Harriet Martineau
deafness. She began to be slightly deaf while she was at Mr. Perry's
school, and the fact was there recognized so far as to cause her to be
placed next to her teacher in the class. How keenly she even then felt
this loss, she has in part revealed in the story of Hugh Procter; and
a few lines from an essay of hers on Scott may here be added:
"Few have any idea of the all-powerful influence which the sense of
personal infirmity exerts over the mind of a child. If it were known,
its apparent disproportionateness to other influences would, to the
careless observer, appear absurd; to the thoughtful it would afford
new lights respecting the conduct of educational discipline; it would
also pierce the heart of many a parent who now believes that he knows
all, and who feels so tender a regret for what he knows that even the
sufferer wonders at its extent. But this is a species of suffering
which can never obtain sufficient sympathy, because the sufferer
himself is not aware, till he has made comparison of this with other
pains, how light all others are in comparison."
As pathetically, but more briefly, she says about herself:--"My
deafness, when new, was the uppermost thing in my mind day and night."
Her inability to hear continued to increase by slow degrees during the
next six years; and when she was eighteen "a sort of accident"
suddenly increased it. Music had, until then, been one of her great
delights, and it shows how gradual was the progress of her deafness,
that she found herself able to hear at an orchestral concert, provided
she could get a seat with a back against which she could press her
shoulder-blades, for a long time after the music had become inaudible
without this assistance. Such a gradual deprivation of a most
important sense is surely far more trying than a quick, unexpected,
and obviously irremediable loss would be. The alternations of hope and
despair, the difficulty of inducing the sufferer's friends to
recognize how serious the case is, the perhaps yet greater difficulty
to the patient to resolutely step out of the ranks of ordinary people
and take up the position of one deficient in a sense, the
mortifications which have to be endured again and again both from the
ignorance of strangers and the mistaken sympathy of friends--all these
make up the special trial of one who becomes by degrees the subject of
a chronic affliction. No sensitive person can possibly pass through
this fiery trial unchanged. Such an experience must either refine or
harden; must either strengthen the powers of endurance or break down
the mind to querulous ill-temper; must either make self the centre of
creation or greatly add to the power of putting personal interests
aside for the sake of wider and more unselfish thoughts and feelings.
Which class of influences Harriet Martineau accepted from her trial
the history of her courageous, resolute life-work, and her devotion to
truth and duty as she saw them, will sufficiently show.
How much she suffered in mind was quite unknown to her family at the
time. She was always reserved in speaking about her own feelings and
emotions to her mother, and in this particular case Mrs. Martineau,
with the kindest intentions, discouraged, as far as possible, all
recognition of the growing infirmity. The society of Norwich had never
been very attractive to the young girl, who was above the average in
natural abilities, and still further removed from the petty and
frivolous gossip of the commonplace evening party, by the extensive
and elevating course of study through which her mind had passed. Had
she been well able to hear, she could have quietly accepted what such
intercourse could give her. This would have been much. Kindliness and
good feeling, common sense, and ideas about man and his circumstances,
are to be enjoyed and gained quite as much in ordinary as in what is
commonly called intellectual society. But in the freshness of her
sensitive suffering Harriet shrank from the Norwich evening parties.
Her mother, however, insisted upon her taking her full share of
visiting.
The case was made worse by the customary errors in the treatment of
deaf persons; namely, the endeavoring to keep up the illusion that she
was not deaf, the occasional assurances that she could hear as well as
ever if it were not for her habits of abstraction, and so forth, and
the imploring her to always ask when she did not hear what was said,
followed by scoldings (kindly meant, but none the less irritating to
the object) when it was found that she had been silently losing the
larger part of a conversation. False pride, pretence, and selfish
exactions were thus sought to be nourished in her; while the blessings
of an open recognition of her trouble, and a full and free sympathy
with her pain and her difficulty in learning to bear it, were at the
same time withheld.
I have spoken of this method of treatment of such a case as erroneous.
But in such a matter only those who have gone through the experience
and have come out of it at last, as she did, with the moral nature
strengthened, and the power of self-management increased, can be really
competent to express an opinion upon the proper method of behavior to
similar sufferers. I hasten to add, therefore, that in substance the
view that I have given is that expressed in Harriet Martineau's _Letter
to the Deaf_, published in 1834. In that remarkable fragment of
autobiography she appealed to the large number of people who suffered
like herself, to insist upon the frank recognition of their infirmity,
and to themselves acquiesce with patience in all the deprivations and
mortifications which the loss of a sense must bring. The revelation in
this essay of her own sufferings is most touching; and very noble and
beautiful is the way in which she urges that the misery must be met,
and the humiliation must be turned aside, by no other means than
courage, candor, patience, and an unselfish determination to consider
first the convenience and happiness of others instead of the sufferer's
own.
"Instead of putting the singularity out of sight we should
acknowledge it in words, prepare for it in habits, and act upon it
in social intercourse. Thus only can we save others from being
uneasy in our presence, and sad when they think of us. That we can
thus alone make ourselves sought and beloved is an inferior
consideration, though an important one to us, to whom warmth and
kindness are as peculiarly animating as sunshine to the caged
bird. This frankness, simplicity, and cheerfulness can only grow
out of a perfect acquiescence in our circumstances. Submission is
not enough. Pride fails at the most critical moment. But hearty
acquiescence cannot fail to bring forth cheerfulness. The thrill
of delight which arises during the ready agreement to profit by
pain (emphatically the joy with which no stranger intermeddleth)
must subside like all other emotions; but it does not depart
without leaving the spirit lightened and cheered; and every
visitation leaves it in a more genial state than the last.... I
had infinitely rather bear the perpetual sense of privation than
become unaware of anything which is true--of my intellectual
deficiences, of my disqualifications for society, of my errors in
matter of fact, and of the burdens that I necessarily impose on
those who surround me. We can never get beyond the necessity of
keeping in full view the worst and the best that can be made of
our lot. The worst is either to sink under the trial or to be made
callous by it. The best is to be as wise as possible under a great
disability, and as happy as possible under a great privation."
It is essential, for a correct understanding of her character, that
this great trial of her youth should be presented amidst the moulding
influences of that time with as much strength as it was experienced.
But it is difficult, within the necessary limits of quotation, to
convey an idea to the reader of either the intensity and bitterness of
the suffering revealed, or of the firmness and beauty of the spirit
with which the trial was met. Nor was the advice that she gave to
others mere talk, which she herself never put in practice. If her
family did not realize at the time how deeply she suffered, still less
could her friends in later life discover by anything in her manners
that her soul had been so searched and her spirits so tried. So
frankly and candidly, and with such an utter absence of affectation,
did she accept this condition of her life, that those around her
hardly realized that she felt it as a deprivation; and a few lines in
her autobiography, in which she mentions how conscious she was of
intellectual fatigue from the lack of those distractions to the mind
which enter continually through the normal ear, came like a painful
shock to her friends, making them feel that they had been unconscious
of a need ever present with her throughout life.
For some time after the deafness began, she did not use an
ear-trumpet. Like many in a similar position, she persuaded herself
that her deafness was not sufficiently great to cause any considerable
inconvenience to others in conversation. At length, however, she was
enlightened upon this point. An account appeared in a Unitarian paper
of two remarkable cures of deafness by galvanism, and Harriet's
friends persuaded her to try this new remedy. For a brief while, hope
was revived in her; the treatment threw her into a state of nervous
fever, during which she regained considerable sensibility in the organ
of hearing. The improvement was very temporary, but it lasted
sufficiently long to let her know how much her friends had been
straining their throats for her sake. From that time she invariably
carried and used an ear-trumpet, commencing with an india-rubber tube,
with a cup at the end for the speaker to take into his hand, but
afterwards employing an ordinary stiff trumpet.
Into this existence, which had hitherto been so full of sadness, there
came at length the bright-tinted and vivid shower of light, which
means so much to a woman. Love came to brighten the life so dark
hitherto for lack of that sunshine. Much as it is to any woman to know
herself beloved by the man whom she loves, to Harriet Martineau it was
even more than to most. It was not only that her character was a
strong one, and that to such a nature all influences that are accepted
become powerful forces, but besides this she had always loved more
than she had been loved; and her self-esteem had been systematically
suppressed by her mother's stern discipline, and afterwards injured by
the mortifications to which the on-coming of her deafness gave rise.
How much, in such a case, it must have been, when the hour at last
came for the history of the heart to be written! How delightful the
time when she could cherish in her thoughts a love which was at once
an equal friendship and a vivid passion! How great the revolution in
her mind when she found that the man whom she could love would choose
her from all the world of women to be his dearest, the partner of his
life!
It would be a proof, if proof were needed at this time of day, that it
is well-nigh impossible for any person to give a candid, full and
unerring record of his own past, and the circumstances in it which
have most influenced his development, to turn from the brief and
cursory record which Harriet Martineau's autobiography gives of this
attachment, to the complete story as I have it to tell, here and in a
future chapter.
The strongest of all the family affections of her childhood and youth
was that which she felt for her brother James. He was two years
younger than herself. They had been playmates in childhood, and