I'm not sure Mill signified medical psychiatric depression with his use of 'depression'.
Unlearned in poetry, I still don't understand this elixir of Wordsworth's poetry, after reading Mill's own writing. To wit, if Mill
put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!"
then how can Wordsworth's poetry change or improve any of this? If Adam Etinson, BA Philosophy (McGill), BPhil DPhil (Oxon) summarized on Oct. 2 2017 Mill's self-cure:
It took Mill two years to find a way out of his crisis. It was only after he began reading, not philosophy, but the poetry of William Wordsworth, that he was fully convinced he had emerged.
What was it about Wordsworth’s romantic poetry — intensely emotional (often melancholy), solitary, autobiographical, and infused with bucolic English imagery — that had such a profound healing effect on Mill? He explains:
What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this…
Mill was searching for a reliable source of joy, one that could survive the unbearable goodness of the world he sought to achieve. He was looking for a happiness that could stave off incursions of dissatisfaction or boredom once the ultimate battle is won, and (at last!) tranquility reigns. The answer, he discovered through reading Wordsworth, is to take refuge in a capacity to be moved by beauty — a capacity to take joy in the quiet contemplation of delicate thoughts, sights, sounds, and feelings, not just titanic struggles.
This discovery is convenient for a philosopher. Mill was trained, from a very young age, to think: to be a quiet contemplator. So, it’s no surprise that he was desperate to make sure he could still take joy in his allotted craft, once the hard labor of social reform was done. But, as Mill says, imaginative pleasures are available to “all human beings,” not just poets and philosophers.
I hope, and suspect, that Mill is right about this: that we all have the ability to find some durable joy in quietude, normalcy and contemplation. In our personal lives, and in our political lives too, it would be nice if we could escape Schopenhauer’s pendulum: to simply enjoy where we are, at times; to find some peace in the cessation of motion.
If we can do that, then a perfect world might not be so bad after all.
