The World's Best Memoir Writing: The Literature of Life From St. Augustine to Gandhi, and From Pablo Picasso to Nelson Mandela by Eve Claxton

Author:Eve Claxton [Claxton, Eve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781402249518
Google: 1-PNqFOcZAsC
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2007-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty

Autobiography (1873) by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), English philosopher and political economist

As he describes in his autobiography, Mill was reading Greek at age three and by the age of eight he had absorbed a large proportion of the classics and English history. His father was a devotee of the political thinker Jeremy Bentham, and the young Mill was brought up to continue the work of Bentham”s staunch utilitarianism. But when he was twenty, Mill entered a period of prolonged dissatisfaction, with both himself and his mentors—he had begun to immerse himself in the Romantic poets and writers, and together with his natural inclination for enquiry, this led him to a period of crisis that lasted from 1826 to 1827, described below. The latter part of the Autobiography deals with his relationship with the social reformer, Harriet Taylor, whom he married in 1851.

It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin.” In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; 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.

At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did not. A night’s sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed consciousness of the woeful fact. I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes’ oblivion of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker and thicker. The lines in Coleridge’s “Dejection”—I was not then acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:

A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,

A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,

Which finds no natural outlet or relief In word, or sigh, or tear.

In vain I sought relief from my favourite books; those memorials of past nobleness and greatness, from which I had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out.

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