BRUCE KINZER
Thomas Macaulay excepted, the British critics of utilitarianism whose influence Mill acknowledges in the Autobiography were associated with what he calls “the reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century” (Early Draft, I: 160). The individuals Mill has in mind include Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Frederick Denison Maurice, and John Sterling (the latter two deemed the “Germano‐Coleridgeans” by Mill). Rejecting the empiricism, naturalism, materialism, and skepticism they identified with the dominant modes of eighteenth‐century thought, these men drew inspiration from German Romanticism and forms of philosophical idealism (which is not to say that they should all be considered “systematic” thinkers). Carlyle, while undeniably a major contributor to the “reaction” Mill invokes, belonged to no “school,” and under no circumstances would wish to be thought of as a “Coleridgean” (in his Life of Sterling Carlyle refers to Coleridge’s “prophetic moonshine” [Carlyle 1894: 78]). Maurice and Sterling, when first encountered by Mill, readily affirmed Coleridge’s hold over their way of thinking. I will turn to Carlyle, and Macaulay too, after taking up Mill’s response to Coleridge and the “Germano‐Coleridgeans.”1
An analysis of the influence of Coleridge, Maurice, and Sterling on Mill must take into account the particular character of his association with each. Although Mill joined Sterling on several visits to Coleridge at Highgate, he knew the latter chiefly through his writings, published and unpublished. Discussing Coleridge in a letter to John Pringle Nichol of April 15, 1834 (the year Coleridge died), Mill noted that he had “not much personal knowledge of him, though I have seen and conversed with him several times.” Coleridge was known to him “by his works, and by the fact that several persons with whom I have been very intimate were completely trained in his school. Through them, too, I have had opportunities of reading various unpublished manuscripts of his” (Letter to John Pringle Nichol, Apr 15, 1834, XII: 221). Mill must have read some of Coleridge’s published works before the end of the 1820s. In a speech he gave at the London Debating Society in spring 1828 he cited Coleridge as one “of the wisest men of all political and religious opinions” (Perfectibility, XXVI: 429–30). Mill’s library at Somerville College includes Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, Biographia Literaria, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, The Friend, On the Constitution of the Church and State, and Second Lay Sermon. Mill’s 1840 essay “Coleridge” draws upon several works not found in his library: the First Lay Sermon, the Literary Remains, and Specimens of the Table Talk. References to a number of Coleridge’s poems turn up in sundry volumes of Mill’s Collected Works (Index of Persons and Works, XXXIII: 135–6). Mill had read a lot of Coleridge before he wrote his letter to Nichol in 1834; much of this he undoubtedly reread in preparation for writing the essay of 1840.
Although one may wonder about Mill’s assertion that he had been “very intimate” with “several persons … completely trained in his [Coleridge’s] school,” Maurice had to be one of these “several persons.” Sterling, so far as I am aware, was the only such person with whom Mill became “very intimate.” Indeed, soon after Maurice’s death in 1872 Mill wrote the following to the former’s second son:
He [Maurice] and I were never intimate, but we used to have long discussions together on philosophy, religion, and politics; from which, though I do not think either of us often convinced the other, I always carried away, along with a most lively impression of his mental powers and resources, ideas both new and invaluable to me.
(Letter to Charles Edmund Maurice, May 19, 1872, XVII: 1898)
Such conversations would have taken place during the late 1820s, when Mill, Maurice, and Sterling were members of the London Debating Society. Mill had in fact met Maurice before the latter joined the Debating Society, the introduction having been made by Mill’s close friend William Eyton Tooke, who had been at Cambridge with Maurice (Autobiography, I: 161). When in residence at Trinity College Maurice came under the influence of Julius Charles Hare, a young Cambridge don who had recently been appointed to a classical lectureship at Trinity. A great admirer of Coleridge’s thought, Hare probably encouraged Maurice (and Sterling, Hare’s pupil) to dig deeply into Coleridge’s body of published work. Hare’s modern biographer, Merrill Distad, notes that Hare “reserved his worst venom for Jeremy Bentham and his followers” (Distad 1979: 47). While still at Cambridge Maurice launched the Metropolitan Quarterly Magazine, for which he wrote a piece entitled “A Supplementary Sheet to Bentham’s Book of Fallacies” (Maurice 1826). Mill read the article, decades later describing it as “an extremely clever quiz of the style of Bentham’s ‘Book of Fallacies’” that amounted “in substance” to “an attack … upon what he [Maurice] considered as fallacious in Bentham’s own modes of reasoning” (Letter to Charles Edmund Maurice, May 19, 1872, XVII: 1897). Hence, Mill knew Maurice as an assailant of Benthamism even before the latter became active in the London Debating Society. After the end of the 1820s Mill and Maurice seldom crossed paths. As Mill explained to Maurice’s son, “both in life and in speculation” each went his own way: “our direct intercourse was small and at considerable intervals; but I remained an assiduous reader of his writings, and was always a sympathizing as well as admiring observer of his career” (Letter to Charles Edmund Maurice, May 19, 1872, XVII: 1898).
With John Sterling Mill had some “direct intercourse,” complemented by a personal correspondence that attests to an ardent friendship. They met in 1828, when Maurice and Sterling became Mill’s “Coleridgian adversaries” in the London Debating Society. In the Autobiography Mill says that “Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at this period, were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice” (Autobiography, I: 159). Sterling’s personal circumstances – chronic ill health, occupational twists and turns, financial difficulties, a rapidly expanding family after his marriage in 1830 – spawned a peripatetic existence that more often than not placed him at some distance from Mill’s London domicile. They met when they could, and carried on an active correspondence when they could not. From the late 1820s until his early death from pulmonary disease in 1844, Sterling’s writings included journalism, a novel, poems, verse dramas, and literary essays. Mill read much that Sterling wrote, and, as editor and proprietor of the London and Westminster Review, printed articles by Sterling on Montaigne, Simonides, and Carlyle.
Sterling was not an original thinker, while Maurice’s originality lay in the realm of Christian theology. Such being the case, neither man was equipped to exercise significant influence on the substance of Mill’s thought. The forcible impact of their personal presence, however, aided Mill’s search for new truths in the wake of his “mental crisis.” His disenchantment with Benthamism – possibly triggered, as Elijah Millgram (2017) powerfully argues in his essay in this volume, by the “epiphany” induced by working through Bentham’s materials on judicial evidence – coincided with his coming to know Maurice and Sterling. These young critics of utilitarianism possessed a depth of character and intellect unmatched by most of the young men who looked to James Mill for authoritative political guidance. John Mill had no reason to suppose that the likes of John Arthur Roebuck, Eyton Tooke, and Horace Grant could enlarge his own store of knowledge or the range of his intellectual sympathies. His association with these contemporaries could not advance the program of self‐cultivation that became a cardinal element in his reappraisal and revision of the system of thought he acquired from Bentham and James Mill. Maurice and Sterling, apart from their instrumental role in fostering John Mill’s serious engagement with Coleridge’s work, did augment this program of self‐cultivation.
In an article published in the Athenaeum in 1828, Maurice described the genuinely moral author as one
whose works have the effect of flinging men back upon themselves; of forcing them to look within for the higher principles of their existence; of teaching them that the only happiness, and the only virtue, are to be found by submitting themselves uniformly to the dictates of duty, and by aiming and struggling always towards a better state of being than that which ourselves, or those around us, have hitherto attained.
(quoted in Allen 1978: 79)
In the same year he praised Wordsworth, whose poetry had the admirable effect of combating “unchristian sectarianism” and of making “men look within for those things in which they agree, instead of looking without for those in which they differ” (quoted in Allen 1978: 78). A shared love of Wordsworth generated the spark of recognition that first brought Mill and Sterling together. In the Autobiography Mill refers to the latter’s “ever assiduous self‐culture” (Autobiography, I: 163).
For Sterling, Mill developed a strong and abiding affection. Their warm friendship testified to the emotional nourishment gained from the cultivation of sympathy.2 The Mill–Sterling friendship also informed Mill’s sensitive response to a varied body of imaginative literature between the late 1820s and the close of the 1830s.3
Maurice’s cast of mind and intellectual distinction presented Mill with issues absent from his association with Sterling. In the Autobiography he goes so far as to say that Maurice’s “intellectual power” surpassed that of Coleridge. He adds, however, that in Maurice “there was more intellectual power wasted … than in any other of my contemporaries” (Autobiography, I: 161). Yet Mill confesses to a profound “respect for Maurice’s character and purposes” (Autobiography, I: 161). The “waste” Mill has in mind concerns Maurice’s growing conviction that
the Church of England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the ground of which Church orthodoxy have been attacked … are not only consistent with the Thirty‐Nine articles [the creed of the Church of England], but are better understood and expressed in those articles than by any one who rejects them.
(Autobiography, I: 161)
Maurice’s unsettling impact on Mill is readily apparent in passages found in the latter’s important essays “Civilization” (1836) and “Coleridge” (1840). A portion of the former essay is devoted to a withering condemnation of Oxford and Cambridge. This section includes a lengthy quotation from Maurice’s novel Eustace Conway (1834), which Mill introduces by saying: “We are glad to corroborate our opinion by a quotation from a work written by a friend to the Universities … a book which contains much subtle and ingenious thought, and the results of much psychological experience” (Civilization, XVIII: 139). He complains, however, that the novel also has “much caricature, and very provoking (though we are convinced unintentional) distortion and misinterpretation of the opinions of some of those with whose philosophy that of the author does not agree” (Civilization, XVIII: 139). Mill had difficulty reconciling his deep respect for Maurice’s “character and purposes,” as well as his esteem for Maurice’s intellect, with what he saw as the “distortion and misinterpretation” in Maurice’s disparagement of the school of “philosophic radicals.” A similar ambivalence turns up in a footnote Mill added to his essay on Coleridge. The footnote amplifies Mill’s observation “that in any person fit to be a teacher, the view he takes of religion will be intimately connected with the view he will take of all the greatest things which he has to teach (Coleridge, X: 149), and cites as illustration “a remarkable pamphlet, entitled Subscription No Bondage [1835] by the Rev. Frederick Maurice.” Declaring the pamphlet “signally unsuccessful in its direct object, the justification of the exclusive regulations of the Universities,” Mill nevertheless says that it “contains, like all that author’s works, many important truths incidentally illustrated, and a lavish display of the resources of a subtle and accomplished as well as a devoted and earnest mind” (Coleridge, X: 149n).
Mill’s personal connections with Maurice and Sterling enhanced his post‐1826 drive to achieve a greater breadth of sympathy and an augmentation of his store of truths. Sterling was especially significant in the former respect, while Maurice mattered more in the latter. In the Autobiography Mill notes Maurice’s formidable “powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths” (Autobiography, I: 161). One such truth so forcibly impressed Mill that he discussed it in a letter to Sterling in October 1831.
I once heard Maurice say (& like many things which have dropped from him, its truth did not strike me at first but it has been a source of endless reflexions since) that almost all differences of opinion when analysed, were differences of method.
(Letter to John Sterling, Oct 20–2, 1831, XII: 79)
Mill’s letter to Maurice’s son states that his conversations with Maurice and Sterling
were almost my first introduction to a line of thought different from any I had previously known, and which, by itself and by its effects, contributed much to whatever mental progress I subsequently made.
(Letter to Charles Edmund Maurice, May 19, 1872, XVII: 1898)
The line of thought to which he refers, like the valuable truths he met with in Maurice’s conversation and writings, carried a Coleridgean imprint.
What can be said with confidence about Mill’s debt to Coleridge?4 Regarding the specifics of this debt the Autobiography is disappointingly reticent. Apropos of the late 1820s, Mill says, without elaboration, that he “was deriving much from Coleridge” (Autobiography, I: 161). When he later discusses the impact upon him of streams of thought expressing the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, he groups Coleridge with several other sources (Autobiography, I: 169). By the 1850s, when Mill embarked upon the writing of the Autobiography, Coleridge meant less to him than would have been the case fifteen years earlier. Enough is said in the Autobiography, and in other writings, to show that Mill valued Coleridge’s poetic gifts, the fruits of which contributed to his affective education. Mill says, in his essay on Coleridge, that he ranks “as one among the great, and … among the greatest, names in our literature” (Coleridge, X: 122). Yet it was principally as a political philosopher, not as a poet, that Coleridge marked Mill’s thinking.
In 1830 Coleridge brought out On the Constitution of the Church and State, in which he urged the state to dedicate national resources to the support of a “clerisy.”5 Coleridge considered the Church of England a national institution whose property should be applied to national purposes. No such purpose mattered more than the education of the people, provision for which was imperative if the state was to meet its duty “to secure to the subjects of the realm generally, the hope, the chance, of bettering their own or their children’s conditions” (Coleridge 1976: 73). The state had an obligation “to develop, in every native of the country, those faculties, and to provide for every native that knowledge and those attainments, which are necessary to qualify him for a member of the state, the free subject of a civilized realm” (Coleridge 1976: 74). The clerisy, Coleridge said, should impart to the members of the community an education “grounded in cultivation, in the harmonious developement of those qualities and faculties that characterise our humanity. We must be men in order to be citizens” (Coleridge 1976: 42–3).
This ideal greatly attracted Mill, who in October 1831 told Sterling “I certainly think it desirable … that there should be a national clergy or clerisy, like that of which Coleridge traces the outline, in his work on Church and State”. He hastened to add that most of the clergy in the Church of England were unfit to form part of this clerisy. Coleridge, Mill felt certain, would agree with him
in thinking that a national clergy ought to be so constituted as to include all who are capable of producing a beneficial effect on their age & country as teachers of the knowledge which fits people to perform their duties & exercise their rights, and as exhorters to the right performance & exercise of them.
(Letter to John Sterling, Oct 20–2, 1831, XII: 75–6)
Mill’s published writings soon showed the effects of Coleridge’s impact. Consider the change in Mill’s disposition regarding an established church. In a speech given in the London Debating Society in 1828 he declared himself “an enemy to church establishments because an established clergy must be enemies to the progressiveness of the human mind” (The Church, XXVI: 424). Five years later Mill asserted that
A national clerisy or clergy, as Mr. Coleridge conceives it, would be a grand institution for the education of the whole people: not their school education merely … but for training and rearing them, by systematic culture continued throughout life, to the highest perfection of their mental and spiritual nature.
(Corporation and Church Property, IV: 220)
An aspiration of this kind presupposes a state whose scope of action went well beyond the prevention of harm. Coleridge enlarged Mill’s conception of the role of the state.
Although the defects of the Church of England continued to draw Mill’s fire, Coleridge’s influence gave him a new way of thinking about institutions, the Church included. The meaning of institutions could only be grasped through an understanding of their history and original purpose. In his essay on Coleridge Mill observes that the Germano‐Coleridgean school was “the first … who inquired with any comprehensiveness or depth into the inductive laws of the existence and growth of human society” (Coleridge, X: 138–9). There he also insists that “an enlightened Radical or Liberal” should “rejoice over such a Conservative as Coleridge.” According to the Mill responsible for this essay, one rather different from the young exponent of Benthamite doctrine in the London Debating Society, fair‐minded Radicals and Liberals
must know that the Constitution and Church of England, and the religious opinions and political maxims professed by their supporters, are not mere frauds, nor sheer nonsense – have not been got up originally, and all along maintained, for the sole purpose of picking people’s pockets; without aiming at, or being found conducive to, any honest end during the whole process.
(Coleridge, X: 146)
The Benthamite position held that institutions had no meaning distinct from their utility in serving practical ends. For Coleridge, institutions embodied an Idea whose essence answered fundamental human needs. Without sharing Coleridge’s belief in the providential origin of institutions and moral truths, Mill did take on board Coleridge’s distinction between form and essence. In Considerations on Representative Government, composed two decades after the essay on Coleridge, Mill stipulated that
In treating of representative government, it is above all necessary to keep in view the distinction between its idea or essence, and the particular forms in which the idea has been clothed by accidental historical developments, or by the notions current at some particular period.
(Considerations, XIX: 422)
Representative Government also offers an analysis of the concepts of “Order” and “Progress,” or, as Mill says, “Permanence and Progression in the words of Coleridge” (Considerations, XIX: 384). In the Second Lay Sermon (1817) Coleridge had argued that a proper balance of the forces of Permanence and Progression was essential to a healthy social and political order (Coleridge 1972: 221–3). The landed classes, as the stewards of the nation’s fixed property, should embody values that fostered the durable interests of the wider society. Those groups engaged in commerce were seen by Coleridge as the agents of Progression. Acknowledging the need for the latter, Coleridge nonetheless worried about the potentially damaging effects of an excess of the commercial spirit, the pursuit of wealth inevitably being linked to the search for personal material advantage over one’s competitors. Mill had his own misgivings regarding the ever‐expanding influence of the commercial spirit, which he associated with the coming of mass society. Within such a society “the weight and importance of an individual … sink into greater and greater insignificance” (Civilization, XVIII: 126). In his second essay on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840) Mill declares “that the most serious danger to the future prospects of mankind is in the unbalanced influence of the commercial spirit.” Moreover, he identifies “our agriculturists” as the class that “should represent the type opposite to the commercial, – that of moderate wishes, tranquil tastes, cultivation of the excitements and enjoyments near at hand, and compatible with their existing position” (De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II], XVIII: 198, 199). The other two classes he deems essential to providing “great social support for opinions and sentiments different from the mass” are “a leisured class, and a learned class” (De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [II], XVIII: 198). In On Liberty Mill treats virtually as a given the proposition “that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life” (Liberty, XVIII: 253). Such views attest unmistakably to Coleridge’s influence on Mill’s thought.
Yet Mill was not content with Coleridge’s distinction between Permanence and Progression, which Mill characterized as “unscientific and incorrect” (Considerations, XIX: 384). Holding that “Progress” subsumes “Permanence,” Mill says in Representative Government that “Progress includes Order, but Order does not include Progress. Progress is a greater degree of that of which Order is a less” (Considerations, XIX: 387). Albeit significant, too much should not be made of the flaw Mill detects in Coleridge’s distinction. In the Preface of Representative Government, Mill says that he wishes to assist in the formation of a doctrine that “in virtue of its superior comprehensiveness, might be adopted by either Liberal or Conservative without renouncing anything which he really feels to be valuable in his own creed” (Considerations, XIX: 373), an aspiration compatible with both his own formulation of the relation of Progress and Order and with Coleridge’s search for comprehensiveness. Towards the close of his essay on Coleridge, Mill expresses the hope that he had
done something to show that a Tory philosopher cannot be wholly a Tory, but must often be a better Liberal than Liberals themselves; while he is the natural means of rescuing from oblivion truths which Tories have forgotten, and which the prevailing schools of Liberalism never knew.
(Coleridge, X: 162–3)
Scholars have acknowledged Coleridge’s influence on Mill’s appreciation of the relation between historical understanding and the fashioning of means to foster social improvement. According to John M. Robson, Mill learned from Coleridge (and the Saint‐Simonians) that history was “a record of the various and continuous means by which institutions have been moulded by man to satisfy his needs” (Robson 1968: 71). Frederick Rosen has forcefully argued that the method of reform embraced by Mill, a method owing much to Coleridge, “allowed Mill to emphasize more easily that reform must be adapted to particular times, and the means devised to achieve given ends could not be assumed to apply universally” (Rosen 2007: 142). Mill’s major contributions to social and political thought indisputably disclose this Coleridgean strain, one nowhere more evident than in Mill’s treatment of “the general science of society” and political sociology in Book VI of the Logic (Logic, VIII: 833–942). One may doubt, however, whether Mill systematically applied the method Rosen ascribes to him. Stefan Collini, in an incisive discussion of Representative Government, endorses Henry Sidgwick’s assessment of Mill’s method in that work. Sidgwick says that when Mill
came to treat with a view to practical conclusions the question of the best form of government, he certainly dealt with it by a method not primarily historical: a method in which history seems only to be used either to confirm practical conclusions otherwise arrived at, or to suggest the limits of their applicability.
(Sidgwick 1891: 8n; Collini, Winch and Burrow, 1983: 148–56)
It should also be noted that when Rosen examines Mill’s “method of reform,” he has Mill’s theoretical prescriptions in mind. The character of Mill’s practical political engagement, whether in his capacity as editor of the London and Westminster Review during the second half of the 1830s or in his parliamentary and extra‐parliamentary activity in the years 1865–73, is often at odds with his abstract investigations of method. Many Mill scholars – Stefan Collini (1991), Jeff Lipkes (1999), Donald Winch (2004), Richard Reeves (2007), and Bruce Kinzer (2007) among them – have pointed out the radical temper and febrile partisanship that sometimes informed Mill’s political activism. Of course it should come as no surprise that contradictory tendencies crop up in the theory and action of complex thinkers. No doubt such tendencies can be found in those here treated as British critics of utilitarianism; Thomas Carlyle, for instance.
The Improvement of Mankind, Robson’s classic study of Mill’s social and political thought, gives Carlyle approximately three times more space than Coleridge in his chapter dealing with “influences” of a non‐Benthamite and non‐Harriet Taylor variety (Robson 1968: 80–95). Most of the account presented by Robson deftly charts the course of the Mill‐Carlyle association: the inception of their friendship in the early 1830s; the rising personal tensions of the late 1830s; the skirmish over “The Negro Question” of the late 1840s; the monumental clash over Governor Eyre’s brutal response to the Jamaican uprising in the mid‐1860s. Robson says, near the close of his section on Carlyle, that “[i]t is difficult to assess Carlyle’s part in Mill’s intellectual development” (1968: 93). Earlier works pairing Carlyle and Mill in their titles had not made this difficulty central to their concerns. Emery Neff’s scholarly study, Carlyle and Mill: Mystic and Utilitarian (1924; republished in 1926 with the new subtitle of An Introduction to Victorian Thought) treats Carlyle and Mill as archetypes of divergent strains in Victorian thought. Richard Pankhurst’s The Saint‐Simonians, Mill and Carlyle: A Preface to Modern Thought (1957) throws an additional element into the mix without answering the problem of Carlyle’s influence on Mill. It is arguable that the problem arises at all only because of the biographical significance of the Mill–Carlyle relationship. By way of contrast, Mill had but a slight personal acquaintance with Coleridge. Yet Carlyle’s influence on Mill’s intellectual growth fell well short of Coleridge’s impact.
The connection between Carlyle and Mill during the 1830s tells us why this is so. The publication in 1831 of Mill’s Examiner series of essays on “The Spirit of the Age” excited Carlyle’s curiosity regarding its author. The latter’s piece “Signs of the Times,” published in the June 1829 number of the Edinburgh Review, proclaimed that “great and outward changes are in progress … The time is sick and out of joint … There is a deep‐lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless grinding collision of the New with the Old” (Carlyle 1829: 458–9). Carlyle found echoes of these themes in “The Spirit of the Age”; from Mill’s handling of them Carlyle impetuously decided that its author was “a new Mystic” (Autobiography, I: 181). The two men met at the home of John and Sarah Austin in early September 1831. A personal attachment of some intensity quickly formed between them.
Carlyle was partial to the idea that he could make a disciple of the brilliant young Mill, a notion made all the more enticing by the pedigree of this imagined acolyte. For Benthamism, Carlyle expressed unmitigated disdain. “Nay, is it not true, and clear as day, that I do reckon Jeremiah Bentham no Philosopher, and the Utilitarian system little better than the gross Idol‐worship of a generation that has forsaken and knows not the “Invisible God”? (Carlyle 1970: 390). Carlyle considered himself a “God‐inspired man.” Made miserable by his loss of faith while a student at the University of Edinburgh, he had turned to German literature for intellectual and spiritual sustenance. What he found did not disappoint. In Goethe especially Carlyle discovered a voice that moved him profoundly, a voice sending forth the heroic purpose of the creative spirit. The material world, Carlyle held, offered visible signposts of a spiritual order whose mysteries the poet alone could penetrate. “He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him” (quoted in Tennyson 1965: 91).
Mill had never before encountered anyone such as Carlyle (nor would he ever encounter his like again). They met at a time when Mill was in quest of new truths to add to those he had already made his own. Carlyle’s blend of moral fervor, rhetorical power, and creative force stimulated Mill’s imaginative faculties. Not that the younger man (eleven years Carlyle’s junior) ever thought himself capable of realizing the aspirations Carlyle had internalized. In July 1832 Mill told Carlyle:
I am rather fitted to be a logical expounder than an artist. You I look upon as an artist, and perhaps the only genuine one now living in this country: the highest of all, lies in that direction; for it is the artist alone in whose hands Truth becomes impressive, and a living principle of action.
(Letter to Thomas Carlyle, Jul 17, 1832, XII: 113)
Mill wanted Carlyle’s approval. Winning and keeping that approval sometimes proved hard to reconcile with complete candor. Although Mill, in his correspondence with Carlyle, acknowledged that there were matters upon which they differed, he showed a marked reluctance to specify the character of these differences. Not wanting Carlyle to assume he had the makings of a Carlylean “mystic,” neither did he want the older man to discount the possibility. Some of Mill’s published writings of the early 1830s suggest the presence of Carlylean corpuscles in the young man’s bloodstream. The following specimen, from 1833, is a case in point.
Let the word be what it may, so it be but spoken with a truthful intent, this one thing must be interesting in it, that it has been spoken by man – that it is the authentic record of something which has actually been thought or felt by a human being. Let that be sure, and even though in every other sense the word be false, there is a truth in it greater than that which it affects to communicate: we learn from it to know one human soul. “Man is infinitely precious to man” [words written by Carlyle in a letter to Mill of January 1833], not only because where sympathy is not, what we term to live is but to get through life, but because in all of us, except here and there a star‐like, self‐poised nature, which seems to have attained without a struggle the heights to which all others must clamber in sore travail and distress, the beginning of all nobleness and strength is the faith that such nobleness and such strength have existed and do exist in others, how few soever and how scattered. (Writings of Junius Redivivus [I], I: 369–70)
Mill’s friendship with Carlyle, like his flirtation with the idiosyncrasies of Carlyle’s style, rested on a shallow foundation. Between them there could not exist a full complement of either intellectual or emotional trust. Of these years in his life it could be said that Mill did not wholly trust himself.6 To Carlyle he made no mention of his most important “friendship,” that with Harriet Taylor. Not until May 1834 did Carlyle hear of Mill’s involvement with Mrs. Taylor (his sources being Sarah Austin and Charles Buller). Concluding by that autumn that Mill had become entangled with people of unsavory character, Carlyle began to have doubts about the soundness of the young man’s judgment. Their personal association showed signs of strain, a strain compounded by the loss in March 1835 of Carlyle’s manuscript on the French Revolution while in Mill’s care. While both men acted commendably in the face of this calamity, and Mill did Carlyle a valuable turn with his laudatory review of The French Revolution in the London and Westminster Review (Carlyle’s French Revolution, XX: 131–66), the closeness of the Mill‐Carlyle friendship attained during the early 1830s proved unsustainable. Even without the complications arising from the Mill–Taylor connection and the burnt manuscript, a parting of the ways eventually would have occurred.
In the years after 1840 the tight fit between Carlyle’s authoritarian temperament and the substance and style of his politics became evermore apparent. Acutely sensitive to abuse of power in any form, Mill recoiled from Carlyle’s glorification of the might wielded by men impelled to enforce providential injunctions. This political dimension, joined to the rising personal animus of the Carlyles for Harriet Taylor, contributed to the growing estrangement of Mill and Carlyle. That estrangement, however, also had an immanent intellectual source. Their modes of understanding “reality” differed fundamentally. It was fanciful of Mill to suppose he had the means to translate “the mysticism of others into the language of Argument” (Letter to Thomas Carlyle, Mar 2, 1834, XII: 219). Fancy Mill seeking to give argumentative form to the following passage of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus (1837), a vivid example of Carlyle’s mysticism.
Thus, like some wild‐flaming, wild‐thundering train of Heaven’s Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long‐drawn, quick‐succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God‐created, fire‐breathing Spirit‐host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth’s mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage; can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last Rear of the host will read traces of the earliest Van. But whence? – O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God.
(Carlyle 1937: 266–7)
Neither the method nor the idiom of Millian argument could accommodate the essence of Carlylean mysticism.
The section of Mill’s Autobiography dealing with Carlyle states that “the good” he obtained from Carlyle’s writings “was not as philosophy to instruct, but as poetry to animate” (Autobiography, I: 183). Mill felt the force of Carlyle’s creative imagination during the 1830s, a decade in which Mill evinced an especially keen interest in the capacity of the artist to convey moral truths through the vibrant representation of human action and feeling. Carlyle reinforced the influence of the Germano‐Coleridgeans in moving Mill to engage with German thought; he also sharpened Mill’s already awakened appetite for “poetic feeling.” Be this as it may, he did not exercise a decisive influence on the substance of Mill’s mature thought. As for style, the texture of some of Mill’s prose momentarily registered Carlyle’s impact, a fact Mill came to regret. In an undated letter (most likely written towards the end of 1840), Mill told George Henry Lewes, who had recently come across Mill’s essay “On Genius” (1832):
The “Genius” paper is no favorite with me, especially in its boyish stile. It was written in the height of my Carlylism, a vice of style which I have since carefully striven to correct … I think Carlyle’s costume should be left to Carlyle whom alone it becomes.
(Letter to George Henry Lewes, XIII: 449)
At no time and in no way did Thomas Macaulay take his cues from Thomas Carlyle. For neither Carlyle nor Coleridge did Macaulay have any use. Indeed, no writer or thinker not long dead – Edmund Burke, who died in 1797, being the exception – stood much chance of gaining Macaulay’s admiration. Supremely self‐confident, Macaulay had from childhood been conspicuously aware of his remarkable intellectual and verbal gifts. At Cambridge (1818–22) he won scholarships and the chancellor’s medal for English verse. Those who witnessed his speeches in Cambridge Union debates marveled at his powers of thought and expression. Macaulay became acquainted with utilitarianism through the riveting presence at Cambridge of Charles Austin, at that time a dogmatic and brilliant young exponent of Benthamite doctrine. Further experience of Benthamite politics came with his participation in the fortnightly meetings of the London Debating Society in 1826, a year after Macaulay made his debut as a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, the great periodical organ of Whiggery. Bearing no traces of either Germano‐Coleridgean or Carlylean influence, Macaulay’s critique of utilitarianism sprang from an overtly political conflict between Benthamite radicalism and the moderate reformism exemplified by the Edinburgh Review.
Whereas James Mill could discern nothing in Coleridge or Carlyle worthy of his attention, he deemed it his duty to expose the oligarchical bias of Whig politics. Early numbers of the Westminster Review, founded in 1824 to advance the Benthamite cause, included two excoriating attacks on the Edinburgh Review. James Mill wrote the first of these (J. Mill 1824); John Mill, overseen by his father, the second (Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review, I: 291–325). Canvassing a wide array of essays appearing in the Edinburgh Review, the Mills contended that the conduct of the Edinburgh demonstrated its refusal to tackle the abuses of aristocratic government. Tories and Whigs, the Benthamites held, were simply two sides of the same aristocratic coin. Both of these oligarchic factions were guilty of seeking to protect the sinister interests of the Few at the expense of the Many. Trying to present themselves as the friends of the people, the Whigs rode a political “see‐saw,” one that routinely tilted in favor of oligarchy. The Edinburgh, according to the Mills, amply displayed this “immoral” practice, “which is, throughout, a mere sacrifice of truth to convenience: a practice which habituates its votaries to play fast and loose with opinions – to lay down one, and take up another, with every change of audience”
(Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review, I: 312–3).
Macaulay’s attendance at the London Debating Society in 1826, coupled with the Mills’ philippics in the Westminster Review, informed his oblique allusion to the Benthamites in an 1827 Edinburgh Review essay on the contemporary political situation. There he told his readers of the presence, within the country’s “middling orders,” of
a Republican sect, as audacious, as paradoxical, as little inclined to respect antiquity, as enthusiastically attached to its ends, as unscrupulous in the choice of its means, as the French Jacobins themselves, – but far superior to the French Jacobins in acuteness and information – in caution, in patience, in resolution.
The intellectual temerity of its members, he added, “made them arrogant, intolerant, and impatient of superiority” (Macaulay 1827: 261). In this piece Macaulay left unnamed the sect and its leaders. Any doubts concerning those he had in mind were removed by his ferocious assault on James Mill in 1829, an assault directed at the very foundations of Benthamite political reasoning.
In the mid‐1820s, James Mill issued a volume of essays he had originally composed for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Coming first in this volume was his Essay on Government, which J.S. Mill and his fellow Benthamites regarded “as a masterpiece of political wisdom” (Autobiography, I: 107). James Mill’s essay sought to identify the best means to obtain legislation consistent with the public interest. He asserted as axiomatic the inexorable force of what he deemed a universal attribute of human nature: the pursuit of individual self‐interest. A concentration of power in the hands of a minority would inevitably result in an abuse of the public interest as those in power satisfied their selfish ends at the expense of the community at large. The only way to prevent such abuse was to devise a system of representation that gave effective expression to the aggregate of individual interests present within the society. An extensive suffrage and frequent elections were the indispensable means to fusing the interests of representatives and the wider public (J. Mill 1825). Macaulay aimed to demolish the political logic evident in James Mill’s Essay on Government, and his effort caused J.S. Mill to doubt the adequacy of his father’s political reasoning.
Brilliantly written and fiercely critical of its subject, Macaulay’s “Mill’s Essay on Government: Utilitarian Logic and Politics” appeared in the March 1829 issue of the Edinburgh Review. Its argumentative thrust contended that the type of reasoning manifest in Mill’s essay vitiated both its explanatory and prescriptive value. James Mill assumed the force of certain predispositions inherent in human nature, “and from these premises the whole science of Politics is synthetically deduced!” (Macaulay 1829: 161, 162). Deriving conclusions from suppositions that woefully failed to acknowledge the range of motives giving rise to conduct in the real world, James Mill’s method inevitably yielded a “science of politics” devoid of practical utility. According to Macaulay, “just conclusions” must rest on induction, the method used “in every experimental science” to enlarge “the power and knowledge of our species.” Would‐be benefactors of mankind must heed “the present state of the world”; scrutinize “the history of past ages”; weigh “the evidence of facts”; generalize “with judgment and diffidence”; constantly test such generalizations against “new facts” (Macaulay 1829: 188–9). James Mill’s modus operandi shunned these imperatives.
Macaulay’s attack came at a time when J.S. Mill was already questioning the adequacy of utilitarian political doctrine, a questioning he links in the Autobiography to his recent encounter with other “schools of political thinking” (the Saint‐Simonian being the most significant of these). Unlike Macaulay, however, the representatives of these schools had not made the flaws in James Mill’s political reasoning a principal concern. Macaulay’s assault, J.S. Mill says, “gave me much to think about.” Macaulay’s “strictures” caused the younger Mill to judge “that my father’s premises were really too narrow, and included but a small number of the general truths, on which, in politics, the important consequences depend.” Achieving an “[i]dentity of interest between the governing body and the community,” while essential, was not in itself a sufficient guarantee of “good government.” Moreover, “conditions of election” could not alone secure such an identity of interest (Autobiography, I: 165). Although J.S. Mill did not look to Macaulay for guidance in discovering the additional requisite “general truths,” the latter’s destructive attack on James Mill had stimulated the search for such truths.7
The effects can be seen in Mill’s 1835 essay “Rationale of Representation,” prompted by the publication of Samuel Bailey’s work on the subject. In this piece Mill concedes that only an enlightened populace capable of detecting fraud could bring about a true identity of interest between government and people. “The identity would be perfect, only if the people were so wise, that it should no longer be practicable to employ deceit as an instrument of government.” Such wisdom would imply “a point of advancement only one stage below that at which they could do without government altogether” (Rationale of Representation, XVIII: 23). Moving a good deal closer to this presumably unattainable ideal required a much greater societal investment in the education of the people than was currently the case. Even a genuinely enlightened populace coupled with appropriate “conditions of election” could not assure good government in the absence of trained leadership. The functions of government must be in the hands of “a select body”; the deciding of “political questions” must express “the deliberately‐formed opinions of a comparatively few, specially educated for the task” (Rationale of Representation, XVIII: 23). These notions owed nothing to Macaulay; nor were they an affront to James Mill, who had devoted much time, thought, and energy to advancing mass education and who was ever mindful of the importance of giving due weight to the instructed members of the community. They did, however, expand “the small number of truths” on which James Mill had founded his science of politics. The doubts raised by Macaulay’s attack on the latter had set the younger Mill on the path that yielded this gain.
Mill briefly scrutinizes that attack in his essay on Bailey’s book, but not in such a way as to make readers think they should look to Macaulay for direction in the province of political reasoning. Bailey had himself gone to some lengths to refute Macaulay’s assertion that “it is not possible to lay down a single general rule respecting the motives which influence human actions” (Macaulay 1829: 186–7). Mill applauds Bailey’s success in showing that
a general proposition may be of the greatest practical moment, although not absolutely true without a single exception; and that in managing the affairs of great aggregations of human beings, we must adapt our rules to the nine hundred and ninety‐nine cases, and not to the thousandth extraordinary case.
(Rationale of Representation, XVIII: 21)
Macaulay’s call for an exclusively empirical treatment of political phenomena struck Mill as seriously misguided. The complexity and profusion of the causes and effects typical of such phenomena rendered useless the experimental method advocated by Macaulay. The inadequacy of James Mill’s premises did not mean that one could do without premises altogether. J.S. Mill had Macaulay in mind when he scornfully declared in his System of Logic that
The vulgar notion, that the safe methods on political subjects are those of Baconian induction – that the true guide is not general reasoning, but specific experience – will one day be quoted as among the most unequivocal marks of a low state of the speculative faculties in any age in which it is accredited.
(Logic, VII: 452)
Mill’s mature thought shows traces of the influence of British critics of utilitarianism. To affirm that the sum of these traces is large would be to affirm too much. The lion’s share of the modest sum came from Coleridge.8