¹ Mill, John Stuart, Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. Robson, John M. and Stillinger, Jack, Toronto, 1981Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, i. 137Google Scholar; hereafter cited as CW, i.Google Scholar

² ‘Sympathy and Self-Interest: The Crisis in Mill's Mental History’, Utilitas, i (1989), 276.Google Scholar

³ See, for example, Sharpless, F. Parvin, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill, The Hague, 1967Google Scholar; Robson, John M., The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill, London, 1968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴ Eisenach, Eldon J., ‘Self-Reform as Political Reform in the Writings of John Stuart Mill’, Utilitas, i (1989), 247.Google Scholar

⁵ Mill, , ‘Sedgwick's Discourse’, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1969Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, x. 60.Google Scholar

⁶ CW, i. 153.Google Scholar

⁷ Fox, Caroline, Memories of Old Friends, ed. Pym, Horace M., London, 1822, p. 113Google Scholar. Quoted by Stillinger, Jack, John Stuart Mill: Autobiography, Oxford, 1971, p. xvi.Google Scholar

⁸ Poetry and Philosophy: a Study in the Thought of John Stuart Mill, London, Hutchinson, 1961, p. 95.Google Scholar

⁹ The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, ed. Mineka, Francis E., 2 vols., Toronto, 1963Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xii. 42.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Mill, , ‘Coleridge’, Essays on Ethics Religion and Society, CW, x. 121.Google Scholar

¹¹ Alexander, Edward, John Stuart Mill: Literary Essays, New York, 1967, p. xv.Google Scholar

¹² One instance of such instability appears in Mill's consideration of the value of speculative freedom. On the one hand Mill asserts that ‘in the present age of transition, everything must be subordinate to freedom of inquiry’ (Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 77)Google Scholar; but less than two years later, in a letter to Carlyle, he may be found maintaining a contradictory position: ‘I have not any great notion of the advantage of what the “free-discussion” men call the “collision of opinions”, it being my creed that Truth is sown and germinates in the mind itself, and is not struck out suddenly like fire from a flint by knocking another hard body against it’ (Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 153).Google Scholar

¹³ CW, i. 163.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Alexander, , p. xxiii.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Sharpless, , p. 79.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Woolford, John, ‘Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism’, in The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Shattock, Joanne and Wolff, Michael, Leicester, 1982, p. 121.Google Scholar

¹⁷ The Letters of George Eliot, ed. Haight, G. S., 9 vols. New Haven, 1954–1978, iii. 111Google Scholar. Quoted on p. xxiv.

¹⁸ CW, i. 414.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Smith's concept of sympathy is recapitulated in the article by Green cited above; Armstrong, Isobel, in Victorien, Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830–1870, London, 1972Google Scholar, discusses the prevelance of sympathy as a term in nineteenth-century critical debate (see especially, pp. 9–11). A more immediate incitement to think about sympathy for nineteenth-century writers than that provided by eighteenth-century philosophy was available in Carlyle's essay ‘Biography’ in which Carlyle maintains that the narrative of a life stirs ‘the Sympathy of mortal hearts into action’; it furnishes an opportunity to ‘know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery; nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on!’ (‘Biography’, Frazers Magazine, v [1832,] 253)Google Scholar. For Mill's enthusiastic reception of the article (he claimed to have ‘derived from it more edification and more comfort, than from all else that I have read for years past’), see Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 104Google Scholar. I will argue that, despite the fulsomeness of Mill's reception, he did not in fact adopt Carlyle's form of belief in art's capacity to engender sympathy.

²⁰ CW, i. 344.Google Scholar

²¹ Alexander, , pp. xxviii and xxix.Google Scholar

²² CW, i.Google Scholar, this and the following quotation are on p. 147.

²³ Robson, , p. 26Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., p. 26.

²⁵ CW, i. 151Google Scholar

²⁶ Ibid., 35.

²⁷ Robson discusses the relationship between self-interest and altruism in depth in chapter 5 of his book and has more to say about sympathy in Mill's ethical thought (see especially pp. 128–39). He argues that ‘the individual in Mill's ethic advances social utility primarily by concentration on his own perfection’ (p. 128), but that this belief is complicated by the fact that for Mill (in contrast to Bentham) ‘the individual is not only self-seeking but also altruistic’. A vexed relationship in Mill's thought on this point is reflected by Robson's analysis, so that he comes near to contradiction in also claiming that ‘social utility begins, therefore, not in a careful calculation of motives and deterrents, though such a calculation is useful, but finds its origin in sympathy’. And ‘moral excellence’ is caught up with the same concept, being ‘founded (as has been seen in the discussion of poetry) on sympathy, although sympathy itself is related to individual pleasures and pains’ (p. 133). The parenthesis again skews the contents of the writings on literature.

²⁸ A prima facie case that Mill's moral philosophy is readily intelligible without recourse to an analysis of his response to poetry is provided by Fred Berger's recent and comprehensive discussion of Mill's ethical thought which makes no reference to literature and its functions. This absence becomes particularly telling in the pages explicitly devoted to examining the role of sympathy in Mill's work. See Happiness, Justice and Freedom: The Moral and Political Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, Berkeley, 1984, pp. 19–23.Google Scholar

²⁸ Mill, , ‘Bentham’, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, CW, x. 112.Google Scholar

³⁰ Ibid., 113.

³¹ Ibid., 92. Mill is probably influenced here by Wordsworth's definition of the poet's ‘disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves’. (‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1800)Google Scholar, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Owen, W. J. B. and Smyser, J. W., 3 vols., Oxford, 1974, i. 138).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, CW, x. 92.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ Mill, , ‘Coleridge’, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, CW, x. 134–5.Google Scholar

³⁵ Martineau, James, ‘John Stuart Mill’, The National Review, ix (1859), 490–1Google Scholar. Marti-neau goes on to defend his decision to classify Mill as an ‘Idealist’ rather than a ‘Materialist’, arguing that ‘the truth is… that he is both, and presents, in different parts of his doctrine, two opposite sides, which often practically co-exist, whether or not they are philosophically coherent’ (496).

³⁶ Ibid., 495–6.

³⁷ CW, i. 348Google Scholar. Mill's definition is discussed in Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, New York, 1953, pp. 23–5Google Scholar. For objections to its ‘hopelessly “romantic”’ concentration on the lyric form, see Jack, Ian, The Poet and his Audience, Cambridge, 1984, p. 169.Google Scholar

³⁸ Two excellent sources of thinking about the context of early nineteenth-century critical thought, a context in which it is vital to place Mill's ideas, are Butler, Marilyn's Peacock Displayed: A Satirist in his Context, London, 1979Google Scholar, especially chapter 8, and the early chapters of Bromwich, David's A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost, Harvard, 1989Google Scholar; for the terms of later critical discussion see Armstrong, , Victorian ScrutiniesGoogle Scholar, and Woolford.

³⁸ Coleridge, , Biographia Literaria, ed. Watson, George, London, 1975Google Scholar. This and the following quotation, p. 180.

⁴⁰ Letter of 27 October 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Gittings, Robert, Oxford, 1975, p. 157Google Scholar. Compare Keats, 's earlier reservation (pp. 60–1)Google Scholar: ‘for the sake of a few fine imaginative or domestic passages… are we to be bullied into a certain Philosophy engendered in the whims of an Egotist… Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself but with its subject’.

⁴¹ Gittings, , p. 48.Google Scholar

⁴² For example, within weeks of protesting about Wordsworth's bullying, he is again regretting the ‘bad impression’ left by Wordsworth of ‘egotism, Vanity and bigotry’, but this time adding a crucial saving distinction: ‘he is a great Poet if not a philosopher’ (Gittings, , p. 69).Google Scholar

⁴³ ‘Observations on Mr Wordsworth's poem The Excursion’ (1817), The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. Howe, P. P., 21 vols., London, 1930, iv. 112.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Ibid., 113.

⁴⁵ Romantic responses to Shakespeare are discussed in Parker, G. F., Johnson's Shake speare, Oxford, 1989Google Scholar, and throughout Bate, Jonathan, Shakespeare and the English Romantic Imagination, Oxford, 1986Google Scholar. On Hazlitt's reading of the history of English poetry (which converges with Coleridge's) as one in which ‘Shakespeare stands for dramatic poetry, range of character, and an effortless immediacy of effect’ and Milton ‘for personal (or “egotistical”) poetry, intensity of character, and a successful striving for effect’, see Bromwich, David's introduction to the selections from Hazlitt in his anthology, Romantic Critical Essays, Cambridge, 1987, p. 82Google Scholar. Bromwich suggests that Hazlitt's historical narrative about this tradition ‘had a lasting influence on Keats’.

⁴⁶ ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Romantic Critical Essays, p. 228.Google Scholar

⁴⁷ ‘Observations on Mr Wordsworth's Poem The Excursion’, 117.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Butler, , Peacock Displayed, p. 298.Google Scholar

⁴⁹ Ibid., pp. 303–4.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 312.

⁵¹ See A Choice of Inheritance, pp. 70–1Google Scholar: ‘Wordsworth's poetry comes back continually to a favourite plot: a long-unchallenged loyalty, broken by sudden betrayal, and renewed under the aspect of time-honoured practices’.

⁵² Ibid., p. 77.

⁵³ Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 80–1.Google Scholar

⁵⁴ ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, p. 126.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ CW, i. 356.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ These ideas first appear in ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’; see CW, i. 356 and 364Google Scholar; in the Tennyson review Mill further explores the thought that ‘every poet who has extensively or permanently influenced mankind, has been a great thinker’, see ibid., 413–17.

⁵⁷ See Cairns, John C.'s ‘Introduction’Google Scholar to Mill, John Stuart, Essays on French History and Historians, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xx. pp. lv–lx.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 148.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Ibid., 78, 134 and 145.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 133.

⁶¹ For an account of Mill's journalism which concentrates on his Examiner writing in the years 1830–34, see Ann P. Robson and Robson, John M., ‘“Impetuous eagerness”: the young Mill's radical journalism’, in The Viciarian Periodical Press, pp. 59–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶² ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, p. 138.Google Scholar

⁶³ CW, i. 349.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Mill, , ‘Bentham’, Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, CW, x. 111.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, p. 120.Google Scholar

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 124.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 148.

⁸⁸ Abrams, (p. 321)Google Scholar speculates that Mill's distinction between poetry and eloquence is an attempt to save poetry from the ‘distrust of rhetoricy’, which in Bentham overflowed into distrust of poetry. Mill's hostility to eloquence can also be referred more concretely to his disenchantment with contemporary means of political persuasion.

⁶⁹ CW, i. 349.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Compare Mill's mistrust of the ‘commercial spirit’ in England, which he sees as a disposition within public life to disregard the ‘the applause which “leads to nothing”’, and to aspire instead to ‘the applause which has exchangeable value’ (Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 32–3).Google Scholar

⁷¹ The essay was revised for republication in both the 1859 and 1867 editions of Dissertations and Discussions.

⁷² CW, i. 348.Google Scholar

⁷³ Mill, John Stuart, Journals and Debating Speeches, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xxvi. 441.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ Mill, John Stuart, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1984Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xxi. 251.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ Ibid., 251 and 254.

⁷⁶ Ibid.

⁷⁷ Ibid., 254.

⁷⁸ Mill, , ‘Utilitarianism’, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, CW, x. 231.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ A System of Logic, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1974Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, viii. 842Google Scholar. Compare the definition of self-culture in Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 101.Google Scholar

⁸⁰ Mill, , ‘On Liberty’, Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols., Toronto, 1977Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xviii. 264.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Mill, , ‘On the Present State of Literature’ (1827), Journals and Debating Speeches, CW, xxvi. 413.Google Scholar

⁸² See CW, i. 193, 197 and 253.Google Scholar

⁸³ Earlier Letters, CW, xii. 163 and 219Google Scholar; CW, i. 623Google Scholar (Early Draft, rejected leaves).

⁸⁴ Ibid., 251.

⁸⁵ Mill, , ‘Writings of Junius Redivivus [I]’, CW, i. 370Google Scholar. Matthew Arnold's poem ‘Self-Dependence’ confirms this idea by making the star an image of stoical immunity from weakening reliance on human comparison: ‘And with joy the stars perform their shining;/For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting/All the fever of some differing soul’ (The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, Kenneth, London, 1965, p. 143, Ils. 21–4Google Scholar. I am grateful to Cathryn Wilcox for pointing this poem in my direction). Mill's admiration for these gifted natures contrasts with his satirical contempt for Whewell's attempt to make his moral philosophy ‘hang self-balanced in space’ on the strength of self-evident truths (‘Whewell on Moral Philosophy’, Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, CW, x. 190)Google Scholar. For Mill's oppostion to Whewell and intuitionism, see Alan Ryan's introductory essay to Utilitarianism and Other Essays: J.S. Mill and Jeremy Bentham, London, 1987Google Scholar; his The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, London, 1970Google Scholar; and Schneewind, J. B., Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy, Oxford, 1977.Google Scholar