Nineteenth Century Questions

by James Freeman Clarke

Her early life seems to have been very sad. We are again and again told how she was misunderstood and maltreated in her own home. Her health was bad until she was thirty; partly owing, as she supposed, to ill-treatment. She needed affection, and was treated with sternness. Justice she did not receive, nor kindness, and her heart was soured and her temper spoiled, so she tells us, by this mismanagement. As she does not specify, or give us the details of this ill-treatment, the story is useless as a warning; and we hardly see the reason for thus publishing the wrongs of her childhood. As children may be sometimes unjust to parents, no less than parents to children, the facts and the moral are both left uncertain. And, on the whole, her chief reason for telling the story appears to be the mental necessity she was under of judging and sentencing those from whom she supposes herself to have received ill-treatment in any part of her life.

This is indeed the most painful feature of the work before us. Knowing the essentially generous and just spirit of Harriet Martineau, it is strange to see how carefully she has loaded this piece of artillery with explosive and lacerating missiles, to be discharged after her death among those with whom she had mingled in social intercourse or literary labors. Some against whom she launches her sarcasms are still living; some are dead, but have left friends behind, to be wounded by her caustic judgments. Is it that her deficiency in a woman's sensibility, or the absence of a poetic imagination, prevented her from realizing the suffering she would inflict? Or is it the habit of mind from which those are apt to suffer who devote themselves to the reform of abuses? As each kind of manual occupation exposes the workman to some special disease,—as those who dig canals suffer from malaria, and file-grinders from maladies of the lungs,—so it seems that each moral occupation has its appropriate moral danger. Clergymen are apt to be dogmatic or sectarian; lawyers become sharp and sophistical; musicians and artists are irritable; and the danger of a reformer is of becoming a censorious critic of those who cannot accept his methods, or who will not join his party. That Harriet Martineau did not escape this risk will presently appear.

While writing her politico-economical stories she moved to London, and there exchanged the quiet seclusion of her Norwich life for social triumphs of the first order, and intercourse with every kind of celebrity. All had read her books, from Victoria, who was then a little girl perusing them with her governess, to foreign kings and savants of the highest distinction. So this young author—for she was only thirty—was received at once into the most brilliant circles of London society. But it does not appear that she lost a single particle of her dignity or self-possession. Among the great she neither asserted herself too much nor showed too much deference. Vanity was not her foible; and her head was too solidly set upon her shoulders to be turned by such successes. She enjoyed the society of these people of superior refinement, rank, and culture, but did not come to depend upon it; and in all this Harriet Martineau sinned not in her spirit.

But why, in writing about these people long afterward, should she have thought it necessary to produce such sharp and absolute sentences on each and all? Into this judgment-hall of Osiris-Martineau, every one whom she has ever known is called up to receive his final doom. The poor Unitarian ministers, who had taught the child as they best could, are dismissed with contemptuous severity. This religious instruction had certainly done her some good. Religion, she admits, was her best resource till she wrought her way to something better. Ann Turner, daughter of the Unitarian minister, gave her piety a practical turn, and when afraid of every one she saw, she was not at all afraid of God; and, on the whole, she says religion was a great comfort and pleasure to her. Nevertheless, she is astonished that Unitarians should believe that they are giving their children a Christian education. She accuses these teachers of her childhood of altering the Scripture to suit their own notions; being apparently ignorant that most of the interpolations or mistranslations of which they complained have since been conceded as such by the best Orthodox critics. But she does not hesitate to give her opinion of all her old acquaintances in the frankest manner, and for the most part it is unfavorable. Mrs. Opie and Mrs. John Taylor are among the "mere pedants." William Taylor, from want of truth and conviction, talked blasphemy. She speaks with contempt of a physician who politely urged her to come and dine with him, because he had neglected her until she became famous. Lord Brougham was "vain and selfish, low in morals, and unrestrained in temper." Lord Campbell was "flattering to an insulting degree;" Archbishop Whately, "odd and overbearing," "sometimes rude and tiresome," and "singularly overrated;" Stanley, Bishop of Norwich, "timid," "sensitive," "heedless," "without courage or dignity." Macaulay "talked nonsense" about the copyright bill, and "set at naught every principle of justice in regard to authors' earnings." Macaulay's opposition to that bill was based on such grounds of perfect justice that he defeated it single-handed. But Harriet Martineau decided then and there that Macaulay was a failure, and that "he wanted heart," and that he "never has achieved any complete success." The poet Campbell had "a morbid craving for praise." As to women, Lady Morgan, Lady Davy, Mrs. Jameson, Mrs. Austin, "may make women blush and men be insolent" with their "gross and palpable vanities." Landseer was a toady to great people. Morpeth had "evident weaknesses." Sir Charles Bell showed his ignorance by relying on the argument for Design. The resources of Eastlake were very bornés. John Sterling "rudely ignored me." Lady Mary Shepherd was "a pedant." Coleridge, she asserts, will only be remembered as a warning; though twenty years ago she, Miss Martineau, "regarded him as a poet." Godwin was "timid." Basil Montagu was "cowardly;" and Lord Monteagle "agreeable enough to those who were not particular about sincerity." Urquhart had "insane egotism and ferocious discontent." The Howitts made "an unintelligible claim to my friendship," their "tempers are turbulent and unreasonable." It may be some explanation of this unintelligible claim that it was heard through her trumpet. Fredrika Bremer is accused of habits of "flattery" and "a want of common sense." Miss Mitford is praised, but then accused of a "habit of flattery," and blamed for her "disparagement of others." And it is Miss Martineau who brings this charge! She also tells us that Miss Bremer "proposes to reform the world by a floating religiosity," whatever that may be. But perhaps her severest sentence is pronounced on the Kembles, who are accused of "incurable vulgarity" and "unreality." In this case, as in others, Miss Martineau pronounces this public censure on those whom she had learned to know in the intimacy of private friendship and personal confidence. She thus violates the rules rather ostentatiously laid down in her Introduction. For she claims there that she practices self-denial in interdicting the publication of her letters,[47] and gives her reasons thus: "Epistolary conversation is written speech; and the onus rests with those who publish it to show why the laws of honor, which are uncontested in regard to conversation, may be violated when the conversation is written instead of spoken." Most of her sharp judgments above quoted are pronounced on those whom she learned to know in the private intercourse of society. Sometimes she recites the substance of what she heard (or supposed that she heard; for she used an ear-tube when she first went to live in London). Thus she tells about a conversation with Wordsworth, and reports his complaints of Jeffrey and other reviewers, and quotes him as saying about one of his own poems, that it was "a chain of very valooable thoughts." "You see, it does not best fulfill the conditions of poetry; but it is" (solemnly) "a chain of extremely valooable thoughts." She then proceeds to pronounce her sentence on Wordsworth as she did on Coleridge. She felt at once, she says, in Wordsworth's works, "the absence of sound, accurate, weighty thought, and of genuine poetic inspiration." She also informs us that "the very basis of philosophy is absent in him," and that it is only necessary "to open Shelley, Tennyson, or even poor Keats ... to feel that, with all their truth and all their charm, few of Wordsworth's pieces are poems." "Even poor Keats!" This is her de haut en bas style of criticism on Wordsworth, one of whose poems is generally accepted as the finest written in the English language during the last hundred years. And this is her way of respecting "the code of honor" in regard to private conversation!

In 1834, at the age of thirty-two, Harriet Martineau sailed for the United States, where she remained two years. She went for rest; but the quantity of work done in those two years would have been enough to fill five or six years of any common life. At this point she began a new career; forming new ties, engaging in new duties, studying new problems, and beginning a new activity in another sphere of labor. The same great qualities which she had hitherto displayed showed themselves here again; accompanied with their corresponding defects. Her wonderful power of study enabled her to enter into the very midst of the phenomena of American life; her noble generosity induced her to throw herself heart, hand, and mind into the greatest struggle then waging on the face of the earth. The antislavery question, which the great majority of people of culture despised or disliked, took possession of her soul. She became one of the party of Abolitionists, of which Mr. Garrison was the chief, and lived to see that party triumph in the downfall of slavery. She took her share of the hatred or the scorn heaped on that fiery body of zealous propagandists, and was counted worthy of belonging to what she herself called "the Martyr Age of the United States."

Fortunately for herself, before she visited Boston, and became acquainted with the Abolitionists, she went to Washington, and traveled somewhat extensively in the Southern States. At Washington she saw many eminent Southern senators, who cordially invited her to visit them at their homes. In South Carolina she was welcomed or introduced by Mr. Calhoun, Governor Hayne, and Colonel Preston. Judge Porter took charge of her in Louisiana. In Kentucky she was the guest of Mrs. Irwin, Henry Clay's daughter and neighbor. Without fully accepting Mrs. Chapman's somewhat sweeping assertion that there was no eminent statesman, man of science, politician, partisan, philanthropist, jurist, professor, merchant, divine, nor distinguished woman, in the whole land, who did not pay her homage, there is no doubt that she received the respect and good-will of many such. She was deeply impressed, she says, on arriving in the United States, with a society basking in one bright sunshine of good-will. She thought the New Englanders, perhaps, the best people in the world. Many well-known names appear in these pages, as soon becoming intimate acquaintances or friends; among these were Judge Story, John G. Palfrey, Stephen C. Phillips, the Gilmans of South Carolina, Mr. and Mrs. Furness of Philadelphia, and in Massachusetts the Sedgwicks, the Follens, Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. Loring, Dr. Channing, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ware, Dr. Flint of Salem, and Ephraim Peabody.

When Miss Martineau had identified herself with Mr. Garrison and his friends by taking part in their meetings, those who had merely sought her on account of her position and reputation naturally fell away. But it may be doubted whether she was in such danger of being mobbed or murdered as she and her editor suppose. She seems to think that Mr. Henry Ware did a very brave deed in driving to Mr. Francis Jackson's house to take her home from an antislavery meeting. She speaks of the reign of terror which existed in Boston at that time. No doubt she, and other Abolitionists, had their share of abuse; but it is not probable that any persons were, as she thought, plotting against her life. She and her friends were deterred from taking a proposed journey to Cincinnati and Louisville by being informed that it was intended to mob her in the first city and to hang her in the second. Now, the writer of this article was at that time residing in Louisville, and though antislavery discussions and antislavery lectures had taken place there about that period, and though antislavery articles not unfrequently appeared in the city journals, no objection or opposition was made to all this by anybody in that place. In fact, it was easier at that time to speak against slavery in Louisville than in Boston. The leading people in Kentucky of all parties were then openly opposed to slavery, and declared their hope and purpose of making Kentucky a free State. A year later, Dr. Channing published his work on slavery, which was denounced for its abolitionism by the "Boston Statesman," and sharply criticised in a pamphlet by the Massachusetts attorney-general. But copious extracts from this work, especially of the parts which exposed the sophisms of the defenders of slavery, were published in a Louisville magazine, and not the least objection was made to it in that city. At a later period it might have been different, though an antislavery paper was published in Louisville as late as 1845, one of the editors being a native Kentuckian.

After her return from the United States she published her two works, "Society in America," and "Retrospect of Western Travel;" and then wrote her first novel, "Deerbrook." The books on America were perhaps the best then written by any foreigner except De Tocqueville. They were generous, honest, kind, and utterly frank,—they were full of capital descriptions of American scenery. She spoke the truth to us, and she spoke it in love. The chief fault in these works was her tone of dogmatism, and her ex cathedrâ judgments; which, as we have before hinted, are among the defects of her qualities.

In 1838, when thirty-six years old, she was taken with serious illness, which confined her to her room for six years. She attributes this illness to her anxiety about her aged aunt and mother. Her mother, she tells us, was irritable on account of Miss Martineau's fame and position in society; in short, she was jealous of her daughter's success. Miss Martineau was obliged to sit up late after midnight to mend her own clothes, as she was not allowed to have a maid or to hire a working-woman, even at her own expense. How she could have been prevented is difficult to see, especially as she was the money-making member of the family. It seems hardly worth while to give us this glimpse into domestic difficulties. But, no doubt, she is quite correct in adding, as another reason for her illness, the toils which were breaking her down. The strongest men could hardly bear such a strain on the nervous system without giving way.

And here comes in the important episode of Mr. Atkinson, mesmerism, and the New Philosophy. She believes that she was cured of a disease, pronounced incurable by the regular physicians, by mesmerism. By this she means the influence exerted upon her by certain manipulations from another person. And as long as we are confessedly so ignorant of nervous diseases, there seems no reason to question the facts to which Miss Martineau testifies. She was, there is little doubt, cured by these manipulations; what the power was which wrought through them remains to be ascertained.