She was not one of those mistresses who cannot talk to their servants, any more than she was one to indulge them in idle and familiar gossip. If there were any special news of the day, she would invite the maids into her sitting-room for half an hour in the evening, to tell them about it. During the Crimean War, and again during the American struggle, in particular, the servants had the frequent privilege of tracing with her on the map the position of the battles, and learning with her aid to understand the great questions that were at stake.
The servants thus trained and considered[ [14] were not, certainly, common domestics. She kept two girls in the house, besides the laboring man and his wife at the cottage; and, as the place was small, and her way of living simple, the work did not require that she should choose rough women for servants merely because of their strength. On the contrary, she made special efforts to secure young girls of a somewhat superior order, whom she might train and attach to herself. She got servants whom she had to dismiss now and again, of course; but the time that most of her maids stopped with her and the warm feelings that they showed towards her, are a high testimony to the domestic character of their "strong minded" mistress. At the time of which we are now speaking, her maids were "Jane," who had been cured from chronic illness by Miss Martineau's mesmerizing, and who was in her service for seven years, when the girl emigrated; and "Martha," who had been trained for teaching, and had to resign it from ill-health, but who later on married the master of Miss Carpenter's Bristol Ragged Schools, and returned to teaching, after serving Miss Martineau for some eight years.
Of the servants who came after this, "Caroline" was there twenty years, till she was removed by death; and "Mary Anne" served Miss Martineau eleven years, till the mistress's death closed the long term of attendance and almost filial love.
Indications of how different the relationship was in this home from what it only too often is, are found in many of Miss Martineau's letters. When "Martha" married, she had the rare honor of having Harriet Martineau and Mary Carpenter for her bridesmaids. The mistress gave the wedding breakfast, and partook of it, too, in company with the bride and bridegroom and their friends; and when she had seen them all off, she sat down to write to her family about her loss "with a bursting heart." References to her feelings for her "dear friend, Caroline," will be seen presently in her letters to Mr. Atkinson; and her care and affection for this valued servant are expressed yet more frequently in letters which I may not quote, to more domestic friends. As to "Mary Anne," she has travelled a long way while in delicate health, to see me, to tell me all she could of her mistress, and to express how glad she was "to know of anything being done to make Miss Martineau's goodness better understood." "Mary Anne" is now a married woman. She was engaged for three or four years before Miss Martineau's death, but would not leave her mistress in her old age and her ill-health. That mistress, on her part, when told of the engagement, not only admitted the lover to an interview with herself, but even generously urged that the wedding should not be delayed for her sake, although at this time she had an almost morbid shrinking from strangers, and the loss of the personal attendant who knew her ways, would have been one of the greatest calamities of the commoner order that could have befallen her. But "Mary Anne" did not leave her; and when, at last, it became quite certain that death was at hand, the generous lady said to a relative that it made her "so glad to think that, when it was over, there could be nothing to stand in the way of Mary Anne's marriage." I have thus anticipated in order to show that the domestic peace which existed under her household rule was no special thing dependent upon the character of a single servant, but was maintained through all the years of her home life, and therefore unquestionably was the result of the mistress's qualities of heart and mind.
What may be called her external home-life—that is to say, what she was to her poorer neighbors—during that ten years of activity, may also be best noticed before the mental progress and literary work of the period come under further review.
Every winter, for several years, she gave a course of lectures to the working-people and tradesfolk of the place, in the Methodist school-room at the back of her house. Many of the gentry desired to attend, but she would have none of them, on the double ground that there was no room for them, and that the lectures were designed for people who had little access to books or other educational resources. The subjects that she treated were as various as those of her books, but all chosen with what I have previously observed seems to me to have been the object of all her works—to influence conduct through knowledge and reasoning. There was a course on sanitary matters, others on her travels (and we know from her books on the same topics from what point of view these were treated), some on the history of England, another on the history and constitution of the United States; and, finally, the last course for which she had health and strength was given in November and December, 1854, and was on the Crimean War and the character of the government of Russia.
I have seen some of the older inhabitants of Ambleside who attended these lectures, and who now speak of them in the warmest terms of admiration. "They were so clear; and she never stopped for a word; and so interesting!—one could have listened to them over and over again." But there is no one who could tell, with the aid of a cultivated taste, what she was as a public speaker. So eloquent is some of her writing that one holds one's breath as one reads it; and the evident rapidity of the penmanship of her MS.[ [15] shows that such passages were produced with all the improvisatory impulse and flow of the orator. If, besides this, her delivery was fervent and impressive, one cannot but think how great a statesman and parliamentary leader she might have been, with these essential qualifications for modern public life added to all that knowledge, judgment, strength of principle, and political capacity which made men willing (as we shall see soon) to accept her as their political teacher in the daily and quarterly press. That she had the orator's stirring gifts, the personal magnetism which compels the minds of a mass to move with the words of a speaker, and the reciprocal power of receiving stimulus from an audience, when
The hearts of many fires the lips of one,
there is one shadowy incident left to show, besides the testimony of her local hearers who survive. It is this: in 1849 Charlotte Brontë, then in the first flush of her fame, sought Harriet Martineau's acquaintance, saying that she desired "to see one whose works have so often made her the subject of my thoughts." In the following year Charlotte visited Harriet at "The Knoll," and heard one of the English History lectures. Her bright eyes were fixed on the lecturer all through; and as Harriet stood on her low platform, while the audience dispersed, she heard Charlotte say, in the very voice of the lecturer, what Edward said in the wind-mill at Cressy: "Is my son dead?" They walked silently to the house together—about three hundred paces—and when Harriet turned up her lamp in the drawing-room, the first thing she saw was Charlotte looking at her with wide, shining eyes, and repeating, in the same tone, "Is my son dead?" To those who know the dramatic quality of Charlotte Brontë's imagination, there is a beam of light reflected from this trifling anecdote upon the force and the manner of the speaker who had so impressed her.
The opinion which this keenly observant and candid woman formed of Harriet Martineau is of peculiar interest, and, as it specially refers to the period and the relations of which we are now treating, I quote it from Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë. It is given in some private letters, written from "The Knoll" (not, as Mrs. Chapman absurdly says, to Emily Brontë, who was dead, but) to Charlotte's life-long and most confidential friend, Miss Ellen Nussey:—