BOOKS.
MRS. CHAPMAN ON HARRIET MARTINEAU.*
[FIRST NOTICE.] BIOGRAPHY is always fascinating, when it deals in any competent manner at all with any one so remarkable and so full of life as Harriet Martineau. And these three volumes are likely to be among the most eagerly read of the biographies of our time. For they are the memorials of a woman of great strength and of a life of redundent energy and high public spirit, though not one at all deficient in harsh and repellent elements of character. One thing in connection with this book we heartily regret, and with that we will deal first, though it closes the book,—we mean the volume of memorials by Mrs. Chapman, to whom Miss Martineau confided her autobiography. This volume exaggerates painfully everything that is disagreeable in the autobiography it- self, and—excepting the American chapter, which in its way is vigorously, though somewhat passionately written—adds nothing at all of interest to the autobiography which might not well have been committed to ' notes ' or an appendix. As if there were not enough in the autobiography itself which is painful to read, and wanting in proper regard for the feelings of others, Mrs. Chap- man carefully picks out, and invests with a great volume of sound and fury, all the deficiencies of taste and temper in her friend, and then injures her by inflated praise, which though evidently sincere, is so very undiscriminating and wide of the mark aimed at, that it does much to spoil by its excesses the character of the impression conveyed by Miss Martineau's most sober and modest estimate of her own powers. The truth is that Mrs. Chapman, who has all the better part of her life been an agitator, though an agitator in the noblest of causes, has not the qualities requisite for this sort of work, and if she had known herself, would have restricted her duties as editor to the narrowest possible limits,—almost exclusively indeed to a narrative of her friend's work in and for America, and such illustrations of the autobiography as might well have been either interwoven with, or appended to, Harriet Martineau's account of herself. As it is, the third volume goes a good way towards making Miss Martineau ridiculous, attacks her mother, imputes mean fraternal jealousy to her brother,—an imputation which will seem to all who know him as ridiculous as it is baseless,—and directs a broad stream of panegyric—with that unfortunate instinct of the injudi- cious friend that warns her where praise is most needed, rather than where it is most deserved—on just the wrong points. Moreover, the arrangement of this volume is sadly confused, as if its composition had been scrambled through, and the many epistles of affectionate regret at the close are just the sort of letters the inclusion of which Miss Martineau would have had far too keen a literary sense to approve, knowing as she did how strongly the feelings of the mourners beside a just-closed grave distort that calm estimate which alone can stand the test of time.
This is a harsh judgment to pass on the third volume, but we shall be surprised if it is not concurred in by all unprejudiced readers of this unfortunate effort of unwise friendship,—of which by far the best, as it is also the clearest, simplest, and most animated part, deals with the American episode in Miss Martineau's life. What can we think of a biographer who, instead of referring with the delicacy and reserve appropriate to such a subject to the not always per- fectly smooth relations between mother and daughter, writes after such a fashion as this?—" Mrs. Martineau having decided that * Harriet Martinean's Autobiography, with Manorial!. By Marie Weston Chapman. a vole. London : Smith, Elder, and Co. her daughter's hopes of a literary career should be crushed, the daughter writes thus (p. 43);" or thus :—" The more she loved and honoured her mother, the more truly she estimated the many really admirable qualities that made her character, the more she must naturally have suffered from a fretful and domineering temper, which claimed continually what it was absurd and wrong in the daughter to yield" (p. 90) ; or thus :—" Mrs. Martineau, always a severe mother, had now become an exacting and jealous one, and no precautionary measures could avail." (p. 93.) Such invasions of the privacy of life, which no filial spirit would have sanctioned, and which there is reason to think Miss Martineau,—though she refers in more guarded ways to what she thought the deficiencies of her home, — would not have approved, seem to us very unjustifiable and almost indecent exercises of the privilege of the biographer. Nor is there even that poor excuse for them which may be suggested for the rather silly and very violent chapter in which Mr. Martineau's review of Mr. Atkinson's and his sister's book on Man's Nature and Development is attacked. That that chapter certainly does not carry out the injunction of Miss Martineau herself to deal gently with the subject, is obvious enough ; but then it is pretty clear from the bitter references to this review in the autobiography, that Miss Martineau would not, perhaps, have interpreted the word " gently " in any very strict sense. But whatever excuse may be offered for a biographer who takes up as a vehement partisan a dispute in which it is clear that her friend's feelings were themselves very keen, there can be no excuse for one who needlessly lifts any veil, though it may not be as complete as one would wish, left by her friend over a delicate subject on which there was no pretence whatever for admitting the public into confidence.
But it is not merely with subjects of a delicate personal nature that Mrs. Chapman shows herself incompetent to deal. She adopts throughout, whenever she characterises Miss Martineau, au inflated style, as inferior to that of Miss Martineau's too modest but otherwise wise estimate of her own capacities, as the style of the historical romance of Bulwer is inferior to that of the his- torical romance of Scott. For instance, she adopts from some silly person, who delivered his oracle to the former editor of the Daily News, concerning Miss Martineau's leading articles in that paper, this ridiculous phrase,—" These are not newspaper articles, but poems." If they were, they were atrociously bad newspaper articles ; but they were not poems. Miss Martineau was far too good a journalist and too business-like a woman to make any such absurd blunder. Her articles were packed full of knowledge, facts, plain common sense, and compressed logic, and no one ever made a good poem solely out of such materials as these. Or take the fol- lowing as a specimen of Mrs. Chapman's sense and judgment :- after one of her unwise and very likely more or less unjust attacks on the treatment of Miss Martineau by her mother as a child, Mrs. Chapman concludes thus :—" The affections so outraged and repressed did but flow the stronger and deeper. Injustice could not pervert a natural rectitude so true, nor oppression harden into selfishness a sympathy so tender. They did but render • metal-slitrong ' the poet-heart that gave itself to life's great organ-music in the after-years, so early, so gladly, and with so full a consciousness." Turgid sentimentalism like this abounds in this third volume, and we read it with a painful sense of the literary distaste with which the subject of the biography would have regarded it, and the unrelenting pen with which she would have cut it out, if she could but have corrected the proofs of her friend's pretentious performance. How would Miss Mar- tineau have been affected by hearing that her friends felt her "presence, like that of the Maid of Orleans, radiant with joy and fame " (p. 163) ? or that the pictures of men and women in her fictions are true to no class, because "true to humanity, they overleap its subdivisions, and like oaks planted in flower- pots, are sure to outgrow their limitations" (p. 221) ? or that her library at Ambleside "seemed less a library than an oratory" (p. 269),—this being the very room in which she then first began to work when she was abandoning alto- gether the belief in a personal God, and endeavouring to prove to the world that prayer is as unmeaning as the "Christian fetishism" out of which the notion of God as a being to be prayed-to arose ? These are the signs, too thickly distributed through the book, that Mrs. Chapman, though, no doubt, a devoted and self-sacrificing politician, who has given up much of her life to the greatest of modem causes, has no literary discrimination. Indeed, she chooses precisely the wrong things to say, sometimes when she should be silent altogether, and sometimes when she should say something of a tendency precisely opposite to what she does say. Whatever the merit of a few of Miss. Martineau's verses may be, and however great her power of pic- turesque writing,—a subject on which we could say a great deal, —the " poet-heart " was just what she had not ; and hardly any one ever resembled Joan of Arc less than the author of the clever illustrations of political economy. Again, some of her- tales are spirited enough, but it is clearly not the massive univer- sality of the human nature in her characters which prevents them from being skilful pictures of any particular class,—a plea, indeed, which could not be a true apology for the defec- tive delineation of any fictitious characters whatever. Then her library, though a room where a great deal of public-spirited labour was done, and one fall of well-selected books, could not remind any rational creature of an oratory, unless the flat and flavourless aphorism, " Laborare eat orare," is to be appealed to, and even then it should hardly be applied with great ostentation and emphasis to one who expressly denied a proper object of prayer. Nor does Mrs. Chapman know how even to- conclude her memorial of a friend, to whom it is evident that she was profoundly attached, with anything like dignity or pathos. Her peroration is one of the most nauseous bits of tawdry rhetoric with which we ever met, and makes us lay down this sad third volume with something between a smile and a sigh. As the last word on such a woman as Harriet Martineau, the fol- lowing sentence is the very acme of painstaking bathos :—" Very many of her own and of other lands, who wished that the name- of this greatest Englishwoman might give an added glory to
the temple where the dead Are honoured by the nations,'
checked the half-formed expression of their wish, just as they forbear to plant flowers where she is buried ; as knowing that for herself, her feelings would have shunned such obsequies. She lies. with her kindred, and only the North wind sheds rose-leaves upon her grave. 'But from whomsoever Persephone accepteth atone- ment made for an ancient woe, their souls unto the light she- sendeth back. And from those souls spring noble kings, and men swift and strong, and in wisdom very great ; and through, the after-time such souls are called holy heroes among men." A prize offered for an inflated conclusion to such a biography as this- could hardly have elicited a worse-conceived wind-up. We suppose that where any expression of Christian or even Theistic faith is held to be objectionable, recourse will still be had to the mystical phraseo- logy of pious myth or legend such as this, to fill up the natural void in the human heart. Mrs. Chapman probably means to say that Harriet Martineau was not buried in Westminster Abbey, because her friends knew that she would have disliked such a proposal ; and. that they did not plant flowers round her grave, because she herself preferred a stern sort of simplicity for burial ; but what Mrs. Chap- man means by the remark that "only the North wind sheds rose- leaves upon her grave," it would puzzle a shrewder head than ours to. discover. Still more, what application is intended of the quotation. about Persephone's procedure when she accepts atonement for an ancient woe, and what the ancient woe may have been, we have no idea at all, and doubt whether Mrs. Chapman has any her- self,—unless she means nothing more than that Harriet Marti- neaus' spirit will live again in those whom it will strengthen to good deeds,—in which case, though it might have been a little flat, how much better it would have been to say so. That a clever woman, of strong and plain sense, of high courage, and. above all, a hard-working woman, the great merit of whose style was its straightforward simplicity, should be celebrated with so little display of good-feeling and good-sense and after this in- flated style, is simply a literary misfortune ; and we could not but deal with this unhappy third volume as it deserved, before giving our estimate of Miss Martineau's own very different though far from faultless story of her own labours and her own character.. We know nothing of Mrs. Chapman, except through this book Webelieve that she has done invaluable work in her own country. But that cannot make bad work good. And whatever else Mrs. Chapman may have done that is noble, there can be no question. at all but that she has contributed almost as much as a woman, certainly not without abilities of some kind, could contribute, to. disfigure the memorials of Harriet Martineau.
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