Paul Strathern - J.S. Mill - Philosophy in an Hour

Despite his pronouncement that he was cured, Mill only gradually recovered from his breakdown. He now courted his father’s disapproval by attending classical concerts. Yet in the midst of an enjoyable performance his overheated logical mind would be gripped with the fear that all music must inevitably come to an end. It had only a limited number of notes, and these would surely soon all be used up. (Despite this simple blunder, Mill’s exceptional logical powers were fortunately restored along with his sanity.)

The inevitably somewhat priggish, driven, and extraordinarily precocious young man whom Mill had been, emerged from his mental ordeal as a human being of rare quality. In place of the unimaginative rigidity instilled by his father, he became an exceptionally understanding man, habitually able to see and empathise with the other person’s point of view. His nobility of purpose was now tempered by practicality. He developed a wide feeling for what human happiness means and a contempt for narrow and unforgiving sectarianism.

Then the inevitable happened. At the age of twenty-four he fell in love with a woman he found darkly attractive and highly intelligent. The twenty-two-year-old Harriet Taylor was a poet of turbulent but contained emotion, and she immediately reciprocated his love. Unfortunately she was also married – to an energetic and successful businessman, whose exceptional qualities of understanding turned out to be the match of Mill’s. John Taylor loved his wife but was quickly persuaded by his forceful partner that she loved John Stuart Mill. Harriet’s sense of loyalty to her husband – for whom she retained a deep fondness – made her assure him that while she insisted upon seeing her lover, there would be no ‘impropriety’ between them. Within a year Queen Victoria had ascended the British throne: meanwhile this very Victorian state of affairs would continue for another twenty years.

Mill took to seeing Harriet Taylor regularly, sometimes even staying for the weekend when John Taylor was away on business. When such occasions did not arise, John Taylor would tactfully retire to his club after dinner, and his wife’s lover would turn up for a platonic evening of earnest philosophic discussion and poetry. Over the years John Taylor developed a certain irritability, John Stuart Mill developed a pronounced tic in one eyebrow, and Harriet herself was beset by a series of nervous complaints – but otherwise all remained swimmingly smooth on the surface. Exercising their powers of sublimation to the utmost, the well-tried trio succeeded in their chosen paths. Taylor made money in the chemical business, Mill became an exceptional philosopher, and Harriet played a major role in developing his ideas. (Mill later claimed that she co-wrote many of his major works.) Meanwhile the Victorian gossips had a field day. Mill would cut dead any friend who even so much as mentioned the name of his lover; Taylor took to enjoying bibulous institutional dinners; and Harriet developed a remarkable ability to faint.

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