On the other side of the human character in her delineation of the bad qualities, she as instinctively seeks and finds causes for the errors and evils of the minds she displays. Foolishness, and ignorance, and poverty are traced, entirely without affectation and "cant," in their action as misleading influences in the lives of the poor sinners and sufferers.

The stories told in the Illustrations are frequently very interesting. In this respect, there is a notable advance in the course of the series. The earlier tales, such as Life in the Wilds and Brooke Farm, are not to be compared, as mere stories, with even those written later on by only eight or nine stirring eventful months, such as Ireland and The Loom and the Lugger. Still better are the latest tales. The Illustrations of Taxation and Illustrations of Poor-Laws and Paupers are, despite the unattractiveness of their topics, of the highest interest. The Parish, The Town, The Jerseymen Meeting, The Jerseymen Parting; and The Scholars of Arnside, would assuredly be eagerly read by any lover of fiction almost without consciousness that there was anything in the pages except a deeply interesting story.

Archbishop Whately pronounced The Parish the best thing she had done. Vanderput and Snook, the story dealing with bills of exchange, was the favorite with Mr. Hallam. Lord Brougham, on whose engagement she did the five "Poor-Law" stories, wrote most enthusiastically that they surpassed all the expectations that her previous works had led him to form. Coleridge told her that he "looked eagerly every month" for the new number; and Lord Durham recounted to her how one evening he was at Kensington Palace (where the widowed Duchess of Kent was then residing, and devoting herself to that education which has made her daughter the best sovereign of her dynasty), when the little Princess Victoria came running from an inner room to show her mother, with delight, the advertisement of the "Taxation" tales; for the young Princess was being allowed to read the Illustrations, and found them her most fascinating story-books.

Harriet's experiences, however, were not all quite so agreeable. Mrs. Marcet, who "had a great opinion of great people—of people great by any distinction, ability, office, birth, and what not—and innocently supposed her own taste to be universal," formed a warm and generous friendship for Miss Martineau, and used to delight in carrying to her the "homages" of the savants and the aristocratic readers of the Illustrations in France, where Mrs. Marcet's acquaintance was extensive. She one day told Miss Martineau, with much delight, that Louis Philippe, the then King of the French, had ordered a copy of the series for each member of his family, and had also requested M. Guizot to have the stories translated, and introduced into the French national schools. This was presently confirmed by a large order from France for copies, and by a note from the officially-appointed translator requesting Harriet Martineau to favor him with some particulars of her personal history, for introduction into a periodical which was being issued by the Government for the promotion of education amongst the French people. The writer added that M. Guizot wished to have Miss Martineau's series specially noticed in connection with her own personality, since she afforded the first instance on record of a woman who was not born to sovereign station affecting practical legislation otherwise than through a man.

At the very time that she received this flattering note, Harriet was engaged in writing her twelfth number, French Wines and Politics. The topic treated in this story is that of value, with the subsidiary questions relating to prices and their fluctuations. The tale takes up the period of the great French Revolution, and shows how the fortunes of certain wine-merchants near Bordeaux, and of the head of the Paris house in connection, were affected by the course of that great social convulsion. The scene was unquestionably happily chosen. The circumstances were abnormal, it is true; but the causes which created such vast fluctuations in prices, and such changes in the value of goods, were, in fact, only the same fundamental causes as are always at the basis of such alterations in price and value; it was merely the rapidity and violence of the movement which were peculiar. The story was well put together; and the "Illustration" was in every way admirable for every possible desirable object, except only for the one of being pleasant to the ruling powers in the France of 1833.

Harriet Martineau's constant sympathy with democracy, her hatred of oppression and tyranny, and her aversion to class government, all became conspicuous in this story. "The greatest happiness of the greatest number" of mankind was her ideal of the aim of legislation; and she well knew, as Bentham saw, that only the democratic form of government can produce a body of laws approximating to this ideal. Her efforts were constant, therefore, to prepare the people to demand, and to afterwards wisely use, the power of governing themselves. Now, though Louis Philippe was the citizen-king, though he was the head of a republican monarchy, though his legislative chamber rejected in that same year a ministerial document because it spoke of the people as "subjects," yet it may be easily understood that this king and his ministers did not care to stimulate the democratic feeling of the nation any more than they found inevitable. The whole tone of this work would be objectionable to them; and a dozen passages might be readily quoted to show why royal and aristocratic rulers were little likely to aid its circulation amongst the people whom they governed. Here, for instance, is a portion of the passage on the storming of the Bastile:—

Besides such passages as this, scarcely likely to please the French king, there was the special ground for his objection that his immediate ancestor, Egalité, was introduced into the story, and depicted in no favorable light his efforts to inflame the popular violence for his selfish ends, his hypocrisy, his cowardice, and so on, being held up to contempt. Mrs. Marcet, when she read all this, came breathless to Harriet Martineau to ask her how she could have made such a blunder as to write a story that plainly would (and, of course, in fact, did) put an end to the official patronage of her series in France, and would destroy for ever any hopes that she might have entertained of being received at the Court of Louis Philippe? Greatly surprised was the good lady at finding Harriet's reverence for that monarch so limited in extent. She replied to her kind friend that she "wrote with a view to the people, and especially the most suffering of them; and the crowned heads must for once take their chance for their feelings."

At the very moment that Mrs. Marcet's remonstrance was made, Miss Martineau was writing a story of a character likely to be even more distasteful to the Emperor of Russia than this one to the King of the French. She had found it difficult to illustrate the theory of the currency in a story treating of the existence of civilized people. The only situation in which she could find persons, above the rank of savages, transacting their exchanges by aid of a kind of money which made the business only one remove from bartering, was amongst the Polish exiles in Siberia. She therefore wrote The Charmed Sea, a story founded upon the terrible facts of the lives of the exiled Poles "in the depths of Eastern Siberia," working in "a silver-mine near the western extremity of the Daourian Range, and within hearing of the waters of the Baikal when its storms were fiercest." Had the melancholy tale been written in the service of the Poles, it could not have been more moving. So powerful, and interesting was it, indeed, that the criticism of the Edinburgh Review was that the fiction too entirely overpowered the political economy. The arrival of The Charmed Sea in Russia changed the favorable opinion which the Czar had previously been so kind as to express about the Illustrations. He had been purchasing largely of the French translation of the series for distribution amongst his people. But now he issued a proclamation ordering every copy in Russia of every number to be immediately burnt, and forbidding the author ever to set foot upon his soil. Austria, equally concerned in the Polish business, followed this example, and a description of Harriet Martineau's person was hung in the appointed places, amidst the lists of the proscribed, all over Russia, Austria, and Austrian-Italy. Despots, at least, had no admiration for her politics.

The only important adverse criticism in the press appeared in the Quarterly Review. [7] The reviewer objected impartially to every one of the twelve stories which had then appeared. Every circumstance which could arouse prejudice against the series was taken advantage of, from party political feeling and religious bigotry, down to the weakness of fluid philanthropy, and "the prudery and timidity of the middle-classes of England." The principal ground of attack was the story which dealt with Malthusianism, Weal and Woe in Garveloch.

The Quarterly Review seized the opportunity of the appearance of this number to make a vile attack upon the series and its writer. Harriet suffered under it to a degree which seems almost excessive. The review is so obviously full of fallacies, as regards its Political Economy, that any person whose opinion was worth having could hardly hesitate in deciding that she, and not her critic, was talking common-sense and arguing logically. As to the personal part of the article, it is, though scurrilous, and even indecent, so very funny that the attacked might almost have forgotten the insult in the amusement. Nevertheless, the writers, Croker and Lockhart, did their worst. Croker openly said that he expected to lose his pension very shortly, and, being wishful to make himself a literary position before that event happened, he had begun by "tomahawking Miss Martineau." All that could be painful to her as a woman, and injurious to her as a writer, was said, or attempted to be conveyed, in this article.

Let us see what it was all about. Garveloch, one of the Hebridean islands, is seen in the "Illustration" rapidly multiplying its population, both by early marriages and by immigration, under the stimulus of a passing prosperity in the fishing industry. The influx of capital and the increase of the demand for food, have led to such an improvement in the cultivation of the land, that the food produce of the island has been doubled in ten years. Ella, the heroine (a fine, strong, self-contained, helpful woman—one of the noblest female characters in these works), foresees that if the reckless increase of population continues, the supply of food will by-and-by run short. Her interlocutor asks how this will be the case, since the population will surely not double again, as it has done already, in ten years? Then the Quarterly quotes Ella's reply, and comments on it:—

The reviewer goes on to suggest, in the broadest language, that she has confounded the rate of the multiplication of the herring-fisher-women with that of the herrings themselves; reproves her for writing on "these ticklish topics" with so little physiological information; and tells her that she, "poor innocent, has been puzzling over Mr. Malthus's arithmetical and geometrical ratios for knowledge which she should have obtained by a simple question or two of her mamma." In one and the same paragraph, he tells her that he is "loth to bring a blush unnecessarily upon the cheek of any woman," and asks her if she picked up her information on the subject "in her conferences with the Lord Chancellor?"

This is enough to show to what a sensitive young lady was exposed in illustrating "a principle as undeniable as the multiplication table," and in stating the facts upon which hangs the explanation of the poverty, and therefore of a large part of the vice and misery, of mankind. Miss Martineau's exposition was, of course, entirely right, and the fallacy in the review is obvious, one would suppose on the surface. The reviewer's error consists in his assumption—the falsity of which is at once apparent on the face of the statement—that land can go on doubling its produce every ten years, for an indefinite period. So far from this being true, the fact is that the limit of improving the cultivation of land is soon reached.

Better agricultural treatment may easily make half-cultivated land bring forth double its previous produce; but the highest pitch of farming once reached—as it comparatively soon is—the produce cannot be further increased; and even before this limit is reached, the return for each additional application of capital and labor becomes less and less proportionately bountiful. This is the truth known to political economists as "the Law of the Diminishing Return of Land." Taken in conjunction with the fact that the human race can double for ever, theoretically, and in reality does multiply its numbers with each generation, checked only by the forethought of the more prudent and the operations of famine, war, crime, and the diseases caused by poverty, this law explains why mankind does not more rapidly improve its condition—why the poor have been always with us—and why teaching such as Harriet Martineau here gave must be received into the popular mind before the condition of society can be expected to be improved in the only way possible, by the wisdom and prudence of its members.

Painful as was the attack she had undergone, intensely as she had suffered from its character and nature, Miss Martineau did not allow what she had felt of personal distress to have any influence on her future writings. Her moral courage had been well trained and exercised, first by the efforts that her mind had had to make in following her conscience as a guide to the formation of opinions, in opposition to the tendency implanted by her mother's treatment to bow supinely before authority; secondly, by the lesson of endurance which her deafness had brought to her. She had now to show, for the first, but by no means the last time, that hers was one of those temperaments which belong to all leaders of men, whether in physical or moral warfare; that danger was to her a stimulus, and that her courage rose the higher the greater the demand for its exercise.

Praise and blame, appreciation and defamation, strengthened and enlarged her mind during this period. But at the end of it, Sydney Smith could say: "She has gone through such a season as no girl before ever knew, and she has kept her own mind, her own manners, and her own voice. She's safe."

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 £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 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:

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:

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 naïvely 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.