Autobiography, John Stuart Mill [best fiction books of all time txt] 📗

of my reading

Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important

event of my life. I took up the collection of his poems from curiosity,

with no expectation of mental relief from it, though I had before

resorted to poetry with that hope. In the worst period of my depression,

I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a

poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser

feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no

good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was

too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all

pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the

good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing

which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them

which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from

the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his

Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my condition,

Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked into the _Excursion_ two

or three years before, and found little in it; and I should probably

have found as little, had I read it at this time. But the miscellaneous

poems, in the two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was

added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be the precise

thing for my mental wants at that particular juncture.

 

In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one

of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural

objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for

much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one

of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty

over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth's

poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which,

owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.

But Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me, if he had

merely placed before me beautiful pictures of natural scenery. Scott

does this still better than Wordsworth, and a very second-rate landscape

does it more effectually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a

medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward

beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under

the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the

feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a

source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which

could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with

struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement

in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to

learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the

greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once

better and happier as I came under their influence. There have certainly

been, even in our own age, greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of

deeper and loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what

his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent

happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this, not only

without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the

common feelings and common destiny of human beings. And the delight

which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this sort, there

was nothing to dread from the most confirmed habit of analysis. At the

conclusion of the Poems came the famous Ode, falsely called Platonic,

"Intimations of Immortality": in which, along with more than his usual

sweetness of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of grand

imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found that he too had had

similar experience to mine; that he also had felt that the first

freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had

sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now

teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely,

emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it.

I long continued to value Wordsworth less according to his intrinsic

merits, than by the measure of what he had done for me. Compared with

the greatest poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,

possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are

precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation

Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically

far more poets than he.

 

It so fell out that the merits of Wordsworth were the occasion of my

first public declaration of my new way of thinking, and separation from

those of my habitual companions who had not undergone a similar change.

The person with whom at that time I was most in the habit of comparing

notes on such subjects was Roebuck, and I induced him to read

Wordsworth, in whom he also at first seemed to find much to admire: but

I, like most Wordsworthians, threw myself into strong antagonism to

Byron, both as a poet and as to his influence on the character. Roebuck,

all whose instincts were those of action and struggle, had, on the

contrary, a strong relish and great admiration of Byron, whose writings

he regarded as the poetry of human life, while Wordsworth's, according

to him, was that of flowers and butterflies. We agreed to have the fight

out at our Debating Society, where we accordingly discussed for two

evenings the comparative merits of Byron and Wordsworth, propounding and

illustrating by long recitations our respective theories of poetry:

Sterling also, in a brilliant speech, putting forward his particular

theory. This was the first debate on any weighty subject in which

Roebuck and I had been on opposite sides. The schism between us widened

from this time more and more, though we continued for some years longer

to be companions. In the beginning, our chief divergence related to the

cultivation of the feelings. Roebuck was in many respects very different

from the vulgar notion of a Benthamite or Utilitarian. He was a lover of

poetry and of most of the fine arts. He took great pleasure in music, in

dramatic performances, especially in painting, and himself drew and

designed landscapes with great facility and beauty. But he never could

be made to see that these things have any value as aids in the formation

of character. Personally, instead of being, as Benthamites are supposed

to be, void of feeling, he had very quick and strong sensibilities. But,

like most Englishmen who have feelings, he found his feelings stand very

much in his way. He was much more susceptible to the painful sympathies

than to the pleasurable, and, looking for his happiness elsewhere, he

wished that his feelings should be deadened rather than quickened. And,

in truth, the English character, and English social circumstances, make

it so seldom possible to derive happiness from the exercise of the

sympathies, that it is not wonderful if they count for little in an

Englishman's scheme of life. In most other countries the paramount

importance of the sympathies as a constituent of individual happiness is

an axiom, taken for granted rather than needing any formal statement;

but most English thinkers always seem to regard them as necessary evils,

required for keeping men's actions benevolent and compassionate. Roebuck

was, or appeared to be, this kind of Englishman. He saw little good in

any cultivation of the feelings, and none at all in cultivating them

through the imagination, which he thought was only cultivating

illusions. It was in vain I urged on him that the imaginative emotion

which an idea, when vividly conceived, excites in us, is not an illusion

but a fact, as real as any of the other qualities of objects; and, far

from implying anything erroneous and delusive in our mental apprehension

of the object, is quite consistent with the most accurate knowledge and

most perfect practical recognition of all its physical and intellectual

laws and relations. The intensest feeling of the beauty of a cloud

lighted by the setting sun, is no hindrance to my knowing that the cloud

is vapour of water, subject to all the laws of vapours in a state of

suspension; and I am just as likely to allow for, and act on, these

physical laws whenever there is occasion to do so, as if I had been

incapable of perceiving any distinction between beauty and ugliness.

 

While my intimacy with Roebuck diminished, I fell more and more into

friendly intercourse with our Coleridgian adversaries in the Society,

Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, both subsequently so well known,

the former by his writings, the latter through the biographies by Hare

and Carlyle. Of these two friends, Maurice was the thinker, Sterling the

orator, and impassioned expositor of thoughts which, at this period,

were almost entirely formed for him by Maurice.

 

With Maurice I had for some time been acquainted through Eyton Tooke,

who had known him at Cambridge, and although my discussions with him

were almost always disputes, I had carried away from them much that

helped to build up my new fabric of thought, in the same way as I was

deriving much from Coleridge, and from the writings of Goethe and other

German authors which I read during these years. I have so deep a respect

for Maurice's character and purposes, as well as for his great mental

gifts, that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem

to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to

accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more

intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my

contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great

powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide

perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting

something better into the place of the worthless heap of received

opinions on the great subjects of thought, but for proving to his own

mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and

that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have

been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as anyone) are not only

consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, but are better understood and

expressed in those Articles than by anyone who rejects them. I have

never been able to find any other explanation of this, than by

attributing it to that timidity of conscience, combined with original

sensitiveness of temperament, which has so often driven highly gifted

men into Romanism, from the need of a firmer support than they can find

in the independent conclusions of their own judgment. Any more vulgar

kind of timidity no one who knew Maurice would ever think of imputing to

him, even if he had not given public proof of his freedom from it, by

his ultimate collision with some of the opinions commonly regarded as

orthodox, and by his noble origination of the Christian Socialist

movement. The nearest parallel to him, in a moral point of view, is

Coleridge, to whom, in merely intellectual power, apart from poetical

genius, I think him decidedly superior. At this time, however, he might

be described as a disciple of Coleridge, and Sterling as a disciple of

Coleridge and of him. The modifications which were taking place in my

old opinions gave me some points of contact with them; and both Maurice

and Sterling were of considerable use to my development. With Sterling I

soon became very intimate, and was more attached to him than I have ever

been to any other man. He was indeed one of the most lovable of men. His

frank, cordial, affectionate, and expansive character; a love of truth

alike conspicuous in the highest things and the humblest; a generous and

ardent nature, which threw itself with impetuosity into the opinions it

adopted, but was as eager to do justice to the doctrines and the men it

was opposed to, as to make war on what it thought their errors; and an

equal devotion to the two cardinal points of Liberty and Duty, formed a

combination of qualities as attractive to me as to all others who knew

him as well as I did. With his open mind and heart, he found no

difficulty in joining hands with me across the gulf which