J. S. Mill’s Theory of Poetry

JOHN M. ROBSON J.S.Mill's Theory ofPoetry Tohn Stuart Mill is often held up to scorn as a cold, mechanical thinker for whom ethics is no more than logic, and politics no more than political economy. Swathed in mournful black, hard-visaged and ice-veined, Mill stands for the Victorian vittues to which we (thank heaven) cannot pretend. The picture is patently a caricature, failing to do justice to the man or to his thought, but correcting it seems difficult. Mill is himself mainly responsible for the difficulty, his Autobiography being little more than the history of his education and opinions. His first biographer, Bain, was plus royalist que Ie roi, and recent biographers (most notably Packe), while reopening itnportant evidence, appear strangely unable to relate his personal experience to his thought. Actually, though most of Mill's work seems to hide rather than to reveal the man, and most ofhis correspondence is public rather than private, even in his System ofLogic there is material to show more than a superficial relation between his life and his thought. What the evidence shows, in fact, is that Mill not only had emotions and was motivated by them, but recognized their place in a complete moral and social theory. Some of the evidence, of course, has not been ignored. Mill's early letters to Carlyle and Sterling, his criticisms of Benthamism in the r830's, and his Autobiography have been seen as indicating emotional tensions, and his praise of Wordsworth and Coleridge has been often recognized as awareness of these tensions. But almost always this material has been seen as yet more evidence of Mill's inconsistency, best explained as a relatively harmless Utilitarian sowing ofwild oats. While it is usual now to see that Mill's life falls into three parts (up to about r828, from r828 to r840, and after r840), not enough credence has been given to Mill's own account of these periods in the Autobiography. Clearly it is his opinion that ifany part ofhis life is distinct from the rest, it is the early years when he was a logioVolume XXlX, Number 4. july. 1960 , J. S. MILL S THEORY OF POETRY tq 42r machine, not the years following his mental distress. In these latter years hejudges that by growing in appreciation ofall facets of/ife he laid a firm base for his mature opinions. As a result of his experience, he was able about r840 to accept a general framework of opinion for the rest of his life. Just a framework, however, was accepted; his thought was fixed in direction, not in place, for his was an open, fact-hungry philosophy. Although studies of Mill's ethics, politics, or economics could be used to substantiate his account, the best support for it is to be found in his theory ofpoetry, which is commonly seen as an aberration, at best curious, but certainlyjejune. To defend it as a complete literary theory is no part of my purpose; its place in the total purview of Mill's thought, however, is important, and the burden of my song. Mill at sixty years of age is indebted to Mill at twenty-six; "What is Poetry?" is echoed in the footnotes toJames Mill's Analysis ofthe Phenomena ofthe Human Mind; the early critic ofTennyson'spoems is clearly seen in the author ofUtilitarianism. Mill's early reading and writing of poetryl was directed by his father's tastes and purposes. The reading was mostly in the eighteenth-century poets, the only later poets being Scott and Campbell. The writing was purely academic, as the "Ode to Diana'" shows; probably its main effect was to convince Mill that he was not a poet. So although, as he says in the Autobiography, he was passively susceptible from the first to all poetry or oratory "which appealed to the feelings on any basis ofreason" (p. 50), he was really open to a new experience, his own and not his father's, when he read the great Romantics in his early twenties. Although the memory is recorded and analysed by the mature Mill, there seems to be no reason to question its truth to...