HARRIET MARTINEAU'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
T" • epitomised autobiography which Miss Martineau deposited with the Daily News, to be published immediately after her death, and which appeared in that journal on Thursday, is a true literary curiosity. We have always maintained that culti- vated persons, in this conscious age of ours, are less under delu- sions about themselves and their own capacities than it is the fashion with satirists to assmne. Very few, it is true, or probably none, understand themselves completely, and very many, possibly all, retain in hidden corners of their minds baseless little vani- ties, sometimes of a very grotesque kind. But a very large nutiber indeed weigh their own powers, as distinct from their own character, very accurately, know exactly what they can do and cannot do, and are able to judge their own minds ab extra as they would judge those of third persons. If they make mis- takes, it is in the direction of self-depreciation, of a distrust which sometimes is consistent with an appearance of vanity on the very subject on which they know themselves to be weak. Vanity, and particularly visible vanity, is often a mere parade of armour over the weak place, and men are constantly soothed by flattery directed to the qualities which, as-they recognise, with humorous eontempt alike for the 'flatterer and themselves, ,they do not possess. Here, for instance, was a middle-aged woman of fifty-three, who had for ten years resided almost in solitude in the Lake country, who was visited mainly by worshippers, who had had, for a woman, considerable literary and political success, and who was by no means of the very first order of intellect. She was a nervous woman, too, who all her life had mistaken a weak heart and a liability to nervous exhaustion for imminent heart-disease,—a temperament perhaps the moat unfavourable of all to true self-knowledge. Yet she sits down and writes a newspaper biography of herself and her work, so coldly judicial, so severely passionless, so harsh, indeed, in some respects, that had it not been her own work, the Editor of the Daily News would have been charged with a mocking hardness for giving it publicity so soon after her death. He would hardly have ventured to write of her efforts at fiction the sentence we have italicised :—" None of her novels or tales have, or ever had, in the eyes of good judges or in her own, any character of permandrice. The artistic aim and qualifications were absent ; she had 'no power of dramatic construction ; neither the poetic inspiration'on the one hand, nor the critical cultivation on the other, without which no work of the' imagination can be worthy to live. Two or three of her Political Economy Tales' are, perhaps, her best achieve- ment in fiction,—her doctrine furnishing the plot which she was unable to create, and the brevity of space duly restricting the indulgence in detail which injured her longer narratives, and at last warned her to leave off writing them. It was fortunate for her that her own condemnation anticipated that of the public. To the end of her life she was subject to solicitations to write more novels and more tales, but she for the most part remained steady in her refusal. Her three volumes of 'Forest and Game- Law Tales' and a few stories in Household Words, written at the express and earnest request of Mr. Dickens, and with little satis- faction to herself, are her latest efforts in that direction." That is a perfectly just judgment, with these exceptions,—that Miss Martineau had some faculty of suggesting, though none of analys- ing character ; and that she had a strange, almost inexplicable power of touching, in most prosaic and unimaginative fashion, 'the springs of pathos and pity. Reading some of her Poor-law stories is like standing by the death-bed of a hungry woman, and leaves a sensation almost of physical pain. She had not, how- ever, the artistic touch, and her fictions, though they did good work in their time, will all moulder away forgotten in ancient libraries.
That a writer should despise some division of his 'writings is, however, no infrequent phenomenon. Defoe never dreamed that he was to live for ever through Robinson Cratme," and many a statesman has hoped, like Richelieu, to survive by his wretched poems, but Miss Martineau judged all her work with the same coldly unfavourable 'eye. She says of her first book on America, that she was carried away by sympathy with some American states- men, and "the book is not a favourable specimen of Harriet Martineau's writings, either in regard to moral or artistic taste. It is full of affectations and preachments, and it marks the highest point of the metaphysical period of her mind." She is equally severe on herself as a historian. Her book, "The History of the Thirty Years' Peace," will live some years, as the only brief and readable collection of the annals of the period, and it brought her much popularity ; but she reckons it in .her biographical sketch at nearly its true value :—" Without taking the chronicle form, this history could not, from the nature of the case, be cast in the ultimate form of perfected history. All that can be done with contemporary history is to collect and metho- dise the greatest amount of reliable facts and distinct impressions —to amass sound material for the veritable historian of a future day—so consolidating, assimilating, and vivifying the structure, as to do for the future writer precisely that which the lapse of •time, and the oblivion which creeps over all transactions, must prevent his doing for himself. This auxiliary usefulness is the aim- of Harriet Martineau's history, and she was probably not mistaken in hoping for that much result from her labour." Of the most serious defect of the book, its absurd over-estimate of that showy politician Canning, she was probably unaware, as she was also unaware that her theological writings contributed positively nothing to the stock of ideas in the world. She seems, in her -bio- graphical sketch, to make an exception in their favour to an estimate more harshly true, perhaps, than woman ever yet passed upon her own performances and powers :—" Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. 'With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularise, while she could neither discover nor invent. She could sympathise in other people's views, and was too facile in doing so ; and she could obtain and keep a firm grasp of her own, and moreover, she could make them understood. The function of her life was to do this, and in as far as it was done diligently and honestly, her life was of use, however far its achievements may have fallen short of expectations less moderate than her own." If any proof were wanting of the lucidity of vision and ex- pression which are the only powers she claims, this sketch alone is sufficient to afford it ; and it will suggest to most men also that she must have possessed another power,—that judicial faculty which is so often wanting in men and women of genius. and is so seldom lacking to any high order of ability. That faculty will give a high interest to the posthumous work we are promised, the Autobiography to which she devoted two years, and which, fearing lest her executors should be blamed for some statements in it, she herself passed through the Press. Considering the number of personages she knew, her utter freedom, as it appears from this sketch, from self-interested prejudice, and her consider- able political knowledge, this should be a book of great interest, even though it does not tell us very, much of the inner nature and ideal life of Miss Harriet, Martineau..
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