John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

TASTES AND DIVERSIONS. 151
complex product. The remark is applicable to the Tender
feeling, viewed in its ultimate form ; and even more to the other
great
feeling.
source of human emotion the Malevolent or Irascible
Unless conspicuously present, or conspicuously absent,
the amount of the feeling in the elementary shape can with
difficulty be estimated in a character notable for growth, and for
complication of impulses. In Mill, all the coarse, crude forms
of angry passion were entirely wanting. He never got into a
rage. His pleasures of malevolence, so far as existing, were of
a very refined nature. Only in the punishment of offenders
against his fellow-men, did he indulge revengeful sentiment.
He could, on occasions, be very severe in his judgments and
denunciations ;
but vulgar calumny, abuse, hatred for the mere
sake of hatred, were completely crucified in him. He spent a
large part of his life in polemics ; and his treatment of oppo
nents was a model of the ethics of controversy. The delight
in victory was with him a genial, hearty chuckle, and no more.
Taking emotional and sensuous elements together, we may
recount his chief tastes and diversions, irrespective of sympathy
proper, which adds a new and all-important fact of character.
The love of scenery, in connexion with touring excursions,
was stimulated from an early date, and indulged in to the last.
Whether he had a refined judgment of scenic effects, from an
artist s point of view, I am unable to say. He did not become
poetically inspired by nature, like Shelley or Wordsworth;
perhaps he enjoyed
it none the less. He made little use of
his varied travels by allusions, or figures in his composition.
His enjoyment of the concrete did not render his style much
less abstract than it would have been although, like Kant, he
had never left home.
His taste for plant-collecting began in France, under George
Bentham, and was continued through
those limited excursions, in the neighbourhood
of London,
that he habitually kept up for the needs of recreation. I may
to a
life. It served him in
be mistaken, but it seems to me, that this taste belongs