The unlikely similarity of J.S. Mill and Samuel Johnson.
Human happiness is the result of effort, but is not entirely within our control.
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It seems like an odd thing to say, but the two heroes I have written most about on this blog—Samuel Johnson and John Stuart Mill—are increasingly interconnected in my mind. How can this be? Johnson was a conservative, a literary critic, a church man, while Mill was a radical, a philosopher, and a secularist. These surface differences, which makes it easy to imagine them disagreeing vehemently if they ever met, are merely that: surface. Instead, as Mill said of Bentham and Coleridge, “they are connected by two of the closest bonds of association—resemblance, and contrast.”
First, they can meet on the safe ground of essay writing. Both men were inveterate essay writers, a habit and occupation that unites them by temperament more deeply than the easy agreement of principles or beliefs. Mill was an exceptional literary critic, and it is to be regretted that he didn’t give more time to this sort of work. As well as his famous essay on poetry, he was the first person to see Tennyson’s genius. And Johnson was a good economist. In the Adventurer No. 67, written twenty-three years before The Wealth of Nations, Johnson exposited many ideas of market economics: division of labour, market satisfaction of human desires, the moral improvement available under commercialism. Johnson enjoyed “the bustle of prosperous trade.” His Journey to the Western Islands has many economic observations.
There is also the question of prose. “The same person may be poet and logician, but he cannot be both in the same composition,” Mill wrote to Carlyle. And then,
prose is after all the language of business, & therefore is the language to do good by in an age when men’s minds are forcibly drawn to external effort . . . in bringing order out of disorder.
This is so Johnsonian. Boswell talks about Johnson loving business. Johnson refers frequently to his love of reason and order. And Johnsons’s periodic prose style was his method for achieving that. Eugene August says Mill takes a middle ground between poetry and logic, writing as a “logician-artist” whose ‘Bentham’ was deeply inspired by Carlyle’s essay about Johnson and Boswell.
In a letter to John Sterling in 1829, Mill said that friendship depended on idem velle, idem nolle—to want, and reject, the same ideas. This quote he seems to have taken from Boswell. Three years later he read Carlyle’s essay on Johnson and Boswell so often he practically memorised it. He copy was worn thin.
Reviewing a book about political philosophy, Mill quoted Johnson:
…when Dr. Johnson says that a man has not a moral right to think as he pleases, “because he ought to inform himself, and think justly,” Mr. Lewis says he must mean legal right; and adds other observations, proving that he has not even caught a glimpse of Johnson’s drift.
Over thirty years later, in On Liberty, Mill quoted the same section of Boswell, but starting a little later, where Johnson talks about martyrdom being necessary to establish religious truth. Of course, Mill and Johnson don’t agree about free speech, but Mill respected Johnson and had absorbed him deeply. In his review of Comte’s positivism, Mill wrote:
We think with Dr. Johnson, that he who has never denied himself anything which is not wrong, cannot be fully trusted for denying himself everything which is so.
Perhaps where they converge most significantly, at the core of both of their ideas, is the notion that human happiness is the result of effort, but is not entirely within our control. Mill never stops asserting that we have responsibility to improve ourselves, to improve each other. He was constantly in the vision of greatness of Ancient Greece, a culture he had been immersed in from, quite literally, his earliest memories. In his fifth review of Grote’s History of Greece he wrote about Plato:
He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind.
Mill took Plato as a model for his own ideas of reform—the renovation of the mind being essential to the reconstruction of society. But, more important, is his reliance on the ancient past. Johnson was a Latin scholar from a young age, constantly relied on Latin authors in his own work, and said in the Rambler No. 2,
What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put their reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imagine themselves giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased: and he that finds his way to reputation through all these obstructions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes besides his industry, his learning, or his wit.
Here is the spirit of ‘Bentham’ and ‘Coleridge’, two of Mill’s most important essays. Note, too, the interplay of nature and nurture, a subject that preoccupied Mill from at least his mental crisis onwards, and reshaped the way he thought about almost everything.
They share a temperament of “superior elevation”. Mill said he would rather be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. Johnson that a philosopher and a peasant may be equally satisfied but not equally happy.
Happiness consists in the multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. A peasant has not capacity for equal happiness with a philosopher.
I can think of no two people in English literature who offer, from their superior elevation, such multiplicity of agreeable consciousness. We may be peasants in comparison, but we can still find some happiness in their presence.
