Child-life and girlhood of remarkable women. A series of chapters from female biography

Chapter I. English Women Of Letters

HARRIET MARTINEAU. FANNY BURNEY. ELIZABETH

INCHBALD. CHARLOTTE BRONTE. SARA COLERIDGE.

— MRS. SOMERVII.LE — MARY RUSSELL MITFORD. — LADY MORGAN.

Harriet Martineau.

IF the old adage be true that " the boy makes the man," the converse, I suppose, must also be true, that the girl makes the woman. For my own part, I am inclined to think that there is greater truth in the latter form of the saying than in the former ; the girl, as she grows up, being less exposed to those external influences which shape and mould the character than the boy. Her development takes place within the secure shelter of the family circle, and she seldom cornes into contact with the world until she has reached womanhood ; when she goes out to meet the stress and strain of daily life with her character matured and "set." It

CHILD-LIFE OF REMARKABLE WOMEN.

is a common remark, that at eighteen a maiden is for the most part a finished woman, with all a woman's readiness of resource, quickness of judgment, and capacity of self-control ; whereas, at that age, the majority of lads are very young men indeed, " raw," wayward, and " boyish." I have known many boys whose after careers have wholly falsified the prognostications founded on the experiences of their boyhood : the meek and gentle scholar of Rugby has hardened mysteriously into the brilliant Anglo-Indian trooper, always foremost in tne desperate charge ; the dull apathetic lad, at the bottom of his " form," constantly suffering the infliction of "repetitions " for carelessly prepared or forgotten lessons, has ripened into the astute special pleader or alert civil, engineer. But I have always found the promise of girlhood fulfilled ; I have always found the woman what the " girl " foreshadowed she would be — what the influences to which as a girl she was subjected, and the training which as a girl she underwent, very clearly indicated what she would of necessity become.

For though there may be differences of opinion as to the range and force of woman's intellect in comparison with that of man, all, I suppose, will agree that it is more plastic, more easily affected by the conditions under which it expands. Most, teachers will acknowledge that girls are more easily taught than boys ; their receptiveness is greater, and their perceptiveness is quicker. They learn and retain more readily, and therefore they are more readily led in any particular direction. Because tliey are less exposed to the indurating action of the world, they are necessarily softer and more ductile, more amenable to the wise caution and the prudent warning, more easily moved by an appeal to their affections. But, if this be the case, what a responsibility rests upon their parents and teachers ! How important it is that these yielding and impressionable natures should be carefully shielded from everything that might warp or sully or degrade them. The judgment has to be formed, the intellect disciplined ; the passions have to be controlled, and the feelings moderated. In a word, there is a mind to be cultivated, a heart to be brought under subjection, a soul to be purified and strengthened. When the soil is prepared for the reception of the germs of future growth, the utmost vigilance is needed lest seed of thorn or thistle should be wilfully and perniciously sown. It is deeply to be regretted that so little care, as a rule, is exercised over the education and training of our girls ; and for want of this wise supervision and loving watchiulness we see society infested by thoughtless and insincere women, who lower the social standard and discredit and dishonour their own sex. Hence it is that we meet so often with the commonplace maiden, without ideas or aspirations, moral or mental energy, who loiters through life as if it had neither duties nor responsibilities; with the flirt who devotes herself to frivolous dissipation ; the gossip, who spends her hours in collecting and retailing the inanities of tea-table talk ; and with other unpleasant types, the products of modern io CHILD-LIFE OF REMARKABLE WOMEN.

society, which have neither earnestness nor truth, no high purpose in life, and no sense of the dignity of womanhood.

In the Southern Highlands of Scotland, (as I have elsewhere written,*) lies a well-known scene, famous in legend, song, and story, where, standing on a narrow isthmus, the traveller sees behind him a small mountain loch, and in front a larger basin of shining waters, which stretches away towards the valley of the Tweed, and pours into it its tribute through the channel of the poetic Yarrow. I have stood there on an early summer morning, when over the larger lake has brooded a luminous mist, rendering all its outlines shadowy and uncertain, while behind me the crystal mere has been as distinctly denned in every feature as if it had been moulded by some master-hand. And I have seen in the double picture an image of maidenhood, which seems to connect, like an isthmus, the two periods of girlhood and womanhood. To the young heart how vague and how vast appears that future on the threshold of which it momentarily pauses in mingled fear and hope ! — how limited and how clearly marked that past which it is for ever leaving ! Longfellow, in some well-known verses,! has described the maiden as

" Standing, with reluctant feet, Where the brook and river meet, Womanhood and childhood fleet !

f Longfellow, Miscellaneous Foems :" Maidenhood."

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

" Gazing, with a timid glance, On the brooklet's swift advance, On the river's broad expanse ! "

Assuredly, there is no stage of woman's career which brings with it such a burden of disturbing emotions, anxieties, aspirations, alarms, and wishes ; there is no stage of graver interest or more serious importance. What her life is to become, whether it is to be nobly used or idly wasted or painfully sacrificed, — whether it is to send up to heaven a sweet savour and incense of duty fulfilled, or whether it is to present a dreary record of responsibilities neglected, — depends upon the preparation and equipment which the maiden has received and acquired in girlhood. Unhappily, too often she is called upon to face the trials of womanhood without any such • preparation. The opportunities of her girlhood have been turned to no account. That vast, dim Future on which her eyes look out so wistfully is all the vaster and dimmer from her absolute ignorance of its obligations, its possibilities, its dangers, and its pleasures. She is sent forward into the battle of life, an untrained recruit. In too many cases her parents, or others interested in her, have made no effort to ascertain the tendencies of her mind, the scope of her talents, the nature of her tastes, the strength or weakness of her character : even her mother is too frequently content to leave her to grope her way as best she can in the twilight, and to discover for herself, after many mistakes and much suffering, the

CHILD-LIFE OF REMARKABLE WOMEN.

path in life that is best fitted to the measure of her capabilities.

It is unnecessary to enlarge upon the value of Biography. From the lives of those who have gone before us it enables us to deduce lessons for our own guidance ; shows us how we may profit by what they have accomplished and endured, what we may learn from their failures as well as their successes. The educational uses of Biography are, I think, not sufficiently appreciated. We read to be amused, to be interested, but not to be taught. Yet the most commonplace life of the most commonplace man would have in it something of high utility — a warning or an encouragement, a reproof or a consolation — if it were rightly studied ; and of much greater importance must be the lives of those who have done great deeds or uttered great thoughts, who have achieved much or suffered much. As they lie unfolded before us, they may be made useful in strengthening our nobler purposes, purifying our motives, elevating our aims, sustaining us under our disappointments. It is a mere truism to speak of the life of Palissy as a commentary on the advantages of perseverance, or of the life of George Stephenson as an illustration of successful industry. There is much more to be learned from real lives than these every-day and most obvious truths. The beauty of sympathy and kindly feeling, the strength that rests in a consciousness of right-doing, the refining effect of exalted aspirations, the victories won by serenity of temper and self-control, the true genius which consists

in the ready adaptation of means to an end, — all this we may gather from the records of good and great lives. Christianity itself is founded upon a biography ; its basis and support is the life of Christ. Therefore, in preparing themselves for the duties and cares, the joys and sorrows of womanhood, our girls should find in Biography an ever-present help. Necessarily, the lives of good and great women will possess a more direct interest and value for them than those of great and good men — though the latter must not be ignored — because whether we do or do not admit the general equality of the two sexes, we cannot deny their intellectual separateness. Two things may be equal and yet not alike : for myself, I cannot decide between the rose and the violet ; both are perfect of their kind, as God hath made them, but both are different. Men and women are not alike, in themselves any more than in their duties ; and in the first place, therefore, our girls must study the biographies of good women, the women who have shown what may be done to ennoble and elevate womanhood. These must be their charts, in which they may discover the sunken reef and the whirling current, the wilderness and the desert, as well as the sunny breadths of azure sea and the happy isles.

In the following pages we have drawn upon Biography for the purpose of showing what some great and good Women were as Girls ; how far the promise of their girlhood blossomed into performance ; to what extent their later lives were affected by the influences which presided over their early years ; and why and how they became the women which Biography represents them to have been. For the reader who thinks as she reads; these passages will possess not only a profound interest but a great practical value. She will see how the Won) an naturally develops and grows out of the Girl, — how Womanhood is the positive and inevitable reflection of Girlhood ; and she will feel that what she may and will be, depends upon what she is.

One of the ablest of literary Englishwomen is Harriet Martineau.* Her books are marvels of cleverness ; she knew how to make political economy interesting, and to clothe with the attractions of fiction the pages of the statute book. She had a quick eye for the weak point of an argument, and in controversy hit quickly and hit sharply. Her clearness of statement was not less remarkable than her graphic force of description. In all her books the lustre of her intellect is obvious enough, but then it is a metallic lustre. They never stir the emotions, never awaken one's tenderness or hope or sympathy. They are so hard and so cold ! Perhaps this is due in no slight degree to her stupendous egotism. Never was there a woman who had so firm a belief in herself, who was so strongly convinced that all

* Born 1802, died 1876. Author of " Deerbrook," "The Hour and the Man," " The Play-fellow," " Feats on the Fiord," " Forest and Game Law Tales," " The Rioters," "Retrospect of Western Travel," "Eastern Life, Past and Present," "Life in the Sick Room," " History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace," etc.

who differed from her must necessarily be in the wrong. She could see everybody's faults and failings but her own. This, it is true, is not an uncommon example of lucidity; but in Harriet Martineau it reached colossal proportions. The best defence that has been made for her has been made, I believe, by Mr. W. R. Greg. He thinks that, considering her extraordinary powers, her consciousness of abounding energy, the suddenness and completeness of her success, and the fame and adulation with which she was surrounded in times of great excitement and amid circles of dazzling brilliancy, her self-confidence, however regrettable, was not only natural, but its absence would have been miraculous. "The truth is," he adds, " that doubt seems to have been a state of mind unknown to her. She never reconsidered her opinions, or mused over her judgments. They were instantaneous insights, not deliberate or gradual deductions. It scarcely seemed to occur to her that she could be wrong • that thousands of eminent or wise men differed from her never appeared to suggest the probability." Still, this ingenious defence can hardly be accepted as satisfactory. An egotism so absorbing was an intellectual no less than a moral defect. And it is true of Miss Martineau, that in spite of her vast energy, her great capacity for work, and her mental force and vigour, she was undoubtedly wanting in the higher genius. There was talent, enough and to spare, — brisk, active, fertile, vehement talent — but nothing more. We cannot conceive of such aggressive self-confidence as an accompaniment and a limi-ation of the genius of Shakespeare, or Newton, or Goethe ; for the self-confidence of Harriet Martineau took away from the merit of every person but herself, resolved the world into a something existing for the display of her own individuality, and was as ready to blot God out of heaven as to depose Satan from the throne of hell.

But she w r as not wanting only in the modesty and calmness which are the characteristics of the higher genius as indisputably as light and warmth are the characteristics of summer : she had no sympathy. She had none of that exquisite tenderness and sympathetic power which we find in the greater minds. She could no more have created a Cordelia and a Desdemona than she could have fashioned a Hamlet or a King Lear. It was a narrow circle within which her fancy worked. Even in her domestic novel ol " Deerbrook," there is an entire want of true domestic feeling ; she writes like an observer, from the outside ; she has held no share or part in it herself; and for this reason she never exercises any command over the emotions of her readers, — is as powerless to move them to tears as to excite them to laughter. The icy glitter of her style chills and repels ; but it is a true reflection of the cold clearness of her thoughts.

Let us now see if her defects are in any way accounted for by the training and experiences of her early life.

Harriet Martineau was the daughter of a respectable Norwich manufacturer, who, though of Huguenot lineage, was an Unitarian in his religious creed. From the records which have come down to us we can gather no very distinct conception of what manner of man he was ; but we know that her mother was a woman of great cleverness, very restless, very dogmatic, and very secure in her own wisdom.. Harriet Martineau was not happy in her parents, who seem to have been singularly unfortunate in their mode of managing children. They never tried to understand her ; they did little to guide her ; they made no attempt to cultivate her affections. She tells us that in her childhood she was only twice treated with any degree of tenderness : once when her parents were moved out of their ordinary indifference by her sufferings from earache; once when a kindly-natured lady took pity upon her alarm at a magic-lantern exhibition. So loveless a childhood will explain, I think, much that was hard and frigid in her womanhood.

She was the sixth of a family of eight ; but though one of the youngest, was selected to enjoy the special benefit of the severest maternal discipline. An almost morbid sensitiveness was a source of great suffering ; but no one seems to have recognized it, and certainly no one allowed for it. She gives it as her opinion that her parents never had the slightest idea of her miseries ; but after all some excuse is to be found for them in the fact that she never confided in them, and of self-created agonies they could hardly be expected to have had much knowledge. She describes her sudden accesses of fear as really unaccountable : they had their origin, no doubt, in her excessive self-concentration. "A magic-lantern," she says, "was iS CHILD- LIFE OF REMARKABLE WOMEN.

exhibited to us on Christmas Day, and once or twice in the year besides. I used to see it cleaned by daylight, and to handle all its parts, understanding its whole structure ; yet, such was my terror of the white circle on the wall, and of the moving slides, that, to speak the plain truth, the first apparition always brought on bowel complaint ; and at the age of thirteen, when I was pretending to take care of little children during the exhibition, 1 could never look at it without having the back of a chair to grasp, or hurting myself, to carry off the intolerable sensation." It is clear that a child of so impressionable a temperament needed the tenderest, most careful, and most delicate management, and a discipline which, while firm, should have been subtly adapted to her idiosyncracies.

Of the actual mental education of the little Martineaus the greatest care seems to have been taken. If the making of them excellent housewives and needlewomen, fine musicians, and tolerable French scholars, were the aim and object of their parents, that aim and object must be held to have been attained. They were sent to a good school, and acquired a sufficient knowledge of Latin to make sonorous hexameters, as so many can do, and even to think in Latin, which so few are able to do. Harriet's master was a man of some ability, and had discernment enough to recognise the good promise of his quaint, Clever, and deaf little pupil. Her literary tendencies first developed themselves in her love of reading; and, like all who really love reading, she read omnivorously, though with a preference for history, poetry, and,

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

strange to say, policies. She says of herself that her mind was desperately methodical ; and no doubt to this passion for method her rapid progress must be attributed. The facts and ideas she acquired were immediately " sorted," so to speak, and put away on different shelves of her memory for future use. They were not heaped upon one another, — rudis indigestaque moles ; — crushing and keeping down with their weight the reflective powers. But even a good thing may be abused, and latterly Miss Martineau carried her systematizing processes to an extreme. Everything that would admit of it she tabulated, like columns of pounds, shillings, and pence. On one occasion she adopted Dr. Franklin's youthful and absurd plan of arranging his day's virtues and vices under heads. " I found at once," she says, " the difficulty of mapping out moral qualities, and had to give it up, — as I presume he had too. But I tried after something quite as foolish, and with immense perseverance. I thought it would be a fine thing to distribute Scripture instructions under the heads of the virtues and vices, so as to have encouragement or rebuke always ready at hand. So I made (as on so many other occasions) a paper book, ruled and duly headed. With the Old Testament I got on very well ; but I was annoyed at the difficulty with the New. I knew it to be of so much more value and importance than the Old, that I could not account for the small number of cut and dry commands. I twisted meanings and wordings, and made figurative things into precepts, before I would give up ; but after rivalling any old

Puritan preacher in my free use of Scripture, I was obliged to own that I could not construct the system I wanted."

To a mind so keenly apprehensive and so restless, religious truth necessarily became an object of early interest. Bred up in the cold atmosphere of Unitarianism, she groped her way painfully towards the light, but her egotism prevented her from finding it. Nothing would serve but that she must have a creed of her own. She could not be contented with the " idea" of Christ's religion which the New Testament embodies, but constructed a Christianity without Christ. The creed of her girlhood was a thing of shreds and patches, something to this effect : She believed in a God who, in her opinion, was milder and more beneficent and passionless th^n the God of " the orthodox," inasmuch as He would not doom any of His creatures to everlasting torment. She did not at any time believe in the Devil, but regarded him as an allegorical personification of Sin, while she thought eternal punishment stood for eternal detriment. She believed in eternal and inestimable rewards of holiness, though she says of herself that she never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one through any consideration of loss or gain. To the best of her recollection, she always feared sin and remorse extremely, but punishment not at all. A mental analysis made in mature womanhood may err, however, on many points of childish thought and belief. But it is not impossible that, as she says, the doctrine of repentance and forgiveness never

HARRIET MAR TINEA U.

availed her much. Probably it was presented to her more as a doctrinal dogma, as an article of the theological system, than as a living truth. Forgiveness for the past was as nothing to her, because it did not seem to involve safety in the future; and she felt that her sins could not be blotted out by any single remission of their consequences, even if such a remission were possible. Hence it appears that while she had constructed for herself a Deity much milder and more beneficent — in her modest opinion — than the God of the Christian believer, she did not love Him sufficiently to desire His praise or dread His anger. To a large extent she seems to have borrowed her religious ideas at first from " Paradise Lost " and "The Pilgrim's Progress." Afterwards they were modified by the conclusions which she drew with hasty self-sufficiency from all kinds of premisses and assumptions. Thus, she speaks of a time when she satisfied herself that the dogmas of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul could not both be true ; but why the one should be incompatible with the other she does not enlighten us. She adhered to the former, she says, after St. Paul : which would seem to imply on her part a strange conviction that St. Paul does not teach the soul's everlasting life !

While we condemn her arrogance of speculation, we must in justice own that she struggled after light. She prayed "night and morning" until she came to mature age ; but unhappily she had not been taught to address herself to a personal Saviour, and in the name of Jesus

Christ to lay her petitions and her perplexities before " the great white throne." What warmth and beauty might have been poured into her daily life had she but realised the truth, the central truth of Christianity, that Jesus the Son of Man was also the Son of God, and that it was He who reconciled man to God by His sacrifice on the cross ! She studied the Bible continuously and most earnestly ; both by daily reading of chapters, after "the approved but mischievous method," and by close consultation of all the commentaries and expositions on which she could lay her hands. She procured the works of Dugald Stewart, Hartley, and Priestley ; ventured boldly into the maze of metaphysics, and spent weary hours on the insoluble problems of foreknowledge and freewill. But not having hold of that clue which lies in the Divinity of Christ, she wandered astray in barren tracks of thought, until she ultimately became a Necessarian, and accepted as a cardinal truth the invariable and inflexible action of fixed laws. The effect upon her theological system was immediate and immense. She alighted upon the astounding discovery that the practice of prayer, as prevailing throughout Christendom, was wholly unauthorised by the New Testament. How she arrived at this "discovery " she does not tell us, and in the face of the commands to " watch and pray " and to " pray without ceasing," we are unable to guess. At all times, however, she must have had a very vague conception of the meaning and spirit of Christian prayer, which she seems to have identified with the Pharisaic prayers reprobated

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

by the Saviour ! We need not be surprised that, after such a discovery, she changed her method.

" Not knowing what was good for me, and being sure that every external thing would come to pass just the same, whether I liked it or not, I ceased to desire, and therefore to pray for, anything external — whether ' daily bread ' [which Christ Himself has taught us to pray for], or health, or life for myself or others, or anything whatever but spiritual good. There I for a long time drew the line. Many years after I had outgrown the childishness of wishing for I knew not what — of praying for what might either be good or evil — I continued to pray for spiritual benefits. I can hardly say for spiritual aid ; for I took the necessarian view of even the higher form of prayer, — that it brought about, or might bring about, its own accomplishment by the spiritual dispositions which it excited and cherished. This view is so far from simple, and so irreconcilable with the view of a revelation of a scheme of salvation, that it is clear that the one or the other view must soon give way."

Unhappily, in Harriet Martineau's case both views gave way, owing, I fear, to the arrogance of spirit in which she approached religious subjects. It was not with the humility of childhood that she knelt before her Lord, — not as one conscious of sin and imploring forgiveness ; but rather with all the pride of a sceptical intellect, and as one who refused to believe whatever that intellect dismissed as unworthy of belief. There is, I confess something very painful to me in Harriet Martin eau's candid revelation of that child-life of hers, from which the child-spirit was ever absent ; that loveless and unloving girlhood, so self-concentrated, so self-reliant, and so coldly speculative, with its want of light and warmth, of reverence and faith ! It sufficiently explains all that was hard and cold in her womanhood, and furnishes a key to the enigmas of her life and character.

How strangely she failed to understand the meaning and spirit of Christian prayer and praise, and how sadly absorbing was that egotism which grew with her growth and developed with her development until she was completely its slave, may be inferred from the following passage : —

" What I could not desire for myself," she says, " I could not think of stipulating for for others ; and thus, in regard to petition, my prayers became simply an aspiration, — ' Thy will be done ! ' But still, the department of praise remained. I need hardly say that I soon drew back in shame from offering to a Divine Being a homage which would be offensive to an earthly one ; and when this practice was over, my devotions consisted in aspiration, — very frequent and heartfelt, — under all circumstances and influences, and much as I meditate now, almost hourly, on the mysteries of life and the universe, and the great science and art of human duty. In proportion as the taint of fear and desire and selfregard fell off, and the meditation had fact instead of passion for its subject, the aspiration became freer and sweeter, till at length, when the selfish superstition had wholly gone out of it, it spread its charm through every change of every waking hour, — and does now, when life itself is expiring." A " selfish superstition " is surely not the term which! a woman like Harriet Martineau should have applied to the fond secret hope that thousands of minds not less gifted — many, indeed, more richly gifted — than her own, have thankfully cherished, and have found a lamp for their feet in life and a stay and support in the presence of the dark valley. But one great flaw vitiates fatally her whole argument. No analogy can with justice be attempted between the God and Father of the Christian's creed, and a feeble, erring, earthly sovereign ; or between the devout and loving worship offered at the altar of the Divine, and the flattery or adulation heaped at the feet of the Human. And further, Miss Martineau loses sight of the great truth that the heart is purified and made better by indulging in admiration of all that is great and good. Prayer and praise are a part of the education of the soul. We may allow ourselves, I think, to conceive of Harriet Martineau as yearning and aspiring after a lofty ideal amid the failings and egotisms of her girlhood ; as endeavouring to find a substitute and compensation for the mother-love which seems to have been denied to her in venturesome speculations and visionary reflections. As she grew older, and grew stronger both in mind and body, it was natural enough that she should grow bolder, and that aspiration should be replaced by self-satisfied conviction. The morbid self-reproach of her earlier years gave way to an extravagant self-consciousness, and thenceforth she soared into an empyrean of her own, high above the faiths and hopes of the many, reposing in the same dignity of a passionless intellect.