118
PARTISAN REVIEW
pen. But it requires these new letters to recognize the full pathological
force of this impulse; we have to realize how deluded Mill was about
Mrs. Taylor, how large an element of phantasy there was in his
projection of her, to realize how ruled he was by the will to believe that
his was a hand that wrote and a mind that thought only at the dictate
of someone else. The father, James Mill, was of course a mighty person;
on this score we have plenty of evidence and we can readily imagine
with what difficulty a son would free himself from his domination.
Indeed, by the time Mill describes the mental crisis of his young man–
hood we are prepared not alone with sympathy but with the explanation
which was unavailable to the sufferer himself: like the gifted children
of Henry James Sr., this gifted eldest son of James Mill had to direct
against himself the guilty destructive feelings which he intended against
such a giant parental figure. But when he had finally, and with so
much pain, freed himself from the one giant power over him, why–
we must ask-did Mill so promptly have to submit himself to another
parental authority; and not only submit to it, but himself create it so
that he
could
submit to it? And why, this time, a woman?
The absence of any mention of Mill's mother in the
Autobiog,-aphy
has often been commented upon. Now that we know, from this new
correspondence, the censorship which Mrs. Taylor imposed, at Mill's
own insistence, on the
Autobiography
no less than on his other writings,
and now that we discover the hideously bad way in which these middle–
aged newlyweds treated Mill's family after their marriage, we can
surmise that Mill would probably have been afraid so much as to
mention the maternal Harriet's name for fear of infuriating his wife
Harriet. (The identity of the given names of the two women is not to
be ignored.) But this explanation, once offered, seems somehow too
simple, and it must also occur to us that perhaps there was at work
here a motive much stronger than the wish merely to placate a wife's
jealous temper, that perhaps, in taking his life out of his father's hands
and putting it instead into the hands of Mrs. Taylor, Mill was returning
himself to his mother, even though he never mentions her. For the all–
powerful father-figure he substitutes the all-powerful mother-figure,
and as fruit of the change there would seem to be a great easing of
the spirit, such as suggests a debt discharged, an amends made.
Mill tells us that everything he wrote came from Mrs. Taylor,
that every idea for which he became famous was at least as much, and
usually more, hers than his-every idea, that is, except one. The single
significant exception is his idea of the equality of the sexes. This, con–
trary to popular prejudice, he did
not
learn from a woman-Mrs. Taylor
