At the end of his fourteenth year Mill went to the south of France,and stayed for a year with Sir Samuel,the brother of Jeremy,Bentham.There he learned French,attended various courses of lectures,and carried on his study of mathematics and of political economy.His intellectual appetite was still voracious and his hours of study were probably excessive.The period,however,was chiefly remarkable for the awakening of other tastes.The lessons of fencing and riding masters seem to have been thrown away;but he learned something of botany from George,the son of Sir Samuel,afterwards eminently distinguished in the science.Mill's taste,though it did not develop into a scientific study,made him a good field botanist,and provided him with almost his only recreation.It encouraged the love of walking,which he shared with his father;and in a tour in the Pyrenees he learned to enjoy grand natural scenery.He appears,too,to have lost some of his boyish awkwardness in the new society.The greatest advantage,however,according to himself,was his,having breathed for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of continental life.'(9)His comments upon this are remarkable.He could not then,as he remarks,know much of English society.He did not know its 'low moral tone,'the 'absence of high feelings'and 'sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them,'nor,therefore,perceive the contrast with the French,who cultivate sentiments elevated by comparison at least,and who,by the habitual exercise of the feelings,encourage also a culture of the understanding,descending to the less educated classes.(10)Still,he was impressed by French amiability and sociability,and the English habit of 'acting as if everybody else was either an enemy or a bore.'
I do not venture to pronounce any opinion upon this estimate of the contrast between English and French society.Whatever truth it contains would be intensified for Mill by the fact that a large class of Englishmen clearly regarded the Utilitarians as 'enemies,'and all men felt them to be bores.The,practical,Briton no doubt treated the views of the philosophical Radical with an application of what he meant for humour and Mill received as brutality.But the estimate is characteristic.Mill's Spartan discipline was already rousing him to a dumb sense of the value of the emotions.Though he,with his school,was bound to denounce 'sentimentalism,'he was beginning to see that there was another side to the question.And,in the next place,Mill's appreciation of French courtesy fell in with a marked tendency of his thought.He had,of course,at this time only laid the foundation of an acquaintance with France and Frenchmen,which,however,became much closer in the following years.He acquired a cordial sympathy with the French liberals;he grew to be thoroughly familiar with French politics,and followed the later history of his friends with sympathy and admiration.In his early essays,he is constantly insisting upon the merits of French writers and lamenting the scandalous ignorance of their achievements prevalent in England;the French philosophes of the eighteenth century became his model;(11)and he pushed his zeal,as he thinks,even to excess;while,as we shall afterwards see,some contemporary French writers exercised an influence upon his own views of the highest importance.He did not learn German till some time later,and never became a profound student of German literature and philosophy.But France was a kind of second country to him;and excited what may almost be called a patriotic sentiment.Patriotism,indeed,was scarcely held to be a virtue by the Utilitarians.It meant for them the state of mind of the country squire or his hanger-on the parson;and is generally mentioned as giving a sufficient explanation of unreasoning prejudice.Mill's development,I doubt not,was furthered by this enthusiasm;it gave him a wider outlook,and stimulated many impulses which had been hampered by the narrowness of his party.
For many years,however,it contributed to make him something of an alien;and I do not think that incapacity to sympathise even with the stupid prejudices of one's countrymen is an unmixed advantage.
