Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  13. See, for example, Salvador Minuchin, Families and Family Therapy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974).

  14. J. Howard Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), 14–15.

  15. George Eliot, Middlemarch, Book 4.

  16. Lutyens, The Ruskins and the Grays, 126–27.

  17. Ibid., 232.

  18. Ibid., 174n.

  19. Ibid., 228.

  20. Ibid., 180.

  21. Ibid., 185.

  22. ‘I have your precious letter here: with the account so long and kind – of all your trial at Blair Athol – indeed it must have been cruel my dearest: I think it will be much nicer next time, we shall neither of us be frightened.’ Lutyens, The Ruskins and the Grays, 185.

  23. Ibid., 214.

  24. Ibid., 218.

  25. Quoted by J. A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 22.

  26. Lutyens, The Ruskins and the Grays, 229.

  27. Ibid., 234.

  28. Lutyens, Young Mrs Ruskin in Venice, 28.

  29. Ibid., 156.

  30. One strange arrangement was that of Radetzky the Austrian military hero who served as governor of the Lombardo-Veneto district when the Ruskins lived there. Radetzky and his wife had recently started living together again after a separation of thirty years. ‘They never quarelled,’ Effie reported, ‘but wrote to each other always, and were very good friends. The other day Radetzky happened to pass through the town where she lived, called upon her and brought her here and our friend thinks they will not separate again.’ Lutyens, Young Mrs Ruskin in Venice, 61.

  31. Ibid., 149.

  32. Ibid., 175.

  33. Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, 14–15.

  34. R. H. Wilenski thinks that Ruskin’s influence as an art critic in the 1850s has been greatly exaggerated. See R. H. Wilenski, John Ruskin: An Introduction to Further Study of his Life and Work (London: Faber and Faber, 1933).

  35. Ruskin’s Modern Painters was an important book for the PRB even though their way of achieving truth to nature, which was hard-edged, comparatively flat and precise in style, differed so from Turner’s fluid, impressionist fidelity, which Ruskin had particularly endorsed. These young artists admired the sincerity, piety, spirituality and freshness of colour characteristic of painters before the High Renaissance – hence the name Pre-Raphaelite. Instead of painting on dark grounds, in imitation of the antique, they painted on white grounds, as artists generally do now, producing (for the moment – they have not lasted well) brighter and clearer colours. One has to struggle to see what so shocked and irritated contemporary audiences about the work of the PRB. Much of it looks stagy and belaboured, anything but ‘true to nature’ as we now see nature. But in their opposition to idealisation and to prettifying, as well as in their technical innovations (bright colour, hard outline), the Pre-Raphaelite painters in their time boldly challenged the hegemony of Academy painting. See Quentin Bell, Victorian Artists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972).

  36. Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, 61.

  37. Ibid., 60.

  38. Ibid., 69.

  39. Ibid., 97.

  40. Ibid., 101.

  41. Ibid., 108.

  42. Ibid., 156. See also 186.

  43. Ibid., 232–33.

  44. Ibid., 185.

  45. Ibid., 129.

  46. Ibid., 150.

  47. It was discovered by the widow of the successor of Rutter’s successor. Its discovery precipitated a battle for ownership between Effie’s descendants and Ruskin’s literary executor. I can only guess how Ruskin would have proved his virility to the court. Although the law defined virility as the ability to perform the sex act with a woman, Ruskin probably thought it meant simply the ability to get an erection. Also, Rousseau had given a certain dignity to masturbation by mentioning it in his Confessions and Ruskin was perhaps offering to show the court evidence of masturbation.

  48. ‘Ruskin’s Statement to His Proctor in the Nullity Suit’ (April 27, 1854), in Whitehouse, Vindication of Ruskin, 16.

  49. Lady Eastlake to Effie in Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, 196.

  50. Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, 199.

  51. Ibid., 197.

  52. Ibid., 216.

  53. ‘Decree of Nullity, Commissary Court of Surrey’ (July 15, 1854), in Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, 230.

  54. See ‘Ruskin on His Marriage: The Acland Letter’, by Jeffrey L. Spear, Times Literary Supplement (February 10, 1978): 163, a report on a recently discovered letter. For other new Ruskin material, see Mary Lutyens, ‘From Ruskin to Effie Gray’, Times Literary Supplement (March 3, 1978): 254.

  55. Lutyens, Millais and the Ruskins, 248.

  HARRIET TAYLOR

  and

  JOHN STUART MILL

  1830–1858

  prelude: carlyle and j. s. mill’s maid

  For five months during his first winter in London, Carlyle had been working on his history of the French Revolution. He wrote in a state of semi-possession. He read obsessively, filled his mind with the subject, then wrote it out at a dash, destroying his notes as he went along. There were, of course, no typewriters, no carbon papers and no Xerox machines.

  On the face of it, Carlyle’s good friend John Stuart Mill would have seemed the more likely person to take up the subject of the French Revolution. Germany had been Carlyle’s province intellectually; Mill was the expert on France. But Mill ceded the project to Carlyle, helping him with references and lending him books. When Carlyle finished the first volume of his ambitious work, he sent the manuscript to John Stuart Mill for comment.

  On March 6, 1835, Mill arrived in the Carlyles’ parlour white-faced and in a state of horrible agitation. They knew before he said a word that something was wrong, and when he asked Mrs Carlyle to go down to his carriage to talk to his friend Mrs Taylor, Mrs Carlyle thought she knew what it was. ‘Gracious Providence,’ she whispered to her husband before running downstairs. ‘He has gone off with Mrs Taylor!’

  In the carriage, Mrs Taylor, as distraught as Mill, could only say over and over, ‘You will never forgive him.’ Mrs Carlyle continued to believe that they had finally decided to elope. So horrid was this prospect and so thoroughly did the Carlyles expect it, that it was, momentarily, a relief to hear the catastrophe Mill had in fact come to announce.

  Mill’s maid, cleaning up, seeing the pile of papers in his parlour, had taken them for scrap and burned the lot. The first volume of the French Revolution was entirely gone.

  How banal are the plots we impose on others’ lives. Or, how much more inventive is the subconscious mind than the conscious mind. Who in 1835 did not think it likely that John Mill would elope with Mrs Taylor? Who would have imagined that he could have burned the only copy of his friend’s masterpiece?

  Five months of work had to be repeated, and under what a fog of discouragement! If the Carlyles had not forgiven Mill, it would not be hard to understand. But the man was so upset on that first terrible evening that the Carlyles had to spend hours cheering him up, making light of the loss, in fear he would harm himself out of remorse and despair. As time went on, instead of blaming Mill, the Carlyles seem to have transferred their irritation to the innocent Mrs Taylor, constructing the fantasy that the manuscript had been burned in her possession, even suspecting that she had done it deliberately.

  living reasonably

  Beautiful nineteen-year-old Harriet Hardy was married in London in 1826 to John Taylor, prosperous junior partner in a firm of wholesale druggists. He was ten years older than Harriet. His family, like hers, was Unitarian. It was a suitable match. The couple seemed happy. John Taylor seemed to have a lot to offer quite apart from his wealth. Clever, good-natured and hospitable, he took an interest in radical politics, helped found London University and was one of the original members of the Reform Club. He made a habit of welcoming political refugees from the Continent. He adored his d
ark-eyed and lively wife and indulged her in every way. He was not so brilliant in conversation as she – not so witty or daring – but he didn’t object to the way Harriet charmed and impressed everyone. In fact, he enjoyed it. There was none of the bully in John Taylor. He felt that Harriet was exactly the kind of wife a man could be proud of – attractive, cultivated, high-spirited.

  In the first four years of their marriage, they had two children, both boys. (A daughter would follow in 1831.) John Taylor continued to be completely satisfied with Harriet, but she became increasingly dissatisfied with him. When the initial excitement of being married wore off, when the pleasure of being treated as a full-fledged adult grew thin, she realised that the man she was married to did not really interest her. Even though he was a man, she was smarter than he was; her mind moved more quickly and was more widely informed. When he came home at night, she was not particularly happy to see him. She felt intruded upon by his preoccupations, his jokes, his reports of the day’s business. She felt intruded upon in more intimate ways, too. Since she never really felt like making love with him, his desire to make love to her came to seem like a demand. She complied at first resignedly, but then with more and more resentment. The very fact that he kept imposing himself on her in this way, which seemed so aggressive and brutal – the Victorian word was ‘inconsiderate’ – strengthened her distaste for him.1

  In the last century, women were forced to be inventive when they realised they had come to find the men they had married distasteful. Divorce for incompatibility did not exist. Even a separation was hard to effect, since a woman had no legal right to property apart from her husband and could finance no arrangement herself. With a likelihood of finding herself joined for life to someone whose mind, body or both disgusted her, a woman nonetheless owed her husband ‘conjugal rights’. She had to submit to what must be the most offensive of frequently recurring human activities – sex without affection, sex against the will. Mill, in The Subjection of Women (inspired, at least in part, by Harriet’s marital experiences), would call it ‘the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations’. To escape this, a woman could produce a stream of excuses: headaches, infirmities, female complaints, religious scruples. She could stay almost constantly pregnant or nursing and could invoke the belief that sexual activity was dangerous at such times. If she were very daring, and unusually sophisticated, she might solace herself with a lover, although it seems doubtful that a woman whose first experience with sex was unpleasant would turn to sex for relief. If she were desperate, utterly amoral and perhaps a bit demented, she might go so far as to kill her husband. Mary S. Hartman’s fascinating book Victorian Murderesses records the stories of middle-class women driven by the stringencies of family life to kill people close to them. A recurrent theme in these histories is the woman’s disgust at having to submit to her husband’s sexual advances – a disgust which occasionally leads to radical insights.2 Had these ‘lady killers’ been intellectuals, they might have analysed their rage and made it the force behind useful activity. As it was, they acted inarticulately and unself-consciously and produced nothing but harm to themselves and others.

  Harriet Taylor was an intellectual. When she realised, after four years of marriage, that her husband was in various ways distasteful to her, she went to consult her minister. She told him that her husband was not her intellectual equal. She said she was bored. She did not mention that she disliked sex with him, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps because she assumed that sex was universally disagreeable. But she continued to think about Taylor’s irritating assumption that he had the right to make love to her whenever he wanted to. Such brutishness in an otherwise kind and thoughtful man made Harriet, when she was quite young, into a severe critic of marriage, which she saw as a sexual contract in which one of the parties, the necessarily virginal woman, could have no idea of what she was committing herself to. Legally, it was outrageous. In no other contract could such a condition be possible – that one of the signers be ignorant of what the contract involved.3

  You can judge, by her minister’s response to her complaints, the enlightened nature of the Unitarian circle in which Harriet Taylor moved. This remarkable man, William Johnson Fox, editor of the Monthly Repository, later a friend of Charles Dickens and a drama critic, did not berate her or counsel submission; he did not remind her of her duty to her husband; instead he took absolutely seriously her desire for intellectual companionship and offered to introduce her to John Stuart Mill. Not only was Mill unquestionably brilliant, he also shared – and there were few men who did – Mrs Taylor’s concern for equal rights for women. So, in a sense, feminism brought them together.4

  When they met, at a dinner party at Mrs Taylor’s house, with Fox and Harriet Martineau among the other guests, Mill was twenty-four, a year older than she, unattached and attractive. He might have seemed in need of some cheering up himself. His father had dedicated him to Reform as others dedicate sons to the Church. James Mill had supervised his son’s education personally, in an effort to prove how much time is wasted by conventional methods. Consequently, Mill knew Greek by the age of three, Latin slightly later and at the age at which most children have little more on their minds than mastering the bicycle, he was in the habit of reading books and summarising their arguments aloud for his father as they took their daily walk. He was trained to argue both sides of every question and taught that you had no right to a belief unless you understood the arguments for its opposite. His mind was made into a fine machine – a logic engine – to be put in the service of radical thought and practical reform. But four years before Mill met Mrs Taylor, the machine had broken down.

  It occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.5

  He was a well-equipped ship with a rudder but no sail; he was without desire, engulfed by ‘a drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief’. The borrowing of Coleridge’s words to describe his depression was significant, for utilitarianism provided no vocabulary for emotional states beyond the crudely quantitative ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. That was part of the problem.

  Mill’s portrait of his emotional make-up and development in his autobiography is perhaps familiar: trained too early and too rigorously in logical analysis, he became unhealthily deficient in feeling. He began to believe – quite in opposition to orthodox utilitarianism – that cultivating the inner person was just as important as bettering a person’s living conditions or improving the laws that shaped the outward circumstances of his life. Happily for children everywhere, Mill decided that his mental breakdown was the result of his relentless education and that there was more to life than was dreamed of in his father’s philosophy. In the late 1820s, to cure his depression, he began to take doses of Wordsworth like doses of medicine. Poetry seemed ‘the very culture of the feelings’ which he was in quest of, because, without feelings, the logic machine couldn’t work, as he himself had discovered. Thought could provide goals, and means, but only emotion could provide the motive, the power, the desire to achieve those goals. Fortunately, the animating power of poetry could be embodied in people.

  In 1831 Carlyle descended upon London from the isolation of Craigenputtock, determined to make a place for himself in the literary world, and one of the people he sought out was young John Stuart Mill, whose essay ‘The Spirit of the Age’, published in the Examiner, had so impressed him. Because
Mill was not satisfied with the way things were, because he talked in terms of historic cycles of decay and change, as did Carlyle himself, Carlyle concluded that Mill shared his views and was ready to submit himself in discipleship. The two men met at the home of Mrs Austin, whose friends included both radicals and romantics, pragmatic Benthamites like Mill and idealists like Carlyle. They immediately recognised in each other equivalent brilliance and were buoyed up by the meeting. Intellectually, they were as far apart as men could be, but, at the time, only Mill realised that, and he did not particularly care. He regarded Carlyle’s ideas as hazy metaphysics, but he was fascinated by his forceful, passionate personality. He made Mill feel like a man of straw. ‘I felt that he was a poet, and that I was not; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; and that as such, he not only saw things long before me, which I could only when they were pointed out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was highly probable he could see many things which were not visible to me even after they were pointed out.’6 He found in Carlyle a person of feeling such as he sought. He found what he wanted even more perfectly embodied in Harriet Taylor.

  Greater than himself, greater than Carlyle – in an act of willed belief he made her transcend the everlasting dualism of thought and feeling by being perfect in both. ‘I had always wished for a friend whom I could admire wholly, without reservation and restriction and I had now found one. To render this possible, it was necessary that the object of my admiration should be of a type different from my own; should be a character preeminently of feeling, combined however as I had not in any other instance known it to be, with a vigorous and bold speculative intellect.’7 He was too wary of the notion of innate differences, too much opposed to sexual stereotypes, to present the woman he loved, even to think of her, as playing feminine emotion to his masculine reason, and so, with a kind of rhetorical flourish which he wholly believed, he made Harriet as great a thinker as she was a ‘poet’.