[2] "_Harriet Martineau's Autobiography._" With Memorials by MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN. In 3 vols. Boston: Jas. R. Osgood & Co.
This copious retrospect appears to have been written about the year 1855, when the author had ceased to labor; having earned a highly honorable repose, and being moreover incapacitated by serious ill health. She appears then, at fifty-three years of age, to have thought her death very near; but she lived to be a much older woman--for upward of twenty years. Her motive in writing her memoirs is affirmed to be a desire to take her good name into her own hands, and anticipate the possible publication of her letters, an event which, very properly, she sternly deprecates. As to these letters, however, Mrs. Chapman publishes several, and makes liberal use of others. The reader wonders what her correspondence would have been, since what she destined to publicity is occasionally so invidious. Another motive with Miss Martineau appears to have been a desire to set forth, in particular, the history of her religious opinions--the history being sufficiently remarkable. Born among the primitive Unitarians (the city of Norwich, her paternal home, was, we believe, a sort of focus of this amiable form of Dissent), she passed, with her advance in life, from a precocious and morbid youthful piety to the furthest limits of skepticism. The story is an interesting one, and it forms both the first and the last note that she strikes; but we doubt whether (even among persons as little "theological" as herself) her reflections on this subject will serve to exemplify her judgment at its best. Her skepticism is too dogmatic and her whole attitude toward the "superstition" she has cast off too much marked by a small eagerness for formulas in the opposite direction, and a narrow complacency in the act of ventilating her negations. She cannot keep her hands off affirmations about a future state, and she lacks that imaginative feeling (so indispensable in all this matter) which suggests that the completest form of the liberty which she claims as against her theological education is tacit suspension of judgment. In general Miss Martineau is certainly not superficial, but here, in feeling, she is. This however is the penalty of having been narrowly theological in one's earlier years; it always leaves a bad trace somewhere, especially in reaction. The chapters in which Miss Martineau describes these early years are admirable; they place before us most vividly the hard conditions of her childish life, and they describe with singular psychological minuteness the unfolding of her character and the growth of her impressions. They have a remarkable candor, and it certainly cannot be said that the author's portrait of her youthful self is a flattered one. We doubt whether, except Rousseau, any autobiographer ever had the courage to accuse himself of so ungraceful a fault as infant miserliness. "I certainly was very close," says Miss Martineau, "all my childhood and youth." Her account of the circumstances which led to and accompanied her first steps in literature, of the first money she earned (she was in sore need of it), and of the growth of her form and development of her powers, and her confidence in them--all this is extremely real, touching, and interesting. She succeeded almost from the first, but her success was the result of an amount of unaided exertion which excites our wonder. What fairly launched her was the publication of her "Tales in Illustration of Political Economy," and there was something really heroic in the way that as a poor young woman with "views" of her own and without helpful companionship, she explored and mastered this tough science. Her views prevailed, and floated her into distinction. We have no space to allude to the details of the rest of her career, one of the principal events of which was her visit to America in 1834. It lasted more than two years, and was commemorated by Miss Martineau, on her return, in no less than six volumes. Mrs. Chapman deals with it largely in her supplementary memoir, treating chiefly, however, of the visitor's relations with the Abolition party. Miss Martineau evidently exaggerates both the odium which she incurred and the danger to which she exposed herself by these relations. They were natural ones for an ardently liberal Englishwoman to form, for the Abolitionists, to foreign eyes, must at that time have represented the only eminent feeling, the only sense of an ideal, visible amid the commonplace prosperity of American life.