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.