120
PARTISAN REVIEW
taint of the decent female concerns which support our confidence in the
intelligence of someone like Jane Carlyle. If, in the new Harriet,
Mill
sought and found the mother Harriet, here was the mother in as male
a form as possible-James Mill had long ago and thoroughly done his
job of incapacitating his son for the acceptance of power except in its
male aspects. Of extravagant homage, Mill's letters to Mrs. Taylor
are full, and of what can pass as the expression of love. But of tender–
ness, of the deep humorful tenderness which naturally unites a man
and a woman, there is none-neither in his letters nor in hers. Small
wonder that students of Mill have had so little trouble believing in the
sexual "purity" of the twenty-year friendship. As a matter of fact, to
one reader the surmise is unavoidable that "pure" the relationship
continued, even after the marriage: certainly Mill and his wife were
perfectly content to spend rather more time apart than together, and
after she died she seems to have been quite adequately substituted for
by her competent daughter.
Prideful, vain and mean-spirited- it is not a pretty picture we
get of Mrs. Taylor. But then, neither is the picture of Mill himself
very pleasant. We tend to be more charitable to Mill, but as to a
"case." We scarcely give him the respect his work would persuade us
to. The constant smarmy flattery, the repeated pleas for light from
this intellectual beacon who in fact was nothing more than a vest–
pocket flashlight .of a mind, the promptness to knock off any relative
or friend at his wife's slightest bidding-all this is humiliating enough
as a spectacle. But this is not the whole of the injury Mill's letters
inflict on his character. There are transgressions difficult to forgive even
in the name of neurosis, as when Mill addresses his wife, in a New
Year's greeting, as "the only person living who is worthy to live."
Indeed, it constitutes a minor miracle that, returning to the
Auto–
biography,
one can still find, if not entirely intact, yet so largely intact
the image one has always had of Mill. And I suspect the explanation
is that Mill could live with and by the phantasy that he owed the
best that was himself to others, while actually the best that he was
he owed only to himself, having wrested it with great labor from the
not-too-propitious gods. We do not know the economy, the internal
strategy, by which this was accomplished. All we know, and we ap–
preciate it for what it teaches us about life, is that even while a man
mantled, or swaddled, himself in the illness of which the woman of
his choice was the figuration, something that was free and healthy in
his spirit, and therefore valuable to mankind, managed to soar.
Diana Trilling
