BOOKS.
A STUDY OF DR. MARTINEAU.t IT is understood that what may be termed the official biography of Dr. Martineau has been entrusted to his colleagues, Professors Drummond and Upton. Meanwhile an American writer, Mr. Jackson, who apparently had much intercourse with Dr. Martineau, and who has evidently been profoundly influenced by him, has produced the present work, which is in part biographical, but far more critical and expository. We may say at once that the reader cannot extract from this work an adequate picture of one of the most striking personalities of our time; though, so far as Mr.
• It Ls a peculiarity of the plane leaf that the old leaf acts ais a sheath to the new.
t James Martineau: a Biography and Study. By A. W. Jackson, A.M. London ; Longman* and Co. [Ili. ad.] Jackson goes, he is accurate and truthful. One feels that the author has given his readers a little too much of his own views and not enough of Dr. Martineau. Still, the book as a whole is thoughtful and well written, and the author is evidently a diligent student of those profound themes to which Dr. Martineau dedicated his life. The mistake made,
it seems to us, is in mixing a rather brief and imperfect biography with a somewhat elaborate treatise on the varied aspects of Dr. Martineau's philosophy. The biographical part might have been left to the forthcoming Life, and the critical exposition have been given by itself.
Those who had the honour of knowing Dr. Martineau were impressed by two things,—first, the absolute domination of the spiritual over the carnal in his nature ; secondly, the immense weight of learning so easily borne, suggestive of a life in which not one minute had ever been wasted. Browning might have written his " Rabbi ben Ezra " with Martineau in his mind.
The spare tenement of clay was for nearly ninety-five years the swift, obedient servant of the regnant soul. The eager mind drew in nourishment from every source of learning and culture. Mr. Jackson's biography, slight though it is, brings out these predominant aspects of Dr. Martineau's nature. Indeed, there is much clear insight as well as invariable good taste in what Mr. Jackson has to say. We agree with him too that the French element in Martineau's mind must never be overlooked. That element, says our author, proclaims the nationality which produced Bossuet,—and we should add, Pascal. Dr. Martineau's family was Huguenot, and it settled
first in London, afterwards at Norwich, where he was born in 1805. Norwich had long been, and was at that time, one of those provincial literary centres whose decay, in our judgment, is a serious national loss. It is characteristic of the high ethical sense of the Martineau family that, after the ruin of the Norwich trade, in which the father was en- gaged, as the result of the French invasion of Spain, which was its chief market, the whole family combined to work and retrench until every penny of debt with interest was paid. The boy was sent to the old Grammar School which reposes under the shadow of the Cathedral, but his reserved, sensitive nature could not endure the rough play and bullying of the average boy, and he was sent to the private school at Bristol of Dr. Carpenter, father of the illustrious physiologist, whence he repaired to Glasgow University. His father designed him for an engineer, and for a twelvemonth he studied mechanics ; but the call to a. different life was too urgent, and he entered the ministry in Dublin. Nominally he was a Presbyterian, but in Ireland, as in England, the Presbyterian body had
mainly passed over to the somewhat mechanical and formal Unitarianism of Priestley and Belsham. It is again charac-
teristic of Martineau's high moral sense that he refused to accept any grant from the Regium Donum. From Dublin he went to Liverpool, and from thence to London, at the same time acting as Professor in the noted Unitarian College, which was located at different times at York, Manchester, and London, and which is now finally fixed at Oxford. The immense task involved in this double function of preacher and teacher can scarcely
be realised by inferior and less diligent minds, especially when it is remembered that Martineau did nothing which was not in its way supremely excellent. Like a finished diamond- cutter, he worked away with the insight of genius until the stone shone with perfect splendour. Never did so great a man work with more modesty ; yet even in the old-fashioned building in a dingy lane off Oxford Street Martineau drew an " audience fit though few "
"Not unnaturally the students of the College came to hear their professors; in one part of the assembly sat Charles Dickens ; in another Frances Power Cobbe, who found the place with all its baldness a fitting one for serious people to meetto think in' ; in yet another Sir Charles Lyell, who spoke with bitterness of the place where England hid her greatest preacher ; and withal there was a very plentiful sprinkling of those toiling at the higher tasks of thought and learning."
We may add that both Darwin and Tyndall were occasional listeners at those wonderful " Hours of Thought on Sacred Things." In 1872, on the urgent command of his doctor, Dr. Martineau laid down the pulpit burden.
Uneventful, in the ordinary sense, as his life was, yet on two occasions Dr. Martineau was destined to go through a painful experience coram public°. The first involved his relations with his sister Harriet, a remarkable and famous woman with great natural gifts, but who in her pursuit of mesmerism and clairvoyance had come under the influence of an impostor, H. G. Atkinson. Dr. Martineau was called upon in the course of his literary work to review a book written by this man. He undertook the painful task and simply annihi- lated Atkinson, but incurred the wrath of his sister and of the literary clientele which took up her cause. The matter became public property, and the modest philosopher was dragged into a controversy he detested. The second incident was connected with the Professorship of Philosophy in University College, for which Martineau was a candidate. That he was far and away the best candidate is certain, and he was supported by Mr. Gladstone and others on that ground. But on the one hand, the fact that he was a Unitarian minister was used against him as a reproach ; and on the other hand, the agnostic and Benthamite section, led by so distinguished a man as Grote, was opposed to one who would have taught a very different philosophy from that which afterwards came to be identified with University College. The incident shows once more the frequent bigotry of " free thought," and is a severe reflection on the boasted " Liberalism" of University College. Martineau felt the wound in spite of his philosophical serenity.
We pass over some other interesting incidents in his life, such as his membership of the famous Metaphysical Society of which Tennyson, Ruskin, Manning, Ward, Huxley, and others were also members, and which cultivated philosophy after dinner once a month at the Grosvenor Hotel ; the fine address presented to him, signed by scholars and thinkers of every civilised nation, thanking him for his services to spiritual life and religious thought ; and the money present given him by his English admirers and friends. His replies to these tributes are characteristic ; as Mr. Jackson says, one can no more mistake the style of Martineau than that of Shakespeare. If at times it is too complex and brilliant, too much polished and refined, yet it is the outcome of the man, and it will perhaps rank with the styles of De Quincey, Arnold, Newman, and Ruskin as the finest English of our century. To our mind, this fine style reaches its height in some of the sermons ; rarely, if ever, has the noblest spiritual thought found more apt, more chastened expression.
We have no space for any treatment of Mr. Jackson's exposition of Martineau's ethics or philosophy of religion. To those who only know the mature products of his mind, it will come as a singular revelation that Martineau started as a Necessarian. But this was the attitude of the old Priestleian Unitarianism in which Martineau was nurtured. The breath of a new life came from Channing, and we may add, from Carlyle, Emerson, Browning, and Tennyson. Martineau early drew in the influence, and his friend J. S. Mill was the first to detect the subtle change. It is a remarkable fact that while Martineau remained relatively orthodox as regards Biblical criticism, and even great points of doctrine, while he held the philosophy of necessity, he became more and more unorthodox as he developed his intuitional ethics and his noble spiritual idealism, until he may be said to have accepted the complete critical results of the advanced German school. His inner evolution, however, was steady; we see no break, nor did the keenest intellectual criticism ever rob the soul of deepest piety. With the neo-Kantian movement which has mainly captured England and Scotland during the last generation Dr. Martineau was in imperfect sympathy. He held so firmly in ethics by intuition, in psychology by free will, in meta- physics by divine personality, that it was impossible he should adopt a different attitude. We cannot classify him in any school; he is a solitary, majestic pillar in the temple of English thought.
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