SOURCE: "J. S. Mill's Theory of Poetry," in University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. XXIX, No. 4, 1960, pp. 420-38.

[In the following essay, Robson argues that Mill's theory of poetry combined Utilitarian principles with certain aspects of Romanticism by asserting that poetry advocates moral actions through an appeal to the emotions. ]

John Stuart Mill is often held up to scorn as a cold, mechanical thinker for whom ethics is no more than logic, and politics no more than political economy. Swathed in mournful black, hard-visaged and iceveined, Mill stands for the Victorian virtues to which we (thank heaven) cannot pretend. The picture is patently a caricature, failing to do justice to the man or to his thought, but correcting it seems difficult. Mill is himself mainly responsible for the difficulty, his Autobiography being little more than the history of his education and opinions. His first biographer, Bain, was plus royalist que le roi, and recent biographers (most notably Packe), while reopening important evidence, appear strangely unable to relate his personal experience to his thought. Actually, though most of Mill's work seems to hide rather than to reveal the man, and most of his correspondence is public rather than private, even in his System of Logic there is material to show more than a superficial relation between his life and his thought. What the evidence shows, in fact, is that Mill not only had emotions and was motivated by them, but recognized their place in a complete moral and social theory.

Some of the evidence, of course, has not been ignored. Mill's early letters to Carlyle and Sterling, his criticisms of Benthamism in the 1830's, and his Autobiography have been seen as indicating emotional tensions, and his praise of Wordsworth and Coleridge has been often recognized as awareness of these tensions. But almost always this material has been seen as yet more evidence of Mill's inconsistency, best explained as a relatively harmless Utilitarian sowing of wild oats. While it is usual now to see that Mill's life falls into three parts (up to about 1828, from 1828 to 1840, and after 1840), not enough credence has been given to Mill's own account of these periods in the Autobiography. Clearly it is his opinion that if any part of his life is distinct from the rest, it is the early years when he was a logic-machine, not the years following his mental distress. In these latter years he judges that by growing in appreciation of all facets of life he laid a firm base for his mature opinions. As a result of his experience, he was able about 1840 to accept a general framework of opinion for the rest of his life. Just a framework, however, was accepted; his thought was fixed in direction, not in place, for his was an open, fact-hungry philosophy.

Although studies of Mill's ethics, politics, or economics could be used to substantiate his account, the best support for it is to be found in his theory of poetry, which is commonly seen as an aberration, at best curious, but certainly jejune. To defend it as a complete literary theory is no part of my purpose; its place in the total purview of Mill's thought, however, is important, and the burden of my song. Mill at sixty years of age is indebted to Mill at twenty-six; "What is Poetry?" is echoed in the footnotes to James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind; the early critic of Tennyson's poems is clearly seen in the author of Utilitarianism.

Mill's early reading and writing of poetry¹ was directed by his father's tastes and purposes. The reading was mostly in the eighteenth-century poets, the only later poets being Scott and Campbell. The writing was purely academic, as the "Ode to Diana"² shows; probably its main effect was to convince Mill that he was not a poet. So although, as he says in the Autobiography, he was passively susceptible from the first to all poetry or oratory "which appealed to the feelings on any basis of reason" (p. 50), he was really open to a new experience, his own and not his father's, when he read the great Romantics in his early twenties. Although the memory is recorded and analysed by the mature Mill, there seems to be no reason to question its truth to his early experience. The key to his response is in the clause just quoted: an appeal to feeling on the basis of reason remained for him the essential task of poetry, essential in two ways, as defining the "essence" of the poet (or of poetry), and as answering to individual and social necessities. The poet, for Mill, is peculiarly useful in bringing closer the greatest happiness of the greatest number.

Like so much else in Mill, his poetic theory resulted from the fusion of old and new ideas, with the initial heat being supplied by personal experience. The old in this case are the theories of the association of ideas; the new, the poetry and poetic theories of the Romantics; the personal experience, the collapse of motivation in the years 1826-7.

First the old ideas: Mill read Hartley's Observations on Man in 1822, and studied it carefully and intensively with a group of friends again in 1829. His father began writing his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind in 1822, and between then and its publication in 1829, John Stuart read and re-read it in manuscript. When it was published, he studied it with the same group of friends. The study was thorough and searching:

Our rule was to discuss thoroughly every point raised, whether great or small, prolonging the discussion until all who took part were satisfied with the conclusion they had individually arrived at; and to follow up every topic of collateral speculation which the chapter or the conversation suggested, never leaving it until we had untied every knot which we found. (Autobiography, p. 84)

This systematic controversy led not only to assimilation of association theory, but also to comprehension of it. There is little doubt that many of Mill's footnotes to the edition of 1869 of the Analysis found their origin and perhaps even wording in the discussions of forty years earlier.

The new ideas about poetry came mainly to Mill initially though the London Debating Society. Becoming acquainted there with disciples of the Lake Poets, he first read, and then met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Of these, only Wordsworth is here significant. Mill first read his poetry in 1828; soon afterwards he defended it against Byron's; and, probably most significantly, he called upon Wordsworth several times during his tour of the Lake District in 1831. Although Mill contributed three short notices on artistic matters to the Examiner previous to this tour, only in the next two years can one see the formation of a theory of art in his writings. It is likely that he first learned from Wordsworth the possibility and value of such a theory. Writing to John Sterling (September 20-2, 1831), Mill remarks, after praising the largeness and comprehensiveness of Wordsworth's thought, feeling, and spirit, that he is the "first person who ever combined, with such eminent success in the practice of the art, such high powers of generalisation and habits of meditation on its principles."³ Again, in a footnote to his article, "The Use and Abuse of Political Terms" (1832), Mill expresses his regret that a poet like Wordsworth, who has

meditated so profoundly on the theory of his art, as he has laboured assiduously in its practice, should have put forth nothing which can convey any adequate notion to posterity of his merits in this department; and that philosophical speculations on the subject of poetry, with which it would be folly to compare any others existing in our language, have profited only to a few private friends.⁴

Mill's nervous attack came just before his first reading of Wordsworth, and not long before his renewed study of association theory. In simplified (and non-psychological) terms, his depression revealed to him a major inadequacy in utilitarian theory: the happiness therein described seemed to have nothing to do with his own happiness. The analysis of man's "moral" (as opposed to "physical") nature drained away motivation, leaving only the dregs of selfish desire. But Mill accepted the accuracy of the analysis; had he not, there would have been no despair. How did he escape? Of the many explanations that have been offered, Levi's psychoanalytic account, which cannot be overlooked but need not be here repeated, and Mill's own theoretical account in terms of an "anti-self-conscious" habit, are the most interesting. Unfortunately Mill's account is so incomplete that it can be interpreted as a contradictory element in his ethics because, inter alia, it does not explain why certain courses of action would be chosen by individuals, and why decisions to follow these courses would be moral. A third explanation, one related to both those already mentioned, and stronger because more complete, can be derived from his remarks on poetry.

One of Mill's releases from depression came from a reading of Wordsworth in 1828. On later examination he found two reasons: (a) the poetry appealed to "one of the strongest of [his] pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery," especially of mountains, his "ideal of natural beauty," and (b) it was also, and more importantly, "a medicine for [his] state of mind . . . [expressing] not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty."⁵ It was medicinal for Mill because it aroused in him feelings which he thought he had lost. Wordsworth's poetry, then, coming after his depression, showed Mill that his education had ignored the affective for the intellectual. In it he found the "very culture of the feelings" for which he was searching, as well as "a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure. . . ." Without feeling there was no desire, without desire no motivation, without motivation no action, without action no morality. For Bentham and James Mill morality depended on selfish feelings, because only these, in their view, were strong and constant enough to make a science of morality possible. But John Stuart had found that the science thus arrived at had no power to motivate his actions; he turned his attention to the unselfish feelings, and to the "art" or practice of morality rather than to the "science" or theory. Eventually he found that although the selfish feelings may be used by the legislator, only the unselfish feelings are moral. So, as will become clear, when he talks of the poet, he talks of the moralist-poet, the poet who portrays other-regarding affections, and he avoids, ignores, or condemns in passing the pseudo-poet who treats immoral or amoral affections.

The discovery in poetry of a perpetual source of ethical joy was particularly valuable to Mill, who had worried about the diminution of motivation in a progressive world. He had wondered whether, "if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures."⁶ This peculiarly nineteenth-century attitude (open to religious, philosophical, and psychological interpretations) held no more terrors for him once the perennial and universally available source of affective culture was revealed to him.

So personal experience brought together and made meaningful the old and new doctrines. The further experience of the early 1830's, the opening ceremonies of the life-long devotional service to Harriet Taylor, is so obviously important as to need no comment. Worthy of note, however, is Mill's continued conviction, in spite of his love, and in spite of his enthusiasm for the insipid verses of Harriet and of Sarah Flower, that he himself is no poet. In the previously mentioned letter to Sterling he makes a point to which he returns time and again in his letters to Carlyle during the next few years:

The only thing which I can usefully do at present, and which I am doing more and more every day, is to work out principles; which are of use for all times, though to be applied cautiously and circumspectly to any: principles of morals, government, law, education, above all self-education. I am here much more in my element; the only thing that I believe I am really fit for is the investigation of abstract truth, and the more abstract the better. If there is any science which I am capable of promoting, I think it is the science of science itself, the science of investigation—of method. (Letters, I, 8.)

This germ bore most obvious fruit in the publication twelve years later of the System of Logic, but the leaves and buds, in the form of poetic theory, began to appear within a year.⁷

The task of the poet will be clear from the preceding discussion: he is to make available to the public a source of moral feeling. What sort of a man is the poet, and how does he perform his task? Various suggestions are made by Mill: (I) The poet has a fine and quick susceptibility to pleasure and pain, especially to pleasure; (II) He has a unique method of mental association—between ideas, and between idea and sensation, the link is emotional; (III) Unlike other benefactors of mankind, therefore, his appeal is not primarily to the intellect; (IV) But to be truly great, the poet must have a cultivated intellect; (V) Imagination is also necessary. Although Mill uses the word in many senses, one is here especially significant: the poet, by using "imagination," feels in himself the emotions appropriate to the situation he is treating, whether or not he has actually experienced those emotions in that situation. These qualities of the poet (discussed at greater length in the following paragraphs) are not treated in one place by Mill, but their interconnections indicate that they are all part of one definition.

(I) When discussing Shelley, his type of the "natural" poet, possessed of an "original fineness of organization," Mill remarks that the "poetic temperament is usually, perhaps always, accompanied by exquisite senses."⁸ The power of producing poetical compositions is not brought into the world at birth with the poet; however,

there is poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its susceptibility: a constitution which makes its possessor capable of greater happiness than mankind in general, and also of greater unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature, is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense, than any other; since the common element of all poetry, that which constitutes poetry, human feeling, enters far more largely into this than into the poetry of culture. Not only because the natures which we have called poetical, really feel more, and consequently have more feeling to express; but because, the capacity of feeling being so great, feeling, when excited and not voluntarily resisted, seizes the helm of their thoughts, and the succession of ideas and images becomes the mere utterance of an emotion; not, as in other natures, the emotion a mere ornamental colouring of the thought. ("The Two Kinds of Poetry," pp. 230-1.)

Here "human feeling" is revealed to be the basic element in poetry; the poet is more open to human feeling than any other type of man, and this susceptibility forces him to display examples of powerful emotion in his works. He thus not only feels exquisitely but also makes exquisite feeling available to the reader.

(II) The extreme sensibility of the poet points to a peculiarity in his habitual associations. Mill, although a confirmed associationist, diverges from both his father and Hartley in describing the associations of the poet. James Mill scorns the notion that poetic "trains" are organized differently from those of any other men:

The trains of poets .. . do not differ from the trains of other men, but perfectly agree with them, in this, that they are composed of ideas, and that those ideas succeed one another, according to the same laws, in their, and in other minds. They are ideas, however, of very different things. The ideas of the poet are ideas of all that is most lovely and striking in the visible appearances of nature, and of all that is most interesting in the actions and affections of human beings.⁹

Hartley is more analytic, but argues for no peculiar organization in the poet apart from that explicable by "the differences of [men's] situations in life, and of the consequent associations formed in them."¹⁰ His further remarks" defining the poet in terms of mechanical attainments could not have satisfied the younger Mill, who argues that a man may pass a life "in writing unquestionable poetry," and earn a place in "the table of contents of a collection of 'British Poets,'" yet not be a poet. Only those are true poets who "are so constituted, that emotions are the links of association by which their ideas, both sensuous and spiritual [i.e., mental], are connected together."¹² The prevailing associations of the poet "will be those which connect objects and ideas with emotions, and with each other through the intervention of emotions."¹³ Although the link is changed, Mill sticks to the usual associationist descriptions of the operation, without clearing up the confusion often attached to some terms. At times he talks of "synchronous" and "successive" associations as opposite types; at other times he opposes "contiguous" and "similar" associations. The facile assumption that "contiguous" includes "synchronous" and "successive" is not always satisfactory, nor is the sometimes helpful assumption that the first pair refers to initial sensation while the second pair refers to mental perception and recall. In spite of this confusion, Mill's meaning can be made out. The untrained mind in a dull body, Mill contends, thinks, as it experiences, chronologically. Sensations are reflected in ideas in the order in which they occur, that is, successively. The trained mind, on the other hand, learns to associate through learned patterns and recognized similarities. It can, unfortunately, have habitual "trains" forced upon it by bad educational practices, and so lose its originality and vitality. The natural poet, untrained in mind but strong in feeling, is a third case: in him sensations call up emotions immediately, so that the ideas connected with the sensations are welded to the ideas connected with the emotions. The chronological "trains" have no chance to form, and so the succession of ideas bears no resemblance to the succession of external events. In his Logic, referring to his earlier remarks in "The Two Kinds of Poetry," and to the speculations of James Martineau, Mill argues that since the effect of pleasurable and painful impressions is more marked in cases of synchronous association, therefore,

in minds of strong organic sensibility synchronous associations will be likely to predominate, producing a tendency to conceive things in pictures and in the concrete, richly clothed in attributes and circumstances, a mental habit which is commonly called Imagination, and is one of the peculiarities of the painter and the poet; while persons of more moderate susceptibility to pleasure and pain will have a tendency to associate facts chiefly in the order of their succession, and such persons, if they possess mental superiority, will addict themselves to history or science rather than to creative art.¹⁴

An even later passage should be seen with this; in reviewing Bain's psychological works in 1859, Mill says:

The two kinds of association [by resemblance or similarity, and by contiguity] are indeed so different, that the predominance of each gives rise to a different type of intellectual character; an eminent degree of the former constituting the inductive philosopher, the poet and artist, and the inventor and originator generally; while adhesive association gives memory, mechanical skill, facility of acquisition in science or business, and practical talent so far as unconnected with invention.¹⁵

The second passage (in which Mill is expressing agreement with Bain) could be taken to cancel the first, or at least to correct it, but in fact the two can be reconciled. Mill believed with Bain, against his father, that resemblance is more basic than contiguity, and so associations even when synchronous need not be casual. In "The Two Kinds of Poetry" he implies the primacy of resemblance in poetic associations: "Thoughts and images will be linked together [in the poet's mind], according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which is allied with it." (P. 225.)

When he turns to composition, then, the "natural" poet, starting with a sensation, throws off a series of images connected emotionally with the sensation. In a short poem, the only sort proper to the uncultivated poet, these images will cluster around the emotion, which will give a centre to the experience portrayed and thus a unity to the poem. In longer poems and with complex emotions or situations, the poet without intellectual training will prove weak. The uncultivated mind, Mill says, forms "casual" associations. Knowing no governor, it plunges ahead, repeating, when called upon, accidental experiences, of interest only to the naive, of immediate use to no one.

(III) While the purposes are shared with other men, the poetic powers are special. And just because special, they are not universally effective. In describing his own skills, Mill does much to clarify the poet's function, although here again the possibility of confusion exists because he offers several distinctions. Writing to Carlyle (July 17, 1832), he says he is called to logic rather than art ("a higher vocation") like Carlyle, and adds that only in the artist's hands does "Truth" become "impressive, & a living principle of action."¹⁶ In this age, however, when only the understanding is cultivated and trusted, people are influenced by lessons in logical garb, and so, he says in a later letter:

my word again is partly intelligible to many more persons than yours is, because mine is presented in the logical & mechanical form which partakes most of this age & country, yours in the artistical & poetical (at least in one sense of those words though not the sense I have been recently giving them [presumably in "What is Poetry?"]) which finds least entrance into any minds now, except when it comes before them as mere dilettantism & pretends not to make any serious call upon them to change their lives.¹⁷

Like the "logical and mechanical" word, then, the "artistic and poetical" word makes a serious call upon men. After mentioning to Fox (May 19, 1833) a "growing want of interest in all the subjects which [he] understand [s], a growing sense of incapacity ever to have a real knowledge of, or insight into the subjects in which alone [he] will ever again feel a strong interest,"¹⁸ Mill tries to explain to Carlyle what he meant by calling him Poet and Artist:

I conceive that most of the highest truths are, to persons endowed by nature in certain ways which I think I could state, intuitive; that is, they need neither explanation nor proof, but if not known before, are assented to as soon as stated. Now it appears to me that the poet or Artist is conversant chiefly with such truths & that his office in respect to truth is to declare them, & to make them impressive. This however supposes that the reader, hearer, or spectator, is a person of the kind to whom those truths are intuitive. Such will of course receive them at once, & will lay them to heart in proportion to the impressiveness with which the artist delivers & embodies them. But the other & more numerous kind of people will consider them as nothing but dreaming or madness: and the more, certainly, the more powerful the artist, as an artist: because the means which are good for rendering the truth impressive to those who know it, are not the same & are often absolutely incompatible with those which render it intelligible to those who know it not. Now this last I think is the proper office of the logician or I might say the metaphysician, in truth he must be both. The same person may be poet & logician, but he cannot be both in the same composition: & as heroes have been frustrated of glory 'carent quia vate sacro ', so I think the vates himself has often been misunderstood & successfully cried down for want of a Logician in Ordinary, to supply a logical commentary on his intuitive truths. The artist's is the highest part, for by him alone is real knowledge of such truths conveyed: but it is possible to convince him who never could know the intuitive truths that they are not inconsistent with anything he does know; that they are even very probable, & that he may have faith in them when higher natures than his own affirm that they are truths.

His own task, he says again, is the humbler one of the man of speculation:

I am not in the least a poet, in any sense; but I can do homage to poetry. I can to a very considerable extent feel it & understand it, & can make others who are my inferiors understand it in proportion to the measure of their capacity. I believe that such a person is more wanted than even the poet himself; that there are more persons living who approximate to the latter character than to the former. . . . Now one thing not useless to do would be to exemplify this difference itself; to make those who are not poets understand that poetry is higher than logic, & that the union of the two is philosophy.¹⁹

Carlyle being still not satisfied with the explanation (or perhaps the praise), Mill writes again (August 2, 1833):

By logic .. . I meant the antithesis of Poetry or Art: in which distinction I am learning to perceive a twofold contrast: the literal as opposed to the symbolical, & reasoning as opposed to intuition. Not the theory of reasoning but the practice. In reasoning I include all processes of thought which are processes at all, that is, which proceed by a series of steps or links.²⁰

This distinction is clear—the speaker of the Word as against the weaver of arguments—and clearly leaves the Artist in the position of preaching to the converted. It would appear that the weight of conversion rests on the thin shoulders of the Logician. Insight is translated into syllogism, for comprehension must precede belief. With belief (in Newman's terms) certainty can give way to certitude, and then action can follow. The argument in these letters foreshadows the pregnant passage in Book VI of Mill's Logic, where he sets forth the proper relation between the work of the Artist and the Scientist in all social endeavour:

the imperative mood is the characteristic of art, as distinguished from science. Whatever speaks in rules or precepts, not in assertions respecting matters of fact, is art; and ethics or morality is properly a portion of the art corresponding to the sciences of human nature and society. (VI, xii, I, p. 616.)

The distinction is roughly that between theoretical and practical, but art has a twofold role, coming both before and after the operations of science. Art, in Mill's meaning, is prior to science, for it decides upon and defines the end to be pursued in a particular area. It then hands this end over to science, as an effect to be studied; science inquires into the causes of the effect, and then turns the problem back to art with a description of the circumstances by which the end can be reached. Art now examines these circumstances and, if they are practicable and moral, proclaims the end as the object of action, and makes the theorem of its attainment, formulated by science, into a rule or precept for practical guidance. In the end, the artist tries to induce a current of morality into the community.

Such apparently dry speculations as these (forecast in the letter to Carlyle of July 5, 1833) seem to drive the poor poet into the market place, with zeal in his heart and text in his hand. Actually the artist is for Mill protean, and the poet is only one shape. One must look at the earlier of his two articles on poetry to see how he distinguishes the poet from the other isotopes of the artist. In "What is Poetry?" he argues that poetry, "the better part of all art whatever, and of life too," is distinguished from its logical opposite, matter of fact or science, by its attempt to move its audience rather than convince it. It offers interesting objects of contemplation to the "sensibilities" not propositions to the understanding. The coincidence with the later argument is obvious, but just at this point Mill indicates that further distinctions are necessary. The novelist, for instance, is also concerned with emotion; is he, then, a poet? No, says Mill, for mere narratives depend for their interest on outward circumstances as opposed to inner sensibility. The truth of narrative is not the truth of poetry:

The truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life. The two kinds of knowledge are different, and come by different ways, come mostly to different persons. Great poets are often proverbially ignorant of life. What they know has come by observation of themselves; they have found there one highly delicate, and sensitive, and refine [sic] specimen of human nature, on which the laws of emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off without much study: and other knowledge of mankind, such as comes to men of the world by outward experience, is not indispensable to them as poets: but to the novelist such knowledge is all in all; he has to describe outward things, not the inward man. . . .²¹

A further distinction remains, that between the poet and the orator—and here are found the most often quoted, and most perceptive, of Mill's remarks on poetry.

Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or uttering forth of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appear [sic] to us to lie in the poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols, which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.²²

But even in this description the poet is not morally useless; he pursues a genuine end for its own sake, but the personal end becomes a social means. "All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy . . . , [but what] we have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know that other eyes are upon us."²³ And the cultivated poet will here be most effective.

(IV) Without resigning his special strengths the poet should cultivate his intellect by retiring at times from the world of strong feeling to meditate upon experience in the manner of the philosopher. (The Wordsworthian theories are seldom far below the surface.) Emotional links cast aside, the poet then reasons like other men, connecting ideas logically, forming associations on the basis of his own and others' experience, testing—the point is not made by Mill in this connection, but is clear from his Logic—mental against physical experience, checking apparent against actual resemblances, associations between ideas against associations between their parent sensations. In short, bringing objectivity as far as possible into his subjective world. (The question of the appropriateness of a belief in right reason in Mill is admittedly begged.) A beneficial result is sure:

Where . . . a poetic nature has been united with logical and scientific culture, the peculiarity of association arising from the finer nature so perpetually alternates with the associations attainable by commoner natures trained to high perfection, that its own particular law is not so conspicuously characteristic of the result produced. . . . Whether the superiority will naturally be on the side of the logician-poet or of the mere poet—whether the writings of the one ought, as a whole, to be truer, and their influence more beneficent, than those of the other—is too obvious in principle to need statement: it would be absurd to doubt whether two endowments are better than one; whether truth is more certainly arrived at by two processes, verifying and correcting each other, than by one alone. ("The Two Kinds of Poetry," p. 235.)

When experience and reason combine, the poet is unlikely to repeat Browning's failure in Pauline:

With considerable poetic powers, the writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. . . . [Browning] should not attempt to show how a person may be recovered from this morbid state,—for he [on the evidence of the poem] is hardly convalescent, and 'what should we speak of but that which we know?'²⁴

Images supplied spontaneously through the fineness of the poet's perceptions are not enough; he must also be supplied through "the vigour and richness of his intellect" with an "abundance of moving thoughts."²⁵ Only when the poet becomes, as he may, a poet-philosopher, can his works conduce fully to the betterment of mankind. Mill makes the point at length in his review of Tennyson's poems:

Every great poet, every poet who has extensively or permanently influenced mankind, has been a great thinker;—has had a philosophy though perhaps he did not call it by that name;—has had his mind full of thoughts derived not merely from passive sensibility, but from trains of reflection, from observation, analysis, and generalization; however remote the sphere of his observation and meditation may have lain from the studies of the schools. Where the poetic temperament exists in its greatest degree, while the systematic culture of the intellect has been neglected, we may expect to find, what we do find in the best poems of Shelley—vivid representations of states of passive and dreamy emotion, fitted to give extreme pleasure to persons of similar organization to the poet, but not likely to be sympathized in, because not understood, by any other persons; and scarcely conducing at all to the noblest end of poetry as an intellectual pursuit, that of acting upon the desires and characters of mankind through their emotions, to raise them towards the perfection of their nature. This, like every other adaptation of means to ends, is the work of cultivated reason; and the poet's success in it will be in proportion to the intrinsic value of his thoughts, and to the command which he has acquired over the materials of his imagination, for placing those thoughts in a strong light before the intellect, and impressing them on the feelings.²⁶

(V) Mill's uses of the word "imagination" are as loose as most people's. Sometimes he accepts the meaning given to it by his father, "train of ideas." Sometimes, again, he uses it in a very common way, as signifying a train of ideas in which the person having the train does not believe. When Mill applies the term to the poet, however, it obviously describes a power. He refers, for example, to "that kind of self-observation which is called imagination," and which, like "simple observation and a more complicated process of analysis and induction" is a method of extracting "the knowledge of general truth . . . from our own consciousness."²⁷ A similar meaning is indicated in a passage already quoted from "What is Poetry?" (p. 205): "What [poets] know has come by observation of themselves; they have found there one highly delicate, and sensitive, and refine [sic] specimen of human nature, on which the laws of emotion are written in large characters, such as can be read off without much study. . . ." But beneath this power of observation must lie another power if the poet is to avoid narrowness; this more basic power needs the information gathered by a cultivated intellect, but, being active, is not limited by such information. Mill, in his earliest remarks on artistic matters, calls this latter power also imagination. He is discussing acting, but the passages have an obvious relevance to his theory of poetry.

A great actor must possess imagination, in the higher and more extensive meaning of the word: that is, he must be able to conceive correctly, and paint vividly within himself, states of external circumstances, and of the human mind, into which it has not happened to himself to be thrown.²⁸

He agrees with Pemberton, an actor,

that in acting, as in everything else, genius does not consist in being a copyist; even from nature: That the actor of genius is not he who observes and imitates what men of particular characters, and in particular situations, do, but he who can, by an act of imagination, actually be what they are: who can so completely understand, and so vividly conceive, the state of their minds, that the conception shall call up in his own the very emotions, and thereby draw from him the very sounds and gestures, which would have been exhibited by the imaginary being whom he is personifying. Such a man's representation of nature will have a consistency and keeping in it, and will reach depths in the human heart, which no man's opportunities and powers of mere outward observation could ever have enabled him to attain to.²⁹

Here again Mill sets off imagination from "outward observation," but obviously without some outward observation the portrayal of other men by the actor or the poet would be impossible. He is suggesting, actually, that passive copying or reporting is not art; art lies in the active sharing in the feelings of the imitated or described persons; and this sharing is imagination. Pemberton has the "faculty" or "power," says Mill,

to call up by a voluntary effort of imagination, what he not unhappily terms secondary feelings, that is, feelings suggested by a vivid conception of similar feelings in others: and by thus realizing for the time being, an imaginary character, to give a profoundly true dramatic presentation of it.³⁰

Elsewhere Mill even introduces the crucial term "creative imagination," but adds little to his previous definition:

The faculty of thus bringing home to us a coherent conception of beings unknown to our experience, not by logically characterizing them, but by a living representation of them, such as they would, in fact, be, if the hypothesis of their possibility could be realized—is what is meant, when anything is meant, by the words creative imagination.³¹

The reader, Mill indicates in his discussion of Tennyson, must cooperate with the poet by suspending his "critical understanding" and giving his "spontaneous feelings" full play, surrendering his "imagination [i.e., trains] to the guidance of the poet."³² He will then feel with the characters in the portrayed situation to the extent that the poet is able to recreate the feelings in his readers by first creating them in himself.

Although, as has been seen, unity of conception and execution is necessary for the greatest art, Mill does not see imagination as the controlling, unifying power; the intellect, governing the essential, but essentially random, emotional associations, selects, discards, and adds. As always in Mill's discussions of man, feeling is the horse, but intellect the rider. So Tennyson is warned by Mill not to accept "poetical" conclusions when unsupported by evidence, especially when philosophical systems are in question. No philosophy should deny the validity of poetry, for philosophic systems are properly "comprehensive" and "commanding":

Let our philosophical system be what it may, human feelings exist: human nature, with all its enjoyments and sufferings, its stragglings, its victories and defeats, still remain [sic] to us; and these are the materials of all poetry. Whoever, in the greatest concerns of human life, pursues truth with unbiased feelings, and an intellect adequate to discern it, will not find that the resources of poetry are lost to him because he has learnt to use and not to abuse them. They are as open to him as they are to the sentimental weakling, who has no test of the true but the ornamental. And when he once has them under his command, he can wield them for purposes, and with a power, of which neither the dilettante nor the visionary have the slightest conception.³³

The purposes come from the philosophy (intellect); the power from the poetry (feeling).

This attempt to define the nature and function of the poet leads outwards into other areas of Mill's thought. The poet is one who speaks truth, who deals in realities (in his later years Mill was more chary of these Carlylianisms). He presents a scene and characters so representative of valid human feelings as to be a moral lesson to all who hear him. He teaches men to share the feelings of others. True sympathy, the ground of morality, can result only from empathy with others. The importance of this sharing is touched on in a passage in which Mill praises Bain for separating "Tender Affections" from "Sympathy," and for treating the latter not "as an emotion, but as the capacity of taking on the emotions, or mental states generally, of others. A character may possess tenderness without being at all sympathetic, as is the case with many selfish sentimentalists; and the converse, though not equally common, is equally in human nature."³⁴ Ideally, the audience does not stop with mere identification, but goes further into a contemplation of perfection beyond that portrayed. In an interesting comment upon Beauty in a footnote to his father's Analysis, Mill commends Ruskin's discussion in Modern Painters, saying that all the elements which Ruskin finds in the idea of Beauty, except those like Moderation,

represent to us some valuable or delightful attribute, in a completeness and perfection of which our experience presents us with no example, and which therefore stimulates the active power of the imagination to rise above known reality, into a more attractive or a more majestic world. This does not happen with what we call our lower pleasures. To them there is a fixed limit at which they stop: or if, in any particular case, they do acquire, by association, a power of stirring up ideas greater than themselves, and stimulate the imagination to enlarge its conceptions to the dimensions of those ideas, we then feel that the lower pleasure has, exceptionally, risen into the region of the aesthetic, and has superadded to itself an element of pleasure of a character and quality not belonging to its own nature.

(Analysis, II, 255n.)

The highest pleasures for Mill, of course, are those mental pleasures of sympathy which guide the actions of the good man. So the poet, speaking "the word . . . with truthful intent," lets his audience "know one human soul"; the greatest poets, living in accord with their word, reveal nobility through beauty, and lead the audience to emulation. So Milton³⁵ and Plato have given us works which are evidence of their lives; more important, the Gospel is the record of the life of Christ as much as of his doctrines.³⁶ The usual attitude to Jesus is typically mistaken: he has been

likened to a logician, framing a rule to meet all cases, and provide against all possible evasions, instead of a poet, orator, and vates, whose object was to purify and spiritualize the mind, so that, under the guidance of its purity, its own lights might suffice to find the law of which he only supplied the spirit, and suggested the general scope.

("On Genius," p. 657.)

At this point Mill's theory seems to be complete, and no one has bothered to consider whether he retained it throughout life. He would appear, from most accounts, to have forgotten, misplaced, or discarded it. But in fact it remained with him, and was altered only by being made more complete as it was brought into closer conjunction with the rest of his thought. Documentation is difficult, but a few references in Bain's Autobiography and Caroline Fox's Memories of Old Friends indicate a constant interest in poetic and artistic matters throughout the 1840's and into the 1850's. For the bulk of the 1850's, Mill's decade of marriage and mourning, there is very little record of any sort, but even here the remarks in "Bain's Psychology" already quoted show that his concern is still present. (On Liberty, while its argument is consonant with that outlined here, is not an obvious source.) In 1867 and 1869, however, appeared two documents which establish not only his continued interest but also his continued belief in the importance of poetry. The latter document, [James Mill's] The Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, with John Mill's footnotes, has already been discussed in the account of association. The former, Mill's Rectorial Address at St. Andrews, a much neglected work, contains as good a summary of Mill's thought as that in the Autobiography, including a lengthy passage on the importance of poetry.

In this Address Mill argues, in terms reminiscent of both his "Bentham" and his Logic,³⁷ that while the two most important parts of education are the intellectual and the moral, the third part, the aesthetic, is also essential. Aesthetic education involves the education of the feelings and the cultivation of the beautiful. The moderns, inferior in poetic control to the ancients, are superior in their choice of subject because they pay more heed to the depths of human experience, having the habit of "meditative self-consciousness" and "brooding and self-conscious minds." Because the proper study of mankind is man, the modern concentration upon inner feelings rather than outer circumstances produces more interesting, more useful, and more moral literature.

In this context the important modification (really no more than an intensification) of one aspect of his theory becomes significant. The cultivation of the beautiful which Mill desiderates is in truth for him a cultivation of beautiful character; the most beautiful nature is worthy human nature. His passion for Wordsworth, continued throughout his life, is most easily explained by the poet's belief in the power of nature to moralize man as it moralizes the poet's song. Now the ethical aim of the poet becomes apparent: he presents scenes and characters which play upon the feelings of his readers in such a way as to pattern out for them a standard of beautiful conduct. If fully communicated, the standard becomes a model permitting of imitation. And imitation is at the root of Mill's ethic. Lacking the supernatural sanctions, he accepts a Religion of Humanity which bolsters moral conduct with natural sanctions. The test of action, ultimately utilitarian, practically and immediately is the imagined approbation of some revered figure. The "passion for ideal excellence," as he remarks in "The Utility of Religion,"³⁸ can be made into a powerful motive; the individual must ask himself whether Socrates, Howard, Washington, Antonius, or Christ (p. 109), or even "ideal perfection embodied in a Divine Being"³⁹ would approve his conduct, and then model his conduct according to the answer of his conscience.

The literary presentation of great men dedicated to altruism and duty supports and aids conscience, which is cultivated in other ways. As conscience is a restraining force, preventing evil actions, so cultivated sentiment is active, leading a man to dedicate himself to love of his country, human improvement, freedom, and virtue. The self must be felt to be insignificant; devotion to others must be all. And the great source of this "elevated tone of mind .. . is poetry, and all literature so far as it is poetical and artistic." All other arts, as their content too is "feeling," tend to the same end, as does natural beauty, especially of the sublime order, for there is a natural affinity between goodness and the cultivation of the beautiful. The virtuous man who has learned to appreciate beauty will try to realize it in his own life, "will keep before himself a type of perfect beauty in human character, to light his attempts at self-culture."⁴⁰ Mill even goes so far as to say that there is truth in Goethe's remark that the Beautiful is greater than the Good, for it includes the Good, and adds perfection to it. As always with him, then, art centres upon humanity and is dedicated to morality.

The species poet is neither last nor least of the genus moralist; often, indeed, in Mill's writings the genus seems only to have one species. The poet's "word" becomes "message" when assimilated by individuals in the audience. As poetry speaks to individuals and transmits human motive power, that is, feeling, it is moral—if the poet has so cultivated his whole being as to escape idiosyncratic (if powerful) emotional displays. Even the immature poet (Shelley) can create great poems on occasion, as can the poet of unpoetic natures (Wordsworth). Parnassus has visitors as well as dwellers, and visitors too can bring guests.

Mill's theory of poetry is no aberration. After 1840 he seldom wrote on poetry, but the almost casual remarks herein mentioned (by no means an exhaustive list) indicate his continued interest and continued convictions. The Autobiography, written and revised late in his life, is evidence enough, but one brief glance at the sober Mill of 1870 gives life to the contention:

After dinner Mr. Mill read us Shelley's Ode to Liberty & he got quite excited & moved over it rocking backwards & nearly chocking with emotion; he said himself: 'it is almost too much for one.' Miss Taylor read the Hymn to Intellectual Beauty but in rather a theatrical voice not as pleasant as Mill's, he also read some of his favourite bits of Wordsworth [whom] he admires very much.⁴¹

Notes

¹ J. S. Mill, Autobiography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), pp. 10-2.

² British Museum Add. MSS. 33, 230.

³ J. S. Mill, Letters, ed. H. Elliot (London, 1910), I, 12.

⁴Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, I, 165n.

⁵Autobiography, pp. 103-4.

⁶Ibid., p. 102.

⁷ I do not here trace the development of Mill's poetic theory in detail, choosing rather to make clear the importance of the theory to Mill's ethical thought. Therefore (and also in the interests of brevity) I treat together the principal articles of the early 1830's: "On Genius," Monthly Repository, VI (Oct., 1832); "What is Poetry?" Monthly Repository, VII (Jan., 1833); "Writings of Junius Redivivus," Monthly Repository, VII (Apr., 1833); "Writings of Junius Redivivus," Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, III (June, 1833); "The Two Kinds of Poetry," Monthly Repository, VII (Nov., 1833); and "Tennyson's Poems," London and Westminster Review, XXX (July, 1835). (Those articles reprinted in Early Essays, ed. J. W. Gibbs [London, 1897], are quoted from that source.) Corroborating and explanatory material is found mostly in the contemporary letters to Carlyle, and in articles in the Examiner.

⁸ "The Two Kinds of Poetry," Early Essays, p. 229.

⁹ James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, ed. J. S. Mill (London, 1869), I, 241-2.

¹⁰ David Hartley, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (London, 1810), I, 434.

¹¹Ibid, 441, 447-8.

¹² "The Two Kinds of Poetry," p. 223.

¹³Ibid, p. 225.

¹⁴ J. S. Mill, System of Logic (London: Longmans, Green, 1906), 317 (III, xiii, 6).

¹⁵ "Bain's Psychology," Dissertations and Discussions (London, 1859-75), III, 131.

¹⁶ National Library of Scotland, MS 618, #6, f.IIr. (July 17, 1832).

¹⁷Ibid., #21, f.46r. (May 18, 1833).

¹⁸ Richard Garnett, Life of W. J. Fox (London, 1909), p. 103.

¹⁹ National Library of Scotland, MS 618, #23, f.50r. & v. (July 5, 1833). Cf. ibid., #38, f.81v. (March 2, 1834).

²⁰Ibid., #25, f.54v.

²¹ "What is Poetry?" Early Essays, p. 205.

²²Ibid., pp. 208-9.

²³Ibid., p. 209.

²⁴ Note in copy of Pauline sent by Fox to Mill. Quoted in Griffin and Minchin, Life of Robert Browning, pp. 59-60.

²⁵ "The Two Kinds of Poetry," p. 231.

²⁶ "Tennyson's Poems," Early Essays, pp. 260-1.

²⁷ "On Genius," p. 652.

²⁸Examiner, pp. 325-6 (May 22, 1831).

²⁹Ibid, p. 226 (June 3, 1832).

³⁰Ibid. Cf. "Bentham," Dissertations and Discussions, I, 353.

³¹ "Tennyson's Poems," p. 263n.

³²Ibid, p. 248.

³³Ibid., pp. 266-7.

³⁴ "Bain's Psychology," p. 134.

³⁵ Later, in a letter to Lalor (c. June 20, 1852), Mill, probably having heard Harriet on the subject, says: ". . . it is not agreeable to me to be praised in the words of a man whom I so wholly disrespect as Milton, who with all his republicanism had the soul of a fanatic, a despot and a tyrant." British Library of Political and Economic Science, Mill-Taylor Collection, I, #22, 64r.

³⁶ "Writings of Junius Redivivus," Monthly Repository, VII, 269.

³⁷ "Bentham," p. 387; Logic, 620 (VI, xii, 6).

³⁸Three Essays on Religion (London, 1885), p. 108.

³⁹Rectorial Address, in James and John Stuart Mill on Education, ed. F. A. Cavenagh (Cambridge University Press, 1931), p. 193.

⁴⁰ The preceding account is drawn from the Rectorial Address, passim, especially pp. 191-6.

⁴¹The Amberley Papers, ed. Bertrand and Patricia Russell (London, 1937), II, 375 ("Kate's Journal," Sept. 28, 1870).