John Stuart Mill His Life and Works by Herbert Spencer

Author:Herbert Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Standard Publications, Incorporated

If Mr. Mill did not love poetry with a purely disinterested love, but with an eye to its moral causes and effects, neither did he study character from mere delight in observing the varieties of mankind. Armand Carrel the Republican journalist, Alfred de Vigny the Royalist poet, Coleridge the Conservative, and Bentham the Reformer, are taken up and expounded, not as striking individuals, but as types of influences and tendencies. This habit of keeping in view mind in the abstract, or men in the aggregate, may have been in a large measure a result of his education by his father; but I am inclined to think that he was of too ardent and pre-occupied a disposition, perhaps too much disposed to take favorable views of individuals, to be very sensitive to differences of character. It should not, however, be forgotten that in one memorable case he showed remarkable discrimination. Soon after Mr. Tennyson published his second issue of poems, Mr. Mill reviewed them in "The Westminster Review" for July, 1835, ancl> witn his usual earnestness and generosity, applied all his powers to making a just estimate of the new aspirant. To have reprinted this among his miscellaneous writings might have seemed rather boastful, as claiming credit for the first full recognition of a great poet: still it is a very remarkable review; and one would hope it will not be omitted if there is to be any further collection of his casual productions. I shall quote two .passages which seem obvious enough now, but which required true insight, as well as courageous generosity, to write them in 1835 :—

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