John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works: Twelve Sketches by Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison, and Other Distinguished Authors
Philosophy
John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works: Twelve Sketches by Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison, and Other Distinguished Authors
Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873; Philosophers -- Great Britain -- Biography
delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion.
It is curious to find one who is sometimes assailed as the advocate of
a grovelling philosophy complaining that the chivalrous spirit has
almost disappeared from books of education, that the youth of both
sexes of the educated classes are growing up unromantic. "Catechisms,"
he says, "will be found a poor substitute for the old romances,
whether of chivalry or faery, which, if they did not give a true
picture of actual life, did not give a false one, since they did not
profess to give any, but (what was much better) filled the youthful
imagination with pictures of heroic men, and of what are at least as
much wanted,--heroic women."
If Mr. Mill did not love poetry with a purely disinterested love, but
with an eye to its moral causes and effects, neither did he study
character from mere delight in observing the varieties of mankind.
Armand Carrel the Republican journalist, Alfred de Vigny the Royalist
poet, Coleridge the Conservative, and Bentham the Reformer, are taken
up and expounded, not as striking individuals, but as types of
influences and tendencies. This habit of keeping in view mind in the
abstract, or men in the aggregate, may have been in a large measure a
result of his education by his father; but I am inclined to think that
he was of too ardent and pre-occupied a disposition, perhaps too much
disposed to take favorable views of individuals, to be very sensitive
to differences of character. It should not, however, be forgotten that
in one memorable case he showed remarkable discrimination. Soon after
Mr. Tennyson published his second issue of poems, Mr. Mill reviewed
them in "The Westminster Review" for July, 1835, and, with his usual
earnestness and generosity, applied all his powers to making a just
estimate of the new aspirant. To have reprinted this among his
miscellaneous writings might have seemed rather boastful, as claiming
credit for the first full recognition of a great poet: still it is a
very remarkable review; and one would hope it will not be omitted if
there is to be any further collection of his casual productions. I
shall quote two passages which seem obvious enough now, but which
required true insight, as well as courageous generosity, to write them
in 1835--
"Of all the capacities of a poet, that which seems to have
arisen earliest in Mr. Tennyson, and in which he most
excels, is that of scene-painting in the higher sense of the
term; not the mere power of producing that rather vapid
species of composition usually termed descriptive
poetry,--for there is not in these volumes one passage of
pure description,--but the power of creating scenery in
keeping with some state of human feeling, so fitted to it as
to be the embodied symbol of it, and to summon up the state
of feeling itself with a force not to be surpassed by any
thing but reality."
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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