Chapter XVIII My Life in London in the Seventies and Eighties. — Social
I must not write here any personal sketch however slight of my revered friend Dr. Martineau, since he is still,—God be thanked for it!—living, and writing as profoundly and vigorously as ever, in his venerable age of 89. But the weekly sermons which I had the privilege of hearing from his lips for many years, down to 1872, beside several courses of his Lectures on the Gospels and on Ethical Philosophy which I attended, formed so very important, I might say, vital a part of my “Life” in London, that I cannot omit some account of them in my story.
Little Portland Street Chapel is a building of very moderate dimensions, with no pretensions whatever to ecclesiastical finery; whether of architecture, or upholstery, or art of any kind. But it was, I always thought, a fitting, simple place for serious people to meet to think in; not to gaze round them in curiosity or admiration, or to be intoxicated with colours, lights, incense and music; as would seem to be the intention of the administrators of a neighbouring fane! Our services, I suppose, would have been pronounced cold, bare and dull by an habitué of a Ritualistic or Romanist church; but for my own part I should prefer even to be “cold,” (which we were not) rather than allow my religious feelings to be excited through the gratification of my æsthetic sense.
On this matter, however, each one must speak and choose for himself. For me I was perfectly satisfied with my seat in the gallery in that simple chapel, where I could well hear the noblest sermons and see the preacher of whom they always seemed a part; his “Word” in the old sense; not (like many other men’s sermons) things quite apart from the speaker, as we know him in his home and in the street. Of all the men with whom I have ever been acquainted the one who most impressed me with the sense,—shall I call it of congruity? or homogeneity?—of being, in short, the same all through, was he to whom I listened on those happy Sundays.
They were very varied Sermons which Dr. Martineau preached. The general effect, I used to think, was not that of receiving Lessons from a Teacher, but of being invited to accompany a Guide on a mountain-walk. From the upper regions of thought where he led us, we were able,—nay, compelled,—to look down on our daily cares and duties from a loftier point of view; and thence to return to them with fresh feelings and resolutions. Sometimes these ascents were very steep and difficult; and I have ventured to tell him that the richness of his metaphors and similes, beautiful and original as they always were, made it harder to climb after him, and that we sometimes wanted him to hold out to us a shepherd’s crook, rather than a jewelled crozier! But the exercise, if laborious, was to the last degree mentally healthful, and morally strengthening. There was a great variety also, in these wonderful sermons. To hear one of them only, a listener would come away deeming the preacher par éminence a profound and most discriminating Critic. To hear another, he would consider him a Philosopher, occupied entirely with the vastest problems of Science and Theology. Again another would leave the impression of a Poet, as great in his prose as the author of In Memoriam in verse. And lastly and above all, there was always the man filled with devout feeling, who, by his very presence and voice communicated reverence and the sense of the nearness of an all-seeing God.
I could write many pages concerning these Sunday experiences; but I shall do better, I think, if I give my readers, who have never heard them, some small samples of what I carried away from time to time of them, as noted down in letters to my friend. Here are a few of them:
“Mr. Martineau preached of aiming at perfection. At the end he drew a picture of a soul which has made such struggles but has failed. Then he supposed what must be the feeling of such a soul entering on the future life, its regrets; and then inquired what influence being lifted above the things of sense, the nearness to God and holiness would have on it? Would it then arise? Yes! and the Father would say, ‘This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found for evermore.’ I cannot tell you how beautiful it was, how true in the sense of those deepest intuitions which I hold to be certainly true because they bear with them the sense of being absolutely highest, the echo of a higher harmony than belongs to our poor minds. He seemed, for a moment, to be talking in the old conventional way about repentance when too late; and then burst out in faith and hope, so far transcending all such ideas that one felt it came from another source.”
“Mr. Martineau gave us a magnificent sermon on Sunday. I was in great luck not to miss it. One point was this. Our moral judgments are always founded on what we suppose to be the inward motive of the actor, not on the mere external act itself, which may be mischievous or beneficent in the highest degree, without, properly-speaking, affecting our purely ethical judgment—e.g., an unintentional homicide. Now, if, (as our opponents affirm) our Moral Sense came to us ab extra, merely as the current opinion which society has attached to injurious or beneficial actions, then we should not thus decide our judgment by the internal, but by the external and visible part of the act, by which alone society is hurt or benefitted. The fact that our moral judgment regards internal things exclusively, is evidence that it springs from an internal source; and that we judge another, because we are compelled to judge ourselves in the same way.”
Here is a Note I took after hearing another Sermon:—
“Sunday, June 23rd.
“‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
“There are two ways of looking at Sin common in our time. One is to proclaim it so infinitely black that God cannot forgive it except by a method of Atonement itself the height of injustice. The other is to treat it as so venial that God may be counted on as certain to pass it over at the first moment of regret; and all the threats of conscience may be looked on as those of a nurse to a refractory child, threats which are never to be executed. The first of these views seems to honour God most, but really dishonours Him, by representing Him as governing the world on a principle abhorrent to reason and justice. The second can never commend itself save to the most shallow minds who make religion a thing of words, and treat sin and repentance as trivial things, instead of the most awful. How shall we solve the mystery? It is equally unjust for God to treat the guilty as if they were innocent, and the penitent as if they were impenitent. Each fact has to be taken into account, and the most important practical consequences follow from the view we take of the matter. First we must never lose hold of the truth, that, as Cause and Effect are never severed in the natural world, and the whole order of nature would fall to ruin were God ever to interfere with them, so likewise Guilt and Pain are, in His Providence, indissolubly linked; and the order of the moral world would be destroyed were they to be divided. But beside the realm of Law, in which the Divine penalties are unalterable, there is the free world of Spirit wherein our repentance avails. When we can say to God, ‘Put me to grief—I have deserved it. Only restore me Thy love,’ the great woe is gone. We shall be the weaker evermore for our fall, but we shall be restored.”
The following remarks were in a letter to Miss Elliot:—
“January, 1867.
“I wish I could write a résumé of a Sermon which Mr. Martineau preached last Sunday. Just think how many sermons some people would make of this one sentence of his text (speaking of the longing for Rest):—‘If Duty become laborious, do it more fervently. If Love become a source of care and pain, love more nobly and more tenderly. If Doubts disturb and torture, face them with more earnest thought and deeper study!’
“This was not a peroration, but just one phrase of a discourse full of other such things.
“It seems to me that the spontaneous response of our inner souls to such ideas is just the same proof of their truth as the shock we feel in our nerves when a lecturer has delivered a current of electricity proves his lesson to be true.”
“January, 1867.
“While you were enjoying your Cathedral, I was enjoying Little Portland Street Chapel, having bravely tramped through miles of snow on the way, and been rewarded. Mr. Martineau said we were always taunted with only having a negative creed, and were often foolish enough to deny it. But all Reformation is a negation of error and return to the three pure articles of faith—God, Duty, Immortality.... The distinction was admirably drawn between extent of creed and intensity of faith.”
On February 5th, 1871, Mr. Martineau preached:—
“Philosophers might and do say that all Religion is only a projection of Man himself on Nature, lending to Nature his own feelings, brightened by a supreme Love or shadowed by infinite displeasure. Does this disprove Religion? Is there no reliance to be placed on the faculties which connect us with the Infinite? We have two sets of faculties: our Senses, which reveal the outer world; and a deeper series, giving us Poetry, Love, Religion. Should we say that these last are more false than the others? They are true all round. In fact, these are truest. Imagination is true. Affection is true. Do men say that Affection is blind? No! It is the only thing which truly sees. Love alone really perceives. The cynic draws over the world a roof of dark and narrow thoughts and suspicions, and then complains of the close, unhealthy air. Memory again is more than mere Recollection. It has the true artist-power of seizing the points which determine the character and reconstructing the image without details. Suppose there be a God. By what faculties could we know Him save by those which now tell us of Him. And why should they deceive us?”
Alas! the exercise of preaching every Sunday became too great for Dr. Martineau to encounter after 1872, and, by his physician’s orders, those noble sermons came to an end.
Beside Dr. Martineau, I had the privilege of friendship with three eminent Unitarian Ministers, now alas! all departed—Rev. Charles Beard, of Liverpool, for a long time editor of the Theological Review; the venerable and beloved John James Tayler; and Rev. William Henry Channing, to whom I was gratefully attached, both on account of religious sympathies, and of his ardent adoption of our Anti-vivisection cause, which he told me he had at first regarded as somewhat of a “fad” of mine, but came to recognise as a moral crusade of deep significance. Among living friends of the same body, I am happy to number Rev. Philip Wicksteed, the successor of Dr. Martineau in Portland Street and the exceedingly able President of University Hall, Gordon Square,—an institution, in the foundation of which I gladly took part on the invitation of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
A man in whose books I had felt great interest in my old studies at Newbridge, and whose intercourse was a real pleasure to me in London, was Mr. W. R. Greg. I intensely respected the courage which moved him, in those early days of the Fifties, to publish such a book as the Creed of Christendom. He was then a young man, entering public life with the natural ambitions which his great abilities justified, and the avowal of such exorbitant heresies (nothing short of pure Theism) as the book contained, was enough at that date to spoil any man’s career. He was a layman, too, and man of the world, “Que Diable allait il faire, writing on theology at all?” That book remains to this day a most valuable manual of arguments and evidences against the Creed of Christendom; set forth in a grave and reverent spirit and in a clear and manly style. His Enigmas of Life had, I believe, a larger literary success. The world had moved much nearer to his standpoint; and the Enigmas concern the most interesting subjects. We had a little friendly controversy over one passage in the essay, Elsewhere. Mr. Greg had laid it down that, hereafter, Love must retreat from the discovery of the sinfulness of the beloved; and that both saint and sinner will accept as inevitable an eternal separation (Enigmas, 1st Edit., p. 263). To this I demurred strenuously in my Hopes of the Human Race (p. 132–6). I said, “The poor self-condemned soul whom Mr. Greg images as turning away in an agony of shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance,—such a soul is not outside the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he not,—even assuming his guilt to be black as night,—only in a similar relation to the purest of created souls, which that purest soul holds to the All-holy One above? If God can love us, is it not the acme of moral presumption to think of a human soul being too pure to love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection? The whole problem is unreal and impossible. In the first place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls capable of equal love, and the one can never reach a height whence it may justly despise the other. And, in the second place, the higher the virtuous soul may have risen in the spiritual world, the more it must have acquired the god-like Insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the god-like Love which embraces the repentant Prodigal.
In the next edition of his Enigmas (the 7th), after the issue of my book, Mr. Greg wrote a most generous recantation of his former view. He said:—
“The force of these objections to my delineation cannot be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No doubt a soul that can so love and so feel its separation from the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qualities to win and to merit answering affection. The lovingness of a nature—its capacity for strong and deep attachment—must constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out of which to elicit and foster all other good. No doubt, again, if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness.”
Later on he asks:—
“How can the blessed enjoy anything to be called Happiness if the bad are writhing in hopeless anguish?” “Obviously only in one way. By ceasing to love, that is, by renouncing the best and purest part of their nature.... Or, to put it in still bolder language, ‘How,—given a hell of torment and despair for millions of his friends and fellow men—can the good enjoy Heaven except by becoming bad, and without being miraculously changed for the worse?’”
The following flattering letters are unluckily all which I have kept of Mr. Greg’s writing:—
“Park Lodge, Wimbledon Common, S.W.,
“February 19th.
“My Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have been solacing myself this morning, after a month of harrowing toil, with your paper in the last Theological, and I want to tell you how much it has gratified me.
“I don’t mean your appreciative cordiality towards myself, nor your criticisms on a portion of my speculations, which, however (though I fancy you have rather misread me), I will refer to again and try to profit by. I daresay you are mainly right, the more so as I see Mr. Thom in the same number remonstrates in an identical tone.
“That your paper is, I think, not only beautiful in thought and much of it original, but singularly full of rich suggestions, and one of the most real contributions to a further conception of a possible future that I have met with for long. It is real thought—not like most of mine, mere sentiment and imagination.
“I don’t know if you are still in town, or have began the villegiatura you spoke of when I last saw you, but I daresay this note will be forwarded.
“When did No. 1 appear?
“I particularly like your remark about self-reprobation, p. 456, and from 463 onward. By the way, do you know Isaac Taylor’s ‘Physical Theory of Another Life?’ It is very curious and interesting.
“Yours faithfully,
“W. R. Greg.
“I have just finished an Introduction (about 100 pp.) to a new edition of “The Creed of Christendom,” which will be published in the autumn, and it contains some thoughts very analogous to yours.”
“Park Lodge, Wimbledon Common, S.W.,
“August 6th.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have read your Town and Country Mouse with much pleasure. I should have enjoyed your Paper still more if I had not felt that it was suggested by your intention to cut London, and the desire to put as good a face upon that regrettable design as you could. However you have stated the case with remarkable fairness. I, who am a passionate lover of nature, who have never lived in Town, and should pine away if I attempted it, still feel in the decline of years the increasing necessity of creeping towards the world rather than retiring from it. I feel, as one grows old, the want of external stimulus to stave off stagnation. The vividness of youthful thought is needed, I think, to support solitude.
“I retired to Westmoreland for 15 years in the middle of life when I was much worn, and it did me good: but I was glad to come back to active life, and I think my present location—Wimbledon Common for a cottage, within 5 miles of London, and coming in five days a week—is perfection.
“I daresay you may be right; but all your friends will miss you much—I not the least.
“Yours faithfully,
“W. R. Greg.”
Mr. Greg’s allusion to my Town and Country Mouse reminds me of a letter which was sent me by some unknown reader on the publication of that article. It repeats a famous story worth recording as told thus by an ear-witness who, though anonymous is obviously worthy of credit.
“Athenæum Club,
“Pall Mall, S.W.
“Will Miss Cobbe kindly pardon the liberty taken by a reader of her delightful ‘Town and Country Mouse’ in venturing to substitute the true version of Sir George Lewis’ too famous dictum?
“In the hearing of the writer he was asked (by one of his subordinates in the Government) as they were getting into the train, returning to town,
“‘Well! How do you like life in Herefordshire?’
“‘Ah! It would be very tolerable, if it were not for the Amusements’—was his reply.
“Miss Cobbe has high Authority for the mis-quotation: for the Times invariably commits it; and the present writer has again and again intended to correct it, and failed to execute the intention.
“If they are pleasures, they are pleasures; and the paradox is absurd, instead of amusing; but the oppressive stupidity of many of the ‘Amusements’ (to the Author of ‘Influence of Authority,’ &c.!) may well call up in the mind the sort of amiable cynicism, which was a feature of his own character.
“On arriving late and unexpectedly at home for a fortnight’s Rest, he found his own study occupied by two young ladies (sisters) as a Bedroom—it being the night of Lady Theresa’s Ball! With his exquisite good nature he simply set about finding some other roost; and all the complaint he ever made was that, which has become perhaps not too famous!”
At the time of the Franco-Prussian war, as will be remembered by everyone living at the time in London, the cleavage between the sympathisers with the two contending countries was almost as sharp as it had previously been during the American War between the partizans of the North and of the South. Dean Stanley was one of our friends who took warmly the side of the Germans, and I naturally sent him a letter I had received from a Frenchman whom we both respected, remonstrating rather bitterly against the attitude of England. The Dean, in returning M. P.’s letter wrote as follows24:—
“Deanery, March 25th, 1871.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Although you kindly excuse me from doing so, I cannot but express, and almost, wish that you could convey to M. P. the melancholy interest with which we have read his letter. Interesting of course it is but to us—I know not whether to you—it is deeply sad to see a man like M. P. so thoroughly blind to the true situation of his country. Not a word of repentance for the aggressive and unjust war! not a word of acknowledgment that, had the French, as they wished, invaded Germany, they would have entered Berlin and seized the Rhenish provinces without remorse or compunction!—not a spark of appreciation of the moral superiority by which the Germans achieved their successes! I do not doubt that excesses may have been committed by the German troops; but I feel sure that they have been exceeded by those of the French, and would have been yet more had the French entered Germany.
“And how very superfluous to attack us for having done just the same as in 1848! Our sad crime was not to have prevented the war by remonstrating with the French Emperor and people in July, 1870, and of that poor P. takes no account! Alas! for France!
“Yours sincerely,
“A. P. Stanley.”
The following is a rather important note as recording the Dean’s sentiments as regarded Cardinal Newman. I cannot recall what was the paper which I had sent him to which he alludes. I think I had spoken to him of my friendship with Francis Newman, and of the information given me by the latter that he could never remember his brother putting his hand to a single cause of benevolence or moral reform. I had asked him to solicit his support with that of Cardinal Manning (already obtained) to the cause for which I was then beginning to work,—on behalf of animals.
“Jan. 15th, 1875.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I return this with many thanks. I think you must have sent it to me, partly as a rebuke for having so nearly sailed in the same boat of ignorance and inhumanity with Dr. Newman.
“I have just finished, with a mixture of weariness and nausea, his letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Even the fierce innuendoes and deadly thrusts at Manning cannot reconcile me to such a mass of cobwebs and evasions. When the sum of the theological teaching of the two brothers is weighed, will not ’the Soul’ of Francis be found to counterbalance, as a contribution to true, solid, catholic (even in any sense of the word) Christianity, all the writings of John Henry?
“I have sent my paper on Vestments to the Contemporary.
“Yours sincerely,
“A. P. Stanley.
“Read it in the light of his old letter to B. Ullathorne, published in (illegible).”
The papers on “Vestments,” to which Dean Stanley alludes, had interested and amused me much when he read it at Sion College, and I had urged him to send it to one of the Reviews. Here is a report of that evening’s proceedings which I sent next day to my friend Miss Elliot.
“January 14th, 1875.
“I do so much wish you had been with us last night at Sion College. Dean Stanley was more delightful than ever. He read a splendid paper, full of learning, wit, and sense on Ecclesiastical Vestments. In the course of it, he said, referring to the position of the altar, &c., that on this subject he had nothing to add to the remarks of his friend, the Dean of Bristol, ‘whose authority on all matters connected with English ecclesiastical history was universally admitted to be the best.’ After the reading of his paper, which lasted an hour and a quarter, that odious Dr. L—— got up, and in his mincing brogue attacked Dean Stanley very rudely. Then they called on Martineau, and he made a charming speech, beginning by saying he had nothing to do with vestments, having received no ordination, and might for his part repeat the poem “Nothing to Wear!” Then he went on to say that if the Church were ever to regain the Nonconformists, it would certainly not be by proceeding in the sacerdotal direction. He was much cheered. Rev. H. White made, I thought, one of the best speeches of the evening. Altogether, it was exceedingly amusing.”
On the occasion of the interment of Sir Charles Lyell in Westminster Abbey, I sent the Dean, by his request, some hints respecting Sir Charles’ views and character, and received the following reply:
“February 25th, 1875.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“Your letter is invaluable to me. Long as was my acquaintance with Sir Charles Lyell, and kind as he was to me, I never knew him intimately, and therefore most of what you tell me was new. The last time he spoke to me was in urging me with the greatest earnestness to ask Colenso to preach. Can you tell me one small point? Had he a turn for music? I must refer back to the last funeral (when I could not preach) of Sir Sterndale Bennett, and it would be a convenience for me to know this, Yes or No.
“You will come (if you come to the sermon) and any friends,—thro’ the Deanery at 2.45 on Sunday.
“Yours sincerely,
“A. P. Stanley.”
Some time after this I sent him one of my theological articles on the Life after Death. He acknowledged it thus kindly:—
“Deanery, November 2nd.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Many thanks. Your writing on this subject is to me more nearly to the truth—at least more nearly to my hopes and desires—than almost any others which are now floating around us.
“Yours sincerely,
“A. P. Stanley.”
This next letter again referred to one of my books—and to Cardinal Newman:—
“October 12th, 1876.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“Many thanks for your book. You will see by my letter last night that I had already made good progress in it; as borrowed from the Library. I shall much value it.
Do not trouble yourself about Newman’s letter. I am much more anxious that the public should see it than that I should. I am amazed at the impression made upon me by the “Characteristics” of Newman. Most of the selections I had read before; but the net result is of a farrago of fanciful, disingenuous nonentities; all except the personal reminiscences.
“Yours truly,
“A. P. Stanley.”
One day I had been calling on him at the Deanery, and said to him, after describing my office in Victoria Street and our frequent Committee meetings there: “Now Mr. Dean, do you think it right and as it ought to be, that I should sit at that table as Hon. Sec. with Lord Shaftesbury on my right, and Cardinal Manning on my left,—and that you should not sit opposite to complete the “Reunion of Christendom?” He laughed heartily, agreed he certainly ought to be there, and promised to come. But time failed, and only his honoured name graced our lists.
The following is the last letter I have preserved of Dean Stanley’s writing. It is needless to say how much pleasure it gave me:—
“October 16th, 1876.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have just finished re-reading with real admiration and consolation your “Hopes of the Human Race.” May I ask these questions: 1. Is it in, or coming into, a second edition? If the latter, is it too much to suggest that the note on p. 3 could, if not omitted, be modified? I appreciate the motive for its insertion, but it makes the lending and recommending of the book difficult. 2. Who is ’one of the greatest men of Science’—p. 20? 3. Where is there an authentic appearance of the Pope’s reply to Odo Russell—p. 107?
“Yours sincerely,
“A. P. Stanley.”
I afterwards learned from Dean Stanley, one day when I was visiting him at the Deanery after his wife’s death, that he had read these Essays to Lady Augusta in the last weeks of her life, finding them, as he told me, the most satisfactory treatment of the subject he had met; and that after her death he read them over again. He gave me with much feeling a sad photograph of her as a dying woman, after telling me this. Mr. Motley the historian of the Netherlands, having also lost his wife not long afterwards, spoke to Dean Stanley of his desire for some book on the subject which would meet his doubts, and Dean Stanley gave him this one of mine.
Dean Stanley, it is needless to say, was the most welcome of guests in every house which he entered. There was something in his high-mindedness, I can use no other term, his sense of the glory of England, his love of his church (on extremely Erastian principles!) as the National Religion, his unfailing courtesy, his unaffected enjoyment of drollery and gossip, and his almost youthful excitement about each important subject which cropped up, which made him delightful to everyone in turn. There was no man in London I think whom it gave me such pleasure to meet “in the sixties and seventies” as the “Great Dean”; and he was uniformly most kind to me. The last occasion, I think, on which I saw him in full spirits was at a house where the pleasantest people were constantly to be found,—that of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, in Cornwall Gardens. Renan and his wife were there, and I was so favoured as to be seated next to Renan; Dean Stanley being on the other side of our tactful hostess. The Dean had been showing Renan over the Abbey in the morning, and they were both in the gayest mood, but I remember Dean Stanley speaking to Renan with indescribable and concentrated indignation of the avowal Mr. Gladstone had recently made that the Clerkenwell explosion had caused him to determine on the disestablishment of the Irish Church.
I have found an old letter to my friend describing this dinner:—
“I had a most amusing evening yesterday. Kind Mrs. Simpson made me sit beside Renan; and Dean Stanley was across the corner, so we made, with nice Mrs. W. R. G. and Mr. M., a very jolly little party at our end of the table. The Dean began with grace, rather sotto voce, with a blink at Renan, who kept on never minding. His (Renan’s) looks are even worse than his picture leads one to expect. His face is exactly like a hog, so stupendously broad across the ears and jowl! But he is very gentlemanly in manner, very winning and full of fun and finesse. We had to talk French with him, but the Dean’s French was so much worse than mine that I felt quite at ease, and rattled away about the Triduos at Florence (to appease the wrath of Heaven on account of his Vie de Jésus), and had some private jokes with him about his malice in calling the Publicans of the Gospels ‘douaniers,’ and the ass a ‘baudet!’ He said he did it on purpose; and that when he was last in Italy numbers of poor people came to him, and asked him for the lucky number for the lotteries, because they thought he was so near the Devil he must know! I gave him your message about the Hengwrt MSS., and he apologised for having written about the ‘mesquines’ considerations which had caused them to be locked up, [to wit, that several leaves of the Red Book of Hergest had been stolen by too enthusiastic Welsh scholars!] and solemnly vowed to alter the passage in the next edition, and thanked you for the promise of obtaining leave for him to see them.
“I also talked to M. Renan of his Essay on the Poésie de la Race Celtique, and made him laugh at his own assertion that Irishmen had such a longing for ‘the Infinite’ that when they could not attain to it otherwise they sought it through a strong liquor ‘qui s’appelle le Whiskey.’”
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s delightful volume on Renan has opened to my mind many fresh reasons for admiring the great French scholar, whose works I had falsely imagined I had known pretty well before reading it. But when all is said, the impression he has left on me (and I should think on most other people) is one of disappointment and short-falling.
M. Renan has written of himself the well-known and often laughed-at boast: “Seul dans mon siècle j’ai pu comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise!” I do not know about his comprehension of St. Francis, though I should think it a very great tour de force for the brilliant French academician and critic to throw himself into that typical mediæval mind! But as regarded the former Person I should say that of all the tens of thousands who have studied and written about him during these last nineteen centuries, Renan was in some respects the least able to “comprehend” him. The man who could describe the story of the Prodigal as a “délicieuse parabole,” is as far out of Christ’s latitude as the pole from the equator. One abhors æsthetics when things too sacred to be measured by their standard are commended in their name. Renan seems to me to have been for practical purposes a Pantheist without a glimmer of that sense of moral and personal relation to God which was the supreme characteristic of Christ. When he translates Christ’s pity for the Magdalenes as jealousy “pour la gloire de son Père dans ces belles créatures;” and introduces the term “femmes d’une vie équivoque” as a rendering for “sinners,” he strikes a note so false that no praise lavished afterwards can restore harmony.
The late Lord Houghton was one of the men of note who I met occasionally at the houses of friends. I had known him in Italy and he was always kind to me and invited me to his Christmas parties at Frystone, which were said to be delightful, but to which I did not go. For a poet he had an extraordinarily rough exterior and blunt manner. One day we had a regular set-to argument lasting a long time. He attacked the order of things with the usual pessimist observations on all the evil in the world, and implied that I had no reasonable right to my faith. I answered as best I could, with some earnestness, and he finally concluded the discussion by remarking with concentrated contempt: “You might almost as well be a Christian!” Next day I went to Westminster Abbey and was sitting in the Dean’s pew, when, to my amusement Lord Houghton came in just below, with a party of ladies and took a seat exactly opposite me. He behaved of course with edifying propriety, but I could not help reflecting with a smile on our argument of the night before, and wondering how many members of that and similar congregations who were naturally counted by outsiders as faithful supporters of the orthodox creed, were as little so, au fond, as either Lord Houghton or I.
With Carlyle, though I saw him very frequently, I never interchanged more than a few banal words of civility. When his biography appeared, I was, (as I frankly told the illustrious biographer) exceedingly glad that I had never given him the chance of attaching one of his pungent epigrams to my poor person. I had been introduced to him by a lady at whose house he happened to call one afternoon when I was sitting with her, and where he showed himself (as it seems to me the roughest men invariably do in the society of amiable Countesses),—extremely apprivoisé. Also I continually met him out walking with one or other of his great historian friends, who were also mine, but I avoided trespassing on their good nature; or addressing him when he walked up and down alone daily before our door in Cheyne Walk,—till one day when he had been very ill, I ventured to express my satisfaction in seeing him out of doors again. He then answered me kindly. I never shared the admiration felt for him by so many able men who knew him personally, and therefore had means which I did not possess, of estimating him aright. To me his books and himself represented an anomalous sort of human Fruit. The original stock was a hard and thorny Scotch peasant-character, with a splendid intellect superadded. The graft was not wholly successful. A flavour of the old acrid sloe was always perceptible in the plum.
The following letter was received by Dr. Hoggan in reply to a letter to Mr. Carlyle concerning Vivisection:
“Keston Lodge, Beckenham,
“28th August, 1875.
“Dear Sir,
“Mr. Carlyle has received your letter, and has read it carefully. He bids me say, that ever since he was a boy when he read the account of Majendie’s atrocities, he has never thought of the practice of vivisecting animals but with horror. I may mention that I have heard him speak of it in the strongest terms of disgust long before there was any speech about public agitation on the subject. He believes that the reports about the good results said to be obtained from the practice of vivisection to be immensely exaggerated; with the exception of certain experiments by Harvey and certain others by Sir Charles Bell, he is not aware of any conspicuous good that has resulted from it. But even supposing the good results to be much greater than Mr. Carlyle believes they are, and apart too from the shocking pain inflicted on the helpless animals operated upon, he would still think the practice so brutalising to the operators that he would earnestly wish the law on the subject to be altered, so as to make Vivisection even in Institutions like that with which you are connected a most rare occurrence, and when practised by private individuals an indictable offence.
“You are not sure that the operators on living animals ‘can be counted on your fingers.’ Mr. Carlyle with an equal share of certainty believes Vivisection and other kindred experiments on living animals to be much more largely practised, and that they are by no means uncommonly undertaken by doctors’ apprentices and ‘other miserable persons.’
“You are mistaken if you look upon the Times as a mirror of virtue; on this very subject when it at first began to be publicly discussed last winter, it printed a letter from... which your letter itself would prove to be altogether composed of falsehoods.
“With Mr. Carlyle’s compliments and good wishes,
“I remain, dear Sir,
“Yours truly,
“Mary Carlyle Aitken.”
Mr. Carlyle supported our Anti-vivisection Society from the outset, for which I was very grateful to him; but having promised to join our first important deputation to the Home Office, to urge the Government to bring in a Bill in accordance with the recommendations of the Royal Commission, he failed at the last moment to put in an appearance, having learned that Cardinal Manning was to be also present. I was told that he said he would not appear in public with the Cardinal, who was, he thought, “the chief emissary of Beelzebub in England!” When this was repeated to me, my remark was:—“Infidels is riz! Time was, when Cardinals would not appear in public with infidels!”
Nothing has surprised me more in reading the memoirs and letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle than the small interest either of them seems to have felt in the great subjects which formed the life-work of their many illustrious visitors. While humbler folk who touched the same circles were vehemently attracted, or else repelled, by the political, philosophical and theological theories and labours of such men as Mazzini, Mill, Colenso, Jowett, Martineau and Darwin, and every conversation and almost every letter contained new facts, or animated discussions regarding them, the Carlyles received visits from these great men continually, with (it would seem) little or no interest in their aims or views one way or the other, in approval or disapproval; and wrote and talked much more seriously about the delinquencies of their own maidservants, and the great and never-to-be-sufficiently-appealed-against cock and hen nuisance.
I had known Cardinal Manning in Rome about 1861 or 1863 when he was “Monsignor Manning,” and went a little into English society, resplendent in a beautiful violet robe. He was very busy in those days making converts among English young ladies, and one with whom we were acquainted, the daughter of a celebrated authoress, fell into his net. He had, at all times, a gentle way of ridiculing English doings and prejudices which was no doubt telling. One of the stories he told me was of an Italian sacristan asking him “what was the Red Prayer Book which all the English tourists carried about and read so devoutly in the churches?” (of course Murray’s Hand-books).25
A few years afterwards when he had returned to England as Archbishop of Westminster, I met him pretty frequently at Miss Stanley’s house in Grosvenor Crescent. He there attacked me cheerfully one evening: “Miss Cobbe I have found out something against you. I have discovered that Voltaire was part-owner of a Slave-ship!”
“I beg you to believe,” said I, “that I have no responsibility whatever respecting Voltaire! But I would ask your Grace, whether it be not true that Las Casas, the saintly Dominican, founded Negro Slavery in America?” A Church of England friend coming up and laughing, I discharged a second barrel: “And was not the Protestant Saint, Newton of Olney,—much worse than all,—the Captain of a Slave-ship?”26
One evening at this pleasant house I was standing on the rug in one of the rooms talking to Mr. Matthew Arnold and two or three other acquaintances of the same set. The Archbishop, on entering shook hands with each of us, and we were all talking in the usual easy, sub-humorous, London way when a tall military-looking man, a Major G., came in, and seeing Manning, walked straight up to him, went down on one knee and kissed his ring! A bomb falling amongst us would scarcely have been more startling; and Manning, Englishman as he was to the backbone under his fine Roman feathers, was obviously disconcerted, though dignified as ever.
In a letter to a friend dated Feb. 19th, 1867, I find I said:
“I had an amusing conversation with Archbishop Manning the other night at Miss Stanley’s. He was most good-humoured, coming up to me as I was talking to Sir C. Trevelyan, about Rome, and saying ‘I am glad you think of going to Rome next winter, Miss Cobbe. It proves you expect the Pope to be firmly established there still.’ We had rather a long talk about Passaglia who he says has recanted,—[a fact I heard strongly contradicted later.] Mr. J. (now Sir H. J.) came behind him in the midst of our talk and almost pitched the Archbishop on me, with such a push as I never saw given in a drawing-room! The Dean and Lady Augusta came in later, and she asked eagerly: ‘Where was Manning?’ having never seen him. He had gone away, so I told her of the enthusiastic meeting which had afforded a spectacle to us all an hour before, between him and Archdeacon Denison. It was quite a scene of ecclesiastical reconciliation; a ‘Reunion of Christendom!’ (They had been told each that the other was in the adjoining room, and Archdeacon Denison literally rushed with both hands outspread to meet the Cardinal, whom he had not seen since his conversion.)”
In later years, I received at least half-a-dozen notes from time to time from his Eminence asking for details of our Anti-vivisection work, and exhibiting his anxiety to master the facts on which he proposed to speak at our Meetings. Here are some of these notes:—
“Archbishop’s House, Westminster, S.W.,
“June 12th, 1882.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I should be much obliged if you would send me some recent facts or utterances of the Mantegazza kind, for the meeting at Lord Shaftesbury’s. I have for a long time lost all reckoning from overwork, and need to be posted up.
“Believe me, always faithfully yours,
“Henry E., Card. Archbp.”
“Cardinal Manning to Miss F. P. C.
“Eastern Road, Brighton.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I can assure you that my slowness in answering your letter has not arisen from any diminution of care on Vivisection. I was never better able to understand it, for I have been for nearly three weeks in pain day and night from neuralgia in the right arm, which makes writing difficult.
“I have not seen Mr. Holt’s Bill, and I do not know what it aims at.
“Before I can say anything, I wish to be fully informed. The Bill of last year does not content me.
“But we must take care not to weaken what we have gained. I hope to stay here over Sunday, and should be much obliged if you could desire someone to send me a copy of Mr. Holt’s Bill.
“Has sufficient organised effort been made to enforce Mr. Cross’s Act?
“Believe me, always yours very truly,
“Henry E., Card. Archbp.”
“Archbishop’s House, Westminster, S.W.,
“June 22nd, 1884.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I will attend the meeting of the 26th unless hindered by some unforeseen necessity, but I must ask you to send me a brief. I am so driven by work that for some time I have fallen behind your proceedings. Send me one or two points marked and I will read them up.
“My mind is more than ever fixed on this subject.
“Believe me, yours faithfully,
“Henry E., Card. Archbp.”
“Archbishop’s House, Westminster, S.W.,
“January 27th, 1887.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“For the last three weeks I have been kept to the house by one of my yearly colds; but if possible I will be present at the Meeting of the Society. If I should be unable to be there I will write a letter.
“I clearly see that the proposed Physiological and Pathological Institute would be centre and sanction of ever advancing Vivisection.
“I hope you are recovering health and strength by your rest in the country?
“Believe me, always faithfully yours,
“Henry E., Card. Archbp.”
“Archbishop’s House, Westminster, S.W.,
“July 31st, 1889.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“My last days have been so full that I have not been able to write. I thank you for your letter, and for the contents of it. The highest counsel is always the safest and best, cost us what it may. We may take the cost as the test of its rectitude.
“I hope you will go on writing against this inflation of vain glory calling itself Science.
“Believe me, always, very truly yours,
“Henry E., Card. Archbishop.”
At no less than seven of our annual Meetings (at one of which he presided) did Cardinal Manning make speeches. All these I have myself reprinted in an ornamental pamphlet to be obtained at 20, Victoria Street. The reasons for his adoption of our Anti-vivisection cause, were, I am sure, mainly moral and humane; but I think an incident which occurred in Rome not long before our campaign began may have impressed on his mind a regret that the Catholic Church had hitherto done nothing on behalf of the lower animals, and a desire to take part himself in a humane crusade and so rectify its position before the Protestant world.
Pope Pio IX. had been addressed by the English in Rome through Lord Ampthill, (then Mr. Odo Russell, our representative there)—with a request for permission to found a Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Rome; where, (as all the world knows) it was almost as deplorably needed as at Naples. After a considerable delay, the formal reply through the proper Office, was sent to Mr. Russell refusing the (indispensable) permission. The document conveying this refusal expressly stated that “a Society for such a purpose could not be sanctioned in Rome. Man owed duties to his fellow men; but he owed no duties to the lower animals therefore, though such societies might exist in Protestant countries they could not be allowed to be established in Rome.”
The late Lord Arthur Russell, coming back from Italy to England just after this event, told me of it with great detail, and assured me that he had seen the Papal document in his brother’s possession; and that if I chose to publish the matter in England, he would guarantee the truth of the story at any time. I did very much choose to publish it, thinking it was a thing which ought to be proclaimed on the housetops; and I repeated it in seven or eight different publications, ranging from the Quarterly Review to the Echo. Soon after this, if I remember rightly, began the Anti-vivisection movement, and almost immediately when the Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection (afterwards called the Victoria Street Society) was founded, by Dr. Hoggan and myself, Cardinal Manning gave us his name and active support. He took part in our first Deputation to the Home Office, and spoke at our first meeting, which was held on the 10th June, 1876, at the Westminster Palace Hotel. On that occasion, when it came to the Cardinal’s turn to speak, he began at once to say that “Much misapprehension existed as to the attitude of his Church on the subject of duty to animals.” [As he said this, with his usual clear, calm, deliberate enunciation, he looked me straight in the face and I looked at him!] He proceeded to say: “It was true that man owed no duty directly to the brutes, but he owed it to God, whose creatures they are, to treat them mercifully.”
This was, I considered a very good way of reconciling adhesion to the Pope’s doctrine, with humane principles; and I greatly rejoiced that such a mezzo-termine could be put forward on authority. Of course in my private opinion the Cardinal’s ethics were theoretically untenable, seeing that if it were possible to conceive of such a thing as a creature made by a man, (as people in the thirteenth century believed that Arnaldus de Villa-Nova had made a living man), or even such a thing as a creature made by the Devil,—that most wretched being would still have a right to be spared pain if he were sensitive to pain; and would assuredly be a proper object of measureless compassion. That a dog or horse is a creature of God; that its love and service to us come of God’s gracious provisions for us; that the animal is unoffending to its Creator, while we are suppliants for forgiveness for our offences; all these are true and tender reasons for additional kindness and care for these our dumb fellow-creatures. But they are not (as the Cardinal’s argument would seem to imply) the only reasons for showing mercy towards them.
Nevertheless it was a great step,—I may say an historical event,—that a principle practically including universal humanity to the lower animals, should have been enunciated publicly and formally by a “Prince of the Church” of Rome. That Cardinal Manning was not only the first great Roman prelate to lay down any such principle, but that he far outran many of his contemporaries and co-religionists in so doing, has become painfully manifest this year (1894) from the numerous letters from priests which have appeared in the Tablet and Catholic Times, bearing a very different complexion. Cardinal Manning repeated almost verbatim the same explanation of his own standpoint in his speech on March 9th, 1887, when he occupied the chair at our Annual Meeting. He said:
“It is perfectly true that obligations and duties are between moral persons, and therefore the lower animals are not susceptible of those moral obligations which we owe to one another; but we owe a seven-fold obligation to the Creator of those animals. Our obligation and moral duty is to Him who made them, and, if we wish to know the limit and the broad outline of our obligation, I say at once it is His Nature and His perfections; and, among those perfections, one is most profoundly that of eternal mercy. (Hear, hear.) And, therefore, although a poor mule or a poor horse is not indeed a moral person, yet the Lord and Maker of that mule and that horse is the highest law-giver, and His Nature is a law to Himself. And, in giving a dominion over His creatures to man, He gave them subject to the condition that they should be used in conformity to His own perfections, which is His own law, and, therefore, our law.”
On the first occasion a generous Roman Catholic nobleman present gave me £20 to have the Cardinal’s speech translated into Italian and widely circulated in Italy.
I have good reason to believe that when Cardinal Manning went to Rome after the election of Leo XIII., he spoke earnestly to his Holiness on the subject of cruelty to animals generally in Italy, and especially concerning Vivisection, and that he understood the Pope to agree with him and sanction his attitude. I learned this from a private source, but his Eminence referred to it quite unmistakeably in his speech at Lord Shaftesbury’s house on the 21st June, 1882, as follows:—
“I am somewhat concerned to say it, but I know that an impression has been made that those whom I represent look, if not with approbation, at least with great indulgence, at the practice of Vivisection. I grieve to say that abroad there are a great many (whom I beg to say I do not represent) who do favour the practice; but this I do protest, that there is not a religious instinct in nature, nor a religion of nature, nor is there a word in revelation, either in the Old Testament or the New Testament, nor is there to be found in the great theology which I do represent, no, nor in any Act of the Church of which I am a member; no, nor in the lives and utterances of any one of those great servants of that Church who stand as examples, nor is there an authoritative utterance anywhere to be found in favour of Vivisection. There may be the chatter, the prating, and the talk of those who know nothing about it. And I know what I have stated to be the fact, for some years ago I took a step known to our excellent secretary, and brought the subject under the notice and authority where alone I could bring it. And those before whom it was laid soon proved to have been profoundly ignorant of the outlines of the alphabet even of Vivisection. They believed entirely that the practice of surgery and the science of anatomy owed everything to the discoveries of vivisectors. They were filled to the full with every false impression, but when the facts were made known to them, they experienced a revulsion of feeling.”
Cardinal Manning also, (as I happen likewise to know) made a great effort about 1878 or 1879, to induce the then General of the Franciscans, to support the Anti-vivisection movement for love of St. Francis, and his tenderness to animals. In this attempt, however, Cardinal Manning must have been entirely unsuccessful, as no modern Franciscan that ever I have heard of, has stirred a finger on behalf of animals anywhere, or given his name to any Society for protecting them, either from vulgar or from scientific cruelty. Knowing this, I confess to feeling some impatience when the name of St. Francis and his amiable fondness for birds and beasts is perpetually flaunted whenever the lack of common humanity to animals visible in Catholic countries happens to be mentioned. It is a very small matter that a Saint, six hundred years ago, sang with nightingales and fed wolves, if the monks of his own Order and the priests of the Church which has canonised him, never warn their flocks that to torment God’s creatures is even a venial sin, and when forced to notice barbarous cruelties to a brute, invariably reply, “Non è Cristiano,” as if all claims to compassion were dismissed by that consideration!
The answer of the General of the Franciscans to Cardinal Manning’s touching appeal was,—“that he had consulted his doctor and that his doctor assured him that no such thing as Vivisection was ever practised in Italy!”
I was kindly permitted to call at Archbishop’s House and see Cardinal Manning several times; and I find the following little record of one of my first visits in a letter to my friend, written the same, or next day:—
“I had a very interesting interview with the Cardinal. I was shown into a vast, dreary dining-room quite monastic in its whitey-brown walls, poverty-stricken furniture, crucifix, and pictures of half-a-dozen Bishops who did not exhibit the ‘Beauty of Holiness.’ The Cardinal received me most kindly, and said he was so glad to see me, and that he was much better in health after a long illness. He is not much changed. It was droll to sit talking tête-à-tête with a man with a pink octagon on his venerable head, and various little scraps of scarlet showing here and there to remind one that ‘Grattez’ the English gentleman and you will find the Roman Cardinal! He told me, really with effusion, that his heart was in our work; and he promised to go to the Meeting to-morrow.... I told him we all wished him to take the chair. He said it would be much better for a layman like Lord Coleridge to do so. I said, ‘I don’t think you know the place you hold in English, (I paused and added avec intention,) Protestant estimation’! He laughed very good-humouredly and said: ‘I think I do, very well.’”
At the Meeting on the following day when he did take the chair, I had opportunities as Hon. Sec., of which I did not fail to avail myself, of a little quiet conversation with his Eminence before the proceedings.
I spoke of the moral results of Darwinism on the character and remarked how paralyzing was the idea that Conscience was merely an hereditary instinct fixed in the brain by the interests of the tribe, and in no sense the voice of God in the heart or His law graven on the “fleshly tablets.” He abounded in my sense, and augured immeasurable evils from the general adoption of such a philosophy. I asked him what was the Catholic doctrine of the origin of Souls? He answered, promptly and emphatically: “O, that each one is a distinct creation of God.”
The last day on which His Eminence attended a Committee Meeting in Victoria Street I had a little conversation with him as usual, after business was over; and reminded him that on every occasion when he had previously attended, we had had our beloved President, Lord Shaftesbury present. “Shall I tell your Eminence,” I asked, “what Mrs. F.” (now Lady B.) “told me Lord Shaftesbury said to her shortly before he died, about our Committees here? He said that ‘if our Society had done nothing else but bring you and him together, and make you sit and work at the same table for the same object, it would have been well worth while to have founded it!’” “Did Lord Shaftesbury say that?” said the Cardinal, with a moisture in his eyes, “Did he say that? I loved Lord Shaftesbury!”
And these, I reflected, were the men whom narrow bigots of both creeds, looked on as the very chiefs of opposing camps and bitter enemies! The one rejoiced at an excuse for meeting the other in friendly co-operation! The other said as his last word: “I loved him!”
I was greatly touched by this little scene, and going straight from it to the house of the friend who had told me of Lord Shaftesbury’s remark, I naturally described it to her and to Mr. Lowell, who was taking tea with us. “Ah, yes!” Lady B. said,—“I remember it well, and I could show you the very tree in the park where we were sitting when Lord Shaftesbury made that remark. But” (she added) “why did you not tell the Cardinal that he included you? What Lord Shaftesbury said was, that ‘the Society had brought the Cardinal and you and himself to work together.’” Mr. Lowell was interested in all this, and the evidence it afforded of the width of mind of the great philanthropist, so often supposed to be “a narrow Evangelical.”
Alas! he also has “gone over to the majority.” I met him often and liked him (as every one did) extremely. Though in so many ways different, he had some of Mr. Gladstone’s peculiar power of making every conversation wherein he took part interesting; of turning it off dusty roads into pleasant paths. He had not in the smallest degree that tiresome habit of giving information instead of conveying impressions, which makes some worthy people so unspeakably fatiguing as companions. I had once the privilege of sitting between him and Lord Tennyson when they carried on an animated conversation, and I could see how much the great Poet was delighted with the lesser one; who was also a large-hearted Statesman; a silver link between two great nations.
I shall account it one of the chief honours which have fallen to my lot that Tennyson asked leave, through his son, to pay me a visit. Needless to say I accepted the offer with gratitude and, fortunately, I was at home, in our little house in Cheyne Walk, when he called on me. He sat for a long time over my fire, and talked of poetry; of the share melodious words ought to have in it; of the hatefulness of scientific cruelty, against which he was going to write again; and of the new and dangerous phases of thought then apparent. Much that he said on the latter subject was, I think, crystallised in his Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later. After he had risen to go and I had followed him to the stairs, I returned to my room and said from my heart, “Thank God!” The great poem which had been so much to me for half a lifetime, was not spoiled; the Man and the Poet were one. Nothing that I had now seen and heard of him in the flesh jarred with what I had known of him in the spirit.
After this first visit I had the pleasure of meeting Lord Tennyson several times and of making Lady Tennyson’s charming acquaintance; the present Lord Tennyson being exceedingly kind and friendly to me in welcoming me to their house. On one occasion when I met Lord Tennyson at the house of a mutual friend, he told me, (with an innocent surprise which I could not but find diverting,) that a certain great Professor had been positively angry and rude to him about his lines in the Children’s Hospital concerning those who “carve the living hound”! I tried to explain to him the fury of the whole clique at the discovery that the consciences of the rest of mankind has considerably outstepped theirs in the matter of humanity and that while they fancied themselves, (in his words,) “the heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of Time,” it was really in the Dark Ages, as regarded humane sentiment,—or at least one or two centuries past,—in which they lingered; practising the Art of Torture on beasts, as men did on men in the sixteenth century. I also tried to explain to him that his ideal of a Vivisector with red face and coarse hands was quite wrong, and as false as the representation of Lady Macbeth as a tall and masculine woman. Lady Macbeth must have been small, thin and concentrated, not a big, bony, conscientious Scotch woman; and Vivisectors (some of them at all events) are polished and handsome gentlemen, with peculiarly delicate fingers (for drawing out nerves, &c., as Cyon describes).
Lord Tennyson from the very first beginning of our Anti-vivisection movement, in 1874, to the hour of his death, never once failed to append his name to every successive Memorial and Petition,—and they were many,—which I, and my successors, sent to him; and he accepted and held our Hon. Membership and afterwards the Vice-Presidency of our Society from first to last.
The last time I saw Lord Tennyson was one day in London after I had taken luncheon at his house. When I rose to leave the table, and he shook hands with me at the door as we were parting, as we supposed, for that season; he said to me: “Good-Bye, Miss Cobbe—Fight the good Fight. Go on! Fight the good Fight.” I saw him no more; but I shall do his bidding, please God, to the end.
I shall insert here two letters which I received from Lord Tennyson which, though trifling in themselves, I prize as testimonies of his sympathy and goodwill. I am fortunately able to add to them two papers of some real interest,—the contemporary estimate of Tennyson’s first poems by his friends, the Kembles; and the announcement of the death of Arthur Hallam by his friend John Mitchell Kemble to Fanny Kemble. They have come into my possession with a vast mass of family and other papers given me by Mrs. Kemble several years ago, and belong to a series of letters, marvellously long and closely written, by John Kemble, during and after his romantic expedition to Spain along with the future Archbishop Trench and the other young enthusiasts of 1830. The way in which John Mitchell Kemble speaks of his friend Alfred Tennyson’s Poems is satisfactory, but much more so is the beautiful testimony he renders to the character of Hallam. It is touching, and uplifting too, to read the rather singular words “of a holier heart,” applied to the subject of “In Memoriam,” by his young companion.
“Farringford, Freshwater,
“Isle of Wight,
“June 4th, 1880.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have subscribed my name, and I hope that it may be of some use to your cause.
“My wife is grateful to you for remembrance of her, and
“I am, ever yours,
“A. Tennyson.”
“Aldworth, Haslemere,
“Surrey, January 9th, 1882.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“I thank you for your essay, which I found very interesting, though perhaps somewhat too vehement to serve your purpose. Have you seen that terrible book by a Swiss (reviewed in the Spectator) Ayez Pitié? Pray pardon my not answering you before. I am so harried with letters and poems from all parts of the world, that my friends often have to wait for an answer.
“Yours ever,
“A. Tennyson.”
“Farringford, Freshwater,
“Isle of Wight, June 12th, 1882.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I am sorry to say that I shall not be in London the 21st, so that I cannot be present at your meeting. Many thanks for asking me. My father has been suffering from a bad attack of gout, and does not feel inclined to write more about Vivisection. You have, as you know, his warmest good wishes in all your great struggle. When are we to see you again? Can you not pay us a visit at Haslemere this summer?
“With our kindest regards,
“Yours very sincerely,
“Hallam Tennyson.”
Extract from letter from John M. Kemble to Fanny Kemble. No date. In packet of 1830–1833:—
“I am very glad that you like Tennyson’s Poems; if you had any poetry in you, you could not help it; for the general system of criticism, and the notion that a poet is to be appreciated by everybody, if he be a poet, are mighty fallacies. It was only the High Priest who was privileged to enter the Holy of Holies; and so it is with that other Holy of Holies, no less sacred and replete with divinity, a great poet’s mind: therein no vulgar foot may tread. To meet this objection, it is often said that all men appreciate, &c., &c., Shakespeare and Milton, &c. To this I answer by a direct denial. Not one man in a hundred thousand cares three straws for Milton; and though from being a dramatic Poet Shakespeare must be better understood, I believe I may say that not one in a hundred thousand feels all that is to be felt in him. There is no man who has done so much as Tennyson to express poetical feeling by sound; Titian has done as much with colours. Indeed, I believe no poet to have lived since Milton, so perfect in his form, except Göthe. In this matter, Shelley and Keats and Byron, even Wordsworth, have been found wanting. Coleridge expresses the greatest admiration for Charles Tennyson’s sonnets; we have sent him Alfred’s poems, which, I am sure, will delight him.”
Extract from letter from John Mitchell Kemble to Fanny Kemble:—
“It is with feelings of inexpressible pain that I announce to you the death of poor Arthur Hallam, who expired suddenly from an attack of apoplexy at Vienna, on the 15th of last month. Though this was always feared by us as likely to occur, the shock has been a bitter one to bear: and most of all so to the Tennysons, whose sister Emily he was to have married. I have not yet had the courage to write to Alfred. This is a loss which will most assuredly be felt by this age, for if ever man was born for great things he was. Never was a more powerful intellect joined to a purer and holier heart; and the whole illuminated with the richest imagination, the most sparkling yet the kindest wit. One cannot lament for him that he is gone to a far better life, but we weep over his coffin and wonder that we cannot be consoled. The Roman epitaph on two young children: Sibi met ipsis dolorem abstulerunt, suis reliquere (from themselves they took away pain, to their friends they left it!) is always present to my mind, and somehow the miserable feeling of loneliness comes over one even though one knows that the dead are happier than the living. His poor father was with him only. They had been travelling together in Hungary and were on their return to England; but there had been nothing whatever to announce the fatal termination of their journey; indeed, bating fatigue, Arthur had been unusually well. Our other friends, though all mourning for him as if he had been our brother, are well.”
In my chapter on Italy I have written some pages concerning Mr. and Mrs. Browning, and printed two or three kind letters from him to me. It is a great privilege, I now feel, to have known, even in such slight measure these two great poets. But what an unspeakable blessing and honour it has been for England all through the Victorian Age to have for her representatives and teachers in the high realm of poetry, two such men as Tennyson and Browning; men of immaculate honour, blameless and beautiful lives, and lofty and pure inspiration! Not one word which either has ever published need be blotted out by any recording angel, and, widely different as they were, their high doctrine was the same. The one tells us that “good” will be “the final goal of ill”; the other that—
“God’s in His Heaven!
All’s right with the world!”
I have had also the good fortune to find other English poets ready to sympathise with me on the subject of Vivisection. Sir Henry Taylor wrote many letters to me upon it and called my attention to his own lines which go so deep into the philosophy of the question, and which I have since quoted so often;
“Pain in Man
Bears the high mission of the flail and fan,
In brutes ’tis purely piteous.”
Here is one of his notes to me:—
“The Roost, Bournemouth,
“November 25th, 1875.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I return your papers that they may not be wasted. I wish you all the success you deserve, which is all you can desire. But I can do nothing. My hands are full here, and my pockets are empty.
“Two months ago I succeeded in forming a local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty in this place.
“We have ordered prosecutions every week since, and have obtained convictions in every case. And these local operations are all that I can undertake or assist.
“Believe me, yours sincerely,
“Henry Taylor.”
He was also actively interested in an effort to improve the method of slaughtering cattle by using a mask with a fixed hole in the centre, through which a long nail may be easily driven, straight through the exact suture of the skull to the brain, causing instant death. Sir Henry specially approved the masks for this purpose, made, I believe, under his own direction at Bournemouth, by Mr. Mendon, a saddler at Lansdowne.
Mr. Lewis Morris has also written some beautiful and striking poems touching on the subject of scientific cruelty, and I have reason to hope that a younger man, who many of us look upon as the poet of the future in England, Mr. William Watson, is entirely on the same side. In short, if the Priests of Science are against us, the Prophets of Humanity, the Poets, are with us in this controversy, almost to a man.
It will be seen that we had Politicians, Historians, and thinkers of various parties among our friends in London; but there were no Novelists except that very agreeable woman Miss Jewsbury and the two Misses Betham Edwards. Mr. Anthony Trollope I knew but slightly. I had also some acquaintance with a very popular novelist, then a young man, who was introduced in the full flush of his success to Mr. Carlyle, whereon the “Sage of Chelsea” greeted him with the encouraging question, “Well, Mr. —— when do you intend to begin to do something sairious?”
With Mr. Wilkie Collins I exchanged several friendly letters concerning some information he wanted for one of his books. The following letter from him exhibits the “Sairius” spirit, at all events (as Mr. Carlyle might admit), in which he set about spinning the elaborate web of his exciting tales.
“90, Gloucester Place, Portman Square, W.,
“23rd June, 1882.
“Dear Madam,
“I most sincerely thank you for your kind letter and for the pamphlets which preceded it. The ‘Address’ seems to me to possess the very rare merit of forcible statement combined with a moderation of judgment which sets a valuable example, not only to our enemies, but to some of our friends. As to the ‘Portrait,’ I feel such a strong universal interest in it that I must not venture on criticism. You have given me exactly what I most wanted for the purpose that I have in view—and you have spared me time and trouble in the best and kindest of ways. If I require further help, you shall see that I am gratefully sensible of the help that has been already given.
“I am writing to a very large public both at home and abroad; and it is quite needless (when I am writing to you) to dwell on the importance of producing the right impression by means which keep clear of terrifying and revolting the ordinary reader. I shall leave the detestable cruelties of the laboratory to be merely inferred, and, in tracing the moral influence of those cruelties on the nature of the man who practices them, and the result as to his social relations with the persons about him, I shall be careful to present him to the reader as a man not infinitely wicked and cruel, and to show the efforts made by his better instincts to resist the inevitable hardening of the heart, the fatal stupefying of all the finer sensibilities, produced by the deliberately merciless occupations of his life. If I can succeed in making him, in some degree, an object of compassion as well as of horror, my experience of readers of fiction tells me that the right effect will be produced by the right means.
“Believe me, very truly yours,
“Wilkie Collins.”
Of another order of acquaintances was that excellent man Mr. James Spedding; also Mr. Babbage, (in whose horror of street music I devoutly sympathised); and Mr. James Fergusson the architect, in whose books and ideas generally I found great interest. He avowed to me his opinion that the ancient Jews were never builders of stone edifices, and that all the relics of stone buildings in Palestine were the work either of Tyrians or of the Idumean Herod, or of other non-Jewish rulers. His conversation was always most instructive to me, and I rejoiced when I had the opportunity of writing a long review (for Fraser I think) of his Tree and Serpent Worship; with which he was so well pleased that he made me a present of the magnificent volume, of which I believe only a hundred copies were printed. Mr. Fergusson taught me to see that the whole civilization of a country has depended historically on the stones with which it happens naturally to be furnished. If these stones be large and hard and durable like those of Egypt, we find grand, everlasting monuments and statues made of them. If they be delicate and beautiful like Pentelic marble, we have the Parthenon. If they be plain limestone or freestone as in our northern climes, richness of form and detail take the place of greater simplicity, and we have the great cathedrals of England, France and Germany. Where there is no good stone, only brick, we may have fine mansions, but not great temples, and where there is neither clay for bricks, nor good stone for building, the natives can erect no durable edifices, and consequently have no places to be adorned with statues and paintings and all the arts which go with them. I do not know whether I do justice to Mr. Fergusson in giving this résumé of his lesson, but it is my recollection of it, and to my thinking worth recording.
One of the friends of whom we saw most in London was Sir William Boxall, whose exquisite artistic taste was specially congenial to my friend, and his varied conversation and love of his poor, dear, old dog “Garry,” to me. After Lord Coleridge’s charming obituary of him nothing need be added in the way of tribute to his character and gifts, or to the refined feeling which inspired him always. I may add, however (what the Lord Chief Justice naturally would not say on his own account), namely, that Boxall, in his latter years of weakness and almost constant confinement to the house, frequently told us when we went to visit him how Lord Coleridge had found time from all his labours to come frequently to sit with him and cheer him; and after a whole day spent in the hot Law Courts would dine on his old friend’s chops, and spend the evening in his dingy rooms in Welbeck Street. Here is a letter from Sir William which I happen to have preserved. It refers to an article I had written in the Echo on the death of Landseer:—
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“Your sympathetic notice of my old friend Landseer and his friends has delighted me—a grain of such feeling is worth a newspaper load of worn-out criticism. I thank you very sincerely for it.
“I should have called upon you, but I have been shut up with the cold which threatened me when I last saw you.
“Yours very sincerely,
“W. Boxall.
“October 6th, 1879.
“There is no hope of my getting to Dolgelly. It will be a great escape for Miss Lloyd, for I am utterly worn out.”
I find that the most common opinion about Lord Shaftesbury is, that he was an excellent and most disinterested man, who did a vast amount of good in his time among the poor, and in the factories and on behalf of the climbing-boy sweeps, but that he was somewhat narrowminded; and dry, if not stern in character. Perhaps some would add that his extreme Evangelicalism had in it a tinge of Calvinistic bigotry. I shared very much such ideas about him till one day in 1875, when I had gone to Stanhope Street to consult Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, my unfailing helpers and advisers, about some matter connected with Lord Henniker’s Bill then before Parliament,—for the restriction of Vivisection. After explaining my difficulty, Lady Mount-Temple said, “We must consult Lord Shaftesbury about this matter. Come with me now to his house.” I yielded to my kind friend, but not without hesitation, fearing that Lord Shaftesbury would, in the first place, be too much absorbed in his great philanthropic undertakings to spare attention to the wrongs of the brutes; and, in the second, that his religious views were too strict to allow him to co-operate with such a heretic as I, even if (as I was assured) he would tolerate my intrusion. How widely astray from the truth I was as regarded his sentiments in both ways, the sequel proved. He had already, it appeared, taken great interest in the Anti-vivisection controversy then beginning, and entered into it with all the warmth of his heart; not as something taking him off from service to mankind, but as apart of his philanthropy. He always emphatically endorsed my view; that, if we could save Vivisectors from persisting in the sin of Cruelty, we should be doing them a moral service greater than to save them from becoming pickpockets or drunkards. He also felt what I may call passionate pity for the tortured brutes. He loved dogs, and always had a large beautiful Collie lying under his writing-table; and was full of tenderness to his daughters’ Siamese cat, and spoke of all animals with intimate knowledge and sympathy. As to my heresies, though he knew of them from the first, they never interfered with his kindness and consideration for me, which were such as I can never remember without emotion.
I shall speak in its place in another chapter of the share he took as leader and champion of our party in all the subsequent events connected with the Anti-vivisection agitation. I wish here only to give, (if it may be possible for me), some small idea to the reader of what that good man really was, and to remove some of the absurd misconceptions current concerning him. For example. He was no bigot as to Sabbatarian observances. I told him once that I belonged to the Society for opening Museums on Sundays. He said: “I think you are mistaken—the working men do not wish it. See! I have here the result of a large enquiry among their Trades Unions and clubs. Nearly all of them deprecate the change. But I am on this point not at all of the same opinion as most of my friends. I have told them (and they have often been a little shocked at it), that I think if a lawyer has a brief for a case on Monday and has had no time to study it on Saturday, he is quite justified in reading it up on Sunday after church.”
Neither did he share the very common bigotry of teetotalism. He said to me, “The teetotallers have added an Eleventh Commandment, and think more of it than of all the rest.” Again, when (as is well known) Lord Palmerston left the choice of Bishops for many years practically in his hands (I believe that seven owed their sees to him), and he, of course, selected Evangelical clergymen who would uphold what he considered to be vital religious truth, he was yet able to concur heartily in the appointment of Arthur Stanley to the Deanery of Westminster. He told me that Lord Palmerston had written to him before inviting Dr. Stanley, and said that he would not do it if he, (Lord Shaftesbury) disapproved; and that he had answered that he was well aware that Dr. Stanley’s theological views differed widely from his own, but that he was an admirable man and a gentleman, with special suitability for this post and a claim to some such high office; and that he cordially approved Lord Palmerston’s choice. I do not suppose that Dean Stanley ever knew of this possible veto in Lord Shaftesbury’s hands, but he entertained the profoundest respect for him, and expressed it in the little poem which he wrote about him (of which Lord Shaftesbury gave me an MS. copy), which appears in Dean Stanley’s biography. He compares the aged philanthropist to “a great rock’s shadow in a weary land.”
It was a charge against Howard and some other great philanthropists that, while exhibiting the enthusiasm of humanity on the largest scale they failed to show it on a small one, and were scantily kind to those immediately around them. Nothing could be less true of Lord Shaftesbury. While the direction of a score of great charitable undertakings rested on him, and his study was flooded with reports, Bills before Parliament and letters by the hundred,—he would remember to perform all sorts of little kindnesses to individuals having no special claim on him; and never by any chance did he omit an act of courtesy. No more perfectly high-bred gentleman ever graced the old school; and no young man, I may add, ever had a fresher or warmer heart. Indeed, I know not where I should look among old or young for such ready and full response of feeling to each call for pity, for sympathy, for indignation, and, I may add, for the enjoyment of humour, the least gleam of which caught his eye a moment. He was always particularly tickled with the absurdities involved in the doctrine of Apostolic Succession, and whenever a clergyman or a bishop did anything he much disapproved, he was sure to stigmatize it from that point of view. One day he was giving me a rather long account of some Deputation which had waited on him and endeavoured to bully him. As he described the scene: “There they stood in a crowd in the room, and I said to them; Gentlemen! I’ll see you.”... (Good Heavens! I thought: Where did he say he would see them?)—“I’ll see you at the bottom of the Red Sea before I’ll do it!” The revulsion was so ludicrous and the allusion to the “Red Sea” instead of “another place,” so characteristic, that I broke into a peal of laughter which, when explained, made him also laugh heartily. Another day I remember his great amusement at a story not reported, I believe, in the Times, but told me by an M.P. who was present in the House when Sir P. O. had outdone Sir Boyle Roche. He spoke of “the ingratitude of the Irish to Mr. Gladstone who had broken down the bridges which divided them from England!”
A lady whose reputation was less unblemished than might have been wished, and of whom I fought very shy in consequence, went to call on him about some business. When I saw him next he told me of her visit, and said, “When she left my study, I said to myself; ‘there goes a dashing Cyprian!’” One needed to go back a century to recall this droll old phrase. More than once he repeated, chuckling with amusement, the speech of an old beggar woman to whom he had refused alms, and who called after him, “You withered specimen of bygone philanthropy!” On another occasion when he was in the Chair at a small meeting, one of the speakers persisted in expressing over and over again his conviction that the venerable Chairman could not be expected to live long. Lord Shaftesbury turned aside to me and said sotto voce, “I declare he’s telling me I’m going to die immediately!” “There he is saying it again! Was there ever such a man?” Nobody was more awake than he to the “dodges” of interested people trying to make capital out of his religious party. A most ridiculous instance of this he described to me with great glee. At the time of the excitement (now long forgotten) about the Madiai family, Barnum actually called upon him (Lord Shaftesbury) and entreated him to allow of the Madiai being taken over to be exhibited in New York! “It would be such an affecting sight,” said Barnum, “to see real Christian Martyrs!”
As an instance of his thoughtfulness, I may mention that having one day just received a ticket for the Private View of the Academy, he offered it to me and I accepted it gladly, observing that since the recent death of Boxall I feared we should not have one given to us, and that my friend would be pleased to use it. “O, I am so glad!” said Lord Shaftesbury; and from that day every year till he died he never once failed to send her, addressed by himself, his tickets for each of the two annual exhibitions. When one thinks of how men who do not do in a year as much as he did in a week, would have scoffed at the idea of taking such trouble, one may estimate the good nature which prompted this over-worked man to remember such a trifle, unfailingly.
The most touching interview I ever had with him, was one of the last, in his study in Grosvenor Square, not long before his death. Our conversation had fallen on the woes and wrongs of seduced girls and ruined women; and he told me many facts which he had learned by personal investigation and visits to dreadful haunts in London. He described all he saw and heard with a compassion for the victims and yet a horror of vice and impurity, which somehow made me think of Christ and the Woman taken in adultery. After a few moments’ silence, during which we were both rather overcome, he said, “When I feel age creeping on me, and know I must soon die, I hope it is not wrong to say it, but I cannot bear to leave the world with all the misery in it.” No words can describe how this simple expression revealed to me the man, in his inmost spirit. He had long passed the stage of moral effort which does good as a duty, and had ascended to that wherein even the enjoyment of Heaven itself, (which of course, his creed taught him to expect immediately after death) had less attractions for him than the labour of mitigating the sorrows of earth.
I possess 280 letters and notes from Lord Shaftesbury written to me during the ten years which elapsed from 1875, when I first saw him, till his last illness in 1885. Many of them are merely brief notes, giving me information or advice about my work as Hon. Sec. of the Victoria Street Society, of which he was President. But many are long and interesting letters. The editor of his excellent Biography probably did not know I possessed these letters, nor did I know he was preparing Lord Shaftesbury’s Life or I should have placed them at his disposal. I can only here quote a few as characteristic, or otherwise specially interesting to me.
“Castle Wemyss, Wemyss Bay, N.B.,
“September 3rd, 1878.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Your letter is very cheering. We were right to make the experiment. We were right to test the man and the law: Cross, and his administration of it. Both have failed us, and we are bound in duty, I think, to leap over all limitations, and go in for the total abolition of this vile and cruel form of Idolatry; for idolatry it is, and, like all idolatry, brutal, degrading, and deceptive....
“May God prosper us! These ill-used and tortured animals are as much His Creatures as we are, and to say the truth, I had, in some instances, rather be the animal tortured than the man who tortured it. I should believe myself to have higher hopes, and a happier future.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
“July 10th, 1879.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have sent your letter to Judas of X——. I find no fault in it, but that of too much courtesy to one so lost to every consideration of feeling and truth.
“Did you know him, as I know him, you would find it difficult to restrain your pen and your tongue.”...
“Some good will come out of the discussion.
“I have unmistakable evidence that many were deeply impressed, but adhesion to political leaders is a higher law with most Politicians than obedience to the law of truth.
“What do you think now of the Doctrine of ‘Apostolic Succession’?
“Would St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John have made such a speech as that of my Lord of P——?
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
“Castle Wemyss, Wemyss Bay, N.B.,
“September 16th, 1879.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“You do that Bishop too much honour. He is not worth notice.
“It is frightful to see that the open champions of Vivisection are not Bradlaugh and Mrs. B. but Bishops, ‘Fathers in God,’ and ‘Pastors’ of the People!
“We shall soon have Bradlaugh and his company claiming the Apostolical Succession; and if that succession be founded on truth, mercy, and love, with as good a right as Dr. G., Dr. M. or D.D. anything else.
“Your letter has crushed (if such a hard substance can be crushed) his Lordship of C....
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
The next letter is in acknowledgment of the following verses which I had sent to him on his Eightieth Birthday. They were repeated by the late Chamberlain of the City of London, Sir Benjamin Scott, in his oration on the presentation of the Freedom of the City to Lord Shaftesbury. I print the letter, (though all too kind in its expression about my poor verses,) on account of the deeply interesting review of his own life which it contains:—
A BIRTHDAY ADDRESS
To Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G.
April 28th, 1881.
For eighty years! Many will count them over,
But none save He who knoweth all may guess
What those long years have held of high endeavour,
Of world-wide blessing and of blessedness.
For eighty years the champion of the right
Of hapless child neglected and forlorn;
Of maniac dungeon’d in his double night;
Of woman overtasked and labour-worn;
Of homeless boy in streets with peril rife;
Of workman sickening in his airless den;
Of Indian parching for the streams of life,
Of Negro slave in bonds of cruel men;
O! Friend of all the friendless ’neath the sun,
Whose hand hath wiped away a thousand tears,
Whose fervent lips and clear strong brain have done
God’s holy service, lo! these eighty years,—
How meet it seems thy grand and vigorous age
Should find beyond man’s race fresh pangs to spare
And for the wrong’d and tortured brutes engage
In yet fresh labours and ungrudging care!
O tarry long amongst us! Live, we pray,
Hasten not yet to hear thy Lord’s “Well done!”
Let this world still seem better while it may
Contain one soul like thine amid its throng.
Whilst thou art here our inmost hearts confess,
Truth spake the kingly Seer of old who said—
“Found in the way of God and righteousness,
A crown of glory is the hoary head.”
“Lord Shaftesbury to Miss F. P. C.
“24, Grosvenor Square, W.,
“April 30th, 1881.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Had I not known your handwriting, I should never have guessed, either that you were the writer of the verses, or that I was the subject of them.
“Had I judged them simply by their ability and force, I might have ascribed them to the true Author; but it required the envelope, and the ominous word ‘eighty,’ to justify me in applying them to myself.
“They both touched and gratified me, but I will tell you the origin of my public career, which you have been so kind as to commend. It arose while I was a boy at Harrow School, about, I should think, fourteen years of age—an event occurred (the details of which I may give you some other day), which brought painfully before me the scorn and neglect manifested towards the Poor and helpless. I was deeply affected; but, for many years afterwards, I acted only on feeling and sentiment. As I advanced in life, all this grew up to a sense of duty; and I was convinced that God had called me to devote whatever advantages He might have bestowed upon me, to the cause of the weak, the helpless, both man and beast, and those who had none to help them.
“I entered Parliament in 1826, and I commenced operations in 1828, with an effort to ameliorate the conditions of lunatics, and then I passed on in a succession of attempts to grapple with other evils, and such has been my trade for more than half a century.
“Do not think for a moment that I claim any merit. If there be any doctrine that I dislike and fear more than another, it is the ‘Doctrine of Works.’ Whatever I have done has been given to me; what I have done I was enabled to do; and all happy results (if any there be) must be credited, not to the servant, but to the great Master, who led and sustained him.
“My course, however, has raised up for me many enemies, and very few friends, but among those friends I hope that you may be numbered.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
I sent him another little souvenir two years later:—
TO LORD SHAFTESBURY ON HIS 82ND BIRTHDAY.
With a China Tablet.
The Lord of Rome, historians say,
Lamented he had “lost a day,”
When no good deed was done.
Scarce one such day, methinks, appears
In the long record of the years
Of England’s worthier son.
If on this tablet’s surface light
His hourly toils should Shaftesbury write
All may be soon effaced:
But in our grateful memories graven
And in the registers of Heaven
They will not be erased.
London, April 28th, 1883.
The next letter refers to my Lectures on the Duties of Women which I had just delivered.
“24, Grosvenor Square, W.,
“May 14th, 1880.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“... I admire your Lectures. But do you not try to make, ‘the sex’ a little too pugnacious? And why do you give ’truth’ to the men, and deny it to the women?
“If you mean by ’truth’ abstinence from fibs, I think that the females are as good as the males. But if you mean steadiness of friendship, adherence to principles, conscientiously not superficially entertained, and sincerity in a good cause, why, the women are far superior.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
“24, Grosvenor Square, W.,
“May 21st, 1880.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“... Your lecture on Vivisection was admirable—we must be ’mealy mouthed’ no longer.
“Shall you and I have a conversation on your lectures and the ‘Duties of Women’? We shall not, I believe, have much difference of opinion; perhaps none. I approve them heartily, but there are one or two expressions which, though intelligible to myself, would be greatly misconstrued by a certain portion of Englishmen.
“I could give you instances by the hundred of the wonderful success that, by a merciful Providence, has followed with our Ragged children, male and female.27 In fact, though after long intervals we have lost sight of a good many, we have very few cases, indeed, of the failure of our hopes and efforts.
“In thirty years we took off the streets of London, and sent to service, or provided with means of honest livelihood more than two hundred and twenty thousand ‘waifs and strays.’
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
“July 23rd, 1880.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have had a very friendly letter from Gladstone; but on reference to him for permission to publish it, he seems unwilling to assent.
“Our testimony, thank God, is cumulative for good. We may hope, and we must pray, for better things.
“I send you Gladstone’s letter. Pray return it to me, and take care that it does not appear in print.28
“I am glad that you liked the ‘Dinner.’ It was, I think, a success in showing civility to foreign friends.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
Lord Shaftesbury made the following remarks about the Future State of Animals, in a very sympathizing reply to a letter I had written to him in which I mentioned to him that my dog had died:—
“September 29th, 1883.
“I have ever believed in a happy future for animals; I cannot say or conjecture how or where; but sure I am that the love, so manifested, by dogs especially, is an emanation from the Divine essence, and, as such, it can, or rather it will never be extinguished.”29
“24, Grosvenor Square, W.,
“May 14th, 1885.
“My dear Miss Cobbe,
“You must not suppose that because I did not answer your letter, at the moment, I am indifferent to you or your correspondence.
“Far from it, but when I have little to do, being almost confined to the house, I have much to write, and to get through my work, I must frequently be relieved by a recumbent posture.
“Nevertheless, by God’s mercy, I am certainly better; and I think that were we blessed with some warm, genial, weather, I should recover more rapidly.
“Bryan30 is a good man, he is able, diligent, zealous and has an excellent judgment. I have not been able to attend his Committee, but his reports to me show attention and good sense.
“I have left, as perhaps you have seen, the Lunacy Commission. It was at the close of 56 years of service that I did so. I dare say that you have had time to read my letter of resignation in the Times of the 8th.
“I am very glad that Miss Lloyd is determined to print those lines. They are very beautiful; and you must be sure to send a copy to Miss Marsh. She admires them as much as I do.
“The thought of Calvary31 is the strength that has governed all the sentiments and actions of my manhood and later life; and you can well believe that I greatly rejoice to find that one, whom I prize so highly, has kindred sympathies....
“May God prosper you.
“Yours truly,
“Shaftesbury.”
The most remarkable woman I have known, not excepting Mrs. Somerville (described in my chapter on Italy), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs. Beecher Stowe, was, beyond any doubt or question, my dear friend, Fanny Kemble. I have told of the droll circumstances of our first meeting at Newbridge in the early Fifties. From that time till her death in 1892, her brilliant, iridescent genius, her wit, her spirit, her tenderness, the immense “go” and momentum of her whole nature, were sources of endless pleasure to me. When I was lame, I used to feel that for days after talking with her I could almost dispense with my crutches, so much did she, literally, lift me up!
Mrs. Kemble paid us several visits here in Wales, and was perhaps even more delightful in our quiet country quarters than in London. She would sit out for many hours at a time in our beautiful old garden, which she said was to her “an idyll;” and talk of all things in heaven and earth; touching in turn every note in the gamut of emotion from sorrowful to joyous. One summer she came to us early, and thus sat daily under a great cherry tree “in the midst of the garden,” which was at the time a mass of odorous and snowy blossoms. Alas! the blossoms have returned and are blooming as I write;—but the friend sleeps under the sod in Kensal Green.
Mr. Henry James’ obituary article and Mr. Bentley’s generous-hearted letter concerning her in the Times—in rebuke of the mean and grudging notice of her which that paper had published,—seem to me to have been by far the most truthful sketches which appeared of the “grand old lioness;” as Thackeray called her. Everybody could admire, and most people a little feared her; but it needed to come very close to her and brush past her formidable thorns of irony and sarcasm, to know and love her, as she most truly deserved to be loved.
There is always something startling and perhaps the reverse of attractive to those of us who have been brought up in the usual English way to repress our emotions, in women who have been trained reversely by histrionic life, to give all possible outwardness and vividness of expression to those same emotions. It is only when we get below both the extreme demonstrativeness on one hand, and the conventional reserve and self-restraint on the other, and meet on common ground of deep sympathies, that real friendship is established; a friendship which in my case was at once an honour and a delight.
Mrs. Kemble in her generous affection made a present to me of the MSS. of her Memoirs, which subsequently I induced her to take back, and publish herself, as her “Old Woman’s Gossip,” her Records of a Girlhood and Records of Later Life. Beside these, which, as I have said, I returned to her one after another, she gave me, and I still possess, an immense packet of her own old letters to her beloved H. S. (Harriet St. Leger) and others; and the materials of five large and thick volumes of autograph letters addressed to her, extending over more than 50 years. They include whole correspondences with W. Donne, Edward Fitzgerald, Henry Greville, Mrs. Jameson, John Mitchell Kemble, George Combe, and several others; and besides these there are either one or half-a-dozen letters from almost every man and woman of eminence in England in her time. Mr. Bentley has very liberally purchased from me for publication about 100 letters from Edward Fitzgerald to Mrs. Kemble. The rest of the Mrs. Kemble’s correspondence I have, as I have mentioned, bound together in five volumes, and I do not intend to publish them. Had any of Mrs. Kemble’s “Records” remained inedited at the time of her death I should have undertaken, (as she no doubt intended me to do) the task of writing her biography. The work was, however, so fully done by herself in her long series of volumes that there was neither need nor room for more. I am happy to add, in conclusion, that in the arrangements I have made regarding my dear old friend’s literary remains, I have the consent and approval of her daughters.
I knew Mrs. Gaskell a little, but not enough to harmonize in my mind the woman I saw in the flesh with the books I liked so well as Mary Barton and Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras. Of Mrs. Stowe’s delightful conversation on the terrace of our villa on Bellosguardo, I have written my recollections, and recorded the glimpses I had of Mrs. Browning. I have also described Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur; our sculptor and painter friends, from the latter of whom I have just (1898) received the kindest letters and her impressive photograph; and Mary Carpenter, my leader and fellow-worker at Bristol. I must not speak here of the affection and admiration I entertain for my dear, living friend Anna Swanwick, the translator of Æschylus and Faust; and for Louisa Lee Schuyler, one of the leaders in the organization of relief in the great Civil War of America and who founded and carried to its present marvellous extent of power and usefulness the State Charities Aid Association of New York. Again, I have known in England Mdme. Bodichon (who furnished Girton with its first thousand pounds); Mrs. Josephine Butler; Mrs. Webster the classic poetess; and Mrs. Emily Pfeiffer, another poetess and very beautiful woman at whose house I once witnessed an interesting scene,—a large party of ladies and gentlemen dressed in the attire of Athenians of the Periclean age. Miss Swanwick and I, who were alone permitted to attend in English costume, were immensely impressed by the ennobling effect of the classic dress, not only on young and graceful people, but on those who were quite the reverse.
I never saw Harriet Martineau; but was so desirous of doing it that I intended to make a journey to Ambleside for the purpose, and with that view begged our mutual friend, the late Mrs. Hensleigh Wedgwood, to ask leave to introduce me to her. It was an unfortunate moment, and I only received the following kind message:—
“I need not say how happy I should have been to become acquainted with Miss Cobbe; but the time is past and I am only fit for old friends who can excuse my shortcomings. I have lost ground so much of late that the case is clear. I must give up all hopes of so great a pleasure. Will you say this to her and ask her to receive my kind and thankful regards, I venture to send on the grounds of our common friendships?”
Of my living, beloved and honoured friends, Mrs. William Grey, Lady Mount-Temple, Miss Shirreff, Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Caroline Stephen, Miss Julia Wedgwood, Lady Battersea, and Miss Florence Davenport Hill, I must not here speak. I have had the pleasure also of meeting that very fine woman-worker Miss Octavia Hill.
George Eliot I did not know, nor, as I have just said, did I ever meet Harriet Martineau. But with those two great exceptions I think I may boast of having come into contact with nearly all the more gifted Englishwomen of the Victorian era; and thus when I speak, as I shall do in the next chapter, of my efforts to put the claims of my sex fairly before the world, I may boast of writing with practical personal knowledge of what women are and can be, both as to character and ability.
The decade which began in 1880 brought me many sorrows. The first was the death of my second brother, Thomas Cobbe, of Easton Lyss. I loved him much for his own sweet and affectionate nature; and much, too, for the love of our mother which he shared especially with me. I was also warmly attached to his beautiful and good Scotch wife, who survived him only a few years; and to his dear children, who were my pets in infancy and have been almost like my own daughters ever since. My brother ought to have been a very successful and brilliant barrister, but his life was broken by the faults of others, and when in advanced years he wrote, with immense patience and research, a really valuable History of the Norman Kings (thought to be so by such competent judges as Mr. William Longman, and the Historical Society of Normandy, which asked leave to translate it), the book was practically killed by a cruel and most unfair review which attributed to him mistakes which he had not made, and refused to publish his refutation of the charge. If this review were written (as we could not but surmise) by an eminent historian, now dead, whose own book my brother had, very unwisely, ignored, I can only say it was a malicious and spiteful deed. My brother’s ambition was not strong enough to carry him over such a disappointment, and he never attempted to write again for the press, but spent his later years in the solitary study of his favourite old chronicles and his Shakespeare. A little later my eldest brother also died, leaving no children. I must be thankful at my age that the youngest, the Rector of Maulden, though five years older than I, still survives in health and vigour, rejoicing in his happy home and family of affectionate daughters. I trust yet to welcome him into the brotherhood of the pen when his great monograph on Luton Church, Historical and Descriptive, sees the light this year.
I lost also in this same decade, my earliest friend Harriet St. Leger; and a younger, very dear one, Emily Shaen. Mrs. Shaen and her admirable husband had been much drawn to me by religious sympathies; and I regarded her with more heartfelt respect, I might say reverence, than I can well express. She endured twenty years of seclusion and suffering, with the spirit at once of a saint and of a philosopher. Had her health enabled her to take her natural place in the world, I have always felt assured she would have been recognised as one of the ablest as well as one of the best women of the day, and more than the equal of her two gifted sisters; Catharine and Susanna Winkworth. The friendship between us was of the closest kind. I often said that I went to church to her sick-room. In her last days, when utterly crushed by incessant suffering and by the death of her beloved husband and her favourite son, she bore in whispers, to me, (she could scarcely speak for mortal weakness,) this testimony to our common faith: “I sent for you,—to tell you,—I am more sure than ever that God is Good.”
All these deaths and the heart-wearing Anti-vivisection work combined with my own increasing years to make my life in London less and less a source of enjoyment and more of strain than I could bear. In 1884 Miss Lloyd, with my entire concurrence, let our dear little house in Hereford Square to our friend, Mrs. Kemble, and we left London altogether and came to live in Wales.