Harriet Martineau

by Florence Fenwick Miller

But was there ever human love unwithered by crime—by crime of which no human law takes cognizance, but the unwritten everlasting laws of the affections? Many will call me thus innocent. The departed breathed out thanks and blessing, and I felt them not then as reproaches. If, indeed, I am only as others, shame, shame on the impurity of human affections; or, rather, alas! for the infirmity of the human heart! For I know not that I could love more than I have loved.

Since the love itself is wrecked, let me gather up its relics, and guard them more tenderly, more steadily, more gratefully. This seems to open up glimpses of peace. O grant me power to retain them—the light and music of emotion, the flow of domestic wisdom and chastened mirth, the life-long watchfulness of benevolence, the thousand thoughts—are these gone in their reality? Must I forget them as others forget?

If I were to see my departed one—that insensible, wasted form—standing before me as it was wont to stand, with whom would I exchange my joy?… But it is not possible to lose all. The shadows of the past may have as great power as their substance ever had, and the spirit of human love may ever be nigh, invested with a majesty worthy to succeed the lustre of its mortal days.

This is the poem of Harriet Martineau's love. This is what remains to show that the girl whose intellect was so powerful, and who had habitually and of choice exercised her mind upon the most abstruse studies and the most difficult thoughts which can engage the attention, could nevertheless feel at least as fervently, and deliver herself up to her emotions at least as fully, as any feeble, ignorant, or narrow-minded creature that ever lived. Surely, with the truth emphasized by such an example, the common but stupid delusion that the development of the intellect diminishes the capacity for passion and tenderness, must fade away! This girl's mental power and her mental culture were both unusually large; but here is the core of her heart, and is it not verily womanly?

This experience did more than give her hours of happiness; it did more than bring to her that enlargement of the spirit which she so well described; for it taught her to appreciate, and to properly value, the influence of the emotions in life. Never in one of her works, never in a single phrase, is she found guilty of that blasphemy against the individual affections, into which some who have yet sought to pose as high priests of the religion of humanity have fallen and lost themselves. In all her writings one finds the continual recognition of the great truth which was in the mind of him who said: "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?"—a truth of the very first consequence to those who aim at expressing their religion by service to the progress of mankind.

The year 1826, to Harriet crowded so full of trouble, came to an end soon after Mr. Worthington's death. In the following year, though she was in very bad health, she wrote a vast quantity of manuscript. Some of it was published at once. Other portions waited in her desk for a couple of years, when her contributions to The Monthly Repository recommenced, after a change in its editorship.

She wrote in the year 1827 various short stories, which were published by Houlston, of Shrewsbury, without her name on their title-pages. Their character may be guessed by the fact that they were circulated as Mrs. Sherwood's writings! In tone, they resemble the ordinary Sunday-school story-book; but there is a fire, an earnestness, and an originality often discoverable in them which are enough to mark them out from common hack-writing. Two of them, The Rioters and The Turn Out, deal with topics of political economy; but the questions were thought out (very accurately) in her own mind, for at that time she had never read a book upon the subject.

These little stories were so successful that the publisher invited her to write a longer one, which should have her name attached to it. She went to work, accordingly, and produced a good little tale, of one hundred and fifty pages of print, which she called Principle and Practice. It recounts the struggles of an orphan family in their efforts after independence. As in all her writings of this kind, her own experience is interfused into the fiction. No part of this story is so interesting as that where a young man who has met with an accident has to reconcile his mind to the anticipation of life-long lameness—as she to deafness. The sisters of this orphan family, too, make money by a kind of fancy-work by which she herself was earning a few guineas from the wealthier members of her family, namely, by cutting bags and baskets out of pasteboard, fitting them together with silk and gold braid, and painting plaques upon their sides. Principle and Practice was so warmly received in the circle to which it was suited that the publisher called for a sequel, which was accordingly written early in the following year.

There was a vast quantity of writing in all these publications; and, besides this, she was continually at work with her needle. Such unremitting sedentary occupation, together with her sorrow, caused a serious illness, from which she suffered during 1828. It was an affection of the liver and stomach, for which she went to be treated by her brother-in-law, Mr. Greenhow, a surgeon at Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Her remarkable powers of steady application, and her untiring industry, were always[ [6] amongst her most noteworthy characteristics—as, indeed, is proved by the vast quantity of work she achieved. In each of her various illnesses, friends who had watched with wonder and alarm how much she wrote, and how unceasingly she worked, either with pen, or book, or needle in hand, told her that her suffering was caused by her merciless industry. Her "staying power" was great; she rarely felt utterly exhausted, and therefore she was impatient of being told that she had, in fact, over-exerted her strength. Sometimes, indeed, she admitted that she worked too much, and pleaded only that she could not help it—that the work needed doing, or that the thoughts pressed for utterance, and she could not refuse the call of duty. But more often she said, as in a letter to Mr. Atkinson, which lies before me, "My best aid and support in the miseries of my life has been in work—in the intellectual labor which I believe has done me nothing but good." So her immense industry in 1827 may have seemed to her a relief from her heart-sorrows at the moment; but none the less it probably was the chief cause of her partial breakdown in the next year. A blister relieves internal inflammation; but a succession of such stimuli too long continued will exhaust the strength, and render the condition more critical than it would have been without such treatment.