Harriet Martineau
person, practice, and character inspire me with the truest
affection and respect.
"I find a worth and greatness in herself, and a consistency and
benevolence and perseverance in her practice, such as win the
sincerest esteem and affection. She is not a person to be judged
by her writings alone, but rather by her own deeds and life, than
which nothing can be more exemplary or nobler. She seems to me the
benefactress of Ambleside, yet takes no sort of credit to herself
for her active and indefatigable philanthropy. The government of
her household is admirably administered; all she does is well
done, from the writing of a history down to the quietest feminine
occupation. No sort of carelessness or neglect is allowed under
her rule, and yet she is not over-strict, or too rigidly exacting;
her servants and her poor neighbors love as well as respect her.
"I must not, however, fall into the error of talking too much
about her, merely because my mind is just now deeply impressed
with what I have seen of her intellectual power and moral worth."
Some of her lectures were given with the express object of inducing
the people to form a building society. Rents were excessively high for
the working classes from the scarcity of cottages; and therefore they
lived and slept crowded together, while the open country extended all
around them. The moral screw was turned upon them, too, about politics
and religion, by the threat of the landlord that, if they offended
him, he would turn them out of the only cottages they could get. With
that true philanthropy which her studies in political economy had
taught, Miss Martineau went to work to aid the people to improve their
own condition. She obtained a loan of L500 from her old friend, Mrs.
Reid, of London (to whom the foundation of Bedford college is mainly
due), with which she purchased a field just above the village at
Ellercross, and parcelled it out, drained it, and made the road. Then,
by her lectures, she showed the people how they could "buy a house
with its rent"; and she undertook all the infinite trouble that
devolved upon her when the society was formed, as the only member of
it with legal and general knowledge, and, therefore, the only one able
to guide its affairs. Before me there lies a package of the notes that
she sent at different times on this business to Mr. Bell, the
Ambleside chemist, who was the nominal chairman--though she was the
real one--of the society. "Jealousy and ridicule went to work against
the scheme"; but her philanthropic energy and wisdom were fully
successful. The cottages are healthily planned and well built, and
remain there as a monument to the efforts which she made for the good
of her poor neighbors.
Besides these more general undertakings for their benefit, there yet
live many amongst them who are grateful to her for personal kindness
and assistance. While her strength lasted, she was ever ready to try
to relieve others from illness by the means which she believed to have
cured herself; and seven mesmerized patients were sometimes asleep at
one time in her drawing-room. She was a powerful mesmerist. Most of
her patients were at least relieved--some cured. A present resident of
Ambleside, who owes his success in business life to her kindness, told
me how she mesmerized him for nearly an hour every day for a year; and
to show that she did not do this without very decided results to
herself, he remembers that her fingers used to swell during the
process, so as to almost hide her rings, if she forgot to take them
off before beginning.
Again, her library was placed freely at the service of deserving young
men in the village, and only book-lovers will be able to appreciate
the generosity of this neighborly kindness. Old Miss Nicholson tells
me of Miss Martineau's kindness to her invalid sister; sharing with
her the luxuries which were not to be bought in Ambleside, but which
the famous writer frequently received from some of her many friends.
Nor was the mere personal human sympathy wanting in her; those who
needed no gifts or material aid from her knew her as a kind friend,
ready to think for them and advise with them in their troubles or
perplexities.
In mentioning her activities other than literary, during those ten
busy and healthy years of home life, I must not omit her
"farming"--her farm of two acres. She had no intention, at first, of
embarking in such an enterprise. She let on hire that portion of her
land which she did not wish to have in her garden, and her maids and
herself, with the occasional help of a man, kept the garden in order.
But this plan did not answer well. The tenant allowed the grass to get
untidy, and his sheep broke into the garden to eat the cabbages.
Neither the vegetable nor the flower garden could be kept so nicely as
might be wished. Milk, butter, eggs, and hams, all had to be bought at
high prices; and so small was the supply at times that these articles
of country produce were actually unattainable by purchase.
The energetic lady of the small domain was profoundly dissatisfied
with this state of affairs. So to work she went to study the science
of agriculture and practical farming; and soon a Norfolk laborer was
established on her land, and this small farm was under her own
management. She set up a cross-pole fence around her estate, the first
one ever seen in the Lake District; and, like a true woman, she
planted roses all along the fence, to wreathe and decorate it in
summer. Then she initiated her fellow-farmers into the mysteries of
high farming, and stall feeding. "A cow to three acres" was the Lake
rule; but she hired another half-acre of land, to add to her own, and
showed that upon this total of two acres she could _almost_ keep two
cows. Fowls and pigs were, of course, kept also; and all the household
comforts which cows, hens, and pigs supply were obtained from her land
at, practically, no cost at all. The subsistence of the laborer and
his wife was created out of the soil; and the house had a constant
supply of vegetables, milk, eggs, and hams, at a less expense than
buying had previously been, and with a much nicer and always certain
supply.
The experiment became famous in a small way. "People came to see how
we arranged our ground, so as to get such crops out of it,"[16] and one
of the Poor-Law Commissioners, having asked her for a private account
of how she had managed her little farm, printed her letter in the
_Times_, without asking her consent. This brought such a flood of
correspondence on her that she was compelled to write on the subject
for publication, and so the farm superintendence resulted in a piece
of literary work for the mistress.
[16] _Health, Husbandry and Handicraft_, p. 269, "Our
Farm of Two Acres."
Now we will see what her pen was doing while all these activities were
helping to fill her days.
CHAPTER IX.
IN THE MATURITY OF HER POWERS.
The book, published early in 1848, in which Harriet described her
Egyptian, Desert and Palestine travels, was entitled _Eastern Life,
Past and Present_. If I were required to give from some one only of
her works a series of extracts which should illustrate the special
powers of her mind and the finest features of her style, it would be
this book that I should choose. I do not mean to say that the most
eloquent and vivid passage that I might find in all her writings is
here; nor that her deepest and noblest qualities as a thinker are more
forcibly displayed here than elsewhere. But I mean that in _Eastern
Life, Past and Present_, all her best moral and intellectual
faculties were exerted, and their action becomes visible, at one page
or another, in reading the book from the first to the last chapters.
The keen observation, the active thought, the vigorous memory, the
power of deep and sustained study, the mastery of language, giving the
ability to depict in words and to arouse the reader's imagination to
mental vision--all these requisites for the writing of a good book of
travel she showed that she possessed. But there is even more than all
this in _Eastern Life_. There is the feeling for humanity in all
its circumstances, which can sympathize no less with the slave of the
harem at this moment alive in degradation, than with the highest
intelligences that ceased from existence unnumbered thousands of years
ago. The most interesting and characteristic feature distinguishing
this work is, however, the openness and freedom of its thought
combined with the profound reverence that it shows for all that is
venerable.
It was _Eastern Life_ which first declared to the world that Harriet
Martineau had ceased to have a theology. She had learned in travelling
through Egypt, how much of what Moses taught was derived from the
ancient mythology of Egypt. Passing afterwards through the lands where
the Hebrew, the Christian, and the Mohammedan faiths in turn arose,
observing, thinking, and studying, the conclusion at which she arrived
at last was, in brief, this: That men have ever constructed the image
of a Ruler of the Universe out of their own minds; that all successive
ideas about the Supreme Power have been originated from within, and
modified by the surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies,
therefore, are baseless productions of the human imagination, and have
no essential connection with those great religious ideas and emotions
by which men are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love
what they see to be the true and the right.
Her conviction that the highest moral conduct, and the most unselfish
goodness, and the noblest aspirations, are in no degree connected with
any kind of creed, was aided and supported, no doubt, by her warm
personal affection for Mr. Atkinson, and some other of her friends of
his way of thinking, in whom she found aspirations as lofty and
feelings as admirable as ever she had enjoyed communion with, together
with a complete rejection, on scientific grounds, of all theology. Her
belief now was that--
The best state of mind was to be found, however it might be
accounted for, in those who were called philosophical atheists....
I knew several of that class--some avowed, and some not; and I had
for several years felt that they were among my most honored
acquaintances and friends; and now I knew them more deeply and
thoroughly, I must say that, for conscientiousness, sincerity,
integrity, seriousness, effective intellect, _and the true
religious spirit_, I knew nothing like them.
Her own "true religious" earnestness was unabated. _Eastern Life_
contains abundance of evidence that the spirit in which she now wrote
against all theological systems was exactly at one with that in which
she had twenty years before written _Addresses, Prayers and Hymns_.
Her intellectual range had become far wider; her knowledge of human
nature and of the history and conditions of mankind had vastly
increased; but her religious earnestness--that is to say, her devotion
to truth, and her emotional reverence for her highest conceptions of
goodness and duty--was as fervent as ever.
Notwithstanding the boldness and heterodoxy of _Eastern Life_, it did
not cause much outcry; and her two next books were amongst the most
successful of all her works. The first of these was _Household
Education_; the second, _A History of the Thirty Years' Peace_.
The former was partly written for periodical publication during 1847
in the _People's Journal_, for which magazine she wrote also a few
desultory articles.
The _History of the Peace_ was a voluminous work of the first order of
importance. Its execution is in most respects entirely admirable. Her