To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward—I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful examination, which they are now destined never to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one-half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivaled wisdom.
—Dedication to "On Liberty," by John Stuart Mill
JOHN STUART MILL
So this then is the love-story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, who first met in the year Eighteen Hundred Thirty. He was twenty-five and a clerk in the East India House. She was twenty-three, and happily married to a man with a double chin.
They saw each other for the first time at Mrs. Taylor's house at a function given in honor of a Right Honorable Nobody from Essex. The Right Honorable has gone down into the dust of forgetfulness, his very name lost to us, like unto that of the man who fired the Alexandrian Library.
All we know is that he served as a pivotal point in the lives of two great people, and then passed on, unwittingly, into the obscurity from whence he came.
On this occasion the Right Honorable read an original paper on an Important Subject. Mrs. Taylor often gave receptions to eminent and learned personages, because her heart was a-hungered to know and to become, and she vainly thought that the society of learned people would satisfy her soul.
She was young. She was also impulsive, vivacious, ambitious. John Stuart Mill says she was rarely beautiful, but she wasn't. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All things are comparative, and John Stuart Mill regarded Mrs. Taylor from the first night he saw her as the standard of feminine perfection. All women scaled down as they varied from her. As an actual fact, her features were rather plain, mouth and nose large, cheek-bones in evidence, and one eye was much more open than the other, and this gave people who did not especially like her, excuse for saying that her eyes were not mates. As for John Stuart Mill he used, at times, to refer to the wide-open orb as her "critical eye."