BOOKS.
HARRIET MARTINEAU.*
[SECOND NOTICE.]
THERE can be no doubt that this autobiography is an exceedingly frank book, written by an exceedingly able and courageous woman ; but nevertheless, so odd is human nature, it does not seem to us by any means a remarkably easy task to make out from it what manner of woman Harriet Martineau was. Our main difficulty
is that frank as Miss Martineau is, she is evidently possessed by a variety of very strange illusions about herself, which entirely shake our confidence in her own interpretations of her own character ; and again that, so far as she gives us any opportunity of testing her judgment by comparing her estimate of others with that afforded us by completer materials than any she had in hand, we are very rarely able to attach much value to that judgment. She seems to us to have habitually misjudged both herself and others. As regards her own view of her own character, for instance, she imagined herself a woman too much disposed to live wholly in her affections, a woman with a spirit early broken by the want of tender- ness at home, and consequently radically deficient in self-respect. But all the evidence of her own story appears to show that though very kind-hearted when nothing occurred to mortify her self-esteem, and full of disinterested public spirit, few women ever lived less in the life of the affections ; that none ever had a deeper self-respect, almost amounting at times to an intolerant pride ; and that so far from her spirit having been broken by the alleged early want of tenderness, she carried her own way in almost every transaction of her life, and very frequently against obstacles before which most women would have quailed. If there were any marked defect in Harriet Martineau, it certainly was due rather to a profound value for herself,—not vanity, not conceit, she had far too sincere a pride to admit of either,—than to any want of faith in herself, such as she so oddly ascribes to herself. For the reader who has mastered the story of Miss Martineau's life, and noted her courage and frequently her remarkable peremptoriness, to return to the following passage, for instance, and read it by the light of the commentary supplied by the re- mainder of the autobiography, produces the quaintest sense of the profound depth of the author's ignorance of herself, or at least of her relative ignorance of what she herself was as com- pared with other women :—
" I am, in truth, very thankful for not having married at all. I have never since been tempted, nor have suffered anything at all in relation to that matter which is held to be all-important to woman,—love and marriage. Nothing, I mean, beyond occasional annoyance, presently disposed of. Every literary woman, no doubt, has plenty of importunity * Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, mith Memorials. By Marie Weston Chapman. With Portraits and Illustrations. 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder, d Co. of that sort to deal with; but freedom of mind and coolness of manner dispose of it very easily: and AVM the time I have been speaking of, my mind has been wholly free from all idea of love-affairs. My subse- quent literary life in Landon was clear from all difficulty and em- barrassment,—no doubt because I was evidently too busy, end too full of interests of other kinds, to feel any awkwardness' —to say nothing of my being then thirty years of age ; an age at which, if ever, a woman is certainly qualified to take care of herself. I can easily conceive how I might have been tempted,—how some deep springs in my nature might have been touched, then,- as earlier; but, as a matter of fact, they never were ; and I consider the immunity a great blessing, under the liabilities of a moral condition such as mine was in the olden time. If I had had a husband dependent on me for his happiness, the respon- sibility would have made me wretched. I had not faith enough in myself to endure avoidable responsibility. If my husband had not depended on me for his happiness, I should have been jealous. So also with children. The care would have so overpowered the joy,—the love would have so exceeded the ordinary chances of life —the fear on
my part would have so impaired the freedom on theirs, I rejoice not to have been involved in a relation for which I was, or believed my- self unfit. The veneration in which I hold domestic life has always shown me that that life was not for those whose self-respect had been early broken down or had never grown. Happily, the majority are free from this disability. Those who suffer under it had bettor be as I, —as my observation of married as well as single life assures me. When 1 see what conjugal love is, in the extremely rare cases in which it is seen in its perfection, I feel that there is a power of attachment in me that has never been touched. When I am among little children, it frightens me to think what my idolatry of my own children would have been. But, through it all, I have ever been thankful to be alone. My strong will, combined with anxiety of conscience, makes me fit only to live alone ; and my taste and liking are for living alone. The olden I have grown, the more serious and irremediable have seemed to me the evils and disadvantages of married life, as it exists among us at this time ; and I am provided with what it is the bane of single life in ordinary cases to want,—substantial, laborious, and serious occupa- tion. My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak ottt with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life. My work and I have been fitted to each other, as is proved by the success of my werk and my own happiness in it. The simplicity and independence of this vocation first suited my infirm and ill-developed nature, and then sufficed for my needs, together with family ties and domestic duties, each as I have been blessed with, and as every woman's heart requires. Thus, I am not only entirely satisfied with my lot, but think it the very best for me, —under my constitution and circumstances; and I long ago came to the conclusion that, without meddling with the case of the wives and mothers, I am probably the happiest single woman in England."
Of course these feelings of ready discouragement and self- distrust must have been really experienced. But then what human being, and especially what woman, has not feelings of discourage- ment and self-distrust at times? Nevertheless, what we mean when we speak of a deficiency in self-respect, is a deficiency as com- pared with average persons. Now we do not hesitate to say that if the average of Englishwomen had in them as profound a self-respect as Miss Martineau, domestic life would only be pos- sible at all on condition of Englishmen accepting the second place in the family, and accommodating themselves meekly to that place. As far as we can see, Miss Martineau was never turned from her purpose by another in any matter on which she had set her heart. Mrs. Chapman, indeed, says that Miss Martineau's mother de- termined that her daughter's literary career should be "crushed," and Miss Martineau herself is lost in wonder that on the occasion in question she should have obeyed the summons back to Norwich, in- stead of "asserting her independence and refusing to return,"—"so clear was, in my eyes, the injustice of surrendering me to a position of helplessness and dependence, when a career of action and inde- pendence was opening before me." And certainly we should have shared Miss Martineau's wonder, if it were not evident enough on the facts of the case, that so far from going back to a position of helplessness and dependence, she went back into the very circumstances best adapted for securing the literary success on which her heart was set. Had she stayed in London to earn her living by proof-correcting and such literary drudgery—as was proposed to her—she would hardly have had time or oppor- tunity for writing the three prize essays which secured her her first literary start in life, and her first stimulus to future exertion. In all probability, she would have earned both less money and less encouragement by accepting the post of literary drudgery in London than by going back to her home to com- pete for the three prizes which she had set her heart on obtain- ing, and which her mother, so far from discouraging her, seems to have done her very best to help her to obtain. Indeed, whatever the faults of Mrs. Martineau may have been, we doubt extremely, on the very evidence which Miss Martineau, with her usual candour, places before us, whether any deficiency in love and tenderness towards this daughter—at least after she was grown up—were amongst them. There seems, on Miss Martineau's own showing, to have been certainly not less—possibly more—in herself than in her mother of a nature to alienate her from her mother. It was not her dependence, but her reserve and independ- ence that tended in this direction. Speaking of the publication of her book, Life in the Sick-Room, she says .—" My mother and sister had a special trial, I knew, to bear in discovering how great my suffering really was ; and I could not but see that it was too much for them, and that from that time forward they were never again to me what they had been." And the whole autobiography tells the same tale. She had no confidante, as regarded per- sonal feelings. What Miss Martineau thought right, that she did, without being very much influenced by the judgment of any human being,—mother, brothers, sisters, or friends. Nay, she not only asserted her independence, but she apparently found it quite easy, not to say pleasant, to assert it. And we strongly suspect she would never have obeyed her mother's summons back to Norwich, on the occasion of that act of deference which so greatly surprised herself in later years, had not her interior mind assured her that it would open a much better literary chance for her than the appoint- ment involving literary drudgery in London. She went up to town and battled through with her publishers the great question of the mode of publishing the illustrations of Political Economy, with far more self-confidence and tenacity, than nine men as able as she out of ten would have shown. Directly her literary success was assured, she emancipated herself, and took to her London career without a moment's hesitation. Daring that career, though she (very wisely) invited her mother and aunt to live with her in town, she settled everything her own wise way, and yielded nothing to her mother's less prudent and more ambitious aspira- tions. In society, again, she took her own line very decisively, ignored her enemies ; repelled with a lofty pride those of her enemies who wished afterwards to befriends, but who nevertheless expressed no contrition for their unjustifiable attacks ; kept the Whigs, for whom she had a morbid hatred, at a distance ; snubbed all who desired to lionise her ; and allowed no encroachments on her literary work. Never was a woman with a juster notion of her own claims, or a larger capacity for enforcing them. Take, for instance, the following passage as illustration :— .
"On my return, I was invited to every kind of party at Lansdowne House,—a concert, a state dinner, a friendly dinner-party, a small evening party, and a ball ; and I declined them all. I went nowhere but where my acquaintance was sought, as a lady, by ladies. Mr. Hallam told me,—what was true enough,—that Lady Lansdowne, being one of the Queen's ladies, and Lord Lansdowne, being a Cabinet Minister, could not make calls. If so, it made no difference in my disinclination to go, in a blue-stocking way, to a house where I was not really ac- quainted with anybody. Mr. Hallam, I saw, thought me conceited and saucy, but I felt I must take my own methods of preserving my social independence. Lord Lansdowne would not give the matter up. Finding that General Fox was coming one evening to a sok& of mine, he invited himself to dine with him, in order to accompany him. I thought this somewhat impertinent, while Mr. Hallam regarded it as an honour. I did not see why a nobleman and Cabinet Minister was more entitled than any other gentleman to present himself uninvited, after his own invitations had been declined. The incident was a trifle, but it shows how I acted in regard to this lionising."
Any more unreal dream than this of Miss Martineau's that it was in an excess of moral " infirmity " and in "broken-down self-re- spect" that she differed from other women, surely never occurred to her in the whole course of her fictions. Cool, inflexible in pur- pose, cordially attached to those who could mould themselves to her, but sundering attachments in a moment rather than break any thread of purpose she had made up her mind to pursue,— such was Harriet Martineau in her early womanhood, in London society, in the midst of American dangers, in her sick-room at Tynemouth, in her Eastern travels, and in her final break with theology ;—always a woman to be respected and even to be loved by those who could subordinate their own objects in life to hers, but quite incapable, as we should judge, of so devoting herself to another as to merge her independent life either in God or man.
In our final notice of her, we hope to estimate somewhat more adequately her intellectual capacity, first, in relation to her chief literary and political efforts, and then in relation to the great subject on which she supposed that she had rendered the greatest of services to her age. But whatever capacity Harriet Martineau had,—and she had many rare capacities,—this, at least, is pretty clear,—that morally she never understood herself.
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