LORD  BYRON  and  his  TIMES

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Reminiscences of a Literary Life

CHAP. IX

MISS MARTINEAU

INTRODUCTION & INDEXES

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INTRODUCTION

PREFACE

CONTENTS

CHAP. I

SHELLEY

CHAP. II

JOHN KEATS

THOMAS CAMPBELL

CHAP. III

GEORGE DOUGLAS

CHAP. IV

WILLIAM STEWART ROSE

CHAP. V

SAMUEL ROGERS

SAMUEL COLERIDGE

CHAP. VI

HARTLEY COLERIDGE

CHAP. VII

THOMAS MOORE

WILLIAM LISLE BOWLES

CHAP. VIII

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

JAMES MATHIAS

CHAP. IX

‣ MISS MARTINEAU

WILLIAM GODWIN

CHAP. X

LEIGH HUNT

THOMAS HOOD

HORACE SMITH

CHAP. XI

SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH

MRS. JAMESON

JANE AND ANNA PORTER

CHAP. XII

TOM GENT

CHAP. XIII

VISCOUNT DILLON

SIR LUMLEY SKEFFINGTON

JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE

CHAP. XIV

LORD DUDLEY

LORD DOVER

CHAP. XV

SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE

WILLIAM BROCKEDON

CHAP. XVI

SIR ROBERT PEEL

SPENCER PERCEVAL

CHAP. XVII

MOUNTSTUART ELPHINSTONE

MR. DAVIS

CHAP. XVIII

ELIJAH BARWELL IMPEY

CHAP. XIX

ALEXANDER I.

GEORGE CANNING

NAPOLEON

QUEEN HORTENSE

ROSSINI

CHAP. XX

COUNT PECCHIO

MAZZINI

COUNT NIEMCEWITZ

CHAP. XXI

CARDINAL RUFFO

CHAP. XXII

PRINCESS CAROLINE

BARONNE DE FEUCHÈRES

CHAP. XXIII

SIR SIDNEY SMITH

CHAP. XXIV

SIR GEORGE MURRAY

CHAP. XXV

VISCOUNT HARDINGE

CHAP. XXVI

REV. C. TOWNSEND

CHAP. XXVII

BEAU BRUMMELL

CHAP. XXVIII

AN ENGLISH MERCHANT

THE BRUNELS

APPENDIX

INDEX

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CHAPTER IX

MISS MARTINEAU

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

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constantly throwing across the table to some one or other of her interlocutors. I would not have been within reach of that tube for a trifle. Years after this meeting, I might have met her frequently at Charles Knight’s, where, for a long while, she was very intimate; but I always avoided the house when I knew that she was there. One day she wanted to cure Margaret K. of a violent attack of toothache by means of mesmerism; but, upon trial, she completely failed. To me it seemed that after a visit of any length, she always left the odour of some of her bad principles behind her. I do not believe that either Mrs. K., or any one of her daughters was infected thereby; but she certainly had an evil effect and influence over the impressionable, changeable, volatile mind of Knight himself. When I first knew that clever, extraordinary man—and he was, and is, extraordinary in many ways—he was far gone in radicalized Whiggery, was clamorous for the Reform Bill, and was ready to advocate almost any innovation in Church or State. But years seemed to have sobered him down, and my collaborateur, George Craik, and I, and one or two others who were Conservatives and very much in his society, flattered ourselves that we had aided in his political conversion, and had brought him to be nearly as conservative as ourselves. I have often heard him and his great friend Matthew Davenport Hill, who had taken a very active part in carrying out reform, declare the Reform Bill to have been a mistake, and Municipal Reform to have been another. Both Hill and Knight had been shabbily treated and ill-used by the Whig Reform Government. When I started for Turkey in the summer of 1847, I thought I left Knight on the right road, “et dans des bons principes politiques”; but when I returned in the autumn of 1848, I found him relapsed into Liberalism. In the interval Craik had been living on his History Professorship at Belfast and Knight had quarrelled

CHAP. IX]

AS HISTORIAN

95

with the other Conservatives; he had cut himself quite off from his old friends, and had formed new and sudden intimacies, with men like Charles Dickens, Mr. “Examiner” Forster, Douglas Jerrold, T. K. Harvey the poet—then editing the Athenæum—and others of that school: men who were, one and all, enemies to the Established Church of England, and friends to every rash experiment in politics, whether at home or abroad. Moreover, during my absence, he had contracted the closest intimacy with Miss Martineau, who had been living a great deal in his family, and had engaged her to do what I in justice ought to have done, that is, to write the history of the thirty years’ peace, as a continuation to the history of the reign of George III., which stopped at the Battle of Waterloo and the Peace of Paris, and had been written by Craik and me. Nobody but Knight would have thought of employing such a writer for the continuation.

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

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that Knight and his “chère Harriette” had had a quarrel which ended in a downright rupture. I knew how it would be. C. K.’s sudden intimacies and spasmodic friendships always ended in that way. Since then he has quarrelled with Dickens, Jerrold, and all that set; but I cannot see or hear that he has renounced their principles, or that he has at all moderated his rekindled Whiggery or Liberalism. He and I are now quite estranged, but I have not a grain of spite or ill-will against him, for I have a sincere affection for his family, with whom I was most intimately associated for the long term of eighteen years. With a little more ballast, with a little more fixity of purpose and principle, and a great deal less of his evil associations, Charles Knight, now a very poor man, might have been prosperous and even wealthy, and might also have obtained a very good standing as a man of letters. But I must say that with his innate and contracted defects he has proved himself, in spite of his ready arithmetic and great skill in every kind of calculation, about the worst man of business that has ever belonged to the “Trade,” or that has ever speculated, in any other line, with his own, or other people’s, money. Through him—and I may say almost entirely through him—I find myself, in fast-coming old age, and with many and increasing infirmities, dépourvu de tout, a ruined man. But I repeat, I nourish no spite, I scarcely feel resentment. I would say, “May peace be with my old ally!”—but Charles Knight will never know peace on this side the grave. Let me return to Harriet Martineau.

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

visited the Pyramids and Catacombs, and that she should have foregathered with the mummies and stuffed crocodiles, would have been quite natural, and not out of keeping with her sentiments and character; but, in the name of all that is holy there, what had she, or one like her, to do in the Holy Land, at the tomb of Christ! I know a part of what she did, while there: she scoffed at everything, she grimly laughed at all the local traditions, and she maintained long arguments in political economy, and about the too fast propagation of the human species—the last being a subject on which she thinks herself very luminous. My thoroughly believing, my pious, and at the same time very romantic friend, the Rev. H. E. W., whose head and heart are full of Scripture, and who has a faith even in legends, had the infelicity of having this unsympathetic female for one of his travelling companions. They crossed the Desert together, and they encamped together at night, tent by tent. She wore an Eastern male dress. Together they ascended Mount Sinai, and they were together at Jerusalem, at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, on Mount Calvary, at Golgotha, and at all those sanctified places.

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

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worships Reason! She sets up poor fallible human reason for her god. I hope that she may live to find out her sad mistake.”