Leo Tolstoy – The Sevastopol Sketches

Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches are an early work of the great Russian, taking us behind the Russian lines at the Siege of Sevastopol (October 1854 – September 1855) in the Crimean War. It is interesting because although that war has been much mythologised in my own country – one need only speak the name “Florence Nightingale” and a floating lamp will appear, while Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is one of the few poems whose lines probably remain burned into the British poetic public consciousness – in Russia one often has the sensation that there was no Crimean War at all. A defeat when the ruling elites were still convinced their country was undefeatable led to a series of reforms culminating in the emancipation of the Russian serfs in 1861.

The picture of Russia that it presents to the world and its people these days has no space for sore defeats such as this one. The only thing we need to know about Crimea is that it is Russian and always has been. Well and good.

Still, this losing war produced a piece of remarkable Russian fiction, one that has much in common with Isaac Babel’s Red Army Cavalry, written as the Soviet Union suffered a disastrous defeat against a newly independent Poland in the early 20th century. Both works attempt to engage with war – a theme so great that it bursts the hinges of anything that aims to contain it (War and Peace, of course, was really too short) – through fragmentation and novel narrative techniques. These techniques – chronological, ironic – Tolstoy would later develop further in works like Hadji Murat – but they found their beginning here. And for this, the work is interesting now, above and beyond its perspective on a war we may think we know.

Overview

“The real hero of my story, who I love with all the powers of my soul, who I have tried to bring out in all his beauty and who has always been, and will always be, sublime – is truth itself.”

In the Sevastopol Sketches Tolstoy, who was writing only a few months after serving in Crimea as an officer – in fact, the first two stories were written while the siege was ongoing – was already formulating many of the basic ideas about war which would later mark his monumental book on the topic. What are these ideas? To begin with, we learn that war is hell. We have always known this, but Tolstoy’s particular goal is to deglamourize heroism – that one thing that has nevertheless made war glorious and somehow justified for the individual soldiers without whom there could be no war. Everything in the Sevastopol Sketches serves towards the argument that war is not a place of heroism and glory, but of sadness, disappointment, and pointless violence.

Leo Tolstoy at the time of the Siege of Sevastopol

The Sketches are three in number, and each is set at a different moment in the siege. As with Babel’s treatment of the Polish war in Red Army Cavalry, this allows us to see the war effort as it goes well, stagnates, and finally is lost – but without having to fill in the gaps in between and thereby enlarge the book without necessarily making it any more compelling. Although the city of Sevastopol remains central throughout, each story gives us different characters. The first and shortest tale, “Sevastopol in December”, uses an unusual second-perspective narration. Tolstoy here plays the part of a gallant tour guide. The sounds of war are in the background, but somehow sufficiently distant. We see a city that seems carefree, relaxed:

“There you will see the defenders of Sevastopol alongside terrible and sad, great and entertaining, but always amazing, soul-raising sights.”

“Sights” is perhaps the key word here – we are a visitor, staring at exhibits in the zoo. Even after a visit to the hospital and conversations with the wounded, still, we are prey to the feelings of awe in the face of “danger, that game of life and death”. Without allowing us to follow a character or linger over a particular wounded, Tolstoy temporarily allows us to see the war in a depersonalised manner and focuses on the great patriotism of the Russians at its commencement. But in the other two stories, not only do we follow individuals, but we also see what the tour downplays or hides – death, ignorance, and hypocrisy.

Communication Failures

In the second story, “Sevastopol in May”, we begin to experience fighting first-hand. We follow an officer, Mikhailov, as he goes about his duties, before finally heading to the fortifications themselves. But these duties are not what we might have expected. An awful lot of his time is given over to considering the complete and utter vanity of the officers:

“A thousand human self-images managed to be offended, a thousand managed to be awfully pleased, to puff themselves up, and a thousand – to find their rest within the arms of death.”

Tolstoy gives us pages on the narcissism of small differences among the officers – who is ranked slightly higher, who has the nicer carriage, who is consumed by this or that petty anxiety. All dialogue is constructed by its participants to give a particular impression – it is a lie, hypocrisy. And this is particularly ridiculous given the context of a war. If we cannot communicate truthfully, how can we possibly hope to fight well, to plan and strategize effectively? At the start of the story, we laugh at the ignorance of a woman from central Russia who has written Mikhailov a letter describing how the press reports the war – battles with hundreds of foreign casualties and only a single Russian one, for example – but then we learn that the soldiers themselves are no less badly informed. One even declares the Americans will save them.

Miscommunication continues once Mikhailov’s part in the war itself begins. In War and Peace, one of the major themes is the incompetence of the commanders in contrast with the intrinsic elan of the soldiers – during a battle, the officers do not matter, and certainly not the generals. Only the individual soul facing its opponent does. And the encounter is inevitably messy. Mikhailov only knows that he has killed a Frenchman because he makes a noise – “ah Dieu” – upon being stabbed. Earlier, we read that “Mikhailov, supposing that they were asking after the company commander, came out of his pit, and thinking that Praskukhin was the leader, holding his hat in his hand, went up to him”. The emphasis is mine – it indicates that assumptions and guesswork lie behind the interactions. It indicates, above all, instincts, which can be either good or bad but which in war are perhaps all we have.

“Sevastopol in May” concludes with Mikhailov getting a light head wound. As if to tie his themes together, Tolstoy shows that Mikhailov’s main concern is whether he will look silly with it, not whether he will die. Even war cannot change vanity, it seems.

Ways of Dying

In fiction, dying often reveals the truth of the life that death ends. A good life generally has a good end, while a bad one, such as Ivan Ilyich’s, tends to end slowly and painfully. There are three significant deaths in The Sevastopol Sketches. The first is in “Sevastopol in May”, while the other two are in “Sevastopol in August 1855”. Each of these deaths has a different purpose and is approached in a different way.

In “Sevastopol in May” the death is Praskukhin’s, an officer’s. He dies fighting alongside Mikhailov. I’ve heard his death mentioned in the secondary literature as one of the earliest examples of a kind of stream of consciousness, for what strikes one about Praskukhin’s death is how his consciousness expands to envelop the whole story, and then like a black hole suddenly collapses inwards. Praskukhin’s death is first of all sad – “he was scared, listening to himself”. He seems little aware that he is dying until it is far too late. War cannot change vanity, but we find that death can. Suddenly Praskukhin is very small, weighed down by what feels like blocks of stone. Just a moment earlier he had seen Mikhailov get injured, and his first thought had been that this was a relief because Mikhailov owed him money. The stream of consciousness narration allows us to see the transformation of Praskukhin’s world from its petty concerns about money into its tragic concern about onrushing death. By connecting the two, Tolstoy seems to suggest that what we think about in war is really far from what we should think about. And this connects ultimately with the idea that if only we understood what war really was – death and destruction – nobody would ever fight again.

Or as he puts it in my favourite quote of the book:

“A disagreement that has not been solved by diplomacy will still less be solved by powder and blood”.

“Sevastopol in August 1855” takes us to the end of the siege, and to the end of the two Kozeltsov brothers. Much of the story is taken up with the younger brother’s arrival in Sevastopol, which is a completely different city to the one it was in the prior stories. Where before it appeared to function normally, with civilians and women and shops, now it is nearly deserted. The younger Kozeltsov is less occupied by vanity than the other officers – instead, he is guilty of an exaggerated love of heroism. He dreams of heroic death, even though “so little of what he saw was anything like his brilliant, joyous, great-souled dreams.”

 When he eventually meets his fellow officers, they do not tell him what to do, even though he knows next to nothing about running an artillery unit. Instead, they want to play cards and gossip. An opportunity to go to the battlements arises and Kozeltsov puts himself forward, only to be rejected by the others. Instead, they draw lots, and Kozeltsov is again chosen – a significant moment, given what comes later. It seems to suggest again that war is less about planning and more about sheer random chance. Kozeltsov gets to the battlements, and the fighting begins, but here the narrative takes us away from him suddenly.

In chapter 24, a brilliant short chapter, we see Sevastopol through the eyes of two spotters far off. They see the beginnings of a hostile assault upon the city, and then later –

“Oh God, a flag! Look, look!” Said the other, getting his breath and moving from the telescope. “A French flag is on Malakhov Redoubt!”

In Hadji Murat the hero’s death is announced before we experience it first hand when his head is brought to the Russians. In “Sevastopol in August 1855” too, death is announced before we experience it directly. The effect of this is to devalue it – we know what will ultimately happen, so any heroism or defiance is suddenly rendered pointless. It would have been better not to die at all.

Both Kozeltsov brothers die in the French attack. The elder is injured first and later succumbs from his wounds. In the confusion of the fighting, he believes he has successfully repelled his enemy. He feels “an inexpressible delight in the knowledge that he had managed a heroic act”. Yet what is this heroism really, if not a lie? He is indeed deceived by the priest in the hospital, who tells him that the enemy are in retreat. Kozeltsov elder may be able to die gladly, but the reader cannot share in his delight. There is something utterly sickening in seeing falsity so close to the grave. Perhaps I am wrong to care so much about truth, but Tolstoy does name truth the hero of his story, so I think I am right here. War cannot be even remotely good if it engenders the need for such deceit, even comforting deceit.

Heroism allows Kozeltsov elder to die gladly, assuring himself that he has protected his fatherland successfully. But Tolstoy devalues that heroism by showing it is based on a lie. Volodya, Kozeltsov younger, who is even more prone to idealise heroism than his older brother, is given an even more brutal send-off. We do not even see his death. Instead, through one of his soldiers’ eyes, we see how “something in an overcoat lay face down in the place where Volodya had just been” as the French begin their attack. There is no last stand, there is no coming to terms with the war. There is simply death. Whereas even the elder’s battle allows us to find redemption in his valour and heroic qualities, Tolstoy does not even allow Volodya a page to make his departure from the world meaningful. Depriving him of description, he deprives him of meaning.

Try as we might, we cannot find any way of saying that his death was worthwhile.

Conclusion

I visited Sevastopol in 2020. In recent years the city has once again attracted international attention. Crossing over from the North to the South parts of the city by ferry – a route taken by many of the characters of The Sevastopol Sketches – I was left awestruck by the great grey mass of Russian Black Sea Fleet, moored inside the bay past the old city harbour walls. I was not particularly interested in the Crimean War and did not seek out any of the museums related to it. Sevastopol is probably more interesting to a tourist these days on account of its pleasant waterfront promenade and its Greek heritage – the ancient city of Khersones is quite well-preserved. All told, however, the promenade at Yalta is more lovely, and the beaches along Crimea’s southern coast, such as Alupka, are better for people who would like to swim and forget their troubles.  

The Crimean War has been forgotten, at least in Russia. For the British, it remains an important part of our national identity. The last time I visited my grandmother’s she produced a diary of one of her forebear’s from the Crimean War for me to flick through. It did not make for particularly entertaining reading – for the most part, it was a list of men lost and troop movements. But to hold history in one’s hand like that is nevertheless a wonderful feeling.

The diary. Note the “Russian attack” at the bottom of the page.

To read Tolstoy’s little book is also to encounter history, and it is to encounter it from a different perspective to the one we are used to. In fact, this perspective-shift buttresses the argument of The Sevastopol Sketches. Reading our “enemy” already leaves us biased against them, so that Tolstoy’s suggestion that war is pointless and desperately sad is easier to accept. The petty vanities of the officers, dislodged from the cultural frame of reference that might let us love them, appear just as petty as they really are.

Ultimately, Tolstoy’s fullest and best critique of war is found, unsurprisingly enough, in War and Peace (or possibly Hadji Murat). But The Sevastopol Sketches are still a fun book. For one, they have in embryo many of the techniques that Tolstoy will expand upon later in his great works. More importantly, however, while few of us will ever fight in a war, Tolstoy’s work acts as an antidote to an idealised notion of it which I think may still be relatively common. And wherever war is idealised, inevitably it will burst into reality.

A Sense of Unreality: Flaubert’s Sentimental Education

The sense of dislocation, the feeling of some thin film separating oneself from the real world out in front of us – there is perhaps no more modern feeling than this. One of the many ideas that Flaubert engages with in his Sentimental Education is this one. The novel is a Bildungsroman in the sense that it describes a young man’s education, but an unusual one. This is because Frédéric Moreau’s education is one of disillusionment – in love, in life, in himself. And partly this disillusionment is delivered through the idea that between him and the world he experiences there is something that prevents him from immersing himself in the latter properly.

Flaubert’s novel is strange. At nearly five hundred pages in my edition, it is much longer than his earlier Madame Bovary, and much more diffuse. There are a huge number of characters, many of whose names and identities end up melting into each other (Deslauriers, Dambreuse, Dussardier). The plot, combining the politics of mid-century Paris with Frédéric’s love for several older women, is occasionally hard to follow. Nor is the book sustained by Frédéric himself, who is an idiot at best and a selfish ass at worst. Instead, it is sustained by a feeling of reality itself – of Paris and Parisians, politics, and passion – which strains against the novel’s boundaries.

Flaubert wrote that he was “obliged to push into the background the things which are precisely the most interesting”, due to the sheer complexity of the world he was conjuring up. But in fact, this is misleading, for the sheer complexity of the world is already an argument about how we engage with it. As characters and events speed past, and facts and figures (who has what money, what business, and so on), we find it increasingly hard to hold anything in our head. Everything is changeable, people are always coming and going, so why attempt to stop things? We “go with the flow”, which prevents us from engaging more deeply with things. Perhaps the most prominent symbol in the book related to this is the stock market. The stock market is not a place, it is an idea – fortunes can be won or lost at random and with the speed of the roulette wheel. When Frédéric loses money and gains it so quickly, so effortlessly, there’s a sense of unreality about it. The use of money and complexity distances us from the world – they suggest it’s not worth trying to understand.

This might be termed a bourgeois sensibility, and it lies at the heart of the book. But an older, Romantic, view is little better. At the novel’s beginning Frédéric is a student, sentimental and silly – when he sees Madame Arnoux, who is destined to be the central love of his life, his first thought is that “she looked like the women you read about in romantic novels”. Rather than see the woman for who she is, Frédéric immediately lays down an idea of her that covers her up. A Romantic sensibility, looking eternally for symbols, gets in the way of real things just as much as does the bourgeois sensibility above. Frédéric has read too much, thought too much – he cannot engage. When he faces the violence of the revolutionary years following 1848, he “felt as if he were watching a play”.

Frédéric is a spectator. He is a spectator on life, and in life. Politics barely engages him. Its role initially is slightly absurd – a bit of a scuffle on the streets gets in the way of Frédéric’s illicit liaisons. Later, he is supposed to stand for election, but never gets around to it. His personal fortune allows him never to have to do anything, and so he does nothing. Nothing other than chasing women around Paris, that is. He toys with various artistic ideas that go nowhere. From something of a naïve child at the novel’s beginning by the end he is an experienced womaniser, whose exploits, however uncomfortable they make us, nonetheless reflect great talents – if that is the word we would like to use.

Flaubert’s structural ingenuity also detaches us, and Frédéric, from the world. His story is one of comparisons. We visit bourgeois parties and decadent artistic ones. While etiquette means that these must be different, we realise that there is just as much moral decay and licentiousness in the former as in the latter. The social rules that govern society seem like a poor cover for people’s fundamental similarity. Even the characters, such as Frédéric, seem to float between both types of engagement without rhyme or reason.

Of course, parties are important for another reason. Or rather, they are unimportant. We may recall from the history books the importance of banqueting clubs for fomenting revolutionary feelings, but ultimately having dinner is the opposite of actually acting. People spend the novel talking, walking, but never doing. Frédéric, as mentioned, never really gets a job. The revolution passes people by, providing a reason for sleepless nights and arguments at dinner, but never anything more. Flaubert shows an age of inaction, in comparison to the regular reference point – the Revolution of 1789. Everyone disagrees with the means used, but at least Robespierre and pals did things. The comparison makes the revolution of 1848 seem more like a spectacle than a real event.

Just as the scenes that Flaubert chooses to depict reflect a world where people are not engaged, so too does the superabundance of characters. If there are a great many characters, none of them can plant themselves in our minds as particularly real. Nobody can be a hero, or even remotely heroic, when the spotlight is only ever placed on them for a few minutes at a time. A major character gets ill on one page and dies on the next. At the funeral people forget to show any real sympathy at all.

The novel also, naturally enough, says an awful lot about social structures. I mentioned the stock market earlier, with its random twists and turns. Frédéric’s life, despite the most unbelievably stupidity on his part, never seems to go wrong. The banker, Monsieur Dambreuse, has the most extraordinary tolerance for his young acquaintance’s idiocy, whether it be being seen in public with a woman of ill repute or refusing to turn up to meetings. Although Dambreuse is determined to see that Frédéric succeeds, whether financially or politically, and always helps his protégé when he has trouble, Frédéric tends to blatantly ignore his own friends’ pleas for help. Fate itself seems to be saying to the young aristocrat that the world was made for him, that he needs not to worry. A hint of the self-entitlement I know all too well in myself and my old schoolfriends is ever present in the background. And if we are entitled to the world, we never need to engage with it. Like men standing before a tree with ripe fruits, we know that we need not bother ourselves to pick them – they will fall of their own accord.

The book ends with two extraordinary chapters of complete brutality. Frédéric, the great womaniser, finds himself defeated and alone. And Flaubert skips into the future with wonderfully dead language:

“He travelled the world.

He tasted the melancholy of packet ships, the chill of waking under canvas, the boredom of landscapes and monuments, the bitterness of broken friendship.

He returned home.

He went into society, and he had affairs with other women. They were insipid beside the endless memory of his first love. And then the vehemence of desire, the keen edge of sensation itself, had left him. His intellectual ambitions were fading too. The years went by; and he resigned himself to the stagnation of his mind and the apathy that lived in his heart.”

Frédéric learns that he has done something to himself, something horrible, over the course of the novel. He has destroyed his connection with reality, and now he cannot rebuild it. Life is dead, and Frédéric has killed it. Whereas in Russian literature a figure like Pechorin (in Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time) comes to us already broken, Flaubert writes the creation of the superfluous man. For that, it is a more terrible read in many ways. When Madame Arnoux, the first love, discovers him again after all these years, we feel an apprehensive shudder. And so we should:

“The lamp, standing on a console table, lit up her white hair. It was like a blow full in the chest”.

Frédéric, even now, cannot face the world. The woman who loves him now needs to be replaced by the image of the woman whom once he loved. And reality itself is left all the poorer for it. Perhaps the most beautiful line in the book comes here: “In every parting there comes a moment when the beloved is already no longer with us.” When we try to picture this sentence, we see the problem I have been trying to describe – two people, and then behind them their spirits, already floating away in different directions. There is no connection, either to each other, or the earth itself.

Flaubert’s story is one of decline, of failure. Like John Williams’ Stoner, which I reread recently, it presents a life where things do not quite go to plan. Or rather, where there is a certain mundane okay-ness about how they turn out. Flaubert does not suggest what the reason might be. When Frédéric and his friend Deslauriers meet again in the very final chapter, they both acknowledge that their respective dreams of love and power have come to nothing. But in considering the reasons, both come up short. Deslauriers says “I was too logical, and you were too sentimental”. We may agree or disagree with this, depending on what we have taken away from the rest of the book. But there is nothing didactic about it. For a novel which has “education” in its title, it doesn’t want to teach. It shows us two bad paths, but no examples of what a “right” path might be.

I venture to suggest that Frédéric’s failure stems partly from a world where a direct connection with things is impossible. This is a sufficiently “weak” concluding argument, in that we can make any suggestion we want for what success would look like or for how Frédéric could reconnect with his surroundings. Manual labour, artistic pursuits, a real love? Take your pick. Whatever we decide, it makes sense to establish the nature of the problem. A sense of dislocation from the world is a feeling that we moderns can never escape – Flaubert’s enduring dramatization of it can teach us how to see it, even if it can’t teach us how to escape it. That is only one of many reasons for reading this amazing work.  

John Stuart Mill: Thinker and Human

I have taught English for several years now to a boy with cerebral palsy. He is about eighteen and he does not get out much. His English is excellent, and he is intelligent, but after several years I am tired out and really do not know what else to teach him. Still, one of the good things that has come from this pairing has been that I have been given an excuse to read authors that I would not otherwise have done. Carlyle is one such author. Another is John Stuart Mill, the noted 19th century British philosopher. We read Utilitarianism and On Liberty some time ago and now we are reading Mill’s Autobiography. In Aileen Kelly’s Herzen Mill was mentioned as one of Herzen’s favourite discoveries, and he was also praised highly by Bertrand Russell (Mill’s godson for a brief year!) – another thinker I was reading recently.

Nevertheless, I had little desire to read Mill, on account of the fact that liberalism is relatively boring. People should be free to do what they want so long as they don’t hurt others – very well. Society can be a pain – indeed it can. Increasing the general happiness is important – really, I had no idea. But Mill is a more complicated thinker than these pithy statements make him out to be, and in particular I found his Autobiography very interesting. For those readers who haven’t seen the point of Mill, I propose to provide a few things I enjoyed in these three works.

On Liberty

The purpose of Mill’s essay is to work out the limits to the power that can legitimately be exercised over the individual by society and government. The tyranny of the “will of the people” is something that Mill faced in his personal life, carrying on an intense friendship with a married woman which created great difficulties for him. The majority or the group that can get others to accept it as the majority will doubtless lead to oppressing the minority, so checks and balances must be created. But where, and of what sort?

The argument, as summarised by Mill, is as follows: “the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. … In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

How, on the basis of this argument, can we have a good society? Firstly, by a free press. Secondly, by having as many opinions as possible. This latter suggestion I particularly liked. Mill argues that if the dissenter from popular opinion is wrong, they learn the truth by speaking out. Meanwhile, those who are correct come to appreciate the truth more. And often both sides may share some truth. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” so either way we must always listen to others. Unfortunately, Mill’s views presuppose that arguments are made in good faith, and that people are willing to change their views if proven wrong. I believe the experience of a global pandemic seems to suggest that some people are unwilling to accept alternative viewpoints, whatever the strength of their foundations. (This is a dig at those against vaccinations, not those sceptical of them.)

If we live in fear, we will not speak out. This ultimately destroys independent thought, and the general development of a given community. At the same time, we must all work to “understand the grounds of one’s own opinions”. A free debate cannot proceed unless both sides know their foundations. A view without known foundations cannot be harmed through argument, but it can be terribly harmful.

Happiness is having the freedom to act according to one’s inner light. It consists in being spontaneous – the very thing society tends not to tolerate. Society, often internalised, leads to a “despotism of custom”. Contrary to the suggestion of coldness and rigidity, Mill’s idea of flourishing here is very freeform – “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”

Liberty ends when harm begins. If we harm others the law must be ready. But if we harm only ourselves, we have only ourselves to blame. The punishment for this is simply a bad reputation, and your friends turning away from you. Once we are adults, we are responsible for our decisions. Nobody can force us to change, or to act in a different way. A big government is unnecessary for Mill because it tends to make of us small people. In the field of human affairs, the government should less prohibit, than act as a guide. A sugar tax, rather than a sugar ban – for example – would be what Mill would propose.

Mill’s essay is marked by a certain gloom. He sees the development of society as leading to a general personal decline into slavish similarity. Communication, commerce, and technological advances have all brought people more in touch with one another, but at the same time they all have reduced the differentiation of the individual. Public opinion, growing ever stronger and more similar, becomes less willing to tolerate dissenting views. Finally, “mankind speedily become unable to conceive diversity, when they have been for some time unaccustomed to see it”. Liberty is lost when homogeneity means nobody has any use for it.

Mill’s piece remains useful today firstly as a reminder of the value of listening to others and understanding the basis of our own opinions, and secondly by arguing for the minimal intrusion of others onto the freedom of the individual. “That the individual is not accountable to society for his actions, in so far as these concern the interests of no person but himself”, is a challenging statement that we may not agree with. But it is useful to hear, to turn over in our minds. If for no other reasons that it makes us think upon our own answer to the question of the relationship between society and the individual.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is about right and wrong. The philosophical idea was first put down by Jeremy Bentham, a friend of Mill’s father, in the form of “the greatest-happiness principle”. An action is good if it increases the general happiness, and bad if it doesn’t. This raised some issues, such as whether happy idiots are better-off than less happy intelligent people. It was also a rather cold doctrine, seemingly devaluing the arts in favour of more coarse pleasures such as eating and carousing. These are issues that Mill seeks to address in his essay.

Mill begins by noting that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure”. Happiness is desirable as an end, but that does not mean that simple pleasures are the most valuable. He suggests that we are capable of comparing pleasures, and in this way determining which of a given two is better. Having listened to some Mozart and eaten a burger I can decide for myself which I prefer. Now, many people may choose the burger (including, possibly, me). But Mill does not despair at this possibility, instead he draws a distinction between happiness and contentedness.

Contented people are generally stupider, meaning they require less pleasures and less complex pleasures. Intelligent people are more demanding of their pleasures, and also have a desire for more complex ones. Since we know the difference, we can say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”. But the fool or the pig cannot agree – and nor could we expect them to.

Just as in On Liberty, here too Mill is concerned with the kind of world that allows for human flourishing. In this essay Mill argues that we need sufficient time to develop our tastes for pleasure, otherwise we will lose them. In a mediocre, unfree society, there will be mediocre and boring pleasures and a lower sort of happiness predominating. The present age, for Mill, with its poor education and dreadful social arrangements, does not let us be as happy as we could be, or develop as much as we could.

Education is particularly important for Mill. In On Liberty, he identified it as the period of a person’s life where we can form people’s tastes before they become entirely responsible for themselves. In Utilitarianism, Mill sees education as playing a key role in helping us to harmonise our idea of our own happiness with the general happiness. Through education we can shape our consciences to be more utilitarian, so that we come to see the interests of others as being more equal to our own interests.

Utilitarianism is really annoying because it’s hard to argue against it for a layman like myself. In its modern form, such as propounded by Peter Singer, it’s thoroughly miserable-making. Can I justify having any money at all when I could give it to the poor and make their lives considerably happier? Singer’s Effective Altruism really appears, when thought through, to be the least we can do, and yet it is more than most of us do. Mill and Singer are not the same person, and Mill’s piece is simpler and less demanding.

At the same time, Utilitarianism does still suffer a little from a belief in human rationality. I remember thinking of Dostoevsky while I read it – a man whose writings time and again demonstrate that people can choose suffering over happiness. Mill might argue that Dostoevsky’s characters are made happy by being miserable, and I’m sure many depressed people would concur with the statement that in despair there can often be something sweet.

Thinking about it now, however, I’m not sure a Dostoevskian objection really holds up – what Dostoevsky is fundamentally after is affirming a sense of human dignity, in other words saying that I’m not a pig but a human being. Taking away our dignity by taking away our responsibility for our actions, as do the great systems (including utilitarianism) that his characters rail against, ultimately deprives us of the foundation of our happiness – our freedom. In other words, we can be against utilitarianism while still fitting very snugly into a utilitarian conception of human ends and means. The fact that such a thought would probably bring The Underground Man to suicide does not devalue it – it just suggests we shouldn’t tell him!

Autobiography – The Childhood

Mill’s Autobiography is another interesting text that throws light upon the concerns of the other two essays, both by answering some of our criticisms about them, and by explaining the character of the man who wrote them. John Stuart Mill was an extraordinary character. At the age of 3 he was learning Greek, at the age of 8 he had taught himself Latin. He was writing and being published in the leading newspapers of the day while still a teenager. And the fact that we are reading him today indicates that all this education led to the creation of a formidable thinker, as well as just a precocious child.

Mill’s purpose in the Autobiography is to leave “some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable.” Under his father’s watchful eye, Mill learned everything under the sun. Pushed relentlessly, he learned that “a pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded which he cannot do, never does all he can.” Yet at the same time, the text is riddled with tensions. Mill was allowed no holidays; he had no friends. He felt bitter about being unlike other children, had trouble dressing himself and tying knots. Worse than that, “Mine was not an education of love but of fear.” These thoughts are hidden from sight, exorcised from the text by Mill’s wife and then later by his stepdaughter. His father alternates between awe-inspiring intellectual power and terrible coldness. The result of such an influence was that for a long time Mill lacked confidence and the ability to think for himself.

Mill’s mother does not receive a mention. I had thought perhaps she had died in childbirth, but apparently Mill was the eldest of nine children (they too are barely mentioned). Mill apparently found no warmth in his mother capable of making up for his father’s coolness. And so, stunted by this childhood, Mill developed, learning a great deal, but feeling very little – he considers himself at this time a mere “reasoning machine” – until he reached the age of twenty and had a great and terrible crisis.  

Autobiography – The Crisis

From his birth Mill had been raised to be a reformer of the world, and he had believed wholeheartedly in that goal. “My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object”. Yet one day Mill asks himself whether he’d be happy if he achieved this goal, and he realised that he would not. Finding the end unrewarding, Mill can no longer see any value in the means and pursuing it. Though he continued to write, the light had gone out inside him. He felt desperately lonely, and could confide in no-one, least of all his father. He realised that his analytical abilities had done him just as much harm as good, because they had ruined his ability to feel. They were “a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and of the virtues”.

Mill escaped from his despair, which was psychological as much as intellectual, through the help of art – he read Wordsworth for the first time. This led him to appreciate that “the internal culture” of an individual is more important than he’d realised. Happiness can lie not just in improving the world, but in art too. Indeed, Mill came to realise that happiness couldn’t be what we strive after – in something vaguely reminiscent of Wittgenstein, he noticed that whenever we asked ourselves if we were happy, we ceased being so. In other words, the resolution to our problems is a dissolution of them. In pursuing another worthwhile goal, Mill thought, “you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagination, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning”. Suddenly utilitarianism does not seem so restrictive after all.

Autobiography – Harriet

Mrs Harriet Taylor, who later became Mill’s wife, was a married woman when they met in his early twenties. But in spite of this the two struck up an extremely intense and rewarding, and apparently platonic, friendship that lasted until her death in 1858. This friendship was “the honour and chief blessing of my existence” and Mill’s praise for his wife is extraordinary for the intensity of the feeling that it conveys. For Mill, Harriet was essential in making him the mature writer we associate with him. Where he had come to his conclusions about life through cold analysis and study, Harriet had come to the same conclusions through her feelings and empathy. Together, they created works like On Liberty and Utilitarianism, combining both approaches to the problems at hand.

Father’s Death, Political Career

Mill’s Autobiography is primarily a record of the first twenty-five or so years of his life, when all the major developments in his thought are taking place. The rest of his life is simply a long chapter at the end. Of this, aside from the records of what he wrote, the most interesting thing is Mill’s description of his brief stint as an MP.

Mill was put forward by some friends to be MP for Westminster. He refused to do any campaigning except at the end, and he also wrote a public letter in which he declared he would not fight for local interests. Nevertheless, he was elected. In Parliament he had a more direct effect on the affairs of state which he had attempted to alter from afar through newspapers and journals, but his radicalism – however normal it seems to us today – did him no favours. He fought for the Irish, for the colonies – in short, he was true to his views. All of these, sadly, were minority views. After the conservatives found themselves under threat, they themselves campaigned more seriously in the next election and Mill was thrown out. He had been an MP for all of three years.

Concluding Remarks

Mill’s Autobiography was written, at least in part, with the goal also of thanking those in whose debt he was for his development. It is at times tedious to read all these names, most of whom are well-forgotten these days. The prose is also rather stodgy. And yet, in spite of all that, I’m rather glad I read it. Mill’s book is not one of those tell-all gossipy biographies, but instead it serves a far more important purpose. It justifies his other works by answering for the man behind them. It shows that his ideas came not just from the cool reasoning of a man behind his desk, but also from the warm-heartedness and appreciation for internal development that it took a crisis and deep friendship to create. It also provides a clear example of how utilitarian ideas can be compatible with a well-lived, ultimately passionate, life. Meanwhile, Mill’s political work shows how committed he was to the ideas of On Liberty.

In sum, Mill’s Autobiography enriches his other works by showing that he had worked and lived enough to write them from a wealth of experience alongside the rational calculation we might expect. I am very glad I read all three.