REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical, and Historical. By John Stuart Mill. In Three Volumes. 12mo. Boston: W. V. Spencer.
At a time of deep national emotion, like the present, it is impossible that we Americans should not feel some bias of personal affection in reading the works of those great living Englishmen who have been true to us in the darkest hour. Were it only for his faithful friendship to freedom and to us, Mr. Mill has a right to claim an attentive audience for every word he has ever written; and this collection of his miscellaneous writings, covering a period of thirty years, has a special interest as showing the successive steps by which he has risen to this high attitude of nobleness.
But apart from these special ties, Mr. Mill claims attention as the most advanced of English minds, and the ablest, all things considered, of contemporary English writers. His detached works have long since found a very large American audience,—larger, perhaps, than even their home-circle of readers; and the sort of biographical interest which attaches to a collection of shorter essays—giving, as it does, a glimpse at the training of the writer—will more than compensate for the want of continuity in these volumes, and for the merely local interest which belongs to many of the subjects treated. Church-rates and the English currency have not to us even the interest of heraldry, for that at least can offer pictures of mermaids, and great ingenuity in Latin puns; but, on the other hand, every discussion of the British university-system has a positive value, in the exceedingly crude and undeveloped condition of American collegiate methods. There is the same disparity of interest in the different critical essays. Bentham has hardly exerted an appreciable influence on American thought, and the transitory authority of Coleridge is now merged in more potent agencies; yet when the essays bearing those great names were first printed in the periodical then edited by Mill, they made an era in contemporary English literature, and therefore indirectly modified our own.
Thus, in one way or another, almost all these essays have a value. The style is always clear, always strong, sometimes pointed, seldom brilliant, never graceful; it is the best current sample, indeed, of that good, manly, rather colorless English which belongs naturally to Parliamentary Speeches and Quarterly Reviews. Not being an American, the author may use novel words without the fear of being called provincial; so that understandable, evidentiary, desiderate, leisured, and inamoveability stalk at large within his pages. As a controversialist, he is a trifle sharp, but never actually discourteous; and it is pleasant to see that his chivalry makes him gentlest in dealing with the humblest, while his lance rings against the formidable shield of a Cambridge Professor or a Master of Trinity as did that of the disguised Ivanhoe upon the shield of Bois-Guilbert.
The historical essays in this collection are exceedingly admirable, especially the defence of Pericles and the Athenians, in the second paper on Crete's History. In reading the articles upon ethical and philosophical questions, one finds more drawbacks. The profoundest truths can hardly be reached, perhaps, by one who, at the end of his life, as at the beginning, is a sensationalist in metaphysics and a utilitarian in ethics. It is only when dealing with these themes that he seems to show any want of thoroughness: unfairness he never shows. In the closing tract on "Utilitarianism," which the American publishers have added to the English collection, one feels especially this drawback. As the theory of universal selfishness falls so soon as one considers that a man is capable of resigning everything that looks like happiness, and of plunging into apparent misery, because he thinks it right,—so the theory of utilitarianism falls, when one considers that a man is capable of abstaining from an action that would apparently be useful to all around him, from a secret conviction that it is wrong in itself. There are many things which are intrinsically wrong, although, so far as one can see, they would do good to all around. To assassinate a bad neighbor,—to rob a miser and distribute his goods,—to marry Rochester, while his insane wife is living, (for Jane Eyre,)—to put to death an imbecile and uncomfortable grandmother, (for a Feegeean,)—these are actions which are indefensible, though the balance of public advantages might seem greatly in their favor. It is probable that at this moment a great good would be done to this nation and to the world by the death of Jefferson Davis; yet the bare suggestion of his assassination, in the case of Colonel Dahlgren, was received with a universal shudder, and disavowed as an atrocious slander. But Mr. Mill can meet such ethical problems only by reverting to that general principle of Kant, which he elsewhere repudiates: "So act that the rule on which thou actest would admit of being adopted as a law for all rational beings." Mr. Mill says of such instances, "The action is of a class which, if practised generally, would be generally injurious, and this is the ground of the obligation to abstain from it." But under the rule of utilitarianism, it is the injuriousness itself which should be the principle of classification, and to prove an action innoxious is at once to separate it from that class; so that the objection falls. By his own principles, a murder which would benefit the community is by that very attribute differenced from ordinary and injurious murders, nor can any good argument be found against its commission. The possible bad precedent is at best a possible misapprehension, to be sufficiently averted by concealment, where concealment is practicable.
In dealing with contemporary and practical questions, Mr. Mill shows always pre-eminent ability, with less of the Insular traits than any living Englishman. While there is perhaps no single passage in these volumes so thoroughly grand as his argument for religions freedom in his essay on Liberty,—an argument which the most heretical theologians of either Continent could hardly have put so boldly or so well,—yet through the whole series of essays there runs the same fine strain. He repeatedly renews his clear and irresistible appeal for the equal political rights of the sexes: a point on which there is coming to be but one opinion among the most advanced minds of Europe and America,—a unanimity which, after the more immediate problem of Slavery is disposed of, must erelong bring about some practical application of the principle, in our republican commonwealths. It is interesting to notice in this connection, that Mr. Mill has included with his own essays the celebrated article by his wife, on "The Enfranchisement of Women," and has prefixed to it one of the noblest eulogies ever devoted to any wife by any husband.
He deals with strictly American subjects in the best criticism ever written upon De Tocqueville, where he shows conclusively the error of that great writer, in attributing to democracy, as such, many social phenomena which are equally observable under the English monarchy. These volumes also include—what the English edition of 1859 of course did not contain—the later essays on "The Contest in America," "The Slave Power," and "Non-Intervention." In treating of Slavery and of the War, the author rarely commits an error; in dealing with other American questions, he is sometimes misled by defective information, and cites gravely, with the prelude, "It is admitted," or "It is understood," statements which have their sole origin in the haste of travellers or in the croaking of disappointed egotists. The government of the majority does not end in tyranny: cultivated Americans are not cowards: the best heads are not excluded from public life: free schools do not tend to stifle free thought, but infinitely to multiply it: individuality of character is not checked, but healthily trained, by political equality. Six months in this country would do more to disabuse Mr. Mill, in these matters, than years of mere reading; and it is a positive injury to his large ideas that he should not take the opportunity of testing them on the only soil where they are being put in practice. Whenever he shall come, his welcome is secure. In the mean time, all that we Americans can do to testify to his deserts is to reprint his writings beautifully, as these are printed,—and to read them universally, as these will be read.