CHAPTER IX.
IN THE MATURITY OF HER POWERS.
The book, published early in 1848, in which Harriet described her Egyptian, Desert and Palestine travels, was entitled Eastern Life, Past and Present. If I were required to give from some one only of her works a series of extracts which should illustrate the special powers of her mind and the finest features of her style, it would be this book that I should choose. I do not mean to say that the most eloquent and vivid passage that I might find in all her writings is here; nor that her deepest and noblest qualities as a thinker are more forcibly displayed here than elsewhere. But I mean that in Eastern Life, Past and Present, all her best moral and intellectual faculties were exerted, and their action becomes visible, at one page or another, in reading the book from the first to the last chapters. The keen observation, the active thought, the vigorous memory, the power of deep and sustained study, the mastery of language, giving the ability to depict in words and to arouse the reader's imagination to mental vision—all these requisites for the writing of a good book of travel she showed that she possessed. But there is even more than all this in Eastern Life. There is the feeling for humanity in all its circumstances, which can sympathize no less with the slave of the harem at this moment alive in degradation, than with the highest intelligences that ceased from existence unnumbered thousands of years ago. The most interesting and characteristic feature distinguishing this work is, however, the openness and freedom of its thought combined with the profound reverence that it shows for all that is venerable.
It was Eastern Life which first declared to the world that Harriet Martineau had ceased to have a theology. She had learned in travelling through Egypt, how much of what Moses taught was derived from the ancient mythology of Egypt. Passing afterwards through the lands where the Hebrew, the Christian, and the Mohammedan faiths in turn arose, observing, thinking, and studying, the conclusion at which she arrived at last was, in brief, this: That men have ever constructed the image of a Ruler of the Universe out of their own minds; that all successive ideas about the Supreme Power have been originated from within, and modified by the surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies, therefore, are baseless productions of the human imagination, and have no essential connection with those great religious ideas and emotions by which men are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love what they see to be the true and the right.
Her conviction that the highest moral conduct, and the most unselfish goodness, and the noblest aspirations, are in no degree connected with any kind of creed, was aided and supported, no doubt, by her warm personal affection for Mr. Atkinson, and some other of her friends of his way of thinking, in whom she found aspirations as lofty and feelings as admirable as ever she had enjoyed communion with, together with a complete rejection, on scientific grounds, of all theology. Her belief now was that—
The best state of mind was to be found, however it might be accounted for, in those who were called philosophical atheists.... I knew several of that class—some avowed, and some not; and I had for several years felt that they were among my most honored acquaintances and friends; and now I knew them more deeply and thoroughly, I must say that, for conscientiousness, sincerity, integrity, seriousness, effective intellect, and the true religious spirit, I knew nothing like them.
Her own "true religious" earnestness was unabated. Eastern Life contains abundance of evidence that the spirit in which she now wrote against all theological systems was exactly at one with that in which she had twenty years before written Addresses, Prayers and Hymns. Her intellectual range had become far wider; her knowledge of human nature and of the history and conditions of mankind had vastly increased; but her religious earnestness—that is to say, her devotion to truth, and her emotional reverence for her highest conceptions of goodness and duty—was as fervent as ever.
Notwithstanding the boldness and heterodoxy of Eastern Life, it did not cause much outcry; and her two next books were amongst the most successful of all her works. The first of these was Household Education; the second, A History of the Thirty Years' Peace.
The former was partly written for periodical publication during 1847 in the People's Journal, for which magazine she wrote also a few desultory articles.