Autobiography and Literary Essays by John Stuart Mill (review)

HUMANITIES 429 John Stuart Mill. Autobiography and Literary Essays Edited by John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, volume 1 University of Toronto Press. liv, 766. $60.00 On 17 October 1873, five months and ten days after the death of John Stuart Mill, Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer published his Autobiography . The source of the edition was a hastily copied transcript written by Helen Taylor, Mill's sister Mary Elizabeth Colman, and an unknown French copyist. Itwas taken from what is now called the Columbia MS, the 1861 revised version of the 1853/4 Early Draft. Now, for the first time, these two texts plus fourteen literary essays by Mill appear in the recently published first volume of The Collected Works ofJohn Stuart Mill. Imaginatively , this jOintly edited volume publishes the 1853/4 and 1861 versions (including the twenty-four sheets appended by Mill in 1869/70) of the Autobiography in parallel form, allowing readers to see simultaneously the frequent substantive changes and revisions made by Mill. Supplementing these texts in the volume are review essays printed between 1824and 1844 that illustrate Mill's evolving ideas about literature. To complete the edition are nine appendices which include examples of Mill's juvenilia, an early account of his father, a commentary on Browning's Pauline, and Helen Taylor's continuation of the Autobiography. The entire 766-page volume, with its bibliographic as well as analytic index, is a complete register of Mill's literary development. Was it necessary, however, to print parallel texts of the Autobiography, producing by any standard an enormous volume? The answer is clearly yes, for only by examining the two versions side by side can one understand the nature and importance of Mill's later revisions. The over 2600 substantive changes vividly portray what Mill himself described as 'the successive phases' of a 'mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to unlearn either from its own thoughts or from those of others.' The frequency and importance of the changes between the two texts necessitated the parallel printing, as the editors explain. The nature of those changes, of course, altered the character of the autobiography . For example, as Mill deflated the egoism of the 1853/4 version in favour of the detachment of the 1861 revision, he often substituted generalizing passages for specific details or omitted particulars of biographical interest. Consequently, as Robson and Stillinger note, the 'revised life is less full, less varied in texture, than that of the Early Draft.' But now we can see why more clearly. The well-known revision of Mill's criticism of his father has a greater impact since the reader can match the passages against one another. Similarly, he can see how Mill rewrote his account ofJohn Sterling, removed most of the section on John Roebuck, or curbed his criticism of Frederic Maurice. The interplay between the Early 4)0 LETTERS IN CANAOA 1981 Draft and later revision now possesses a dramatic nature with the parallel printing of the two texts. The nearly 250 pages devoted to Mill's literary essays, only two of which appeared in Dissertations and Discussions (1859) in any entirety, provide perhaps the most important examples of Mill's literary ideas yet available. Although they establish no coherent literary theory, the essays none the less reveal him as a sensitive practical critic and also as a writer forging a theoretical approach to literature. 'Thoughts on Poetry and lts Varieties' (18))) contains his best-known ideas on poetry, the first section having been published as 'What is Poetry?: but in his 18)5 essay on Tennyson's Poems (reprinted here for the first time) Mill enlarges his earlier concepts. His later essay in particular stresses the importance of feeling and thought in poetry, the product of what he calls 'cultivated reason.' He expresses this when he writes that there are 'in the character of every true poet, two elements, for one of which he is indebted to nature, for the other to cultivation: In his reviews of Vigny, Milnes, and Macaulay, also included, Mill extends his ideas on the social and cultural functions of poetry. The...