MRS. F. FENWICK MILLER. (continued 3)

Persecution for opinion is always going on. It can be inflicted out of the province of Law as well as through it.... Whatever a nation may tell him of its love of liberty should go for little if he sees a virtuous man's children taken from him on the ground of his holding an unusual religious belief; or citizens mobbed for asserting the rights of negroes; or moralists treated with public scorn for carrying out allowed principles to their ultimate issues; or scholars oppressed for throwing new light on the sacred text; or philosophers denounced for bringing fresh facts to the surface of human knowledge, whether they seem to agree or not with long established suppositions. [8]

The next piece of work that Harriet did in this spring of 1838 was of a very different order. The Poor-Law Commissioners were desirous of issuing a series of "Guides to Service," and application was made to Miss Martineau to write some of these little books. She undertook The Maid of All Work, The Housemaid, The Lady's Maid and The Dress-maker. These were issued without her name on the title-page, but the authorship was an open secret.

She was a thoroughly good housekeeper herself. Her conscience went into this, as into all her other business. "Housewifery is supposed to transact itself," she wrote; "but in reality it requires all the faculties which can be brought to bear upon it, and all the good moral habits which conscience can originate." It was in this spirit that she wrote instructions for servants. The fine moral tone invariably discoverable in her works, is as delightful here as elsewhere. But the little "Guides to Service," contain also the most precise and practical directions for the doing of the household duties and the needlework which fall to the hands of the classes of servants for whom she wrote. Practical hints are given from which the majority of these classes of women-workers might learn much, for brains tell in the mean and dirty scrubbery of life as well as in pleasanter things, and science is to be applied to common domestic duties as to bigger undertakings. The heart and mind of Harriet Martineau were equal to teaching upon matters such as these, as well as to studying the deeper relations of mankind in political economy, or the state of society in a foreign land. Her great power of sympathy enabled her to enter fully into every human position. So well was the maid-of-all-work's station described, and her duties indicated, and her trials pointed out, and how she might solace herself under those troubles discovered, and the way in which her work should be set about detailed, that the rumor spread pretty widely that Harriet had once occupied such a situation herself. She regarded this mistake with complacency, as a tribute to the practical character of her little work.

As a fact, she was herself a capable housewife. Her housekeeping was always well done. Her own hands, indeed, as well as her head, were employed in it on occasion. When in her home, she daily filled her lamp herself. She dusted her own books, too, invariably. Sometimes she did more. Soon after her establishment at the Lakes (an event which we have not yet reached, but the anecdote is in place here), a lady who greatly reverenced her for her writings called upon her in her new home, accompanied by a gentleman friend. As the visitors approached the house by the carriage-drive, they saw someone perched on a set of kitchen steps, cleaning the drawing-room windows. It was the famous authoress herself! She calmly went for her trumpet, to listen to their business; and when they had introduced themselves, she asked them in, and entered into an interesting conversation on various literary topics. Before they left, she explained, with evident amusement at having been caught at her housemaid's duties, that the workmen had been long about the house; that this morning, when the dirty windows might for the first time be cleaned, one of her servants had gone off to marry a carpenter, and the other to see the ceremony; and so the mistress, tired of the dirt, had set to work to wash and polish her window for herself.

An article on "Domestic Service," for the Westminster Review, was written easily, while her mind was so full of the subject, in the beginning of June, 1838. But a great enterprise was before her—a novel; and at length she settled down to this, beginning it on her thirty-sixth birthday, June 12th, 1838. The writing of this new book was interrupted by a tour in Scotland during August and September, and by writing a remarkable and eloquent article on slavery, "The Martyr Age of the United States," which occupies' fifty-five pages of the Westminster Review in the January, 1839, number of that publication. The novel got finished, however, in February of this latter year; and it was published by Easter under the title of Deerbrook.

Great expectations had been entertained by the literary public of Harriet Martineau's first novel. The excellences of her Illustrations as works of fiction had been so marked and so many, that it was anticipated that she might write a novel of the highest order when released from the trammels under which she wrote those tales. To most of those who had expected so much Deerbrook was a complete disappointment. I believe I may justly say that it is the weakest of all Harriet Martineau's writings. It is, indeed, far superior in all respects to nine hundred out of every thousand novels published. But she is not judged by averages. A far higher standard of literary art is that to which we expect Harriet Martineau's writings to conform.

The book is deficient in story. Deerbrook is a country village, where two sisters from Birmingham, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, take up their temporary abode. Mr. Hope, the village surgeon, falls in love with Margaret; but being told that Hester loves him, while Margaret is attached to Philip Enderby, Hope decides to propose to Hester; is accepted, married to the sister he does not love, and sets up housekeeping with the sister with whom he is in love as an inmate of his home. The wife, moreover, is of a jealous, exacting disposition, ever on the watch for some token of neglect of her feelings by her friends, anxious, irritable, and hyper-sensitive.

Here is a situation which, the characters being what they are described to be, could in real life eventuate only in either violent tragedy or long, slow heart-break. A woman of ultra-sensitive and refined feelings could not live with a husband and a sister under such circumstances without discovering the truth. A man of active temperament and warm emotions, who declares to himself on the night of his return from his wedding tour that his marriage "has been a mistake, that he has desecrated his own home, and doomed to withering the best affections of his nature,"—such a man, with the woman he really loves living in his home, beside the unloved wife, could not completely conceal his state of mind from everybody, and presently find that after all he likes the one he has married best. Yet in the impossible manner just indicated do all things end in Deerbrook. The interest of the book is then suddenly shifted to Margaret and Enderby. Hope and Hester become mere accessories. But the plot does not improve. The Deerbrook people, hitherto adorers of their doctor, suddenly take to throwing stones at him, and to mobbing his house, because he votes for the Parliamentary candidate opposed by the great man of the village, and because they take it into their heads (not a particle of reason why they do so being shown,) that he anatomizes bodies from the graveyard. We are invited to believe that though his practice had been singularly successful, all his patients deserted him; and notwithstanding that Hester and Margaret had each seventy pounds a year of private income, the household was thus reduced to such distress that they could not afford gloves, and had to part with all their servants, and dined as a rule off potatoes and bread and butter! Then Margaret's lover, Enderby, hears that she and Hope loved each other before Hope married; and though he does not for a moment suspect anything wrong in the present, and though he passionately loves Margaret, this supposed discovery that he is not her first love causes him to peremptorily and without explanation break off the engagement. Presently, however, an epidemic comes and restores confidence in Mr. Hope; and Enderby's sister, who had given him the information on which he acted, confesses that she had exaggerated the facts and invented part of her story; and so it all ends, and they live happily ever after!

Feeble and untrue as are plot and characters in this "poor novel" (as Carlyle without injustice called it), yet many scenes are well written, the details are truly colored, and every page is illuminated with thought of so high an order and language so brilliant, so flowing, so felicitous, that one forgives, for the sake of merits such as these, the failure of the fiction to be either true or interesting. This seemed to show, nevertheless, that Harriet could write essays, and travels, and didactic and philosophical works, but could not write a novel except "with a purpose," when the accomplishment of the purpose might excuse any other shortcomings. But when one considers the great excellence of many of the Illustrations, the decided drawing of the characters, the truthful analysis of the springs of human action, the manner in which the incidents are combined and arranged to develop and display dispositions and histories, it becomes clear that she had great powers as an imaginative depicter of human nature and social life, and that there must have been other causes than sheer incapacity for the faults and the feebleness of Deerbrook.

The first cause was what seems to me a mistaken theory about plots in fiction, which she had adopted since writing the Illustrations. She now fancied that a perfect plot must be taken from life, forgetting that we none of us know the whole plot of the existence of any other creature than ourselves, and that the psychological insight of the gifted novelist is displayed in arguing from what is known to what is unknown, and in combining the primary elements of human character into their necessary consequences in act and feeling. This error she would have been cured from by experience had she gone on writing fiction. She might have been aided in this by what she naïvely enough avows about Deerbrook: that she supposed that she took the story of Hope's marriage from the history of a friend of her family, and that she afterwards found out that nothing of the sort had really happened to him! She might then have asked herself whether the story as she had told it was more possible than it was possible that gunpowder should be put to flame without an explosion. A girl in her teens might have been forgiven for playing with the history of the wildest passions of the human heart; but Harriet Martineau erred because she tried to enslave herself to fact in a matter in which she should have inferred, judged from psychological principles, and trusted to the intuitions of her own mind for the final working out of her problem. As it was, if her "fact" had been a reality we should have been compelled to account for the placid progress of events by the supposition that she had utterly misrepresented the characters of the persons involved.

This bondage to (supposed) fact was one cause of her failure. A lesser, but still important reason for it, was that she tried to imitate Jane Austen's style. Her admiration of the works of this mistress of the art of depicting human nature was very great. Harriet's diary of the period when she was preparing to write Deerbrook, shows that she re-read Miss Austen's novels, and found them "wonderfully beautiful." This judgment she annexed to Emma; and again, after recording her new reading of Pride and Prejudice, she added, "I think it as clever as before; but Miss Austen seems wonderfully afraid of pathos. I long to try." When she did "try," she, either intentionally or unconsciously, but very decidedly, modelled her style on Miss Austen's. But the two women were essentially different. Harriet Martineau had an original mind; she did wrong, and prepared the retribution of failure for herself, in imitating at all; and Jane Austen was one of the last persons she should have imitated.

The principal reasons for the inferiority of Deerbrook, however, are found in her personal history. Three months after its publication, she was utterly prostrated by an illness which had undoubtedly been slowly growing upon her for long before. Thus, she wrote her novel under the depression and failure of strength caused by this malady. The illness itself was partly the result of what further tended to make her work poor in quality—the domestic anxieties, miseries and heart-burnings of that period.

The three anxious members of her family were at this time upon her hands. That brother who had succeeded to the father's business, and in whose charge it had failed, was at this time in London. Before the weaving business stopped, Henry Martineau was engaged; but the girl broke off the affair in consequence of the downfall of his pecuniary prospects. Henry then undertook a wine-merchant's business, and wretched with the mortification of his double failure in purse and in heart, he yielded to the temptations of his new employment, and became intemperate. During the time that Deerbrook was being written, he was living with his mother and sister in London. At the same time Mrs. Martineau, now nearing seventy years old, was becoming blind. The natural irritability of her temper was thus increased. The heart-wearing trials of a home with two such inmates were made greater to Harriet by the fact that an aged aunt also lived with them, who, besides the many cares exacted for the well-being of age, added to Harriet's troubles by the necessity of shielding her from the tempers and depressions of the other two.

It was in this home that Harriet Martineau did all the work that has now been recorded after her return from America. No one who has the least conception of how imperatively necessary domestic peace and comfort are for the relief of the brain taxed with literary labor, will be surprised to hear that Harriet's strength and spirits failed during all that summer and winter in which she was writing Deerbrook, and that presently her health completely broke down.

CHAPTER VII.

FIVE YEARS OF ILLNESS AND THE MESMERIC RECOVERY.

Almost immediately after the publication of Deerbrook Harriet started for a Continental tour. She was to escort an invalid cousin to Switzerland, and afterwards to travel through Italy with two other friends. But her illness became so severe by the time that she reached Venice that the remainder of the journey had to be abandoned. Under medical advice, a couch was fitted up in the travelling carriage, and upon it, lifted in and out at every stage, she returned to England and was conveyed to her sister's at Newcastle-on-Tyne. In the autumn of that same year (1839) she took up her abode in Front street, Tynemouth, in order to remain under the medical care of her brother-in-law, Mr. Greenhow of Newcastle.

Her physical sufferings during the next five years were very severe, and almost incessant. She could not go out of the house, and alternated only between her bed in one room and her couch in another. From her sick-room window she overlooked a narrow space of down, the ruins of the priory, the harbor with its traffic, and the sea. On the farther side of the harbor she could discern through the telescope a railroad, a spreading heath, and, on the hills which bounded the view, two or three farms. To this outlook she, whose life had been hitherto spent so actively, and in the midst of such a throng of society, found herself confined for a term of five years. At the same time her pain was so great that she was compelled to take opiates daily. "I have observed, with inexpressible shame, that with the newspaper in my hand, no details of the peril of empires, or of the starving miseries of thousands, could keep my eye from the watch before me, or detain my attention one second beyond the time when I might have my opiate. For two years, too, I wished and intended to dispense with my opiate for once, to try how much there was to bear, and how I should bear it; but I never did it, strong as was the shame of always yielding. I am convinced that there is no more possibility of becoming inured to acute agony of body, than to paroxysms of remorse—the severest of moral pains. A familiar pain becomes more and more dreaded, instead of becoming more lightly esteemed in proportion to its familiarity. The pain itself becomes more odious, more oppressive, more feared in proportion to the accumulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the aggregate of painful associations which every visitation revives." [9]

Some indication of what she endured in those weary years is given in this quotation. If we had to rely upon the inferences to be drawn from the amount of work which she did in her sick-room, we should naturally suppose the suffering not to have been very great; for she produced, in the midst of her illness, as much and as noble work as we look for from the most active persons in ordinary health.

The first business of the sick-room life was to write both an article for publication, and a number of letters of personal appeal to friends, on behalf of Oberlin College, an institution which was being founded in America for the education of persons of color of both sexes, and of the students who had been turned out of Lane College for their advocacy of anti-slavery principles.

The next undertaking was another novel; or, rather, a history, imaginatively treated, of the negro revolution in San Domingo. Toussaint L'Ouverture, the leader of the revolution and the president of the black Republic of Hayti, was the hero of this story. The Hour and the Man, as a mere novel, is vastly superior to Deerbrook. Harriet wrote it, however, rather as a contribution to the same anti-slavery cause for which she had written her preceding article, believing that it would be useful to that cause to show forth the capacity and the high moral character which had been displayed by a negro of the blackest shade when in possession of power. The work was begun in May, 1840, and published in November of the same year.

Lord Jeffrey, in a familiar private letter to Empson, his successor in the editorship of the Edinburgh Review, wrote thus of The Hour and the Man:—

I have read Harriet's first volume, and give in my adhesion to her Black Prince with all my heart and soul. The book is really not only beautiful and touching, but noble; and I do not recollect when I have been more charmed, whether by very sweet and eloquent writing and glowing description, or by elevated as well as tender sentiments.... The book is calculated to make its readers better, and does great honor to the heart as well as the talent and fancy of the author. I would go a long way to kiss the hem of her garment, or the hand that delineated this glowing and lofty representation of purity and noble virtue. And she must not only be rescued from all debasing anxieties about her subsistence, but placed in a station of affluence and honor; though I believe she truly cares for none of these things. It is sad to think that she suffers so much, and may even be verging to dissolution.

Even the morose and ungracious Carlyle, writing to Emerson of this book, is obliged to say "It is beautiful as a child's heart; and in so shrewd a brain!" While Florence Nightingale declares that she "can scarcely refrain from thinking of it as the greatest of historical romances."

The allusion in the latter part of Lord Jeffrey's letter was to a proposal just then made to give Harriet Martineau one of the Civil List literary pensions. This idea had been mooted first during the progress of her Illustrations, and again after her return from America; but upon each occasion she had stated privately that she would not be willing to accept it. She replied from Tynemouth to the same effect to Mr. Hutton, who wrote to inquire if she would now be thus assisted. Her objection was, in the first place, one of principle; she disapproved of the money of the people being dispensed in any pensions at the sole will of the Ministry, instead of being conferred directly by the representatives of the people. Her second reason was, that after accepting she would feel herself bound to the Ministers, and would be understood by the public to be so bound, and would thus suffer a loss of both freedom and usefulness during whatever life might remain to her. Lord Melbourne, a few months later, in July, 1841, made her an explicit offer of a pension of £150 per annum, and her answer to the Minister was substantially the same as to her friend. She said that while taxation was levied so unequally, and while Parliament had no voice in the distribution of pensions, she would rather receive public aid from the parish, if necessary, than as a pensioner. She added an earnest plea that all influential persons who held themselves indebted on public grounds to any writer, would show that gratitude by endeavoring to make better copyright arrangements and foreign treaties, so as to secure to authors the full, due and independent reward of their efforts.

The rare (perhaps mistaken) generosity of this refusal can only be appreciated by bearing in mind that she had invested a large part of her earnings a few years before in a form from which she was now receiving no return. During her illness she was really in want of money, so far as to have to accept assistance from relatives. For her charities she partly provided by doing fancy-work, sending subscriptions both in this form and in the shape of articles for publication to the anti-slavery cause in America.

In the early part of 1841 she began a series of four children's stories, which were published under the general title of The Playfellow. These admirable tales are still amongst the best-known and most popular of her writings; simple, vivid and interesting, they are really model children's stories, and it would have been quite impossible for any reader to imagine that they were written by an invalid, in constant suffering. Settlers at Home was the first one written, The Prince and the Peasant came next; then Feats on the Fjord; and, finally, that one from which I quoted largely in an early chapter, The Crofton Boys. By the time the last-named was finished she was very ill, and believed that she should never write another book.

Her interest in all public affairs continued, nevertheless, to be as keen as ever. In 1841 she wrote for publication a long letter to support the American Anti-Slavery Society under a secession from its ranks of a number of persons, chiefly clerical, who objected, of all things, to women being allowed to be members of the society! Another piece of work which she did for the public benefit was by a course of correspondence, full of delicate tact, to personally reconcile Sir Robert Peel and Mr. Cobden, and so to pave the way for the amicable work of the two statesmen in the repeal of the Corn Laws.

In 1843, some of her friends who knew her circumstances, and that she had refused a pension, collected money to present her with a testimonial. £1,400, thus obtained, was invested for her benefit in the Terminable Long Annuities, and a considerable sum besides was expended in a present of plate. The Ladies Lambton (the eldest of whom, as Countess of Elgin, was afterwards one of her warmest friends) went over to Tynemouth to use the plate with her for the first time, and "it was a testimonial fête."

It was about this time, too, that the personal acquaintance, destined to become an intimate association in work, between Harriet Martineau and Florence Nightingale was commenced. Miss Martineau's younger sister Ellen had been governess in Miss Nightingale's family. Sick-nursing occupied Florence Nightingale's hands and heart long before the Crimean War made her famous, and Harriet Martineau was one of the sick to whom she ministered in those earlier days.

Towards the end of 1843, Harriet's mind had accumulated a store of thoughts and feelings which imperatively pressed to be poured forth. She wrote then, in about six weeks, her volume of essays, Life in the Sick-Room. The book was published under the pseudonym of "An Invalid," but was immediately attributed to her on all hands. It is a most interesting record of the high thoughts and feelings by which so melancholy an experience as years of suffering, of an apparently hopeless character, can be elevated, and made productive of benefit to the sufferer's own nature. Incidentally there is much wise counsel in the volume for those who have the care of invalids of this class.

Amidst the many expressions of admiration and interest which this work drew forth, the following is perhaps most worthy of preservation because of the source whence it came. Mr. Quillinan, Wordsworth's son-in-law, wrote as follows to his friend, Henry Crabbe Robinson, on December 9, 1843:—

Mr. Wordsworth, Mrs. Wordsworth and Miss Fenwick have been quite charmed, affected, and instructed by the invalid's volume.... Mrs. Wordsworth, after a few pages were read, at once pronounced it to be Miss Martineau's production, and concluded that you knew all about it and caused it to be sent hither. In some of the most eloquent parts it stops short of their wishes and expectations: but they all agree that it is a rare book, doing honor to the head and heart of your able and interesting friend. Mr. Wordsworth praised it with more unreserve—I may say, with more earnestness—than is usual with him. The serene and heavenly-minded Miss Fenwick was prodigal of her admiration. But Mrs. Wordsworth's was the crowning praise. She said—and you know how she would say it—"I wish I had read exactly such a book as that years ago!"… It is a genuine and touching series of meditations by an invalid not sick in mind or heart. [10]

From one of the letters with which Mr. Henry G. Atkinson has favored me and my readers, I find that she wrote a chapter for that book, which undoubtedly must have been of the deepest interest, but which was not published.

Letter to Mr. Atkinson.

[Extract.]

November 19, 1872.

Dear Friend:

… You will feel at once how earnestly I must be longing for death—I who never loved life, and who would any day of my life have rather departed than stayed. Well! it can hardly go on very much longer now. But I do wish it was permitted to us to judge for ourselves a little how long we ought to carry on the task which we never desired and could not refuse, and how soon we may fairly relieve our comrades from the burden of taking care of us. I wonder whether the chapter I wrote about this for the "Sick-Room" book will ever see the light. I rather wish it may, because I believe it utters what many people think and feel. I let it be omitted from that book because it might perhaps injure the impression of the rest of the volume; but, so far as I remember it, it is worth considering, and therefore publishing.

I have made such inquiries as I could (of one of Miss Martineau's executors and others), but can get no tidings of this missing chapter on Euthanasia. It was just such a subject—needing for its discussion, courage, calmness, common sense, and logic, combined with sympathy, and a high standard of moral beauty and goodness—as she would have been sure to treat rarely well. There is one passage in Life in the Sick-Room, bearing upon the question; she observes that the great reason why hopeless invalids so commonly endure on when they are longing for the rest of insensibility, is the uncertainty as to whether they may not find themselves still conscious in another state. Her own history was to supply a stronger reason still against the irrevocable action being taken upon our rash assumptions that our work and our usefulness in life are ended. As she truly observed: "No one knows when the spirits of men begin to work, or when they leave off, or whether they work best when their bodies are weak, or when they are strong. Every human creature that has a spirit in him must therefore be taken care of, and kept alive as long as possible, that his spirit may do all it can in the world." So she wrote at that very time—showing how her mind was pondering every view of the subject.

The sentence just quoted is from Dawn Island, a little one-hundred paged story which she wrote in the midst of her suffering, as her contribution to the funds of the Anti-Corn Law League. It was printed and sold for the benefit of that league, at the great bazaar of 1845.

After the publication of the "Sick-Room" book, she commenced the writing of her autobiography—not as it was published afterwards, be it understood—for she was too ill to make much progress with it, and soon stopped writing. But she never became too ill to feel and to show a vivid interest in every cause that had the happiness and progress of mankind for its object. She kept up an extensive correspondence with those engaged in the world's work, and such personal efforts for public objects as those above mentioned she frequently exerted—sometimes over-exerted—herself to make. Her body was chained to two small rooms; but her mind, with all its powers and affections, yet swept freely through the universe. No one would have been more impatient than she herself of any pretence that she lived incessantly on a high plane of lofty emotions, where pain ceased to be felt, or that her care for others was so extraordinary that self-regard was swallowed up in the depths of altruism. I have quoted her candid revelations about her sufferings and her opiates, to avoid the possibility of conveying an impression that she was thus guilty of hypocrisy or affectation. But the wide interests and the sympathies with mankind that were the solace of her sick life, and the inspiration of the work which she did so heavily, and yet so continuously, amidst her pain, assuredly shall be marked with the reverence that they merit.

In 1844 the long illness came to an end. Harriet Martineau was restored to perfect health by means of mesmerism. Such a cure of such a person could not fail to make a great sensation. Not only had she a wide circle of personal acquaintances, but she had deeply impressed the public at large with a sense of her perfect sanity, her calm common-sense, and her practical wisdom, as well as with a conviction of her truthfulness and accuracy. Accordingly, as the Zoist (Dr. Elliotson's mesmeric periodical) declared at the time:—

The subject which the critic, a few months since, would not condescend to notice, has been elevated to a commanding position. It is the topic with which the daily papers and the weekly periodicals are filled; in fact, all classes are moved by one common consent, and mesmerism, from the palace to the smallest town in the United Kingdom, is the scientific question absorbing public attention.... The immediate cause of all this activity, is the publication of the case of Miss Martineau, who, after five years' incessant suffering and confinement to her couch, is now well.

I have thought that what needs to be said here of the medical aspect and course of this period of suffering, and of the final cure, will best be said consecutively; and, therefore, we will look back briefly over the five busy but suffering years, the work of which has now been recorded, and see what were the physical conditions under which that work was executed.

Her health had been declining gradually from 1834 to 1839; there was a slow but a marked deterioration in strength, and her spirits became depressed. In April of the latter year, when she undertook a continental journey the fatigue of travelling suddenly aggravated her condition; and in Venice, early in June, she was compelled to consult a physician, Dr. Nardo. She was found to be suffering from a tumor, with enlargement and displacement of an important organ, all this causing great internal pain, accompanied by frequent weakening hemorrhages. She was carried back to England by easy stages, and lying on a couch, and reached Newcastle-on-Tyne at the end of July, 1839. She stayed for some time at the house in that town of her eldest sister, and then was removed only nine miles off, in order that her brother-in-law, Mr. T. M. Greenhow, F.R.C.S., might undertake the medical care of her case. Until October, she persevered in taking walking exercise; but the pain, sickness and breathlessness which accompanied this were so distressing, that soon after her removal to Tynemouth she ceased to go out of doors, or even to descend the stairs.

Mr. Greenhow's prescriptions were confined at first to opiates, and other medicines to alleviate symptoms. The opiates were not taken in excess—as, indeed, the books written in the period would conclusively prove. The patient's suffering was so great, however, that extreme recourse to such palliatives might have been forgiven. She could not raise the right leg; and could neither sit up for the faintness which then ensued, nor lie down with ease because of the pain in her back. "She could not sleep at night till she devised a plan of sleeping under a basket, for the purpose of keeping the weight of the bed-clothes from her; and even then she was scared by horrors all night, and reduced by sickness during the day. This sickness increased to such a degree that for two years she was extremely low from want of food."

At the end of two years, that is to say, in September, 1841, Sir Charles Clarke, M.D., was called in consultation; and he prescribed iodine, remarking at the same time that, in his view, such a case as hers was practically incurable, and admitting that he "had tried iodine in an infinite number of such cases, and never knew it avail." For the next three years Miss Martineau took three grains per diem of iodide of iron. It relieved the sickness; but up to April, 1844 (two and a half years from the commencement of its administration), Mr. Greenhow did not pretend that any improvement in the physical condition had taken place. In that month, as he afterwards said, he believed he found a slight change, "but he was not sure"; and, if any, it was very trifling. The patient, on her part, was quite convinced that her state then was in no way altered.

More than once different friends—amongst them Lord Lytton, Mr. Hallam, and the Basil Montagus—had urged her to try mesmerism; but she had thought it due to her relative to give his orthodox medicines the fullest trial, before taking herself out of his hands in such a way. In June, 1844, however, Mr. Greenhow himself suggested that she should be mesmerized. Of course, so advised, she consented to make the trial. A Mr. Hall, brought by Mr. Greenhow, accordingly mesmerized her for the first time on June 22d, 1844, and again on the following day.

The patient thought she experienced some relief, but did not feel quite sure. "On occasion of a perfectly new experience, scepticism and self-distrust are strong." [11] The next day, however, set her doubts at rest. Mr. Hall was unable to come to her, and she asked her maid to make the passes in his stead.

Within one minute, the twilight and phosphoric lights appeared; and in two or three more a delicious sensation of ease spread through me—a cool comfort, before which all pain and distress gave way, oozing out, as it were, at the soles of my feet. During that hour, and almost the whole evening, I could no more help exclaiming with pleasure than a person in torture crying out with pain. I became hungry, and ate with relish for the first time for five years. There was no heat, oppression, or sickness during the séance, nor any disorder afterwards. During the whole evening, instead of the lazy, hot ease of opiates, under which pain is felt to lie in wait, I experienced something of the indescribable sensations of health, which I had quite lost and forgotten.

Her dear friend during all the years that remained to her—Mr. Henry G. Atkinson [12]—had just come into her life. His interest in her case was enlisted by their mutual friend, Basil Montagu; and Mr. Atkinson undertook to direct the mesmeric treatment by correspondence. Margaret, the maid, continued the mesmerism till September, and then Mr. Atkinson induced his friend Mrs. Montague Wynyard, the young widow of a clergyman, to undertake the case. "In pure zeal and benevolence this lady came to me, and has been with me ever since. When I found myself able to repose on the knowledge and power (mental and moral) of my mesmerist the last impediments to my progress were cleared away and I improved accordingly."

On December the 6th Mr. Greenhow found his patient quite well, and about to leave the place of her imprisonment, and start on a series of friendly visits. He declared, notwithstanding, that firstly, her physical condition was not essentially different from what it had been all through; secondly, that the change in her sensations arose from the iodine suddenly and miraculously becoming more effective, and not from mesmerism.

Such is the medical history, so interesting to all physiological students and to all sufferers of the same class, of Harriet Martineau's five years' illness and recovery. My business is simply to state facts, and I need not here undertake any dissertation upon mesmerism. It is sufficient to add that only those who are unaware of the profundity of our ignorance (up to the present day) about the action of the nervous system, and still more about what life really is, can be excused for rash jeering and hasty incredulity in such a case as this.

Harriet Martineau knew that she was well again, and it seemed to her a clear duty to make as public as possible the history of how her recovery had been brought about. She did so by six letters to the Athenæum; and these were reprinted in pamphlet form. Mr. Greenhow was thereupon guilty of one of the most serious professional faults possible. He also published an account of The Case of Miss H. M., in a shilling pamphlet, giving the most minute and painful details of her illness, and respecting no confidence that had been reposed in his medical integrity. The result of this conduct on his part was that his patient felt herself compelled to break off all future intercourse with a man capable of such objectionable action.

It may be added here that the cure was a permanent one. [13] She enjoyed ten years of health so good that she declared it taught her that in no previous period of her life had she ever been well. It may be as well to say that she never wavered in her assurance that her cure was worked by mesmerism, and that the cure was complete. All dispute about her firm conviction on this point may be set at rest by the following extracts from

Letters to Mr. Atkinson.

[Extract.]

July 6, 1874.

Notices of my mesmeric experience in illness have revived an anxiety of mine about what may happen when I am gone, if certain parties should bring up the old falsehoods again, when I am not here to assert and prove the truth. I don't in the least suppose you can help me, any more than Mrs. Chapman, whom I have got to look over a box of papers of mine deposited with her. But I had rather tell you what is on my mind about it.

I wrote, at Tynemouth, a diary of my case and experience under the mesmeric experiment (experiment desired and proposed by Mr. Greenhow himself). He read it when finished, and so did several of my friends. There are two copies somewhere, for, not wishing to show certain passages, rather saucy, about the Greenhow prejudices and behavior, I accepted Mrs. Wynyard's kind offer to copy the MS., omitting those remarks. Now where are those MSS? I cannot find them, nor say what I did with them, beyond having a dim notion that they (or at least Mrs. Wynyard's copy) were put away into some safe place, to await future chances. I perfectly remember the look of the packet, and the label on it, etc. When I remember what was said after reading it, by one of the wisest people I have known, I am shocked at our inability to find it. "One must dispute anything being the cause of anything, if one disputes after reading this statement, that your recovery is due to mesmerism." And now, while I see false statements of the "facts," and false references circulating, as at present, I cannot find my own narrative, written from day to day, and do not know where to turn next! If I had strength I would turn out all the papers in my possession, and make sure for myself. Now, dear friend, do you think you ever saw that statement?

[Extract.]

September 18, 1874.

My malady was absolutely unlike cancer, and it never had any sort of relation to "malignant" disease. The doctors called it "indolent tumor—most probably polypus." Don't you remember how, at that very time, the great dispute on Elliotson's hands was whether any instance could be adduced of cure of organic disease by mesmerism? Elliotson was nearly certain, but not quite, of the cure of a cancer case in his own practice. The doctors were full of the controversy, and some of them wrote both to me and to Mr. Greenhow to inquire the nature of my case, whether malignant or not. Of course we both replied "No." It would be a dreadful misfortune if now anybody concerned should tell a different story. Greenhow is still living (aged 82) and all alive; and he would like nothing better than to get hold of it, and bring out another indecent pamphlet. If I could but lay hands on the diary of the case, written at the time, what a security it would be? But I can nowhere find it. The next best security is turning back to the statement, "Letters" in the Athenæum of the autumn of 1844. Those "Letters" went through two editions when reprinted, after having carried those numbers of the Athenæum through three editions. One would think the narrative must be accessible enough. Above all things, let there be no mistake in our statements.

It ought to be enough for observers that I had ten years of robust health after that recovery, walking from sixteen to twenty miles in a day, on occasion, and riding a camel in the heart of Nubia, and hundreds of miles on horseback, through Palestine to Damascus, and back to the Levant.

I have written so much because I could not help it. I shall hardly do it again. I will add only that the mesmerizing began in June, 1844, and the cure was effected before the following Christmas.

Dear friend,

I am yours ever,

H. M.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE HOME LIFE.

At forty-two years old, Harriet Martineau found herself free for the first time to form and take possession of a home of her own. Now, for the first time, she could have the luxury which many girls obtain by marriage so young that they spoil it to themselves and others, and which it is as natural for each grown woman to desire, irrespective of marriage, as it is for a fledged bird to leave the old nest—a house and a domestic circle in which she could be the organizing spirit, where the home arrangements should be of her own ordering, and where she could have the privacy and self-management which can no otherwise be enjoyed, in combination with the exercise of that housewifely skill to which all women more or less incline.

The beauty of the scenery led her to fix upon the English lakes for the locality in which to make her home, and, finding no suitable house vacant, she resolved to build one for herself. She purchased two acres of land, within half-a-mile of the village of Ambleside; borrowed some money on mortgage from a well-to-do cousin; had the plans drawn out under her own instructions, and watched the house being built so that it should suit her own tastes.

It is a pretty little gabled house, built of gray stone, and stands upon a small rocky eminence—whence its name "the Knoll." There is enough rock to hold the house, and to allow the formation of a terrace about twenty feet wide in front of the windows; then there comes the descent of the face of the rock. At the foot of the rock is the garden. Narrow flights of steps at either end of the terrace lead down to the greensward and the flower-beds; in the centre of these is a gray granite sun-dial, with the characteristic motto around it—"Come Light! Visit me!" To the left is the gardener's cottage, with the cow-house, pig-stye and root-shed. The front of the house looks across the garden, and over the valley to Loughrigg. Its back is turned to the road, and concealed from passers-by, partly by the growth of greenery, and partly by the Methodist Chapel. A winding path leads up from the road to the house, and a small path forking off from this goes round past the cottage to the field where the cows used to graze, and to the piece of land that was appropriated to growing the roots for the cows and the household fruit and vegetables.

Within, "The Knoll" is just a nice little residence for a maiden lady, with her small household, and room for an occasional guest. You enter by a covered porch, and find the drawing-room on the right hand of the hall. It is a fairly large room, and remarkably well-lighted; there was a window-tax when she built, but she showed her faith in the growth of political common-sense abrogating so mischievous an impost, by building in anticipation of freedom of light and air from taxation. The drawing-room has two large windows, one of which descends quite to the floor, and is provided with two or three stone steps outside, so that the inmates may readily step forth on to the terrace. This window, by the way, exposed her to another tax than the Government one. Hunters of celebrities were wont, in the tourist season, not merely to walk round her garden and terrace without leave, but even to mount these steps and flatten the tips of their noses against her window. Objectionable as the liability to this friendly attention would be felt by most of us, it was doubly so to Miss Martineau because of her deafness, which precluded her from receiving warning of her admirers' approaches from the crunching of their footsteps on the gravel—so that the first intimation that she would receive of their presence would be to turn her head by chance and find the flattened nose and the peering eyes against the window-pane. There is a special record of one occasion, when her bell rang in an agitated fashion, and the maid, on going, found her mistress much disturbed. "There is a big woman, with a big pattern on her dress, beckoning to me to come to the window—go, and tell her to go away." But similar incidents were manifold, and her servants had to be trained to guard their mistress as if she were the golden apples of the Hesperides. Indeed, for several years (till she became too ill to travel) she used to leave her lake-side home altogether during the tourist season.

In her latest years she commonly wrote in the drawing-room, as the sunniest and most cheerful apartment, and where, too, she could sit by the fire, and yet get plenty of daylight. Her proper study, however, was the room on the opposite side of the hall. This is a long room with a bay window at the other end of the fire-place, and the door in the centre. Book-cases lined the whole of these walls; but her library was an extensive one, and there were books all over the house. This room served as dining-room and study, both; the writing table was near the window, the dining-table further towards the fire.

The only other room on the ground floor is the kitchen, which runs parallel with the drawing-room. Her principles and her practice went hand-in-hand in her domestic arrangements as in her life generally; and her kitchen was as airy, light and comfortable for her maids as her drawing-room was for herself. The kitchen, too, was provided with a book-case for a servants' library. A scullery, dairy, etc., are annexed to the kitchen, and the entrance to the cellars below is also found through the green baize door which shuts off the cooking region from the front of the house.

Up-stairs, that which was her own room is large and cheerful, and provided with two windows, a big hanging cupboard, and a good sized dressing-room—the latter indeed, fully large enough for a maid to sleep in. The next was the spare-room; and there lingers no small interest about the guest-chamber, where Harriet Martineau received such guests as Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Emerson, and Douglas Jerrold. A small servants' room is next to this, and a larger one is over the kitchen, so that it comes just at the head of the stairs. Such is the size and arrangement of Harriet Martineau's home.

Climbing plants soon covered "The Knoll" on every side. The ivy kept it green through all the year; the porch was embowered in honeysuckle, clematis, passion-flower, and Virginia creeper. Wordsworth, Macready, and other friends of note, planted trees for Harriet below the terrace. The making of all these arrangements was a source of satisfaction and delight to her such as can only be imagined by those who have felt what it is to come abroad after a long and painful confinement from illness, and to find life and usefulness freely open again under agreeable conditions and prospects.

While her house was being built, she lodged in Ambleside; and in that time, during the autumn and winter of 1845-6, she wrote her Forest and Game Law Tales, with the object of showing how mischievous the game laws were in their operation upon society at large, and more particularly upon the fortunes of individual farmers, and upon the laborers who were led into poaching. These tales occupy three volumes of the ordinary novel size. They had a sale which would have been very good for a novel; two thousand copies were disposed of, and doubtless did some service for the cause for which she had worked. So far as her own pecuniary interests were concerned, however, these tales made her first failure. It was the only work which never returned her any remuneration. The publisher had reckoned on a very large circulation, and so had put out too much capital in stock, stereotypes, and the like, to leave any profit on the sale that actually took place; and the publication unfortunately coincided with the agitation of the political world about the repeal of the corn laws. But one pleasing incident arose out of them for her personally. She had been in difficulties as to how to obtain turf to lay down upon the land under her terrace. One fine morning, soon after her entrance on her home, her maid found a great heap of sods under the window, when she opened the shutters in the morning. A dirty note, closed with a wafer, was stuck upon the pile, and this was found to state that the sods were "a token of gratitude for the Game Law Tales, from a Poacher." Harriet never discovered from whom this tribute came.

She took possession of her home on April 7th, 1846. During the summer she wrote another story for young people—one of her most interesting tales, and instructive in its moral bearing—The Billow and the Rock. It must here be noted, in passing, that this is the last of her works in which the theism that she had, up to this time, held for religious truth, makes itself visible. A new experience was about to lead her to think afresh upon the theological subjects, and to revise her opinions about the genesis of faiths, and their influence upon morals.

In the autumn of 1846, she accepted an invitation from her friends, Mr. and Mrs. R. V. Yates, of Liverpool, to join them in a journey to the East, they bearing the expense. The party left England in October, and were met at Malta by Mr. J. C. Ewart, afterwards M.P. for Liverpool. Together, these four travellers sailed up the Nile to the second cataract, studied Thebes and Philæ, went up and into the Great Pyramid, visited bazaars, mosques and (the ladies) harems, in Cairo. Then they travelled in the track of Moses in the desert, passing Sinai and reaching Petra. Next, they completely traversed Palestine; and finally, passed through Syria to Beyrout, where they took ship again for home. This journey occupied eight months.

In October, 1847, Harriet reached "The Knoll" again, and settled herself in her permanent course of home life. As the same habits were continued, with only the interruptions of occasional visits to other parts of the country, day by day, for many years, I may as well mention what was the course of that daily home life.

She rose very early: not infrequently, in the winter, before daylight; and immediately set out for a good, long walk. Sometimes, I am told, she would appear at a farm-house, four miles off, before the cows were milked. The old post-mistress recollects how, when she was making up her early letter-bags, in the gray of the morning mists, Miss Martineau would come down with her large bundle of correspondence, and never failed to have a pleasant nod and smile, or a few kindly inquiries, for her humble friend. "I always go out before it is quite light," writes Miss Martineau to Mr. Atkinson, in November, 1847; "and in the fine mornings I go up the hill behind the church—the Kirkstone road—where I reach a great height, and see from half way along Windermere to Rydal. When the little shred of moon that is left and the morning star hang over Wansfell, among the amber clouds of the approaching sunrise, it is delicious. On the positively rainy mornings, my walk is to Pelter Bridge and back. Sometimes it is round the south end of the valley. These early walks (I sit down to my breakfast at half-past seven) are good, among other things, in preparing me in mind for my work."

Returning home, she breakfasted at half-past seven; filled her lamp ready for the evening, and arranged all household matters; and by half-past eight was at her desk, where she worked undisturbed till two, the early dinner-time. These business hours were sacred, whether there were visitors in the house or not. After dinner, however, she devoted herself to guests, if there were any; if not, she took another walk, or in bad weather, did wool-work—"many a square yard of which," she says, she "all invisibly embossed with thoughts and feelings worked in." Tea and the newspaper came together, after which she either read, wrote letters, or conversed for the rest of the evening, ending her day always, whatever the weather, by a few moments of silent meditation in the porch or on the terrace without.

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:—

"I am at Miss Martineau's for a week. Her house is very pleasant both within and without; arranged at all points with admirable neatness and comfort. Her visitors enjoy the most perfect liberty; what she claims for herself she allows them.... She is a great and good woman.... The manner in which she combines the highest mental culture with the nicest discharge of feminine duties filled me with admiration; while her affectionate kindness earned my gratitude. I think her good and noble qualities far outweigh her defects. It is my habit to consider the individual apart from his (or her) reputation, practice independent of theory, natural disposition isolated from acquired opinion. Harriet Martineau's person, practice, and character inspire me with the truest affection and respect.

"I find a worth and greatness in herself, and a consistency and benevolence and perseverance in her practice, such as win the sincerest esteem and affection. She is not a person to be judged by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler. She seems to me the benefactress of Ambleside, yet takes no sort of credit to herself for her active and indefatigable philanthropy. The government of her household is admirably administered; all she does is well done, from the writing of a history down to the quietest feminine occupation. No sort of carelessness or neglect is allowed under her rule, and yet she is not over-strict, or too rigidly exacting; her servants and her poor neighbors love as well as respect her.

"I must not, however, fall into the error of talking too much about her, merely because my mind is just now deeply impressed with what I have seen of her intellectual power and moral worth."

Some of her lectures were given with the express object of inducing the people to form a building society. Rents were excessively high for the working classes from the scarcity of cottages; and therefore they lived and slept crowded together, while the open country extended all around them. The moral screw was turned upon them, too, about politics and religion, by the threat of the landlord that, if they offended him, he would turn them out of the only cottages they could get. With that true philanthropy which her studies in political economy had taught, Miss Martineau went to work to aid the people to improve their own condition. She obtained a loan of £500 from her old friend, Mrs. Reid, of London (to whom the foundation of Bedford college is mainly due), with which she purchased a field just above the village at Ellercross, and parcelled it out, drained it, and made the road. Then, by her lectures, she showed the people how they could "buy a house with its rent"; and she undertook all the infinite trouble that devolved upon her when the society was formed, as the only member of it with legal and general knowledge, and, therefore, the only one able to guide its affairs. Before me there lies a package of the notes that she sent at different times on this business to Mr. Bell, the Ambleside chemist, who was the nominal chairman—though she was the real one—of the society. "Jealousy and ridicule went to work against the scheme"; but her philanthropic energy and wisdom were fully successful. The cottages are healthily planned and well built, and remain there as a monument to the efforts which she made for the good of her poor neighbors.

Besides these more general undertakings for their benefit, there yet live many amongst them who are grateful to her for personal kindness and assistance. While her strength lasted, she was ever ready to try to relieve others from illness by the means which she believed to have cured herself; and seven mesmerized patients were sometimes asleep at one time in her drawing-room. She was a powerful mesmerist. Most of her patients were at least relieved—some cured. A present resident of Ambleside, who owes his success in business life to her kindness, told me how she mesmerized him for nearly an hour every day for a year; and to show that she did not do this without very decided results to herself, he remembers that her fingers used to swell during the process, so as to almost hide her rings, if she forgot to take them off before beginning.

Again, her library was placed freely at the service of deserving young men in the village, and only book-lovers will be able to appreciate the generosity of this neighborly kindness. Old Miss Nicholson tells me of Miss Martineau's kindness to her invalid sister; sharing with her the luxuries which were not to be bought in Ambleside, but which the famous writer frequently received from some of her many friends. Nor was the mere personal human sympathy wanting in her; those who needed no gifts or material aid from her knew her as a kind friend, ready to think for them and advise with them in their troubles or perplexities.

In mentioning her activities other than literary, during those ten busy and healthy years of home life, I must not omit her "farming"—her farm of two acres. She had no intention, at first, of embarking in such an enterprise. She let on hire that portion of her land which she did not wish to have in her garden, and her maids and herself, with the occasional help of a man, kept the garden in order. But this plan did not answer well. The tenant allowed the grass to get untidy, and his sheep broke into the garden to eat the cabbages. Neither the vegetable nor the flower garden could be kept so nicely as might be wished. Milk, butter, eggs, and hams, all had to be bought at high prices; and so small was the supply at times that these articles of country produce were actually unattainable by purchase.

The energetic lady of the small domain was profoundly dissatisfied with this state of affairs. So to work she went to study the science of agriculture and practical farming; and soon a Norfolk laborer was established on her land, and this small farm was under her own management. She set up a cross-pole fence around her estate, the first one ever seen in the Lake District; and, like a true woman, she planted roses all along the fence, to wreathe and decorate it in summer. Then she initiated her fellow-farmers into the mysteries of high farming, and stall feeding. "A cow to three acres" was the Lake rule; but she hired another half-acre of land, to add to her own, and showed that upon this total of two acres she could almost keep two cows. Fowls and pigs were, of course, kept also; and all the household comforts which cows, hens, and pigs supply were obtained from her land at, practically, no cost at all. The subsistence of the laborer and his wife was created out of the soil; and the house had a constant supply of vegetables, milk, eggs, and hams, at a less expense than buying had previously been, and with a much nicer and always certain supply.

The experiment became famous in a small way. "People came to see how we arranged our ground, so as to get such crops out of it," [16] and one of the Poor-Law Commissioners, having asked her for a private account of how she had managed her little farm, printed her letter in the Times, without asking her consent. This brought such a flood of correspondence on her that she was compelled to write on the subject for publication, and so the farm superintendence resulted in a piece of literary work for the mistress.

Now we will see what her pen was doing while all these activities were helping to fill her days.

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.

The History of the Peace was a voluminous work of the first order of importance. Its execution is in most respects entirely admirable. Her task of writing the history of the time in which she had herself lived was one of extreme delicacy. Honest contemporary judgments about still-living or lately-dead persons, and about actions which have been observed with all the freshness of feeling of the passing moment, must often seem unduly stern to those who look back through the softening veil of the past, and to whom the actors have always been purely historic personages. Moreover, I have before mentioned her tendency, which seems to me to have arisen from her deafness, to give insufficient shading off in depicting character. But wonderfully little allowance is, after all, required on such grounds from the reader at the present day of Harriet Martineau's history of the years between 1815 and 1845. The view taken by her of O'Connell, Brougham, and some others is perhaps too stern; the picture has too many dark shades, and not a due proportion of light tints; but it can scarcely be questioned that the outline is accurate, and the whole drawing substantially correct. The earnest endeavor after impartiality, and the success with which the judicial attitude of the historian is on the whole maintained, are very remarkable.

This appears so to one who looks upon the book with the eyes of the present generation; but the recognition of the fact at the moment when she wrote is perhaps more conclusive, and the following quotation may serve to show the opinion of those who (with her) had lived through the time of which she treats.

Miss Martineau has been able to discuss events which may almost be called contemporary as calmly as if she were examining a remote period of antiquity. She has written the history of a rather undignified reign with a dignity that raises even the strifes of forgotten and exploded parties into philosophic importance. She exhibits warm sympathies for all that is noble, honorable, or exalted—and a thorough disdain of every paltry contrivance devised to serve a temporary purpose, or gain an unworthy end. The principles which she enunciates are based on eternal truths, and evolved with a logical precision that admits rhetorical ornament without becoming obscure or confused. There are few living authors who may be so implicitly trusted with the task of writing contemporary history as Miss Martineau. She has spared no pains in investigating the truth, and allowed no fears to prevent her from stating it. [17]

Though all her other books should die, and be buried utterly under the dust of time, this one will never be entirely lost. It is as accurate and as careful in its facts as the driest compendium, while yet its pages glow with eloquence, and are instinct with political wisdom. She really did here what she had designed to do in Society in America; but here she did it in the right method, there in a wrong one. The great growth of her mind in twelve years of maturity could not be better gauged than by a comparison of these two works. Her political principles did not change in the time; she was a true believer in popular government all her life—her love of justice caused her to be a hater of class rule, and of every kind of privilege; her sympathies were boundless, and made her in earnest for the freedom and progress of the democracy; her conscience was active so that she loved truth for its own sake; and her sense of duty never failed to keep alive in her large mind a feeling of personal concern in the progress of public affairs. All this was true of her when she wrote her American book; it was equally true when she treated the history of her own land and her own times. But in the latter case, she writes on political philosophy like a statesman—in the former there is much of the doctrinaire. In the latter work, principles underlie the whole fabric; but the actions of politicians are made the means of judging their own professed creeds, the value of those creeds being easily appraised by the results seen to follow on actions in conformity with them. In the earlier work, as we saw, the theories were postulated first, and the actions were measured against those self-derived standards of right and wrong. For political sagacity, for nobility of public spirit, for effective thought, for knowledge of facts, for clear presentation of them, for accuracy in judging of their permanent importance, for candor, and impartiality, for insight into character, and for vivid and glowing eloquence, The History of the Thirty Years' Peace stands forth unmatched amongst books of its class. This, I take it, will be the most enduring and valuable of all her works, and the one by which chiefly posterity will learn what were her powers and how estimable was her character.

In the two works last mentioned, Eastern Life and The Thirty Years' Peace, it seems to me that she touched the high-water mark of her permanent achievements. We have nearly reached the end of the long catalogue of her books, though by no means the end of her writings. Very much more work she did in her life, as will presently be told, but it was that kind of work which is (with the single exception of oratory) the most powerful at the moment, but the most evanescent—journalism. She was soon to begin to apply her ripe wisdom and her life-long study of the theory of government to the concrete problems of practical politics. The influence of an active and powerful journalist cannot be measured; the work itself cannot be adequately surveyed and criticized; and thus what is, perhaps, the most useful, capable and important work which Harriet Martineau did, eludes our detailed survey. We can best judge what was her power as a leader-writer and review and magazine essayist by noting how progressively her mind improved, and to what a high moral and intellectual standpoint she had attained in her latest volumes, just before she exchanged such sustained labors for the briefer though not less arduous efforts of leading and teaching through the periodical press.

The History of the Peace was completed in 1850, and was so immediately successful that the publisher asked Miss Martineau to write an introductory volume on the history of the first fifteen years of this century. While at work upon this "Introduction" she did also some short articles on various subjects for Charles Dickens' periodical, Household Words, and was likewise proceeding with the preparation of another volume of a very different kind. This last was published in January, 1851 (before the introductory volume of the History), under the title of Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development, by Henry George Atkinson, F.G.S., and Harriet Martineau.

The contents of the book were actual letters which had passed between the friends. It will be remembered that Harriet did not meet Mr. Atkinson during the progress of her mesmeric treatment and recovery from illness under his written advice. But soon after she got better, they were visiting together at the house of a cousin of hers, and during the six years or so which had since then passed, they had often met, and their correspondence had grown to be very frequent. Mr. Atkinson had gradually become the friend dearest to Harriet Martineau in all the world. He gained her affection (I use the word advisedly) by entirely honorable roads—by the delight which she took in observing his scientific knowledge, his originality of thought and his elevated tone of mind. But I cannot doubt that long before this volume of Letters was published, he had become dear to her by virtue of that personal attraction which is not altogether dependent upon merit, but which enhances such merits as may be possessed by the object of the attachment, and somewhat confuses the relationship on the intellectual side. This condition of things is in no way especially feminine; John Stuart Mill bowed down to Mrs. Taylor, and Comte erected his admiration of Clotilde into a culte. Mr. Atkinson was many years younger than his friend, and very likely she never fully realized the depth of her own feelings towards him. But still the attraction had its influence, though unacknowledged in words, and unreciprocated in kind.

Miss Martineau was really taught by Mr. Atkinson much of science that she had not previously studied; but yet it was an error, from every point of view, for her to present to the world a book in which she avowed herself his pupil. Her letters are mainly composed of questions, upon which she seeks enlightenment. The answers cannot, in the nature of the case, give forth a connected system of thought upon "Man's Nature and Development." No one was more ready than she herself to recognize that, as she says, "in literature, no mind can work well upon the lines laid down by another"; yet this was what she required Mr. Atkinson to do in replying to her questions and taking up her points. The errors that one would expect are found in the results of this mistaken form; the facts and the inferences are neither sufficiently separated, nor properly connected; and the real value which the book had as a contribution to science and philosophy is lost sight of in the disorder. In fact, no form could be less suitable than the epistolary for such work—either for the writers to arrange and analyze what they were doing, or for the reader to see and understand what they have done. Besides this, the public had long consented to learn from Harriet Martineau; but Mr. Atkinson, though highly respected by his own circle, was not known to the general public, and it was therefore an error in policy for Miss Martineau to show herself sitting as a pupil at his feet, and to call on those who believed in her to believe in him as her teacher and guide. Her fine tact and long experience must have led her to perceive all this in an ordinary case; and only the personal reason of a desire to win for her friend the recognition from the public which she herself had already given him so fully in her own head and heart, could have led an experienced and able woman of letters to so blunder in her selection of the literary form of the book.

As to the substance of the Letters, but little need be said, because the bulk of the volume is not her writing, but Mr. Atkinson's. The ideas which she had then accepted, however, were those by which she lived the rest of her life, and must have their due share of notice for that reason.

The fundamental point in the book is its insistance on the Baconian, or experiential, or scientific, method of inquiry being adopted in studying man and his mental constitution, just as much as in studying inanimate nature. A great First Cause of all things is not denied, but declared unknown and unknowable, as necessarily beyond the comprehension of the senses of man. Supernatural revelation is, of course, entirely rejected; indeed, the very word supernatural is held to involve a fallacy, for only natural things can be known. Mr. Atkinson pointed out that the whole of the facts which are around us can be observed, analyzed, and found to occur in an invariable sequence of causes and effects, which form natural laws; and that the mind of man is no exception to this general truth, that all events spring from causes, and are themselves in turn causes of other effects. It follows from these conclusions that the "First Cause" (which, as Miss Martineau said, the constitution of the human mind requires it to suppose) never intervenes in the world as an errant influence, disturbing natural law; and all speculations about its nature, character, and purposes are put aside as out of the field of inquiry.

Passing on from method to results, Mr. Atkinson gave the first hints of many doctrines now fully accepted: as that of unconscious cerebration, or that of more senses than five, for instance; and many others (based mainly on phrenology and mesmerism) not held, up to the present time, even by the scientists of his own school. For the rest the book has much that is interesting; it has much that is true; but it has, also, much that might well have been put forward as speculation, but should not have been stated so dogmatically as it was on the evidence available. [18]

It was received in 1851 with a howl from the orthodox press which would seem strange indeed in these days. But of competent criticism it had very little. Miss Martineau's name, of course, secured attention for it; and small though her share in the book was, it was quite enough to make the fact perfectly clear that she was henceforth to be looked upon as a "materialist" and a "philosophical atheist," and the rest of the names by which it was customary to stigmatize any person who rejected supernaturalism and revelation.

The motives with which this book was written and published could hardly be misunderstood. There could be no idea of making money out of a work on philosophy—even if either of the authors had been in the habit of writing merely to make money; while as to fame and applause, everyone is more or less acquainted with the history of the reception given in all ages to those who have questioned the popular beliefs of their time! The sole motive with which Harriet Martineau wrote and issued this book was the same that impelled her to do all her work—the desire to teach that which she believed to be true, and to be valuable in its influence upon conduct. With regard to the latter point, it seemed to her that one great cause for the slow advance of civilization is the degree to which good men and women have occupied themselves with supernatural concerns, neglecting for these the actual world, its conditions, and its wants, and giving themselves over to the guidance of a spiritual hierarchy instead of exercising all their own powers in freedom. She struck at this error in publishing the Letters. At the same time she felt doubtful if her future writings would ever be read after her bold utterances, and even, as the following letter shows, whether she might not find herself the occupant of a felon's dock for the crime of which Socrates, and Jesus, and Galileo were each in turn accused—blasphemy:

Letter to Mr. Atkinson.

[Extract.]

August 10, 1874.

One thing more is worth saying. Do you remember how, when we were bringing out our "Letters," I directed your attention to our Blasphemy Law, and the trial of Moxon, under that law, for publishing Shelley's "Queen Mab" among his Poems? You ridiculed my statement, and said Mr. Procter [19] denied there being such a law, or Moxon having been tried, in the face of the fact that I had corresponded with Moxon on the occasion, on the part of certain personal friends. The fact appeared afterwards in the Annual Register, but it seemed to produce no effect. Well, now you can know the truth by looking at the Life of Denman, by Sir Joseph Arnould. If you can lay your hands on the book, please look at vol. ii. p. 129, where there is an account of the trial, Judge Denman being the judge who tried the case. The narrative ends thus:—"The verdict was for the Crown" (conviction for blasphemy), "but Mr. Moxon was never called up for sentence." It is too late for Mr. Procter to learn the truth, but it is surely always well for us, while still engaged in the work of life, to be accurately informed on such matters as the laws we live under, and our consequent responsibilities. Is it not so?

It was, then, with the full anticipation, not only of social obloquy, but also of legal penalty, that the brave thinker fulfilled (to quote her own words in the preface to the Letters) "that great social duty, to impart what we believe, and what we think we have learned. Among the few things of which we can pronounce ourselves certain is the obligation of inquirers after truth to communicate what they obtain." The heroic soul fulfilled now, as before and afterwards, what she held to be her duty, as simply and unwaveringly as ever a soldier on the battlefield charged the cannon's mouth.

Five times in her life did Harriet Martineau write and publish that which she believed would ruin her prospects, silence her voice for ever, and close her career. Far from her was that common paltering with the conscience by which so many men confuse their minds—the poor pretence that truth must not be spoken for fear that the speaker's influence for future worthy work may be injured by his boldness. This is how the devil tempts, saying, "Fall down, and worship me, and I will give thee all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them." Harriet Martineau never worshipped evil even by silence, when silence was sin, playing fast and loose with her conscience by a promise to use the power so obtained for higher objects hereafter. The truth that appeared to her mind she spoke frankly; the work that was placed for her to do she did simply; and so the quagmire of the expedient never engulfed her reputation, her self-respect and her usefulness, as it has done that of so many who have been lured into it from the straight path of right action and truthful speech in public life, by will-o'-the-wisp hopes of greater power and glory for themselves in the future—which they hope they may use for good when they shall be smothered in cowardice and lies. She had much to suffer, and did suffer. Martyrs are not honored because they are insensate, but because they defy their natural human weaknesses in maintaining that which they believe to be true. Probably the keenest grief which she experienced on the occasion now before us came from the complete separation which took place between her and the dearest friend of her youth, her brother James. Dr. Martineau was, at that time, one of the editors of the Prospective Review. Philosophy was his department, and in the natural order the Letters came to him for review. He reviewed the book accordingly and in such terms that all intercourse between him and his sister was thenceforward at an end. They had long before drifted apart in thought; but this final separation was none the less felt as a wrench. Dr. Martineau's attack was almost exclusively aimed against Mr. Atkinson. But with Harriet's loyalty of nature she was more impelled to resent what was said about her friend and colleague than if it had been directed against herself. The brother and sister never met or communicated with each other again.