IT has always been very difficult to believe John Stuart
Mill's account of his wife in his autobiography. He claimed that not only were his writings as much hers as his, but her perceptive mind " would, with her gifts of feeling and imagination, have fitted her to be a consummate artist " as well as a great orator or politician. Why these statements have been passed over with indulgent allowances for Mill's very long devotion to Harriet Taylor, before and after their marriage, is because they reveal a self- evident exaggeration, implying that she could have been anything she cared. But the fact remains that Mrs. Taylor never practised any art persistently. Presumably she felt no compulsion to do so and there- fore lacked that vital attribute of the " con- summate artist." But she was a very rare and fascinating being. Professor Hayek makes an entertaining as well as scholarly book from his research into the relation- ship between Mill and Mrs. Taylor, bring- ing both personalities closer to the reader than ever before. The personal aspect of Mill has always been inaccessible ; the human being has been obscured by the humanist, and he has seemed to inhabit an abstract world of ideasideas which, as he admitted, merely synthesised other people's. Though Professor Hayek does• not show convincingly that, as he concludes, Harriet Taylor's " influence on his thought and out- look, whatever her capacities may have been, were quite as great as Mill asserts," he does reveal the exceptional flowering of Mrs. Taylor's intellectual gifts through the long years of her association with John Stuart
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