"Miss H. Martineau will be happy to see Mr. Holyoake at tea on Wednesday evening next, if he can favour her with his company at seven o'clock.
"55, Devonshire Street, Portland Place."
In accordance with this note I took tea with her. She conversed in her accustomed unperturbed way, and said, "I sent for you that you may bear witness that I die on your side. An attempt will be made to represent that my opinions have vacillated. Whereas I have gone right on, as, I believe, from truth to truth. My views may not, however, have been those of progress."
I remarked that I had bought her earlier works to satisfy myself of the successiveness of her convictions, as expressed in her writings, and thought she rightly described them as being intrinsically progressive.
"Yes," she added, "my views from time to time were at successive stages, as they are now, clear and decided. Certainly I was never happier in my life than at the present time. Christians, if they think it worth while to attempt it, will not be able to make a 'Death Bed' out of me. I wish you to know my opinions at this time. We have to vindicate the truth as well as to teach it."*
* I put these words down the same night; thus I am able to
quote them.
For myself, I was neither priest nor confessor. Had I been, I should have felt it presumption to attempt to confirm one better able to teach me than I was to teach her. All I said was: "It is certainly a moral relief not to hold the cardinal Christian tenets of faith, as so many preachers speaking, as they assume to do, in the name of God, explain them. To act according to conscience and speak according to knowledge, never ceasing to consider what we can do for the service of others, is the one duty which a future life, if it comes, will not contradict."
Though no one was so well able as herself to write her biography, it was not in her mind to do it, and she wrote to me to give her the names of persons I thought might undertake it. I named three: Charles Knight, who knew more of her life than any one else, eligible to write it; next Francis William Newman, who, being a many-sided thinker, and largely coinciding with her views, could justly estimate her earlier and later convictions. The third was Mr. H. G. Atkinson, who was entirely conversant with her convictions and career, but who declined with expressions of diffidence, though I urged him to undertake the work. At length she did it herself, in a way which showed no one else could have done it so well. She left instructions in her will that I should receive a copy of her Autobiography, which appeared in three volumes, and came to me (February 28, 1877) from Mr. Thomas Martineau, one of her executors.
No autobiography produced in its day a greater impression. The treatment Miss Martineau had received from eminent adversaries astonished a generation in which greater controversial fairness had come to prevail. The friends of those who had assailed her felt some consternation at the imperishable descriptions of their conduct, which would never cease to be associated with their names, and they made public attempts to explain the facts away.
Her mind was photographic in other respects. She saw social facts and their influences, their nature and sequences, with a vividness no other writer of her day did. Her charming romance, the "Feats of the Fiord" impressed Norwegians with the belief that she was personally familiar with the country, where she had never been. There was "caller" air in the pages which made the reader hungry.