by Phyllis Rose
There are other ways of explaining why Mill reacted to Mrs Taylor with such an explosion of feeling – Carlyle’s, for example. ‘That man, who up to that time, had never looked a female creature, even a cow, in the face, found himself opposite those great dark eyes, that were flashing unutterable things, while he was discoursing the unutterable concernin’ all sorts o’ high topics.’8 Ruskin would say that the great flaw of his education was its failure to provide him with an object of love, with the result that love, when it came, came with a force he had no way of controlling. The same could be said of Mill. It could also be said that his father had never allowed him a mother, and he found a way of getting himself one, however belatedly, and against whatever odds.
By 1832, Mill and Mrs Taylor were deeply involved, seeing each other daily, exchanging fervent letters. The Monthly Repository had helped to unite them, for Harriet Taylor had begun to write reviews and articles for it, and Mill worked on them with her, talking over the ideas, editing the prose. He accepted her suggestions, developed her ideas, told her with complete sincerity that she was as great a thinker as he was. It was the ideal companionship she had longed for when she went to complain to Fox about her discomfort in marriage.
You could see how they complemented each other by the way they looked. What people noticed first about Harriet were her eyes – flashing – and a suggestion in her body of mobility, whereas his features, variously described as chiselled and classical, expressed an inner rigidity. He shook hands from the shoulder. He spoke carefully. Give him facts, and he would sift them, weigh them, articulate possible interpretations, reach a conclusion. Where he was careful, she was daring. Where he was disinterested and balanced, she was intuitive, partial and sure of herself. She concerned herself with goals and assumptions; he concerned himself with arguments. She was quick to judge and to generalise, and because he was not, he valued her intellectual style as bold and vigorous where another person, more like her, might have found her hasty and simplistic.
Together they read poetry, particularly Harriet’s favourite, Shelley. Naturally they despised the cynical Byron. Harriet’s tastes were ardent, romantic; her responses to beauty intense. She took Mill to see pictures and sculpture, and taught him to respond to them for the sake of their beauty, rather than looking in them for some ‘meaning’ or utility. Mill’s intellectual mentor, Jeremy Bentham, had been of the opinion that, if the quantity of pleasure it gave was the same, pushpin (for which read ‘Pacman’) was as good as poetry. Mill now felt as though another world were being opened up to him. This was what he’d missed in those arid years: beauty, emotion, passionate response. Harriet seemed to care about everything, approaching ideas with passion and not the calm logic he had been trained to exercise. He liked that about her. In him, some crucial element seemed missing, so that he pursued the good and true conscientiously, but without drawing upon his deepest vitality. He admired people who were spontaneous and enthusiastic, who believed what they believed with emotion, not just as the inevitable result of a logical train of thought. For this reason he adored the company of Harriet Taylor and never ceased to think of her as a better human being than himself. His life, which had seemed to him formless and purposeless, began to take shape and cohere around Harriet.
At Harriet’s request, they exchanged position papers on marriage, ‘the subject which, of all connected with human Institutions, is nearest to her happiness’.9 Harriet spilled out all the bitterness she had stored up in six years as a wife. ‘Women are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying – (some poor souls get it without the churchgoing. It’s the same way – they do not appear to be a bit worse than their honoured sisters).’ ‘One observes very few marriages where there is any real sympathy or enjoyment or companionship between the parties.’ And, she said,
Whether nature made a difference in the nature of men and women or not, it seems now that all men, with the exception of a few lofty minded, are sensualists more or less – women on the contrary are quite exempt from this trait.10
Attempting to write philosophy, Harriet was writing the story of her life. Marriage appeared to her no more than the transfer of a sexual commodity, with men getting all the pleasure and women getting all the ‘disagreeables and pains’. She heartily recommended that divorce be possible at will.
What Mill wrote for Mrs Taylor was a closely reasoned argument against the indissolubility of marriage which, characteristically, stated the case against divorce as persuasively as the case for it. I quote some of it, because I think it’s a remarkable piece of common sense and shows the temper of the man.
Most persons have but a very moderate capacity of happiness; but no person ever finds this out without experience, very few even with experience: and most persons are constantly wreaking that discontent which has its source internally, upon outward things. Expecting therefore in marriage a far greater degree of happiness than they commonly find: and knowing not that the fault is in their own scanty capabilities of happiness – they fancy they should have been happier with some one else: or at all events the disappointment becomes associated in their minds with the being in whom they had placed their hopes – and so they dislike one another for a time – and during that time they would feel inclined to separate: but if they remain united, the feeling of disappointment after a time goes off, and they pass their lives together with fully as much happiness as they could find either singly or in any other union, without having undergone the wearing of repeated and unsuccessful experiments.11
In his argument in favor of divorce, Mill assumes that happiness is unlikely to be found in a first choice, made when people are young and inexperienced and too much under the influence of their parents. Indeed, at any time of life, the statistical chances of finding happiness in marriage are slim. ‘Marriage is really, what it has been sometimes called, a lottery: and whoever is in a state of mind to calculate the chances calmly and value them correctly, is not at all likely to purchase a ticket. Those who marry after taking great pains about the matter, generally do but buy their disappointment dearer.’12 Therefore, assuming there are no children involved, we ought to be free to change partners until we find one who suits us.
Mill saw that the problem of the marriage laws was inextricably tied with the position of women. They did not regulate a union of equals, but of master and slave, protector and dependant. Bad as they were, they were better than a state of nature in which man, relying upon his physical superiority, could simply pick up a woman and drop her when he chose. Whereas Harriet saw the marriage contract as binding essentially upon the wife, requiring her to supply sexual favours on demand, Mill saw it binding essentially upon the husband, requiring him to stay with his wife even after his appetite for her is sated and he wishes to wander to fresher sexual fields. The marriage laws, he said, were shaped ‘by sensualists, for sensualists and to bind sensualists’, and the most important thing shared by Mill’s essay and Mrs Taylor’s, after their belief in marriage as a contract between equals which should be breakable like any other contract, is their contempt for sensuality. If most people married for the right reasons, for intellectual and emotional companionship, rather than for reasons of physical desire, there would be no reason why law should have to set limits on the freedom of uniting and separating.
To understand the story of Mill’s affair with Harriet Taylor one must appreciate the disgust for sex which marriage had left her with, the low estimation of sexual activity which they shared, and their conviction that in each other they had found the highest companionship of which human beings were capable, a love compounded only of spirit and intellect, with no earthly dross, a love at the high end of the platonic ladder – the greatest good life had to offer.
Poor John Taylor tried to act like a man of reason. He believed his wife’s assurances that her relationship with Mill was entirely innocent, founded on an intimacy of intellect alone. Still, he had cause for complaint, for if she was not sleeping with Mill, neither was she sl
eeping with her husband, boasting in later years that almost from the moment of meeting Mill she had been no more than a seelenfreundin, a soul mate, to the two men in her life. She told her husband with a brutal frankness she no doubt considered philosophic candour that she had found with Mill a companionship she had been missing with him and that she loved Mill more than she loved him.
Once, he asked her to ‘renounce sight’ of Mill, and she agreed to do so. She wrote Mill a farewell letter, and he wrote back a heartbroken letter of compliance in French, a language which seemed to him more appropriate than English for discussing matters of the heart. But the solution was to be neither so dramatic nor so simple – and certainly not quick. Harriet found that she could not do without her friend, and her husband could not bear to make her unhappy. Gradually things returned to the way they had been, with Mill in the role of sanctioned platonic lover. He was at the Taylors’ house almost every night of the week. He relinquished Wednesday, because that was the night the Taylors received company and he would then have to share Harriet with others. On the other nights, Mr Taylor frequently went to his club in order to get out of their way.
In this situation, the husband about whom so little is known probably gave the most and got the least of the three. Insofar as he comes across through his letters, he is always puzzled, always trying to understand his wife’s behaviour and delicacies of sensibility. Harriet gave him to understand pretty clearly that she and John Mill were made of finer stuff than he was, that their thinking was very advanced indeed and that a junior partner in a wholesale drug firm, however prosperous, would have to run hard to keep up with them. So he ran and ran. And the men in his club along with many others laughed at him, not appreciating the fine distinctions of his wife’s behaviour as he had been trained to do.
At last, Taylor reached the point of preferring to lose Harriet rather than enduring the humiliation of her liaison with Mill – however innocent. He made an ultimatum. If Harriet would not end her friendship with Mill, he would like a separation. Harriet agreed to the separation. She would go alone to Paris for six months. She would decide whether to spend her future with her husband, with Mill, or perhaps by herself in Paris. This was the moment of ultimate decision. If ever Harriet were to leave her husband and take the revolutionary step of living with Mill, she would have done it in 1833. It would have been daring, but Harriet Taylor and John Mill were daring people. They endorsed Robert Owen’s radical definition of chastity as sexual intercourse with affection, prostitution as sexual intercourse without it. They did not, in thinking about sexual conduct, ‘consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject so entirely personal’.13
Mill was considerably more reluctant than Mrs Taylor to commit an unforgivable social sin. ‘What ought to be so much easier to me than her, is in reality more difficult – costs harder struggle – to part company with the opinion of the world, and with my former modes of doing good in it.’14 Farewell to reputation, farewell to all influence if he went off publicly with Harriet. As unworthy a goal as living for reform seemed to him in 1826, living for love seemed equally unworthy in 1833. He would be reduced to being ‘obscure and insignificant’. Recklessly, he confessed his fear to Harriet. ‘Good heaven,’ she replied. ‘Have you at last arrived at fearing to be “obscure & insignificant”! What can I say to that but “by all means pursue your brilliant and important career”. Am I one to choose to be the cause that the person I love feels himself reduced to “obscure & insignificant”! Good God what has the love of two equals to do with making obscure & insignificant.’15 She called his reluctance to destroy his own career little more than ‘common place vanity’. No wonder this imperious woman made Mill feel that at last he was alive. Her outrage is wholly silly – and wholly irresistible – to anyone who responds, as Mill did, to pure energy and passion.
Harriet thought she could bring herself to risk the scandal of running off with Mill, but would he, after all, be any better than her husband? Upon arriving in Paris, she felt a burst of gratitude and affection for Mr Taylor, who, considering his limitations, was behaving remarkably well. (He was, of course, paying for everything.) Were she and Mill really suited? They had spent so little time together, and, close as they had been, were so restrained in their dealings. Not long after she went to Paris, Mill joined her there – breaking his promise to Carlyle to spend his vacation with him in Craigenputtock. It was Duty, he assured Carlyle, to ‘a person who of all persons alive I am under the greatest obligation’. They spent two weeks together in perfect companionship. ‘We never could have been so near, so perfectly intimate, in any former circumstances – we never could have been together as we have been in innumerable smaller relations and concerns – we never should have spoken of all things, in all frames of mind with so much freedom and unreserve.’ It was probably at this time that a French friend of the Carlyles saw Mill and Mrs Taylor eating grapes off the same bunch ‘like love birds’. The result of this fortnight was that Harriet’s doubts were put to rest. She was convinced they could live together happily, were in fact more suited to ‘that perfect than for this imperfect companionship’.16
The discovery was perhaps academic, since the barrier to their spending their lives together – Harriet’s husband – still existed and still was a barrier. Harriet wrote to him frequently, letters which expressed the affection she insisted she had always felt for him. She got carried away as she wrote. She was more affectionate, more exuberant than she could bring herself to be in his presence. Mr Taylor was delighted with her letters and believed he had won her back. Tolerance had been the right strategy; absence had made the heart grow fonder. Mill was forced to explain it all to the bewildered Reverend Fox, who was trying to keep track of this domestic pas de trois from London. ‘Because her letters to Mr Taylor express the strong affection she has always felt, and he is no longer seeing, every day, proof of her far stronger feeling for another, he thinks the affection has come back – he might have seen it quite as plainly before; only he refused to believe it. I have seen it, and felt its immense power over her…. Her affection for him, which has always been the principle, is now the sole obstacle to our being together – for the present there seems absolutely no prospect of that obstacle’s being got over. She believes – & she knows him better than any of us can – that it would be the breaking up of his whole future life – that she is determined never to be the cause of.’17 Mill was not the person to sweep her off. Taylor was not the person to coerce her. If any of the three was capable of extreme action, it was Harriet, and it was probably not in her interests to act extremely. The situation was rich with material for thought as it was!
The triangle is a peculiarly stable arrangement, and Harriet Taylor was not unusual in finding deep satisfaction in being the apex between two men. Nor was she unique in thinking that her husband’s life would go to pieces if she left him. But rarely has so much speculative care, so much seeming reason, gone into deliberations about the conduct that ought to follow upon a premise of passion. Systematically, philosophically, they considered whether Mrs Taylor should leave her husband and live with Mill. Bringing to the drama of their own lives all the scrupulous consideration they devoted to theoretical problems of justice in society, Mrs Taylor and Mill determined that nothing could justify so great an injury to Mr Taylor except the clearest perception that it would not only guarantee their happiness but that either or both of them would be insupportably unhappy if they did not live together. Here is the Utilitarians’ greatest happiness principle applied to personal ethics with a stoical twist: how is the greatest quantity of unhappiness to be avoided? These people of strong will and reason and not negligible passions decided at last that the least unhappiness would result from Harriet’s staying with Taylor if she could continue to enjoy the company of Mill. It would frustrate and irritate all three of them but would create utter misery in no one. So persuasively did Harriet state the case to her husband that he agreed he had been selfish before and vowed to think less ab
out himself and more about others in the future. He would allow her to see Mill if she would agree to keep up the appearance of marriage. In other words, after all the agonised thought and talk, they decided to continue exactly as they had been, with Taylor resigned to being no more than a ‘friend and companion’ to his wife.
You have to hand it to Harriet. She had a solid husband against whose placidity her own wit could shine all the more dazzlingly. Out of an uncomfortable marriage in which she felt sexually oppressed she had constructed a situation in which she had her husband’s support, both emotional and financial, without paying the sexual debt she so much loathed. She had the luxury of thinking she was sacrificing her happiness for his. She had one of the most brilliant men in London as her intimate and devoted friend, and she had him convinced she was making a sacrifice for his sake, too. She had the love of her three children, who adored her, no doubt, for the same reasons Mill did – for her clarity and firmness, combined with warmth and spontaneity. She was an excellent mother and, throughout all these complicated domestic manoeuvres, retained the reputation of being an excellent mother. Precariously, she even had her respectability. This was evidently a woman of extraordinary talents, as John Mill always said.
Of course they were talked about, by no one more than that enthusiastic gossip Thomas Carlyle, who considered himself, in those years, a good friend of Mill. But although the two men had corresponded since 1831, exchanging long letters on a more or less monthly basis, and although Mill had even agreed to visit Craigenputtock in 1833 (the visit which had to be cancelled in favour of Mrs Taylor and Paris), he had told Carlyle nothing about Mrs Taylor, which made both the Carlyles all the more shocked when they moved to London in 1834 and heard about the matter. Carlyle reported to his brother:
