the possibility of immediate (shared) emotional response. Mill’s liberalism is predicated in part, then, on establishing a distinction between a “crowd” and a “public”: between inherently excitable forms of social aggregation, as in a mob, and a reading public’s inherent resistance to such affective intensification.²⁵

However, Mill’s concerns with the capacity of the printed word run deeper. Appiah’s notion of unsociable individualism implies that Mill’s political thinking is always predicated on establishing a secluded space in which the cool light of reason shines without the heat of passion. Appiah disregards Mill’s emphasis throughout on the times when retreat to such a cool, detached realm in fact engenders the most poignant sorts of feeling. The famous case for reading lyric that Mill makes in “What Is Poetry?” is predicated on the intense emotions that can only arise in acts of solitary reading: poetry is the “overheard” utterance that sparks in the reader the same feeling (or “feeling thought”²⁶) that had inspired the utterance in the author. Mill’s account of poetry may have little enduring interest as an account of the creative process or as an account of the form of the lyric itself, but it has a great deal to tell us about the forms of receptive reading that Mill, in his political writings, came to see as deeply formative of the liberal subject.

“What Is Poetry?” records the surprising discovery of an emotional upwelling within a reader—implicitly, within Mill himself, as the memorable passages on Mill’s own poetry reading in his Autobiography attest. In Mill’s account, strong emotion is not triggered by direct appeal, but rather elicited indirectly. The reader’s emotions are made available when the poet reveals to the reader her own inward nature, giving utterance (via the printed page) to her own deepest feelings. The reader’s response to a poem is like neither the newspaper reader nor the mob member digesting an opinion about corn-dealers. Rather, the reader of a lyric utterance seems to possess qualities both of the mob member and of the newspaper reader. What circulates through magazines and books, then, need not be dispassionate. Instead, some written words can function as the irreplaceable record of another’s emotions, recollected not in tranquility but via a complete recall that unites the original speaker and the reader in a feeling that is deeply personal and yet not at all private.

This view of reading has immense implications for Mill’s account of the ideal form of a liberal subject: a subject formed by exposure to the social realm, yet capable of choosing how to express the character autonomously. In spending so much time with the potential emotional charge of poetry, Mill may be after something like an extension of the Kantian notion of “representative thinking,” in which others are made present inside one’s own internal version of the public realm, conjured up mimetically so that they can be properly understood and answered. What his essay pointedly avoids contemplating is visceral emotional response to an appeal made directly, person-to-person. Thought hinges on absence as presence in Schiller; in Mill, socialization becomes a similarly semi-detached phenomenon.

FEELING, HEARTINESS, AND SPECTRAL BIPEDS: CARLYLE VS. MILL

Given the wide latitude that Mill’s 1833 “What Is Poetry?” grants to feelings expressed through the medium of verse, Thomas Carlyle’s attempt in the very same year to wring from Mill a more direct expression of sympathy makes for fascinating reading. Raised under the aegis of Benthamite radicalism, Mill was, in the early 1830s, initially overwhelmed by Carlyle’s appeals for his friendship. But the correspondence reveals that, as seriously as Mill took Carlyle’s vision of a sort of empathic connection different from any friendship he had known, he also took seriously his own involuntary recoil from the most direct and explicit appeals that Carlyle made for that friendship.27

Responding to a letter in which Carlyle pleads for sympathy and evidence of love, Mill effusively praises his ability to feel passionately and to demand fellow-feeling from friends like Mill himself. However, he declares himself incapable of returning the kind of emotions in the way Carlyle might want: “You wonder at ‘the boundless capacity Man has of loving. . . .’ Boundless indeed it is in some natures, immeasurable and inexhaustible; but I also wonder, judging from myself, at the limitedness and even narrowness of that capacity in others.”²⁸ Carlyle had asked that Mill speak to him with a “Man’s” true feelings, rather than “Cackle” like a “mere spectral biped.”29 In response, Mill declares that he must lack the feeling heart such declarations require:

Truly I do not wonder that you should desiderate more “heartiness” in my letters, and should complain of being told my thoughts only, not my feelings; especially when, as is evident from your last letter, you stand more than usually in need of the consolation and encouragement of sympathy. But alas! when I give my thoughts, I give the best I have.³⁰

The very fertility of thoughts that Mill delights in elsewhere has here become a deficit. If Mill had learned nothing else from his early education, he had learned to trust the dispassionate turn toward cool calculation, which is just the turn Carlyle seeks to deny him.

Mill’s attraction to Carlyle, and to the strain of nationalist romanticism that he cautiously praises in “Coleridge” (1840), has deep roots. It stems from his conviction that Benthamite radicalism lacked a route to happiness and spiritual perfection—a conviction strengthened by his own misery and bouts of depression.³¹ The burgeoning friendship with Carlyle in the early 1830s seemed to offer Mill a way to restore strong feeling to the ordinary current of life.³² However, instead of meeting Carlyle’s demands head-on, Mill makes clear how far he is from being able to respond to the claim directly. Carlyle’s plaint forces Mill to consider whether he is nothing but an emotionless, calculating machine.³³ Mill’s response, though, involved conjecturing that the best form of character building and the most reliable form of profound social interaction lay in mediated involvement—that is, a form of absorption in the emotional content of poetry that depends on the reader’s knowing that the emotions of others are accessible only through the print public sphere.

Far from finding a way to overcome the sense of emotive deficit that Carlyle uncovers in that 1833 exchange, Mill conjures up out of its ashes an innovative aesthetics. Rather than being an impediment to emotional connection, the realm of print (lyric poetry, but in later writings, other genres as well) becomes a way to experience others’ necessarily private experience. The reader’s distance—in space, in time, in possibility of reciprocation—from the lyric speaker whose feelings he understands so intimately is thus not a pitfall but, paradoxically, an asset. Schiller envisions modern poetry as defined by absence, abstraction, and the incompleteness of thought. Mill instead takes up the question of what pleasures mediation can afford.

In his letters to Carlyle, Mill seemingly disavows the capacity to sympathize directly. Yet he treasures poetry because it can produce, by way of an operation that is part thought and part feeling, effusions that are at once private—one’s own inescapably inward feelings—and public—exchangeable tokens in the common language of the world. Poetry, as the “overheard” art, opens up the possibility of indirect, nonreciprocal communication with others—by foreswearing any such direct appeals as Carlyle was making to Mill. In “What Is Poetry?” Mill represents poetry as an oasis, a place to eavesdrop on other’s words and feel their feelings—as Montaigne put it, the chance to gather other men’s flowers—secure in the knowledge that an enlightening return to one’s own private thoughts and feelings would follow. True companionship can arise if the poet

can succeed in excluding from his work every vestige of such lookings-forth into the outward and every-day world, and can express his emotions exactly as he has felt them in solitude, or as he is conscious that he should feel them, though they were to remain for ever unuttered, or (at the lowest) as he knows that others feel them in similar circumstances of solitude.34

This is the involvement Mill craves—that the utmost in inward contemplation might also turn around and become a form of external address. The unuttered emotions of oneself or others thus become precious currency, precious because they are not originally intended for utterance in the public realm at all.

Mill is looking here for a way of understanding social interaction as something that may proceed most satisfactorily when the parties involved are not mutually present: when they do not share the same physical space, when they are not in dialogue with one another. (Hannah Arendt liked Cato’s apothegm for this situation: “Never am I less alone than when by myself.”³⁵)

Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.³⁶

By airing a feeling that is known as another’s and yet recognized and felt as one’s own, poetry manages to be at once subjective and objective, intimate and universal. Thus Carlyle’s feelings, phrased as direct demand to Mill, can spark no response; but Wordsworth’s lyrical effusions, dangling there as an objectless appeal, can readily seem at home in Mill’s mind. Only by gaining poetic access to a feeling that is clearly not one’s own can one understand what feelings mean and where virtue lies.

Mill establishes neither the serene realm of disinterested thought that Benthamite radicalism seems to prescribe, nor a Carlylean self, comprised of feelings lodged in unplumbable interiors. Instead, he offers an innovative and implicitly recursive account of the role that recognizing the feelings of others plays in generating a self that only seems to have existed prior to the reading of the poem itself. Poetry calls into being the feeling self, a self that only seems, retrospectively, to precede the moment poetry brought it into being. It is through poetry that “feeling confessing itself to itself” takes on a material form. Poetry makes visible, to itself, a self that would otherwise have no reliable grounds of existence.

Only when poetry has opened up the reader’s own feelings as belonging, antecedently, to another person can that reader begin to delineate his or her own discrete self. Only in his mediated encounter with the highly wrought feelings of others can Mill discern his own. Poetry teaches Mill how to forge his character on the model of another, but only because that other is unaware of, and unchanged by, the effect he has had upon Mill. Personal correspondence, by contrast, is a genre that partakes of two sorts of intimacy at once: the potentially universal emotive appeal of lyric poetry and a much more tangible, direct, and accordingly unsettling, even disgusting, appeal that operates much more like face-to-face social interaction. Critics generally isolate the claims that Mill makes about poetry, distinguishing them sharply from his later accounts of the basis for interaction with others in the social realm. Mill’s later articulation of a new basis for liberal subjecthood actually begins here, in his description of how a reader can gain access to another’s feelings—and his own—via the printed page.

Correspondence can elicit honest answers from Mill about the state of Carlyle’s feelings or his own—but Mill pointedly denies that it can provide the sort of immediate succor for which he feels Carlyle is calling. This is a generic distinction, certainly, between two forms of writing. Yet for Mill, it is also something more, a difference between the admirable, immediate, and transformative effect of lyric poetry’s indirect appeal, and the unsettling but ultimately unmoving attempt via Carlyle’s direct address. For further evidence that Mill continued to endow the readerly relationship with forms of mediated involvement unavailable elsewhere, we might begin by looking at Mill’s autobiographical descriptions of his relationship to reading.

MILL AMONG THE DISCIPLES

If all the dead were living they could talk to us only in the same way that the living do. And a conversation with Plato would still be a conversation, that is to say, an exercise infinitely more superficial than reading, the value of things heard or read being of less importance than the spiritual state they create in us and which can be profound only in solitude or in that peopled solitude that reading is.

Marcel Proust, “On Reading Ruskin”

Half a century after Mill’s death, the notion that reading might be more intimate than face-to-face communication was, if not quite an artistic commonplace, certainly a viable hypothesis. In Proust’s description of the virtues of reading, talking with Plato is far inferior to reading him. Reading, circa 1900, can look like a happy substitute for the perils of ordinary sociability.

Proust’s textophilia is certainly a far cry from Mill’s fascination with moments in which textual mediation seems to bring with it inescapable immediacy, a text-borne solidarity that is unmatchable in textless sociability. Mill remained fervently engaged in political and cultural battles of his own day (even entering Parliament as a Liberal in the late 1860s), battles he could and would not have fought without a passionate investment and a firm belief in the inextricability of humans from their cultural surroundings.37 Nor did Mill’s liberalism grow out of a notion of autonomy that favored reading over speech, and solitude over interaction. In fact, it is precisely the interplay of solitude and necessary interaction that marks Mill’s chief innovations as a theorist of liberalism.³⁸

Yet both early and late in his career, Mill is curiously fascinated by the possibility that a reading-based involvement might prove the best way for the feelings of others to make their way into an individual’s thoughts. Mill argues that in parsing written work readers may come to make sense of emotional demands that are touching precisely because they are not directly addressed to the reader (“all poetry is of the nature of a soliloquy”).³⁹ Nancy Yousef reads Mill’s Autobiography as representing Mill wrapped so profoundly in solitude that he finds himself bereft even of the words with which to express loneliness.⁴⁰ But the ceaseless production of text about texts that defines the boyhood recollections in the Autobiography also suggests ways in which Mill’s loneliness comes to be transfigured, transvalued even, by a mental solidarity that he arrives at only in his encounters with books.

In Mill’s Autobiography—written and rewritten from the early 1850s onward—both the quantity and the quality of his encounters with books vastly overshadow the space and energy allotted to detailing face-to-face encounters. This begins with Mill’s predictable recourse to books for tutorials in concepts—for example, reading a history of the French Revolution allows Mill to gain a feeling for what liberty is and why it ought to be valued. In every meeting that Mill records, moreover, the textual trace precedes and conditions mere social contact.41 We might even call the form that his social life took a semi-detached one: mediated involvement strikes him most forcefully and directly, while face-to-face encounters seem curiously irrelevant.⁴²

When Mill speaks of friends—Ricardo, Bentham, or the radical MP Joseph Hume—his descriptions are so buttressed by commentary on their publications that their “dearness” is inextricable from his responses to their written oeuvres.⁴³ After having known Bentham his whole life, and having repeatedly discussed his ideas with him, Mill has nothing to say about the man, but reports his near-ecstasy when, on his first serious perusal of Bentham’s writing at age eighteen, the greatest happiness principle “burst upon me with all the force of novelty.”⁴⁴ It is unsurprising, then, that Mill registers nothing of his actual travels through Europe in early life—no Simplon Pass episodes, no Humboldt-like pleasure in the natural. Instead, he details mental “eminences.” When reading Bentham on “Painful and Pleasurable Consequences,” for example, Mill recalls feeling “taken up to an eminence from which I could survey a vast mental domain, and see stretching out into the distance intellectual results beyond all computation.”⁴⁵

Mill’s descriptions of his relationship with his father have long struck readers as the ne plus ultra of emotional chilliness. Mill’s curious descriptions of the nascent utilitarians who hung around James Mill and Bentham strike me as equally revealing. Mill goes out of his way at one juncture to proclaim a disjunction between those young men and his father. His initial motive is to refute the idea that a “school” of philosophical radicalism was brought together and drilled under Bentham and James Mill.

This supposed school, then had no other existence than what was constituted by the fact, that my father’s writings and conversation drew round him a certain number of young men who had already imbibed, or who imbibed from him, a greater or smaller portion of his very decided political and philosophical opinions. The notion that Bentham was surrounded by a band of disciples who received opinion from his lips, is a fable to which my father did justice in his “Fragment on Mackintosh” and which, to all who knew Mr. Bentham’s habits of life and manner of conversation, is simply ridiculous. The influence which Bentham produced was by his writings. Through them he has produced, and is producing, effects on the condition of mankind, wider and deeper, no doubt, than any which can be attributed to my father.46

Looking back at his youth, Mill again strikes the note that he struck in the 1830s: trust in the intimacy and passionate connection available only via the printed page. Ask for something more direct (as Carlyle had), and risk mere nullity—or the kind of irrecoverable intimacy that never achieves the poetic effect of lending itself to being overheard.

In place of such directness, Mill continually seeks a site of laudably semi-detached interchange, where thought and feeling can merge, so that what is felt as most personal can potentially be shared with any other person. Mill’s attachment to the give-and-take of political magazines, for example, seems bound up with his interest in a medium that records indirect interactions even with one’s intimates. His correspondence often records him writing to friends as if their latest articles had been personally addressed to him. At times he even tells correspondents that he does not see the need to say to them in a personal letter what he had already published in an article he presumes they have read. That suggests it would be a mistake to sequester Mill’s thinking about poetic interchange and the pleasures offered by books, and a mistake to treat such claims as distinct from his thoughts on what forms of social interaction can best sustain a liberal polity. In his mature works of political philosophy, Mill remains dedicated to mapping text-based forms of solidarity or communion, forms that can allow valuable kinds of intimacy while avoiding the dangers that “society’s . . . moral coercion” poses.

ON LIBERTY

By 1859, the year On Liberty appears, Mill is ready to find in a remarkably wide range of readerly experiences the same kinds of associative intimacy that in 1833 he had cautiously discerned within poetry alone. The final few passages examined in the following sections all shed some light on the complicated ways that Mill works to explore forms of a sustained and productive exchange of views with others from whom one may differ greatly not just in opinion, but in beliefs and forms of feeling. If we ask what paradigms Mill offers for how rival opinions and views can work on us to change our minds, then Mill’s notion of mediated involvement and his reliance upon print-borne sociability begins to make more sense.

He stresses, for example, the importance of the widest and most pervasive form of exposure to divergent views. What he seems to prescribe is exposure to the human beings who can attest to those views in the broadest range of ways—a diversity of living human disagreement:

To do justice to the arguments or bring them into real contact with his own mind [the liberal subject] must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them. . . . He must feel the full force of the difficulty which the true view of the subject has to encounter and dispose of, else he will never really possess himself of the portion of the truth which meets and removes that difficulty. . . . [Beware of people who] have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them.47

Mill goes on to argue, however, that the actual existence of those who think and believe differently from you is not at the crux of the exercise. The crux is the capacity to think representatively, to make the ideas of others present to you in unexpected ways.

So essential is this discipline to a real understanding of moral and human subjects that, if opponents of all-important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil’s advocate can conjure up.⁴⁸

When Mill goes on to assert that “there are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until personal experience has brought it home,”⁴⁹ the experience to which he refers hinges simply on the capacity to “feel the full force” of skillful arguments from another perspective, conjured up out of the brain’s ceaseless capacity to make other people and their views present to itself. As I argued when parsing the differences Mill sees between lyric poetry and his personal correspondence with Carlyle, we ought to think about what forms of mediated involvement various genres of writing can offer. Additionally, in order to locate the sorts of distinctions that Mill offers between the various genres’ reading experiences, it is worth turning to an unobtrusive element of On Liberty: its dedication.

Mill opens On Liberty with a striking suggestion about where to find an exemplary kind of “personal experience”: in the composition of On Liberty itself. Harriet Taylor Mill’s death in 1858 may not have been the only precipitating factor in the 1859 publication of On Liberty, but it is quite clear from the dedication that she was on his mind in more ways than one.⁵⁰ The dedication portrays her as beloved spouse but also as the interlocutor of choice in his writing projects—and something more:

To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward—I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now destined never to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.51

Neither entirely muse nor ghostwriter, nor actual author of Mill’s works, Harriet is assigned a floating role—or rather, she moves between several roles.⁵² First, she is “inspirer and incitement”—yet in that first phrase she has also become “in part the author.”

This may seem a conventional courtesy to the Muse. Mill still places his own name on the title page, after all, and reserves the right to dedicate the volume to her—coauthors are never dedicatees. The claim that “it belongs as much to her as to me” could similarly fit a simple model of grateful gift-giving: I give you this volume, in exchange for love or other pervasive inspiration. The second sentence though, locates another role for her: she is the reviser of his work, and it seems usually the re-reviser, as well. Muse and editor, then, are oddly conjoined: she inspires Mill to write, it seems, and then also edits what he does write. In the final sentence, though, she becomes the fount from which both thoughts and feelings flow.

How can the person who edits his words also be the source from which they are derived? Mill thinks that two friends who are caught up in reading and writing together achieve involvement with one another through the realm of ideas—and with the realm of ideas through one another. Rather than the “audible thinking” Charlotte Brontë idealizes as the acme of conversation at the end of Jane Eyre, Mill has in mind a permanently mediated interplay between two reader/writers and the text that arises between them. The mutual interpretation that Harriet and John supply one another models a way in which thoughts and feelings can move within a realm larger than the individual mind, without tyrannizing that mind as society’s “opinion” threatens to do.

In his reflections on the process of composition in the Autobiography, Mill continues the thought and sustains the ambiguity about where any particular thought or expression can be located:

With regard to the thoughts, it is difficult to identify any particular element as being more hers than all the rest. The whole mode of thinking of which the book was the expression, was emphatically hers. But I also was so thoroughly imbued with it that the same thoughts naturally occurred to us both. That I was thus penetrated with it, however, I owe in a great degree to her.53

Rather than Mill deducing from Harriet Taylor Mill’s influence a general duty to be open to a variety of intellectual influences, he immediately stresses that he was so “penetrated” by the thoughts that he shared with Harriet precisely because he had not been penetrated by stray thoughts from elsewhere. He credits her explicitly with making him a “thorough radical and democrat” because she dissuaded certain kinds of suggestibility and openness to new ideas coming from other quarters:

My great readiness and eagerness to learn from everybody, and to make room in my opinions for every new acquisition by adjusting the old and the new to one another, might, but for her steadying influence, have seduced me into modifying my early opinions too much.⁵⁴

Mill’s praise for Harriet, both as opener and gatekeeper of his mind, seems to continue his defense of a practice of shared reading and writing with Harriet—a practice he imagined as potentially belonging as well to any reader who took seriously the possibility of thought shared through a process that may look like little more than cowriting and copyediting. Just as Schiller felt the naïve poet moved only “through sensuous truth, through living presence,” while the sentimental poet moved through ideas, so too Mill finds in direct contact between persons (living presence) a simple, irrefutable, and unappealing sort of contact. By contrast, mediated involvement offers a durably shareable intimacy.

WILLFUL AND WILL-LESS

Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued that Kant’s influence makes will come to seem, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the basis for subjectivity. In a world defined by “a scientific self[,] grounded in a will to willlessness at one pole, and an artistic self that circulated around a will to willfulness at the other,” objectivity is defined as the site where subjectivity is suppressed—but suppressed willfully.55 Scientific rigor is willed will-lessness.

Perhaps Mill’s apology to Carlyle, then—“When I give my thoughts, I give the best I have”—is the confession of a dispassionate scientist bemoaning his unsuitability for the role of artist. Perhaps because he is part of the first generation to attempt to translate Bentham’s speculations into a living political credo, or simply by good timing as part of the first generation of scientists to value objectivity (or, more narrowly, to be one of the rare avowed social scientists among that generation), Mill finds it feasible to will will-lessness. Yet Mill also evidently worries about his failure to be willful when called upon. Drawn as Mill is to mediated involvement, it would be possible for him still to see himself as a depleted subject: one of those anemic statisticians who, in Carlyle’s terms, is nothing more than a pale, empyrean being, suffering from a superabundance of thought and a lack of substance—“a mere Thinking machine” who turns out not “real Facts” but a “matrix of surds.”⁵⁶

If this feeling did afflict Mill, though, he certainly does not attempt to overcome it by willing himself back into a direct emotional address to Carlyle, or indeed to any other friend. Instead, in “What Is Poetry?” he describes a readerly capacity to discover one’s own emotions as an echo of another’s, which has the odd effect of making the feelings triggered by poetry seem at once willful—because rooted in another’s subjectivity—and unwilled—because it is the product of one’s imaginative capacity to be overcome by the thoughts and feelings of another. Mill’s 1833 recoil from Carlyle by letter thus casts a revealing light on his passionate advocacy, in an essay that appeared in the same month, for the thought-shaping “feelings” that are concretized in poetry.

It is not until the major writing of the 1850s—as evidenced by that anguished dedication to On Liberty—that Mill comes to terms with the full implications of the aesthetics nascently outlined in 1833. Not only in his fervent denunciations of the power of “moral coercion” exerted by society but also in his equally passionate avowal of that debt to Harriet, Mill offers new ways to imagine reading as the reconciling term between societal pressure and individual liberty. Schematically, it may appear that in On Liberty, Mill is praising the idea of emotional contact, but not with a living person: wanting sociability, but without actual society. Yet that schematic formulation risks undervaluing the subtlety with which Mill approaches the problem of how “moral coercion” pours down on individuals from “society,” while individual character simultaneously comes to be constituted out of that same individual’s exposures to the rational norms that are only available through an ongoing, open-ended conversation with like and unlike minds.

Accordingly, the liberal aesthetics that Mill struggles toward as early as “What Is Poetry?” and partially constructs in On Liberty have a great deal to tell us about Mill’s perennial problem of reconciling the impetus toward individual autonomy with the impetus toward solidarity. Rather than positing a public realm of action and thought marred by a private realm of feeling, Mill’s late writing seems to suggest both that thought flows readily through our private lives (how else can we explain the poignancy of the dedication to Harriet?) and that feelings can come more thoroughly to life in the realm of letters than inside individual minds. If this is the case, then Mill’s liberalism takes a romantic notion of acute self-examination and inverts it: literature is never more moving to Mill than when it allows for the inspection of interior depths that belong to others even before they belong to oneself.

If this makes liberalism into a political belief system with a crucial place for feeling (and for willing), it also ensures that such feelings can register their claim only indirectly. Sartre describes literature as an appeal to the reader. We might say that, for Mill, such an appeal can strike a chord only when the reader is certain of not being the text’s addressee. A great deal of Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor occurs in the realm of the face-to-face, and a great deal more in their correspondence. Yet Mill proposes at the beginning of On Liberty that the reader need not imagine the face-to-face realm as meaningfully distinct from the textual intercourse that constituted much of the labor of her (and what he imagined to be his) final years. Mill believed he was most passionately involved with Harriet, and she with him, when they were together imagining, writing, and revising a text, ushering it into public circulation.

CONCLUSION: A NOVEL MILL

The mediated involvement that Mill experiments with in the 1830s through the 1850s suggests a new way to think about the relationship between political liberalism and the formal work of the European novel (especially in its English and French incarnations) from 1850 into the modernist era. One reason for that link is implicit in the tension Wendy Donner identifies in Mill between social connection and autonomy. If Mill’s thinking posits that maximum freedom from constraint is a crucial desideratum, what is left for the realm of culture broadly (and literature narrowly) to do?

Certainly there have been a range of attempts to redeem liberal autonomy and cultural cohesion both: notably Matthew Arnold’s, which makes Mill seem a spokesman for the notion of character development that flows readily into the moral role attributed to the modern university. But mediated involvement in Mill—a way of making other minds present to oneself, “realizing them” in ways that go beyond cordial bodily encounters in some sanctioned public space—has attracted writers suspicious of the direct moral claims levied by society.

Might there, however, be an elective affinity between mid-Victorian liberal subjects and the notion of semi-detached sociability and mediated involvement in others’ lives, involvement that takes place through a new kind of reading? On the one hand, the Victorian subjects Mill addresses can take little comfort from organic community, nor an intuitive shared knowledge of a noumenal world.57 On the other end of the epistemological spectrum, even the acolytes of James Mill and Bentham lacked faith in social science’s capacity to alleviate social woe by way of pure, depersonalized, rational enlightenment. Caught between an unsatisfying romantic particularism and Enlightenment universalism that can offer no cohesive account of actual lived experience, Mill proposes that thinking of poetry as “overheard speech” is a viable way both to preserve and to share knowledge about inner states in a form that was at once personal and potentially applicable to all mankind. Taking seriously Mill’s durable ambivalence about the promise and the pitfalls of coming to know the world through texts offers some intriguing new ways to think about the consolations and new kinds of understanding that literature may have had to offer to a liberal society—if that literature came to seem a viable avenue for mediated involvement between those otherwise cut off from one another.

This chapter ends, therefore with the unlikely proposal that we take Mill seriously as a literary critic. Ian Duncan has argued that one effect of the Scottish Enlightenment was to make the notion of “fiction” central to conceptions of the social, and the political, realm.

Fiction is the discursive category that separates novels from history, from periodicals and other kinds of writing, in its designation of a strategic difference from reality—a distance or obliquity in the relation between narrative and world, a figural disguise or darkening of the real.⁵⁸

Duncan’s account helps explain a flickering quality in a wide range of romantic-era fiction, which often works by moving the reader, like the novel’s characters themselves, rapidly between “absorption” and “reflection.” In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1823), readers are repeatedly jolted between giving credence to a story and distancing themselves critically from it. Rather than being an obstacle to a novel’s seeming “real,” this awareness of fictiveness within the novel ironically becomes the very imprimatur not simply of realism but even of reality at large. A kind of suspended credence in the reasonableness of others’ actions becomes as crucial for making sense of daily social transactions as it is for successful novel reading. Because “Humean skepticism posits this continuous, habitual world of ordinary relations as a fiction,” inhabitants of the everyday social realm find themselves oscillating—like readers of a novel—between states of “absorption” and “reflection.”59

The flickering fiction Duncan describes, with its oscillating mixture of poetry-like absorption and eloquence-like reflection, does not figure in Mill’s early essay, “What Is Poetry?” Instead Mill reduces fiction to mere adventure, the actions of “men” rather than the deep musings of “man.” In 1833, Mill seems a friend to poetry precisely by being an enemy to fiction. It is poetry that, by his account, offers the most salient model for making sense of that ordinary imbrication of daydreaming and empirical attentiveness that defined the composite totality of life in a world that has both inward experience and external shared actuality. Poetry, because it allows the articulation of feelings as one might confess them to oneself, is overheard, while eloquence, designed with an audience in mind, is simply heard. Mill posits a public realm that might be imagined as made up of fully engaged, thinking, arguing beings whose every word is a critical reflection, uttered with some specific audience in mind. As a counterweight to such intrusive actuality, poetry provides a resonant cavity, a site where one’s own feelings can become visible to oneself precisely by comparing them to the private, inmost feelings of others, which are at once hidden away and made accessible by being overheard.

In the decades that followed, though, Mill reconsidered the relationship between the heard and the overheard. He eventually found a way to construe writing not only as a form of persuasion in a fully public realm but also as a form of intimate interaction that, in the correct form, might allow for both presence and the sort of absence upon which Kantian imagination depends. Public writing, even persuasive writing with certain features, came to seem to Mill a site where autonomous individuals, endowed with deep feelings, could find a selfhood molded by the thoughts of others yet not conclusively defined by the “tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling.”60 Immersing oneself in the written emotions and thoughts of others comes to seem to Mill the best way for individuals to participate in a community without becoming rigidly committed to oppressive, everyday social roles. Mill is seeking a new form for the sharing of thoughts—and equally important, of feelings. “What Is Poetry?” begins a journey that ends in On Liberty (1859), with Mill’s idea that the insidious and invasive powers of the social realm may be circumvented by taking refuge and pleasure in text-based intimacy. That model of intimacy—predicated on an imaginative capacity that allows the presence of the other to permeate one’s thoughts precisely when that other person is absent—understands the essence of other people (their thoughts and feelings) to be present principally, not secondarily, as representations.

Mill’s innovation comes in his coupling of seemingly contradictory convictions: first, that “the tyranny” of social conventions necessitates some form that allows withdrawal from excessive social palaver; second, that without some forum for coming into contact with both the thoughts and feelings of others, a sterile monadism might result. What in 1833 had seemed a stark choice between public eloquence and overheard passion returns as an intrinsically double medium, which offers both an occasion for immersion in the thoughts and feelings of others and a space to draw away and reflect upon that very immersion. The notion of mediated involvement allows us to make sense not only of Mill’s impulse toward semi-detached sociability but also of the possibilities that literature opens up for him.

A key component of Mill’s liberalism, commonly overlooked, is precisely the weight that it places on the possibility of mediated involvement between individuals in a society. The power of political theory, like the power of poetry, is purely fictional. The irony, though, is that Mill’s conception of what it might mean for texts to be their most intimate when they express the most universalizable notions has everything to do with the forms of vicarious intimacy on which nineteenth-century fiction depends. Mill arrives at his own account of emotional absorption mixed with critical reflection by initially disparaging fiction in comparison to poetry and later implicitly transferring all the most desirable features of poetry into the realm of public text exchange at large.

If fiction in the generations after Mill comes to look like an oasis for acts of antisocial solidarity, that may have more to do with the genre’s surprising flexibility in incorporating, as part of its own formal articulations, something that Mill assumes must be sought in a text’s readers rather than in its words. Mill imagines that acts of intimate attention, of implicit emotional involvement, can underwrite texts that showcase pure critical reflection. The fiction that follows him, though, discovers ways of documenting the acts of attention that Mill assumes must serve as implicitly antecedent to the opus itself.

There is an intriguing connection, then, between Mill’s conception of mediated involvement and George Eliot’s withdrawn fascination with the lives of her neighbors—her belief that she could create typical “nobodies” who would become bearers of intense emotions without actually existing.61 By the same token, something links Eliot to Henry James’s experiments with building novels that, like machines, could operate to deliver the idea of other people to readers without those other people having to exist. We might say that all are experiments in semi-detached sociability, making use of the suspended disbelief that novels paradigmatically demand, but that other kinds of reading also presume. Such sociability, a sort of willful will-lessness, potentially offers a form of shared experience to liberal subjects, a shared experience that operates not as a supplement but as an alternative to the propulsively acculturating Arnoldian character formation by way of “the best which has been thought and said.”

Such later fiction—in a way that Mill’s limited experiments in collaborative textual editing with Harriet only faintly foreshadow—suggests social intimacy itself (highly attuned sensitivity to the thoughts, feelings, and will of another) not only depends upon a kind of textual close reading but may ultimately be nothing more than such reading. If that is so, then realist fiction takes on a new life as the acme of all sociability—precisely to the extent that it allows printed words on the page to substitute for what used to count as “real” social life. Mill’s notion of fiction as nothing more than a series of surface events may have been the necessary foil that allowed him to conceive a liberalism predicated on poetic intimacy between properly autonomous souls. Victorian realist fiction proves such a potent successor to Mill’s liberalism because of its unwillingness to admit that there existed a bright line between the story of “men” and of “man.” Yet telling the story of that connection clearly involves looking at problems of semi-detachment and of fictionality, of narration, and of “truth to life” in another art altogether.