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.