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why, we must ask, did she leave no independent record of it? What
writer is content to be vicarious forever? (After all, even Jane Carlyle
wrote more and better letters than circumstances required.) Or again,
if
Mrs. Taylor was so luminous a character, why was her light visible
only to Mill? We can dismiss Carlyle's poor opinion of her, for who
/Would take Carlyle's opinion of anybody; and we can accuse Mrs.
Carlyle of cattiness. Still, shouldn't there have been someone from the
MiII-Taylor circle, however small that became, to bear witness in Mrs.
Taylor's defense?
But in large part the doubt about Mrs. Taylor has been only un–
generous. For there is the simple fact that public opinion hates to credit
a wife, any wife, with being what Mill said Mrs. Taylor was to him-the
source of his strength. Men have their masculinity, women their
femininity to protect in insisting that man is autonomous. Better to
dismiss Mill's claims for his wife on the ground of Love, that great
hallucinator, than risk upsetting in even a single instance the balance
of sexual power that our society maintains at such cost!
Thus whoever, like myself, would have preferred, in thinking of
Mrs. Taylor, to take the chance on the side of her sex rather than stand
flat-footed with the skeptics was bound to have an uneasy time of it.
Yet it was with this desire intact that I picked up Professor Hayek's
volume, eager to vindicate both Mrs. Taylor and Mill's sense of reality.
But alas! Once more wishfulness retreats before fact, and skepticism
triumphs. The letters not only show Mill to have been injudicious about
Mrs. Taylor, they show Mrs. Taylor to have been one of the meanest
and dullest ladies in literary history, a monument of nasty self-regard,
as lacking in charm as in grandeur. (Only the pictures speak in her
favor: she was quite personable.) More, they indicate that Mill, exalt–
ing her as he did, must have been emotionally disturbed in a fashion
that, to my knowledge, is unique in the heavy record of disturbed
literary persons.
The first fact we must be struck by is that, in the measure that Mill
impressed himself upon the educated consciousness of the world, he had
to protest that he himself deserved but small credit for his achievements
since he was merely another man's, or woman's, creature. Even in the
Autobiography,
and especially in the unexpurgated Columbia University
edition of 1924, we see Mill's almost obsessive need to assign respon–
sibility for himself to someone else-first it was his father who made
him, then it was Mrs. Taylor, and then after Mrs. Taylor died, oh most
fortunate of men, he had her daughter Helen to guide
his
soul and
