Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Mrs Austin had a tragical story of [Mill’s] having fallen desperately in love with some young philosophic beauty (yet with the innocence of two sucking doves), and being lost to all his friends and to himself.

  And Jane less graciously reported that ‘a young Mrs Taylor, tho’ encumbred with a husband and children, has ogled John Mill successfully so that he was desperately in love’.18

  When they were introduced to Mrs Taylor, both Carlyles found her fascinating. ‘She is a living romance heroine, of the clearest insight, of the royalest volition, very interesting, of questionable destiny.’ Jane paid a call on her and they dined at her house, in the company also of W. J. Fox and John Taylor, ‘an obtuse, most joyous natured man, the pink of social hospitality’. But Platonica – as Carlyle took to calling Mrs Taylor – did not wear well. Her manner was a little too regal for the Carlyles. She affected a ‘sultana high-mindedness’ they did not care for, along with a ‘girlish petulance’. They did not approve the liberal politics of Mrs Taylor and her friends, whom Carlyle called snidely ‘friends of the species’. ‘Jane and I often say: “Before all mortals, beware of a friend of the species!” Most of these people are very indignant at marriage and the like; and frequently are obliged to divorce their wives, or be divorced: for though the world is already blooming (or is one day to do it) in everlasting “happiness of the greatest number” these people’s own houses (I always find) are little Hells of improvidence, discord, unreason.’19

  Gradually they came to worry about their friend Mill and to distrust Platonica, ‘a dangerous looking woman’, said Jane now, ‘engrossed with a dangerous passion’, between whom and herself no ‘useful relation’ could grow. When the terrible accidental burning of the manuscript occurred, the Carlyles seem to have transferred any irritation they might reasonably have felt against Mill to Mrs Taylor. She was ruining Mill’s life, one of the clearest signs of which, in Jane’s estimation, was that his intellect was failing in its strongest point – his ‘implicit admiration and subjection’ to her husband. Nevertheless, in one point of friendship they never wavered; perhaps the more easily because of the nature of their own relationship, they never doubted that Mill’s relationship with Mrs Taylor was technically innocent.

  Is it not strange, this pining away into desiccation and nonentity of our poor Mill, if it be so, as his friends all say, that his charmer is the cause of it? I have not seen any riddle of human life which I could so ill form a theory of. They are innocent says Charity: they are guilty says Scandal: then why in the name of wonder are they dying broken-hearted? One thing only is painfully clear to me, that poor Mill is in a bad way.20

  Poor Mill was in fact consumptive, and a trip to the Continent would later miraculously arrest the disease. But Thomas Carlyle, out of an inability to comprehend a man’s devotion to a woman as anything but besotted and comic infatuation, out of jealousy because Mrs Taylor had secured the very friend he had wanted, and partly out of congenital malice, which coloured almost all his observations about his contemporaries, contributed to the popular version of Mill’s romance with Mrs Taylor the tale of a naïve philosopher ruined by a femme fatale.

  None behave with a greater appearance of guilt than people who are convinced of their own virtue. Mill and Mrs Taylor tried to go about London together openly, but they caused too many shocks. John Roebuck, for example, watched them arrive at a dinner party at the home of Charles Buller’s mother. Mill entered with Mrs Taylor on his arm. ‘The manner of the lady, the evident devotion of the gentleman, soon attracted universal attention, and a suppressed titter went round the room.’21 Roebuck, who was one of Mill’s closest friends, went to his office the next day to beg him to relinquish his compromising entanglement. Mill refused ever to speak to him again. Mill’s father, the old Utilitarian, told his son plainly that he was coveting another man’s wife, which was as bad as coveting his goods. John Mill replied that his feelings for Mrs Taylor were no different from what they would be for a competent man, and no more was ever said within his family about his closest friend.

  John Taylor once again rescued the situation by taking a house for Harriet in the country, where she might see Mill in privacy, and from which Mr Taylor could more easily absent himself than from his London home. In as much secrecy as could be mustered, Mill regularly went out to Kingston or Walton and spent weekends with Mrs Taylor. In secrecy they travelled together abroad, usually in search of health, which was failing in both of them. Sometimes Mr Taylor would escort his wife as far as Paris, where he would turn her over to the protection of Mr Mill. On one trip, in 1836, they were accompanied by Harriet’s children and Mill’s young brothers. The youngsters were left in Switzerland while Mill and Mrs Taylor continued on to Italy, spending two months on the bay of Genoa. In his autobiography, in a passage heavily worked over by Harriet and written at her suggestion, Mill said of those years, ‘I … was greatly indebted to the strength of character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations liable to be put on the frequency of my visits to her while generally living apart from Mr Taylor, and on our occasionally travelling together, though in all other respects our conduct during those years gave not the slightest ground for any other supposition than the true one, that our relation to each other at that time was one of strong affection and confidential intimacy only.’22

  In their own time, their innocence was not self-evident, and scandal led Mill and Mrs Taylor to withdraw almost completely from society throughout the 1840s. In that difficult decade, they worked together closely on the Principles of Political Economy and other of Mill’s writing. Mrs Taylor had stopped writing, finding it more satisfying to work with – and through – Mill. He was so grateful for her help with the Principles of Political Economy that he wanted to include in the book a public acknowledgement:

  to

  mrs john taylor

  as the most eminently qualified

  of all persons known to the author

  either to originate or to appreciate

  speculations on social improvement

  this attempt to explain and diffuse ideas

  many of which were first learned from herself,

  is

  with the highest respect and regard

  dedicated.23

  It was perhaps exaggerated; it was certainly indiscreet. Harriet consulted with her husband about whether or not to accept the dedication and was surprised to encounter one of his rare bursts of irritation. John Taylor found dedications generally in bad taste but this one betrayed a want of taste and tact which he could not have believed possible. ‘It is not only “a few common people” who will make vulgar remarks, but all who know any of us – The dedication will revive recollections now forgotten and will create observations and talk that cannot but be extremely unpleasant to me.’ It was never pleasant to differ from Harriet, and he regretted the vexation his opinion caused her (she wanted to accept the dedication), but this infraction was so serious he was willing to risk her displeasure. For all that, the dedication was inserted into all copies given to friends.24

  In December of 1848, Harriet decided to go to the south of France for the winter, partly for her health, but partly to avoid her brother, with whom she did not get along, who was visiting London from Australia. Mr Taylor was very sorry when he heard her plans. He was not feeling well himself and wished to have her less drastically away from him. But Harriet didn’t waver. ‘I can assure you I do not do it for my pleasure, but exceedingly the contrary, & only after the most anxious thought – Indeed I am half killed by intense anxiety. The near relationships to persons of the most opposite principles to my own produces excessive embarrassments.’ She meant her brother. If she stayed she would be sure to get into difficulties about him which she hadn’t the strength to bear. ‘Your saying that you are sorry I am going has given me ever since I read your note so intense a headache, that I can scarcely see to write – However it is only one of the vexations I have to bear and perhaps everybody has.’25

>   Harriet felt everything she did was rationally justified, so that when, the following March in Pau, she received a letter from her husband saying that he was sick and asking her to come home to him, she declined to do so on the grounds that Mr Mill was coming to Europe in the middle of April for his health and she had promised to meet him. Nothing but a ‘feeling of right’, she said, would keep her from returning home immediately. She was quite certain that her obligation to Mill, who was suffering from a loss of vision and inability to write, was greater than her obligation to her husband, who was in fact dying of cancer, although she could not have known it. When she finally returned home, he was close to death. For two months she nursed him, attending him constantly. ‘There is nothing on earth I would not do for him and there is nothing on earth which can be done.’26 Perhaps she felt for once that she had not treated him uniformly well. But she had always been fond of him and he of her. In their way, they were platonic lovers, too. In July of 1849 he died, leaving her all his property.

  The next day Mill and Mrs Taylor began to discuss whether Mill should appear at the funeral. She wrote:

  My first impression about your coming was a feeling of ‘better not’ grounded on the sort of distance which of late existed. But now on much consideration it seems to me in the first place that coming is certainly thought a mark of respect? Is it not? and that therefore your not doing so will be a manque of that. Then again the public in some degree and his public too have heard … of our intimacy … Does not therefore absence seem much more noticeable than coming? On the other hand nothing is more true of common world than ‘out of sight out of mind.’27

  It is typical of how the best in them sometimes slid over into being the worst. Is this an example of the examined life? Or is it an example of the absence of something spontaneous which lends grace to action, whatever action is taken?

  Daring in her thought, Harriet was in some ways deeply conventional in behaviour. Two years, the conventional period of mourning, elapsed after John Taylor’s death before Harriet agreed, conventionally, to become Mrs Mill. That marriage was the course for them was not completely obvious. They wanted to live together, to end the perpetual coming and going which aggravated every minor difference between them. Marriage, however, had dismal associations for Harriet, and both of them disliked the institution, believing it legalised an essentially immoral transfer of all power and property to the man. As they moved closer to marriage in 1852, Mill produced a remarkable document disclaiming the rights which would be conferred on him as a husband.

  Being about, if I am so happy as to obtain her consent, to enter into the marriage relation with the only woman I have ever known, with whom I would have entered into that state; and the whole character of the marriage relation as constituted by law being such as both she and I entirely and conscientiously disapprove, for this amongst other reasons, that it confers upon one of the parties to the contract, legal power and control over the person, property and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will; I, having no means of legally divesting myself of these odious powers … feel it my duty to put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage, in so far as conferring such powers; and a solemn promise never in any case or under any circumstances to use them. And in the event of marriage between Mrs Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention and the condition of the engagement between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such marriage had taken place; and I absolutely disclaim and repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of such marriage.28

  Harriet would have understood that by these dry and graceless sentences Mill repudiated not only property rights conferred on him by marriage but the sexual rights which had made her first marriage such a source of misery. Any sexual activity between them would not be a matter of rights and debts.

  They were married quietly at a registry office outside London with two of Harriet’s children the only witnesses. Mill signed the registry with his customary signature, ‘J S Mill’, only to be told that his full name was required, necessitating that he squeeze in the omitted letters and making his signature look in the end rather silly. The incident preyed on his mind so much that it is hard not to take it seriously. Sometime later he formally wrote to his wife explaining the mistake. The letter itself served, it would seem, a quasi-legal function, as they were living together at the time he wrote it. He begged her to re-marry him so that no one could doubt the propriety of their marriage. As an administrator and legislative reformer, he had great respect for the letter of the law, and he was so worried about being married that he was worried he wasn’t married at all.

  Mill had seemed a man entirely without anger. According to his friend and biographer, the logician Alexander Bain, he never got into a rage, and all hatred and abuse was, in Bain’s strange phrase, ‘crucified’ in him.29 His strongest sign of emotion in controversy was the chuckle. But now, upon his marriage, he started lashing out at some of the people he had been closest to, not on his own account, to be sure, but on Harriet’s. Until the day of his wedding, Mill had continued to live with his mother and two of his sisters, yet he broke with them completely because they did not immediately pay a call upon Harriet when he announced his engagement. His anger was as unreasonable and as unreasoning as the sudden movement of long-lying magma in the eruption of a volcano. It devastated the devoted ladies in Kensington, who had never been anything but proud of and compliant to the man who had been beloved head of their family since James Mill’s death. In twenty years of friendship, Mill and Mrs Taylor had lived a furtive existence, hiding their meetings, misleading people about their travel plans, enduring malicious gossip. Perhaps the anger had pooled, waiting for expression until they achieved the respectability of marriage. The reasonable man who could not get angry, the man unschooled in the expression of emotions, was now swept away by anger as years before he had been swept away by love – so much so that in his anger as in his love he seems like a bad actor trying to play a lover, trying to play an angry man.

  One of the people who was surprised by Mill and Mrs Taylor’s decision to marry was Mill’s younger brother, George, who was engaged in the silk trade in Madeira. He admired his eldest brother and the woman he had heard about. He admired their principles, which he thought included a cavalier disregard for the forms of society. He did not see what two such people, who scorned conventional institutions, had to gain from marriage. They had enjoyed each other’s companionship for many years without being married. (George Eliot would encounter the same disappointed response from free-thinking friends when, after her unconventional liaison with Lewes was ended at last by his death, she married J. W. Cross.)

  A month after his marriage, Mill wrote to his brother without announcing the change in his life. George heard the news eventually from his mother and sisters in London and politely wrote a note to his new sister-in-law and one to her son Haji. He mentioned his surprise. He said he didn’t understand why they had done something so at variance with their principles. He didn’t know what changes, if any, their union would make in their mode of life, but he wished them well. In light of the document Mill wrote disclaiming his rights as a husband, George’s befuddlement may seem understandable. But no ambivalence about the institution of marriage showed in Mill’s savage reply to his brother.

  I have long ceased to be surprised at any want of good sense or good manners in what proceeds from you – you appear to be too thoughtless or too ignorant to be capable of either – but such want of good feeling, together with such arrogant assumption, as are shown in your letters to my wife and to Haji I was not prepared for…. You were ‘surprised’, truly, at our marriage and do not ‘know enough of the circumstances to be able to form an opinion on the subject.’ Who asks you to form an opinion? An opinion on what? Do men usually when they marry consu
lt the opinion of a brother twenty years younger than themselves? or at my age, of any brother or person at all? But though you form no ‘opinion’ you presume to catechise Haji respecting his mother, and to call her to account before your tribunal for the conformity between her conduct and her principles.30

  Either Mill is firing a cannon to kill a mosquito, or there is more involved here than might at first appear. I would suggest there is a buried issue, nothing less than the meaning Mill wished to be drawn from the story of his relations with Harriet, the meaning of the story of his life.

  It requires little reading between the lines to see that George assumed that their relationship had always been sexual. He admired them as sexual radicals – on the lines of Shelley – a hero and heroine of free love, flouting marriage, flouting conventional sanctions. Nothing could have been further from the moral Mill and Harriet wished to be drawn from their story. They had no desire to be seen as people who believed in acting on passion. Why, but for their rational concern for John Taylor’s feelings, would they have deprived themselves of the pleasure of each other’s company for all those years? They did not want to be viewed as the philosophic heirs of Shelley, with his absurd and childish romanticism, but as advanced in a manner more distinctly modern, with a greater emphasis on restraint, moral fibre, progress through self-discipline, a manner, if I may say so, more Victorian. Like a hardworking but not very bright schoolboy, George Mill had studied his lessons but had come up with the wrong interpretation, turning a complex and subtle meaning into a vulgar and simplistic one, and Mill came down on him with the frustrated anger of the teacher whose point has not gotten across.