Harriet Martineau

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

"HOW I detest benevolent people!" Sydney Smith is reported to have said, on looking up from a hook he had been reading.

"Why?" asked his daughter.

"Because they are so cruel," was his reply.

I was reminded of this anecdote upon looking over a .book lately published, entitled "Harriet Martineau's Autobiography," which is full of the personal gossip that amuses readers, but gives extreme pain to large numbers of worthy persons who cannot possibly set themselves right with the public by correcting the misconceptions of a writer no longer among the living. Miss Martineau was, doubtless, a lady who strongly desired the happiness of mankind, and who had some correct ideas of the manner in which human happiness is to be promoted. She rendered much good service in her day and generation, but she left this book to be published after her death, which is unjust to almost every individual named in it, and, most of all, unjust to herself.

And the worst of it is, no effective answer can be made to it. The gifted family of the Kembles, for example, and particularly Mrs. Kemble, a lady still living, with children and other relations, are held up to the contempt of man-kind as vain, vulgar, and false. Perhaps the Kembles thought Miss Martineau vain, vulgar, and false ; but they have not had the indecency to tell the public so. Macaulay, Miss Martineau tells us, had "no heart," and his nephew, Trevelyan, "no head." Lord Althorp was one of nature's graziers;" Lord Brougham was a creature obscene and treacherous ; Earl Russell and the whole Whig party were a set of conceited incapables; Thackeray, the satirist of snobs, was himself a snob; N. P. Willis, a lying dandy; Eastlake an artist of "limited" understanding; and so she deals out her terrible gossip, which might have been harmless enough spoken at a tea-table to a confidential friend, but was not proper to be printed during the lifetime of the individuals named, nor during the lifetime of their immediate descendants.

Things go by contraries in this world. We often find high Tories who, in their practical dealings with their fellow-men, are perfectly democratic; and it is well known-that some of the most positive democrats this country has ever produced have been, in their personal demeanor, haughty and inhuman. It is much the same with philanthropists and misanthropists. A person may snarl at mankind in a book and be the soul of kindness in his own circle, and he may deluge the world with benevolent "gush," without having learned to be agreeable or good-tempered in his own home.

Miss Martineau, however, has been to no one so unjust as to herself; for she has not had the art to make her readers feel and realize the disadvantages under which she labored. She was deaf ; she had no sense of smell, and only a very imperfect sense of taste. She could hear, it is true, by the aid of a trumpet, but she was cut off from all that higher, easier, constant intercourse with her kind which people enjoy who rarely know what silence is, and who hear human speech of some kind at almost every moment when they are awake. And she had a childhood which disarms censure. During the first thirty, years of her life, she scarcely enjoyed one day of health or peace, all in consequence of her mother's neglect. The child, soon after it was born, was sent out of the way to a wet-nurse in the country, who nearly starved her to death, having an insufficiency of milk, and being unwilling to lose the charge of the child by telling the truth. Her deafness and her bad health during the first third of her life were always ascribed by her mother to this starvation.

The story of her childhood is almost incomprehensible to American parents, who are apt to watch their children with even an excessive care and tenderness. Her parents seemed never to have suspected what she suffered, nor did she ever have confidence enough in them to attempt to make known to them her miseries. Milk, for example, always disagreed with her, and to such a degree that she had "a horrid lump at her throat for hours every morning, and the most terrible oppression in the night." Nevertheless, as English children are always fed upon milk, she continued to drink it morning and night, with-out mentioning her sufferings, until she was old enough to drink tea, which, in England, is usually about the sixteenth year. How amazing is this ! On what strange terms children must live with their elders where such a thing could be!
During all her childhood she was tormented by fear and shame. She was afraid of everything and everybody. Sometimes, at the head of the stairs, she would be panic-stricken, and feel sure she could never get down. In going a few steps into the garden she would be afraid to look behind her, dreading an imaginary wild beast. She was afraid of the star-lighted sky, having an awful dread of its coming down upon her, crushing her, and remaining upon her head. She was afraid of persons, and declares that, to the best of her belief, she never met with an individual whom she was not afraid of until she was six-teen years of age. The exhibition of a magic lantern was awful to her, and she was terrified beyond measure by seeing the prismatic colors in the glass drops of a chandelier. There were certain individuals whom she met occasionally in the town, of whom she knew nothing, neither their name nor their occupation, and yet she could never see them without experiencing the most intense fear. At the same time she was bitterly ashamed of this weakness, and seems never to have thought of mentioning it to a living creature, least of all to her mother and sisters. For a long course of years from about eight to fourteen—she tried with all her might to pass a day without crying.

"I was a persevering child," she says, "and I knew I tried hard ; but I. failed. I gave up at last, and during all those years I never did pass a day without crying."

She thinks her temper must have been " excessively bad," and that she was " an insufferable child for gloom, obstinacy, and crossness." But she also thought that if her parents and brothers and sisters had shown ever so little sympathy with her unhappiness, she should have responded with joyous alacrity. When her hearing began to grow dull, it did not excite sympathy in the family, but distrust and contempt. She would be told that " none are so deaf as they who do not wish to hear ; " and when it could no longer be doubted that she was growing deaf, the best help she got was from her brother, who told her that he hoped she would never make herself troublesome to other people. What a delightful family ! Such treatment, however, had one good effect : she made up her mind, and she kept her resolution, never to make her deafness a burthen to others. She never asked any one to repeat a remark in company which she had not caught, and always trusted her friends to tell her what it was necessary for her to know.

During the generation which saw the beginning and the end of Napoleon's career, a kind of savageness seems to have pervaded human life. All Europe was fighting; school-boys were encouraged and expected to fight, and the softer feelings of our nature were undervalued or despised. Bonaparte made life harder for almost every one in the civilized world ; and this may partly explain how an intelligent, virtuous, and even benevolent family could have lived together in a manner which seems to us heartless and savage.

Her parents gave her an excellent education. She could make shirts and puddings; she could iron and mend; she acquired all household arts, as girls did in those days; but at the same time she became a considerable proficient in languages and science, and very early began to show an inclination to composition. The circumstance which made her a professional writer was interesting. She had secretly sent an article to a monthly magazine, and a few days after, as she was sitting after tea iii her brother's parlor, he said:

"Come now, we have had plenty of talk; I will read you something."

He took the very magazine that contained her contribution, and opening it at her article he glanced at it, and said:

They have got a new hand here. Listen."

He read a few lines, and then exclaimed :

"Ah! This is a new hand ; they have had nothing as good as this for a long while."

He kept bursting out with exclamations of approval as he continued to read, until, at length, observing her silence, he said :

"Harriet, what is the matter with you ? I never knew you so slow to praise anything before."
She replied in utter confusion :

"I never could baffle anybody. The truth is, that paper is mine."

He brother said nothing, but finished the article in silence, and spoke no more until she rose to go home. Then he laid his hand on her shoulder, and said, in a serious tone :

"Now, dear " (he had never called her dear before), " now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings, and do you devote yourself to this."

And so she did. With immense perseverance, and after encountering every sort of discouragement, she reached the public ear, by writing stories in illustration of the truths of political economy. For a time she was the most popular story-writer in England, and the aid of her pen was sought by cabinet ministers, as well as by the conductors of almost every important periodical. She was so good and useful a woman, that we must forgive whatever mistakes of judgment and temper we may lament in her autobiography. She loved America almost as though she had been born upon its soil, and Americans must take her censures in good part.

During her residence in the United States, she sacrificed her popularity, and even risked her personal safety, by openly espousing the cause of the detested abolitionists. At one of their meetings in Boston, in 1835, to attend which she braved the fury of a mob, she deliberately, and with full knowledge of what her action involved, spoke in defence of their principles. Her own narrative of the event, as given in her Autobiography, is of singular interest :

"In the midst of the proceedings of the meeting, a note was handed to me written in pencil on the back of the hymn which the party were singing. It was from Mr. Loring, and these were his words :

"Knowing your opinions, I just ask you whether you would object to give a word of sympathy to those who are suffering here for what you have advocated elsewhere. It would afford great comfort."

"The moment of reading this note was one of the most painful of my life. I felt that I could never be happy again if I refused what was asked of me ; but to comply was probably to shut against me every door in the United States but those of the Abolitionists. I should no more see persons and things as they ordinarily were. I should have no more comfort or pleasure in my travels; and my very life would be, like other people's, endangered by an avowal of the kind desired. George Thompson was then on the sea, having narrowly escaped with his life, and the fury against ' foreign incendiaries ran high. Houses had been sacked ; children had been carried through the snow from their beds at midnight; travelers had been lynched in the market-places, as well as in the woods ; and there was no safety for any one, native or foreign, who did what I was now compelled to do. Having made up my mind, I was considering how the word of sympathy should be given, when Mrs. Loring came up, with an easy and smiling countenance, and said :

""You have had my husband's note. He hopes you will do as he says ; but you must please yourself, of course."

"I said, ' No ; it is a case in which there is no choice.' "' Oh, pray do not do it unless you like it. You must do as you think right.'

"Yes,' said I, ' I must.'

"At first, out of pure shyness, I requested the president to say a few words for me ; but, presently, remembering the importance of the occasion and the difficulty of setting right any mistake the president might fall into, I agreed to that lady's request, that I should speak for myself. Having risen, therefore, with his note in my hand, and being introduced to the meeting, I said, as was precisely recorded at the time, what follows :

"I have been requested by a friend present to say something—if only a word—to express my sympathy in the objects of this meeting. I had supposed that my presence here would be understood as showing my sympathy with you. But as I am requested to speak, I will say what I have said through the whole South, in every family where I have been; that I consider slavery as inconsistent with the law of God and as incompatible with the law of his Providence. I should certainly say no less at the North than at the South concerning this utter abomination, and I now declare that in your principles I fully agree.' "

"As I concluded, Mrs. Chapman bowed down her glowing head on her folded arms, and there was a murmur of satisfaction through the room, while, outside, the growing crowd (which did not, however, become large) was hooting and yelling, and throwing mud and dust against the windows."

It was bravely clone. Happily, the present generation can form but an imperfect idea of the sacrifice she made in taking sides with a party then held in equal abhorrence and contempt. Several days passed before this action of Miss Martineau was known to the public. Gradually, however, it circulated, and, at length, the little speech itself was printed verbatim in a report of the Anti-Slavery Society. Precisely that happened which Miss Martineau had anticipated. Every door was closed against her, except those of the Abolitionists. No more invitations littered her table. She was a lion no longer. Houses where she was known to be staying were avoided, as though they had shown to the passer-by the warning signal of contagion. The Boston Advertiser opened upon her its provincial thunder, and Boston society shuddered at the awful fate which the brave woman had brought upon herself.. The press in general denounced her, and even some of the Abolitionists felt that, being a stranger, she nerd not have incurred this obloquy.

Miss Martineau's tranquility was not for a. moment disturbed, and she was glad that, in so critical a moment, she had been able to preserve her self-respect. 

"The shock of your tidings to me, of course, was great ; but, 0, I feel how delightful the surprise to her! How much she must know now ! How much she must have enjoyed already ! I do not know what your opinions are about this ; I know what hers were, and for a long time, I have thought how great will be the surprise to her —a glorious surprise! She served the Right, that is, God, all her life."

In a similar strain wrote other friends, who were believers in immortal life. Miss Martineau died at her own house at Ambleside, in 1876, aged seventy-four years. She expressed the secret of her life in a sentence of her Autobiography.

"The real and justifiable and honorable subject of interest to human beings, living and dying, is THE WELFARE OF THEIR FELLOWS, surrounding or surviving them."

For twenty years after she had written her autobiography in momentary expectation of death, she continued to live and work for the welfare of her fellows. 'In her own words, "Literature, though a precious luxury, was not, and never had been, the daily bread of her life. She felt that she could not be happy, or in the best way useful, if the declining years of her life were spent in lodgings in the morning and drawing-rooms in the evening. A quiet home of her own, and some few dependent on her for their domestic welfare, she believed to be essential to every true woman's peace of mind ; and she chose her plan of life accordingly." She lived in the country, built a house, and tried her hand successfully on a farm of two acres. She exerted herself for the good of her neighbors, and devised schemes to remedy local mischiefs. Her servants found in her a friend as well as a mistress.

Her long and busy life bears the constant impress of two leading characteristics—industry and sincerity. In the brief autobiographical sketch, left to be published in the London Daily News, to which she had contributed altogether sixteen hundred important articles, she gives this curiously candid judgment of herself; which is more correct than many of her judgments of others: "Her original power was nothing more than was due to • earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while she could neither discover nor invent."

Her infirmity of deafness probably enabled her to accomplish the immense amount of literary work which she did, since it withdrew her from many distractions. The cheerful and unobtrusive spirit with which she bore her infirmity remains an example and encouragement to her fellow.

Her years of lingering illness proved a time of quiet enjoyment to her, being soothed by family and social love and care and' sympathy. In the words of her biographer, Mrs. M. W. Chapman, a woman of kindred spirit:

"If; instead of dying so slowly, she had (lied as she could have wished and thought to have done, without delay, what a treasure of wise counsels, what a radiance of noble deeds, what a spirit of love and of power, what brave victorious battle to the latest hour for all things good and true, had been lost to posterity ! What an example of more than resignation, of that ready, glad acceptance of a lingering and painful death which made the sight a blessing to every witness, had been lost to the surviving generation."
 

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