This lady is “unhappily indifferent to the truth of revelation, yet exercises the wildest flights of fancy in constructing something like a new scheme of theogony suitable to the ruins of Egypt. Pronouncing Moses an impostor, she gives implicit credit to that convicted charlatan, the ‘Magician’ of Cairo—nay, even at home, believes in the supernatural powers of a cunning servant-girl” (Quarterly Review, clxxxi.). I met this rampant rationalist, this prophetess of mesmerism, this ill-favoured, dogmatizing, masculine spinster but once, and that was at a large dinner party of literary people, where I had the good fortune to be seated far away from her. I disliked the tendency of her writings, and I was disgusted with her personal appearance, her loquacity, and her positiveness on all subjects and things. My friend, Lord Brougham, was made very angry one day by being told that people were saying that Miss Martineau was, in person, so like his lordship that she might be taken for his sister! Brougham, as everybody knows, was never a beauty of a man; but, compared with Miss Martineau, his face was charming, and Brougham had always the look and bearing of a gentleman, while the spinster had not at all the appearance of a lady.
How she did talk and “argufy” at that dinner! She was as deaf as
a post, and made use of an ivory ear-trumpet, attached to a long flexible tube, which
looked very much like a snake, and which she was
| 94 | MISS MARTINEAU | [CHAP. IX |
| CHAP. IX] | AS HISTORIAN | 95 |
The woman’s politics and other principles were wide as the poles asunder. Knight very soon and financially found out his mistake. Those who admired Miss Martineau’s doing could not tolerate ours; and those who liked what we had done detested the tone and spirit of Miss Martineau. The book did not sell, and for a time it seriously impeded the sale of ours. Her performance was suited only to the taste of Radicals and Unitarians; and these classes, though they are great in the noise and bustle they make, and as seen through the dust they kick up, are in reality neither so numerous nor so liberal as book-purchasers as some good people imagine. By the scandalous way in which she handled the character and memory of the late Premier, Lord Londonderry, and by other calumnious and violent diatribes, she merited the words that were applied to her by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review: “The false, foul, and unfeminine pen of Miss Martineau.”
Not long after my return from the East, I heard
| 96 | MISS MARTINEAU | [CHAP. IX |
What could ever have induced this raisonneuse, this
esprit fort, this downright sceptic, to
travel through the Desert in the track of Moses and his Israelites, and to go to the Holy
Land and to Jerusalem? That she should have gone into Egypt, being furnished as she was
with the means of doing so in a comfortable manner, that she should have
| CHAP. IX] | IN THE HOLY LAND | 97 |
She taunted my friend, and she reasoned with what she thought his downright
idolatry and blind superstition; and because he took care not to insult the religious
feelings of either the Greek priests and monks nor the Latin monks and priests, but to
conform to some of the local usages and practices, she afterwards showed him up in her book
of travels, and in a way to make him recognizable to all his numerous friends and
acquaintances, and to many besides who were neither, and ready enough to get up an outcry
against him on account of his Puseyism. My dear friend is far too good a Christian and too
perfect a gentleman to resent conduct like this, or to indulge in any animosity. The
harshest words I have ever heard him say of her were these: “Miss Martineau
| 98 | MISS MARTINEAU | [CHAP. IX |
Old Godwin greatly preferred a quiet game of whist in a cosy corner, to conversation. In his manner he was a quiet, retiring, unpretentious old gentleman. At first I was rather surprised to discover how much he had modified many of his political opinions, and how completely he had changed others. Some of his books had been dogmatical and positive enough; but now he never dogmatized, and to his very utmost shunned argument and discussion. A flippant young man asked him one evening, “What are your fixed opinions?” “Sir,” said Godwin, “I have none; I left off my fixed opinions with my youth.”
During the season of the great combustion about the Reform Bill, little
Martin, the painter, took violently to politics.
He would insist upon pledges from every candidate, or from every member about to be
returned to the House of Commons; he would have no man give his vote without being sure of
the pledge that the honourable gentleman would vote in Parliament as his constituents
required, or vacate his seat. Martin had, on the whole, a consentient
audience, for the party (with a supper afterwards) was in his own house, and the listeners
were either artists or second or third rate authors, a class about as radical as the
artists. But Alaric Watts stood stoutly up in
opposition. “How!” said Martin, “all that I have
said is in Godwin’s ‘Political
Justice,’ and here is Godwin, who will bear me
out.” Godwin, who was just sitting down to his
parti carré, said that he might forget,
but he did not think he had written anything of the sort; that if he had done so he must
have committed a great mistake, and that
| CHAP. IX] | A GAME OF WHIST | 99 |
“If ever I said so,” said Godwin, “I must have been under a mistake.” “Mr. Godwin,” rejoined the artist, now getting rather vexed, “I am afraid that you do not stick to your principles!” The old reformed revolutionist, who was taking up his cards and arranging his suit, said mildly and even meekly: “Principles and opinions! opinions and principles! perplexing things! When I really know what or which I am to stick to, I will think about making up my mind. It is very easy to stick when, like a mussel, one sticks to the side of a rock, or a copper-bottomed ship; when one doesn’t think.”
“But,” said Martin, “we have had march of intellect, progress of education, intellectual development, throwing off of prejudices; and now the Nation, the People, thinks!” Old Godwin, beginning to lead in trumps, and transparently annoyed at the interruption, yet still as calm and cool as a cucumber, said: “I don’t think that a whole People can think.” “Then,” said Martin, “you throw up the democratic principle?” “Perhaps I do,” said Godwin, making a trick.
I liked little Martin, not for his
vapid politics, nor even very much for his phantasmagoric pictures; but I liked him very
much for his kindliness of heart and other good qualities that were in him. I also liked
old Godwin, and all the more for his tranquil mood,
and for the ease and honesty with which he made confession of past errors. For two or three
London seasons I met him rather frequently, and always found him the same quiet, composed,
retiring
| 100 | WILLIAM GODWIN | [CHAP. IX |
Lord Dudley and Ward, who had been, more than once, a Quarterly Reviewer, was in the habit of calling rather frequently at Albemarle Street, for a gossip in King John’s drawing-room. One afternoon His Majesty told him that old William Godwin was in great difficulties and absolute distress. “I am sorry for that,” said Lord Ward, “very sorry. He wrote some wild, perilous political trash in his young days; but the author of ‘Caleb Williams’ is a man of genius, and ought not to know want. It is a shame! and in his old age too!” He went into an inner room, as if to look for something, and on his return put a cheque for £100, quite slily, into John’s hand, whispering him to get the cheque cashed, to send the money to Godwin, and to say nothing about it to anyone. And if King John had not babbled over his cups, and if his head clerk and “Fidus Achates,” Mr. Dundas, had not tattled, Godwin would never have known whence the money came, nor would the world have known anything about it.
Such acts of generosity, and acts still more munificent, were by no means uncommon with his lordship. Miss M. R., cousin and confidante to Lady Lyndhurst, told me of a good many which had come to her knowledge, either accidentally or through Lady L.’s revelations; and no doubt there were many that neither Lady L. nor her cousin had ever heard of.
This admiration for “Caleb
Williams” was not peculiar to Lord Dudley and
Ward. Mr. Canning told his cousin
Stratford (not Lord Stratford de
Redcliffe) that the first time he took up that book he was thrilled and
riveted by it; and that, though much occupied at the time, he could scarcely lay the book
| CHAP. IX] | CALEB WILLIAMS | 101 |
Nearly two years after this, I read it again at Naples, and was almost equally struck with it; yet, when I came to reperuse it last year (1855), I must confess that for me nearly all the charm was gone, that it hung heavily on hand, and that I could not imagine how it had ever so thrilled and excited me. I could no longer detect that life and very essence of reality for which it has been so long and universally applauded. How is this? It cannot be that my personal acquaintance with the author had anything to do with the matter; for, on the whole, I liked old Godwin, and much admired his old age gentleness. I can only say that so it is. Other works of fiction that amused me in 1815 divert and please me still, and among these are included Mrs. Radcliffe’s Romances, which, nowadays, nobody seems to care about—except Mountstuart Elphinstone, who can still read them with pleasure. Quite lately, I took up Godwin’s “Essay on Sepulchres,” and was quite as much delighted with it as ever I had been. It is a very choice bit of English writing, and has a reverential and even a devotional feeling about it, which leads me to hope and almost believe, without a knowledge of the fact, that Godwin after all his vacillations and changes in matters of faith or unbelief, must at last have died a Christian.
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