MISS MARTINEAU'S INTELLECTUAL ACRIMONY. NO one can read • Miss
Martineau's autobiography without
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being struck with the bitterness of the majority-of her personal judgments. There • is hardly a period of her -life -without some mysterious traitor in it. In her youth, it -is-the unnamed person who hinted to her lover that she -was already engaged. Later on, her mother tramples dawaher literary hopes, which, however, are not a bit the worse for the treatment. l'aen her publisher-wrongs her. When she goes toAmerica, her fellow- passenger, the mysterious Russian, is plotting against her. At Tynemouth, some intrusive person insists on lodging near her of whom it is darkly intimated that she was bent upon injuring her, apparently by disclosing to her the particulars of the testi- monials got up in her favour ! Then comes the medical conspiracy against her for trusting mesmerism ; and next, Ambleside, with its " mutual quarrelling fierce and wide and deep," shows her its dark side. Soon the fell persecution which dissolved "all false relations " bursts-upon her, on occasion of the publication of the letters on "Man's Nature and Develop- ment." It is much the same with her judgments on individuals. There are a few, indeed, to whom she always refers with kind- ness. Of Lord and Lady Durham, of Charles Buller, of Mrs. Barbauld, of Joanna Refills, of ,Mrs. Somerville, of Lord Hough- ton, of Douglas Jerrold, of William Lloyd Garrison, and one or two other notable persons, she speaks with • nothing but kind- nem. But for the most part, she always mingles an amount of gall with the honey in her compliments, more than enough to make the mixture very bitter. Thus of Dr. Lent Carpenter, her first religious teacher,—of whom, apparently, by her own admis- sion, she learned much, both morally and intellectually,--she finds the unpleaaantest things to say. She is bitter-sweet in hen criticism on Dean. Milman, on Bishop Stanley (of Norwich), on :Wordsworth, on Miss Mitford, on Miss Sedgwick, on Mrs. Maireet, John Stuart Mill, Campbell, Sir E. Landseer, the liembles, Miss Bremer, Miss Brontd, Dickens, Thackeray, and others ; and she is almost exclusively acrimonious in speaking of William Taylor of Norwich, of Coleridge, of Lord Brougham, Lord Melbourne, Lord John Russell, and the Whig statesmen in general, of the statesmen of the American Union, of Margaret Fuller, and some members of her own family. Yet it is obvious that Miss Martineau was not a malicious person, that to her dependents, and all who looked up to her, she was thoroughly affectionate, and that she often endeavoured, even when speaking of those whom she extremely disliked, to record what she knew to their credit. She is most lenient where there is nothing like the assumption of the power or right to teach her ; and most severe where there was any such assumption, especially in those who came nearest to her, either in the field of her labours, or in domestic proximity. She cannot endure any pretension to philoso- phy which clashes with her own notions. Her severity in speaking of Coleridge as a philosopher, and of Wordsworth as a philosophical poet, is extreme. When John Stuart Mill dies, she is so jealous of the-interpretation which might be put on any subscription of hem to his memorial, that she withholds • her subscription for:the time. Her resentment of the pretensions of the Whigs is evidently, in no small degree, a resentment towards political rivals who patronised more than, they admired her. Evidently Miss Martineau was one who could not live at ease without a certain space cleared round her own individuality, with which no one should venture even to attempt to interfere. Nothing excited her: acrimony more than any disposition to do so. Thus, when Mr. Empson,—her friendly reviewer in the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards editor of that Review,—wrote to her to dissuade her from touching in her book called Society in America' the sub- ject of the position and rights of women there, she wrote back what may be called rather a despatch than a letter, asserting the indefeasible right of authors to treat their subject in any way in which it best recommended itself to them, and insisting on the impropriety of giving authors advice for which they had not asked. "You ought to be aware that no second mind can come into the oouncil at all." " The encroachment of mind upon mind should be checked in its smallest beginning, for the sake of the young and.timid, who shrink from asserting, their own liberty " (vol. pp, 165-6), and so forth. And when poor Mr. Empson writes back withdrawing his suggestion, and making as light of the matter as he. can, Miss Martineau loftily condemns him for a reply which " shows that he no more discerned the principle of the case after reading my letter, than before ;" " and in fact," she adds severely, "if he had been restricted in his habit of advising everybody on all occasions, he would have felt his occupation gone." Evidently what most irritated Miss Martineau into intellectual and moral acrimony was any attempt, and especially any formidable attempt, to interfere with the discretion and judgment of -her own mind. For our own parts, we are disposed to regard the joy with which, according to her statement, she threw off the last fetters of theology and the last belief in immortality, and welcomed the sweetness of the starlight so soon as-it no longer spoke to her of any divine authority, as due much less to any intellectual recognition of the agreement of her new view with facts, than to her satisfaction in thinking that she now recognised no revising and criticising power, spiritual or other- wise, which had any claim to reverse her personal judgments, or to require from her,--here or hereafter,—a change in the prin- ciple of her conduct. If agnosticism and annihilation did but save her from expecting to have her mind and character re- viewed by any Court of Appeal, they conferred on her a benefit greater than any of which they deprived her.
Is this whet theologians condemn as " pride of intellect," and brand as so deep-rooted in man ? If it is, we exceedingly doubt whether it is half so common as theologians suppose ; and even in Miss Martineau's case, it is obvious that there are excep- tions to this irritable dislike of anything like interference with the- course of her own thought and the discretionary freedom of- her own action. In relation to the Anti-Slavery cause, she declares that her judgment submitted itself almost abso- solutely to that of Mrs. Chapman ; and she declares this with
a humility as remarkable as any teacher short of Ignatius Loyola would have required. Again, in relation to philosophy, it is clear that she not only sat at Mr. Atkinson's feet, but was proud to avow to all the world that she did so. Of •the , first relation of discipleship she tells us :—" My relation to Mrs. Chapman required my utmost moral care. The discovery of her moral power and insight was to me so extraordinary, that while I longed to work with and under her, I felt that it must be morally perilous to lean on any one mind as I could not but lean on hers..
Thus far, whenever we had differed (and that had not seldom happened), I had found her right, and so deeply and broadly right as to make me long to commit myself to her guidance.' We fear that in relation to the literary difference between the first two volumes and the third of this book, Miss Martineau,-
would hardly think Mrs. Chapman so " deeply-and broadly right " as she may have been in her judgments on the anti-slavery cause,—though even there, if we may judge by Mrs. Chap-i man's excessively narrow, not to say grudging and unfair, judgment of Dr. Channing's character, we suspect Mrs: Chapman to fall very far short of that ideal justice with which. Miss Martineau credits her. Anyhow, it is clear Mrs. Chapman was greatly the inferior of Miss Martineau in all the capacities in which Miss Martineau was specially strong ; and the same may confidently be asserted of Mr. Atkinson, whom she credits with- - first put her into the paths of right philosophy and led her -te-the - true method for discovering truth. And no doubt, it may be said that in neither case was there, or could there have been, any authority asserted, which Miss Martineau had not first voluntarily conferred. She had chosen them, not they her; and the authority which vexes the soul is that, and that only, which claims to. withdraw it from the track on which it is bent, and to. lead it, against the impulse of an inner tendency, into one less,- congenial to itself.
Moreover, intellectual acrimony against a claim. implies not only that that claim is unwelcome, but also that it. appeals to something, however faint and feeble, in the-mind which repudiates it, something which renders it difficult to turn to that claim. a r
deaf ear, and impossible to ignore it altogether. For- such acrimony is due to a mixture of profound self-confidence, with a little residuum of haunting self-distrust, the latter not enough to influence the conduct in any degree, but just enough., to give a certain alarm in the mind of the subject of it, and_ therefore to give a touch of acerbity to the tone in which the claim made to exercise influence over the conduct is. repudiated. We do not doubt that this is in great part the reason of the intellectual acrimony of Miss Martineau's judgments, from that on Dr. Lant Carpenter and some of her own family, to that on the Whig Ministry, Lord Macaulay, and John Stuart Mill.
She did not admit their authority. It interfered with the tenden, ties of her own mind. But at the bottom she felt a certain die, comfort in ignoring it, which turned the mere intellectual antagonism into a source of bitterness. That a woman of such high courage and such amazing self-confidence should have- shrunk a little from the course to which that courage and that self- confidence prompted her, is perhaps odd, but it is one of those
small paradoxes which are of the very essence of haman nature, and which may be paralleled in almost every human being, who ever breathed.
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