By ANTHONY DANIELS [New Criterion] – My copy of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography
I do not think you can read Mill’s prose without forming a strong and favorable impression of his character. It is exactly that which is conveyed by G. F. Watts’s famous portrait of him. (Watts was once compared, in England at least, with Michelangelo, as Saint-Saëns was in France with Beethoven.) Mill’s face, like his prose, is strong, direct, honest, and unflinching; when Mill writes something that is unsound, it is because he is mistaken, not because he is dishonest. He takes care always to express his thoughts as clearly as possible, an admirable moral quality, though he was by no means oblivious to grace or rhythm. Unfortunately, honesty is not incompatible with self-deception, and ludicrous self-deception at that.
Open any page of Mill, and you will find something very well-expressed. If I were teaching students to write good, serviceable, muscular, forthright English prose, I should give them Mill to read.
Continued at the New Criterion | More Chronicle & Notices.
