CHAPTER VI.

FIVE ACTIVE YEARS.

On the conclusion of the publication of the _Illustrations of

Political Economy_, Harriet went to the United States, and travelled

there for more than two years. Her fame had preceded her; and she

received the warm and gracious greeting from the generous people of

America that they are ever ready to give to distinguished guests from

their "little Mother-isle." She travelled not only in the Northern

States, but in the South and the West too, going in the one direction

from New York to New Orleans, and in the other to Chicago and

Michigan. Everywhere she was received with eager hospitality. Public

institutions were freely thrown open to her, and eminent citizens vied

with each other in showing her attention, publicly and privately.

The most noteworthy incident in the course of the whole two years was

her public declaration of her anti-slavery principles. The

Anti-Slavery movement was in its beginning. The abolitionists were the

subjects of abuse and social persecution, and Miss Martineau was

quickly made aware that by a declaration in their favor she would risk

incurring odium, and might change her popularity in society into

disrepute and avoidance. It would have been perfectly easy for a less

active conscience and a less true moral sense to have evaded the

question, in such a manner that neither party could have upbraided her

for her action. She might simply have said that she was there as a

learner, not as a teacher; that her business was to survey American

society, and not to take any share in its party disputes, or to give

any opinion on the political questions of a strange land. Such

paltering with principle was impossible to Harriet Martineau. She did

not obtrude her utterances on the subject, but when asked in private

society what she thought, she frankly spoke out her utter abhorrence,

not merely of slavery in the abstract, but also of the state of the

Southern slave-holders and their human property. She could not help

seeing that this candor often gave offense; but that was not her

business when her opinion was sought on a moral question.

The really searching test of her personal character did not come,

however, with regard to this matter, till she went to stay for a while

in Boston, the head-quarters of the abolitionists, fifteen months

after her arrival in America. It happened that she reached Boston the

very day a ladies' anti-slavery meeting was broken up by the violence

of a mob, and that Garrison, falling into the hands of the enraged

multitude, was half-murdered in the street. Harriet had given a

promise, long previously, to attend an abolitionists' meeting; and

though these occurrences showed her that there was actual personal

danger in keeping her word, she was not to be intimidated. She went to

the very next meeting of the ladies' society, which was held a month

after the one so violently disturbed, and there, being unexpectedly

begged to "give them the comfort" of a few words from her, she rose,

and as the official report says, "with great dignity and simplicity of

manner," declared her full sympathy with the principles of the

association.

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-passage 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 attitude 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 competition 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 L300 per volume for the

first edition of three thousand copies. The book appeared in three

volumes, so that she received L900 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 title 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 Constitution. Her publishers so

strongly objected to this title, 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 emancipation of

women; or when she devoted a chapter to showing the evils which spring

from the accumulation 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

accumulations: in these and other passages 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

pronounce 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 manuscript 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 _Illustrations 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 _Illustrations_ 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 assurance 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 title, 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

asserting the rights of negroes; or moralists treated with public

scorn for carrying out allowed principles to their ultimate

issues; or scholars oppressed for throwing new light on the sacred

text; or philosophers denounced for bringing fresh facts to the

surface of human knowledge, whether they seem to agree or not with

long established suppositions.[8]

[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 title-page,

but the authorship was an open secret.

She was a thoroughly good housekeeper herself. Her conscience went

into this, as into all her other business. "Housewifery is supposed to

transact itself," she wrote; "but in reality it requires all the

faculties which can be brought to bear upon it, and all the good moral

habits which conscience can originate." It was in this spirit that

she wrote instructions for servants. The fine moral tone invariably

discoverable in her works, is as delightful here as elsewhere. But

the little "Guides to Service," contain also the most precise and

practical directions for the doing of the household duties and the

needlework which fall to the hands of the classes of servants for whom

she wrote. Practical hints are given from which the majority of these

classes of women-workers might learn much, for _brains tell_ in the

mean and dirty scrubbery of life as well as in pleasanter things, and

science is to be applied to common domestic duties as to bigger

undertakings. The heart and mind of Harriet Martineau were equal to

teaching upon matters such as these, as well as to studying the deeper

relations of mankind in political economy, or the state of society in

a foreign land. Her great power of sympathy enabled her to enter fully

into every human position. So well was the maid-of-all-work's station

described, and her duties indicated, and her trials pointed out, and

how she might solace herself under those troubles discovered, and the

way in which her work should be set about detailed, that the rumor

spread pretty widely that Harriet had once occupied such a situation

herself. She regarded this mistake with complacency, as a tribute to

the practical character of her little work.

As a fact, she was herself a capable housewife. Her housekeeping was

always well done. Her own hands, indeed, as well as her head, were

employed in it on occasion. When in her home, she daily filled her

lamp herself. She dusted her own books, too, invariably. Sometimes she

did more. Soon after her establishment at the Lakes (an event which we

have not yet reached, but the anecdote is in place here), a lady who

greatly reverenced her for her writings called upon her in her new

home, accompanied by a gentleman friend. As the visitors approached

the house by the carriage-drive, they saw someone perched on a set of

kitchen steps, cleaning the drawing-room windows. It was the famous

authoress herself! She calmly went for her trumpet, to listen to their

business; and when they had introduced themselves, she asked them in,

and entered into an interesting conversation on various literary

topics. Before they left, she explained, with evident amusement at

having been caught at her housemaid's duties, that the workmen had

been long about the house; that this morning, when the dirty windows

might for the first time be cleaned, one of her servants had gone off

to marry a carpenter, and the other to see the ceremony; and so the

mistress, tired of the dirt, had set to work to wash and polish her

window for herself.

An article on "Domestic Service," for the _Westminster Review_, was

written easily, while her mind was so full of the subject, in the

beginning of June, 1838. But a great enterprise was before her--a

novel; and at length she settled down to this, beginning it on her

thirty-sixth birthday, June 12th, 1838. The writing of this new book

was interrupted by a tour in Scotland during August and September, and

by writing a remarkable and eloquent article on slavery, "The Martyr

Age of the United States," which occupies' fifty-five pages of the

_Westminster Review_ in the January, 1839, number of that publication.

The novel got finished, however, in February of this latter year; and

it was published by Easter under the title of _Deerbrook_.

Great expectations had been entertained by the literary public of

Harriet Martineau's first novel. The excellences of her _Illustrations_

as works of fiction had been so marked and so many, that it was

anticipated that she might write a novel of the highest order when

released from the trammels under which she wrote those tales. To most

of those who had expected so much _Deerbrook_ was a complete

disappointment. I believe I may justly say that it is the weakest of

all Harriet Martineau's writings. It is, indeed, far superior in all

respects to nine hundred out of every thousand novels published. But

she is not judged by averages. A far higher standard of literary art

is that to which we expect Harriet Martineau's writings to conform.

The book is deficient in story. Deerbrook is a country village, where

two sisters from Birmingham, Hester and Margaret Ibbotson, take up

their temporary abode. Mr. Hope, the village surgeon, falls in love

with Margaret; but being told that Hester loves him, while Margaret is

attached to Philip Enderby, Hope decides to propose to Hester; is

accepted, married to the sister he does not love, and sets up

housekeeping with the sister with whom he is in love as an inmate of

his home. The wife, moreover, is of a jealous, exacting disposition,

ever on the watch for some token of neglect of her feelings by her

friends, anxious, irritable, and hyper-sensitive.

Here is a situation which, the characters being what they are

described to be, could in real life eventuate only in either violent

tragedy or long, slow heart-break. A woman of ultra-sensitive and

refined feelings could not live with a husband and a sister under such

circumstances without discovering the truth. A man of active

temperament and warm emotions, who declares to himself on the night of

his return from his wedding tour that his marriage "has been a

mistake, that he has desecrated his own home, and doomed to withering

the best affections of his nature,"--such a man, with the woman he

really loves living in his home, beside the unloved wife, could not

completely conceal his state of mind from everybody, and presently

find that after all he likes the one he has married best. Yet in the

impossible manner just indicated do all things end in _Deerbrook_. The

interest of the book is then suddenly shifted to Margaret and Enderby.

Hope and Hester become mere accessories. But the plot does not

improve. The Deerbrook people, hitherto adorers of their doctor,

suddenly take to throwing stones at him, and to mobbing his house,

because he votes for the Parliamentary candidate opposed by the great

man of the village, and because they take it into their heads (not a

particle of reason why they do so being shown,) that he anatomizes

bodies from the graveyard. We are invited to believe that though his

practice had been singularly successful, all his patients deserted

him; and notwithstanding that Hester and Margaret had each seventy

pounds a year of private income, the household was thus reduced to

such distress that they could not afford gloves, and had to part with

all their servants, and dined as a rule off potatoes and bread and

butter! Then Margaret's lover, Enderby, hears that she and Hope loved

each other before Hope married; and though he does not for a moment

suspect anything wrong in the present, and though he passionately

loves Margaret, this supposed discovery that he is not her first love

causes him to peremptorily and without explanation break off the

engagement. Presently, however, an epidemic comes and restores

confidence in Mr. Hope; and Enderby's sister, who had given him the

information on which he acted, confesses that she had exaggerated the

facts and invented part of her story; and so it all ends, and they

live happily ever after!

Feeble and untrue as are plot and characters in this "poor novel" (as

Carlyle without injustice called it), yet many scenes are well

written, the details are truly colored, and every page is illuminated

with thought of so high an order and language so brilliant, so

flowing, so felicitous, that one forgives, for the sake of merits such

as these, the failure of the fiction to be either true or interesting.

This seemed to show, nevertheless, that Harriet could write essays,

and travels, and didactic and philosophical works, but could not write

a novel except "with a purpose," when the accomplishment of the

purpose might excuse any other shortcomings. But when one considers

the great excellence of many of the _Illustrations_, the decided

drawing of the characters, the truthful analysis of the springs of

human action, the manner in which the incidents are combined and

arranged to develop and display dispositions and histories, it becomes

clear that she _had_ great powers as an imaginative depicter of human

nature and social life, and that there must have been other causes

than sheer incapacity for the faults and the feebleness of

_Deerbrook_.

The first cause was what seems to me a mistaken theory about plots in

fiction, which she had adopted since writing the _Illustrations_. She

now fancied that a perfect plot must be taken from life, forgetting

that we none of us know the whole plot of the existence of any other

creature than ourselves, and that the psychological insight of the

gifted novelist is displayed in arguing from what is known to what is

unknown, and in combining the primary elements of human character into

their necessary consequences in act and feeling. This error she would

have been cured from by experience had she gone on writing fiction.

She might have been aided in this by what she naively enough avows

about _Deerbrook_: that she supposed that she took the story of Hope's

marriage from the history of a friend of her family, and that she

afterwards found out that nothing of the sort had really happened to

him! She might then have asked herself whether the story as she had

told it was more possible than it was possible that gunpowder should

be put to flame without an explosion. A girl in her teens might have

been forgiven for playing with the history of the wildest passions of

the human heart; but Harriet Martineau erred because she tried to

enslave herself to fact in a matter in which she should have inferred,

judged from psychological principles, and trusted to the intuitions of

her own mind for the final working out of her problem. As it was, if

her "fact" had been a reality we should have been compelled to account

for the placid progress of events by the supposition that she had

utterly misrepresented the characters of the persons involved.

This bondage to (supposed) fact was one cause of her failure. A

lesser, but still important reason for it, was that she tried to

imitate Jane Austen's style. Her admiration of the works of this

mistress of the art of depicting human nature was very great.

Harriet's diary of the period when she was preparing to write

_Deerbrook_, shows that she re-read Miss Austen's novels, and found

them "wonderfully beautiful." This judgment she annexed to _Emma_;

and again, after recording her new reading of _Pride and Prejudice_,

she added, "I think it as clever as before; but Miss Austen seems

wonderfully afraid of pathos. I long to try." When she did "try," she,

either intentionally or unconsciously, but very decidedly, modelled

her style on Miss Austen's. But the two women were essentially

different. Harriet Martineau had an original mind; she did wrong, and

prepared the retribution of failure for herself, in imitating at all;

and Jane Austen was one of the last persons she should have imitated.

The principal reasons for the inferiority of _Deerbrook_, however, are

found in her personal history. Three months after its publication, she

was utterly prostrated by an illness which had undoubtedly been slowly

growing upon her for long before. Thus, she wrote her novel under the

depression and failure of strength caused by this malady. The illness

itself was partly the result of what further tended to make her work

poor in quality--the domestic anxieties, miseries and heart-burnings

of that period.

The three anxious members of her family were at this time upon her

hands. That brother who had succeeded to the father's business, and in

whose charge it had failed, was at this time in London. Before the

weaving business stopped, Henry Martineau was engaged; but the girl

broke off the affair in consequence of the downfall of his pecuniary

prospects. Henry then undertook a wine-merchant's business, and

wretched with the mortification of his double failure in purse and in

heart, he yielded to the temptations of his new employment, and became

intemperate. During the time that _Deerbrook_ was being written, he

was living with his mother and sister in London. At the same time

Mrs. Martineau, now nearing seventy years old, was becoming blind.

The natural irritability of her temper was thus increased. The

heart-wearing trials of a home with two such inmates were made greater

to Harriet by the fact that an aged aunt also lived with them, who,

besides the many cares exacted for the well-being of age, added to

Harriet's troubles by the necessity of shielding her from the tempers

and depressions of the other two.

It was in this home that Harriet Martineau did all the work that has

now been recorded after her return from America. No one who has the

least conception of how imperatively necessary domestic peace and

comfort are for the relief of the brain taxed with literary labor,

will be surprised to hear that Harriet's strength and spirits failed

during all that summer and winter in which she was writing

_Deerbrook_, and that presently her health completely broke down.