Harriet Martineau Part 6

She knew well how grave would be the social consequences to her of thus throwing in her lot with the despised and insulted abolitionists; but she felt that "she never could be happy again" if she shrunk from the duty of expression thrust upon her. The results to her were as serious as she had apprehended. She received innumerable personal insults and slights, public and private, where before all had been homage; the Southern newspapers threatened her personal safety, calling her a foreign "incendiary;" and, to crown all, she had to give up an intended Ohio tour, on the information of an eminent Cincinnati merchant that he had heard with his own ears the details of a plot to hang her on the wharf at Louisville, before the respectable inhabitants could intervene, in order to "warn all other meddlesome foreigners."

All this abuse and insult and threatening from the lower kind of persons, interested for their purses, had, of course, no influence upon the hundred private friendships that she had formed. Ardent and deep was the affection with which many Americans came to regard her, and with some of them her intimate friendship lasted through all the succeeding forty years of her life. Emerson was one of these friends, and Garrison another. It was her frequent correspondence with these and many others that kept her interest in the affairs of the United States so active, and made her so well-informed about them as to give her the great authority that she had, both in England and America, during the life and death struggle of the Union, so that at that time, when she was writing leaders for the London _Daily News_, Mr. W.

E. Forster said that "it was Harriet Martineau alone who was keeping English public opinion about America on the right side through the press."

Loath to leave such friendships behind, and yet longing for home, she sailed from New York at the end of July, 1836, and reached Liverpool on the 26th August. A parting act of American chivalry was that her ship-pa.s.sage was paid for her by some unknown friend.

It was while she was in the United States that the first portrait of her which I have seen was painted. She herself did not like it, calling the att.i.tude melodramatic; but her sister Rachel, I am told, always declared that it was the only true portrait of Harriet that was ever taken. At this point, then, some idea of her person may be given.

She was somewhat above the middle height, and at this time had a slender figure. The face in the portrait is oval; the forehead rather broad, as well as high, but not either to a remarkable degree. The most noticeable peculiarity of the face is found in a slight projection of the under lip. The nose is straight, not at all turned up at the end, but yet with a definite tip to it. The eyes are a clear gray, with a calm, steadfast, yet sweet gaze; indeed there is an almost appealing look in them. The hair is of so dark a brown as to appear nearly black. A tress of it (cut off twenty years later than this American visit, when it had turned snow-white) has been given to me; and I find the treasured relic to be of exceptionally fine texture--a sure sign of a delicate and sensitive nervous organization.

Her hands and feet were small.

She was certainly not beautiful; besides the slight projection of the lower lip the face has the defect of the cheeks sloping in too much towards the chin. But she was not strikingly plain either. The countenance in this picture has a look both of appealing sweetness and of strength in reserve; and one feels that with such beauty of expression it could not fail to be attractive to those who looked upon it with sympathy.

The compet.i.tion amongst the publishers for Miss Martineau's book on America was an amusing contrast to the scorn with which her proposals for her _Political Economy_ had been received. Murray sent a message through a friend, offering to undertake the American work; and letters from two other publishers were awaiting her arrival in England. On the day that the newspapers announced that she had reached town no fewer than three of the chief London publishers called upon her with proposals. She declined those of Bentley and Colburn, and accepted the offer of Messrs. Saunders and Otley to pay her 300 per volume for the first edition of three thousand copies. The book appeared in three volumes, so that she received 900 for it. She completed the three goodly volumes in six months.

She had wished to call the book _Theory and Practice of Society in America_, a t.i.tle which would have exactly expressed the position that she took up in it, viz., that the Americans should be judged by the degree in which they approached, in their daily lives, to the standard of the principles laid down in their Const.i.tution. Her publishers so strongly objected to this t.i.tle, that she consented to call the work simply _Society in America_. She held to her scheme none the less, and the book proceeds upon it. She quotes the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. "Every true citizen," she claims, "must necessarily be content to have his self-government tried by the test of the principles to which, by his citizenship, he has become a subscriber." She brings social life in the United States of 1834-6 to this test accordingly.

That method of approaching her subject had some advantages. It enabled her to treat with peculiar force the topics of slavery, of the exclusion of women from political affairs, and of the subservience to the despotism of public opinion which she found to exist at that time in America.

But she herself came to see, in after times, that her _plan_ (leaving the details aside) was radically faulty. She was, as she says, "at the most metaphysical period" of her mental history. Thus, she failed at the moment to perceive that she commenced her subject _at the wrong end_ in taking a theory and judging the facts of American society by their agreement or disagreement with that _a priori_ philosophy. It was the theory that had to be judged by the way in which the people lived under a government framed upon it, and not the people by the degree in which they live up to the theory. The English public wanted a book that would help them to know the American public and its ways; the Americans required to see through the eyes of an observant, cultivated foreigner, what they were being and doing. It is this which a traveller has to do--to observe _facts_: to draw lessons from them, if he will, but not to consider the facts in their relationship to a pre-conceived theory. Human experience is perennially important and eternally interesting; and this is what a traveller has to note and record. Political philosophies must be gathered from experience instead of (what she attempted) the real life being viewed only as related to the philosophy. In fine, her error was in treating abstractedly what was necessarily a concrete theme.

With this objection to the scheme of the book, all criticism may end.

All criticism did not end (any more than it began) in this way in 1837. Speaking out so boldly as she did on a variety of the most important social topics, she naturally aroused opposition, which the power and eloquence of the style did not mitigate.

The anti-slavery tone of the book alone would have ensured violent attacks upon it and its author, as, after her ostracism because of her anti-slavery declaration, she well knew would be the case. "This subject haunts us on every page," distressfully wrote Margaret Fuller; and greatly exaggerated though this statement was, it certainly is true that there is hardly a chapter in which the reader is allowed to forget that the curse of humanity made merchandise, shadowed life, directly or indirectly, throughout the whole United States. Neither by the holders of slaves in the South, nor by their accessories in the North, was it possible that she could be regarded otherwise than as an enemy, the more powerful, and therefore the more to be hated and abused, because of her standing and her ability. In estimating the courage and disinterestedness which she displayed in so decisively bearing her witness against the state of American society under the slave system, it must be remembered not only that she had many valued personal friends in the South, and amongst the anti-abolitionists of the North, but also that she knew that she was closing against herself a wide avenue for the dissemination of her opinions upon any subject whatsoever. No book written by an abolitionist would be admitted into any one of thousands of American homes. The abolitionists reprinted portions of _Society of America_, as a pamphlet, and distributed it broadcast. The result was that, up to the time when slavery was abolished Harriet Martineau was continually held up to scorn and reprobation in Southern newspapers, "in the good company of Mrs.

Chapman and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe."

Even greater courage was displayed by Harriet Martineau in her boldness of utterance upon some other points, about which freedom of thought was as obnoxious in England as in America. When she maintained that divorce should be permissible by mutual consent, provided only that the interests of children and the distribution of property were equitably arranged for; when she pleaded for the emanc.i.p.ation of women; or when she devoted a chapter to showing the evils which spring from the acc.u.mulation of enormous fortunes, and incidentally attacked the laws and customs of primogeniture, of the transfer of land, and the like, which are devised specially to facilitate and encourage such acc.u.mulations: in these and other pa.s.sages of an equally radical nature, she braved a large body of opinion in English society, as well as in the other country for which she wrote. She mentions subsequently, that for many years she was occasionally startled by finding herself regarded in various quarters as a free-thinker upon dangerous subjects, and as something of a demagogue. I have little doubt that the "advanced" political philosophy of _Society in America_ did originate such suspicions in minds of the Conservative order, "the timid party," as she described them in this same book. Yet she adds:

I have never regretted its boldness of speech. I felt a relief in having opened my mind which I would at no time have exchanged for any gain of reputation or fortune. The time had come when, having experienced what might be called the extremes of obscurity and difficulty first, and influence and success afterwards, I could p.r.o.nounce that there was nothing for which it was worth sacrificing freedom of thought and speech.

There was but little in _Society in America_ of the ordinary book of travels. As an account of the political condition and the social arrangements of the American people it was of singular value. But the personal incidents of travel, the descriptions of scenery, the reminiscences of eminent persons, of all which Harriet Martineau had gathered a store, were entirely omitted from this work. Messrs.

Saunders and Otley suggested to her that she should make a second book out of this kind of material. She consented; and wrote her _Retrospect of Western Travel_. She completed the ma.n.u.script of this in December, 1837, and it was published soon afterwards in three volumes. The publishers gave her six hundred pounds for it.

The fifteen hundred pounds which she thus earned exceeded in amount the whole of what she had then received for her _Ill.u.s.trations of Political Economy_. The last-named great work was nearly all published upon the absurdly unequal terms which Charles Fox had secured from her in the beginning. It was characteristic of her generosity in pecuniary matters and her loyalty to her friends, that although her agreement with Fox was dissoluble at the end of every five numbers, she nevertheless allowed it to hold good, and permitted him to pocket a very leonine share of her earnings throughout the whole publication of the original series, only claiming a revision of the terms when she commenced afresh, as it were, with the "Poor-Law," and "Taxation"

tales. Thus the immense popularity of the _Ill.u.s.trations_ had not greatly enriched her. A portion of her earnings by them was invested in her American tour; and now that she received this return from her books of travels she felt it her duty to make a provision for the future. She purchased a deferred annuity of one hundred pounds to begin in April, 1850. It displayed a characteristic calm confidence in herself that she should thus have entirely locked up her earnings for twelve years. She clearly felt a quiet a.s.surance that her brain and her hand would serve to maintain her, at least as long as she was in the flower of her age.

The six volumes about America were not the whole of her work during the first eighteen months after her return to England. She wrote an article on Miss Sedgwick's works for the _Westminster Review_, and several other short papers for various magazines. The extraordinary industry with which she returned to labor after her long rest requires no comment.

Early in 1838 she wrote a work called _How to Observe in Morals and Manners_. It forms a crown octavo volume of two hundred and thirty-eight pages, and was published by Mr. Charles Knight. The book is an interesting one, both for the reflections which it contains upon the subject of its t.i.tle, and as indicating the method which she had herself pursued in her study of the morals and manners of the country in which she had been travelling. There is certainly no failure in the courage with which she expresses her convictions. She admits elsewhere that the abuse which she received from America had so acted upon her mind that she had come to quail at the sight of letters addressed in a strange handwriting, or of newspapers sent from the United States. But there is no trace in this her next considerable work of any tendency to follow rather than to lead the public opinion of her time. One paragraph only may be quoted to indicate this fact:

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 a.s.serting 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]

[8] _How to Observe_, p. 204.

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 t.i.tle-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 cla.s.ses of servants for whom she wrote. Practical hints are given from which the majority of these cla.s.ses 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 auth.o.r.ess 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 t.i.tle of _Deerbrook_.

Great expectations had been entertained by the literary public of Harriet Martineau's first novel. The excellences of her _Ill.u.s.trations_ as works of fiction had been so marked and so many, that it was antic.i.p.ated 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 circ.u.mstances 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 b.u.t.ter! 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 pa.s.sionately 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 _Ill.u.s.trations_, the decided drawing of the characters, the truthful a.n.a.lysis 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 _Ill.u.s.trations_. 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 navely 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 pa.s.sions 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 princ.i.p.al 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 s.p.a.ce 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 acc.u.mulation of experience of weary hours, in proportion to the aggregate of painful a.s.sociations which every visitation revives."[9]

[9] _Life in the Sick-Room._

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 n.o.ble 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 inst.i.tution which was being founded in America for the education of persons of color of both s.e.xes, 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.