ing companion. It was not solely, or even | And the panegyric closes with words chiefly, in diffusing his merely intellectual con- taken from that immortal passage victions that his power showed itself: it was surely the most beautiful in the literature still more through the influence of a quality, of antiquity which was inspired by the of which I have only since learnt to appreciate grave and noble sorrow of Tacitus, Quid the extreme rarity: that exalted public spirit, and regard above all things to the good of the whole, which warmed into life and activity every germ of similar virtue that existed in the minds he came in contact with: the desire he made them feel for his approbation, the shame at his disapproval; the moral support which his conversation and his very existence gave to those who were aiming at the same objects, and the encouragement he afforded to the faint-hearted or desponding among them, by the firm confidence which (though the reverse of sanguine as to the results to be expected in any one particular case) he always felt in the power of reason, the general progress of improvement, and the good which individuals could do by judicious effort. (Autobiography, pp. 101-2.) quid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est in animis hominum, in æternitate temporum, fama rerum. It is to the pages of the son's "Autobiography" that we must go for the inner structure of ideas and beliefs which lay under so imposing a character. It will hardly be time lost to re-read and to tran. scribe some parts of Mr. Mill's account: ... My father's moral convictions, wholly dissevered from religion, were very much of the character of those of the Greek philosophers; and were delivered with the force and decision which characterized all that came from him. . . His moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the "Socratici viri ;" justice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labor; regard for the public good; estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things accord Nor was this the exaggeration of filial piety. Editors of newspapers are not usually an enthusiastic class, but Black of the Morning Chronicle and Fonblanque of the Examiner were as sensible as his son himself of James Mill's rare qualities.*ing to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exer"Mr. Mill," says Black, "was eloquent tion in contradiction to one of self-indulgent and impressive in conversation. He had ease and sloth. These and other moralities he a great command of language, which bore conveyed in brief sentences, uttered as occathe stamp of his earnest and energetic sion arose, of grave exhortation, or stern reprocharacter. Young men were particularly bation and contempt. ... In his views of life fond of his society, and it was always to he partook of the character of the Stoic, the him a source of great delight to have an Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his peropportunity of contributing to form their sonal qualities the Stoic predominated. His minds and exalt their characters. Νο standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch man could enjoy his society without catchas it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive ing a portion of his elevated enthusiasm." test of right and wrong, the tendency of action Fonblanque's eulogy runs in similar terms. to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and "Wherever talent and good purpose were this was the Cynic element) scarcely any belief found conjoined the power and the will in pleasure; at least in his later years, of which to serve the cause of truth the ability alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. and the disposition to be useful to so- He was not insensible to pleasures; but he ciety, to weed out error, and advance im- deemed very few of them worth the price which, at least in the present state of society, wherever these qualities provement must be paid for them. The greater number were united, the possessor found a friend, of miscarriages in life, he considered to be a supporter to fortify, cheer, and encour-attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. age him in his course, in James Mill. He fanned every flame of public virtue, he strengthened every good purpose that came within the range of his influence. His conversation was full of instruction." | may be supposed, in the presence of young * See Mr. Bain's Appendix, 457-8. He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsat isfied curiosity had gone by. This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it persons; but when he did, it was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes say, that if life were made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of the beneyolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense was with him a bye: word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded modern times, compared with that of the ancients, the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct of acts and omissions; there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead, either to good or to bad actions; conscience itself, the very desire to act right, often leading people to act wrong. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action, when the motive was a feeling of duty, as if the agents had been consciously evil doers. . He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad cause, as much or more than one who adopted the same cause from self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically mischievous. And thus his aversion to many intellectual errors, or what he regarded as such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in a degree once common, but now very unusual, threw his feelings into his opinions; which truly it is difficult to understand how any one who possesses much of both, can fail to do. (Pp. 46-50.) as an aberration of the moral standard of This, then, is the interesting man of whom Professor Bain has now given us the biography, on which, and incidentally on the little companion volume on the younger Mill, we now propose to make a few remarks. That the book is as interesting as the subject cannot, we fear, be honestly affirmed. It has all the merits that industry can secure, nor can anybody say with the typical critic that it would have been better if the author had taken | more pains. All that diligent search for the facts of James Mill's life could do has been done, and the results are duly entered and posted up with the laudable Professor Bain has certainly not been accuracy of daybook and ledger. But able to do for this eminent member of the great domus Socratica what Plato did for Socrates himself. It is no slight on an author to say that he does not write as well as Plato, but Mr. Bain carries the license which every author has of writing worse than Plato, almost to excess. There is no light in his picture, no composition, no color. It would be too much to ask for the polish and elegance, the urbanity and finesse, of a discourse at the French Academy, but the author is really more severe than is permitted in his disdain for graces of style and the art of presentation. A writer does well to be concise, yet the Greeks have shown us that a writer or an orator may attain the art of conciseness without being either dry or ungenial. It is not enough to give us a catalogue, however industriously compiled, of the external incidents of a man's life in the order of time, of his books and articles, and even of his ideas. Such things are mere memoranda, and not biography. Of these laborious memoranda there are enough and too many. Bain gives us, for instance, a minute description of Ford Abbey, where James Mill and his family spent many months. with Jeremy Bentham, who then lived there. "The original plan of the front," it seems, "compels us to divide the whole range into seven portions,” and to each of these seven portions the reader is virtuously trotted, learning, if he be so minded, how many divisions there are in the archways, how many windows in each floor, at what distances the windows are from one another, what the upper story used to be and is, what the lower story. With weary foot we follow our guide into the inside, we open a door to the left and are in the great hall, 55 feet in length, 27 feet wide, and 28 feet high; then into the dining-room; then back to the main entrance to a cloister, which is 82 feet long, and 17 feet high; then up-stairs to a great saloon, 50 feet long, 26 wide, and Mr. 20 high; there are not less than thirty bedrooms in the house; there is a gravel walk a quarter of a mile long, and 30 feet wide; and so on, and so on, through five closely printed pages. Who cares to know all this, unless Ford Abbey happens to be to let or sell? Nobody can remember, or ought to remember, a word of it, but everybody recalls the few lines in the autobiography, which stamp the place and its impression on Mill in the inmost mind | of the reader: From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived during half of each year at Ford Abbey in Somersetshire (or rather in a part of Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the advantage of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, an important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to universal elevation of sentiments in a people than the large and free character of their habitations. The middleage architecture, the baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence, and were to me a sort of poetic cultivation, aided also by the grounds in which the abbey stood; which were riant and secluded, umbrageous, and full of the sound of falling waters. (Autobiography, p. 56.) gives us Mill's letter to the Morning Chronicle commemorating his friend's loss, and there the matter ends. Yet it was far better worth while to tell us a little more about Ricardo than to tell us so much about a country house in Somersetshire. He was a far more interesting subject, and much more to James Mill's life, than Ford Abbey. If Mr. Bain answers that there is nothing to say about Ricardo's life, that is quite true in the sense of there being nothing particular in the way of dates and little external incidents; but the question how it was that Ricardo was prepared to receive Mill's impressions and to react to his stimulation is full of interest. Witness, for example, the remarks of Mr. Bagehot on Ricardo; on the connection between his dealings on the Stock Exchange and his power of abstract thinking; on the subtle preparation of race for these high regions of thought, (for Ricardo belonged to the same race as Spinoza); on the peculiar economic circumstances of the time, which fitted Ricardo to apply Mill's method of reasoning to deal with them.* Mr. Bain may perhaps disdain all this as mere fanciful speculation, but it is such things, nevertheless, that make all the difference between a book that is readable, fertile, and suggestive, and one that is none of these things. With the highest respect for Mr. Bain's conscientious and painstaking method, we submit that he has not seriously re- It is not merely in the conception of the flected on the things that are worth tell-art of biography that Mr. Bain seems to ing, on the relation of details to the whole, us to fall somewhat short of what might what it is that the reader seeks to know, have been hoped. In the mere quality of what it is good for him to know on the literary correctness he does not come up difference, in short, between a jejune list to the standard which he exacts with of dramatis persona and the drama itself. much rigor from other people. He has There is Ricardo, for instance. Ricardo done good service before now, for examwas, excepting his son, James Mill's most ple, by working out the distinction beeminent disciple, and indeed he was more tween the relative pronouns, who or which peculiarly and exclusively his disciple than and that. His rule on the matter is a John Mill himself. It was Mill's Socratic good guide, but all such rules are subject stimulation that inspired the founder of to old and accepted usage (more than half abstract political economy to work out his of grammar having its root in usage), and observations into a connected system; all are liable to nice variations from the and whatever value we may set on the influence of taste and ear. Mr. Bain, if system when it was so worked out, at we remember rightly, gives Shakespeare least it made a very profound mark on the a scolding for using which when, if he current thought in its own sphere. All had been lucky enough to be bred at that Mr. Bain has to tell us of Ricardo is Aberdeen, instead of among the drowsy that his intimacy with Mill began in 1811, meadows of Stratford-on-Avon, he would that he was shy and timid, that Mill en- have used that.† The same damning couraged him to publish his book on rent and to enter Parliament, that he amassed an 60. enormous fortune on the Stock Exchange, and that, if we may trust Bentham, he was stingy in small matters (pp. 74, 75, 153). When Ricardo dies in 1823, Mr. Bain properly enough * Economic Studies. By Walter Bagehot, pp. 151 † Mr. Bain's rule is that the heavy relatives who and which are to be used when they introduce a second coordinate sentence; that is to be used when the sentence added by it is a qualifying, limiting, descriptive, or adjectival proposition. Thus: "Canning delivers an elaborate oration, which is the subject of a scathing writer is not a good sign for the future of our language, especially at a moment when it is in such imminent danger from the defiling flood of trans-Atlantic vulgarisms, so ingenious, so humorous, so wonderful, so truly hideous and detestable. We should certainly not care to notice these nugas difficiles, nor to pursue this labor ineptiarum, if Mr. Bain had not himself drawn especial attention to such matters. A writer who is so censorious on the style of another, is bound to watch his own. One can hardly think it a happy turn of expression, for instance, to say that a man has no energy "available for establishing the co-ordinations of manual dexterity" (p. 333), when you only mean that he is too tired by reading and thinking to have spirits for boxing and fencing. blemish is now exposed in the writing of J. S. Mill, and in truth I do not know one single author of eminence in whose pages Mr. Bain's rule is not most freely neglected. Mr. Bain may say that these famous men, Shakespeare, Burke, and the rest, would have written better if they had never used who or which, except to connect two co-ordinate sentences, and always used that when they wanted the proper restrictive, explicative, limiting, or defining relative. It may be so; and it may be that Felix Holt was much more sensible than his neighbors in wearing a cap instead of a hat, but nevertheless the cap gave him a vulgar and ill-bred air which he might as well have avoided. And to us, Mr. Bain's over-scrupulous rejection of the common use of who and which gives to his style something disa-J. S. Mill's style may perhaps have been, greeable and uncouth. His precision in this and other points makes it the more singular that Mr. Bain should not always satisfy his own requirements. "On referring to the volumes of these various reviews," he says for instance, "about the years when Mill may have been a contributor, I was deterred by the multitude of short articles that would need to have been studied" (p. 62). It is superfluous to remind the author of a "Companion to the Higher Grammar," that this ought to have been, "the multitude of short artiIcles that would have needed (or would need to be studied." Whatever, also, we may think about the use of which and that, it is slipshod work to use such an expression as "the way that he allowed himself to speak and behave." Again, it may or may not be pardonable for us poor journalists, whose writing, like the grass of the field, to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, to talk of the "Bradlaugh business," and the like; but a leisured professor of rhetoric surely ought not to keep us in countenance in these malpractices by such phrases as "the women question," "the language element," ""the Bentham philosophy." Nor can we profess to admire the elegance of the propositions that "Mrs. Grote came in for the cold shoulder," that " Baldwin came to grief," or that Parliamentary reform went on " by flukes and leaps in the dark." That these refined atticisms should appear in a book by a serious letter by Grote in the Morning Chronicle." Here there are two distinct propositions: Canning delivers the oration, and on it Grote writes the letter. But if the facts had been put differently the words would have run thus: "The scathing letter that Grote wrote in the Chronicle was prompted by the oration that Canning had delivered." as Mr. Bain says, "wanting in delicate attention to the placing of qualifying words generally," but surely either delicate attention or something else is wanting in the following sentence of the critic's own: "According to our present notions of physical and mental training he [Mill] ought to have had a decided break in the afternoon. Considering that he was at work from about six in the morning, with only half an hour for breakfast, he should clearly have had between one and two a cessation of several hours." Of course we know what Mr. Bain means, but the language is less precise than we have a right to expect in one who is an arbiter elegantiarum by profession. Some of Mr. Bain's criticisms of the younger Mill's grammar are undoubtedly just. What he says of the slovenly use of only is clearly quite correct. Oddly enough this is one of the very words about which Mill himself many years ago gave us a useful hint in a passage which unfortunately remains as much in season to-day as when it was written. Only, said Mill, is not fine enough for our modern rhetoric of ambitious ignorance, and so writers are turning alone into an adverb. "The time is coming when Tennyson's Enone could not say, I will not die alone,' lest she should be supposed to mean that she would not only die but do something else." In the same place he notices such ignorant vulgarisms as transpire for happen, sanatory for sanitary, and predicate for predict. Mill's protest is now forty years old, yet these freaks are more common than they ever were.* * Logic, bk. iv., ch. v., § 3-one of the very rare passages in Mill's writing where we detect something like irascibility. He had the same feeling for of his preaching exist," Mr. Bain tells us; "but there is good evidence of his officiating in the church of Logie Pert. My informant, the last survivor of the Barclay family, distinctly remembers hearing him on one occasion; and knows of his preaching twice. She remembers his loud, clear voice, which filled the church; that his text was from Peter; and that the generality of the hearers complained of not being able to understand him. Sir David Brewster said to myself, 'I've Having disposed of these lighter matters, we may turn to the substance of the story that Mr. Bain has to tell. In truth the private life of James Mill does not make much of a story. There can be no doubt as to what is the most remarkable episode in it. "It was said of the famous Swedish chemist, Bergman," says Mr. Bain, with excellent point, "that he had made many discoveries, but his greatest was the discovery of Scheele. In like manner it will be said of James Mill that his greatest contribution to human prog-heard him preach; and no great han' he ress was his son." It is the record of the made o't.' His discourses would no education of J. S. Mill which stands out doubt be severely reasoned, but wanting in heroic proportions in the history of his in the unction of the popular evangelical father's life. In other respects James preacher." In after years a parcel of his Mill's career was marked by hardly any sermons was known by his family to exist external events of striking interest. The in a saddle-bag in an attic, but they disapstruggle of authorship is an old tale, and peared, and he was supposed to have except that the battle was waged by him destroyed them. The ministrations of with more than ordinary stubbornness the pulpit seem to have been at no time and resolution, there is nothing remark- congenial to him, and for four years after able about it. He was the son of a shoe- he had been licensed to preach he is bemaker in Forfarshire (b. 1773), and ac-lieved to have played miscellaneous parts quired the elements of education first at of a lay kind, as family tutor, corrector of the public school, and next at the burgh the press, and possibly hack-writer. school of Montrose. His reputation for This interval, we may suppose, marks good parts and promise is supposed to the time when he finally repudiated thehave commended the youth to the notice ology. Mr. Bain maintains a certain of the family of Sir John Stuart, a person discreet reserve on Mill's rejection of all of consideration in the neighborhood, and religion. But the son's "Autobiography" Mill's friend through life. At their insti- tells us enough (p. 38). By his own readgation, and presumably through their ing and reflection James Mill had been means, he was sent (1790) to prepare him- early led to throw over natural religion self for the sacred office of the ministry as well as revealed. Butler's "Analogy at the University of Edinburgh. At Ed- for a long time kept him a believer in the inburgh, he pursued his own studies, divine authority of Christianity. If a while at the same time acting as tutor to wise and benevolent being can have made Stuart's only daughter. Mill himself the universe, why should he not have mentions the most important of the influ- acted as the New Testament records? ences of which he was conscious at the "Those who admit an omnipotent as well university. "All the years I remained as perfectly just and benevolent Maker about Edinburgh," he said, "I used, as and Ruler of such a world as this can say often as I possibly could, to steal into little against Christianity, but what can, Mr. Stewart's class to hear a lecture, with at least equal force, be retorted which was always a high treat. I have against themselves." It was the moral heard Pitt and Fox deliver some of their difficulty which overthrew, in Mill's mind, most admired speeches; but I never the faith in which he had been educated. heard anything nearly so eloquent as He found it impossible to believe that a some of the lectures of Professor Stew-world so full of cruelty and wrong could art. The taste for the studies which have be the work of a Creator uniting infinite formed my favorite pursuits, and which power and wisdom to perfect goodness. will be so till the end of my life, I owe to And so at last he came to the conviction him." that concerning the origin of things nothThe divinity course he did not finishing whatever can be known. Questions until 1797, and in the following year he was licensed by the Presbytery of Brechin to preach the gospel. "Very few records those who spoil the noble instrument of language as for those who efface natural beauties, and he had surely good cause for his anger in both cases. how the world came into existence and who made us, he henceforth definitely regarded as impenetrable problems, because we had no experience and no authentic knowledge from which to solve them. |