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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 207.: THE MONTHLY REPOSITORY FOR JUNE 1833 EXAMINER, 16 JUNE, 1833, PP. 372-3 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II

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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

207.: THE MONTHLY REPOSITORY FOR JUNE 1833 EXAMINER, 16 JUNE, 1833, PP. 372-3 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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207.

THE MONTHLY REPOSITORY FOR JUNE 1833

EXAMINER, 16 JUNE, 1833, PP. 372-3

The third of Mill’s favourable reviews of Fox’s journal (see Nos. 198 and 200) contains interesting material relating to his theory of poetry. Mill had nothing in this number of the Monthly Repository, but his “Alison’s History” appeared in two parts in the numbers for July and August. The review, which appeared in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “The Monthly Repository for June [n.s. VII]. (Edited by W.J. Fox.)”; the page references are to this volume. The article is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A notice of the Monthly Repository for June 1833, in the Examiner of 16th June 1833” (MacMinn, p. 32). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Review of the Monthly Repository for June” and enclosed in square brackets, with one correction: at 574.28 “as” is deleted in “occasions; as it”.

an excellent number of an excellent work. Each article deserves a separate commendation, for each has its own merit and its own interest; and there is more than usual variety both in the subjects and in the treatment of them. The article which contains most wisdom, as well as beauty, is ostensibly a description of scenery, under the quaint title of Local Logic;1 and it indeed proves many things; but chiefly, what perhaps the writer least thought of, that the highest beauty is not that which is received from the object, but that which is given to it by the perceiving mind: that—(as Pope says)—

  • —the difference is as great between
  • The optics seeing as the objects seen.2

It is the poetry of description and the philosophy both in one; because the description is only the outward part, the inward is the feelings and the thoughts of a highly sensitive and reflecting mind. These feelings and thoughts are the soul, the scenery described is the body, which gives impressions to the soul but receives them back tenfold. The wisdom is not in sentences and maxims equally fit for all occasions; it admits not of being extracted; it pervades the whole, and shines through from beneath the surface, but no more admits of being detached from its external vesture, than the flesh from the skin.

Among the other articles we would notice particularly a paper on Miss Martineau’s tale of The Parish, in which the writer takes up the cause of that lady against her reviewer in the Edinburgh Review.3 We have seldom read any article more characteristic of Whiggery, of the Edinburgh Review itself, and of the juste-milieu respectability spirit in general, than that same Whig article on Miss Martineau. With some just and some unjust criticism on the details of her various performances, the aim and purport of the article on the whole was to intimate to Miss Martineau, in as many and as various forms of words as the writer could, that she was and should be reputed a very clever, meritorious, indeed extraordinary person, provided always she would submit all her opinions to the previous ordeal of Whig wisdom; that it is a very fine thing in a woman to write, and write with earnestness, on politics and morals, so long as all she writes in politics is strictly Whig, and in morals strictly common-place, but vastly shocking if she writes anything else. Every approach to free, vigorous, far-reaching thought which we recollect to have seen in Miss Martineau’s Illustrations, her Edinburgh reviewer, with scarcely an exception, singles out for special animadversion; and reads a succession of solemn, prosing, good-natured lectures to one who is at least as well-qualified to lecture him; and who in the long run will be by many degrees the more successful lecturer, for the time is no more when the ballast of society was too ponderous for its quantity of sail.

Our friend “Junius Redivivus” has two able papers in this number,4 and the Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice is full of mournful truths on education and society as they now are;5 and as such writers as the Edinburgh reviewer would for ever keep them, not from evil intention, but from a most plentiful lack of intellectual audacity and comprehension of mind.

[1 ]W.J. Fox, “Local Logic,” pp. 413-26.

[2 ]Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “Epistle 1,” ll. 31-2, of Moral Essays, in Works, ed. Joseph Warton, et al., 10 vols. (London: Priestley and Hearne, 1822, 1825), Vol. III, p. 178.

[3 ]In “Poor Laws and Paupers,” pp. 361-81, W.J. Fox defends Harriet Martineau’s The Parish: A Tale (No. 1 of Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated [London: Fox, 1833]), against the attack in William Empson’s “Illustrations of Political Economy: Mrs. Marcet—Miss Martineau,” Edinburgh Review, LVII (Apr. 1833), 1-39. Empson (1791-1852), a major contributor to the Edinburgh, was a professor at the East India College at Haileybury.

[4 ]“Proposal for a National College of Language” (pp. 381-92) and “On the Conduct of the Police at the Late Meeting” (pp. 426-37), by William Bridges Adams (“Junius Redivivus”) (1797-1872), an engineer and ingenious inventor as well as political writer, who married Eliza Flower’s sister, Sarah, in 1834. (For Mill’s reviews of his writings, see CW, Vol. I, pp. 367-90.)

[5 ]Charles Reece Pemberton, “Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice,” pp. 392-403. This was Chap. ii; Chap. i had appeared in May, pp. 323-39; and other chapters followed, pp. 475-88, 529-45, 623-44, 691-705, 816-29, and n.s. VIII (Jan. 1834), 21-39 (see Nos. 214, 225, and 229).