Harriet Martineau Part 3

But there was more than this in it. In her philosophical studies, she had, of course, met with the eternal debates of metaphysicians and theologians on Foreknowledge, Fate, and Freedom of the Will. The difficult question had, indeed, presented itself to her active and acute young mind long before those studies began. She remembered that when she was but eleven years old she found courage to offer her questionings upon this point to her elder brother Thomas. She asked: If G.o.d foreknew from eternity all the evil deeds that every one of us should do in our lives, how can He justly punish us for those actions, when the time comes that we are born, and in due course commit them?

Her brother replied merely that she was not yet old enough to understand the point. The answer did not satisfy the child. She knew that if she were old enough to feel the difficulty, she must also be mentally fit to receive some kind of explanation. But under the pastoral influence of Dr. Carpenter, the emotional side of her religion was cultivated, and such doubts and difficulties of the reason were put away for the time.

Not for all time, however, could the problem be shirked by so active, logical, and earnest a mind. It recurred to her when she was left to her own spiritual guidance. Long before the date of these "Devotions"

she had fought out the battle in her own mind, and had reached the standpoint from which her Prayers are written. She had convinced herself of the truth of the Necessitarian doctrine, that we are what we are, we do what we do, because of the impulses given by our previous training and circ.u.mstances; and that the way to amend any human beings or all mankind is to improve their education, and to give them good surroundings and influences, and mental a.s.sociations; in short, that physical and psychological phenomena alike depend upon antecedent phenomena, called causes.

As soon as she had thus settled her mind in the doctrine of Necessity, she perceived that prayer, in the ordinary sense of the term, had become impossible. If it be believed that all that happens in the world is the consequence of the course of the events which have happened before, it is clear that no pet.i.tions can alter the state of things at any given moment. A belief in the efficacy of "besieging Heaven with prayers" implies a supposition that a Supreme Ruler of the Universe interferes arbitrarily with the sequence of events. Those whose minds are clear that no such arbitrary interference ever does take place, but that, on the contrary, like events always and invariably follow from like causes, cannot rationally ask for this fundamental rule of the government of the universe to be set aside for their behoof; even although they may believe in an all-powerful Divine Ruler, who has appointed this sequence of events for the law under which His creatures shall live and develop.

Still, however, Harriet Martineau supplicated for spiritual benefits, as we have seen in the little volume of _Devotional Exercises_. These aspirations not only gave her an emotional satisfaction, but were, she then thought, justifiable on necessitarian principles; for each time that we place our minds in a certain att.i.tude we increase their "set"

in the same direction; and she believed at that time that a holy life was in this way aided by frequent reflections on and aspirations towards the highest ideal of holiness personified in the name of G.o.d.

Her religious belief was, then, pure Theism. To her, it was still very good to be a worshipper of Jehovah, the Eternal Presence, the Ever-living Supreme; and Jesus was His Messenger, the highest type that He had ever permitted to be revealed to man of the excellencies of the divine nature. But there was no Atonement, no personal Evil One, no h.e.l.l, no verbally-inspired revelation in her creed.

It will be unnecessary to say more about her theological beliefs till the next twenty years have been recorded, for in that period there was substantially no change in her views. There did come, indeed, a change in her method of self-management and in her opinions as to the way in which religious feelings should affect daily life. She soon concluded that we are best when least self-conscious about our own goodness, and that, therefore, we should rely upon receiving inspiration to right and elevated feelings from pa.s.sing influences, and should refrain from putting our minds, by a regular exercise of volition, into affected postures in antic.i.p.ation of those high emotions which we cannot command. Under these beliefs she soon ceased all formal prayer.

Meantime she was still, at twenty-one years old, in the condition of mind to write _Devotional Exercises_.

The little book met with a favorable acceptance among the Unitarians, and speedily went into the second edition. Thus encouraged, Harriet began another volume of the same character. Such work could not proceed very fast, however, for her domestic duties were not light, and her writing was still looked upon in her family as a mere recreation. She labored under all the disadvantages of the amateur.

But events soon began to crowd into her life to alter this view of the case, and to prepare the way for her beginning to do the work of her life in the only fashion in which such labor can be effectively carried on--as a serious occupation, the princ.i.p.al feature of every day's duties.

After a long period of poverty and distress, caused by the Napoleonic wars, England, in 1824, experienced the special dangers of a time of rapidly increasing wealth. There was more real wealth in the country, owing to the expansion of trade, which followed on the re-opening of the continent to our commerce, but speculation made this development appear far greater than it was in reality.

There was, at that time, no sort of check upon the issue of paper money. Not only did the Bank of England send out notes without limit; not only could every established bank multiply its drafts recklessly; but any small tradesman who pleased might embark in the same business, and put forth paper money without check or control. Thus there was money in abundance, the rate of interest was low, and prices rose.

The natural and inevitable consequence of this state of things, at a moment when trade was suddenly revived, was a rage for speculation.

Not only merchants and manufacturers were seized with this epidemic; the desire for higher profits than could be obtained by quiet and perfectly safe investments spread amongst every cla.s.s. "As for what the speculation was like, it can hardly be recorded on the open page of history without a blush. Besides the joint-stock companies who undertook baking, washing, baths, life insurance, brewing, coal-portage, wool-growing, and the like, there was such a rage for steam navigation, ca.n.a.ls and railroads, that in the session of 1825, 438 pet.i.tions for private Bills were presented, and 286 private Acts were pa.s.sed.... It is on record that a single share of a mine on which 70 had been paid, yielded 200 per cent, having risen speedily to a premium of 1400 per share."[5]

[5] Harriet Martineau's _History of the Peace_, book ii, p. 8.

Periods of such inflation invariably and necessarily close in scenes of disaster. Gold becomes scarce; engagements that have been recklessly entered into cannot be met; goods have been produced in response to a speculative instead of a legitimate demand, and therefore will not sell; the locked-up capital cannot be released, nor can it be temporarily supplied, except upon ruinous terms. Panic commences; it spreads over the business world like fire over the dry prairies. The badly-managed banks and the most speculative business houses begin to totter; the weakest of them fall, and the crash brings down others like a house of cards; and in the depreciation of goods and the disappearance of capital, the prudent, sagacious and honorable merchant suffers for the folly, the recklessness, the avarice and the dishonesty of others.

Such a crash came, from such causes, in the early winter of 1825.

Harriet Martineau's father was one of those injured by the panic, without having been a party to the errors which produced it. He had resisted the speculative mania, and allowed it to sweep by him to its flood. It was, therefore, by no fault of his own that he was caught by the ebbing wave, and carried backwards, to be stranded in the shallows. His house did not fail; but the struggle was a cruel one for many months. How severe the crisis was may be judged from the fact that between sixty and seventy banks stopped payment within six weeks.

The strain of this business anxiety told heavily upon the already delicate health of Mr. Thomas Martineau. In the early spring of 1826 it became clear that his days were numbered. Up to the commencement of that troubled winter it had been supposed that his daughters would be amply provided for in the event of his death. But so much had been lost in the crisis, that he found himself, in his last weeks, compelled to alter his will, and was only able to leave to his wife and daughters a bare maintenance. He lingered on till June, and in that month he died.

It was while Mr. Martineau lay ill, that Harriet's second book, _Addresses, Prayers, and Hymns_, pa.s.sed through the press, and the dying father took great interest and found great comfort in his child's work. Much of it he must have read with feelings rendered solemn by his situation.

This little volume so closely resembles the _Devotional Exercises_, that it is unnecessary to refer to it at greater length. The hymns, which are the special feature of this volume, do not call for much notice. They are not quite commonplace; but verse was not Harriet's natural medium of expression: she wrote a considerable quant.i.ty of it in her early days, as most young authors do; but she soon came to see for herself that her gift of expression in its most elevated form was rather that which makes the orator than the poet.

The comparative poverty to which the family were reduced on Mr.

Martineau's death at once freed Harriet, to a considerable extent, from the obstacles which had previously been interposed to her spending time in writing. It was still far from being recognized that literature was to be her profession; but it was obvious that if her pen could bring any small additions to her income they would be very serviceable. A friend gave her an introduction to Mr. Houlston, then publishing at Wellington, Shropshire; and a few little tales, which she had lying by, were offered to him. He accepted them, issued them in tiny volumes, and paid her five guineas for the copyright of each story. This, then, was the beginning of Harriet Martineau's professional authorship.

CHAPTER IV.

GRIEF STRUGGLE AND PROGRESS.

The loss of pecuniary position did something more for Harriet Martineau besides opening the way to work in literature. The knowledge that she was now poor gave her lover courage to declare himself, and to seek her for his wife. Poverty, therefore, brought her that experience which is so much in a woman's mental history, however little it, perhaps, goes for in a man's. A love in youth, fervent, powerful, and pure; a love, happy and successful in the essential point that it is reciprocated by its object, however fate may deny it outward fruition; such a love once filling a woman's soul, sweetens it and preserves it for her whole life through. Pity the shriveled and decayed old hearts which were not thus embalmed in youth! Harriet Martineau did have this precious experience; and her womanliness of nature remained fresh and true and sweet to the end of her days because of it.

There may be many married women old maids in heart--to be so is the punishment of those who marry without love; and there are many, like Harriet Martineau, who are single in life, but whose hearts have been mated, and so made alive. I do not know that she would have gained by marriage, in any way, except in the chance of motherhood, a yet greater fact than love itself to a woman. On the other hand, her work must have been hindered by the duties of married life, even if her marriage had been thoroughly happy, and her lot free from exceptional material cares. Matronage is a profession in itself. The duties of a wife and mother, as domestic life is at present arranged, absorb much time and strength, and so diminish the possibilities of intellectual labor. Moreover, the laws regulating marriage are still, and fifty years ago were far more, in a very bad state; and, leaving a woman wholly dependent for fair treatment, whether as a wife or mother, upon the mercy and goodness of the man she marries, justify Harriet Martineau's observation: "The older I have grown, the more serious have seemed to me the evils and disadvantages of married life, as it exists among us at this time." The wife who is beloved and treated as an equal partner in life, the mother whose natural rights in the guardianship of her family are respected, the mistress of a home in which she is the sunshine of husband and children, must ever be the happiest of women. But far better is it to be as Harriet Martineau was--a widow of the heart by death--than to have the affections torn through long years by neglect and cruelty, springing less from natural badness than from the evil teaching of vile laws and customs. Fifty years ago marriage was a dangerous step for a woman; and Harriet Martineau had reason for saying at last: "Thus, I am not only entirely satisfied with my lot, but think it the very best for me."

For a while, however, the happy prospect of a beloved wifehood cheered her struggling and anxious life. But it was not for long. Her actual and acknowledged engagement lasted, I believe, only a few months. Mr.

Worthington had, at this time, but lately completed his course as a Divinity student; and he had been appointed to the joint charge of a very large Unitarian Church at Manchester. Conscientiousness was one of the most marked features of his character, according to his college friend; and Harriet herself declares that she "venerated his moral nature." He had thrown himself into the very heavy pastoral work committed to him with all the devotion of this high characteristic.

Moreover, the long doubt and suspense of his love for her before their engagement, had, doubtless, worked unfavorably upon his nervous system. The end of it was, that he was suddenly seized with a brain fever, in which he became delirious. He was removed to his father's home in Leicestershire, to be nursed; and in process of time, the fever was subdued. But the mind did not regain its balance. He was still, as she says, "insane"; but from one of her dear and early friends, I hear that "his family did not call it insanity,"--only a feeble and unhinged state, from which recovery might have been expected hopefully.

In this state of things it was thought desirable that the woman he loved should be brought to see him. The beloved presence, his physician believed, might revive old impressions and happy antic.i.p.ations, and might be the one thing needful to induce a favorable change in his condition. His mother wrote to beg Harriet Martineau to come to him; Harriet eagerly sought her mother's permission to hasten to his side; and Mrs. Martineau forbade her daughter to go. The old habit of obedience to her mother, and the early implanted ideas of filial duty, were too strong for Harriet at once to break through them; she did not defy her mother and go; and in a few more weeks--terrible weeks of doubt and mental storm they must have been, between her love and her obedience dragging her different ways--Worthington died, and left her to her life of heart-widowhood, darkened by this shadow of arbitrary separation to the last. "The calamity was aggravated to me," she says, "by the unaccountable insults I received from his family, whom I had never seen. Years after, the mystery was explained. They had been given to understand, by cautious insinuation, that I was actually engaged to another while receiving my friend's addresses." They had not appreciated how submissive she was as a daughter; and their belief that her love was insincere was not an unnatural one in the circ.u.mstances.

Had those relatives of the dead lover lived to read Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, they would not have been made to think differently of her feelings towards him; for there she goes calmly on, after the pa.s.sage above quoted, to say only: "Considering what I was in those days, it was happiest for us both that our union was prevented." As we have had to look outside the Autobiography for a record of what love was to her, and what it did for her, so we must seek elsewhere for the cry of agony which tells how she felt her loss. But the record exists; it is found in an essay ent.i.tled _In a Death Chamber_, one of that autobiographical series published in _The Monthly Repository_, from which I have previously quoted.

This beautiful piece of writing--far more of a poem in essence than anything which she ever published in verse--is spoiled as a composition by mutilation in quoting. But its length leaves me no option but to select from it only a few of the more confessional pa.s.sages, to aid us in our psychological study:

This weary watch! In watching by the couch of another there is no weariness; but this lonely tending of one's own sick heart is more than the worn-out spirit can bear. What an age of woe since the midnight clock gave warning that my first day of loneliness was beginning--to others a Sabbath, to me a day of expiation.

All is dull, cold and dreary before me, until I also can escape to the region where there is no bereavement, no blasting root and branch, no rending of the heart-strings. What is aught to me, in the midst of this all-pervading, thrilling torture, when all I want is to be dead? The future is loathsome, and I will not look upon it; the past, too, which it breaks my heart to think about--what has it been? It might have been happy, if there is such a thing as happiness; but I myself embittered it at the time, and for ever. What a folly has mine been! Mult.i.tudes of sins now rise up in the shape of besetting griefs. Looks of rebuke from those now in the grave; thoughts which they would have rebuked if they had known them; moments of anger, of coldness; sympathy withheld when looked for; repression of its signs through selfish pride; and worse, far worse even than this ... all comes over me now. O! if there be pity, if there be pardon, let it come in the form of insensibility; for these long echoes of condemnation will make me desperate.

But was there ever human love unwithered by crime--by crime of which no human law takes cognizance, but the unwritten everlasting laws of the affections? Many will call me thus innocent. The departed breathed out thanks and blessing, and I felt them not then as reproaches. If, indeed, I am only as others, shame, shame on the impurity of human affections; or, rather, alas! for the infirmity of the human heart! For I know not that I could love more than I have loved.

Since the love itself is wrecked, let me gather up its relics, and guard them more tenderly, more steadily, more gratefully. This seems to open up glimpses of peace. O grant me power to retain them--the light and music of emotion, the flow of domestic wisdom and chastened mirth, the life-long watchfulness of benevolence, the thousand thoughts--are these gone in their reality? Must I forget them as others forget?

If I were to see _my_ departed one--that insensible, wasted form--standing before me as it was wont to stand, with whom would I exchange my joy?... But it is not possible to lose all. The shadows of the past may have as great power as their substance ever had, and the spirit of human love may ever be nigh, invested with a majesty worthy to succeed the l.u.s.tre of its mortal days.

This is the poem of Harriet Martineau's love. This is what remains to show that the girl whose intellect was so powerful, and who had habitually and of choice exercised her mind upon the most abstruse studies and the most difficult thoughts which can engage the attention, could nevertheless feel at least as fervently, and deliver herself up to her emotions at least as fully, as any feeble, ignorant, or narrow-minded creature that ever lived. Surely, with the truth emphasized by such an example, the common but stupid delusion that the development of the intellect diminishes the capacity for pa.s.sion and tenderness, must fade away! This girl's mental power and her mental culture were both unusually large; but here is the core of her heart, and is it not verily womanly?

This experience did more than give her hours of happiness; it did more than bring to her that enlargement of the spirit which she so well described; for it taught her to appreciate, and to properly value, the influence of the emotions in life. Never in one of her works, never in a single phrase, is she found guilty of that blasphemy against the individual affections, into which some who have yet sought to pose as high priests of the religion of humanity have fallen and lost themselves. In all her writings one finds the continual recognition of the great truth which was in the mind of him who said: "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love G.o.d whom he hath not seen?"--a truth of the very first consequence to those who aim at expressing their religion by service to the progress of mankind.

The year 1826, to Harriet crowded so full of trouble, came to an end soon after Mr. Worthington's death. In the following year, though she was in very bad health, she wrote a vast quant.i.ty of ma.n.u.script. Some of it was published at once. Other portions waited in her desk for a couple of years, when her contributions to _The Monthly Repository_ recommenced, after a change in its editorship.

She wrote in the year 1827 various short stories, which were published by Houlston, of Shrewsbury, without her name on their t.i.tle-pages.

Their character may be guessed by the fact that they were circulated as Mrs. Sherwood's writings! In tone, they resemble the ordinary Sunday-school story-book; but there is a fire, an earnestness, and an originality often discoverable in them which are enough to mark them out from common hack-writing. Two of them, _The Rioters_ and _The Turn Out_, deal with topics of political economy; but the questions were thought out (very accurately) in her own mind, for at that time she had never read a book upon the subject.

These little stories were so successful that the publisher invited her to write a longer one, which should have her name attached to it. She went to work, accordingly, and produced a good little tale, of one hundred and fifty pages of print, which she called _Principle and Practice_. It recounts the struggles of an orphan family in their efforts after independence. As in all her writings of this kind, her own experience is interfused into the fiction. No part of this story is so interesting as that where a young man who has met with an accident has to reconcile his mind to the antic.i.p.ation of life-long lameness--as she to deafness. The sisters of this orphan family, too, make money by a kind of fancy-work by which she herself was earning a few guineas from the wealthier members of her family, namely, by cutting bags and baskets out of pasteboard, fitting them together with silk and gold braid, and painting plaques upon their sides. _Principle and Practice_ was so warmly received in the circle to which it was suited that the publisher called for a sequel, which was accordingly written early in the following year.

There was a vast quant.i.ty of writing in all these publications; and, besides this, she was continually at work with her needle. Such unremitting sedentary occupation, together with her sorrow, caused a serious illness, from which she suffered during 1828. It was an affection of the liver and stomach, for which she went to be treated by her brother-in-law, Mr. Greenhow, a surgeon at Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Her remarkable powers of steady application, and her untiring industry, were always[6] amongst her most noteworthy characteristics--as, indeed, is proved by the vast quant.i.ty of work she achieved. In each of her various illnesses, friends who had watched with wonder and alarm how much she wrote, and how unceasingly she worked, either with pen, or book, or needle in hand, told her that her suffering was caused by her merciless industry. Her "staying power" was great; she rarely felt utterly exhausted, and therefore she was impatient of being told that she had, in fact, over-exerted her strength.

Sometimes, indeed, she admitted that she worked too much, and pleaded only that she could not help it--that the work needed doing, or that the thoughts pressed for utterance, and she could not refuse the call of duty. But more often she said, as in a letter to Mr. Atkinson, which lies before me, "My best aid and support in the miseries of my life has been in _work_--in the intellectual labor which I believe has done me nothing but good." So her immense industry in 1827 may have seemed to her a relief from her heart-sorrows at the moment; but none the less it probably was the chief cause of her partial breakdown in the next year. A blister relieves internal inflammation; but a succession of such stimuli too long continued will exhaust the strength, and render the condition more critical than it would have been without such treatment.

[6] "I should think there never was such an industrious lady," said the maid who was with her for the last eleven years of her life; "when I caught sight of her, just once, leaning back in her chair, with her arms hanging down, and looking as though she wasn't even thinking about anything, it gave me quite a turn. I felt she _must_ be ill to sit like that!"

At Newcastle there was a brief cessation from work, under the doctor's orders. But in the middle of 1828 Harriet began to write again for the _Repository_, in response to an appeal put forth by the editor for gratuitous literary aid. That editor was the well-known Unitarian preacher, William Johnston Fox, of South Place Chapel. Mr. Fox became Harriet Martineau's first literary friend. He had no money with which to reward her work for his magazine; but he paid her amply in a course of frank, full, and generous private criticism and encouragement. "His correspondence with me," she says, "was unquestionably the occasion, and, in great measure, the cause, of the greatest intellectual progress I ever made before the age of thirty." Mr. Fox was so acute a critic that he ere long predicted that "she would be one of the first authors of the age if she continued to write;" while, at the same time, he offered suggestions for improvement, and made corrections in her work upon occasion. Her advance in literary capacity was now very rapid. Her style went on improving, as it should do, till her latest years; but it now first became an _individual_ one, easy, flowing, forcible, and often most moving and eloquent.

During the latter half of 1828 and the early part of the succeeding year, she contributed, more or less, to nearly every monthly number of the _Repository_, without receiving any payment. She wrote essays, poems, and so-called reviews, which last, however, were really thoughtful and original papers, suggested by the subject of a new book. Some of these contributions were signed "V"; but others, including all the reviews, were anonymous.

Most of these articles are on philosophical subjects, and are written with the calmness of style suitable to logical and argumentative essays. In the _Repository_ for February, 1829, and the succeeding month, for instance, there appeared two papers, headed, "On the Agency of Feelings in the Formation of Habits," which are simply an accurate, clear, and forcibly-reasoned statement of the philosophical doctrine of a.s.sociation, with which that of Necessity is inseparably connected.

These were, it has been already observed, the theories by which she was learning both to guide her own action and to see that society is moulded, however unconsciously, as regards most of the individuals composing it. A clearer statement of the doctrines, or a more forcible indication of how they can be made to serve as a moral impulse, cannot be imagined. Here is very different work from _Devotional Exercises_, or _Principle and Practice_. But it brought its author neither fame nor money.