Although regarded as a philosopher rather than an artist, John Stuart Mill employs artistry as well as rational argument to enlighten his reader. Mill's “Bentham,” for example, demonstrates how Mill operates as a sage using both logic and art to awaken the reader to a new perception of reality. In “Bentham” Mill creates a sense of disappointment arising from Bentham's great promise and limited performance, both as thinker and as man. Constructing an image of himself as a whole thinker, Mill thereby underscores Bentham's position as half-thinker. Mill also creates an elaborate portrait of Bentham as a great father-teacher-hero-God figure, only to reveal Bentham's inability to perform these roles adequately. By heavy use of negatives, Mill suggests that Bentham's thought has little positive value. And, finally, the essay's structure undermines all of Bentham's philosophical contributions. Deriving from Carlyle's “Boswell's Life of Johnson,” Mill's earlier writings on Bentham show him refashioning Carlyle's language and developing the ironic techniques used in “Bentham.” Like other Victorian sages, Mill has no clear-cut theory of prose artistry; he often regards poetry and prose as antithetical media. Nevertheless, in practice he writes as a complex logician-artist, using prose as an imaginative medium.
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