Savage Landor. At that time he was, with his dear Pomeranian dog,
_Giallo_, living alone in very ordinary lodgings in Florence, having
quarrelled with his family and left his villa in their possession. He
had a grand, leonine head with long white hair and beard, and to hear
him denouncing his children was to witness a performance of Lear never
matched on any stage! He was very kind to me, and we often walked about
odd nooks of Florence together, while he poured out reminiscences of
Byron and Shelley, some of which I have recorded (Chap. IX., p. 257),
and of others of the older generation whom he had known, so that I
seemed in touch with them all. He was then about 88 years of age, and
perhaps his great and cultivated intellect was already failing. Much
that he said in wrath and even fury seemed like raving, but he was
gentle as a child to us women, and to his dog whom he passionately
loved. When I wrote the first Memorial against Prof. Schiff which
started the anti-vivisection crusade, Mr. Landor’s name was one of the
first appended to it. He added some words to his signature so fierce and
contemptuous that I never dared to publish them!
We also saw much of Dr. Grisanowski, a very clever Pole, who afterwards
became a prominent advocate of the science-tortured brutes. When I
discussed the matter with him he was entirely on the side of Science.
After some years he sent me his deeply thought-out pamphlet, with the
endorsement “For Miss Cobbe,—who was right when I was wrong;” a very
generous retractation. We also received Mr. Frederick Tennyson, (Lord
Tennyson’s brother), Madame Venturi, Madame Alberto Mario, the late Lord
Justice Bowen, (then a brilliant young man from Oxford,) and many more.
By far the best and dearest of my friends in Florence however, was one
who never came up our hill, and who was already then an aged woman—Mrs.
Somerville. I had brought a letter of introduction to her, being anxious
to see one who had been such an honour to womanhood; but I expected to
find her an incarnation of Science, having very little affinity with
such a person as I. Instead of this, I found in her the dearest old lady
in all the world, who took me to her heart as if I had been a
newly-found daughter, and for whom I soon felt such tender affection
that sitting beside her on her sofa, (as I mostly did on account of her
deafness) I could hardly keep myself from caressing her. In a letter to
Harriet St. Leger I wrote of her: “She is the very ideal of an old lady,
so gentle, cordial and dignified, like my mother; and as fresh, eager
and intelligent _now_, as she can ever have been.” Her religious ideas
proved to be exactly like my own; and being no doubt somewhat a-thirst
for sympathy on a subject on which she felt profoundly, (her daughters
differing from her), she opened her heart to me entirely. Here are a few
notes I made after talks with her:—
“Mrs. Somerville thinks no one can be eloquent who has not studied the
Bible. We discussed the character of Christ. She agreed to all I said,
adding she thought it clear the Apostles never thought he was God, only
the image of the perfection of God. She kissed me tenderly when I rose
to go and bade me come back at any hour—at three in the morning if I
liked!—May 18th. Mrs. Somerville gave me her photograph. She says she
always feels a regret thinking of the next life that we shall see no
more the flowers of this world. I said we should no doubt see others
still fairer. “Ah! yes,” she said, “but _our own_ roses and mignonette!
I shall miss them. The dear animals I believe we _shall_ meet. They
suffer so often here, they must live again.”—June 3rd. Wished farewell
to Mrs. Somerville. She said kissing me with many tears, “We shall meet
in Heaven! I shall claim you there.”
I saw Mrs. Somerville again on my other visits to Italy, at Genoa,
Spezzia and Naples; of course making it a great object of my plans to be
for some weeks near her. In my last journey, in 1879, I saw at Naples
the noble monument erected over her grave by her daughter. It represents
her (heroic size) reclining on a classic chair,—in somewhat the attitude
of the statue of Agrippina in the Vatican.
Mrs. Somerville ought to have been buried in Westminster Abbey. When I
saw her death announced on the posters of the newspapers in the streets
in London, I hurried as soon as I could recover myself, to ask Dean
Stanley to arrange for her interment in the Abbey. The Dean consented
freely and with hearty approval to my proposition, and Mrs. Somerville’s
nephew, Sir William Fairfax, promised at once to defray all expenses.
There was only one thing further needed, and that was the usual formal
request from some public body or official persons to the Dean and
Chapter of Westminster. Dean Stanley had immediately written to the
Astronomer Royal to suggest that he and the President of the Royal
Society, as the representatives of the sciences with which Mrs.
Somerville’s fame was connected, should address to him the demand which
would authorize his proceeding with the matter. But that gentleman
_refused_ to do it—on the ground that _he_ had never read Mrs.
Somerville’s books! Whether he had read one in which she took the
opposite side from his in the sharp and angry Adams-Le Verrier
controversy, it is not for me to say. Any way, jealousy, either
scientific or masculine, declined to admit Mary Somerville’s claims to a
place in the national Valhalla, wherein so many men neither
intellectually nor morally her equals have been welcomed.
From the time of our first meeting till her death in 1872, Mrs.
Somerville maintained a close correspondence with me. I have had all her
beautifully-written letters bound together, and they form a considerable
volume. Of course it was a delight to me to send her everything which
might interest her, and among other things I sent her a volume of
Theodore Parker’s Prayers; edited by myself. In October, 1863, I spent a
long time at Spezzia to enjoy the immense pleasure of her society. I was
then a cripple and unable to walk to her house, and wrote of her visits
as follows to Miss Elliot:
“Mrs. Somerville comes to me every day. She is looking younger than
three years ago and she talked to me for three hours yesterday,
pouring out such stores of recent science as I never heard before.
Then we talked a little heresy, and she thanked me with tears in her
eyes for Parker’s _Prayers_, saying she had found them the greatest
comfort and the most perfect expression of religious feeling of any
prayers she has known.”
Another time I sent her my _Hopes of the Human Race_. She wrote, three
weeks before her death, “God bless you dearest friend for your
irresistible argument for our Immortality! Not that I ever doubted of
it, but as I shall soon enter my ninety-third year, your words are an
inexpressible comfort.”
Mary Somerville was the living refutation of all the idle, foolish
things which have been said of intellectual women. There never existed a
more womanly woman. Her _Life_, edited by her eldest daughter Martha
Somerville (her son by her first marriage, Mr. Woronzow Greig, died long
before her), has been much read and liked. I reviewed it in the
_Quarterly_ (January, 1874), and am tempted to enclose a letter which
Martha Somerville (then and always my good friend) wrote about it:
“From Miss Somerville to F. P. C.
“22nd January, Naples.
“My dear Frances,
“I have this morning received the _Quarterly Review_ and some slips
from newspapers. What can I say to express my gratitude to you for the
article,—so admirably written; and giving so touching a picture of my
Mother,—as you, her best friend (notwithstanding the great difference
of age) knew her? Also I received lately the _Academy_ which pleased
me much, too. The Memoir has been received far more favourably than I
ventured to expect.”
A long time after this, I paid a visit to friends at St. Andrews and
stopped from Saturday to Monday, on my way, at Burntisland. Writing from
thence to Miss Elliot about her own country, and countrymen, I said:—
“I came here to look up the scene of Mrs. Somerville’s childhood, and
I have found everything just as she described it;—the Links; the
pretty hills and woods full of wild flowers; the rocky bit of shore
with boulders full of fossil shells which excited her childish wonder
when she wandered about, a beautiful little girl, as she must have
been. If ever there were a case of—
“‘Nourishing a youth sublime,
With the fairy tales of science and the long results of Time,’
it was surely hers. Very naturally I was thinking of her all day and
wondering whether she is _now_ studying the flora of Heaven, of which
she used to speak, and pursuing Astronomy among the stars; or whether
it _can_ be possible these things pass away for ever! I wanted very
much to make out where Sir William Fairfax’ house had been, and
finally was directed to the schoolmaster who, it was said, knew all
about it. I found the good man in a large schoolhouse where he has 600
pupils; and as soon as he learned my name he seized my hand and made
great demonstrations; and straightway proceeded to constitute himself
my guide to the localities in question. The joke however was this.
Hardly were we out of the house before he said, ‘I’ll send you a
pamphlet of mine—not about Science, I don’t care for Science, I care
for Morals;—and I’ve found out there is only _a very little thing to
be done, to stop all pauperism and all crime_! You are just the person
to understand me!’ The idea of this poor schoolmaster in Burntisland
compressing _that_ modest programme into a ‘pamphlet’ seems to me
deliciously characteristic of Scotland.”
A college for Ladies was opened some years ago at Oxford and named after
Mrs. Somerville. I greatly rejoiced at the time at this very fitting
tribute to her memory; and induced my brother to send his daughter, my
dear niece, Frances Conway Cobbe, to the Hall. I ceased to rejoice,
however, when I found that a lady bearing a name identified with
Vivisection in England was nominated for election as a member of the
Council of the College. I entered, (as a Subscriber,) the most vigorous
protest I could make against the proposed choice, but, alas! in vain.
One of our visitors at Villa Brichieri was a very pious French lady, who
came up to us one day to dinner straight from her devotions in the
Duomo, where a Triduo was going on against Renan; and, as it chanced,
she began to praise somewhat excessively a lady of rank whose reputation
had suffered more than one serious injury. My English friend remarked,
smiling, in mitigation of the eulogy:—
“Elle a eue ses petits délassements!”
the answer was deliciously XVIII. Century—
“C’est ce qui m’occupe le moins. Pourvu que cela soit fait avec du bon
goût! D’ailleurs on ne parle sérieusement que de deux ou trois. Le
Prince de S., par exemple. Encore est il mort celui-là!”
It was during one of my visits to Florence that I saw King Victor
Emanuel’s public entry into the city, which had just elected him King.
This is how I described the scene to Harriet St. Leger:—
“Happily we had a fine day for the king’s entry on Monday last. It was
a glorious sight! The beautiful old city blossomed out in flowers,
flags, garlands, hangings and gonfalons beyond all English
imagination. In every street there was a triumphal arch, while
_boulevards_ of artificial trees loaded with camelias, ran from the
railway to the gate and down the via Calzaiuoli. Even the mean little
sdrucciolo de’ Pitti was made into one long arbour by twenty green
arches sustaining hanging baskets of flowers. The Pitti itself had its
rugged old face decked with wreaths. I had the good fortune to stand
on a balcony commanding a view of the whole procession. Victor
Emanuel, riding his charger of Solferino, looked—coarse and fat as he
is,—a _man_ and a soldier, and more sympathetic than Kings in general.
Cavour has a Luther-like face, which wore a gleam of natural pleasure
at his reception. The people were quite mad with joy. They did not
cheer as we do, but uttered a sort of deep roar of ecstacy, flinging
clouds of flowers under the King’s horse’s feet, and seeming as if
they would fling themselves also from their balconies. Our hostess, an
Italian lady, went directly into hysterics, and all the party, men and
women cried and kissed and laughed in the wildest way. At night there
was a marvellous illumination, extending as far as the eye could
reach, in every palazzo and cottage down the Val d’ Arno and up the
slopes of the Apennines, where bonfires blazed on all the heights.”
In Florence my friends had been principally literary men and women. In
Rome they were chiefly artists. Harriet Hosmer, to whom I had letters,
was the first I knew. She was in those days the most bewitching sprite
the world ever saw. Never have I laughed so helplessly as at the
infinite fun of this bright Yankee girl. Even in later years when we
perforce grew a little graver, she needed only to begin one of her
descriptive stories to make us all young again. I have not seen her now
for many years since she has returned to America, nor yet any one in the
least like her; and it is vain to hope to convey to any reader the
contagion of her merriment. O! what a gift,—beyond rubies, are such
spirits! And what fools, what cruel fools, are those who damp them down
in children possessed of them!
Of Miss Hosmer’s sculpture I hoped, and every one hoped, great things.
Her _Zenobia_, her _Puck_, her _Sleeping Faun_ were beautiful creations
in a very pure style of art. But she was lured away from sculpture by
some invention of her own of a mechanical kind, over which many years of
her life have been lost. Now I believe she has achieved a fine statue of
Isabella of Spain, which has been erected in San Francisco.
Jealous rivals in Rome spread abroad at one time a slanderous story that
Harriet Hosmer did not make her own statues. I have in my possession an
autograph by her master, Gibson, which he wrote at the time to rebut
this falsehood, and which bears all the marks of his quaint style of
English composition.
“Finding that my pupil Miss Hosmer’s progress in her art begins to
agitate some rivals of the male sex, as proved by the following
malicious words printed in the Art journal;—
“‘Zenobia—said to be by Miss Hosmer, but really executed by an Italian
workman at Rome’;—
“I feel it is but justice on my part to state that Miss Hosmer became
my pupil on her arrival at Rome from America. I soon found that she
had uncommon talent. She studied under my own eyes for seven years,
modelling from the antique and her own original works from the living
models.
“The first report of her Zenobia was that it was the work of Mr.
Gibson. Afterwards that it is by a Roman workman. So far it is true
that it was built up by my man from her own original small model,
according to the practice of our profession; the long study and
finishing is by herself, like every other sculptor.
“If Miss Hosmer’s works were the productions of other artists and not
her own there would be in my studio two impostors—Miss Hosmer and
Myself.
“JOHN GIBSON, R.A.
“Rome, Nov., 1863.”
Gibson was himself a most interesting person; an old Greek soul, born by
haphazard in a Welsh village. He had wonderfully little (for a Welshman)
of anything like what Mr. Matthew Arnold calls Hebraism in his
composition. There was a story current among us of some one telling him
of a bet which had been made that another member of our society could
not repeat the Lord’s Prayer; and it was added that the party defied to
repeat it had begun (instead of it) with a doggerel American prayer for
children:—
“Before I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
“Ah! you see,” said Gibson, “He _did_ know the Lord’s Prayer after all!”
Once he sat by me on the Pincian and said: “You know I don’t often read
the Bible, I have my sculpture to attend to. But I have had to look into
it for my bas-relief of the Children coming to Christ, and, do you know,
I find that Jesus Christ really said a good thing?”
I smothered my laughter, and said: “O certainly, Mr. Gibson, a great
many excellent things.” “Yes!” he said in his slow way. “Yes, he did.
There were some people called Pharisees who came and asked him
troublesome questions. And he said,—he said,—well, I forget exactly what
he said, but ‘Deeds not words,’ was what he meant to say.”
The exquisite grace of Gibson’s statues was all a part of the purity and
delicacy of his mind. He was in many respects an unique character; a
simple-hearted and single-minded worshipper of Beauty; and if my good
friend Lady Eastlake had not thought fit to prune his extraordinarily
quaint and original Autobiography, (which I have read in the MS.) to
ordinary book form and modernised style, I believe it would have been
deemed one of the gems of original literature, like Benvenuto Cellini’s,
and the renown of Gibson as a great artist would have been kept alive
thereby.
A merry party, of whom Mr. Gibson was usually one, used to meet
frequently that winter at the hospitable table of Charlotte Cushman, the
actress. She had, then, long retired from the stage, and had a handsome
house in the via Gregoriana, in which also lived her friend Miss
Stebbins and Miss Hosmer. Our dinners of American oysters and wild boar
with agro-dolce-sauce, and déjeuners including an awful refection
menacing sudden death, called “Woffles,” eaten with molasses (of which
woffles I have seen five plates divided between four American ladies!)
were extremely hilarious. There was a brightness, freedom and joyousness
among these gifted Americans, which was quite delightful to me. Miss
Cushman in particular I greatly admired and respected. She had, of
course, like all actors, the acquired habit of giving vivid outward
expression to every emotion, just as we quiet English ladies are taught
from our cradles to repress such signs, and to cultivate a calm
demeanour under all emergencies. But this vivacity rendered her all the
more interesting. She often read to us Mrs. Browning’s or Lowell’s
poetry in a very fine way indeed. Some years after this happy winter a
certain celebrated London surgeon pronounced her to be dying of a
terrible disease. She wished us farewell courageously, and went back to
New England, as we all sadly thought to die there. The next thing we
heard of Charlotte Cushman was, that she had returned to the stage and
was acting Meg Merrilies to immense and delighted audiences! Next we
heard that she had thus earned £5,000, and that she was building a house
with her earnings. Finally we learned that the house was finished, and
that she was living in it! She did so, and enjoyed it for some years
before the end came from other causes than the one threatened by the
great London surgeon.
One day when I had been lunching at her house, Miss Cushman asked
whether I would drive with her in her brougham to call on a friend of
Mrs. Somerville, who had particularly desired that she and I should
meet,—a Welsh lady, Miss Lloyd, of Hengwrt? I was, of course, very
willing indeed to meet a friend of Mrs. Somerville. We happily found
Miss Lloyd, busy in her sculptor’s studio over a model of her Arab
horse, and, on hearing that I was anxious to ride, she kindly offered to
mount me if I would join her in her rides on the Campagna. Then began an
acquaintance, which was further improved two years later when Miss Lloyd
came to meet and help me when I was a cripple, at Aix-les-Bains; and
from that time, now more than thirty years ago, she and I have lived
together. Of a friendship like this, which has been to my later life
what my mother’s affection was to my youth, I shall not be expected to
say more.
On my way home through France to Bristol from one of my earlier journeys
and before I became crippled, I had the pleasure of making for the first
time the acquaintance of Mdlle. Rosa Bonheur. Miss Lloyd, who knew her
very intimately and had worked in her studio, gave me an introduction to
her and I reported my visit in a letter to Miss Lloyd in Rome.
“Mdlle Bonheur received me most cordially when I sent up your note.
She was working in that most picturesque studio (at By, near Thoméry).
I had fancied from her picture that she was so much taller and larger
that I hardly supposed that it was she who greeted me, but her face is
_charming_; such fine, clear eyes looking straight into one’s own, and
frank bearing; an Englishwoman’s honesty with a Frenchwoman’s
courtesy. She spoke of you with great warmth of regard; remembered
everything you had said, and wanted to know all about your sculpture
studies in Rome. I said it had encouraged me to intrude on her to hope
I might persuade her to fulfil her promise of stopping with you next
winter, and added how very much you wished it, and described the
association she would have with you, sketching excursions, _bovi_, and
Thalaba” (Miss Lloyd’s Arab horse). “She said over and over she would
not go to Italy without going to see you; and that she hoped to go
soon, possibly next winter.... Somehow, from talking of Italy we
passed to talking of the North, which Mdlle. Bonheur thinks has a
deeper poetry than the South, and then to Ireland, where she wishes to
go next summer (I hope stopping at my brother’s _en passant_) and of
which country she said such beautiful, dreamy things that even I grew
poetic about our ‘_Brumes_,’—to which she quickly applied the epithet
‘grandiose,’—and our sea, looking, I said, like an angel’s eye with a
tear in it. At this simile she was so pleased that we grew quite
friends, and I can only hope she will not see that sea on a grey day
and think me an impostor! Nothing I liked about her, so much, however,
as her interest in Hattie Hosmer, and her delight in hearing about her
_Zenobia_[20] (_triumphans_) in the Exhibition; at which report of
mine she exclaimed: ‘That is the thing above all others I shall wish
to see in London! You know I have seen Miss Hosmer, but I have never
seen any of her works, and I do very much desire to do so’.... Her
one-eyed friend sat by painting all the time. She is not enticing to
look at, but I dare say, not bad. I said I always envied friends whom
I caught working together and that I lived alone; to which she replied
‘_Je vous plains alors!_’ in a tone of conviction, showing that, in
her case at all events, friendship was a very pleasant thing. Mdlle.
Bonheur showed me three or four fine pictures she is painting, and
some prints, but of course I was as stupid as usual in studios and
only remarked (as a buffalo might have done,) that Roman _bovi_ were
more majestic and like Homeric Junos than those wiry little Scotch
short-horns her soul delighteth to honour. But O! she has done a Dog,
_such_ a dog! Like Bush in outward dog, but the inner soul of him more
profoundly, unutterably wise than tongue may tell! a Dog to be set up
and worshipped as Anubis. Certainly Mdlle. Bonheur is a finer artist
than Landseer in this, his own line. I wish she would leave the cattle
and ‘go to the dogs.’”
My last journey but one to Italy was taken when I was lame; and, after
my sojourn at Aix-les-Bains, I spent the autumn in Florence and the
winter in Pisa; where I met Cav. d’ Azeglio as above recorded. Miss
Lloyd rejoined me at Genoa in the spring to help me to return to
England, as I was still (after four years!) miserably helpless. We
returned over Mont Cenis which had no tunnel through it in those days;
and, on the very summit, our carriage broke down. We were in a sad
dilemma, for I was quite unable to walk a hundred yards; but a train of
carts happily coming up and lending us ropes enough to hold our trap
together for my use alone, Miss Lloyd ran down the mountain, and at last
we found ourselves safe at the bottom.