Little Journeys to the Homes of Famous Women — Harriet Martineau, Part 1

HARRIET MARTINEAU

You better live your best and act your best and think your best today; for today is the sure preparation for tomorrow and all the other tomorrows that follow.

--_Life's Uses_ [Illustration: HARRIET MARTINEAU] I believe it was Thackeray who once expressed a regret that Harriet Martineau had not shown better judgment in choosing her parents.

She was born into one of those big families where there is not love enough to go 'round.

The mother was a robustious woman with a termagant temper;

she was what you call "practical."

She arose each morning, like Solomon's ideal wife, while it was yet dark, and proceeded to set her house in order.

She made the children go to bed when they were not sleepy and get up when they were.

There was no beauty-sleep in that household, not even forty winks; and did any member prove recreant and require a douse of cold water, not only did he get the douse but he also heard quoted for a year and a day that remark concerning the sluggard, "A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep: so shall thy poverty come as one that traveleth, and thy want as an armed man."

This big, bustling Amazon was never known to weep but once, and that was when Lord Nelson died.

To show any emotion would have been to reveal a weakness, and a caress would have been proof positive of folly.

Life was a stern business and this earth-journey a warfare.

She cooked, she swept, she scrubbed, she sewed.

And although she withheld every loving word and kept back all demonstration of affection, yet her children were always well cared for: they were well clothed, they had plenty to eat, and a warm place to sleep.

And in times of sickness this mother would send all others to rest, and herself would watch by the bedside until the shadows stole away and the sunrise came again.

I wonder where you have lived all your life if you have never known a woman like that?

In the morning, as soon as the breakfast things were done and the men folks had gone to the cloth-factory, Mrs. Martineau would marshal her daughters in the sitting-room to sew.

And there they sewed for four hours every forenoon for more than four years; and as they sewed some one would often read aloud to them, for Mrs. Martineau believed in education--education gotten on the wing.

Sewing-machines and knitting-machines have done more to emancipate women than all the preachers.

Think of the days when every garment worn by men, women and children was made by the never-resting hands of women!

And as the girls in that thrifty Norwich household sewed and listened to the reader, they occasionally spoke in monotone of what was read---all save Harriet: Harriet sewed.

And the other girls thought Harriet very dull, and her mother was sure of it, and called her stupid, and sometimes shook her and railed at her, endeavoring to arouse her out of her lethargy.

Harriet has herself left on record somewhat of her feelings in those days.

In her child-heart there was a great aching void.

Her life was wrong--the lives about her were wrong--she did not know how, and could not then trace the subject far enough to tell why.

She was a-hungered, she longed for tenderness, for affection and the close confidence that knows no repulse.

She wanted them all to throw down their sewing for just five minutes, and sit in the silence with folded hands.

She longed for her mother to hold her on her lap so, that she could pillow her head on her shoulder with her arms about her neck, and have a real good cry.

Then all her troubles and pains would be gone.

But the slim little girl never voiced any of these foolish thoughts; she knew better.

She choked back her tears and leaning over her sewing tried hard to be "good."

"She is so stupid that she never listens to what one reads to her," said her mother one day.

One of that family still lives.

I saw him not long ago and talked with him face to face concerning some of the things here written--Doctor James Martineau, ninety-two years old.

The others are all dead now--all are gone.

In the cemetery at Norwich is a plain, slate slab, "To the Memory of Elizabeth Martineau, Mother of Harriet Martineau."

* * * And so she sleeps, remembered for what?

As the mother of a stupid little girl who tried hard to be good, but didn't succeed very well, and who did not listen when they read aloud.

* * * * * It seems sometimes that there is no such thing as a New Year--it is only the old year come back.

These folks about us--have they not lived before?

Surely they are the same creatures that have peopled earth in the days agone; they are busy about the same things, they chase after the same trifles, they commit the same mistakes, and blunder as men have always blundered.

Only last week, a teacher in one of the primary schools of Chicago reported to her principal that a certain little boy in her room was so hopelessly dull and perverse that she despaired of teaching him anything.

The child would sit with open mouth and look at her as she would talk to the class, and five minutes afterward he could not or would not repeat three words of what had been said.

She had scolded him, made him stand on the floor, kept him in after school, and even whipped him--but all in vain.

The principal looked into the case, scratched his head, stroked his whiskers, coughed, and decided that the public-school funds should not be wasted in trying to "teach imbeciles," and so reported to the parents.

He advised them to send the boy to a Home for the Feeble-Minded, sending the message by an older brother.

So the parents took the child to the Home and asked that he be admitted.

The Matron took the little boy on her lap, talked to him, read to him, showed him pictures and said to the astonished parents, "This child has fully as much intelligence as any of your other children, perhaps more--but he is deaf!"

Harriet Martineau from her twelfth year was very deaf, and she was also devoid of the senses of taste and smell.

"Oh, these are terrible tribulations to befall a mortal!"

we exclaim with uplifted hands.

But on sober second thought I am not sure that I know what is a tribulation and what a blessing.

I'm not positive that I would know a blessing should I see it coming up the street.

For as I write it comes to me that the Great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more.

They harmed me not.

The things that have really made me miss my train have always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the, least afraid.

Mother Nature is kind, and if she deprives us of one thing she gives us another, and happiness seems to be meted out to each and all in equal portions.

Harriet's afflictions caused her to turn her mind to other things than those which filled the hearts of girls of her own age.

Society chatter held nothing for her, she could not hear it if she would; and she ate the food that agreed with her, not that which was merely pleasant to the taste.

She began to live in a world of thought and ideas.

The silence meant much.

"The first requisite is that man should be a good animal."

I used to think that Herbert Spencer in voicing this aphorism struck twelve.

But I am no longer enthusiastic about the remark.

The senses of most dumb animals are far better developed than those of man.

Hounds can trace footsteps over flat rocks, even though a shower has fallen in the interval; cats can see in the dark; rabbits hear sounds that men never hear; horses detect an impurity in water that a chemical analysis does not reveal, and homing pigeons would gain nothing by carrying a compass.

And so I feel safe in saying that if any man were so good and perfect an animal that he had the hound's sense of smell, the cat's eyesight, the rabbit's sense of hearing, the horse's sense of taste, and the homing pigeon's "locality," he would not be one whit better prepared to appreciate Kipling's "Dipsy Chanty," and not a hair's breadth nearer a point where he could write a poem equal to it.

No college professor can see so far as a Sioux Indian, neither can he hear so well as a native African.

There are rays of light that no unaided human eye can trace, and there are sounds subtler than human ear can detect.

These five bodily faculties that we are pleased to call the senses were developed by savage man.

He holds them in common with the brute.

And now that man is becoming partly civilized he is in danger of losing them.

Faculties not used are taken away.

Dame Nature seems to consider that anything you do not utilize is not needed; and as she is averse to carrying dead freight she drops it out.

But man can think, and the more he thinks and the further he projects his thought, the less need he has for his physical senses.

Homer's matchless vision was the rich possession of a blind man; Milton never saw Paradise until he was sightless, and Helen Keller knows a world of things that were neither told to her in lectures nor read from books.

The far-reaching intellect often goes with a singularly imperfect body, and these things seem to point to the truth that the body is one thing and the soul another.

I make no argument for impoverished vitality, nor do I plead the cause of those who enjoy poor health.

Yet how often do we find that the confessional of a family or a neighborhood is the bedside of one who sees the green fields only as did the Lady of Shalott, by holding a looking-glass so that it reflects the out-of-doors.

Let me carry that simile one step further, and say that the mirror of the soul when kept free from fleck and stain, reveals the beauties of the universe.

And I am not sure but that the soul, freed from the distractions of sense and the trammels of flesh, glides away to a height where things are observed for the first time in their true proportions.

"The soul knows all things," says Emerson, "and knowledge is only a remembering."

* * * * * The Martineaus were Huguenots, a stern, sturdy stock that suffered exile rather than forego the right of free-thought and free speech.

These are the people who are the salt of the earth.

And yet as I read history I see that they are the people who have been hunted by dogs, and followed by armed men carrying fagots.

The driving of the Huguenots from France came near bankrupting the land, and the flight of Jews and Huguenots into England helped largely to make that country the counting-house of the world.

Take the Quakers, Puritans, Huguenots and other refugees from America and it is no longer the land of the free or the home of the brave.

Of the seven Presidents who presided over the deliberations of that first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, three were Huguenots: Henry Laurens, John Jay and Elias Boudinot, and in the seats there were Puritans not a few.

"By God, Sir, we can not afford to persecute the Quakers," said a certain American a long while ago.

"Their religion may be wrong, but the people who cling to an idea are the only people we need.

If we must persecute, let us persecute the complacent."

Harriet Martineau had all the restless independence of will that marked her ancestry.

She set herself to acquire knowledge, and she did.

When she was twenty she spoke three languages and could read in four.

She knew history, astronomy, physical science, and it crowded her teacher in mathematics very hard to keep one lesson in advance of her.

Besides, she could sew and cook and "keep house."

Yet it was all gathered by labor and toil and lift.

By taking thought she had added cubits to her stature.

But at twenty, a great light suddenly shone around her.

Love came and revealed the wonders of Earth and Heaven.

She had ever been of a religious nature, but now her religion was vitalized and spiritualized.

Deity was no longer a Being who dwelt at a great distance among the stars, but the Divine Life was hers.

It flowed through her, nourished her and gave her strength.

Renan suggests that one reason why religion remains on such a material plane for many is because they have never known a great and vitalizing love--a love where intellect, spirit and sex find their perfect mate.

Love is the great enlightener.

And in my own mind I am fully persuaded that comparatively few mortals ever experience this rebirth that a great love gives.

We grope our way through life.

Nature's first thought is for reproduction of the species; she has so overloaded physical passion that men and women marry when the blood is warm and intellect callow.

Girls marry for life the first man that offers, and forever put behind them the possibilities of a love that would enable them to lift up their eyes to the hills from whence cometh their help.

Very, very seldom do the years that bring a calmer pulse reveal a mating of mind and spirit.

When love came to Harriet, she began to write, her first book being a little volume called "Devotional Exercises."

These daily musings on Divine things and these sweetly limpid prayers were all written out first for herself and her lover.

But it came to her that what was a help to them might be a help to others.

A publisher was found, and the little work had a large sale and found appreciative readers for many years.