He had from childhood taken pleasure in music.During the period of depression even music had lost its charm.As he revived,the charm gradually returned.Yet he teased himself by the reflection that,as the number of musical notes is limited,there must come a time when new Mozarts and Webers would no longer be possible.
This,he says,was like the fear of the Laputans that the sun would in time be burnt out,a fear,it may be remarked,which modern science has not diminished.He might have noticed that,as the number of combinations of twenty-six letters is finite,new Shakespeares and Dantes will become impossible.He observes,however,that this was connected with the 'only good point in his very unromantic and in no way honourable distress.'It showed an interest in the fortunes of the race as well as in his own,and therefore gave hopes that if he could see his way to better prospects of human happiness his depression might be finally removed.This state of mind made his reading of Wordsworth's Excursion in the autumn of 1828an important event in his life.
He could make nothing of Byron,whom he also studied for the first time.But Wordsworth appealed to the love of scenery,which was already one of his passions,and thus revealed to him the pleasure of tranquil contemplation and of an interest in the common feelings and destiny of human beings.From the famous Ode,too,he inferred that Wordsworth had gone through an experience like his own,had regretted the freshness of early life,and had found compensation by the path along which he could guide his reader.
The effect upon Mill of Wordsworth's poetry is remarkable,though I cannot here discuss the relation.Readers of the fourth book of the Excursion (called 'despondency corrected')may note how directly the poet applies his teaching to the philosopher.He asks,for example,whether men of science and those who have,analysed the thinking principle,are to become a 'degraded race',and declares that it could never be intended by nature 'That we should pore,and dwindle as we pore,Viewing al objects unremittingly In disconnexion dead and spiritless;And still dividing,and dividing still,Break down all grandeur,still unsatisfied With the perverse attempt,while littleness May yet become more little;waging thus An impious warfare with the very life Of our own souls!'
This is the precise equivalent of Mill's doctrine about the danger of the habit of analysis,and James Mill,if Wordsworth had ever read him,would have made an admirable example for the excellent pedlar.
It is characteristic of Mill that he does not explicitly attribute this mental crisis to the obvious physical cause.As Professor Bain tells us,he would never admit that hard work could injure anybody.Disbelief in that danger is only too common with hard workers.Mill intimates that his dejection was occasioned by a 'low state of nerves,'but adds that this was one of the accidents to which every one is occasionally liable.(19)A man would at least be more liable to it who,like Mill,had been kept in a state of severe intellectual tension from his earliest infancy,and who had gone through such labours as the editing Bentham's Rationale of Evidence.That his health was permanently affected seems to be clear.Ten years later (1836)he was 'seized with an obstinate derangement of the brain.'One symptom was a,ceaseless spasmodic twitching over one eye,'which never left him.In 1839another illness forced him to take a month's holiday,which he spent in Italy.It left permanent weakness in the lungs and the stomach.An accident in 1848led to a long illness and prostration of the nervous system;and in 1854another serious illness,which he met by an eight months'tour in Italy,Sicily,and Greece,led to the,partial destruction of one lung,and great 'general debility.'(20)In spite of these illnesses,Mill continued to labour as strenuously as before,and until the illness of 1848at least showed no signs of any decline of intellectual energy.They must be remembered if we would do full justice to his later career.
It is,meanwhile,remarkable that his energetic course of self-education seems hardy to have been interrupted by the period of dejection.In the year 1825,while,one might have supposed,fairly drowned in Bentham's manuscript,he contributed an article upon Catholic Emancipation to a Parliamentary History,started by Mr Marshall of Leeds.He wrote others upon the commercial crisis and upon the currency and upon reciprocity in commerce for the two subsequent annual issues.He thinks that his work had now ceased to be 'juvenile,'and might be called original,so far as it applied old ideas in a new connection.At the same time he learned German,forming a class for the purpose.He also set up a society which met two days a week at Grote's house in Threadneedle Street and discussed various topics from half-past 8till 10A.M.These meetings lasted till 1830.The young men discussed in succession political economy,logic,and psychology.
