6

MISS MARTINEAU'S political relations had now become so interesting that she found it desirable to take up her abode in London: accordingly, in 1832, whilst the series of Illustrations of Political Economy was in course of publication, she went thither, and soon proved the benefits and disadvantages of metropolitan society in its higher circles. Her power as a writer being recognized, she received such attentions from great people as would have made captive to the Whiggism of the day any child of the people' less sturdily independent than herself. But though she lent her aid to the Government on various questions connected with the Poor Laws and Taxation, she kept herself free enough from obligation to the party to criticize its leaders. This she did in the most contemptuous terms, as a remarkably vulgar class of men,' marked by 'poverty and perverseness of ideas and insolence of feeling.' She subsequently gave further proof of her resolution to keep clear of party trammels, by refusing a pension of £150 which Lord Melbourne offered her when her health failed. This conduct excited the ire of Lord Brougham, who declared, with emphasis, that he hated Harriet Martineau. Her means were at the time very slender, and the prospect of her recovery was very faint; but she determined not to

incur any restraint upon her perfect freedom in politics; and also (as she nobly says) the popular adversity being then great, she preferred to share the poverty of the multitude to being helped out of the public purse.

Another result of her popularity, she says, was very distasteful to her

-the attempt to 'lionize' her on the part of many titled people. She found herself, on one occasion, stationed in a room to gratify the curiosity of a number of idle people, and could see into another room where a Hindu Rajah, 'meek and perspiring,' was undergoing the same ordeal. She always refused a second invitation to houses where she had been bored by intrusive pedantries and inanities. Miss Martineau, however, was, by her own account, which we may readily believe, exceedingly well able to take care of herself in such assemblies nature had furnished her with sharp weapons of attack and defence, which she knew how to use. Even her infirmity was a means of protection from annoyance: when much disgusted she simply dropped her trumpet, and thus secured herself against the invasion of impertinent remarks.

In 1835 she made a journey to America for the purpose of investigating the treatment of criminals and lunatics in that country, and reporting thereon to our own Government. While there her interest in these questions became altogether second to that excited by the question of slavery, even then the burning question' of American politics. Her opinions about this 'peculiar institution' had already been expressed in her Political Economy series. She was in principle a strong abolitionist; but disposed to regard with suspicion the motives and procedure of the practical abolitionists. She found that it was the general practice in polite society in the North to deplore slavery, and pity the slaveholder as the victim of circumstances; whilst

the abolitionist, with practical views, was regarded as a wretch not fit to live, to whom judges, of learning and integrity, would calmly refuse the protection of the law. An attempt was made to conceal from her the fact that the free expression of opinion on this subject was stifled by brute force; but she was too clearsighted to be so misled. Then a futile attempt was made to intimidate her. Her friends, however, refused to allow her to complete her journey through the Southern States, having good reason to fear that her life would have been forfeited. This, she says, she would willingly have laid down for the sake of the good cause. The effect of her American experience was to lead her to reject all thought of compromise, and to throw the whole of her literary influence on the side of the 'fanatical' abolitionists. She published, on her return to England, Society in America, in which she dealt fairly and frankly with what she had observed during her travels. Such candour is sure to create some enemies; and Miss Martineau found that, not only in slaveholding circles, but in the great literary centres of the north, in Philadelphia and Boston, her book was received with a scream of rage. One leading American Review styled her an 'itinerant leper,' a 'Malthusian dragon-fly;' a 'poor, flimsy tool of a nest of poisonous Radicals;' 'a poor, insolent woman, of circumscribed education, and crude and mischievous mind.' The epithet 'Malthusian' recalls the fact that in her Illustrations she had touched, though with perfect propriety of language, on the important and difficult question of Population. The support which she gave to the views of Mr. Malthus may have been a fair subject for animadversion; but that repugnance to her conclusions should have led a reviewer into the gross personalities and the dis

honourable imputations that appeared in the Quarterly, is one of the discreditable things of English journalism.

It is not possible in this Paper to give an account of every work that came from her rapid pen; but we may stay to mention her two most popular Tales, Deerbrook and The Hour and the Man, because of the curiously frank judgment she passed upon them. Her tales were, she says, mere transcripts from familiar life: she had no invention; no dramatic power, no poetic inspiration, no artistic qualifications, no critical cul-、 tivation; and was only fortunate in finding out her lack of genius before the public did. Severe as this judgment of herself is, the world has already endorsed it; and the stories which had been eagerly read by thousands when they appeared, and even affected the course of politics for a while, had ceased some years before the death of the authoress to have any place in the general esteem.

In 1839, whilst on the continent, her health suddenly failed, through the development of an internal disorder. Returning home she remained a prisoner to her couch for five years, and then almost as suddenly recovered. Her disease was probably due in part to constitutional weakness and early neglect; but the harass of her work, and the exacting conduct of her mother, who even at this time of life kept her under the yoke of household duties, no doubt aggravated the complaint. After she had submitted to the treatment of various physicians without any benefit, she was induced to try mesmerism; and, according to her own account, the effect of this was that in five months she was physically a new woman. Certain medical authorities assert that the graver symptoms of the disorder

had abated before she resorted to this

'quackery;' and that recovery was

already begun. Be this as it may, the outcry against her for daring to patronize an empirical curative system was a little unreasonable; and in the ridicule of the world, and the estrangement of some of her chief friends, she paid a rather heavy penalty for publishing her experience. The indignation of relatives in the medical profession, and the loud jeers of incredulous newspapers notwithstanding, she continued to proclaim, with her customary stoutness of heart, her faith in the new law of nature that she thought had been discovered, and to practise mesmeric passes upon those who were willing to submit to them.

In 1845, with health restored, she removed to Ambleside, where she spent the remainder of her life, a period of more than thirty years. There, on a rocky knoll commanding a wide and pleasant prospect, she built a cottage, fashioned and furnished according to her tastes. Her form soon became familiar in the neighbourhood, as she traversed the roads and lanes, walking (often considerable distances) in an unconventional manner and unconventional attire. Her neighbour, the poet Wordsworth, was alarmed for her, and for those who, from time to time, were her companions. Take care! take care!' he said to one gentleman, 'don't let her carry you about. She is killing off half the gentlemen in the county. Macready, who saw her about this time, speaks of her as a 'brownfaced woman' walking with 'firm and almost manly strides.' Hawthorne says of her: She is a large, robust, elderly woman, and plainly dressed; but withal she has so kind, cheerful and intelligent a face, that she is pleasanter to look at than most beauties.' Her portrait at the age of fifty, by Richmond, shows a countenance in which firmness and benevolence are expressed in the lines of the cheek and mouth, and a swift,

keen intellect looks out from the eyes. Like many other deaf people, she was an incessant talker: her friends, however, considered her loquacity justified by its brightness and prevailing good sense. According to Hawthorne she was also a ready listener, if you had the courage to address her: The ear trumpet seems a sensible part of her, like the antennæ of some insects. If you have any little remark to make, you drop it in; and she helps you to make remarks by this delicate little appeal of the trumpet, as she slightly directs it towards you, and if you have nothing to say the appeal is not strong enough to embarrass you.'

In the course of her long life she had acquaintance more or less close with very many of the famous people of this century, and not the least interesting part of this book is the criticism she applies to them as she makes them file in review before her. Lord Brougham, Wilberforce, Macaulay, Jeffrey, Coleridge, Hallam, Whately, Sydney Smith, Mr. Grote, Dr. Chalmers, Mrs. Somerville, J. S. Mill, Charlotte Bronté, Lord Lytton, Dickens and many others have passed away. Some of her eminent friends who survive her are Carlyle, Robert Browning, Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Dean Stanley. If her life had terminated when she expected, the publication of this work would have given great pain of mind to many who in the meantime have passed beyond the reach of criticism. For instance, of Bulwer (Lord Lytton) she says, he always appeared to her 'a woman of genius, enclosed by misadventure in a man's form'; of Edwin Landseer, 'curled and cravatted,' that he held his cheerfulness at the mercy of great folks' graciousness to him'; of Miss Mitford, that she never knew her to 'respond to any act or course of conduct that was morally lofty'; of Brougham, that he was 'too vain and

selfish, too low in morals and unrestrained in temper, to turn out a really great man when his day of action came'; of Macaulay, that his review articles

ought to have abolished all confidence in his honesty, as well as in his capacity for philosophy;' and that 'his powers, once believed adequate to the construction of eternal monuments of statesmanship and noble edifices of intellectual worship, will be found capable of nothing better than rearing gay kiosks in the flower gardens of literature, to be soon swept away by the caprices of a new taste, as superficial as his own."

The poet Campbell, she declares, obtrudes his sentimentalities amidst a quivering apprehension of making himself ridiculous': Howitts have unreasonable and turbulent tempers': Mill is much over-rated' and Thackeray's 'frittered life and obedience to the call of the great are the observed of all observers.' Foreigners do not fare better at her hands: the American, Webster, 'lays aside such logical faculties as he has, and puts false cases out of the insincerity of his heart': Everett is the completest illustration of the influences of republican life upon a man of powers without principle, and of knowledge without wisdom': Mazzini is 'an ideologist who will preach for ever in a mood of exaltation, and a style of fustian.' In many cases, it is true, Miss Martineau tempers the acidity of her judgment with words of praise: but who would care for praise after such blame? Miss Martineau's love of epigram doubtless gave the sharp edge to many of her censures; but this having been allowed, it must be confessed that charity was a very minute ingredient in her moral composition.

In 1846 Miss Martineau took a journey to the East, and her travels in Palestine and Egypt had the effect of defining her views as to what she was pleased to call the genealogy of the

old faiths: the Egyptian, the Hebrew, the Christian and the Mohammedan. These she fancied to be necessary stages of belief in the progress of the world. As she accounted the Christian religion the noblest of all superstitions, she ought to have accounted for the phenomenon that the Mohammedan religion came last.

But, in tracing the decay of all religious belief in this remarkable woman, the work just mentioned, which Mr. Murray, the publisher, termed 'a conspiracy against Moses,' must be regarded as only prefatory to one published in 1850, in which her views were set forth with startling distinctness and extremity. It was entitled Letters on the Laws of Man's Nature and Development. These letters were for the most part the composition of a Mr. Atkinson, with whom Miss Martineau became acquainted during her mesmeric experiences; some, however, were written by herself; and the scheme of publication was hers; so that she incurred, and, indeed, accepted, responsibility for all that was advanced in the book. The opinions now so boldly expressed were strictly necessarian. In her system Law was Lord everywhere. Everything was held in the iron bands of necessity. A First Cause was recognized, and designated the Unknowable, respecting which, however, curiously enough, she professed to know several things: (1.) It was declared to exist; (2.) It was known to be unknowable; (3.) It was known to be the cause of everything else; (4.) It was known to be impersonal.

According to her, Christianity revealing a personal God, and man's relation to Him, with the action of miracles, is a disordered dream, is Fetish; prayer, praise, worship are folly; and Christianity, 'the strongest and noblest of superstitions,' was declared to be 'ready to vanish away.'

Science was proclaimed the true religion of humanity. When, in the progress of knowledge, the absolute and universal imperium of Law was clearly seen, men, it was predicted, would soon acquiesce in its operations, and know their proper place: as mere puppets, moved 'At bidding of vast formless Things That shift the scenery to and fro.' The hope and the fear of a life to come would presently cease, and men would be well-pleased to lose themselves in the All; in plain words, to have no conscious or personal existence. In holding these opinions, Miss Martineau and her friend professed to rejoice in a great liberty: relieved from the last restraint of belief in the Divine, they were free to roam, like cattle broken from tether, on 'the broad, bright, breezy common of the universe; their roaming, of course, coming to an end with the close of their bodily life. They also affected to regard with pity those who were still in the bondage of Belief, and with an amusing arrogance claimed for themselves exclusively the bench of the judge in the cause of Religion 7. Philosophy.

Miss Martineau cleverly protected herself against adverse argument by protesting that none but a necessarian could understand the necessarian doctrine; which was only another way of saying that nothing but the want of intellectual power equal to her own prevented its immediate and universal adoption. On the other hand, necessarians assume to perfectly understand the Christian doctrine, and therefore they alone can be arbiters in their own case. Miss Martineau went further: she claimed to know fully the consolations of the Christian religion as well as those of philosophy-a claim which, remembering the doctrine in which she was nurtured, cannot, of course, for one moment be allowed. Her assertions as to the gaiety conferred upon her

life by her new opinions are certainly remarkable; but, by their frequency and empressement, remind us a little of the efforts of a certain character to be 'jolly' under the most dismal circumstances. Moreover, she tells us that her philosophy made existence itself a festival; and this being the case, it is all the more difficult to believe that she could have been quite so willing to quit it. Yet this she constantly affirmed: she had been satiated at the banquet of life, and contemplated extinction without emotion. Such were the views which this strong-minded, mature-aged woman and her friend presented to the world, and it is not surprising that the word Atheism should have been affixed to them. It would seem that Miss Martineau winced a little under the indictment; but plain people may be pardoned for not being able to discover in her shapeless, soulless, unknowable Something, (hardly so definite as Mr. Matthew Arnold's

Power not ourselves making for righteousness,') even the remote abstraction of the Living God.

:

One amongst the many strictures made upon her in the different reviews cut her to the quick an article entitled Mesmeric Atheism, which appeared in a Unitarian periodical. This was soon known to be the composition of her favourite brother James, whose influence, as 'guide, philosopher and friend,' had been supplanted by that of her coadjutor in this particular work. The article charged her with prostrating herself at the feet of this master, 'laying down at his bidding her early faith in moral obligation, in the living God, in the immortal sanctities; glorying in the infection of his blind arrogance and scorn, mistaking them for wisdom and pity, and meekly undertaking to teach him grammar in return. The very fact that there was so much. truth in these remarks made them the more likely to have their actual.