"And for those who let it go by for conscience sake, and do not ask for it again?"
"Why, they are happy in having learned what the one feeling is that life is worth living for. They may make themselves happy upon it for ever, after that. Oh! Effie, you would not believe, nothing could make you believe, what I was the day before and the day after I saw that sudden change of look of yours that told me all. The one day, I was shrinking inwardly from everything I had to do, and every word of my father's, and everybody I met; and was always trying to make myself happy in myself alone, with the sense of God being near me and with me. The other day, I looked down upon everybody, in a kindly way; and yet I looked up to them, too, for I felt a respect that I never knew before for all that were suffering and enjoying; and I felt as if I could have brought the whole world nearer to God, if they would have listened to me. I shall never forget the best moment of all—when my mind had suddenly ceased being in a great tumult, which had as much pain as pleasure in it. When I said distinctly to myself, 'She loves me,' Heaven came down round about me that minute."[ [4]
This tells how Harriet Martineau could love in her youth. Perhaps the stream ran all the more powerfully for its course being checked; for it was over three years after she met and became attached to Mr. Worthington before their love was allowed to be declared, and their engagement was permitted—a long period for hope and fear to do their painful office in the soul, a long test of the reality of the love on both sides.
Her extensive and deep studies, her sufferings and inward strivings from her deafness, and the joys and anxieties of her love, were the chief moulding influences of her early womanhood. We shall soon see how she came to seek expression for the results of all these in literature.
CHAPTER III.
EARLIEST WRITINGS.
Harriet Martineau's first attempt to write for publication was made in the same year that her acquaintance with Mr. Worthington was formed; in 1822, when she was twenty years old. It was, apparently, at the close of the vacation in which Worthington had visited his friend Martineau at Norwich, that she commenced a paper with the design of offering it to the Unitarian magazine, The Monthly Repository. She had told James that when he had returned to college she should be miserable, and he had, with equal kindness and sense, advised her to try to forget her feelings about the parting by an attempt at authorship. On a bright September morning, therefore, when she had seen him start by the early coach, soon after six, she sat down in her own room with a supply of foolscap paper before her to write her first article.
The account which she—writing from memory—gives in her autobiography, of this little transaction, is curiously inaccurate, as far as the trifling details are concerned. Her own statement is that she took the letter "V" for her signature, and that she found her paper printed in the next number of the magazine, "and in the 'Notices to Correspondents' a request to hear more from 'V' of Norwich." Her little errors about these facts must be corrected, because the truth of the matter is at once suggestive and amusing.
The article may be found in the Monthly Repository for October, 1822. It is signed, not "V," but "Discipulus." This, it need hardly be pointed out, is the masculine form of the Latin for learner, or apprentice. The note in the correspondents' column is not in that same month's magazine; but in the number for the succeeding month, the editor says in his answers to correspondents: "The continuation of 'Discipulus' has come to hand. His other proposed communications will probably be acceptable." If more proofs than these were required that the youthful authoress had presented herself to her editor in a manly disguise, it would be furnished by a passage in one of these "Discipulus" articles, in which she definitely figures herself as a masculine writer, speaking of "our sex" (i.e. the male sex) as a man would do. The interesting fact is thus disclosed that Harriet Martineau adds another to the group of the most eminent women writers of this century who thought it necessary to assume the masculine sex in order to obtain a fair hearing and an impartial judgment for their earliest work. Surely, as our "Discipulus" takes her place in this list with George Eliot, George Sand, and Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, a great deal is disclosed to us about how women in the past have had to make their way to recognition against the tide of public opinion.