He spoke first of all of his wife, whose grave in Avignon he had just left. He had purchased a house in that city, where she had died, and always passed half of the year there. Already in his introduction to her essay on the "Enfranchisement of Women," which was the foundation of his own book on "The Subjection of Women," he had given public utterance to his enthusiastic admiration for the deceased. He had there said, the loss of the authoress was one that, even from a purely intellectual point of view, could never be repaired; he had declared that he would rather see the essay remain "unacknowledged, than that it should be read with the idea that even the faintest image could be found in it of a mind and heart which, in their union of the rarest, and what are deemed the most conflicting, excellences, were unparalleled"; indeed, he had called "the highest poetry, philosophy, oratory, or art," "trivial by the side of her," and had ended with the prophecy, that if mankind continued to improve, its spiritual history for ages to come would be nothing but "the progressive working out of her thoughts and realization of her conceptions." In this tone, too, he spoke of her in my room. We may well suppose that the man who could thus express himself was no great portrait-painter, and we may doubt the objective tendency of his judgment; we cannot, however, accuse him of viewing marriage as a mere contract, a charge frequently brought against him on account of his ultra-rationalistic standpoint on the woman question. Great poets, like Dante and Petrarch, have erected over the women who were fantastically beloved by them a fantastic monument; but I do not know that ever a poet gave such true and such warm expression to his loving veneration of a female character as Mill, in the words in which his opinion of her worth and her enduring significance to him was couched. The inscription he had cast on her tombstone in Avignon is no evidence of an artistic talent for the lapidary style; it has too many and too eulogistic words. How energetic and beautiful, though, is the sentence with which it ends, "Were there even a few hearts and intellects like hers, this earth would already become the hoped-for heaven." I asked Mill if his wife had ever written anything else than the essay edited by him. "No," he answered; "but all through my writings you will find her ideas; the best passages in my books are by her." "In your 'System of Logic' too?" I asked once more. "No," he replied, half apologetically; "my Logic was written before I was married." I could not avoid thinking that the contributions of Mrs. Mill to the inductive logic, even in the opposite case, could scarcely have been very considerable; a little thinking and reasoning would, under all circumstances, have fallen to the lot of Mill himself. The tone of reverential submissiveness apparent in his conversation was, however, peculiar to the temperament of the great thinker.
His nature was endowed with a decided inclination to serve not a cause alone, but its personal incarnation, and thus he was led to worship one after the other, two individuals, who, rare and significant though they may have been, were by no means his superiors,—his father and his wife. To his father (and to Bentham) he looked up in his early youth, to his wife all the rest of his life.
No one who has read Mill's "Autobiography" will have forgotten the gloomy description he gives of the desperate state of languor which ushered in his manhood. It was a long and painful crisis, during which his nature reacted against the excessive development of his faculties caused by his abnormal education. Instead of admiring the perfect intellectual organization which enabled him to come forth uninjured from the overfreighted and dangerous school of his father, English mediocrity was fond of pronouncing him, because of this hot-house culture, an abnormal being who was by no means fitted to be a teacher and an example. In the incredibly large and varied store of information imparted to him when he was a mere boy, the proof of the unnaturalness of his teachings and the "inhumanity" of Stuart Mill was found. What could be expected from a reading-machine that had studied Greek at three years of age, and at thirteen had gone through a course of political economy? The crisis which followed this overloading has been no less misinterpreted than was the encyclopædic education of the boy. Its symptoms were total indifference to all objects that previously had seemed to the young man worth desiring, and an unbroken state of joylessness, during which he asked himself whether the complete realization of all his ideas, and the achievement of the reforms for which he had been eager, would cause him genuine satisfaction, and found himself compelled to answer the question in the negative. Philosophers have discovered in this crisis nature's contradiction of Mill's utilitarian theory, inasmuch as, according to his own confession, the realization of the greatest possible happiness for the greatest possible number would have failed to make him happy. Theologians have found in it the stealthy approach of that secret melancholy, that deep-seated despair, which is always experienced by unbelievers, even when they themselves are not aware of it. Still, it is scarcely evidence against utilitarianism that morality alone is not sufficient for happiness, and it would be poor testimony, indeed, in behalf of the indispensability of dogmatic belief that a highly gifted and eminently critical youth of twenty years of age (who, moreover, both earlier and later managed to make his way cheerfully through the world without dogmatic belief) passed one whole winter in a state of profound aversion to action, overwhelmed with that sense of the misery of existence, with which every speculative mind is compelled to contend, and which almost every one is forced to conquer at least once in a lifetime. Among highly developed men there are but few who have not known this self-abandonment; with some it is of short duration, with others it becomes chronic: the exterior cause, as well as the weapons to be used against it, alone differ. Every one has his armor against discontent, one the impulse to work, another ambition, another family life, another frivolity; but through the meshes of his coat of mail weariness of life will occasionally find its way. With Stuart Mill this armor was manifestly the certainty of being in harmony with the mind of another person whom he esteemed more highly than himself. We must not overlook his own utterance that if he had, during the sorrowful crisis, "loved any one sufficiently to making confiding his griefs a necessity, he should not have been in the condition he was." Had Mill at that time been acquainted with his future wife, the crisis would certainly not have assumed such an acute character: she would have helped him to conquer his profound dejection more surely than dogmas and moral systems. This is very obvious from the pertinent words with which he has described his condition, "I was thus, as I said to myself, stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail." The sail of this ship, which bore so rich and precious a freight, was and always remained his enthusiastic tendency to bow in profound submission before a chosen idol. At that period the influence of his father was markedly on the wane, that of his wife had not yet begun; consequently he stood still.
So much, at least, was made very plain in my first conversation with Mill, that the gain of this woman friend was the greatest boon of his life. Only in one of the passages that he has written about her has he succeeded in giving an exact idea of the peculiar nature of her character, and that is where he compares her to Shelley. A female Shelley—so she stood before him in his youth; later, even Shelley, who was so early snatched away, seemed to him a child in thought and intellectual maturity in comparison with what she became. He states many times, in very decided terms, what he owes to her: the perception of the region of ultimate aims, that is, the final consequences of theory; and of that of the nearest means, that is, of the immediately useful and practically attainable. The original endowment which he himself acknowledges, was now directed to the fusion of these extremes, to finding the medium course in political and moral truths.
Nevertheless, it does not seem to me probable that Mrs. Mill inspired her husband with any direct new thought. The essential significance to him must, I think, be sought in two other points. In the first place, she strengthened his mental courage, and it is the boldness rather than the novelty of thought that gives its character to such classic works, as "On Liberty." Many times, even during our first conversation, he returned with regret to the lack of courage that everywhere withholds writers from supporting new ideas. He said, "There are writers of the first rank, such as George Sand, whose actual originality consists in courage. I leave out of consideration," he added, "her indescribably beautiful style, whose music can only be compared with the pleasing sounds of a symphony." The very confidence that a sense of harmony with the thought of another arouses, had enabled the wife of Stuart Mill to promote in him the courage he so extolled in George Sand.
In the second place, through her female universality, Mrs. Mill prevented her husband from running into any prejudice whatsoever. She confirmed in his mind a certain scepticism that led him to keep open amid the ice of doctrine one spot that would never freeze; and in thus inclining him to be sceptical, she became the cause of his progress. While the majority of so-called freethinkers have almost always purchased relative free thought in one point with double obduracy in other respects, Mill was continually on his guard against conventional prejudice; indeed, until the day of his death he carried on a sharp warfare against it, ferreting it out in its stronghold with the utmost intrepidity, in order to denounce and annihilate it.
Finally, there can be no doubt that Mrs. Mill was largely responsible for the active part her husband took in advocating the elevation of woman's social position. I felt interested to learn whether he had ever replied to his assailants on the woman question. He had given them no answer, nor did he purpose to pay any heed to them. "Why," said he, "forever keep repeating the same thing? Not one of them has produced anything of value." I touched upon the opposition of several physicians, whose objections were based on the necessities of nature to which a woman is subjected. He spoke harshly and positively against the prejudices of physicians in general. Long and tenderly he lingered, on the contrary, on the pleasure women took in performing the duties of the medical profession, and of the decided vocation they not unfrequently manifested for it. He mentioned Miss Garrett, who had recently taken a medical degree in Paris, and praised her as the first woman who had had the courage to make such an attempt. In a letter to me, he had once designated the woman question as "in his eyes the most important of all political questions of the present day." At all events, it was one of those which during the last years of his life personally occupied him the most.
He did not hesitate, either in his written or in his spoken words, to use the strongest expressions in order to place in the right light his conception of the unnaturalness of women's state of dependence. Indeed, he had not been afraid to challenge universal laughter through his vehement assertion, that, as we had never seen woman in freedom, we did know nothing whatever until now of her nature; as though Raphael's Sistine Madonna, Shakespeare's young maidens, all the literature about women, in fact, had taught us nothing of the feminine character. On this point he was almost fanatical. He, who in all the relations between man and woman was refinement and delicacy itself, allowed himself to be positively insulting in his expressions when an opinion differing from his own on his favorite topic was uttered in his presence. One day I chanced to be visiting a celebrated French savant when the mail brought him a letter from Stuart Mill. It was an answer to a communication in which the Frenchman had expressed the opinion that the change in the social status of women, demanded in Mill's essay on "The Subjection of Women," might turn out well in England, where it would harmonize with the character of the race, but that in France, where the talents and tastes of the women were so contrary to it, there could be no possibility of success. Mill's pithy reply, which was handed to me with a smile, read as follows: "I see in your remarks that contempt for woman which is so prevalent in France. All that I can say on the subject is, that the French women pay this contempt back with interest to the men of France."
The peculiarity of Mill's standpoint in this emancipation question was, that it was based solely and entirely on a Socratic ignorance. He refused to see in the accumulated experience of ages any proof in regard to the boundaries of the so long enthralled feminine mind, and insisted that à priori we knew nothing at all about woman. He proceeded from no doctrinal view of especial feminine faculties, resting content with the simple proposition that man had no right to deny woman any occupation to which she felt attracted; and he declared everything like guardianship to be utterly useless as well as unjust, since free competition would of itself exclude woman from every occupation for which she was incapacitated, or in which man decidedly surpassed her. He has repelled many people by immediately deducing the final logical consequences of his theory the first time the question was brought forward, and by advocating the immediate participation of women in the affairs of government; but, as an Englishman, he had a too matter-of-fact mind not to limit the practical agitation to a single point. I remember asking him why—in utter disregard of what appeared to me the first requisite of all, social emancipation—every effort in England and America was concentrated on political suffrage, which was so much more difficult to attain. He replied, "Because when that is gained, all the rest will follow."