BOOKS.
HARRIET MARTINEAU'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY.•
[THIRD NOTICE.]
Miss MARTINEAU'S most earnest admirers, and those who are least able to share in that admiration, will probably agree that in
this autobiography she has achieved her most effective work. It
is written with a continuous vigour and with an animation which are truly wonderful, when we consider that she was, at the time
she wrote it, suffering from heart-disease, from which she ex- pected, and was told to expect, that she might die at any moment, though in fact she lived for twenty-one years longer, and the book carries the reader on from the first to the last page without ever wearying him. But we must add that its great
merit as a literary work appears to us to reflect the greatest weakness of the woman whose life it records. No doubt a great part of the vigour of the book is due to the writer's amazing self-confidence. Some one said of Lord Macaulay, "I Wish I could be as cocksure of anything as Bob Macaulay is of everything." And whether that judgment were true or false of Lord Macaulay, it is certainly true of Miss Martineau, and very curious, when we think through what an astounding transformation her opinions went on the greatest of all sub- jects. It may be, of course, that the autobiography does not hilly represent in this respect her actual mind, for it is no easy thing to recall at any time the phases of one's past life even with such assistance as Miss Martineau's voluminous diaries and works gave her. But making all due allowance for this, it is pretty clear that no mind ever went through such mighty revolutions as hers with so little of hesitation, doubt, or difficulty. By her own account, the old faiths ran off her like the water from a duck's back. She had no more difficulty in discovering Christianity to be a poor sort of " Fetishism," and immortality a "selfish" dream, than she had in dissolving all those " false relations," as she cheerfully denominated them, which had first arisen as family ties, and had been cemented by the deepest personal affection. And though we are disposed to take all this with a certain qualification, and to assume that in point of fact there must have been more of suspense and hesitation and deliberation in her life than there appears to have been on the face of her own narrative, yet no one, we think, could attach much importance to Miss Martineau's story, without perceiving that she dropped both spiritual con- victions and human attachments with more ease and leas hesita- tion than any equally candid and equally able person of whom we have any trustworthy record. Changes of belief and changes of moral relation which would have cost most men of the same calibre years of hesitation or self-reproach, slide past us in her story with as much ease as if they were recombinations of the kaleido- scopic shapes and colours of pure imagination. And when at the close we find her revelling "under the stars and within the circuit of the solemn mountains" in her freedom from the childish super- stition of a personal God, and taking leave, as she phrases it, "to study and enjoy, without leave asked or fear of penalty," we cannot help questioning whether even those who most agree with her will not be struck by the extraordinary recklessness of her changes, as they see the deepest faiths of her earlier life plucked up as it were by the hand, and cast away, without making any material difference to her peace ; and observe that new cuttings only planted yesterday sprout and grow with the rapidity of Jonah's gourd, invisible to her one year, and sheltering her exulting nature in the next.
It is obvious from all her work that Miss Martineau had a rapid and confident power of vision, which power of vision she easily confounded with a power of deliberate judgment. Her judgments of men were very hasty and superficial,—partly, no doubt, from her defect of hearing, which enabled her to hear only what was said expressly for her to hear, and not to catch those far more suggestive remarks which are not meant for the consideration of the critic. But making all allowance for this, she evidently found it far too easy to judge men, and therefore judged them hastily and often unjustly. Why, for instance, she bated the Whigs with so deadly a hatred it is difficult to say, but it is amusing to find her predicting for Mr. Roebuck a triumph as a true Liberal over the " insolent official Liberals," whom she de- scribes as his contemners. Mr. Roebuck is no longer a Liberal in any intelligible sense at all, while Lord John Russell, whom she tramples under foot on Mr. Roebuck's behalf, lived to stand • Harriet Martineaus Autobiography, with Memorials. By Marie Weston Chapman. With Porta:Ea and Illustrations. 3 vols. London : Smith, Eder, B Co. up for her beloved cause, the cause of the North, when Mr. Roebuck was doing all in his power to betray it. Again, of Lord Macaulay she said peremptorily that " the evidence seems to indi- cate that he wants heart ;" and even after the publication of the Life by his nephew, she sticks to her peremptory judgment. " I do not mean," she wrote, "that he did not love his family, or that he was not in a small way benevolent. But if he had been a man of heart, could he have gone through the world without taking it in, with all its grand interests, its sufferings, and its destinies ? He did not live on the high level of the heart. But he was a most charming litterateur, and as such admired and rewarded." It is the old question between range and intensity. We should be sorry to say with equal peremptoriness that so public-spirited and benevolent a woman as Harriet Martineau did not live on "the high level of the heart," whatever that somewhat mysteri- ous phrase may mean, but we should not hesitate to say for a moment that she never appears to us to have " taken in " the world, " with all its grand interests, its sufferings, and its des- tinies," at all as completely, as many whom she condemns certainly have taken it in, for her correspondence with Mr. Atkinson seems to us fair evidence of her never having had a real hold of the deepest human questions at all, that she never knew what was really involved in them. Her gravest political judgments are often mere slap-dash shots. Consider only this intense hatred of the Whigs, which, as we have said, runs through the whole autobiography. She accuses them of " pride" and " vul- garity" (L 337), of "indifference" and "shamelessness" (I. 340), of "greedily clutching" power and holding it with "shameless tenacity " (I. 346), of " flippancy, haughtiness, and ignorance'
(I. 410), of " flippancy, conceit, official helplessness, and ignor- ance " (I. 411), of having led the Queen astray, " flattered and pampered her " (II. 120), and of an " incapacity and self-com- placency" which " disgraced our administration and lowered our national character in the eyes of the world, and cost their country many thousands of lives and many millions of treasure (II. 300). Now, we are not saying that some of the Whig leaders did not deserve some of these violent epithets at particular periods of their lives. What leaders of any party have not de- served them ? But where is the political class which has ever de- served well of the country, if the Whigs of Miss Martineau's time have deserved nothing better than a general character such as- this ? it is clear that Miss Martineau, when she took into her mind either a political or a personal prejudice,. whether one against or in favour of others, let it ride rampant over her imagi- nation, and hide from her the very principles on which a fair investigation should proceed and a calm judgment be guided.
Miss Martineau's great successes were all attained in illustrative tales, and no doubt that was very characteristic of the nature of her intellect and her imagination. She had a very receptive understanding, caught up ideas easily, mastered them well, and illustrated them with ease. Even her longer stories, Deerbrook and the Hour and the Man, are really illustrations. We doubt if Miss Martineau ever wrote a story purely for the pleasure of painting life, and without the guidance and impulse of a special idea to illustrate. That was the literary impulse to which she owed almost everything. We know no case in which she has shown the power to discuss in any large measure the limits within which alone principles are true, and to examine the basis of a great and difficult question. Even as a political economist, she appears to have fallen into most if not all of the somewhat narrow conceptions of the political economy of that period, and never to have adopted fully the larger views of the science opened out by Mr. J. S. DEL—against whom, as against many others, she had evidently contracted one of her vehement intellectual prejudices. On philosophy, again, she early picked up the neces- sarian theory and steadily clung to it, without, so far as we know, ever displaying the least knowledge of the profound difficulties besetting it, and this though it drove her, as she herself confesses, early to give up prayer, and later to give up God. And the deeper she went, the more she lost that power to illustrate and realise what she held, which had been the chief security of her mind on narrower and shallower intellectual topics. As far as we can see, she adopted the philosophy of Mr. Atkinson, and the system of Auguste Comte, without a trace of ever having discussed anxiously with herself the intellectual issues on which, even for a necessarian, these further developments of her theory would depend. In fact, if we are not very much mistaken, some of Mr. Atkinson's views as to matter would not have suited the philosophy of Auguste Comte at all, though Miss Martineau seems to have adopted both. Directly she loses the help of her graphic pictorial imagination, her mind seems to lose its helm. Thus, after her great conversion to something which may be called a mixture of agnosticism, materialism, and positivism, her assump- tions are so startling, and so wide of the mark of her philosophy, that we cannot believe she ever really mastered this last, and as she thought, highest phase of her convictions. Take, for instance, the following remark, which is repeated, in one form or another, a half-dozen times at least in the autobiography:— "When I experienced the still, new joy of feeling myself to be a portion of the Universe, resting on the security of its everlasting laws, certain that its Cause was wholly out of the sphere of human attributes, and that the special destination of my race is infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of "divine moral government," how could it matter to me that the adherents of a decaying mythology (the Christians following the heathen as the heathen followed the barbaric fetish) were firmly clinging to their Man-God, their scheme of salvation, their reward and punishment, their arrogance, their selfishness, their essential pay-system, as ordered by their mythology ?"
How, indeed?.—but what a strange mixture of certainties have we got here,—first, a certainty that the ultimate Cause is unknown, and next, a certainty as to what is to be the effect of the unknown cause. Miss Martineaau's perfect intellectual assurance that a cause of which she says she knows that it is " wholly out of the sphere of human attributes," will yet bring about a "special destination for her race infinitely nobler than the highest proposed under a scheme of divine moral government,' " is one of the sublimest leaps of agnostic thought ever witnessed. How can any one know that a cause which is " wholly out of the sphere of human attributes" will not ultimately produce an effect which is also " wholly out of the sphere of human attributes," and that it may net therefore get rid of man altogether. If material causes are the ultimate ones, as Mr. Atkinson appears to hold, there are apparently material causes enough in existence which promise us that the earth must entirely cease one day to be the abode of such life as we now know, whether human or other. Surely such a conviction of the sublime destiny of man on agnostic principles was as unwarranted as was that profound emotion of joy with which Miss Martineau hailed herself as a part of the universe, —as if she had really believed herself external to the universe so long as she remained a Theist and a Christian. To us, Miss Martineau seems in her latest stage—the stage of Positivism—to have emancipated herself entirely not only from her early con- victions, but from her early logic and her early power of thinking into pictures whatever she had distinctly apprehended. She indulges feelings that are irrational, and hopes that are equally irrational on her new theory ; and dismisses fears that are perfectly rational on that theory as altogether baseless. On the whole, we fear we must say of her that her greatest power was that of a clear, graphic, lucid, and compact writer on intellectual subjects of small range and narrow drift. As a woman of business, as a " leader "-writer, she was admirable. As a describer she was charming. Her intellect and imagination were always available for duties of this kind, and she was, for the greater part of her literary life, wholly free from affectations. But she was not a thinker. And her character, courageous, high-spirited, and disinterested as she proved it to be in public matters, wanted sweetness and light. Her self-confidence was immense. Her judgments on others were too often somewhat spiteful, and she did not know the limits of her own power. When, for instance, she tells us that her mature judgment on Words- worth was less appreciative than her early one, that she could see little pure poetry in him in her later days, she only tells us that her mind had lost the little insight she ever had into the higher region of the imagination. She was quite unaware that on such subjects, as well as on philosophy, there were very narrow limits to the range of her apparently inexhaustible faculty. But no doubt, with all her faults, she kept, in general, a high aim in life, an unsullied integrity, and a power almost unequalled amongst women, and rarely equalled amongst men, of doing with her whole might whatever she had found to do at all.
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