Part 8

We need not dally with old Mr. Taylor here--for us he was only Mrs. Taylor's husband, a kind of useful marital appendendum. He was a merchant on 'Change, with interests in argosies that plied to Tripoli--successful, busy, absorbed, with a twinge of gout, and a habit of taking naps after dinner with a newspaper over his face. Moreover, he was an Oxford man, and this was his chief recommendation to the eighteen-year-old girl, when she married him four years before. But education to him was now only a reminiscence. He had sloughed the old Greek spirit as a bird molts its feathers, with this difference: that a bird molts its feathers because it is growing a better crop, while Mr. Taylor wasn't growing anything but a lust after "L. s. d."

Once in two years there was an excursion to Oxford to attend a reunion of a Greek-letter society, and perhaps twice in the winter certain ancient cronies came, drank musty ale, and smoked long clay pipes, and sang college songs in cracked falsetto.

Mrs. Taylor was ashamed of them--disappointed. Was this the college spirit of which she had read so much? The old cronies leered at her as she came in to light the candles--they leered at her; and the one seated next to her husband poked that fortunate gentleman in the ribs and congratulated him on his matrimonial estate.

Yet Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were happy, or reasonably so. He took much pride in her intellect, indulged her in all material things she wanted, and never thwarted her little ambitions to give functions to great men who came up from the provinces.

She organized a Literary Coterie, to meet every Saturday and study Mary Wollstonecraft's book on the "Rights of Woman."

Occasionally, she sat in the visitors' gallery at Parliament, but always behind the screen. And constantly she wrote out her thoughts on the themes of the time. Her husband never regarded these things as proof that she was inwardly miserable, unsatisfied, and in spirit was roaming the universe seeking a panacea for soul-nostalgia; not he! Nor she.

And so she gave the function to the Right Honorable Nobody from Essex. And among thirty or forty other people was one John Stuart Mill, son of the eminent James Mill, historian and philosopher, also Head Examiner of the East India House. Mr. and Mrs. Taylor had made out the list of people between them, choosing those whom they thought had sufficient phosphorus so they would enjoy meeting a great theological meteoric personality from Essex.

Mr. Taylor had seen young Mr. Mill in the East India House, where young Mr. Mill made out invoices with big seals on them. Mr. Taylor had said to Mr. Mill that it was a fine day, to which proposition Mr. Mill agreed.

The Honorable James Mill was invited, too, but could not come, as he was President of the Land Tenure League, and a meeting was on for the same night.

Mr. Taylor introduced to the company the eminent visitor from Essex--they had been chums together at Oxford--and then Mr. Taylor withdrew into a quiet corner and enjoyed a nap as the manuscript was being read in sonorous orotund.

The subject was, "The Proper Sphere of Woman in the Social Cosmogony." By chance Mrs. Taylor and John Stuart Mill sat next to each other.

The speaker moved with stately tread through his firstly to his seventhly, and then proceeded to sum up. The argument was that of Saint Paul amplified, "Let woman learn in subjection"--"For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is also the head of the Church"--"God made woman for a helpmeet to man," etc.

Mrs. Taylor looked at young Mr. Mill, and Mr. Mill looked at Mrs. Taylor. They were both thinking hard, and without a word spoken they agreed with each other on this, that the speaker had no message.

Young Mr. Mill noted that one of Mrs. Taylor's eyes was much wider open than the other, and that her head had corners. She seemed much beyond him in years and experience, although actually she was two years younger--a fact he did not then know.

"Does not a woman need a helpmeet, too?" she wrote on the fly-leaf of a book she held in her lap. And young Mr. Mill took the book and wrote beneath in a copper-plate East India hand, "I do not know what a woman needs; but I think the speaker needs a helpmeet."

And then Mrs. Taylor wrote: "All help must be mutual. No man can help a woman unless she helps him--the benefit of help lies as much in the giving as in the receiving."

After the function Mrs. Taylor asked Mr. Mill to call. It is quite likely that on this occasion she asked a good many of the other guests to call.

Mr. Mill called the next evening.

* * * * *

John Stuart Mill was not a university man. He was an intellectual cosset, and educated in a way that made the English pedagogues stand aghast. So, probably thousands of parents said, "Go to! we will educate our own children," and went at their boys in the same way that James Mill treated his son, but the world has produced only one John Stuart Mill.

Axtell, the trotter, in his day held both the two-year-old and the three-year-old record. He was driven in harness from the time he was weaned, and was given work that would have cocked most ankles and sent old horses over on their knees. But Axtell stood the test and grew strong.

Certain horsemen, seeing the success of Axtell, tried his driver's plan, and one millionaire I know ruined a thousand colts and never produced a single racehorse by following the plan upon which Axtell thrived.

The father of John Stuart Mill would now be considered one of England's great thinkers, had he not been so unfortunate as to be thrown completely into the shadow by his son. As it is, James Mill lives in history as the man who insisted that his baby three years old should be taught the Greek alphabet. When five years old, this baby spoke with an Attic accent, and corrected his elders who dropped the aspirate. With unconscious irony John Stuart Mill wrote in his "Autobiography," "I learned no Latin until my eighth year, at which time, however, I was familiar with 'AEsop's Fables,' most of the 'Anabasis,' the 'Memorabilia' of Xenophon, and the 'Lives of the Philosophers' by Diogenes Laertius, part of Lucian, and the 'Ad Demonicum' and 'Ad Nicoclem' of Isocrates." Besides these he had also read all of Plato, Plutarch, Gibbon, Hume and Rollin, and was formulating in his mind a philosophy of history.

Whether these things "educated" the boy or not will always remain an unsettled question for debating-societies.

But that he learned and grew through constant association with his father there is no doubt. Wherever the father went, the boy trotted along, a pad in one hand and a pencil in the other, always making notes, always asking questions, and always answering propositions.

The long out-of-door walks doubtless saved him from death. He never had a childhood, and if he ever had a mother, the books are silent concerning her. He must have been an incubator baby, or else been found under a cabbage-leaf. James Mill treated his wife as if her office and opinions were too insignificant to consider seriously--she was only an unimportant incident in his life. James Mill was the typical beef-eating Englishman described by Taine.

According to Doctor Bain's most interesting little book on John Stuart Mill, the youth at nine was appointed to supervise the education of the rest of the family, "a position more pleasing to his vanity than helpful to his manners." That he was a beautiful prig at this time goes without saying.

The scaffolding of learning he mistook for the edifice, a fallacy borrowed from his father. At the age of fourteen he knew as much as his father, and acknowledged it. He was then sent to France to study the science of government under Sir Samuel Bentham.

His father's intent was that he should study law, and in his own mind was the strong conviction that he was set apart, and that his life was sacred to the service of humanity. A year at the study of law, and a more or less intimate association with barristers, relieved him of the hallucination that a lawyer's life is consecrated to justice and the rights of man--quips, quirks and quillets were not to his taste.

James Mill held the office of Chief Examiner in the East India House, at a salary equal to seven thousand five hundred dollars a year. The gifted son was now nineteen, and at work as a junior clerk under his father at twenty pounds a year. Before the year was up he was promoted, and when he was twenty-one his salary was one hundred pounds a year.

There are people who will say, "Of course his father pushed him along." But the fact that after his father's death he was promoted by the Directors to Head of the Office disposes of all suspicion of favoritism. The management of the East India Company was really a matter of statesmanship, and the direct, methodical and practical mind of Mill fitted him for the place.

Thomas Carlyle, writing to his wife in Scotland in the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty-one, said: "This young Mill, I fancy and hope, is a being one can love. A slender, rather tallish and elegant youth, with Roman-nosed face, earnestly smiling blue eyes, modest, remarkably gifted, great precision of utterance, calm--a distinctly able and amiable youth."

So now behold him at twenty-five, a student and scholarly recluse, delving all day in accounts and dispatches, grubbing in books at night, and walking an hour before sunrise in the park every morning. It was about then that he accepted the invitation of Mrs. Taylor to call.

I do not find that James Mill ever disputed the proposition that women have souls: he evidently considered the matter quite beyond argument--they hadn't. His son, at this time, was of a like opinion.

John Stuart Mill had not gone into society, and women to him were simply undeveloped men, to be treated kindly and indulgently. As mental companions, the idea was unthinkable. And love was entirely out of his orbit--all of his energies had been worked up into great thoughts. Doctor Bain says that at twenty-five John Stuart Mill was as ignorant of sex as a girl of ten.

He called on Mrs. Taylor because she had pleased him when she said, "The person who helps another gets as much out of the transaction as the one who is helped." This was a thought worth while. Perhaps Mrs. Taylor had borrowed the idea. But anyway it was something to repeat it. He revolved it over in his mind all day, off and on. "To help another is to help yourself. A helpmeet must grow by the exercise of being useful. Therefore, a woman grows as her husband grows--she can not stand if she puts forth intelligent effort. All help is mutual."

"One eye was wider than the other--her head had corners--she carried her chin in!"

John Stuart Mill wished the day would not drag so; after supper he would go and call on Mrs. Taylor, and ask her to explain what she meant by all help being mutual--it was a trifle paradoxical!

The Taylors were just finishing tea when young Mr. Mill called. They were surprised and delighted to see him. He was a bit abashed, and could not quite remember what it was he wanted to ask Mrs. Taylor, but he finally got around to something else just as good. Mrs. Taylor had written an article on the "Subjugation of Women"--would Mr. Mill take it home with him and read it, or would he like to hear her read a little of it now?

Mr. Mill's fine face revealed his delight at the prospect of being read to. So Mrs. Taylor read a little aloud to Mr. Mill, while Mr. Taylor took a much-needed nap in the corner.

In a few days Mr. Mill called to return Mrs. Taylor's manuscript and leave a little essay he himself had written on a similar theme. Mr. Taylor was greatly pleased at this fine friendship that had sprung up between his gifted wife and young Mr. Mill--Mrs. Taylor was so much improved in health, so much more buoyant! Thursday night soon became sacred at the Taylors' to Mr. Mill, and Sunday he always took dinner with them.

Goldwin Smith, a trifle grumpy, with a fine forgetfulness as to the saltness of time, says that young Mr. Mill had been kept such a recluse that when he met Mrs. Taylor he considered that he was the first man to discover the potency of sex, and that he thought his experience was unique in the history of mankind.

Perhaps love does make a fool of a man--I really can not say. If so, then John Stuart Mill never recovered his sanity. Suppose we let John speak for himself--I quote from his "Autobiography":

It was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honor and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement.

My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in Eighteen Hundred Thirty, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.

* * * * *

I very soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known.

It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that she became afterwards. Least of all could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally from the ardor with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an experience without making it the source or occasion of an accession of wisdom.

* * * * *

In her, complete emancipation from every kind of superstition (including that which attributes a pretended perfection to the order of Nature and the universe) and an earnest protest against many things which are still part of the established constitution of society, resulted not from the intellect, but from strength, a noble and elevated feeling, and co-existent with a highly reverential nature. In general spiritual characteristics, as well as in temperament and organization, I have often compared her, as she was at that time, to Shelley: but in thought and intellect, Shelley, so far as his powers were developed in his short life, was but a child compared with what she ultimately became.

Alike in the highest regions of speculation and in the smaller practical concerns of daily life, her mind was the same perfect instrument, piercing to the heart and marrow of the matter, always seizing the essential idea or principle.

The same exactness and rapidity of operation, pervading as it did her sensitive as well as her mental qualities, would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her for a consummate artist, as her fiery and tender soul and her vigorous eloquence would certainly have made her a great orator. And her profound knowledge of human nature, and discernment and sagacity in practical life, would, in the times when such a career was open to women, have made her eminent among the rulers of mankind.

Her intellectual gifts did but minister to a moral character at once the noblest and the best balanced which I have ever met with in my life. Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of duties, but of a heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others, and often went to excess in consideration for them by imaginatively investing their feelings with the intensity of her own.

The passion of justice might have been thought to be her strongest feeling, but for her boundless generosity, and a lovingness ever ready to pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of giving the smallest feelings in return. The rest of her moral characteristics were such as naturally accompany these qualities of mind and heart: the most genuine modesty combined with the loftiest pride; a simplicity and sincerity which were absolute towards all who were fit to receive them; the utmost scorn for whatever was mean and cowardly, and a burning indignation at everything brutal or tyrannical, faithless or dishonorable in conduct and character, while making the broadest distinction between "mala in se" and mere "mala prohibita"--between acts giving evidence of intrinsic badness in feeling and character, and those which are only violations of conventions either good or bad, violations which whether in themselves right or wrong are capable of being committed by persons in every other respect lovable and admirable.

To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect was only gradual, and several years elapsed before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far greater than any which I could hope to give; though to her, who had at first reached her opinions by the moral intuition of a character of strong feeling, there was doubtless help as well as encouragement to be derived from one who had arrived at many of the same results by study and reasoning: and in the rapidity of her intellectual growth, her mental activity, which converted everything into knowledge, doubtless drew from me, as it did from other sources, many of its materials. What I owe, even intellectually, to her is, in its detail, almost infinite; of its general character a few words will give some, though a very imperfect, idea.

With those who, like the best and wisest of mankind, are dissatisfied with human life as it is, and whose feelings are wholly identified with its radical amendment, there are two main regions of thought. One is the region of ultimate aims--the constituent elements of the highest realizable ideal of human life.

The other is that of the immediately useful and practically attainable. In both these departments, I have acquired more from her teaching than from all other sources taken together. And, to say truth, it is in these two extremes principally, that real certainty lies. My own strength lay wholly in the uncertain and slippery intermediate region, that of theory, or moral and political science; respecting the conclusions of which, in any of the forms in which I have received or originated them, whether as political economy, analytic psychology, logic, philosophy or history, or anything else, it is not the least of my intellectual obligations to her that I have derived from her a wise skepticism, which, while it has not hindered me from following out the honest exercise of my thinking faculties to whatever conclusions might result from it, has put me on my guard against holding or announcing these conclusions with a degree of confidence which the nature of such speculations does not warrant, and has kept my mind not only open to admit, but prompt to welcome and eager to seek, even on the questions on which I have most meditated, any prospect of clearer perceptions and better evidence. I have often received praise, which in my own right I only

## partially deserve, for the greater practicality that is supposed to

be found in my writings, compared with those of most thinkers who have been equally addicted to large generalizations. The writings in which this quality has been observed, were not the work of one mind, but of the fusion of two: one as eminently practical in its judgments and perceptions of things present, as it was high and bold in its anticipations for futurity.

* * * * *

The social functions at the Taylor home now became less frequent, and finally ceased. Women looked upon the friendship of John Stuart Mill and Mrs. Taylor with some resentment and a slight tinge of jealousy. Men lifted an eyebrow and called it "equivocal"--to use the phrase of Clement Shorter.

"The plan of having a husband and also a lover is not entirely without precedent," said Disraeli in mock apology, and took snuff solemnly. Meantime manuscripts were traveling back and forth between the East India House and the Taylors'.

John Stuart Mill was contributing essays to the magazines that made the thinkers think. He took a position opposed to his father, and maintained the vast importance of the sentiments and feelings in making up the sum of human lives. When Mill was mentioned, people asked which one.

The Carlyles, who at first were very proud of the acquaintanceship of Mill, dropped him. Then he dropped them. Years after, the genial Tammas, writing to his brother John, confirmed his opinion of Mill, "after Mill took up with that Taylor woman." Says Tammas: "You have lost nothing by missing the 'Autobiography' of Mill. I never read a more uninteresting book, nor should I say a sillier."

James Mill protested vehemently against his son visiting at the Taylors', and even threatened the young man with the loss of his position, but John Stuart made no answer. The days John did not see Harriet he wrote her a letter and she wrote him one.

To protect himself in his position, John now ceased to do any literary work or to write any personal letters at the office. While there he attended to business and nothing else. In the early morning he wrote or walked. Evenings he devoted to Mrs. Taylor; either writing to her or for her, or else seeing her. On Saturday afternoons they would usually go botanizing, for botany is purely a lovers' invention.

Old acquaintances who wanted to see Mill had to go to the East India House, and there they got just five minutes of his dignified presence. Doctor Bain complains, "I could no longer get him to walk with me in the park--he had reduced life to a system, and the old friends were shelved and pigeonholed."

When Mill was thirty his salary was raised to five hundred pounds a year. His father died the same year, and his brothers and sisters discarded him. His literary fame had grown, and he was editor of the London "Review." The pedantry of youth had disappeared--practical business had sobered him, and love had relieved him of his idolatry for books. Heart now meant more to him than art. His plea was for liberty, national and individual. The modesty, gentleness and dignity of the man made his presence felt wherever he went. A contemporary said: "His features were refined and regular--the nose straight and finely shaped, his lips thin and compressed--the face and body seemed to represent the inflexibility of the inner man. His whole aspect was one of high and noble achievement--invincible purpose, iron will, unflinching self-oblivion--a world's umpire!"

Mill felt that life was such a precious heritage that we should be jealous of every moment, so he shut himself in from every disturbing feature. All that he wrote he submitted to Mrs. Taylor--she corrected, amended, revised. She read for him, and spent long hours at the British Museum in research work, while he did the business of the East India Company.