the scrappy _souvenirs_ I shall now put together any important
contribution to the memoirs of the future. At best, a woman’s knowledge
of the eminent men whom she only meets at dinner parties, and perhaps in
occasional quiet afternoon visits, is not to be compared to that of
their associates in their clubs, in Parliament and in all the work of
the world. Nevertheless as all of us, human beings, resemble diamonds in
having several distinct facets to our characters, and as we always turn
one of these to one person and another to another, there is generally
some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem. The relation
too, which a good and kindly man (and such I am happy to say were most
of my acquaintances) bears to a woman who is neither his mother, sister,
daughter, wife or potential wife, but merely a reasonably intelligent
listener and companion of restful hours, is so different from that which
he holds to his masculine fellow-workers,—rivals, allies or enemies as
they may be,—that it can rarely happen but that she sees him in quite a
different light from theirs. Englishmen are not eaten up with _Invidia_,
like Italians and Frenchmen, such as made D’ Azeglio say to me that it
was a positive danger to a statesman to win a battle, or gain a
diplomatic triumph, so much envy did it excite among his own party. In
our country, men, and still more emphatically, women, glory
enthusiastically in the successes of their friends, if not of others.
But the masculine mind, so far as I have got to the bottom of it, (as
George Eliot says, “it is always so superior—_what there is of it_!”),
is not so quick in gathering impressions of character as ours of the
softer (and therefore, I suppose, more waxlike) sex; and when fifty men
have said their say on a great man I should always wish to hear _also_
what the women who knew him socially had to add to their testimony. In
short, dear Fanny Kemble’s “_Old Woman’s Gossip_” seems to me admissible
on the subject of the character and “little ways” of everybody worthy of
record.
It was certainly an advantage to us in London to be, as we were, without
any kind of ulterior aim or object in meeting our friends and
acquaintances, beyond the pleasure of the hour. We never had anything in
view in the way of social ambition; not even daughters to bring out! It
was not “_de l’Art pour l’Art_,” but _la Société pour la Société_, and
nothing beyond the amusement of the particular day and the interest of
the acquaintanceships we had the good fortune to make. We had no rank or
dignity of any kind to keep up. I think hardly any of our friends and
_habitués_ even knew who we were, from Burke’s point of view! I was
really pleased once, after I had been living for years in London, to
find at a large dinner-party, where at least half the company were my
acquaintances, that not one present suspected that I had any connection
with Ireland at all. Our host (a very prominent M.P. at the time) having
by chance elicited from me some information on Irish affairs, asked me,
“What do you know about Ireland?” “Simply that the first 36 years of my
life were spent there,” was my reply; which drew forth a general
expression of surprise. The few who had troubled themselves to think who
I was, had taken it for granted that I belonged to a family of the same
name, _minus_ the final letter, in Oxfordshire. In a country
neighbourhood the one prominent fact about me, known and repeated to
everyone, would have been that I was the daughter of Charles Cobbe of
Newbridge. I was proud to be accepted and, I hope, liked, on the
strength of my own talk and books, not on that of my father’s acres.
We did not (of course) live in London all the year round, but came every
summer to Wales to enable my friend to look after her estate; and I went
every two or three years to Ireland, and more frequently to the houses
of my two brothers in England,—Maulden Rectory, in Bedfordshire, and
Easton Lyss, near Petersfield,—where they respectively lived, and where
both they and their wives were always ready to welcome me
affectionately. I also paid occasional visits at two or three country
houses, notably Broadlands and Aston Clinton, where I was most kindly
invited by the beloved owners; and twice or three times we let our house
for a term, and went to live on one occasion in Cheyne Walk, and another
time at Byfleet. We always fell back, however, on our dear little house
in Hereford Square, till we let it finally to our old friend Mrs.
Kemble, and left London for good in the spring of 1884.
I think the first real acquaintances we made in London (whether through
Mrs. Somerville or otherwise I cannot recall) were Sir Charles and Lady
Lyell, and their brother and sister, Col. and Mrs. Lyell. The house, No.
73, Harley Street—in after years noticeable by its bright blue door, (so
painted to catch Sir Charles’ fading eyesight on his return from his
daily walks), became very dear to us, and I confess to a pang when it
was taken by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone after the death of our dear old
friends. Like Lord Shaftesbury’s house in Grosvenor Square, pulled down
after his death and replaced by a brand new mansion in the latest
Londonesque architecture, there was a “bad-dreaminess” about both
transformation scenes. The Lyells regularly attended Mr. Martineau’s
chapel in Little Portland Street, as we did; and ere long it became a
habit for us to adjourn after the service to Harley Street and spend
some of the afternoon with our friends, discussing the large supply of
mental food which our pastor never failed to lay before us. Those were
never-to-be-forgotten Sundays.
Sir Charles Lyell realised to my mind the Man of Science as he was of
old; devout, and yet entirely free-thinking in the true sense; filled
with admiring, almost adoring love for Nature, and also (all the more
for that enthusiasm), simple and fresh-hearted as a child. When a good
story had tickled him he would come and tell it to us with infinite
relish. I recollect especially his delight in an American boy (I think
somehow connected with our friend Mr. Herman Merivale), who, being
directed to say his prayers night and morning, replied that he had no
objection to do so at _night_, but thought that “a boy who is worth
anything can take care of himself _by day_.”[21] Another time we had
been discussing Evolution, and some of us had betrayed the impression
that the doctrine, (which he had then recently adopted), involved always
the survival of the _best_, as well as of the “fittest.” Sir Charles
left the room and went downstairs, but suddenly rushed back into the
drawing-room, and said to me all in a breath, standing on the rug: “I’ll
explain it to you in one minute! Suppose _you_ had been living in Spain
three hundred years ago, and had had a sister who was a perfectly
common-place person, and believed everything she was told. Well! your
sister would have been happily married and had a numerous progeny, and
that would have been the survival of the fittest; but _you_ would have
been burnt at an _auto-da-fè_, and there would have been an end of you.
You would have been unsuited to your environment. There! that’s
Evolution! Good-bye!” On went his hat, and we heard the hall door close
after him before we had done laughing.
Sir Charles’ interest in his own particular science was eager as that of
a boy. One day I had a long conversation with him at his brother,
Colonel Lyell’s hospitable house, on the subject of the Glacial period.
He told me that he was employing regular calculators at Greenwich to
make out the results of the ice-cap and how it would affect land and
sea; whether it would cause double tides, &c. He said he had pointed out
(what no one else had noticed) that the water to form this ice-cap did
not come from another planet, but must have been deducted from the rest
of the water on the globe. Another day I met him at a very imposing
private concert in Regent’s Park. The following is my description of our
conversation in a letter to my friend, Miss Elliot:—
“Sir Charles sat beside me yesterday at a great musical party at the
D.’s, and I asked him, ‘Did he like music?’ He said, ‘Yes! _for it
allowed him to go on thinking his own thoughts._’ And so he evidently
did, while they were singing Mendelssohn and Handel! At every interval
he turned to me. ‘Agassiz has made a discovery. I can’t sleep for
thinking of it. He finds traces of the Glaciers in tropical America.’
(Here intervened a sacred song.) ‘Well, as I was saying, you know
230,000 years ago the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit was at one of
its maximum periods; and we were 11,000,000 miles further from the sun
in winter, and the cold of those winters must have been intense;
because heat varies, not according to direct ratio, but the squares of
the distances.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘but then the summers were as much
hotter?’ (Sacred song.) ‘No, the summers wern’t! They could not have
conquered the cold.’ ‘Then you think that the astronomical 230,000
years corresponded with the glacial period? Is that time enough for
all the strata since?’ (Handel.) ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we must go
back to the still greater period of the eccentricity of the orbit
three million years ago. Then we were 14 millions of miles out of the
circular path.’ (Mendelssohn.) ‘Good-bye, dear Sir Charles—I must be
off.’
“Another day last week, he came and sat with me for two hours. I would
not light candles, and we got very deep into talk. I was greatly
comforted and instructed by all he said. I asked him how the modern
attacks on the argument from Design in Nature, and Darwin’s views,
touched him religiously? He replied, ‘Not at all.’ He thought the
proofs in Nature of the Divine Goodness quite triumphant; and that he
watched with secret pleasure even sceptical men of science whenever
they forget their theories, instinctively using phrases, all
_implying_ designing wisdom.”
I remember on another occasion Sir Charles telling me with much glee of
two eminent Agnostic friends of ours who had been discussing some
question for a long time, when one said to the other, “You are getting
very _teleological_!” To which the friend responded, “I can’t help it!”
At another of his much prized visits to me (April 19th, 1866) he spoke
earnestly of the future life, and made this memorable remark of which I
took a note: “The further I advance in science, the less the mere
physical difficulties in believing in immortality disturb me. I have
learned to think nothing too amazing to be within the order of Nature.”
The great inequalities in the conditions of men and the sufferings of
many seemed to be his strongest reasons for believing in another life.
He added: “Aristotle says that every creature has its instincts given by
its Creator, and each instinct leads to its good. Now the belief in
immortality is an instinct tending to good.”
After the death of his beloved wife—the truest “helpmeet” ever man
possessed—he became even more absorbed in the problem of a future
existence, and very frequently came and talked with me on the subject.
The last time I had a real conversation with him was not long before his
death, when we met one sweet autumn day by chance in Regent’s Park, not
far from the Zoological Gardens. We sat down under a tree and had a long
discussion of the validity of religious faith. I think his argument
culminated in this position:—
“The presumption is enormous that all our faculties, though liable to
err, are true in the main, and point to real objects. The religious
faculty in man is one of the strongest of all. It existed in the
earliest ages, and instead of wearing out before advancing
civilization, it grows stronger and stronger; and is, to-day, more
developed among the highest races than ever it was before. I think we
may safely trust that it points to a great truth.”
Here is another glimpse of him from a letter:—
“After service I went to Harley Street, Sir Charles, I thought,
looking better than for a long time. He thinks the caves of Aurignac
can never be used as evidence; the witnesses were all tampered with
from the first. He saw a skeleton found at Mentone 15 feet deep, which
he thinks of the same age as the Gibraltar caves. The legs were
distinctly platycnemic, and there was also a curious process on the
front of the shoulder—like the breast of a chicken. The skull was
full-sized and good. I asked him how he accounted for the fact that
with the best will in the world we could not find the _least_
difference between the most ancient skulls and our own? He said the
theory had been suggested that all the first growth went to brain, so
that very early men acquired large brains, as was necessary. This is
not very Darwinian, is it?”
It is the destiny of all books of Science to be soon superseded and
superannuated, while those of Literature may live for all time. I
suppose Sir Charles Lyell’s _Principles of Geology_ has undergone, or
will undergo, this fate ere long; but the magnanimity and candour which
made him, in issuing the 10th edition of that book, abjure all his
previous arguments against Evolution and candidly own himself Darwin’s
convert, was an evidence of genuine loyalty to truth which I trust can
never be quite forgotten. He was, as Prof. Huxley called him, the
“greatest Geologist of his day,”—the man “who found Geology an infant
science feebly contending for a few scattered truths, and left it a
giant, grasping all the ages of the past.” But to my memory he will
always be something more than _an_ eminent man of Science. He was the
type of what _such men ought to be_; with the simplicity, humility and
gentleness which should be characteristic of the true student of Nature.
Of the priestlike arrogance of some representatives of the modern
scientific spirit he had not a taint. In one of his last letters to me,
he said:
“I am told that the same philosophy which is opposed to a belief in a
future state undertakes to prove that every one of our acts and
thoughts are the necessary result of antecedent events, and conditions
and that there can be no such thing as Free-will in man. I am quite
content that both doctrines should stand on the same foundation; for
as I cannot help being convinced that I have the power of exerting
Free-will, however great a mystery the possibility of this may be, so
the continuance of a spiritual life may be true, however inexplicable
or incapable of proof.
“I am told by some that if any of our traditionary beliefs make us
happier and lead us to estimate humanity more highly, we ought to be
careful not to endeavour to establish any scientific truths which
would lessen and lower our estimate of Man’s place in Nature; in
short, we should do nothing to disturb any man’s faith, if it be a
delusion which increases his happiness.
“But I hope and believe that the discovery and propagation of every
truth, and the dispelling of every error tends to improve and better
the condition of man, though the act of reforming old opinions causes
so much pain and misery.”
It will give me pleasure if these few reminiscences of my honoured
friend send fresh readers to his excellent and spirited biography by his
sister-in-law Mrs. Lyell, Lady Lyell’s sister, who was also his brother,
Colonel Lyell’s wife; the mother of Sir Leonard Lyell, M.P.
I saw a great deal of Dr. Colenso during the years he spent in England;
I think about 1864–5. He lived near us in a small house in Sussex Place,
Glo’ster Road (not Sussex Place, Onslow Square), where his large family
of sons and daughters practised the piano below stairs and produced
detonations with chemicals above, while visitors called incessantly,
interrupting his arduous and anxious studies! He was in all senses an
iron-grey man. Iron-grey hair, pale, strong face, fine but somewhat
rigid figure, a powerful, strong-willed, resolute man, if ever there
were one, and an honest one also, if such there have been on earth. His
friend, Sir George W. Cox, who I may venture to call mine also, has, in
his admirable biography, printed the three most important letters which
the Bishop of Natal wrote to me, and I can add nothing to Sir George’s
just estimate of the character of this modern _Confessor_. I will give
here, however, another letter I received from him at the very beginning
of our intercourse, when I had only met him once (at Dr. Carpenter’s
table); and also a record in a letter to a friend of a _tête-à-tête_
conversation with him, further on. I have always thought that he made a
mistake in returning to Natal, and that his true place would have been
at the head of a Christian-Theistic Church in London:—
“23, Sussex Place, Kensington,
“Feb. 6th, 1863.
“My Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I thank you sincerely for your letter, and for the volume which you
have sent me. I have read the preface with the deepest interest—and
heartily respond to _every_ word which you have written in it. A
friend at the Cape had lent me a German edition of De Wette, which I
had consulted carefully. But, about a fortnight ago, a lady, till then
a stranger to me, sent me a copy of Parker’s Edition. I value it most
highly for the sake both of the Author’s and Editor’s share in it. But
the criticism of the present day goes, if I am not mistaken,
considerably beyond even De Wette’s, in clearing up the question of
the Age and Authorship of the different parts of the Pentateuch. I
shall carefully consider the Tables of Elohistic and Jehovistic
portions, as given in De Wette; but, in many important respects, my
conclusions will be found to differ from his, and, as I think, upon
certain grounds. De W. leant too much to the judgment of Stäbelin.
“The above, however, is the only one of Th. Parker’s works, which has
yet come into my hands, till the arrival of your book this morning.
When I repeat that every word of your Preface went to my very
heart—and that many of them drew the tears from my eyes and the prayer
from my heart that God would grant me grace to be in any degree a
follower of the noble brother whose life you have sketched, and whose
feet have already trodden the path, which now lies open before me—you
will believe that I shall not leave long the rest of the volume
unread. But, whatever I may find there, your Preface will give comfort
and support to thousands, if only they can be brought to read it.
Would it not be possible to have it printed separate, as a _cheap
Tract_? It would have the effect of recommending the book itself, and
Parker’s works, generally, to multitudes, who might otherwise not have
them brought under their notice effectively? I think if largely
circulated it might help materially the progress of the great work, in
which I am now engaged.
“You will allow me, I hope, to have the pleasure of renewing my
acquaintance with you, by making a call upon you before long—and may I
bring with me Mrs. Colenso, who will be very glad to see you?
“Very truly yours,
“JO. NATAL.
“Please accept a copy of my ‘Romans,’ which Macmillan will send you.
The _spirit_ of it will remain, I trust, abiding, though much of the
_letter_ must now be changed.”
Writing of Dr. Colenso to a friend in February, 1865, I said:—
“I never felt for him so much as last night. We came to talk on what
we felt at standing so much alone; and he said that when the extent of
his discoveries burst on him he felt as if he had received a
paralyzing electric shock. A London clergyman wrote to him the other
day to give him solemn warning that he had led one of his parishioners
to destruction and drunkenness. Colenso answered him, that ‘it was not
_he_ who led men to doubt of God and duty, but those teachers who made
them rest their faith on God and Duty on a foundation of falsehood
which every new wave of thought was sweeping away.’ The clergyman
seems to have been immensely dumbfounded by this reply.”
Another most interesting man whom I met at Dr. Carpenter’s table was
Charles Kingsley.
One day, while I was still a miserable cripple, I went to dine in
Regent’s Park and came rather late into a drawing-room full of company,
supported by what my maid called my “_best_ crutches!” The servant did
not know me, and announced “Miss Cobble.” I corrected her loudly enough
for the guests to hear, in that moment of pause: “No! Miss Hobble!”
There was of course a laugh, and from the little crowd rushed forward to
greet me with both hands extended, a tall, slender, stooping figure with
that well-known face so full of feeling and tenderness—Charles Kingsley.
“At _last_, Miss Cobbe, at _last_ we meet,” he said, and a moment later
gave me his arm to dinner. This greeting touched me, for we had
exchanged, as theological opponents, some tolerably sharp blows for
years before, but his large, noble nature harboured no spark of
resentment. We talked all dinner-time and a good deal in the evening,
and then he offered to escort me home to South Kensington—a proposal
which I greedily accepted, but, somehow, when he found that I had a
brougham, and was not going in miscellaneous vehicles (in my best
evening toggery!) from one end of London to the other at night, he
retracted, and could not be induced to come with me. We met, however,
not unfrequently afterwards, and I always felt much attracted to him; as
did, I may mention, my friend’s little fox terrier, who, travelling one
day with her mistress in the Underground, spied Kingsley entering the
carriage, and incontinently leaving her usual safe retreat under the
seat made straight to him, and without invitation, leaped on his knee
and began gently kissing his face! The dog never did the same or
anything like it to any one else in her life before or afterwards. Of
course, my friend apologised to Mr. Kingsley, but he only said in his
deep voice, “Dogs always do that to me,”—and coaxed the little beast
kindly, till they left the train.
The last time I saw Canon Kingsley was one day late in the autumn some
months before he died. Somebody who, I thought, he would like to meet
was coming to dine with me at short notice, and I went to Westminster in
the hope of catching him and persuading him to come without losing time
by sending notes. The evening was closing, and it was growing very dark
in the cloisters, where I was seeking his door, when I saw a tall man,
strangely bent, coming towards me, evidently seeing neither me nor
anything else, and absorbed in some most painful thought. His whole
attitude and countenance expressed grief amounting to despair. So
terrible was it that I felt it an intrusion on a sacred privacy to have
seen it; and would fain have hidden myself, but this was impossible
where we were standing at the moment. When he saw me he woke out of his
reverie with a start, pulled himself together, shook hands, and begged
me to come into his house; which of course I did not do. He had an
engagement which prevented him from meeting my guest (I think it must
have been Keshub Chunder Sen), and I took myself off as quickly as
possible. I have often wondered what dreadful thought was occupying his
mind when I caught sight of him that day in the gloomy old cloisters of
Westminster in the autumn twilight.