We have, it is plain, got a long way from Rousseau. We are almost, it may be said, at the very opposite pole of character. If vanity be a determining force in both cases, it is in the two cases controlled and directed by opposite passions. Combined with a morbid tendency to retrospection, a weak self-pity, an effeminate shrinking from pain, it reveals itself as a perverse pleasure in baring to public gaze those viler impulses which most men shrink from revealing to themselves. In the masterful, overbearing, active character, it appears in the more natural shape of straightforward ostentation, though it sometimes leads to the same end; for it displays follies and vices, not because they are shameful, but for the opposite reason that it sees nothing in them to be ashamed of. Whether it should be called by the same name, as manifested in the one or in the other combination, is a question for the unlucky psychologist who has already a sufficient burden of insoluble problems. And we might find new puzzles in abundance for the same person by tracing the manifold transformations of the same Protean quality. We might skip from the Quixote-Plato—rather, one might say, the Bobadil-Kant—to another biographer, like him in little but the power of amusing, the vivacious Colley Cibber. Cibber's vanity is of a simpler type. It seems to be an unaccountable freak of nature that Cibber should have been the descendant of a Schleswig-Holstein father and an English mother. We could have sworn that he was a born Frenchman. His vanity is that which we generally attribute to the race whom we used to call our 'lively neighbours.' In other words, instead of being priggish or sulky like the English, it is closely allied to good sense, good humour, and simplicity. It implies unfeigned self-complacency quite unalloyed by self-deception. It supplied the excellent Colley with an armour of proof which made him absolutely impervious even to the most vicious stings of Pope's poisonous satire. He took all ridicule with the most imperturbable good temper, because he fully recognised, and was perfectly reconciled to the fact that he was ridiculous. He writes his life, as he tells us with admirable serenity, because he was vain, and liked to talk about himself. What can the critic say more? 'Expose me? Why, dear sir, does not every man that writes expose himself? Can you make me more ridiculous than nature has made me?' To hurt such a man by correct portraiture was impossible; and when Pope tried to injure him by giving him the absurdly incorrect name of Dunce, the satirist missed his mark too palpably to hurt anybody but himself. And so, though the laughing-stock of all the wits, assailed by Pope and Fielding, the lucky Cibber, lapped in his invulnerable vanity, went gaily through his eighty-six years of life, as brisk and buoyant to the end as when he had only to go upon the stage with his natural manners to be the ideal representative of the Foppingtons and Easys of his own comedy. If the autobiography be slightly deficient on the side of sentiment, we may console ourselves by admitting that some of the descriptions of the actors of the time would not disgrace Charles Lamb. Would we find another variety of innocent and excessive vanity? Take up the memoirs—unfortunately fragmentary—of one whose long life ran side by side with Cibber's for some eighty-two years, though in oddly different surroundings,—Swift's 'wicked Will Whiston,' so called because so transparently guileless and well-meaning that even bigots could only smile at his absurdities. In reading him we fancy that we must be studying a new version of the 'Vicar of Wakefield.' In truth, however, that good Dr. Primrose was one of Whiston's disciples, and got into trouble, as we may remember, by advocating a crotchet learnt from his predecessor a little too warmly. The master, however, suffered longer than the disciple, and shows just the same innocuous vanity in regard to his own supposed discoveries, and the same simple-minded wonder that others should fail to be converted, or should refuse to sacrifice preferment to crotchets about the date of the Apostolic Constitutions. Whiston's self-complacency reappears with a difference in Baxter's ponderous autobiography. The copious outpourings of the good man help us to understand the report, which he can happily deny, that his multitudinous publications had ruined his bookseller; but it is full of interesting display of character, and nowhere more than in the profound conviction that if he had been able to apply a few more sermons he would have converted Cromwell and his troopers from their rebellious purposes, and the innocent enthusiasm with which he hurls his elaborate syllogisms at the heads of Charles II.'s bishops, believing, poor man, in all good faith that the policy of the Restoration government was to be determined by scholastic argumentation.
If we seek for an excellent contrast we may go to those admirable representatives of the worldly bishop of the now extinct type, Newton or Watson. There is something quite touching in Watson's complaints of an unappreciative world. He had been made a professor of chemistry without having studied the very elements of the science, a professor of divinity without having studied theology before, or taking the trouble to study it afterwards. He was appointed to a bishopric because he was a sound Whig, and passed his life in a delightful country town on the banks of Windermere without ever bothering himself to reside in his Welsh diocese. But the stoppage of his preferment at this point is for him a conclusive proof that true Christian principles could not meet with their reward in this world. How else account for this scandalous neglect of one who, in addition to all his other merits, had taken great trouble to plant trees, and to make an honourable provision for his children—as well as giving them a sound education? It is a natural corollary that the man whose memoirs are thus a continuous grumble over the absence of preferment should specially pride himself on his thorough self-respect. He belongs, he says, to the oaks, not to the willows. Whenever he asks for a vacant bishopric, he explains that it is only in deference to the wishes of his friends. For himself he asks for nothing better than a life of retirement, though the king and his ministers will be eternally disgraced for having left him to enjoy that blessing. The finest satirist, Fielding or Thackeray, might have been proud of portraying this ingenious and yet transparent self-deception; of unravelling the artifice by which worldliness and preferment hunting are so wrapped in blustering self-assertion as to appear—to the actor himself—as dignified independence of spirit.
Running over such varieties of character, we may ask whether it is fair to set down the autobiographic impulse as in all cases a manifestation of vanity. Or if we call it vanity, must we not stretch the meaning of the word beyond all bearing? The old psychologists used to maintain that every passion was a special form of self-love; and, if we may take such a license, we may call every man vain who takes an interest in his own affairs, and expects that others may be interested. He may hold that opinion even whilst sincerely believing that his success in the game of life was more due to the cards he held than to his intrinsic skill. If that still imply the presence of some latent vanity, some bias to our judgment lying below the region of conscious reflection, it is certainly of a scarcely perceptible kind. Vanity in this sense is but the inverse side of a man's philosophy of life. It is the value which he sets upon certain qualities of mind and character, which is, no doubt, apt to be more or less connected with the trifling circumstance that he takes them to be his own. But in some cases this latter consideration has so little prominence that we almost overlook it. The autobiography takes so much the form of a philosophical sermon on the true principles of conduct, that we quite forget that the preacher is his own text. He treats himself with apparent impartiality, as if he were merely a scientific specimen whose excellent adaptation to the general scheme of things deserves the notice of an impartial inquirer. It happens to be the case nearest at hand, but is interesting only in the light of the general impersonal principle.
It is curious to trace this in one of the most interesting of modern autobiographies. J. S. Mill begins his recollections by disavowing—with obvious sincerity—any egoistic motive. He wishes to show the effect of a particular mode of education, to trace the influence upon a receptive mind of various currents of modern thought; and, above all, to show how large a debt he owed to certain persons who, but for this avowal, would not receive their due meed of recognition. He is to give a lecture upon his own career as dispassionately as Professor Owen might lecture upon a creature which died in the palæozoic era. In pursuing this end, Mill made more revelations as to his own character than he perhaps knew himself. The book is much else, but it is also an exposition of a definite theory of life. Some readers were astonished to find that, as Mill puts it, a Benthamite might be something more than a mere 'reasoning machine.' That description, he admits, was applicable in some cases, and even to himself at one period of his life. But nothing could be clearer to readers of the autobiography—as, indeed, it was clear enough to the observers of his later career—that, so far from being a mere reasoning machine, Mill was a man of strong affections, and even feminine sensibility. And in this, as some critics have said, consists the peculiar pathos of the book. It was the story of a man of strong feelings, who had been put into a kind of moral and logical strait-waistcoat and kept there till it had become a part of himself. The diagnosis of the case showed it, upon this understanding, to be one of partial atrophy of the affections—or rather—for the affections clearly survived—illustrated the effect of depriving them of their natural sustenance. To Mill himself, it was rather a record of the means by which the strait-waistcoat had been forced to yield. Like Bunyan, he had been locked up by Giant Despair, and had escaped from the dungeons, though by a different method. The account of the crisis in his moral development which corresponds to a conversion in the case of Bunyan, gives the real key to his story. He had been put into the strait-waistcoat by that tremendous old gentleman, James Mill, whose force of mind produced less effect through his books than by his personal influence upon his immediate surroundings. His doctrine repelled most readers till it had been made more sympathetic by passing through the more sensitive and emotional nature of his son. The ultimate effect was not to suppress J. S. Mill's affections, but to confine them to certain narrow channels. The primary effect, however, was to produce that 'reasoning machine' period in which the son was a simple logic-mill grinding out the materials supplied by the father and Bentham. Now old Mill was not simply a kind of personified 'categorical imperative'—a rigid external conscience imposing a fixed rule upon his filial disciple, but his doctrine was certainly a trying one. He held that the sole end of morality was to produce happiness, and at the same time he did not believe in happiness. 'He thought human life a poor thing at best after the freshness of youth and unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.' He and his disciples denounced all emotion as 'sentimentality,' and fully shared that English prejudice which, as J. S. Mill declares, regards feeling, especially if it has a touch of the romantic or exalted, to be something intrinsically disgraceful. Here then was the uncomfortable dilemma into which the younger Mill was driven, and which made him miserable. A rigid sense of duty was the sole rule of life; duty meant the production of happiness; and happiness was a mere illusion and unsubstantial phantom. No wonder if a period followed during which the world seemed to him weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable. To feel that all that is left for one is to be a machine grinding out theorems in political economy is certainly not an exhilarating state of things.
The escape from this condition, as Mill represents, involved two discoveries, which, like all such discoveries, are old enough in the state of abstract theory, and new only in so far as they become actual possessions and active principles of conduct. Happiness, he discovered, was to be found by not aiming at happiness; by working for some external end and not meditating upon your own feelings. And, secondly, he discovered the importance of cultivating those sympathies and sentiments which he had previously been inclined to despise as mere encumbrances to his reasoning machinery. But do not the two doctrines clash? Is not an æsthetic cultivation of happiness a name for that introspective brooding of which Rousseau is the great example, implying precisely that thirst for happiness as an ultimate end and aim which his other principles showed to be suicidal? Consciously to cultivate the emotions is to become a sentimentalist—the very thing which he was anxious to renounce. The apparent paradox was solved for him by the help of Wordsworth, who taught him that the charm of tranquil contemplation might be heightened instead of dulled by a vivid interest in the common feelings and common destinies of human beings; and that æsthetic delight in nature was perfectly compatible with scientific interest in its laws. The famous ode proved to him that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment could be replaced by a wider interest in our fellows; and that the thoughts which gather round the setting sun are not something distinct from, but really identical with, those suggested by a watch over man's mortality. This teaching, he says, dispersed for ever his youthful depression.
The problem seems a simple one when thus stated. How to cultivate your feelings without becoming sentimental? Find your happiness in the happiness of others; and regard even the grinding of that logical mill as work done for the benefit of your kind. Problems, however, which have to be worked out by modifying your own character take a good deal more labour than is implied in putting together a couple of syllogisms. And it is in this modification of character that the peculiar interest of the autobiography consists. The aversion of his mind from his own private interests, the intense devotion of his mental energies to what he regarded as the great needs of his fellow-men, the constant reference of his apparently most abstract speculation to practical reforms, are obvious and most honourable characteristics of Mill as a thinker. One may doubt whether women will be as much improved by receiving votes as he anticipated; one cannot doubt the generosity with which he revolted against their supposed 'subjection.' But there is another sense in which this theory of the vast importance of 'extra-regarding' habits brings out some curious results. We are all such adepts at self-deception that we need not wonder if the very resolution not to think of oneself sometimes tends to a more refined kind of self-consciousness. I have often fancied that nobody can be so dogmatic as your thoroughly candid person. The fact that he has listened to all sides gives him a kind of right in his own opinion to speak with the authority of a judge. It has been said that a tendency to be 'cock-sure' is a special characteristic of Mill's school; and perhaps we may recognise it in their master not the less because it is combined with a scrupulous desire to grant a hearing to all antagonists. But another manifestation of character is more interesting. No one could be more anxious than Mill to arrogate nothing to himself. Nobody could state more explicitly that his merit was less in original thought than in willingness to learn from others, and thus that his true function was to mediate between the public and the original thinkers. And therefore it is natural to find him insisting with passionate eagerness upon the superlative merits of the woman who was, according to him, the guide of his mature years, as his father had been of his infancy and youth. Here was the practical commentary on the text of cultivating the emotions. If he withdrew from society and many social enjoyments, it was because his whole emotional strength was concentrated upon a single object. We listen with some mixture of feeling to his rather strained and exalted eulogy. It may be true that Mrs. Mill was more of a poet than Carlyle, and more of a thinker than Mill himself; that she was like Shelley, but that Shelley was but a child to what she ultimately became; that her wisdom was 'all but unrivalled,' and much more to the same purpose. It may, I say, be true, for one cannot prove a negative in regard to a person of whom the world knows so little. Yet it is a weakness, though an amiable weakness, to attempt, by force of such language, to overcome the inevitable decree of circumstances, and to try to dictate to the world an opinion which it cannot receive upon any single authority. It may be profoundly melancholy that such exalted merit should vanish without leaving more tangible traces; but it is useless to resent the fact, or to suppose that when such traces are non-existent, the defect can be supplied by the most positive assertions that they might have existed. And Mill would have seen in any other case what was the inevitable suggestion to his readers. He could not, he says, 'detect any mixture of errors' in the truths which she struck out far in advance to him. What are the opinions in which a man detects no mixture of error? Plainly his own. But these were far in advance of him. That means that they were deductions from his own. Is it possible, to speak it plainly, to resist a strong impression that these extravagant expressions of admiration may have been lavished upon a living echo—an echo, it is true, skilful enough to anticipate as well as to repeat, but still essentially an echo? We know, for Mill has told us, what he did alone, and we know what he did in co-operation; and if the earlier work was not his best, it certainly contained the whole sum and substance of his later teaching. That his wife must have been a remarkable woman may be a fair deduction from his admiration; that she was all that he then thought her would be, to say the least of it, a very rash conjecture.
Happiness, says Mill, is to be found by aiming at something different from happiness. And if we thus cheat ourselves into happiness, we may attain to the vanity of self-esteem by a similar expedient. By lavishing all our enthusiasm upon one who is but a second self, we may deprive our appreciation of our own merits of its apparent arrogance. This, indeed, is one of the many illusions which give a peculiar interest to the unconscious confessions of autobiographers. But neither is it to be roughly set down as an illusion, and still less as an unworthy sentiment. It in no sort diminishes our interest in discovering that this so-called reasoning machine was a man of the most delicate fibre and most tender affections. It is easy to forgive the illusions against which a thick cuirass of tough selfishness is the only known safeguard of complete efficacy. Rather it helps to convince us that Mill should be classed in some respects with the unworldly enthusiasts of the Vicar of Wakefield type whose very simplicity leads them to a harmless vanity which exaggerates their own infallibility and importance to the world. He had the character, though not the crotchets, of the life-long recluse. Though his intellect was deeply interested in the great problems of contemporary thought, and though he had been for many years in State affairs, there was a wall of separation between himself and his contemporary society. When he came into Parliament he came as re-entering the world from a remote hermitage. Hermits, whether they come from deserts or from the India Office, have a certain tendency to intolerance and contempt for the social part of the species. They have lost some human feeling and preach crusades with a reckless indifference to consequences. I cannot determine how far Mill might be rightly accused of a want of practical sense. But in any case he had nothing of the bitterness or the harsh pedantry of the solitary theorist. Even his enemies could see that his sympathies were fresh and generous, and that his impulses were invariably generous. As a philanthropist, his philanthropy was not of the merciless and inhuman variety. The discovery of the fact was a surprise at the time to those who believed in the traditional Benthamite and Malthusian. The autobiography, with its strange bursts of emotion, perhaps reveals the true secret. If he naturally exaggerated the merits of the partner of his hermitage, he did not necessarily exaggerate her services to him. It is easily credible that her company saved him from ossifying into a mere grinder of formulæ and syllogisms. We shrink a little from certain over-strung phases, but they reveal to us the pathos of the man's life. Admit that his affection produced illusion, or that it covered and was combined with a sort of vicarious self-conceit, yet at bottom it represents the intense devotion which springs only out of simplicity and tenderness of nature.
It would be tempting here to draw the obvious parallel between Mill and Carlyle, which must just now be in everyone's mind; for certainly whatever may be said of the 'Reminiscences' just published, they contain one of the most remarkable self-revelations ever given to the world, and the relations of the two men to vigorous fathers and passionately adored wives have singular points of contrast and resemblance. But I must be content to close this ramble through some famous autobiographies by touching upon one which often seems to me to be the most delightful of its class. I know, as everybody knows, what may be said against Gibbon: against his want of high enthusiasm, his deficient sympathy with the great causes and their heroes, the provoking self-sufficiency and apparent cold-bloodedness of the fat composed little man. And yet, when reading his autobiography and contrasting it with some of those we have considered, I find myself constantly led to a conclusion not quite in accordance with the proper rules of morality. After all, one cannot help asking, did not Gibbon succeed in solving the problem of life more satisfactorily than almost anybody one knows? Other autobiographies are for the most part records of hard struggles with fate, plaintive lamentations over the inability to obtain any solid satisfaction out of life, appeals of disappointed vanity to the judgment of an indifferent posterity, vain-glorious braggings over successes which should rather have been the cause of shame, weak regrets for the vanishing pleasures of youth and hopeless attempts to make the might-have-been pass muster with the actual achievement. The more a man prides himself upon his successes, the more we feel how good a case a rival's advocate could make on the other side: and when he laments over his failures, the more we are inclined to say that after all it served him right. But when in imagination we take that famous turn with Gibbon upon that terrace at Lausanne beneath the covered walk of acacias, gaze upon the serene moon and the silent lake, and hear him soliloquise upon the conclusion of the 'Decline and Fall,' we feel that we are in presence of a man who has a right to his complacency. He has not aimed, perhaps, at the highest mark, but he has hit the bull's-eye. Given his conception of life, he has done his task to perfection. With singular felicity, he has come at the exact moment and found the exact task to give full play to his powers. Nobody had yet laid the keystone in the great arch of history; and he laid it so well that his work can never be superseded. Somebody defines a life to be une pensée de jeunesse exécutée par l'âge mûr. It was Gibbon's singular good fortune to illustrate that saying as few men have done. Though his plan ripened slowly and with all deliberation, he acted as if he had foreseen the end from the beginning. If he had been told in his boyhood, You shall live so long a life, with such and such means at your disposal, he could hardly have laid out his life differently. To mistake neither one's powers nor one's opportunities is a felicity which happens to few; and Gibbon had the additional good fortune that even his distractions seem to have been useful. The interruption to his Oxford education made him a cosmopolitan; his service with the volunteers helped him to be a military historian; and even his parliamentary career, which threatened to absorb him, only gave to the student the tone of a practical politician. It seems as though everything had been expressly combined to make the best of him.
What more could be desired by a man of Gibbon's temperament? Undoubtedly to be a man of Gibbon's temperament is to have a moderate capacity for certain forms of happiness. In the lives of most great men the history of a conversion is a record of heart-rending struggle, ending in hard-won peace. Gibbon merely changed his religion as he changed his opinion upon some antiquarian controversy; it is a question as to the weight of historical evidence, like the question about the sixth Æneid, or a dispute about the genealogy of the house of Brunswick. Whatever pangs and raptures may require religious susceptibility were clearly not within his range of feeling. And in another great department of feeling we need not inquire into the character of the author of the inimitable sentence, 'I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.' One is tempted to put it beside a remark which he makes on another occasion, 'I yielded to the authority of a parent, and complied, like a pious son, with the wish of my own heart.' Perhaps the heart which sanctioned his filial obedience in the latter case was not so opposed to it in the other as he would have us believe. It is better worth noting, however, that, in spite of the very tepid disposition illustrated by these familiar passages, Gibbon has affections as warm as are compatible with thorough comfort. He was not a passionate lover; and we cannot say, for he was not tried, that his friendship was of an heroic strain; but he had a very good supply of such affections as are wanted for the ordinary wear and tear of life—to provide a man with enough interests and sympathies to make society pleasant, and his family life agreeable. Nay, he seems to have been really generous and considerate beyond the ordinary pitch, and to have been a faithful friend, and excellent in some very delicate relationships. For a statesman, a religious teacher, or a poet, much stronger equipment in this direction might be desirable. But Gibbon had warmth enough to keep up a pleasant fireside, if not enough to fire the hearts of a nation. He clearly had enough passion for his historical vocation. A more passionate and imaginative person would hardly have written it at all. It requires a certain moderation of character to be satisfied with a history instead of a wife, and Gibbon was so great an historian because he could accept such a substitute. No one capable of being a partisan could have preserved that stately march and equable development of the vast drama of human affairs which gives a monumental dignity to his great book. Even if you do not want to write another 'Decline and Fall,' is not such a disposition the most enviable of gifts? If such a life has less vivid passages, is there not something fascinating about that calm, harmonious existence, disturbed by no spasmodic storms, and yet devoted to one achievement grand enough to extort admiration even from the least sympathetic? Surely it is a happy mean; enough genius to be in the front rank, if not in the highest class, and yet that kind of genius which has no affinity to madness or disease, and virtue enough to keep up to the respectable level which justifies a comfortable self-complacency without suggesting any awkward deviations in the direction of martyrdom. That is surely the kind of composition which a man might desire if he were to calculate what character would give him the best chance of extracting the greatest possible amount of enjoyment out of life. Luckily for the world, if not for its heroes, men's characters cannot be fixed by such calculations; and a certain number of perverse people are even glad to possess vehement emotions and restless intellects, however conscious that the fiery soul will wear out the pigmy body. We try to persuade ourselves that they are not only choosing the noblest part, but acting most wisely for their own interests. It may be so; for the problem is a complex one. But it has not yet been proved that a man can always make the best of both worlds, and that the sacrifices imposed by virtue are always repaid in this life. Certainly it seems doubtful, when we have studied the self-written records of remarkable men, whether experience will confirm that pleasant theory; whether it is not more probable that for simple employment it is not best to have one's nature pitched in a key below the highest. Most of us would make a very fair compromise if we should abandon our loftier claims on condition of being no worse than Gibbon.