XIII. BRISTOL. FRIENDS.
What is Chance? How often does that question recur in the course of every history, small or great? My whole course of life was deflected by the mishap of stepping a little awry out of a train at Bath, and miscalculating the height of the platform, which is there unusually low. I had gone to spend a day with a friend, and on my way back to Bristol I thus sprained my ankle. I was at that time forty years of age (a date I now alas! regard as quite the prime of life!), and in splendid health and spirits, fully intending to continue for the rest of my days labouring on the same lines as prospects of usefulness might open. I remember feeling the delight of walking over the springy sward of the Downs and laughing as I said to myself “I do believe I could walk down anybody and perhaps talk down anybody too!” The next week I was a poor cripple on crutches, never to take a step without them for four long years, during which period I grew practically into an old woman, and (unhappily for me) into a very large and heavy one for want of the exercise to which I had been accustomed. The morning after my mishap, finding my ankle much swollen and being in a great hurry to go on with my work, I sent for one of the principal surgeons in Bristol, who bound the limb so tightly that the circulation (always rather feeble) was impeded, and every sort of distressful condition supervened. Of course the surgeon threw the blame on me for attempting to use the leg; but it was very little I could do in this way even if I had tried, without excessive pain; and, after a few weeks, I went to London in the full confidence that I had only to bespeak “the best advice” to be speedily cured. I did get what all the world would still consider the “best advice;” but bad was that best. Guineas I could ill spare ran away like water while the great surgeon came and went, doing me no good at all; the evil conditions growing worse daily. I returned back from London and spent some wretched months at Clifton. An artery, I believe, was stopped, and there was danger of inflammation of the joint. At last with infinite regret I gave up the hope of ever recovering such activity as would permit me to carry on my work either in the schools or workhouse. No one who has not known the miseries of lameness, the perpetual contention with ignoble difficulties which it involves, can judge how hard a trial it is to an active mind to become a cripple.
Still believing in my simplicity that great surgeons might remedy every evil, I went again to London to consult the most eminent, and by the mistake of a friend, it chanced that I summoned two very great personages on the same day, though, fortunately, at different hours. The case was, of course, of the simplest; but the two gentlemen gave me precisely opposite advice. One sent me abroad to certain baths, which proved to be the wrong ones for my trouble, and gave me a letter to his friend there, a certain Baron. The moment the Baron-Doctor saw my foot he exclaimed that it ought never to have been allowed to get into the state of swollen veins and arrested circulation in which he found it; astringents and all sorts of measures ought to have been applied. In truth I was in a most miserable condition, for I could not drop the limb for two minutes without the blood running into it till it became like an ink-bottle, when, if I held it up, it became as white as if dead. And all this had been getting worse and worse while I was consulting ten doctors in succession, and chiefly the most eminent in England! The Baron-Doctor first told me that the waters would bring out the gout, and then, when I objected, assured me they should not bring it out; after which I relinquished the privilege of his visits and he charged me for an entire course of treatment.
The second great London surgeon told me not to go abroad, but to have a gutta-percha boot made for my leg to keep it stiff. I had the boot made, (with much distress and expense), took it abroad in my trunk, and asked the successor of the Baron-Doctor (who could make the waters give the gout or not as he pleased), “Whether he advised me to wear the wonderful machine?” The good old Frenchman, who was also Mayor of his town, and who did me more good than anybody else, replied cautiously, “If you wish, Madame, to be lame for life you will wear that boot. A great many English come to us here to be unstiffened after having had their joints stiffened by English surgeons’ devices of this sort, but we can do nothing for them. A joint once thoroughly stiff can never be restored.” It may be guessed that the expensive boot was quietly deposited on the nearest heap of rubbish.
After that experience I tried the baths in Savoy and others in Italy. But my lameness seemed permanent. A great Italian Doctor could think of nothing better than to put a few walnut-leaves on my ankle—a process which might perhaps have effected something in fifty years! Only the good and great Nélaton, whom I consulted in Paris, told me he believed I should recover some time; but he could not tell me anything to do to hasten the event. Returned to London I sent for Sir William Fergusson, and that honest man on hearing my story said simply: “And if you had gone to nobody and not bandaged your ankle, but merely bathed it, you would have been well in three weeks.” Thus I learned from the best authority, that I had paid for the folly of consulting an eminent surgeon for a common sprain, by four years of miserable helplessness and by the breaking up of my whole plan of life.
I must conclude this dismal record by one last trait of medical character. I had determined, after seeing Fergusson, to consult no other doctor; indeed I could ill afford to do so. But a friend conveyed to me a message from a London surgeon of repute (since dead) that he would like to be allowed to treat me gratuitously; having felt much interest in my books. I was simple enough to fall into the trap and to feel grateful for his offer: and I paid him several visits, during which he chatted pleasantly, and once did some trifling thing to relieve my foot. One day I wrote and asked him kindly to advise me by letter about some directions he had given me; whereupon he answered tartly that he “could not correspond; and that I must always attend at his house.” The suspicion dawned on me, and soon reached conviction, that what he wanted was not so much to cure me, as to swell the scanty show of patients in his waiting-room! Of course after this, I speedily retreated; offering many thanks and some small, and as I hoped, acceptable souvenir with inscription to lie on his table. But when I thought this had concluded my relations with Mr. ——, I found I had reckoned without my—doctor! One after another he wrote to me three or four peremptory notes requesting me to send him introductions for himself or his family, to influential friends of mine rather out of his sphere. I would rather have paid him fifty fees than have felt bound to give these introductions.
Finally I ceased to do anything whatever to my unfortunate ankle, except what most of my advisers had forbidden, namely, to walk upon it,—and a year or two afterwards I climbed Cader Idris; walking quietly with my friend to the summit. Sitting there, on the Giants’ Chair we passed an unanimous resolution. It was: “Hang the Doctors!”
I must now set down a few recollections of the many friends and interesting acquaintances whom I met at Bristol. In the first place I may say briefly that all Miss Carpenter’s friends (mostly Unitarians) were very kind to me, and that though I did not go out to any sort of entertainment while I lived with her, it was not for lack of hospitable invitations.
The family next to that of the Dean with which I became closely acquainted and to which I owed most, was that of Matthew Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, whose labours (summed up in his own Repression of Crime and in his Biography by his daughters) did more, I believe, than those of any other philanthropist beside Mary Carpenter, to improve the treatment of both adult and juvenile crime in England. I am not competent to offer judgment on the many questions of jurisprudence with which he dealt, but I can well testify to the exceeding goodness of his large heart, the massiveness of his grasp of his subjects, and (never-to-be-forgotten) his most delightful humour. He was a man who from unlucky chances never attained a position commensurate with his abilities and his worth, but who was beloved and admired in no ordinary degree by all who came near him. His family of sons and daughters formed a centre of usefulness in the neighbourhood of Bristol as they have since done in London, where Miss Hill is, I believe, now the senior member of the School Board, while her sister, Miss Florence Davenport Hill, has been equally active as a Poor Law Guardian, and most especially as the promoter of the great and farreaching reform in the management of pauper orphans, known as the system of Boarding-out, of which I have spoken in the last chapter. I must not indulge myself by writing at too great length of such friends, but will insert here a few notes I made of Recorder Hill’s wonderfully interesting conversation during a Christmas visit I paid to him at Heath House.
“Dec. 26th. I spent yesterday and last night with my kind friends the Hills at Heath House. In the evening I drew out the Recorder to speak of questions of evidence, and he told me many remarkable anecdotes in his own practice at the Bar, of doubtful identity, &c. On one occasion a case was tried three times; and he observed how the certainty of the witnesses, the clearness of details, and unhesitating asseveration of facts which at first had been doubtfully stated, grew in each trial. He said ‘the most dangerous of all witnesses are those who honestly give false witness—a most numerous class.’
“To-day he invited me to walk with him on his terrace and up and down the approach. The snow lay thick on the grass, but the sun shone bright, and I walked for more than an hour and a-half beside the dear old man. He told me how he had by degrees learned to distrust all ideas of Retribution, and to believe in the ‘aggressive power of love and kindness,’ (a phrase Lady Byron had liked); and how at last it struck him that all this was in the new Testament; and that few, except religious Christians, ever aided the great causes of philanthropy. I said, it was quite true, Christ had revealed that religion of love; and that there were unhappily very few who, having intellectually doubted the Christian creed, pressed on further to any clear or fervent religion beyond; but that without religion, i.e., love of God, I hardly believed it possible to work for man. He said he had known nearly all the eminent men of his time in every line, and had somehow got close to them, and had never found one of them really believe Christianity. I said, ‘No; no strong intellect of our day could do so, altogether; but that I thought it was faithless in us to doubt that if we pushed bravely on to whatever seemed truth we should there find all the more reason to love God and man, and never lose any real good of Christianity.’ He agreed, but said, ‘You are a watchmaker, I am a weaver; this is your work, I have a different one,—and I cannot afford to part with the Evangelicals, who are my best helpers. Thus though I wholly disagree with them about Sunday I never publish my difference.’ I said I felt the great danger of pushing uneducated people beyond the bounds of an authoritative creed, and for my own part would think it safest that Jowett’s views should prevail for a generation, preparatory to Theism.
“Then we spoke of Immortality, and he expressed himself nobly on the thought that all our differences of rich and poor, wise or ignorant, are lost in comparison of that one fact of our common Immortality. As he said, he felt that waiting a moment jostled in a crowd at a railway station, was a larger point in comparison of his whole life than this life is, to the future. We joined in condemning Emerson and George Eliot’s ideas of the ‘little value’ of ordinary souls. His burst of indignation at her phrase ‘Guano races of men’ was very fine. He said, talking of Reformatories, ‘A century hence,—in 1960,—some people will walk this terrace and talk of the great improvement of the new asylums where hopeless criminals and vicious persons will be permanently consigned. They will not be formally condemned for life, but we shall all know that they will never fulfil the conditions of their release. They will not be made unhappy, but forced to work and kept under strong control; the happiest state for them.’”
Here is a very flattering letter from Mr. Hill written a few years later, on receipt of a copy of my Italics:—
“The Hawthorns, “Edgbaston, Birmingham, “25th Oct., 1864.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“Although I am kept out of court to-day at the instance of my physician, who threatens me with bronchitis if I do not keep house, yet it has been a day not devoid of much enjoyment. Your charming book which, alas, I have nearly finished, is carrying me through it only too rapidly. What a harvest of observation, thought, reading, and discourse have you brought home from Italy! But I am too much overwhelmed with it to talk much about it, especially in the obfuscated state of my intellect to which I am just now reduced. But I must just tell you how I am amused in midst of my admiration, with your humility as regards your sex; said humility being a cloak which, opening a little at one page, discloses a rich garment of pride underneath (vide page 438 towards the bottom). I say no more, only as I don’t mean to give up the follies of youth for the next eight years, that is until I am eighty, I don’t choose to be called ‘venerable.’ One might as well consent to become an Archdeacon at once!
“Your portraits are delightful, some of the originals I know, and the likeness is good, but alas, idealized!
“To call your book a ‘trifling’ work is just as absurd as to call me ‘venerable.’ It deals nobly, fearlessly, and I will add in many parts profoundly, with the greatest questions that can employ human intellect or touch the human heart, and although I do not always agree with you, I always respect your opinions and learn from the arguments by which they are supported. But certainly in the vast majority of instances I do agree with you, and more than agree, which is a cold, unimpressive term.
“Most truly yours, “M. D. HILL.”
“Heath House, Stapleton, Bristol, “17th August, 1871.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“That is to say falsest of woman-kind! You have cruelly jilted me. Florry wrote to say you were coming here as you ought to have done long ago. Well, as your countryman, Ossian, or his double, Macpherson, says, ‘Age is dark and unlovely,’ and therefore the rival of the American Giantess turns a broad back upon me. I must submit to my fall....
“Though I take in the Echo, I have not lately seen any article which I could confidently attribute to your pen.
“I have, however, been much gratified with your article on The Devil, the only writing I ever read on the origin of evil which did not appear to me absolutely contemptible. Talking of these matters, Coleridge said to Thelwall (ex relatione Thelwall), ‘God has all the power that is, but there is no power over a contradiction expressed or implied.’ Your suggestion that the existence of evil is due to contradiction, is, I have no doubt, very just, but my stupid head is this morning quite unable to put on paper what is foggily floating in my mind, and so I leave it.
“I spent a good part of yesterday morning in reading the Westminster Review of Walt Whitman’s works, which quite laid hold of me.
“Most truly yours, “M. D. HILL.”
Another interesting person whom I first came to know at Bristol, (where he visited at the Deanery and at Dr. Symonds’ house,) was the late Master of Balliol. I have already cited some kind letters from him referring to our plans for Incurables and Workhouse Girls. I will be vain enough to quote here, with the permission of the friend to whom they were addressed, some of his remarks about my Intuitive Morals and Broken Lights; and also his opinion of Theodore Parker, which will interest many readers:—
“From Rev. Benjamin Jowett.
“January 22nd, 1861.
“I heard of your friend Miss Cobbe the other day at Fulham.... Pray urge her to go on with her books and try to make them more interesting. (This can only be done by throwing more feeling into them and adapting them more to what other people are thinking and feeling about). I am not speaking of changing her ideas, but the mode of expressing them. The great labour of writing is adapting what you say to others. She has great ability, and there is something really fine and striking in her views of things, so that it is worth while she should consider the form of her writings.”...
“April 16th, 1861.
“Let me pass to a more interesting subject—Miss Cobbe. Since I wrote to you last I have read the greater part of her book” (Intuitive Morals) “which I quite agree with you in thinking full of interest. It shows great power and knowledge of the subject, yet I should fear it would be hardly intelligible to anyone who had not been nourished at some time of their lives on the philosophy of Kant; and also she seems to me to be too exclusive and antagonistic towards other systems—e.g., the Utilitarian. All systems of Philosophy have their place and use, and lay hold on some minds, and therefore though they are not all equally true, it is no use to rail at Bentham and the Utilitarians after the manner of Blackwood’s Magazine. Perhaps, however, Miss Cobbe would retort on me that her attacks on the Utilitarians have their place and their use too; only they were not meant for people who ‘revel in Scepticism’ like me (the Saturday Review says, is it not very Irish of them to say so?) Pray exhort her to write (for it is really worth while) and not to spend her money and time wholly in schemes of philanthropy. For a woman of her ability, writing offers a great field, better in many respects than practical life.”
“October 10th, 1861.
“A day or two ago I was at Clifton and saw Miss Cobbe, who might be truly described as very ‘jolly.’ I went to a five o’clock tea with her and met various people—an aged physician named Dr. Brabant who about thirty years ago gave up his practice to study Hebrew and became the friend of German Theologians; Miss Blagden, whom you probably know, an amiable lady who has written a novel and is the owner of a little white puppy wearing a scarlet coat; Dr. Goodeve, an Indian Medical Officer; and various others.”...
“February 2nd, 1862.
“Remember me to Miss Cobbe. I hope she gains from you sound notions on Political Economy. I shall always maintain that Philanthropy is intolerable when not based on sound ideas of Political Economy.”
“June 4th, 1862.
“The articles in the Daily News I did not see. Were they Miss Cobbe’s? I read her paper in Fraser in which the story of the Carnival was extremely well told.”...
“March 15th, 1863.
“I write to thank you for Miss Cobbe’s pamphlet, which I have read with great pleasure. I think her writing is always good and able. I have never seen Theodore Parker’s works: he was, I imagine, a sort of hero and prophet; but I think I would rather have the Church of England large enough for us all with old memories and feelings, notwithstanding many difficulties and some iniquities, than new systems of Theism.”...
“March 10th, 1864.
“Miss Cobbe has also kindly sent me a little book called Broken Lights, which appears to me to be extremely good. (I think the title is rather a mistake.) I dare say that you have read the book. The style is excellent, and the moderation and calmness with which the different parties are treated is beyond praise. The only adverse criticism that I should venture to make is that the latter part is too much narrowed to Theodore Parker’s point of view, who was a great man, but too confident, I think, that the world could be held together by spiritual instincts.”
And here are three charming letters from Mr. Jowett to me, one of them in reply to a letter from me from Rome, the others of a later date.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I write to thank you for the Fraser which I received this morning and have read with great amusement and interest. I think that I should really feel happier living to see the end of the Pope, at least in his present mode of existence.
“I did indeed receive a most capital letter from you with a kind note from Miss Elliot. And ‘I do remember me of my faults this day.’ The truth is that being very busy with Plato (do you know the intolerable burden of writing a fat book in two vols.?) I put off answering the letters until I was not quite certain whether the kind writers of them were still at Rome. I thought the Plato would have been out by this time, but this was only one of the numerous delusions in which authors indulge. The notes, however, are really finished, and the Essays will be done in a few months. I suspect you can read Greek, and shall therefore hope to send you a copy.
“I was always inclined to think well of the Romans from their defence of Rome in 1848, and their greatness and strength really does seem to show that they mean to be the centre of a great nation.
“Will you give my very kind regards to the Elliots? I should write to them if I knew exactly where: I hear that the Dean is transformed into a worshipper of the Virgin and of other pictures of the Saints.[17]
“Believe me, dear Miss Cobbe, “Yours very truly, “B. JOWETT.
“Bal. Coll., May 19th.
“Coll. de Bal., Oxon.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I shall certainly read your paper on Political Economy. Political Economy seems to me in this imperfect world to be Humanity on a large scale (though not the whole of humanity). And I am always afraid of it being partially supplanted by humanity on the small scale, which relieves one-sixth of the poor whom we see, and pauperizes the mind of five-sixths whom we don’t see.
“I won’t trouble you with any more reflections on such an old subject. Remember me most kindly to the Dean and his daughters. I was going to send him a copy of the Articles against Dr. Williams. But upon second thoughts, I won’t. It is such an ungracious, unsavoury matter. I hope that he won’t give up the Prolocutorship, or that, if he does, he will state boldly his reasons for doing so. It is true that neither he nor anyone can do much good there. But the mere fact of a great position in the Church of England being held by a liberal clergyman is of great importance.
“I should have much liked to go to Rome this winter. But I am so entangled, first, with Plato, and, second, with the necessity of getting rid of Plato and writing something on Theology, that I do not feel justified in leaving my work. The vote of last Tuesday deferring indefinitely the endowment of my Professorship makes me feel that life is becoming a serious business to me. Not that I complain; the amount of sympathy and support which I have received has been enough to sustain anyone, if they needed it, (you should have seen an excellent squib written by a young undergraduate). But my friends are sanguine in imagining they will succeed hereafter. Next year it is true that they probably will get a small majority in Congregation. This, however, is of no use, as the other party will always bring up the country clergy in Convocation. I have, therefore, requested Dr. Stanley to take no further steps in the Council on the subject; it seems to me undignified to keep the University squabbling about my income.
“Excuse this long story which is partly suggested by your kind letter. I hope you will enjoy Rome. With sincere regard,
“Believe me, yours truly, “B. JOWETT.”
“Rev. Benjamin Jowett to Miss Cobbe. “Coll. de Ball., Oxon, “February 24th, 1865.
“My Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I write to thank you for your very kind note. I am much more pleased at the rejoicings of my friends than at the result which has been so long delayed as to be almost indifferent to me. I used to be annoyed at feeling that I was such a bad example to young men, because they saw, as they were intended to see, that unless they concealed their opinions they would suffer. I hope they will have more cheerful prospects now.
“I trust that some day I shall be able to write something more on Theology. But the Plato has proved an enormous work, having expanded into a sort of translation of the whole of the Dialogues. I believe this will be finished and printed about Christmas, but not before.
“I have been sorry to hear of your continued illness. When I come to London I shall hope to look in upon you in Hereford Square.
“In haste, believe me, “Yours very truly, “B. JOWETT.”
“I read a book of Theodore Parker’s the other day—‘Discourses on Religion.’ He was a friend of yours, I believe? I admire his character—a sort of religious Titan. But I thought his philosophy seemed to rest too much on instincts.”
How much Mr. Jowett had to bear from the animosity of his orthodox contemporaries in the Sixties at Oxford was illustrated by the following incident. I was, one day about this time, showing his photograph to a lady, when her son, late from Oxford, came into the room with a dog at his heels. Seeing the photograph, he remarked, “Ah, yes! very like. This dog pinned him in quod one day, and was made so much of afterwards! The Dean of —— especially invited him” (the dog) “to lunch. Jowett complained of me, and I had to send all my dogs out of Oxford!”
The following is a Note which I made of two of his visits to me on Durdham Down:
“Two visits from Mr. Jowett, who each time drank tea with me. He said he felt writing to be a great labour; but regularly wrote one page every day. The liberal, benevolent way he spoke of all creeds was delightful. In particular he spoke of the temptation to Pantheism and praised Hegel, whom, he said, he had studied deeply. Advising me kindly to go on writing books, he maintained against me the vast power of books in the world.”
Mr. Jowett was, of course, at all times a most interesting personality, and one whose intercourse was delightful and highly exciting to the intellect. But his excessive shyness, combined with his faculty for saying exceedingly sharp things, must have precluded, I should think, much ease of conversation between him and the majority of his friends. As usually happens in the case of shy people, he exhibited rather less of the characteristic with an acquaintance like myself who was never shy (my mother’s training saved me from that affliction!) and who was not at all afraid of him.
In later years Mr. Jowett obtained for me (in 1876) the signatures of the Heads of every College in Oxford to a Petition which I had myself written, to the House of Lords in favour of Lord Carnarvon’s original Bill for the restriction of Vivisection. At a later date the Master of Balliol declined to support me further in the agitation for the prohibition of the practice; referring me to the assurances of a certain eminent Boanerges of Science as guarantee for the necessity of the practice and the humanity of vivisectors. It is very surprising to me how good and strong men, who would disdain to accept a religious principle or dogma from pope or Council, will take a moral one without hesitation from any doctor or professor of science who may lay down the law for them, and present the facts so as to make the scale turn his way. Where would Protestant divines be, if they squared their theologies with all the historical statements and legends of Romanism? If we construct our ethical judgments upon the statements and representations of persons interested in maintaining a practice, what chance is there that they should be sound?
I find, in a letter to a friend (dated May, 1868) the following souvenir of a sermon by Mr. Jowett, delivered in a church near Soho:—
“We went to that sermon on Sunday. It was really very fine and very bold; much better than the report in the Pall Mall Gazette made it. Mr. Albert D—— was there, but few else who looked as if they could understand him. He has a good voice and delivery, and the “cherubic” countenance and appealing eyes suit the pulpit; but he looks at one as I never knew any preacher do. We sat close to him, and it was as if we were in a drawing-room. M. says that all the first part was taken from my Broken Lights; that is,—it was a sketch of existing opinions on the same plan. It was good when he said:
“The High church watchword is: The Church; always and ever the same.
“The Low church watchword is: The Bible only the Religion of Protestants.
“The party of Knowledge has for its principle: ‘The Truth ever and always, and wherever it be found.’
“He gave each their share of praise and blame, saying: ‘the fault of the last party’ (his own, of course) was—that ‘sometimes in the pursuit of Knowledge they forgot Goodness.’”
I heard him preach more than once afterwards in the same gloomy old church. His aspect in his surplice was exceedingly quaint. His face, even in old age, was like that of an innocent, round-faced child; and his short, slender figure, wrapped in the long white garment, irresistibly suggested to me the idea of “an elderly cherub prepared for bed”! Altogether, taking into account his entire career, the Master of Balliol was an unique figure in English life, whom I much rejoice to have known; a modern Melchisedek.
Here is another memorandum about the same date, respecting another eminent man, interesting in another way:—
“Sept. 25th, 1860. A pleasant evening at Canon Guthrie’s. Introduced to old Lord Lansdowne; a gentle, courteous old man with deep-set, faded grey eyes, and heavy eyebrows; a blue coat and brass buttons! In the course of the evening I was carrying on war in a corner of the room against the Dean of Bristol, Mr. C—— and Margaret Elliot, about Toryism. I argued that if Justice to all were the chief end of Government, the power should be lodged in the hands of the class who best understood Justice; and that the consequence of the opposite course was manifest in America, where the freest government which had ever existed, supported also the most gigantic of all wrongs—Slavery. On this Countess Rothkirch who sat by, clapped her hands with joy; and the Dean came down on me saying, ‘That if power should only be given to those who would use it justly, then the Tories should never have any power at all; for they never used it justly.’ Hearing the laughter at my discomfiture, Lord Lansdowne toddled across the room and sat down beside me saying: ‘What is it all about?’ I cried: ‘Oh Lord Lansdowne! you are the very person in the whole world to help me—I am defending Tory principles!’ He laughed heartily, and said ‘I am afraid I can hardly do that.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘you may be converted at the eleventh hour!’ ‘Don’t you know,’ he said, ‘what a child asked her mother: “Are Tories born wicked, mother, or do they only become so?”’ Margaret said this was really asked by a cousin of her own, one of the Adam family. It ended in much laughter and talking about ‘Transformation,’ and the ‘Semi-attached Couple‘—which Lord Lansdowne said he was just reading. ‘I like novels very much,’ he said, ‘only I take a little time between each of them.’ When I got up to go away the kind old man rose in the most courtly way to shake hands, and paid me a little old-world compliment.”
This was the eloquent statesman and patron of literature, Henry, third Marquis of Lansdowne, in whose time his house, (Bowood,) was the resort of the finest intellectual society of England. I have a droll letter in my possession referring to this Bowood society, by Sydney Smith, written to Mrs. Kemble, then Mrs. Butler. It has come to me with all her other papers and with seven letters from Lord Lansdowne pressing her to pay him visits. Sydney Smith writes on his invitation to her to come to Combe Fleury; after minute directions about the route:—
“The interval between breakfast and dinner brings you to Combe Fleury. We are the next stage (to Bowood). Lord Lansdowne’s guests commonly come here dilated and disordered with high living.”
In another letter conveying a similar invitation he says, with his usual bitterness and injustice as regards America:
“Be brave my dear lady. Hoist the American flag. Barbarise your manners. Dissyntax your language. Fling a thick mantle over your lively spirits, and become the fust of American women. You will always remain a bright vision in my recollection. Do not forget me. Call me Butler’s Hudibras. Any appellation provided I am not forgotten.”
Among the residents in Clifton and at Stoke Bishop over the Downs I had many kind friends, some of whom helped me essentially in my work by placing tickets for hospitals and money in my hands for the poor. One of these whom I specially recall with gratitude was that ever zealous moral reformer, Mrs. Woolcott Browne, who is still working bravely with her daughter for many good causes in London. I must not write here without permission of the many others whose names have not come before the public, but whose affectionate consideration made my life very pleasant, and whom I ever remember with tender regard. Of one excellent couple I may venture to speak,—Dr. and Mrs. Goodeve of Cook’s Folly. Mrs. Goodeve herself told me their singular and beautiful story, and since she and her husband are now both dead, I think I may allow myself to repeat it.
Dr. Goodeve was a young medical man who had just married, and was going out to seek his fortune in India, having no prospects in England. As part of their honeymoon holiday the young couple went to visit Cook’s Folly; then a small, half-ruinous, castellated building, standing in a spot of extraordinary beauty over the Avon, looking down the Bristol Channel. As they were descending the turret-stair and taking, as they thought, a last look on the loveliness of England, the young wife perceived that her husband’s head was bent down in deep depression. She laid her hand on his shoulder and whispered “Never mind, Harry? You shall make a fortune in India and we will come back and buy Cook’s Folly.”
They went to Calcutta and were there most kindly received by a gentleman named Hurry, who edited a newspaper and whose own history had been strange and tragic. Started in his profession by his interest, Dr. Goodeve soon fell into good practice, and by degrees became a very successful physician, the founder (I believe) of the existing Medical College of Calcutta. Going on a shooting party, his face was most terribly shattered by a chance shot which threatened to prove mortal, but Mrs. Goodeve, without help or appliances, alone with him in a tent in a wild district, pulled him back to life. At last they returned to England, wealthy and respected by all, and bringing a splendid collection of Indian furniture and curios. The very week they landed, Cook’s Folly was advertised to be sold! They remembered it well,—went to see it,—bought it—and rebuilded it; making it a most charming and beautiful house. A peculiarity of its structure as remodelled by them was, that there was an entire suite of rooms,—a large library overlooking the river Avon, bedroom, bathroom and servant’s room,—all capable of being shut off from the rest of the house, by double doors, so that the occupant might be quite undisturbed. When everything was finished, and splendidly furnished, the Goodeves wrote to Mr. Hurry: “It is time for you to give up your paper and come home. You acted a father’s part to us when we went out first to India. Now come to us, and live as with your son and daughter.”
Mr. Hurry accepted the invitation and found waiting for him and his Indian servant the beautiful suite of rooms built for him, and the tenderest welcome. I saw him often seated by their fireside just as a father might have been. When the time came for him to die, Mrs. Goodeve nursed him with such devoted care, and strained herself so much in lifting and helping him, that her own health was irretrievably injured, and she died not long afterwards.
I could write more of Bristol and Clifton friends, high and low, but must draw this chapter of my life to a close. I went to Bristol an utter stranger, knowing no human being there. I left it after a few years all peopled, as it seemed to me, with kind souls; and without one single remembrance of anything else but kindness received there either from gentle or simple.
XIV. ITALY. 1857–1879.
I visited Italy six times between the above dates. The reader need not be wearied by reminiscences of such familiar journeyings, which, in my case, were always made quickly through France, (a country which I intensely dislike) and extended pretty evenly over the most beautiful cities of Italy. I spent several seasons in Rome and Florence, and a winter in Pisa; and I visited once, twice or three times, Venice, Bologna, Naples, Perugia, Assisi, Verona, Padua, Genoa, Milan and Turin. The only interest which these wanderings can claim belongs to the people with whom they brought me into contact, and these include a somewhat remarkable list: Mr. and Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Somerville, Theodore Parker, Walter Savage Landor, Massimo d’ Azeglio, John Gibson, Charlotte Cushman, Count Guido Usedom, Adolphus Trollope and his first wife, Mr. W. W. Story, and Mrs. Beecher Stowe. Of many of these I gave slight sketches in my book, Italics; and must refer to them very briefly here. That book, I may mention, was written principally at Villa Gnecco, a beautiful villa at Nervi on the Riviera di Levante, then rented by my kind friend Count Usedom, the Prussian Ambassador and his English wife. Count Guido Usedom,—now alas! gone over to the majority,—was an extremely cultivated man, who had been at one time Secretary to Bunsen’s Embassy in Rome. He was so good as to undertake what I may call my (Italian) Political Education; instructing me not only of the facts of recent history, but of the dessous des cartes of each event as they were known to the initiated. He placed all his despatches for many years in my hands, and explained the policy of each nation concerned; and even taught me the cryptographs then in diplomatic use. His own letters to his King, the late Emperor Wilhelm I., were lively and delightful sketches of Italian affairs; for, as he said, he had discovered that to induce the King to read them they must be both amusing and beautifully transcribed. From him and the Prefects and other influential men who came to visit him at Villa Gnecco, I gained some views of politics not perhaps unworthy of record.
One day I asked him, “Whether it were exactly true that Cavour had told a distinct falsehood in the Chambers about Garibaldi’s invasion of Naples?” Count Usedom replied, “He did; and I do not believe there is a statesman in Europe who would not have done the same when a kingdom was in question.” He obviously thought, (scrupulously conscientious as he was himself) that, to diplomatists in general and their sovereigns, the laws of morality and honour were like ladies’ bracelets, highly ornamental and to be worn habitually, but to be slipped off when any serious work was to be done which required free hands. He said: “People (especially women) often asked me is such a King a good man? Is Napoleon III. a good man? This is nonsense. They are all good men, in so far that they will not do a cruel, or treacherous, or unjust thing without strong reasons for it. That would be not only a crime but a blunder. But when great dynastic interests are concerned, Kings and Emperors and their ministers are neither guided by moral considerations or deterred from following their interests because a life, or many lives, stand in the way.” He adduced Napoleon III.’s Coup d’état as an example. Napoleon was not a man to indulge in any cruel or vindictive sentiment; but neither was he one to forego a step needed for his policy.
The year following these studies under Count Usedom I was living in London, and met Mazzini one evening by special invitation alone at the house of Mr. and Mrs. James Stansfeld (I speak of Mr. Stansfeld’s first wife, sister of Madame Venturi). After dinner our hosts left us alone, and Mazzini, whom I had often met before and who was always very good to me, asked me if I would listen to his version of the recent history of Italy, since he thought I had been much misinformed on the subject? Of course I could only express my sense of the honour he did me by the proposal; and then, somewhat to my amazement and amusement, Mazzini descended from his armchair, seated himself opposite me cross-legged on the magnificent white rug before Mrs. Stansfeld’s blazing fire, and proceeded to pour out,—I believe for quite two hours,—the entire story of all that went before and after the siege of Rome, his Triumvirate, and the subsequent risings, plots and battles. If any one could have taken down that wonderful story in shorthand it would possess immense value, and I regret profoundly that I did not at least attempt, when I went home, to write my recollections of it. But I was merely bewildered. Each event which Mazzini named,—sitting so coolly there on the rug at my feet:—“I sent an army here, I ordered a rising there,” appeared under an aspect so entirely different from that which it had borne as represented to me by my political friends in Italy, that I was continually mystified, and asked: “But Signor Mazzini, are you talking of such and such an event?”—“Ma sì, Signora”—and off he would go again with vivid and eloquent explanations and descriptions, which fairly took my breath away. At last (I believe it was near midnight), Mrs. Stansfeld, who had, of course, arranged this effort for my conversion to Italian Republicanism, returned to the drawing-room; and I fear that the truly noble-hearted man who had done me so high a favour, rose disappointed from his lowly rug! He said to me at another time: “You English, who are blessed with loyal sovereigns, cannot understand that one of our reasons for being Republicans is, that we cannot trust our Kings and Grand Dukes an inch. They are each one of them a Rè Traditore!” One could quite concede that a constitutional government under a traitor-prince would not hold out any prospect of success; but at all events Victor Emanuel and Umberto have completely exonerated themselves from such suspicions.
To return to Italy and the men I know there. Count Usedom’s reference to Napoleon’s Coup d’état reminds me of the clever saying which I have quoted elsewhere, of a greater diplomatist than he; Cavaliere Massimo d’ Azeglio. Talking with him, as I had the privilege of doing every day for many months at the table d’hôte in the hotel where we both spent a winter in Pisa, I made some remark about the mistake of founding Religion on histories of Miracles. “Ah, les miracles!” exclaimed D’ Azeglio; “je n’en crois rien! Ce sont des coups d’état célestes!” Could the strongest argument against them have been more neatly packed in one simile? A coup d’état is a practical confession that the regular and orderly methods of Government have failed in the hands of the Governor, and that he is driven to have recourse to irregular and lawless methods to compass his ends and vindicate his sovereignty. A coup d’état is like the act of an impatient chess player who, finding himself losing the game while playing fairly, sweeps some pieces from the board to recover his advantage. Is this to be believed of Divine rule of the universe?
D’ Azeglio was one of those men, of whom I have met about a dozen in life, who impressed me as having in their characters elements of real greatness; not being merely clever or gifted, but large-souled. When I knew him he was a fallen Statesman, an almost forgotten Author, a General on the shelf, a Prime Minister reduced to living in a single room at an hotel, without a secretary or even a valet; yet he was the cheeriest Italian I ever knew. His spirits never seemed to falter. He was the life of our table every day, and I used to hear him singing continually over his watercolour drawing in his room adjoining mine at the Gran’ Bretagna, on the dull Lung-Arno of Pisa. The fate of Italy, which still hung in suspense, was, however, ever near his heart. One day it was talked over at the table d’hôte, and D’ Azeglio looked grave, and said: “We speak of this man and the other; but it is GOD who is making Italy!” It was so unusual a sentiment for an Italian gentleman to utter, that it impressed the listeners almost with awe. Another day, talking of Thackeray and the ugliness of his school of novelists, he observed: “It is all right to seek to express Truth. But why do these people always seem to think qu’il n’y a rien de vrai excepté le laid?” The reason,—I might have replied,—is, that it is extremely difficult to depict Beauty, and extremely easy to create Ugliness! Beauty means Proportion, Refinement, Elevation, Simplicity. How much harder it is to convey these truly, than Disproportion, Coarseness, Baseness, Duplicity? Since D’ Azeglio spoke we have gone on creating Ugliness and calling it Truth, till M. Zola has originated a literature in honour of LE LAID, and given us books like L’Assommoir in which it is perfected, almost as Beauty was of old in a statue of Praxiteles or in the Dresden Madonna.
One day that M. d’ Azeglio was doing me the honour of paying me a visit in my room, he narrated to me the following singular little bit of history. It seems that when he was Premier of Sardinia and Lord John Russell of England, the latter sent him through Lord Minto a distinct message,—“that he might safely undertake a certain line of policy, since, if a given contingency arose, England would afford him armed support.” The contingency did occur; but Lord Russell was unable to give the armed support which he had promised; “and this,” said D’ Azeglio, “caused my fiasco.” He resigned office, and, I think, then retired from public life; but some years later, being in England, he was invited to Windsor. There he happened to be laid up with a cold, and Lord Russell and Lord Minto, who were also guests at the castle, paid him a visit in his apartments. “Then,” said D’ Azeglio, “I turned on them both, and challenged them to say whether Lord Minto had not conveyed that message to me from Lord Russell, and whether he had not failed to keep his engagement? They did not attempt to deny that it was so.” D’ Azeglio (I understood him to say) had himself sent the Sardinian contingent to fight with our troops and the French in the Crimea, for the express and sole purpose of making Europe recognise that there was a Question d’Italie; (or possibly he spoke of this being the motive of the Minister who did so). Another remark which this charming old man made has remained very clearly on my memory for a reason to be presently explained. He observed, laughing: “People seem to think that Ministers have indefinite time at their disposal, but they have only 24 hours like other men, and they must eat and sleep and rest like the remainder of the human race. When I was Premier I calculated that dividing the subjects which demanded attention and the time I had to bestow on them, there were just three minutes and a-half on an average for ordinary subjects, and eight minutes for important ones! And if that be so in a little State like Piedmont, what must it be in the case of a Prime Minister of England? I cannot think how mortal man can bear the office!”
Many years afterwards I told this to an English Statesman, and he replied—with rather startling gaieté de cœur, considering the responsibilities for Irish murders then resting on his shoulders:—“Quite true, it is all a scuffle and a scramble from morning to night. If you had seen me two hours ago you would have found me listening to a very important dispatch read to me by one of my secretaries while I was dictating another, equally important; to another. All a scuffle and a scramble from morning to night!” Count Usedom told me that at one time he had been Minister of War in Prussia, and that he knew a great battle was imminent next day, the Prussian army having just come up with the enemy. He lay awake all night reflecting on the horrors of the ensuing fight; remembering that he had the power to telegraph to the General in command to stop it, and longing with all his soul to do so, but knowing that the act would be treachery to his country. Of this sort of anxiety I strongly suspect some statesmen have never felt a twinge.
It was at Florence in 1860 that I met Theodore Parker for the first time. After the letters of deep sympathy and agreement on religious matters which had passed between us, it was a strange turn of fate which brought him to die in Florence, and me to stand beside his death-bed and his grave. The world has, as is natural, passed on over the road which he did much to open, and his name is scarcely known to the younger generation; but looking back at his work and at his books again after thirty years, and when early enthusiasm has given place to the calm judgment of age, I still feel that Theodore Parker was a very great religious teacher and Confessor,—as Albert Reville wrote of him: “Cet homme fût un Prophète.” That is, he received the truths of what he called “Absolute Religion” at first hand in his own faithful soul, and spoke them out, fearless of consequences, with unequalled straightforwardness. He was not subtle-minded. He did not at all see obliquely round corners, as men like Cardinal Newman always seem to have done; nor estimate the limitations which his broad statements sometimes required. It would have been scarcely possible to have been both the man he was, and also a fine critic and metaphysician. But his was a clear, trumpet voice, to which many a freed and rejoicing spirit responded; and if he founded no sect or school, he did better. He infused into the religious life of England and America an element, hardly present before, of natural confidence in the absolute goodness of God independent of theologies. No man did more than he to awaken the Protestant nations from the hideous nightmare of an Eternal Hell, which within my own recollection, hovered over the piety of England. As he was wont himself to say, laughingly, he had “knocked the bottom out of hell!”
I will copy here some Notes of my only interviews with this honoured friend and teacher, to whom I owed so much:
“28th April. Saw Mr. Parker for the first time. He was lying in bed with his back to the light. Mrs. Parker brought me into the room. He took my hand tenderly and said in a low, hurried voice, holding it: ‘After all our wishes to meet, Miss Cobbe, how strange it is we should meet thus.’ I pressed his hand and he turned his eyes, which were trembling painfully and evidently seeing nothing, towards me and said, ‘You must not think you have seen me. This is not me, only the wreck of the man I was.’ Then, after a pause he added: ‘Those who love me most can only wish me a quick passage to the other world. Of course I am not afraid to die (he smiled as he spoke) but there was so much to be done!’ I said: ‘You have given your life to God and His truth as truly as any martyr of old.’ He replied: ‘I do not know; I had great powers committed to me, I have but half used them.’ I gave him a nosegay of roses and lily-of-the-valley. He smiled and touched the lily-of-the-valley, saying it was the sweetest of all flowers. I begged him, if his lodgings were not all he desired, to come to villa Brichieri” [a villa on Bellosguardo, which I then shared with Miss Blagden], “but he said he was most comfortable where he was. Then his mind wandered a little about a bad dream which haunted him, and I left him.”
“April 29th. I was told on arriving that Mr. Parker had spoken very tenderly of my visit of the day before, but had said, ‘I must not see her often. It makes my heart swell too high. But you (to his wife) must see her every day. Remember there is but one Miss Cobbe in the world.’ Afterwards he told Dr. Appleton that he wanted him to get an inkstand for me as a last gift. [This inkstand I have used ever since.] He received me very kindly, but almost at once his mind wandered, and he spoke of ‘going home immediately.’ He asked what day of the week it was? I said: ‘This is the blessed day; it is Sunday.’ ‘Ah yes!’ he said, ‘It is a blessed day when one has got over the superstition of it. I will try to go to you to-morrow.’ (Of course this was utterly out of the question.) Then he looked at the lily of Florence which I had brought, and told him how I had got it down from one of the old walls for him, and he smiled the same sweet smile as yesterday, and touched the beautiful blue Iris, and soon seemed to sleep.”
I called after this every day, generally twice a day, at the Pension Molini where he lay; but rarely could interchange a word. Parker’s friend, Dr. Appleton of Boston, who was faithfully attending him, sent for another friend, Prof. Desor, and they and the three ladies of the party nursed him, of course, devotedly. On the 10th May I saw him lying breathing quietly, while life ebbed gently. I returned to Bellosguardo and at eight o’clock in the evening Prof. Desor and Dr. Appleton came up to tell me he had passed peacefully away.
Parker had, long before his death, desired that the first eleven verses of the Sermon on the Mount should be read at his funeral. Whether he intended that they should form the only service was not known; but Desor and Appleton arranged that so it should be, and that they should be read by Rev. W. Cunningham, an American Unitarian clergyman who was fortunately at the time living near us on Bellosguardo, and who was a man of much feeling and dignity of aspect. The funeral took place on Sunday, the 13th May, at the beautiful old Campo Santo Inglese, outside the walls of Florence, which contains the dust of Mrs. Browning, of Arthur Hugh Clough, and many others dear to English memories. It was the first funeral I had ever attended. The coffin when I arrived, was already lying in the mortuary chapel. My companions placed a wreath of laurels on it, and I added a large bunch of the lily-of-the-valley which he had loved. Then eight Italian pall-bearers took up the coffin and carried it on a side-walk to the grave. When it had been lowered with some difficulty to the last resting-place, my notes say:—
“Dr. Appleton then handed a Bible to Mr. Cunningham. I was standing close to him and heard his voice falter. He read like a man who felt all the holy words he said, and those sacred Blessings came with unspeakable rest to my heart. Then Desor, who had been pale as death, threw in one handful of clay.... The burial ground is exquisitely lovely, a very wilderness of flowers and perfume. Only a few cypresses give it grandeur, not gloom. All Florence was decorated with flags in honour of the anniversary of Piedmontese Constitution. We said to one another: ‘It is a festival for us also—the solemn feast of an Ascension.’”
Of course I visited this grave when I returned to Florence several years afterwards. The cypresses had grown large and dark and somewhat shadowed it. I had the violets, &c., renewed upon it more than once, but I heard later that it had become somewhat dilapidated, and I was glad to join a subscription got up by an American gentleman to erect a new tombstone. I hope it has been done, as he would have desired, with simplicity. I shall never see that grave again.
Two or three years later I edited all the twelve vols. of Parker’s Works for Messrs. Trübner, and wrote a somewhat lengthy Preface for them; afterwards reprinted as a separate pamphlet entitled the Religious Demands of the Age. Three Biographies of Parker have appeared; the shortest, published in England by Rev. Peter Dean, being in my opinion the best. The letters which I received from Parker in the years before I saw him are all printed by my permission in Mr. Weiss’ Life, and therefore will not be reproduced here.
That venerable old man, Rev. John J. Tayler, writing to me a few years later, summed up Parker’s character I think as justly as did Mr. Jowett in calling him a “religious Titan.”
“I read lately with much pleasure your Preface to the forthcoming edition of Theodore Parker’s works. I agree cordially with your estimate of his character. His virtues were of the highest type of the hero and the martyr. His faults, such as they were, were such as are incident to every ardent and earnest soul fighting against wickedness and hypocrisy; faults which colder and more worldly natures easily avoid, faults which he shared with some of the best and noblest of our race—a Milton, a Luther, and a Paul. When freedom and justice have achieved some conquests yet to come, his memory will be cherished with deeper reverence and affection than it is, except by a small number, now.
“I remain, dear Miss Cobbe, very truly yours, “J. J. TAYLER.”
At the time of Parker’s death I was sharing the apartment of my clever and charming friend, Isa Blagden, in Villa Brichieri on Bellosguardo. It was a delightful house with a small podere off the road, and with a broad balcony (accommodating any number of chairs) opening from the airy drawing-room, and commanding a splendid view of Florence backed by Fiesole and the Apennines. On the balcony, and in our drawing-rooms, assembled regularly every week and often on other occasions, an interesting and varied company. We were both of us poor, but in those days poverty in Florence permitted us to rent 14 well-furnished rooms in a charming villa, and to keep a maid and a man-servant. The latter bought our meals every morning in Florence, cooked and served them; being always clean and respectably dressed. He swept our floors and he opened our doors and announced our company and served our ices and tea with uniform quietness and success. A treasure, indeed, was good old Ansano! Also we were able to engage an open carriage with a pair of horses to do our shopping and pay our visits in Florence as often as we needed. And what does the reader think it cost us to live like this, fire and candles and food for four included? In those halcyon days under the old régime, it was precisely £20 a month! We divided everything exactly and it never exceeded £10 apiece.
Among our most frequent visitors was Mr. Browning. Mrs. Browning was never able to drive so far, but her warm friendship for Miss Blagden was heartily shared by her husband and we saw a great deal of him. Always full of spirits, full of interest in everything from politics to hedge-flowers, cordial and utterly unaffected, he was at all times a charming member of society; but I confess that in those days I had no adequate sense of his greatness as a poet. I could not read his poetry, though he had not then written his most difficult pieces, and his conversation was so playful and light that it never occurred to me that I was wasting precious time chatting frivolously with him when I might have been gaining high thoughts and instruction. There was always a ripple of laughter round the sofa where he used to seat himself, generally beside some lady of the company, towards whom, in his eagerness, he would push nearer and nearer till she frequently rose to avoid falling off at the end! When we drove out in parties he would discuss every tree and weed, and get excited about the difference between eglantine and eglatere (if there be any), and between either of them and honeysuckle. He and Isa were always wrangling in an affectionate way over some book or music; (he was a fine performer himself on the piano), and one night when I had left Villa Brichieri and was living at Villa Niccolini at least half-a-mile off, the air, being in some singular condition of sonority, carried their voices between the walls of the two villas so clearly across to me that I actually heard some of the words of their quarrel, and closed my window lest I should be an eavesdropper. I believe it was about Spirit-rapping they were fighting, for which, and the professors of the art, Browning had a horror. I have seen him stamping on the floor in a frenzy of rage at the way some believers and mediums were deceiving Mrs. Browning.
Thirty years afterwards, the last time I ever had the privilege of talking with Robert Browning (it was in Surrey House in London), I referred to these old days and to our friend, long laid in that Campo Santo at Florence. His voice fell and softened, and he said: “Ah, poor, dear Isa!” with deep feeling.
At that time I do not think that any one, certainly no one of the society which surrounded him, thought of Mr. Browning as a great poet, or as an equal one to his wife, whose Aurora Leigh was then a new book. The utter unselfishness and generosity wherewith he gloried in his wife’s fame,—bringing us up constantly good reviews of her poems and eagerly recounting how many editions had been called for,—perhaps helped to blind us, stupid that we were! to his own claims. Never, certainly did the proverb about the “irritabile genus” of Poets prove less true. All through his life, even when the world had found him out, and societies existed for what Mr. Frederic Harrison might justly have called a “culte” of Browning, if not a “latria,” he remained the same absolutely unaffected, unassuming, genial English gentleman.
Of Mrs. Browning I never saw much. Sundry visits we paid to each other missed, and when I did find her at home in Casa Guidi we did not fall on congenial themes. I was bubbling over with enthusiasm for her poetry, but had not the audacity to express my admiration, (which, in truth, had been my special reason for visiting Florence;) and she entangled me in erudite discussions about Tuscan and Bolognese schools of painting, concerning which I knew little and, perhaps, cared less. But I am glad I looked into the splendid eyes which lived like coals, in her pain-worn face, and revealed the soul which Robert Browning trusted to meet again on the threshold of eternity.[18] Was there ever such a testimony as their perfect marriage,—living on as it did in the survivor’s heart for a quarter of a century,—to the possibility of the eternal union of Genius and Love?
I received in later years from Mr. Browning several letters which I may as well insert in this place.
“19, Warwick Crescent, W., “December 28th, 1874.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I return the Petition, for the one good reason, that I have just signed its fellow forwarded to me by Mr. Leslie Stephen. You have heard ‘I take an equal interest with yourself in the effort to suppress Vivisection.’ I dare not so honour my mere wishes and prayers as to put them for a moment beside your noble acts, but this I know, I would rather submit to the worst of deaths, so far as pain goes, than have a single dog or cat tortured on the pretence of sparing me a twinge or two. I return the paper, because I shall be probably shut up here for the next week or two, and prevented from seeing my friends, whoever would refuse to sign would certainly not be of the number.”
“Ever truly and gratefully yours, “ROBERT BROWNING.”
“19, Warwick Crescent, W., “July 3rd, 1881.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I wish I were not irretrievably engaged on Monday afternoon, twice over, as it prevents me from accepting your invitation. By all I hear, Mr. Bishop’s performance must be instructive to those who need it, and amusing to everybody.[19]
“Thank you very much, “Ever truly yours, “ROBERT BROWNING.”
“19, Warwick Crescent, W., “October 22nd, 1882,
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“It is about a week ago since I had to write to the new Editor of the ‘Fortnightly,’ Mr. Escott—and assure him that I was so tied and bound by old promises ‘to give something to this and that Magazine if I gave at all’—that it became impossible I could oblige anybody in even so trifling a matter. It comes of making rash resolutions—but, once made, there is no escape from the consequence—though I rarely have felt this so much of a hardship as now when I am forced to leave a request of yours uncomplied with. For the rest, I shall indeed rejoice if that abominable and stupid cruelty of pigeon-shooting is put a stop to. The other detestable practice, Vivisection, strikes deeper root, I fear; but God bless whoever tugs at it!
“Ever yours most truly, “ROBERT BROWNING.”
Another of our most frequent visitors at Villa Brichieri was Mr. T. Adolphus Trollope, author of the Girlhood of Catherine de’ Medici, “A Decade of Italian Women” and other books. Though not so successful an author as his brilliant brother Anthony, he was an interesting man, whom we much liked. One day he came up and pressed us to go back with him and pay a visit to a guest at his Villino Trollope in the Piazza Maria Antonia,—a lovely house he had built, with a broad verandah behind it, opening on a garden of cypresses and oranges backed by the old crenelated and Iris-decked walls of Florence. He had, he told us, a most interesting person staying with him and Mrs. Trollope;—Mrs. Lewes—who had written Adam Bede, and was then writing Romola. Miss Blagden alone went with him, and was enchanted, like all the world, with George Eliot.
Mr. Trollope told me many curious facts concerning Italian society which, from his long residence, he knew more intimately than almost any other foreigner. He described the marriage settlement of a nobleman which had actually passed through his hands, wherein the intending husband, with wondrous foresight and precaution, deliberately named three or four gentlemen, amongst whom his future wife might choose her cavaliere servente!
We had several other habitués at our villas; Dall’ Ongaro, a poet and ex-priest; Romanelli, the sculptor; and Miss Linda White, now Madame Villari, the charming authoress and hostess of a brilliant salon, wife of the eminent historian who was recently Minister of Education.
Perhaps the most interesting of our visitors, after Mr. Browning, was Mrs. Beecher Stowe. She impressed me much, and the criticisms I have read of her “Sunny Memories” and other books have failed to diminish my admiration for her. She was one of the few women, I suppose, who have actually felt Fame, as heroes do who receive national Triumphs; and she seemed to be as simple and unpretentious, as little elated as it was possible to be. She had even a trick of looking down as if she had been stared out of countenance; but this was perhaps a part of that singular habit which most Evangelicals of her class exhibited thirty years ago, of shyness in society and inability to converse except with the person seated next them in company. It was the verification after eighteen centuries of the old heathen taunt against the Christians, recorded in the dialogues of Minucius Felix, “In publicam muta, in angulis garrula!” I have recorded elsewhere Mrs. Stowe’s remark when I spoke with grief of the end of Theodore Parker’s work. “Do you think,” she said, suddenly looking up at me with flashing eyes, “that Theodore Parker has no work to do for God now?” I must not repeat again her interesting conversation as we sat on our balcony watching the sun go down over the Val d’ Arno. After much serious talk as to the nearness of the next life, Mrs. Stowe narrated a saying of her boy on which, (as I told her), a good heterodox sermon in my sense might be preached. She taught the child that Anger was sinful, whereupon he asked: “Then why, Mama, does the Bible say so often that God was angry?” She replied motherlike: “You will understand it when you are older.” The boy pondered seriously for awhile and then burst out: “O Mama, I have found it out! God is angry, because God is not a Christian!”
Another of our habitués on my first visit to Florence was Walter Savage Landor. At that time he was, with his dear Pomeranian dog, Giallo, living alone in very ordinary lodgings in Florence, having quarrelled with his family and left his villa in their possession. He had a grand, leonine head with long white hair and beard, and to hear him denouncing his children was to witness a performance of Lear never matched on any stage! He was very kind to me, and we often walked about odd nooks of Florence together, while he poured out reminiscences of Byron and Shelley, some of which I have recorded (Chap. IX., p. 257), and of others of the older generation whom he had known, so that I seemed in touch with them all. He was then about 88 years of age, and perhaps his great and cultivated intellect was already failing. Much that he said in wrath and even fury seemed like raving, but he was gentle as a child to us women, and to his dog whom he passionately loved. When I wrote the first Memorial against Prof. Schiff which started the anti-vivisection crusade, Mr. Landor’s name was one of the first appended to it. He added some words to his signature so fierce and contemptuous that I never dared to publish them!
We also saw much of Dr. Grisanowski, a very clever Pole, who afterwards became a prominent advocate of the science-tortured brutes. When I discussed the matter with him he was entirely on the side of Science. After some years he sent me his deeply thought-out pamphlet, with the endorsement “For Miss Cobbe,—who was right when I was wrong;” a very generous retractation. We also received Mr. Frederick Tennyson, (Lord Tennyson’s brother), Madame Venturi, Madame Alberto Mario, the late Lord Justice Bowen, (then a brilliant young man from Oxford,) and many more.
By far the best and dearest of my friends in Florence however, was one who never came up our hill, and who was already then an aged woman—Mrs. Somerville. I had brought a letter of introduction to her, being anxious to see one who had been such an honour to womanhood; but I expected to find her an incarnation of Science, having very little affinity with such a person as I. Instead of this, I found in her the dearest old lady in all the world, who took me to her heart as if I had been a newly-found daughter, and for whom I soon felt such tender affection that sitting beside her on her sofa, (as I mostly did on account of her deafness) I could hardly keep myself from caressing her. In a letter to Harriet St. Leger I wrote of her: “She is the very ideal of an old lady, so gentle, cordial and dignified, like my mother; and as fresh, eager and intelligent now, as she can ever have been.” Her religious ideas proved to be exactly like my own; and being no doubt somewhat a-thirst for sympathy on a subject on which she felt profoundly, (her daughters differing from her), she opened her heart to me entirely. Here are a few notes I made after talks with her:—
“Mrs. Somerville thinks no one can be eloquent who has not studied the Bible. We discussed the character of Christ. She agreed to all I said, adding she thought it clear the Apostles never thought he was God, only the image of the perfection of God. She kissed me tenderly when I rose to go and bade me come back at any hour—at three in the morning if I liked!—May 18th. Mrs. Somerville gave me her photograph. She says she always feels a regret thinking of the next life that we shall see no more the flowers of this world. I said we should no doubt see others still fairer. “Ah! yes,” she said, “but our own roses and mignonette! I shall miss them. The dear animals I believe we shall meet. They suffer so often here, they must live again.”—June 3rd. Wished farewell to Mrs. Somerville. She said kissing me with many tears, “We shall meet in Heaven! I shall claim you there.”
I saw Mrs. Somerville again on my other visits to Italy, at Genoa, Spezzia and Naples; of course making it a great object of my plans to be for some weeks near her. In my last journey, in 1879, I saw at Naples the noble monument erected over her grave by her daughter. It represents her (heroic size) reclining on a classic chair,—in somewhat the attitude of the statue of Agrippina in the Vatican.
Mrs. Somerville ought to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. When I saw her death announced on the posters of the newspapers in the streets in London, I hurried as soon as I could recover myself, to ask Dean Stanley to arrange for her interment in the Abbey. The Dean consented freely and with hearty approval to my proposition, and Mrs. Somerville’s nephew, Sir William Fairfax, promised at once to defray all expenses. There was only one thing further needed, and that was the usual formal request from some public body or official persons to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Dean Stanley had immediately written to the Astronomer Royal to suggest that he and the President of the Royal Society, as the representatives of the sciences with which Mrs. Somerville’s fame was connected, should address to him the demand which would authorize his proceeding with the matter. But that gentleman refused to do it—on the ground that he had never read Mrs. Somerville’s books! Whether he had read one in which she took the opposite side from his in the sharp and angry Adams-Le Verrier controversy, it is not for me to say. Any way, jealousy, either scientific or masculine, declined to admit Mary Somerville’s claims to a place in the national Valhalla, wherein so many men neither intellectually nor morally her equals have been welcomed.
From the time of our first meeting till her death in 1872, Mrs. Somerville maintained a close correspondence with me. I have had all her beautifully-written letters bound together, and they form a considerable volume. Of course it was a delight to me to send her everything which might interest her, and among other things I sent her a volume of Theodore Parker’s Prayers; edited by myself. In October, 1863, I spent a long time at Spezzia to enjoy the immense pleasure of her society. I was then a cripple and unable to walk to her house, and wrote of her visits as follows to Miss Elliot:
“Mrs. Somerville comes to me every day. She is looking younger than three years ago and she talked to me for three hours yesterday, pouring out such stores of recent science as I never heard before. Then we talked a little heresy, and she thanked me with tears in her eyes for Parker’s Prayers, saying she had found them the greatest comfort and the most perfect expression of religious feeling of any prayers she has known.”
Another time I sent her my Hopes of the Human Race. She wrote, three weeks before her death, “God bless you dearest friend for your irresistible argument for our Immortality! Not that I ever doubted of it, but as I shall soon enter my ninety-third year, your words are an inexpressible comfort.”
Mary Somerville was the living refutation of all the idle, foolish things which have been said of intellectual women. There never existed a more womanly woman. Her Life, edited by her eldest daughter Martha Somerville (her son by her first marriage, Mr. Woronzow Greig, died long before her), has been much read and liked. I reviewed it in the Quarterly (January, 1874), and am tempted to enclose a letter which Martha Somerville (then and always my good friend) wrote about it:
“From Miss Somerville to F. P. C.
“22nd January, Naples.
“My dear Frances,
“I have this morning received the Quarterly Review and some slips from newspapers. What can I say to express my gratitude to you for the article,—so admirably written; and giving so touching a picture of my Mother,—as you, her best friend (notwithstanding the great difference of age) knew her? Also I received lately the Academy which pleased me much, too. The Memoir has been received far more favourably than I ventured to expect.”
A long time after this, I paid a visit to friends at St. Andrews and stopped from Saturday to Monday, on my way, at Burntisland. Writing from thence to Miss Elliot about her own country, and countrymen, I said:—
“I came here to look up the scene of Mrs. Somerville’s childhood, and I have found everything just as she described it;—the Links; the pretty hills and woods full of wild flowers; the rocky bit of shore with boulders full of fossil shells which excited her childish wonder when she wandered about, a beautiful little girl, as she must have been. If ever there were a case of—
“‘Nourishing a youth sublime, With the fairy tales of science and the long results of Time,’
it was surely hers. Very naturally I was thinking of her all day and wondering whether she is now studying the flora of Heaven, of which she used to speak, and pursuing Astronomy among the stars; or whether it can be possible these things pass away for ever! I wanted very much to make out where Sir William Fairfax’ house had been, and finally was directed to the schoolmaster who, it was said, knew all about it. I found the good man in a large schoolhouse where he has 600 pupils; and as soon as he learned my name he seized my hand and made great demonstrations; and straightway proceeded to constitute himself my guide to the localities in question. The joke however was this. Hardly were we out of the house before he said, ‘I’ll send you a pamphlet of mine—not about Science, I don’t care for Science, I care for Morals;—and I’ve found out there is only a very little thing to be done, to stop all pauperism and all crime! You are just the person to understand me!’ The idea of this poor schoolmaster in Burntisland compressing that modest programme into a ‘pamphlet’ seems to me deliciously characteristic of Scotland.”
A college for Ladies was opened some years ago at Oxford and named after Mrs. Somerville. I greatly rejoiced at the time at this very fitting tribute to her memory; and induced my brother to send his daughter, my dear niece, Frances Conway Cobbe, to the Hall. I ceased to rejoice, however, when I found that a lady bearing a name identified with Vivisection in England was nominated for election as a member of the Council of the College. I entered, (as a Subscriber,) the most vigorous protest I could make against the proposed choice, but, alas! in vain.
One of our visitors at Villa Brichieri was a very pious French lady, who came up to us one day to dinner straight from her devotions in the Duomo, where a Triduo was going on against Renan; and, as it chanced, she began to praise somewhat excessively a lady of rank whose reputation had suffered more than one serious injury. My English friend remarked, smiling, in mitigation of the eulogy:—
“Elle a eue ses petits délassements!”
the answer was deliciously XVIII. Century—
“C’est ce qui m’occupe le moins. Pourvu que cela soit fait avec du bon goût! D’ailleurs on ne parle sérieusement que de deux ou trois. Le Prince de S., par exemple. Encore est il mort celui-là!”
It was during one of my visits to Florence that I saw King Victor Emanuel’s public entry into the city, which had just elected him King. This is how I described the scene to Harriet St. Leger:—
“Happily we had a fine day for the king’s entry on Monday last. It was a glorious sight! The beautiful old city blossomed out in flowers, flags, garlands, hangings and gonfalons beyond all English imagination. In every street there was a triumphal arch, while boulevards of artificial trees loaded with camelias, ran from the railway to the gate and down the via Calzaiuoli. Even the mean little sdrucciolo de’ Pitti was made into one long arbour by twenty green arches sustaining hanging baskets of flowers. The Pitti itself had its rugged old face decked with wreaths. I had the good fortune to stand on a balcony commanding a view of the whole procession. Victor Emanuel, riding his charger of Solferino, looked—coarse and fat as he is,—a man and a soldier, and more sympathetic than Kings in general. Cavour has a Luther-like face, which wore a gleam of natural pleasure at his reception. The people were quite mad with joy. They did not cheer as we do, but uttered a sort of deep roar of ecstacy, flinging clouds of flowers under the King’s horse’s feet, and seeming as if they would fling themselves also from their balconies. Our hostess, an Italian lady, went directly into hysterics, and all the party, men and women cried and kissed and laughed in the wildest way. At night there was a marvellous illumination, extending as far as the eye could reach, in every palazzo and cottage down the Val d’ Arno and up the slopes of the Apennines, where bonfires blazed on all the heights.”
In Florence my friends had been principally literary men and women. In Rome they were chiefly artists. Harriet Hosmer, to whom I had letters, was the first I knew. She was in those days the most bewitching sprite the world ever saw. Never have I laughed so helplessly as at the infinite fun of this bright Yankee girl. Even in later years when we perforce grew a little graver, she needed only to begin one of her descriptive stories to make us all young again. I have not seen her now for many years since she has returned to America, nor yet any one in the least like her; and it is vain to hope to convey to any reader the contagion of her merriment. O! what a gift,—beyond rubies, are such spirits! And what fools, what cruel fools, are those who damp them down in children possessed of them!
Of Miss Hosmer’s sculpture I hoped, and every one hoped, great things. Her Zenobia, her Puck, her Sleeping Faun were beautiful creations in a very pure style of art. But she was lured away from sculpture by some invention of her own of a mechanical kind, over which many years of her life have been lost. Now I believe she has achieved a fine statue of Isabella of Spain, which has been erected in San Francisco.
Jealous rivals in Rome spread abroad at one time a slanderous story that Harriet Hosmer did not make her own statues. I have in my possession an autograph by her master, Gibson, which he wrote at the time to rebut this falsehood, and which bears all the marks of his quaint style of English composition.
“Finding that my pupil Miss Hosmer’s progress in her art begins to agitate some rivals of the male sex, as proved by the following malicious words printed in the Art journal;—
“‘Zenobia—said to be by Miss Hosmer, but really executed by an Italian workman at Rome’;—
“I feel it is but justice on my part to state that Miss Hosmer became my pupil on her arrival at Rome from America. I soon found that she had uncommon talent. She studied under my own eyes for seven years, modelling from the antique and her own original works from the living models.
“The first report of her Zenobia was that it was the work of Mr. Gibson. Afterwards that it is by a Roman workman. So far it is true that it was built up by my man from her own original small model, according to the practice of our profession; the long study and finishing is by herself, like every other sculptor.
“If Miss Hosmer’s works were the productions of other artists and not her own there would be in my studio two impostors—Miss Hosmer and Myself.
“JOHN GIBSON, R.A. “Rome, Nov., 1863.”
Gibson was himself a most interesting person; an old Greek soul, born by haphazard in a Welsh village. He had wonderfully little (for a Welshman) of anything like what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls Hebraism in his composition. There was a story current among us of some one telling him of a bet which had been made that another member of our society could not repeat the Lord’s Prayer; and it was added that the party defied to repeat it had begun (instead of it) with a doggerel American prayer for children:—
“Before I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
“Ah! you see,” said Gibson, “He did know the Lord’s Prayer after all!”
Once he sat by me on the Pincian and said: “You know I don’t often read the Bible, I have my sculpture to attend to. But I have had to look into it for my bas-relief of the Children coming to Christ, and, do you know, I find that Jesus Christ really said a good thing?”
I smothered my laughter, and said: “O certainly, Mr. Gibson, a great many excellent things.” “Yes!” he said in his slow way. “Yes, he did. There were some people called Pharisees who came and asked him troublesome questions. And he said,—he said,—well, I forget exactly what he said, but ‘Deeds not words,’ was what he meant to say.”
The exquisite grace of Gibson’s statues was all a part of the purity and delicacy of his mind. He was in many respects an unique character; a simple-hearted and single-minded worshipper of Beauty; and if my good friend Lady Eastlake had not thought fit to prune his extraordinarily quaint and original Autobiography, (which I have read in the MS.) to ordinary book form and modernised style, I believe it would have been deemed one of the gems of original literature, like Benvenuto Cellini’s, and the renown of Gibson as a great artist would have been kept alive thereby.
A merry party, of whom Mr. Gibson was usually one, used to meet frequently that winter at the hospitable table of Charlotte Cushman, the actress. She had, then, long retired from the stage, and had a handsome house in the via Gregoriana, in which also lived her friend Miss Stebbins and Miss Hosmer. Our dinners of American oysters and wild boar with agro-dolce-sauce, and déjeuners including an awful refection menacing sudden death, called “Woffles,” eaten with molasses (of which woffles I have seen five plates divided between four American ladies!) were extremely hilarious. There was a brightness, freedom and joyousness among these gifted Americans, which was quite delightful to me. Miss Cushman in particular I greatly admired and respected. She had, of course, like all actors, the acquired habit of giving vivid outward expression to every emotion, just as we quiet English ladies are taught from our cradles to repress such signs, and to cultivate a calm demeanour under all emergencies. But this vivacity rendered her all the more interesting. She often read to us Mrs. Browning’s or Lowell’s poetry in a very fine way indeed. Some years after this happy winter a certain celebrated London surgeon pronounced her to be dying of a terrible disease. She wished us farewell courageously, and went back to New England, as we all sadly thought to die there. The next thing we heard of Charlotte Cushman was, that she had returned to the stage and was acting Meg Merrilies to immense and delighted audiences! Next we heard that she had thus earned £5,000, and that she was building a house with her earnings. Finally we learned that the house was finished, and that she was living in it! She did so, and enjoyed it for some years before the end came from other causes than the one threatened by the great London surgeon.
One day when I had been lunching at her house, Miss Cushman asked whether I would drive with her in her brougham to call on a friend of Mrs. Somerville, who had particularly desired that she and I should meet,—a Welsh lady, Miss Lloyd, of Hengwrt? I was, of course, very willing indeed to meet a friend of Mrs. Somerville. We happily found Miss Lloyd, busy in her sculptor’s studio over a model of her Arab horse, and, on hearing that I was anxious to ride, she kindly offered to mount me if I would join her in her rides on the Campagna. Then began an acquaintance, which was further improved two years later when Miss Lloyd came to meet and help me when I was a cripple, at Aix-les-Bains; and from that time, now more than thirty years ago, she and I have lived together. Of a friendship like this, which has been to my later life what my mother’s affection was to my youth, I shall not be expected to say more.
On my way home through France to Bristol from one of my earlier journeys and before I became crippled, I had the pleasure of making for the first time the acquaintance of Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur. Miss Lloyd, who knew her very intimately and had worked in her studio, gave me an introduction to her and I reported my visit in a letter to Miss Lloyd in Rome.
“Mdlle Bonheur received me most cordially when I sent up your note. She was working in that most picturesque studio (at By, near Thoméry). I had fancied from her picture that she was so much taller and larger that I hardly supposed that it was she who greeted me, but her face is charming; such fine, clear eyes looking straight into one’s own, and frank bearing; an Englishwoman’s honesty with a Frenchwoman’s courtesy. She spoke of you with great warmth of regard; remembered everything you had said, and wanted to know all about your sculpture studies in Rome. I said it had encouraged me to intrude on her to hope I might persuade her to fulfil her promise of stopping with you next winter, and added how very much you wished it, and described the association she would have with you, sketching excursions, bovi, and Thalaba” (Miss Lloyd’s Arab horse). “She said over and over she would not go to Italy without going to see you; and that she hoped to go soon, possibly next winter.... Somehow, from talking of Italy we passed to talking of the North, which Mdlle. Bonheur thinks has a deeper poetry than the South, and then to Ireland, where she wishes to go next summer (I hope stopping at my brother’s en passant) and of which country she said such beautiful, dreamy things that even I grew poetic about our ‘Brumes,’—to which she quickly applied the epithet ‘grandiose,’—and our sea, looking, I said, like an angel’s eye with a tear in it. At this simile she was so pleased that we grew quite friends, and I can only hope she will not see that sea on a grey day and think me an impostor! Nothing I liked about her, so much, however, as her interest in Hattie Hosmer, and her delight in hearing about her Zenobia[20] (triumphans) in the Exhibition; at which report of mine she exclaimed: ‘That is the thing above all others I shall wish to see in London! You know I have seen Miss Hosmer, but I have never seen any of her works, and I do very much desire to do so’.... Her one-eyed friend sat by painting all the time. She is not enticing to look at, but I dare say, not bad. I said I always envied friends whom I caught working together and that I lived alone; to which she replied ‘Je vous plains alors!’ in a tone of conviction, showing that, in her case at all events, friendship was a very pleasant thing. Mdlle. Bonheur showed me three or four fine pictures she is painting, and some prints, but of course I was as stupid as usual in studios and only remarked (as a buffalo might have done,) that Roman bovi were more majestic and like Homeric Junos than those wiry little Scotch short-horns her soul delighteth to honour. But O! she has done a Dog, such a dog! Like Bush in outward dog, but the inner soul of him more profoundly, unutterably wise than tongue may tell! a Dog to be set up and worshipped as Anubis. Certainly Mdlle. Bonheur is a finer artist than Landseer in this, his own line. I wish she would leave the cattle and ‘go to the dogs.’”
My last journey but one to Italy was taken when I was lame; and, after my sojourn at Aix-les-Bains, I spent the autumn in Florence and the winter in Pisa; where I met Cav. d’ Azeglio as above recorded. Miss Lloyd rejoined me at Genoa in the spring to help me to return to England, as I was still (after four years!) miserably helpless. We returned over Mont Cenis which had no tunnel through it in those days; and, on the very summit, our carriage broke down. We were in a sad dilemma, for I was quite unable to walk a hundred yards; but a train of carts happily coming up and lending us ropes enough to hold our trap together for my use alone, Miss Lloyd ran down the mountain, and at last we found ourselves safe at the bottom.
After another very pleasant visit together to her friend Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur, and many promises on her part to come to us in England (which, alas! she never fulfilled) we made our way to London; and, within a few weeks, Miss Lloyd—one morning before breakfast,—found, and, in an incredibly short time, bought the dear little house in South Kensington which became our home with few interruptions for a quarter of a century; No. 26, Hereford Square. It was at that time almost at the end of London. All up the Gloucester Road between it and the Park were market-gardens; and behind it and alongside of it, where Rosary Gardens and Wetherby Place now stand, there were large fields of grass with abundance of fine old lime trees and elms, and one magnificent walnut tree which ought never to have been cut down. Behind us we had a large piece of ground, which we rented temporarily and called the “Boundless Prairie,” (!) where we gave afternoon tea to our friends under the limes, when they were in bloom. On a part of our garden Miss Lloyd erected a sculptor’s Studio. The House itself, though small, was very pretty and airy; every room in it lightsome and pleasant, and somehow capable of containing a good many people. We often had in it as many as 50 or 60 guests. In short, I had once more a home, and a most happy one; and my lonely wanderings were over.
XV. LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES. LITERARY LIFE.
For some time before I took up my abode in London I had been writing busily for the press. When my active work at Bristol came to an end and I became for four years a cripple, I naturally turned to use my pen, and, finding from my happy experience of Workhouse Sketches in Macmillan’s Magazine that I could make money without much difficulty, I soon obtained almost as many openings as I could profit by to add to my income. I wrote a series of articles for Fraser’s Magazine, then edited by Mr. Froude, who had been my brother’s friend at Oxford, and who from that time I had the high privilege to count as mine also. These first papers were sketches of Rome, Cairo, Athens, Jerusalem, etc.; and they were eventually reprinted in a rather successful little volume called Cities of the Past, now long out of print. I also wrote many papers connected with women’s affairs and claims, in both Macmillan and Fraser; and these likewise were reprinted in a volume; Pursuits of Women. Beside writing these longer articles, I acted as “Own Correspondent” to the Daily News in Rome one year, and in Florence another, and sent a great many articles to the Spectator, Economist, Reader, &c. In short I turned out (as a painter would say) a great many Pot-Boilers. These, with my small patrimony, enabled me to bear the expense of travelling and of keeping a maid; a luxury which had become indispensable.
I also at this time edited, as I have mentioned, for Messrs. Trübner, the 12 vols. of Parker’s Works, with a Preface. The arrangement of the great mass of miscellaneous papers was very laborious and perplexing, but I think I marshalled the volumes fairly well. I did not perform as fully as I ought to have done my editorial duty of correcting for the press; indeed I did not understand that it fell to my share, or I must have declined to undertake the task. Mr. Trübner paid me £50 for this editing, which I had proposed to do gratuitously.
I had much at heart,—from the time I gave up my practical work among the poor folk at Bristol,—to write again on religious matters, and to help so far as might be possible for me to clear a way through the maze of new controversies which, in those days of Essays and Reviews, Colenso’s Pentateuch and Renan’s Vie de Jésus, were remarkably lively and wide-spread through all classes of society. With this hope, and while spending a summer in my crippled condition at Aix-les-Bains, and on the Diablerêts, I wrote to Harriet St. Leger:—
“I am now striving to write a book about present controversies and the future basis of religious faith. I want to do justice to existing parties, High, Low and Broad, yet to show (as of course I believe) that none of them can really solve the problem; and that the faith of the future must be one not based on a special History, though corroborated by all history.”
The plan of this book—named Broken Lights—is as follows: I discriminate the different sections of thinkers from the point of view of the answers they would respectively give to the supreme question, “What are the ultimate grounds of our faith in God, in Duty and in Immortality?” First, I distinguish between those who hold those grounds to rest on the Traditional Revelation; and those who hold them to be the Original Revelation of the Divine Spirit in each faithful soul. The former are divided again, naturally, into those who take their authoritative tradition from a Living Prophet, a Church, or a Book. But in Christian times we have only had a few obscure prophets (Montanus, Joseph Smith, Swedenborg, Brother Prince, Mr. Harris, &c.), and the choice practically lies between resting faith on a Church, or resting it on a Book.
I classify both the parties in the English Church who rest respectively on a Church and on a Book, as Palæologians, the one, the High Church, whose ground of religious faith is: “The Bible authenticated and interpreted by the Church;” and the other the Low Church, whose theory is still the formula of Chillingworth: “The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.”
But it has come to pass that all the distinctive doctrines of Christianity (over and above Theism) which the Traditionalists maintain, are, in these days, more or less opposed to modern sentiment, criticism and science; and among those who adhere to them, one or other attitude as regards this opposition must be taken up. The Palæologian party in both wings insists on the old doctrines more or less crudely and strictly, and would fain bend modern ideas to harmonize with them. Another party, which is generally called the Neologian, endeavours to modify or explain the old doctrines, so as to harmonize them with the ethics and criticism of our generation.
After a somewhat careful study of the positions, merits and failures of the two Palæologian parties, I proceed to define among the Neologians, the First Broad Church (of Maurice and Kingsley), whose programme was: “To harmonize the doctrines of Church and Bible with modern thought.” This end it attempted to reach by new readings and interpretations, consonant with the highest modern sentiment; but it remained of course obvious, that the supposed Divinely-inspired Authorities had failed to convey the sense of these interpretations to men’s minds for eighteen centuries; indeed had conveyed the reverse. The old received doctrine of an eternal Hell, for example, was the absolute contradiction of the doctrines of Divine universal love and everlasting Mercy, which the new teachers professed to derive from the same traditional authority. This school emphatically “put the new wine into old bottles;” and the success of the experiment could only be temporary, since it rests on the assumption that God has miraculously taught men in language which they have, for fifty generations, uniformly misinterpreted.
The other branch of the Neologian party I call the Second Broad Church (the party of Stanley and Jowett). It may be considered as forming the Extreme Left of the Revelationists; the furthest from mere Authority and the nearest to Rationalism; just as the High Church party forms the Extreme Right; the nearest to Authority and furthest from Rationalism. I endeavour to define the difference between the First and Second Broad Church parties as follows:—
“The First Broad Church, as we have seen, maintains that the doctrines of the Bible and the Church can be perfectly harmonized with the results of modern thought, by a new, but legitimate exegesis of the Bible and interpretation of Church formulæ. The Second Broad Church seems prepared to admit that, in many cases, they can only be harmonized by the sacrifice of Biblical infallibility. The First Broad Church has recourse (to harmonize them) to various logical processes, but principally to that of diverting the student, at all difficult points, from criticism to edification. The Second Broad Church uses no ambiguity, but frankly avows that when the Bible contradicts Science, the Bible must be in error. The First Broad Church maintains that the Inspiration of the Bible differs in kind as well as in degree, from that of other books. The Second Broad Church appears to hold that it differs in degree, but not in kind.”
After a considerable discussion on the various doctrines of the nature and limitations of Inspiration, I ask, p. 110, 111:—
“Admit the Inspiration of Prophets and Apostles to have been substantially the same with that always granted to faithful souls;—admit, therefore, the existence of a human element in Revelation, can we still look to that Revelation as the safe foundation for our Religion?”
“To this question the leaders of the Second Broad Church answer unhesitatingly: ‘Yes. It has been an egregious error of modern times to confound the Record of the Revelation with the Revelation itself, and to assume that God’s lessons lose their value because they have been transmitted to us through the natural channels of human reason and conscience. Returning to the true view, we shall only get rid of uncounted difficulties and objections which prevent the reception of Christianity by the most honest minds here in England and in heathen countries.’”
But in conclusion I ask—
“‘What influence can the Second Broad Church exercise on the future religion of the world? What answer will it supply to the doubts of the age, and whereon would it rest our faith in God and Immortality?’ The reply seems to be brief. The Second Broad Church would, like all the other parties in the Church, call on us to rest our faith on History; but in their case, it is History corroborated by consciousness, not opposed thereto. In the next Chapter it will be my effort to show that under no conditions is it probable that History can afford us our ultimate grounds of faith. Meanwhile, it must appear that if any form of Historical faith may escape such a conclusion and approve itself to mankind in time to come, it is that which is proposed by the Second Broad Church, and which it worthily presents,—to the intellect by its learning, and to the religious sentiment by its profound and tender piety.”—Broken Lights, p. 120.
These four parties, two Palæologian and two Neologian, thus examined, included between them all the members of the Church of England, and all the Orthodox Dissenters. There remained the Jews, Roman Catholics, Quakers and Unitarians, and of each of these the book contains a sketch and criticism; finally concluding with an exposition (so far as I could give it) of Theoretic and of Practical Theism.
The book contains further two Appendices. The first treats of Bishop Colenso’s onslaught on the Pentateuch; then greatly disturbing English orthodoxy. The second Appendix deals with the other most notable book of that period; Renan’s Vie de Jésus. After maintaining that Renan has failed in delineating his principal figure, while he has vastly illuminated his environment, I give with diffidence my own view of Christ, lest Traditionalists should, without contradiction, assume that Renan has given the general Theistic idea of his character. After referring to the measureless importance of the palingenesia of which Christ spoke to Nicodemus, I draw a comparison between the New Birth in the individual soul, and the historically-traceable results of Christ’s life on the human race. (P. 167.)
“Taking the whole ancient world in comparison with the modern, of Heathendom with Christendom, the general character of the two is absolutely analogous to that which in individuals we call Unregenerate and Regenerate. Of course there were thousands of regenerated souls, Hebrew, Greek, Indian, of all nations and languages, before Christ, and of course there are millions unregenerate now. But nevertheless, from this time onward we trace through history a new spirit in the world: a leaven working through the whole mass of souls.”...
The language of the old world was one of self-satisfaction, as its Art was of completeness. On the other hand:
“The language of the new world, coming to us through the thousand tongues of our multiform civilization, is one long cry of longing aspiration: ‘Would that I could create the ineffable Beauty! Would that I could discover the eternal and absolute Truth! Would! O, would it were possible to live out the good, the noble, and the holy!’”...
“This great phenomenon of history surely points to some corresponding great event whereby the revolution was accomplished. There must have been a moment when the old order stopped and the new began. Some action must have taken place upon the souls of men which thenceforth started them in a different career, and opened the age of progressive life. When did this moment arrive? What was the primal act of the endless progress? By whom was that age opened?”
“Here we have really ground to go upon. There is no need to establish the authenticity or veracity of special books or harmonize discordant narratives to obtain an answer to our question. The whole voice of human history unconsciously and without premeditation bears its unmistakeable testimony. The turning point between the old world and the new was the beginning of the Christian movement. The action upon human nature which started it on its new course was the teaching and example of Christ. Christ was he who opened the age of endless progress.”
“The view, therefore, which seems to be the best fitting one for our estimate of the character of Christ, is that which regards him as the great Regenerator of Humanity. His coming was to the life of humanity what Regeneration is to the life of the individual. This is not a conclusion doubtfully deduced from questionable biographies; but a broad, plain inference from the universal history of our race. We may dispute all details; but the grand result is beyond criticism. The world has changed, and that change is historically traceable to Christ. The honour, then, which Christ demands of us must be in proportion of our estimate of the value of such Regeneration. He is not merely a Moral Reformer inculcating pure ethics; not merely a Religious Reformer clearing away old theologic errors and teaching higher ideas of God. These things he was; but he might, for all we can tell, have been them both as fully, and yet have failed to be what he has actually been to our race. He might have taught the world better ethics and better theology, and yet have failed to infuse into it that new Life which has ever since coursed through its arteries and penetrated its minutest veins.”
Broken Lights proved to be (with the exception of my Duties of Women) the most successful of my books. It went through three English editions, and I believe quite as many in America; but of these last all I knew was the occasional present of a single specimen copy. It was very favourably reviewed, but some of my fellow Theists rather disapproved of the tribute I had paid to Christ (as quoted above); and my good friend, Prof. F. W. Newman, actually wrote a severe pamphlet against me, entitled “Hero-Making Religion.” It did not alter my view. I do not believe that our Religion (the relation of our souls to God) can ever properly rest upon History. Nay I cannot understand how any one who knows the intricacies and obscurities attendant on the verification of any ancient History, should for a moment be content to suppose that God has required of all men to rest their faith in Him on such grounds, or on what others report to them of such grounds. In the case of Christianity, where scholars like Renan and Martineau—profoundly learned in ancient and obsolete tongues, and equipped with the whole arsenal of criticism of modern Germany, France and England,—can differ about the age and authority of the principal piéce de conviction (the Gospel of St. John), it is truly preposterous to suggest that ordinary men and women should form any judgment at all on the matter. The Ideal Christ needs only a good heart to find and love him. The Historical Christ needs the best critic in Europe, a Lightfoot, a Koenen, a Martineau, to trace his footsteps on the sands of time. And they differ as regards nearly every one of them!
But though History cannot rightly be Religion or the basis of Religion, there is, and must be, a History of Religion; as there is a history of geometry and astronomy; and of that History of the whole world’s Religion the supreme interest centres in the record of
“The sinless years That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.”
Yet, as regards my own personal feeling, I must avow that the halo which has gathered round Jesus Christ obscures him to my eyes. I see that he is much more real to many of my friends, both Orthodox and Unitarian, than he can ever be to me. There is nothing, no, not one single sentence or action attributed to him of which (if we open our minds to criticism) we can feel sufficiently certain to base on it any definite conclusion, and this to me envelopes him in a cloud. Each Christian age has indeed, (as I remark in my Dawning Lights), seen a Christ of its own; so that we could imagine students in the future arguing that there must have been “several Christs,” as old scholars held there were several Zoroasters and several Buddhas. Just as Michael Angelo’s Christ was the production of that dark and stormy age when first his awful form loomed out of the shadows of the Sistine, in no less a degree do the portraits of Ecce Homo and the Vie de Jésus belong to our era of sentiment and philanthropy. We have no sun-made photograph of his features; only such wavering image of them as may have rested on the waters of Galilee, rippling in the breeze. I must not however further prolong these reflections on a subject discussed to the best of my poor ability in my more serious books.
After BROKEN LIGHTS, I wrote the sequel: Dawning Lights just quoted above. In the first I had endeavoured to sketch the Conditions and Prospects of religious belief. In the second I speculated on the Results of the changes which were taking place in various articles of that belief. The chapters deal consecutively with Changes in the Method of Theology,—in the Idea of God; in the Idea of Christ; in the Doctrine of Sin, theoretical and practical; in the idea of the Relation of this life to the next; in the idea of the Perfect Life; in the Idea of Happiness; in the Doctrine of Prayer; in the Idea of Death; and in the Doctrine of the eternity of Punishment.
This book also was fairly successful, and went into a second edition.
Somewhere about this time (I have no exact record) I edited a little book called Alone to the Alone, consisting of private prayers for Theists. It contains contributions from fifteen men and women, of Prayers, mostly written for personal use, before the idea of the book had been suggested, under the influence of those occasional deeper insights and more fervent feelings which all religious persons desire to perpetuate. They are all anonymous. In the Preface I say that the result of such a compilation,
“‘Is necessarily altogether imperfect and fragmentary, but in the great solitude where most of us pass our lives as regards our deeper emotions, it may be more helpful to know that other human hearts are feeling as we feel, and thinking as we think, rather than to read far nobler words which come to us only as echoes of the Past.’ The book is ‘designed for the use of those who desire to cultivate the feelings which culminate in Prayer, but who find the rich and beautiful collections of the Churches of Christendom no longer available, either because of the doctrines whose acceptance they imply or of the nature of the requests to which they give utterance. Adequately to replace in a generation, or in several generations, such books, through which the piety of ages has been poured, is wholly beyond hope; and the ambition to do so would betray ignorance of the way in which these precious drops are distilled slowly year after year, from the great Incense-tree of humanity.’”
The remainder of the Preface, which is somewhat lengthy, discusses the validity of Prayer for the attainment of spiritual (not physical) benefits. It concludes thus—p. xxxvi.
“And, lastly, if Religion is still to be to mankind in the future what it has been in the past, it must still be a religion of Prayer. Nothing is changed in human nature because it has outgrown some of the errors of the past. The spiritual experience of the saintly souls of old was true and real experience, even when their intellectual creeds were full of mistakes. By the gate through which they entered the paradise of love and peace, even by that same narrow portal of Prayer must we pass into it. No present or future discoveries in science will ever transmute the moral dross in human nature into the pure gold of virtue. No spectrum analysis of the light of the nebulæ will enable us to find God. If we are to be made holy, we must ask the Holy One to sanctify us. If we are to know the infinite joy of Divine Love, we must seek it in Divine communion.”
This book was first published in 1871; one of the years of the rising tide of liberal-religious hope. A third edition was called for in 1881, when the ebb had set in. In a short Preface to this third edition I notice this fact, and say that those hopes were doubtless all too hasty for the slow order of Divine things.
“Nay, it would seem that, far from the immediate aurora of such a morning, the world is destined first to endure a great ‘horror of darkness,’ and to pass through the dreary and disaster-laden experience of a night of materialism and agnosticism. Perhaps it will only be when men have seen with their eyes how the universe appears without a thought of God to illumine its dark places, and gauged for themselves where human life will sink without hope of immortality to elevate it, that they will recognise aright the unutterable preciousness of religion. Faith, when restored after such an eclipse, will be prized as it has never been prized heretofore....
“And Faith must return to mankind sooner or later. So sure as God is, so sure must it be that he will not finally leave his creatures, whom he has led upward for thousands of years, to lose sight of him altogether, or to be drowned for ever in the slough of atheism and carnalism. He will doubtless reveal himself afresh to the souls of men in his own time and in his own way,—whether, as of old, through prophet-souls filled with inspiration, or by other methods yet unknown. God is over us, and Heaven is waiting for us all the same, even though all the men of science in Europe unite to tell us there is only Matter in the universe, and only corruption in the grave. Atheism may prevail for a night, but faith cometh in the morning. Theism is ‘bound to win’ at last; not necessarily that special type of Theism which our poor thoughts in this generation have striven to define; but that great fundamental faith,—the needful substructure of every other possible religious faith—the faith in a Righteous and loving God, and in a life for man beyond the tomb.”
The book contains 72 Prayers; half of which refer to the outer and half to the inner life. Among the former, are Noon and Sunset prayers; thanksgivings for the love of friends, and for the beauty of the world; also a Prayer respecting the sufferings of animals from human cruelty. In the second part some of the Prayers are named, “In the Wilderness”; “On the Right Way”; “God afar off”; “Doubt and Faith”; “Fiat Lux”; “Fiat Pax”; “Thanksgiving for Religious Truth”; “For Pardon of a Careless Life”; “For a Devoted Life”; “Joy in God”; “Here and Hereafter.”
I never expected that more than a very few friends would have cared for this book, and in fact printed it with the intention of almost private circulation; but it has been continuously, though slowly, called for during the 23 years which have elapsed since it was compiled.
I wrote the essays included in the volume “HOPES OF THE HUMAN RACE,” in 1873–1874. This has run through several editions. The long Introduction to this book was written immediately after the publication of Mr. Mill’s Essay on Religion; a most important work of which Miss Taylor had kindly put the proof sheets in my hands, and to which I was eagerly anxious to offer such rejoinder from the side of faith as might be in my power. Whether I succeeded in making an adequate reply in the fifty pages I devoted to the subject, I cannot presume to say. The Pessimist side, taken by Mr. Mill has been gaining ground ever since, but there are symptoms that a reaction is taking place, beginning (of all countries!) in France. I conclude this Preface thus—p. 53.
“But I quit the ungracious, and, in my case, most ungrateful, task of offering my feeble protest against the last words given to us by a man so good and great, that even his mistakes and deficiencies (as I needs must deem them) are more instructive to us than a million platitudes and truisms of teachers whom his transcendent intellectual honesty should put to the blush, and whose souls never kindled with a spark of the generous ardour for the welfare of his race which flamed in his noble heart and animated his entire career.”
The book contains two long Essays on the Life after Death contributed originally to the Theological Review. In the first of these, after stating at length the reasons for supposing that human existence ends at death, I ask: “What have we to place against them in the scale of Hope?” and I begin by observing that all the usual arguments for immortality involve at the crucial point the assumption that we possess some guarantee that mankind will not be deceived, that Justice will eventually triumph and that human affairs are the concern of a Power whose purposes cannot fail. Were the faith which supplies such warrant to fail, the whole structure raised upon it must fall to the ground. Belief in Immortality is pre-eminently a matter of Faith; a corollary from faith in God. To imagine that we can reach it by any other road is vain. Heaven will always be (as Dr. Martineau has said) “a part of our Religion, not a Branch of our Geography.” But in addressing men and women who believe in God’s Justice and Love, I hope to show that, not by one only but by many convergent lines, Faith uniformly points to a Life after Death; and that if we follow her guidance in any one direction implicitly, we are invariably conducted to the same conclusion. Nay more; we cannot stop short of this conclusion and retain entire faith in any thing beyond the experience of the senses. Every idea of Justice, of Love and of Duty is truncated if we deny to it the extension of eternity; and as for our conception of God himself, I see not how any one who has realised the dread darkness of “the riddle of the painful earth,” can call him “Good” unless he can look forward to the solution of that problem hereafter. The following are channels through which Faith inevitably flows towards Immortality:
1st. The human race longs for Justice. Even “if the Heavens fall,” we feel Justice ought to be done. All literature, from Æschylus and Job to our own time, has for its highest theme the triumph of Justice, or the tragedy of the disappointment of human hope thereof. But where did we obtain this idea? The world has never seen a Reign of Astræa. Injustice and Cruelty prevail largely, even now in the world; and as we go back up the stream of time to ruder ages where Might was more completely dominant over Right, the case was worse and worse. Where then, did Man derive his idea that the Power ruling the world,—Zeus, or Jehovah, or Ormusd,—was Just? Not only could no ancestral experience have caused the “set of our brains” towards the expectation of Justice, but experience, under many conditions of society, pointed quite the other way. It is assuredly (if anything can be so reckoned) the Divine spirit in man which causes him to love Justice, and to believe that his Maker is just, for it is inconceivable how he could have arrived at such faith otherwise. But if death be the end of human existence this expectation of justice has been only a miserable delusion. God has created us, poor children of the dust, to love and hope for Justice, but He Himself has disregarded it, on the scale of a disappointed world. After referring to the thousands of cases where the bad have died successful and peacefully, and the good,—like Christ,—have perished in misery and agony, I say “boldly and so much the more reverently: Either Man is Immortal or God is not Just.”
2nd. The second line of thought leading us to belief in Immortality is,—that if there be no future life, there are millions of human beings whose existence has answered no purpose which we can rationally attribute to a wise and merciful God. He is a baffled God, if His creature be extinguished before reaching some end which He may possibly have designed.
3rd. The incompleteness of the noblest part of man offers so strange a contrast to the perfection of the other work of creation that we are drawn to conclude that the human soul is only a bud to blossom out into full flower hereafter. No man has ever in his life reached the plentitude of moral strength and beauty of which his nature gives promise. A garden wherein all the buds should perish before blooming, would be more hideous than a desert, and such a garden is God’s world if man dies for ever when we see him no more.
4th. Human love urges an appeal to Faith which has been to millions of hearts the most conclusive of all.
“To think of the one whose innermost self is to us the world’s chief treasure, the most beautiful and blessed thing God ever made, and believe that at any moment that mind and heart may cease to be, and become only a memory, every noble gift and grace extinct, and all the fond love for ourselves forgotten for ever,—this is such agony, that having once known it we should never dare again to open our hearts to affection, unless some ray of hope should dawn for us beyond the grave. Love would be the curse of mortality were it to bring always with it such unutterable pain of anxiety, and the knowledge that every hour which knitted our heart more closely to our friend also brought us nearer to an eternal separation. Better never to have ascended to that high Vita Nuova where self-love is lost in another’s weal, better to have lived like the cattle which browse and sleep while they wait the butcher’s knife, than to endure such despair.
“But is there nothing in us which refuses to believe all this nightmare of the final sundering of loving hearts? Love itself seems to announce itself as an eternal thing. It has such an element of infinity in its tenderness, that it never fails to seek for itself an expression beyond the limits of time, and we talk, even when we know not what we mean of “undying affection,” “immortal love.” It is the only passion which in the nature of things we can carry with us into another world, and it is fit to be prolonged, intensified, glorified for ever. It is not so much a joy we may take with us, as the only joy which can make any world a heaven when the affections of earth shall be perfected in the supreme love of God. It is the sentiment which we share with God, and by which we live in Him and He in us. All its beautiful tenderness, its noble self-forgetfulness, its pure and ineffable delight, are the rays of God’s Sun of Love reflected in our souls.
“Is all this to end in two poor heaps of silent dust decaying slowly in their coffins side by side in the vault? If so, let us have done with prating of any Faith in Heaven or Earth. We are mocked by a fiend.”—(Hopes, p. 52.)
5th. A remarkable argument is to be found in Prof. F. W. Newman’s Theism (p. 75). It insists on the fact that many men have certainly loved God and that God must love them in return (else Man were better than God); and we must reasonably infer that those whom God loves are deathless, else would the Divine Blessedness be imperfect, nay, “a yawning gulf of ever-increasing sorrow.”
6th. The extreme variability of the common human belief that the “soul of man never dies” makes it difficult to discern its proper evidential value, still it seems to have the Note of a genuine instinct. It begins early, though (probably) not at the earliest stage of human development. It attains its maximum among the highest races of mankind (the Vedic-Aryan, early Persian and Egyptian). It projects such varied and even contrasted ideals of the other life (e.g., Valhalla and Nirvana) that it cannot well have been borrowed by one race from another but must have sprung up in each indigenously. Finally the instinct begins to falter in ages of self-consciousness and criticism.
7th, lastly. The most perfect and direct faith in Immortality belongs to saintly souls who personally feel that they have entered into relations with the Divine Spirit which can never end. “Faith in God and in our eternal Union with Him,” said one such devout man to me, “are not two dogmas but one.” “Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades. Thou wilt guide me by thy counsel and afterwards receive me to Glory.”
“Such, for a few blessed souls, seems to be the perfect evidence of things not seen. But can their full faith supply our lack? Can we see with their eyes and believe on their report? It is only possible in a very inferior measure. Yet if our own spiritual life have received even some faint gleams of the ‘light which never came from sun or star,’ then, once more, will our faith point the way to Immortality; for we shall know in what manner such truths come to the soul, and be able to trust that what is dawn to us may be sunrise to those who have journeyed nearer to the East than we; who have surmounted Duty more perfectly, or passed through rivers of affliction into which our feet have never dipped. God cannot have deluded them in their sacred hope of His eternal Love. If their experience be a dream all prayer and communion may be dreams likewise.”
In conclusion, while commending to the reader’s consideration what appears to me the true method of solving the problem of a Life after Death, I point to the fact that on the answer to that question must hang the alternative, not only of the hope or despair of the Human Race, but of the glory or the failure of the whole Kosmos, so far as our uttermost vision can extend.
“Lions and eagles, oaks and roses, may be good after their kind; but if the summit and crown of the whole work, the being in whose consciousness it is all mirrored, be worse than incomplete and imperfect, an undeveloped embryo, an acorn mouldered in its shell, a bud blighted by the frost, then must the entire world he deemed a failure also. Now, Man can only be reckoned on any ground as a provisionally successful work; successful, that is, provided we regard him as in transitu, on his way to another and far more perfect stage of development. We are content that the egg, the larva, the bud, the half-painted canvas, the rough scaffolding, should only faintly indicate what will be the future bird and butterfly and flower and picture and temple. And thus to look on man (as by some deep insight he has almost universally regarded himself) as a ‘sojourner upon earth,’ upon his way to ‘another country, even a heavenly,’ destined to complete his pilgrimage and make up for all his shortcomings elsewhere, is to leave a margin for believing him to be even now a Divine work in its embryonic stage. But if we close out this view of the future, and assure ourselves that nothing more is ever to be expected of him than what we knew him to be during the last days of his mortal life; if we are to believe we have seen the best development which his intellect and heart, his powers of knowing, feeling, enjoying, loving, blessing and being blessed, will ever obtain while the heavens endure,—then, indeed, is the conclusion inevitable and final. Man is a Failure, the consummate failure of creation. Everything else,—star, ocean, mountain, forest, bird, beast and insect—has a sort of completeness and perfection. It is fitting in its own place, and it gives no hint that it ought to be other than it is. ‘Every Lion,’ as Parker has said, ‘is a type of all lionhood; but there is no Man who is a type of all Manhood.’ Even the best and greatest of men have only been imperfect types of a single phase of manhood—of the saint, the hero, the sage, the philanthropist, the poet, the friend,—never of the full-orbed man who should be all these together. If each perish at death, then,—as the seeds of all these varied forms of good are in each,—every one is cut off prematurely, blighted, spoiled. Nor is this criterion of success or failure solely applicable to our small planet; a mere spark thrown off the wheel whereon a million suns are turned into space. It is easy to believe that much loftier beings, possessed of far greater mental and moral powers than our own, inhabit other realms of immensity. But Thought and Love are, after all, the grandest things which any world can show; and if a whole race endowed with them should prove such a failure as death-extinguished Mankind would undoubtedly be, there remains no reason why all the spheres of the universe should not be similar scenes of disappointment and frustration, and creation itself one huge blunder and mishap. In vain may the President of the British Congress of Science dazzle us with the splendid panorama of the material universe unrolling itself ‘from out of the primal nebula’s fiery cloud.’ Suns and planets swarming through the abysses of space are but whirling sepulchres after all, if, while no grain of dust is shaken from off their rolling sides, the conscious souls of whom they have been the palaces are all for ever lost. Spreading continents and flowing seas, soaring Alps and fertile plains are worse than failures, if we, even we, poor feeble, sinful, dim-eyed creatures that we are, shall ever ‘vanish like the streak of morning cloud in the infinite azure of the past.’”
The second part of this essay discusses the possible conditions of the Life after Death. I cannot summarize it here.
The rest of the volume consists of a sermon which I read at Clerkenwell Unitarian Chapel, in 1873, entitled “Doomed to be Saved.” I describe the disastrous moral consequences to a man in old times who believed himself to have sold his soul to the Evil One, and to have cast himself off from God’s Goodness for ever; and I contrast this with what we ought to feel when we recognize that we are Doomed to be Saved—destined irretrievably to be brought back, in this life or in far future lives, from all our wanderings in remorse and penitence to the feet of God.
The book concludes with an Essay on the Evolution of the Social Sentiment, in which I maintain that the primary human feeling in the savage which still lingers in the Aryan child, is not Sympathy with suffering, but quite an opposite, angry and even cruel sentiment, which I have named Heteropathy; which inspires brutes and birds to kill their wounded or diseased companions. Half-way after this, comes Aversion; and last of all, Sympathy,—slowly extending from the mother’s “pity for the son of her womb,” to the Family, the Tribe, the Nation, and the Human Race; and, at last to the Brutes. I conclude thus:
“Such is, I believe, the great Hope of the human race. It does not lie in the progress of the intellect, or in the conquest of fresh powers over the realms of nature; not in the improvement of laws, or the more harmonious adjustment of the relations of classes and states; not in the glories of Art, or the triumphs of Science. All these things may, and doubtless will, adorn the better and happier ages of the future. But that which will truly constitute the blessedness of Man will be the gradual dying out of his tiger passions, his cruelty and his selfishness, and the growth within him of the god-like faculty of love and self-sacrifice; the development of that holiest Sympathy wherein all souls shall blend at last, like the tints of the rainbow which the Seer beheld around the great White Throne on high.”
Beside these theological works I published more recently two slight volumes on cognate subjects: A Faithless World, and Health and Holiness. I wrote “A Faithless World” (first published in the Contemporary Review) in reply to Sir Fitzjames Stephen’s remark in the Nineteenth Century, No. 88, that “We get on very well without religion” ... “Love, Friendship, Ambition, Science, literature, art, politics, commerce, and a thousand other matters will go equally well as far as I can see, whether there is or is not a God and a future state.” I examine this view in detail and conclude that instead of life remaining (in the event of the fall of religion) to most people much what it is at present, there would, on the contrary, be actually nothing which would be left unchanged by such a catastrophe.
I sent a copy of this article when first published, (as I was bound in courtesy to do), to Sir James, whom I had often met, and whose brother and sister were my kind friends. He replied in such a manly and generous spirit that I am tempted to give his letter.
“December 2nd, “32, De Vere Gardens, W.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I am much obliged by your note and by the article in the Contemporary, which is perfectly fair in itself and full of kind things about myself personally.
“The subject is too large to write about, and I am only too glad to take both the letter and the article in the spirit in which they were written and ask no further discussion.
“It seems to me very possible that there may be a good deal of truth in what you suggest as to the nature of the difference between the points of view from which we look at these things, but it is not unnatural that I should think you rather exaggerate the amount of suffering and sorrow which is to be found in the world. I may do the opposite.
“However that may be, thank you heartily for both your letter and your article.
“I am sure you will have been grieved to hear of poor Henry Dicey’s death. His life had been practically despaired of for a considerable time.
“I am, ever sincerely yours, J. F. STEPHEN.”
Several of these books of mine, dealing with religious subjects, were translated into French and published by my French and Swiss fellow-religionists, and also in Danish by friends at Copenhagen. Le Monde Sans Religion; Coup d’œil sur le Monde à Venir; L’Humanité destinée au Salut; La Maison sur le Rivage; Seul avec Dieu (Geneva Cherbuliez, 1881), En Verden uden Tro, &c., &c.
But all the time during the intervals of writing these theological books, I employed myself in studying and writing on various other subjects of temporary or durable interest. I contributed a large number of articles to the following periodicals:—
The Quarterly Review (then edited by Sir William Smith).
The Contemporary Review (edited by Mr. Bunting).
Fraser’s Magazine (edited by Mr. Froude).
Cornhill Magazine (edited by Mr. Leslie Stephen).
The Fortnightly Review (edited by Mr. Morley).
Macmillan’s Magazine (edited by Mr. Masson).
The Theological Review (Unitarian Organ, edited by Rev. C. Beard).
The Modern Review (Unitarian, edited by Rev. R. Armstrong).
The New Quarterly Magazine (edited by W. Oswald Crawford).
One collection of these articles was published by Trübner in 1865, entitled Studies New and Old on Ethical and Social Subjects; (1 vol., crown 8vo., pp. 466). This volume begins with an elaborate study of “Christian Ethics and the Ethics of Christ” (Theological Review, September, 1869), which I have often wished to reprint in a separate form. Also a very long and careful study of the Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians, which brought me the visits and friendships of a very interesting Parsee gentleman, Nowrosjee Furdoonjee, President of the Bombay Parsee Society, and of another Parsee gentleman resident in London. Both expressed their entire approval of my representation of their religion.
These Studies also contain a long paper on the Philosophy of the Poor Laws, which, as I have narrated in a previous chapter, fell into fertile soil on the mind of an Australian gentleman and caused the introduction of some of the reforms I advocated into the Poor Law system of New South Wales.
There were also in this volume articles on “Hades”; on the “Morals of Literature”; and on the “Hierarchy of Art,” which perhaps have some value; but I have not of late years cared to press the book, and have not included it in Mr. Fisher Unwin’s Re-issue of 1893 on account of the paper it contains on “The Rights of Man and the Claims of Brutes.” This article, which appeared first in Fraser’s Magazine, Nov., 1863, was my earliest effort (so far as I know, the first effort of anybody) to work out the very obscure and difficult ethical problem to which it refers, in answer to the demands of Vivisectors. I am not satisfied with the position I took up in this paper. In the thirty years which have elapsed since I wrote it, my thoughts have been greatly exercised on the subject, and I think I see the “Claims of Brutes” more clearly, and find them higher than I did. But, though I believe that I expressed the most advanced opinion of that time on the duty of Man to the lower animals, and of the offence of cruelty towards them, I here enter my caveat against the quotation of this article (as was lately done by a zealous Zoophilist) as if it still represented exactly what I think on the subject after pondering upon it for thirty years, and taking part in the Anti-vivisection crusade for two entire decades.
I have mentioned this matter especially, because it is of some importance to me, and also because I do not find that there is any other opinion which I have ever published in any book or article, on morals or religion, which I now desire to withdraw, or even of which I care to modify the expression. It is a great happiness to me at the end of a long and busy literary life, to feel that I have never written anything of which I repent, or which I wish to unsay.
A collection of minor articles, with several fresh papers of a lighter sort,—an Allegory, The Spectral Rout, &c.—was also published by Trübner in 1867, under the name of Hours of Work and Play.
In 1872 Messrs. Williams & Norgate published a rather large collection of my Essays, under the name of Darwinism in Morals and other Essays. The first is a review of the theory of ethics expounded in Darwin’s Descent of Man. I argue that the moral history of mankind (so far as it is known to us) gives no support whatever to Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis that Conscience is the result of certain contingencies in our development, and that it might, at an earlier stage, have been moulded into quite another form, causing Good to appear to us Evil, and Evil Good.
“I think we have a right to say that the suggestions offered by the highest scientific intellects of our time to account for its existence on principles which shall leave it on the level of other instincts, have failed to approve themselves as true to the facts of the case. And I think, therefore, that we are called on to believe still in the validity of our own moral consciousness, even as we believe in the validity of our other faculties; and to rest in the faith (well-nigh universal) of the human race, in a fixed and supreme Law, of which the will of God is the embodiment and Conscience the Divine transcript.”—Darwinism in Morals, p. 32.
In this same volume (included in the re-issue) are essays on Hereditary Piety (a review of Mr. Galton’s Hereditary Genius); one on The Religion of Childhood, on Robertson’s Life; on “A French Theist” (M. Pécaut); and a series of studies on Eastern Religions; including reviews of Mr. Ferguson’s Tree and Serpent Worship (with which Mr. F. was so pleased that he made me a present, of his magnificent book); Bunsen’s God in History, Max Muller’s Chips from a German Workshop, and Mrs. Manning’s Ancient and Mediæval India. Each of these is a careful essay on one or other of the oriental faiths referring to many other books on each subject. Beside these there are in the same volume two articles on Unconscious Cerebration and Dreams, which excited some interest in their day; and seem to me (if I be not misled by vanity) to have forestalled a good deal which has been written of late years about the “subliminal” or “subjective” consciousness.
In 1875, Messrs. Ward, Lock & Tyler, for whose New Quarterly Magazine I had written two long articles on Animals in Fable and Art and the Fauna of Fancy, asked my consent to re-publishing them in their Country House Library. To this I gladly agreed, adding my article in the Quarterly Review on the Consciousness of Dogs; and that in the Cornhill: “Dogs whom I have met.” The volume was prettily got up, and published under the name of “False Beasts and True.”
From the close of 1874, when I undertook the Anti-vivisection crusade, my literary activity dwindled down rapidly to small proportions. In the course of eight years I wrote enough magazine articles to fill one volume, published in 1882, and containing essays on Magnanimous Atheism; Pessimism and One of its Professors, and a few other papers, of which the most important,—the Peak in Darien,—gives its name to the book. It is an argument, (with many facts cited in its support,) for believing that the dying, as they are passing the threshold, not seldom become aware of the presence of beloved ones waiting for them in the new state of existence which they are actually entering.
After this book I wrote little for some years, but in 1888 I was asked to contribute an article to the Universal Review on the Scientific Spirit of the Age. I gladly acceded, but the Editor desired to cut down my MS., so I published it as a book with a few other older papers; notably one on the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse; a half-humorous study of the pros and cons of Life in London, and Life in a Country house.
After this, again, I published two editions of a little compilation, the “Friend of Man and His Friends the Poets;” a collection (with running commentary) of Poems of all ages and countries relating to Dogs, which were likely, I thought, to aid my poor, four-footed friends’ claims to sympathy and respect.
Of my remaining books, the Duties of Women, and The Modern Rack I shall speak in the chapters which respectively concern my work for Women, and the Anti-vivisection movement.
XVI. MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES JOURNALISM.
Journalism is, to my thinking, a delightful profession, full of interest, and promise of ever-extending usefulness. During the years in which I was a professional Journalist, when I had occasion to go into a Bank or a lawyer’s office, I always pitied the clerks for their dull, monotonous, ugly work, as compared with mine. If not carried on too long or continuously,—so that the brain begins to churn leaders sleeping or waking (a dreadful state of things into which we may fall),—it is pre-eminently healthy, being so full of variety and calling for so many different mental faculties one after another. Promptitude, clear and quick judgment as to what is, and is not, expedient and decorous to say; a ready memory well stored with illustrations and unworn quotations, a bright and strong style; and, if it can be attained, a playful (not saturnine) humour superadded,—all these qualities and attainments are called for in writing for a daily newspaper; and the practice of them cannot fail to sharpen their edge. To be in touch with the most striking events of the whole world, and enjoy the privilege of giving your opinion on them to 50,000 or 100,000 readers within a few hours, this struck me, when I first recognised that such was my business as a leader-writer, as something for which many prophets and preachers of old would have given a house full of silver and gold. And I was to be paid for accepting it! It is one thing to be a “Vox clamantis in Deserto,” and quite another to speak in Fleet Street, and, without lifting up one’s voice, to reach all at once, as many men as formed the population of ancient Athens, not to say that of Jerusalem! But I must not “magnify mine office” too fondly!
From the time of my second journey to Italy I obtained employment, as I have mentioned, as Correspondent to the Daily News, with whose Italian politics I was in sympathy. I also wrote all sorts of miscellaneous papers and descriptions for the Spectator, the Reader, the Inquirer, the Academy, and the Examiner. When in London I was engaged on the staff of the short-lived Day (1867); and much lamented its untimely eclipse, when my friend Mr. Haweis, unkindly “chaffed” me by mourning over it:—
“Sweet Day! How cool! how bright!”
I was paid, however, handsomely for all I had written for it, and a few months later I received an invitation from Mr. Arthur Arnold (since M.P. for Salford) to join his staff on the newly-founded Echo. It was a great experiment on the part of the proprietors, Messrs. Petter & Galpin, to start a half-penny paper. Such a thing did not then exist in England, and the ridicule it encountered, and boycotting from the news-agents who could not make enough profit on it to satisfy themselves, were very serious obstacles to success. Nevertheless Mr. Arnold’s great tact and ability cleared the way, and before many months our circulation, I believe, was very large indeed. My share in the undertaking was soon arranged after a few interviews and experiments. It was agreed that I should go on three mornings every week at ten o’clock, to the office in Catherine Street, Strand, and there in a private room for my own use only, write a leading article on some social subject after arranging with the editor what it should be. I am proud to say that for seven years from that time till I retired, I never once failed to keep my engagement. Of course I took a few weeks’ holiday every year; but Mr. Arnold never expected his contributor in vain. Sometimes it was hard work for me; I had a cold, or was otherwise ill, or the snow lay thick and cabs from South Kensington were not to be had. Nevertheless I made my way to my destination punctually; and, when there, I wrote my leader, and as many “Notes” as were allotted to me, and thus proved, I hope, once for all, that a woman may be relied on as a journalist no less than a man. I do not think indeed, that very many masculine journalists could make the same boast of regularity as I have done. My first article appeared in the third number of the Echo, December 10th, 1868, and the last on, or about, March, 1875. Of course at first I found it a little difficult to write exactly what, and how much was wanted, neither more nor less; but practice made this easier. I wrote, of course, on all manner of subjects, politics excepted; but chose in preference those which offered some ethical interest,—or (on the other hand) an opening for a little fun! The reader may see specimens of both, e.g., the papers on the great Divorce Case; Lent in Belgravia; and on Fat People; Sweeping under the Mats, &c., in Re-echoes, a little book compiled from a selection of my Echo articles which Tauchnitz reproduced in his library. A few incidents in my experience in Catherine Street recur to me, and may be worth recording.
Terrible stories of misery and death were continuously cropping up in the reports of Coroners’ Inquests, and I found that if I took these reports as they were published and wrote leading articles on them, we were almost sure next day to receive several letters begging the Editor to forward money (enclosed) to the surviving relations. It became a duty for me to satisfy myself of the veracity of these stories before setting them forth with claims for public sympathy; and in this way I came to see some of the sadder sides of poverty in London. There was one case I distinctly recall, of a poor lady, daughter of a country rector, who was found (after having been missed for several days, but not sought for) lying dead, scarcely clothed, on the bare floor of a room in a miserable lodging-house in Drury Lane. I went to the house and found it a filthy coffee-house, frequented by unwashed customers. The mistress, though likewise unwashed, was obviously what is termed “respectable.” She told me that her unhappy lodger was a woman of 40 or 50, perfectly sober and well conducted in every way. She had been a governess in very good families, but had remained unemployed till her clothes grew shabby. She walked all day long over London for many weeks, seeking any kind of work or means of support, and selling by degrees everything she possessed for food. At last she returned to her wretched room in that house into which it was a pain for any lady to enter,—and having begged a last cup of tea from her landlady, telling her she could not pay for it, she locked her door, and was heard of no more. Many days afterwards the busy landlady noticed that she had not seen her going in or out, and finding her door locked, called the police to open it. There was hardly an atom of flesh on the poor worn frame, scarcely clothes for decency, no food, no coals in the grate. “Death from Starvation” was the only possible verdict. When the case had been made public, relatives, obviously belonging to a very good class of society, came hastily and took away the corpse for burial in some family vault. The sight, the sounds, the fetid smells of that sordid lodging-house as endured by that lonely, dying, starving lady, will haunt me while I live.
Another incident (in January, 1869) had a happier conclusion. There was a case in the law Reports one day of a woman named Susannah Palmer, who was sent to Newgate for stabbing her husband. The story was a piteous one as I verified it. Her husband was a savage who had continually beaten her; had turned her out of the house at night; brought in a bad woman in her place; and then had deserted her for months, leaving her to support herself and their children. After a time he would suddenly return, take the money she had earned out of her pocket (as he had then a legal right to do), sell up any furniture she possessed; kick and beat her again; and then again desert her. One day she was cutting bread for the children when he struck her, and the knife in her hand cut him; whereupon he gave her in charge for “feloniously wounding”; and she was sent to jail. The Common Sergeant humanely observed as he passed sentence that “Newgate would be ten times better for her than the hell in which she was compelled to live.” It was the old epitaph exemplified:
“Here lies the wife of Matthew Ford, Whose soul we hope is with the Lord; But if for Hell she’s changed this life ‘’Tis better than being Mat. Ford’s wife!’”
Having obtained through John Locke (the well-known Member for Southwark, who had married my cousin) a special permit from the Lord Mayor, I saw the poor, pale creature in Newgate and heard her long tale of wrong and misery. The good Ordinary of the jail felt deeply with me for her; and when I had seen the people who employed her as charwoman (barbers and shoemakers in Cowcross Street) and received the best character of her, I felt justified in appealing, in the Echo, for help for her, and also in circulating a little pamphlet on her behalf. Eventually, when Mrs. Palmer left Newgate a few weeks later, it was to take possession, as caretaker for the chaplain, of nice, tidy rooms where she and her children could live in peace, and where her brutal husband could not follow her, since the place belonged legally to the chaplain.
When there was a dearth of interesting news on the mornings of my leader-writing, it was my custom to send for a certain newspaper, the organ of the extreme Ritualistic party, and out of this I seldom failed to extract Pabulum for a cheerful article! One day, just after the 29th of September, I found such a record of folly,—vestments, processions, thuribles, and what not, that I proceeded with glee to write a leader on Michaelmas Geese. Next day, to my intense amusement, there was a letter at the office addressed to the author of the article, in which one of the “Geese,” whom I had particularly attacked and who naturally supposed me to be a man, invited me to come and dine with him, and “talk of these matters over a good glass of sherry and a cigar!” The worldly wisdom which induced the excellent clergyman to try and thus “silence my guns” by inducing me to share his salt; and his idea of the irresistible attractions of sherry and cigars to a “poor devil” (as he obviously supposed) of a contributor to a half-penny paper, made a delightful joke. I had the greatest mind in the world to accept the invitation without betraying my sex till I should arrive at his door in the fullest of my feminine finery, and claim his dinner; but I was prudent, and he never knew who was the midge who had assailed him.
The incident reminds me of another journalistic experience not connected with the Echo, which throws some light on certain charges recently discussed about “commissions” given to newspaper writers who puff the goods of tradesmen under the guise of instructing the public in the latest fashions in dress, furniture and bric-à-brac. It was the only case in which any bribe of the kind ever came to my door. Some grandes dames anxious for the health of work-girls, had opened a millinery establishment in Clifford Street on purely philanthropic lines, and begged me to write an appeal in the Times for support for it. After visiting the beautiful, airy workrooms and dormitories, I did this with a clear conscience (of course gratuitously) to oblige my friends on the Committee. Next day a smart brougham drove to my door in Hereford Square, and an exquisitely dressed lady got out of it, and sent in her card, “Madame D——.” I was so grossly ignorant of fashionable millinery, that I did not know that my visitor was then at the very apex of that lofty commerce. She remonstrated on my injustice in praising the Clifford Street establishment, when her girls were exactly as well lodged and fed. “Would I not come and see for myself, and then write and say so equally publicly?” I agreed that this would be only fair, and fixed an hour for my inspection; on which she gracefully thanked me and departed, murmuring as she disappeared that she would be happy to present me with “Une jolie toilette!” Poor woman! She had come to the only gentlewoman perhaps in London to whom a “toilette” by Madame D—— offered no attractions at all, and to whom (even if I would have accepted one) it would have been useless, seeing that I never wore anything but the simply-made skirts and jackets of my maid’s manufacture. Of course I visited and justly praised her establishment, as I had promised; and I suppose she long expected me to come and claim her “jolie toilette!”
There was another story of which the memory is in my mind closely associated with a dear young friend,—Miss Letitia Probyn, who helped me ardently in my efforts, very shortly before her untimely death, while bathing, at Hendaye near Arcachon. The case of a woman named Isabel Grant moved us deeply. The poor creature, in a drunken struggle with her husband at supper, had cut him with the bread knife in such manner that he died next day. Her remorse was most genuine and extreme. She was sentenced to be hanged; and just at the same time an Irishman who had murdered his wife under circumstances of exceptional brutality and who had from first to last gloried in his crime, was set free after a week’s imprisonment! We got up a Memorial for Isabel Grant, Miss Probyn’s family interest enabling her to obtain many influential signatures; and we contrived that both the cases of exceptional severity to the repentant woman and that of lenity to the unrepentant man, should be set forth in juxtaposition in a score of newspapers. In the end Isabel Grant obtained a commutation of her sentence.
In 1875 the proprietors of the Echo sold the paper to Baron Grant; and Mr. Arnold and I at once resigned our positions as Editor and Contributor. He had created the paper,—I may say even more,—had created first-class, half-penny journalism altogether; and it was deeply regretted that his able and judicious guidance was lost to the Echo. After an interval, the paper was redeemed from the first purchaser’s hands by that generous gentleman, Mr. Passmore Edwards, than whom it could have no better Proprietor.
I wrote on the whole more than 1,000 leading articles, and a vast number of Notes, for the Echo during the seven years in which I worked upon its staff. The contributors who successively occupied the same columns of second leaders on my off-days were willing, (as I believe Mr. Arnold desired), to adopt on the whole the general line of sentiment and principle which my articles maintained; and thus I had the comfort of thinking that, as regarded social ethics, my work had given in some measure the tone to the paper. It was my pulpit, with permission to make in it (what other pulpits lack so sadly!) such jokes as pleased me; and to put forward on hundreds of matters my views of what was right and honourable. We did not profess to be “written by gentlemen for gentlemen.” The saturnine jests, the snarls and the pessimisms of the clubs were not in our way; and we did not affect to be blasés, or to think the whole world was going to the dogs. There were of course subjects on which a Liberal like Mr. Arnold and a Tory like myself differed widely; and then I left them untouched, for (I need scarcely say) I never wrote a line in that or any other paper not in fullest accordance with my own opinions and convictions, on any subject small or great. The work, I think, was at all events wholesome and harmless. I hope that it also did, now and then, a little good.
After the sudden and unexpected termination of my connection with the Echo I accepted gladly an engagement, not requiring personal attendance, on the staff of the Standard, and wrote two or three leaders a week for that newspaper, for a considerable time. At last the Vivisection controversy came in the way, when I resigned my post in consequence of the appearance of a pro-vivisecting paragraph. The editor assured me generally of his approval of my crusade, and I wrote a few articles more, but the engagement finally dropped. My time had indeed become too much absorbed by the other work to carry on regular Journalism with the needful vigour.
It may interest women who are entering the profession in which I found such pleasure and profit, to know that as regards “filthy lucre,” I found it more remunerative than writing for the best monthly or quarterly periodicals. I did both at the same period; often sitting down to spend some hours of the afternoon over a “Study of Eastern Religion” or some such subject, when I had gone to the Strand and written my leader and notes in the forenoon. Putting all together and the profits of my books, (which were small enough,) I made by my literary and journalistic work at one time a fair income. This golden epoch ended, however, when I threw myself into the Anti-vivisection movement, after which date I do not think I have ever earned more than £100 a year, and for the last 12 years not £20. I suppose in my whole life I have earned nearly £5,000, rather more than my whole patrimony. What my poor father would have felt had he known that his daughter eked out her subsistence by going down in all weathers to write articles for a half-penny newspaper in the Strand, I cannot guess. My brothers happily had no objection to my industry, and the eldest—who drew, as usual with elder sons in our class, more money every year from the family property than I received for life,—kindly paid off my charges on the estate and added £100 a year to the proceeds, so that I was thenceforth, for my moderate wants, fairly well off, especially since I had a friend who shared all expenses of housekeeping with me.
In reviewing my whole literary and journalistic life as I have done in these two chapters, I perceive that I have been from first to last an Essayist; almost pur et simple. I have done very little in any other way than to try to put forward—either at large in a book or in a magazine article, or, lastly, in a newspaper-leader—which was always a miniature essay,—an appeal for some object, an argument for some truth, a vindication of some principle, an exposure of what I conceived to be an absurdity, a wrong, a falsehood, or a cruelty. At first I had exaggerated hopes of success in these endeavours. Books had been a great deal to me in my own solitary life, and I far over-estimated their practical power. When editors and publishers readily accepted my articles and books, and reviewers praised them, I fancied, (though they never sold very freely,) that I was really given the great privilege of moving many hearts. But by degrees as years went on I felt the sorrowful limitation of literary influence. Sometimes I was wild with disappointment and indignation when critics lauded the “style” of my books while they never so much as noticed the purpose for sake of which I had laboured to make them good and strong literature.
For my own part I have shunned Review-writing; partly (as regarded newspaper criticism) for the rather sordid reason that it involves the double labour of reading and writing for the same pay per column, but generally, and in all cases, because I cannot say,—as dear Fanny Kemble used to remark in a sepulchral voice (quite falsely), “I am nothing if not critical.” On the contrary, I am several other things, and very little critical; and the pain and deadly injury I have seen inflicted by a severe review is a form of cruelty for which I have no predilection. It is necessary, no doubt, in the literary community that there should be warders and executioners at the public command to birch juvenile offenders, and flog garrotters, and hang anarchists; but I never felt any vocation for those disagreeable offices. The few reviews I have ever written have been properly Essays on given subjects, taking some book which I could honestly praise for a peg. As in the old Egyptian Book of the Dead the soul of the deceased protests, among his forty-two abjurations,—“I have not been the cause of others’ tears,”—so, I hope, I may say, I have given no brother or sister of the pen the wound (and often the ruinous loss) of a damaging critique of his or her books. If my writings have given pain to any persons, it can only have been to men whose dead consciences it would be an act of mercy to awaken, and towards whom I feel not the smallest compunction. Briefly I conclude in this book, (doubtless my last), a long and moderately successful literary life, with no serious regrets, but with much thankfulness and rejoicing for all the interest, the pleasure and the warm and precious friendships which the profession of letters has brought to me ever since I entered it,—just forty years ago,—when William Longman accepted my Intuitive Morals.