in Heaven, though there are few of us who believe it. It may, however,
well be true that there are certain spiritual marriages or associations
which are made in Heaven in the sense that they have a certain cosmic
foundation in the nature of things and in the relationship of one life
to another. It may also be true that two lives are brought together for
special and important purposes by influences working from another and a
far higher plane. Collaboration is a very commonplace word, but there
was certainly no element of the commonplace in the collaboration of Anna
Kingsford and Edward Maitland. History perhaps contains nothing more
remarkable, and romance nothing more romantic, than this singular
association of two strikingly diverse and original characters of
opposite sexes for a single and supreme purpose. To the two individuals
concerned, the sacrifice of two lives to the ideal which inspired them
seemed but little in view of the momentous character of the objects to
be achieved. The world may not set the same store on the high mission of
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, may not perhaps value it at the same
price as the two co-workers who gave up their all in pursuit of their
aims. Many may say, as many have said already, that, like Arthur’s
Knights of the Round Table, they were pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp and
not the Holy Grail of their hearts’ desire. But assuming that they
partially misinterpreted the end to be achieved, or, alternatively,
over-estimated their own powers of achieving that end with anything like
the success that so high an ideal demanded, it should still be borne in
mind that those who under-estimate the greatness of their own mission
must inevitably fail to impress others with its value in the scheme of
things, and it is therefore far better to over-estimate your own powers
and the importance of the object aimed at than to underrate either the
one or the other.
[Illustration: Anna Kingsford.]
People are apt to look scoffingly at the man with a mission, but it is
the men and the women with missions who have in fact made the world what
it is to-day. “A crank,” said some wit, “is a little thing that makes
revolutions.” The saying is as true as it was in the times of Jesus
Christ, that God has “chosen the foolish things of the world to confound
the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which
are mighty.” If there is one word in our language more misunderstood
than any other, it is the little word “Faith.” We have been told by the
cynical that faith is the capacity for believing that which we know to
be untrue, and the misinterpretation of this term by the orthodox clergy
is responsible for the derision which has been cast upon it. Worst of
all sinners within the fold of the Church has been the evangelical
contingent. “Believe,” they tell us, “all the dry-as-dust dogmas of
orthodox theology, and you will win eternal salvation.” This is not, we
may be sure, the sense in which Jesus used the word. Neither is it the
sense in which, in a magnificently eloquent passage, the word was
employed by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he spoke of
those who “through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions; quenched the violence of
fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong,
waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”
The faith of Jesus and the faith of his apostles and followers is the
faith that implies and includes the power to achieve. It is what we call
in the ordinary language of the day “self-confidence,” but it is not the
confidence in the _lower_ but in the _higher_ self; it is the confidence
which comes of the conscious placing of ourselves _en rapport_ with what
Prentice Mulford called “the Infinite Life” and the “Divine Source.”
This power is the secret of all great achievement. The _faith_ of the
orthodox, on the other hand, corresponds to the _credulity_ of the man
in the street. It is the will-o’-the-wisp that leads fools to sacrifice
the reality for a chimera. It was in condemnation and in ridicule of
such folly as this that Omar Khayyám bade his friends “take the cash and
let the credit go.” It was in the spirit of this true self-confidence
and self-reliance that Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland entered upon
the daring project of their life’s work. It was this spirit of faith
that enabled them to carry it at length to a triumphant
conclusion—successful in spite of those imperfections inevitably
incidental to a work of the kind, achieved under the defective
conditions of present-day humanity.
A great work was certainly seldom, if ever, accomplished under such
curious and such self-contradictory conditions. A man and a woman have
frequently worked together before, and worked effectively and
harmoniously, but they have either been in the relationship of husband
and wife, of avowed lovers, independent of or having deliberately cast
aside other ties, or they have been free to work together as friends
owing to the fact that circumstances have left them unhampered by family
conditions. The peculiarity of the present case is that the relations of
Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland subsisted in spite of the existence
of a husband for whom his wife had a very genuine and warm affection,
and who most undoubtedly reciprocated it to the full—in spite also of
the fact that the husband was fully aware of, and approved of, all that
took place, without seeing anything in it to lessen his esteem for his
wife or compromise their relationship—in spite also of the fact that the
society of the day held up its hands in horror at the scandal and more
than suspected immorality where there was none to suspect—in spite,
finally, of the fact that, joined to the respect and friendly feeling
which Edward Maitland felt for the husband, there was something in his
whole attitude and demeanour towards Anna Kingsford which was more in
the nature of the devotion of a lover to his mistress than anything else
which the ordinary terms of language can express. When Anna Kingsford
passed away to another sphere early indeed in life (she was but
forty-two), but with her life’s work accomplished, the two who joined
hands over her grave and who mourned her most deeply and most sincerely
were the devoted husband who loved her without understanding the most
remarkable side of her character, and the friend who loved and
understood, but, better even than the woman whom he loved, loved the
work of which her presence and being were to him the divine symbol and
seal.
People of the type of Anna Bonus Kingsford are too sensitive and
impressionable ever to be really happy for long. The acuteness of their
feelings exaggerates their own sufferings, and at the same time makes
the consciousness of the sufferings of others an ever present torture
and martyrdom. Mrs Kingsford’s life, indeed, at times when her health,
always far from robust, was below the usual level, became absolutely
unbearable. The thought of bringing a child into the world to share her
own anguish and despair seemed in itself a crime.
I long (she writes, in one of these moods of depression), I long for
a little rest and peace. The world has grown very bitter to me. I
feel as if every one were dead!
Ah, what a life is before me!—a life of incessant struggle,
reproach, and loneliness. I shall never be as other women, happy in
their wifehood and motherhood. Never to my dying day shall I know
the meaning of a home.
And behind me, as I look back on the road by which I have come, all
is storm and darkness. I fought my way through my lonely,
sad-hearted childhood; I fought my way through my girlhood,
misunderstood, and mistrusted always; and now, in my womanhood, I am
fighting still. On every side of me are rebuke and suspicion, and
bitter, abiding sorrow. Pain and suffering of body and of spirit
have hung on my steps all the years of my life. I have had no
respite.
Is there never to be peace? Never to be a time of sunlight that
shall make me glad of my being?
Her spirit was indeed naked and without defence against the arrows of
the world. Endowed with courage far greater than falls to the lot of
most women, with great independence and an utter fearlessness of
conventionality, she had no hesitation in avowing her own profound
belief in her divine mission. To one who, meeting her for the first
time, observed with ill-timed jocularity, “I understand, Mrs Kingsford,
that you are a prophetess,” she retorted with the utmost solemnity, “I
am indeed a prophetess,” and on her interrogator continuing his banter
by inquiring: “But not, I suppose, as great as Isaiah?” “Yes,” she
returned, “greater than Isaiah.” Such mockery, however boldly she faced
it, caused her the most acute pain. There was, indeed, nothing
undignified about her avowal of her claims, nothing that jarred, nothing
of the charlatan in her composition. If she was deceived herself, at
least she never dreamed of deceiving others. She never posed or
attempted to gain a hearing by acting a part which was not natural to
her. She was too genuine, too intense in her convictions, and withal too
natural and too unaffected to be otherwise than always and everywhere
true to herself. She was essentially a child of nature, and in some of
the traits of her character she retained to the end the simplicity and
wayward playfulness which most people say good-bye to when they reach
years of discretion. Animals, of course, always appealed to her
strongest sympathies, and for nine long years she could not bear to be
parted except for occasional very brief periods from her favourite
guinea-pig, Rufus. Nature in its varying moods made the strong appeal
which it always does to people of so emotional a temperament. Once after
recovering from a serious bout of illness she was taken to convalesce at
Dieppe. An incident occurred here very illustrative of her susceptible
nature. Having stayed for some time and being greatly benefited by the
change, she was proceeding in company with Mr Edward Maitland to see her
husband off by the steamer. Says her biographer:
It was a day of days for beauty. While waiting, we sat watching the
gambols of a flock of sea-gulls, whose gleaming white wings, as they
circled round and round against a sky of clearest and tenderest
blue, approaching each other to give loving salute with their bills,
and then darting off only to return and repeat the act, uttering the
while shrill notes of joy and delight, made a spectacle of exquisite
beauty, and one that went to the invalid’s inmost heart, inducing an
estatic sense of the possibilities of happiness in the mere fact of
a natural and healthy existence. Though entranced by the scene no
less than my companion, I did not fail to note the effect upon her,
and the thought arose in my mind, “This is the best remedy of all
she has yet had.”
As we were thus gazing and feeling, a shot was fired from a boat
containing some men and women, which, unperceived by us, had glided
out from behind the opposite pier; and immediately one of the birds
fell into the sea, where it lay fluttering in agony with a broken
wing, while its companions fled away with harsh, discordant cries;
and in one instant the whole bright scene was changed for us from
one of innocence and joy into one of the darkest gloom and misery.
It was a murder done in Eden, followed by the instant eclipse of all
that made it Paradise. Mary was frantic. Her so lately injured
organism gave way under the shock of such a revulsion of feeling.
Her impulse was to throw herself into the sea to succour the wounded
bird, and it was with difficulty that I restrained her; and only
after giving vent to an agony of tears, and pouring on the shooting
party a storm of reproaches, at the imminent risk of being given
into custody as they landed bearing the bird, now dead, as a trophy,
did I succeed in getting her back to the hotel. For the next
twenty-four hours her state was one of raving mania.
No incident could be more characteristic of her temperament or of her
outlook upon life. The charm and beauty and joy of life were all on the
surface and only served to conceal the horror and anguish which lurked
beneath. She felt, with the apostle, that all creation groaneth and
travaileth together, and to her hyper-sensitive spirit life itself was
all too frequently a very hell. One can well understand the ardour with
which a spirit like hers pursued the campaign against vivisection. But
it is rare indeed to find this temperament joined with a courage which
faced the presence of the horrors she so dreaded to go through the
entire medical course and qualify as a doctor at a time when obstacles
innumerable were placed in the way of women candidates for the
profession. It is in connection with this phase of her career that a
story is narrated which has attained for her a somewhat unenviable
notoriety. This is the record of the boast she is stated herself to have
made that she had brought about by her magical powers the death of one
of the most prominent supporters of vivisection in its worst form in the
medical world. The doctor in question was the well-known Professor
Claude Bernard, and the claim that she made will probably be regarded by
the occultist as not wanting foundation in fact. The narrative had
better be given in her biographer’s own words:
It was in mid-February, when, having occasion to visit the _Ecole de
Médecine_, I accompanied her thither. It was afternoon. On reaching
the place we found it shut up, and a notice on the gate apprised us
that the school was closed for the day on account of the obsequies
of Professor Claude Bernard. We had not heard even of his illness. A
cry, or rather a gasp, of astonishment escaped her, and she
exclaimed, “Claude Bernard dead! Claude Bernard dead! Take hold of
me! Help me to a seat or I shall fall. Claude Bernard dead! Claude
Bernard dead!” The only seat available near was on the stony steps
by which we were standing, and I accordingly placed her on these,
seeing that emotion had deprived her of all her powers. Once seated
she buried her face in her hands, and I stood before her awaiting
the result in silence. I knew that such an event could not fail
greatly to move her, but no special reason occurred to me. Presently
she looked up, her face strangely altered by the intensity of her
emotion, and asked me if I remembered what she had told me some
weeks ago about Claude Bernard, and her having been provoked to
launch her maledictions at him. I remembered perfectly. It was in
the latter part of the previous December. Her professor had forced
her into a controversy about vivisection, the immediate occasion
being some experiments by Claude Bernard on animal heat, made by
means of a stove invented by himself, so constructed as to allow of
observations being made on animals while being slowly baked to
death. Her professor had agreed with her as to the unscientific
character and utter uselessness for any medical purpose of such a
method of research. But he was altogether insensible to its moral
aspects, and in answer to her strong expressions of reprobation, had
taken occasion to deliver himself of a tirade against the sentiments
generally of morality and religion, and the folly of allowing
anything so chimerical to stand in the way, not merely of science,
but of any object whatever to which one might be inclined, and
setting up a transcendental standard of right and wrong, or
recognising any limits to self-gratification saving the physical
risks to oneself. Even the feeling which makes a mother weep over
her child’s suffering he sneered at as hysterical, and gloried in
the prospects of the time when science and intellect should be
utterly unrestrained by what people call heart and moral conscience,
and the only recognised rule should be that of the bodily self.
Thus speaking, he had worked his pupil into a frenzy of righteous
indignation, and the vision rose before her of a future when,
through the teaching of a materialistic science, society at large
had become wholly demonised, even as already were this man and his
kind. And seeing in Claude Bernard the foremost living
representative and instrument of the fell conspiracy, at once
against the human and the divine, to destroy whom would be to rid
the earth of one of its worst monsters, she no sooner found herself
alone than she rose to her feet, and with passionate energy invoked
the wrath of God upon him, at the same moment hurling her whole
spiritual being at him with all her might, as if with intent, then
and there, to smite him with destruction. And so completely, it
seemed to her, had she gone out of herself in the effort that her
physical system instantly collapsed, and she fell back powerless on
her sofa, where she lay awhile utterly exhausted and unable to move.
It was thus that, on rejoining her, I found her, with just
sufficient power to recount the experience, and to ask me my opinion
as to the possibility of injuring a person at a distance by making,
as it were, a spiritual thunderbolt of oneself; for, if such a thing
were possible, and had ever happened, it must, she was convinced,
have happened then.
At the moment the discussion on this subject was dropped, but further
evidence was subsequently sought which it was hoped would confirm or
disprove the idea that Anna Kingsford had been responsible for the great
French doctor’s death. Eventually, our heroine came across an
acquaintance of the deceased Professor in the person of a practical
student of occult science. It appeared from his narrative that Claude
Bernard was one of the few members of the profession who also took an
interest in this subject, which had served as a link between them. He
informed Mrs Kingsford that the doctor had described his earliest
symptoms to himself, and had regarded them as somewhat mysterious. He
was engaged, it appears, in his laboratory in the _Collège de France_,
being at the time in his usual health, when he felt himself suddenly
struck as if by some poisonous effluvium which he believed to emanate
from the subject of his experiment. The effect, instead of passing off,
became intensified, and manifested itself in severe internal
inflammation, from which he eventually died. The doctors pronounced the
complaint to be Bright’s disease. This was the disease which Claude
Bernard had chiefly endeavoured to investigate by inducing it in
animals. The possibility of such an incident is of course familiar to
students of occultism, and Paracelsus, with others before and since,
have maintained its feasibility. The great German occultist writes that
it is possible that the spirit without the help of the body may,
“through a fiery will alone, and without a sword, stab and wound
others.” This is purely in accordance with the general trend of his
doctrine, a large part of which is based on the belief that the will is
a most potent operator in medicine.
Anna Kingsford was, it is well known, one of the earliest and foremost
champions of the movement for women’s rights, but the line she took in
this movement was supremely sane and wise, and was devoid of all the
extravagances which have since brought certain sides of one of the
greatest and most important movements of the day into well-deserved
contempt. Edward Maitland was in entire sympathy with her in this
matter, and in endorsing one of her communications to him observes: “I
send you to-day’s _Times_, with a report of the debate on the Women’s
Suffrage Bill, which will show you how much you are needed in that
movement. For the debate shows why it does not advance. They are all on
the wrong tack, supporters and opponents alike. The franchise is claimed
in hostility, not sought in love. The women are demanding it as a means
of defence and offence against man, instead of as a means of aiding and
perfecting man’s work. They want a level platform with man expressly in
order to fight him on equal terms. And of course the instinct of the
majority of men and women resents such a view.” “Justice, in fact, as
between men and women, human and animal,” was among Anna Kingsford’s
foremost aims; for, as her biographer well says: “All injustice was
cruelty, and cruelty was for her the one unpardonable sin.” “Her love,”
he adds in a curiously revealing passage, “was all for principles, not
for persons. The last thing contemplated by Anna Kingsford was an
aggravation of the existing divisions and antagonisms between the
sexes.” “And,” continues Mr Maitland, “so far from accepting the
doctrine of the superiority of spinsterhood over wifehood, she regarded
it as an assertion of the superiority of non-experience over experience
as a means of education.” But that which most of all she reprobated was
the disposition which led women to despise womanhood itself as an
inferior condition, and accordingly to cultivate the masculine at the
expense of the feminine side of their nature. “It was by magnifying
their womanhood and not by exchanging it for a factitious masculinity
that she would have her sex obtain its proper recognition.” This
recognition no one more ardently desired than herself. She compares the
modern woman to Andromeda bound to the rock on the seashore, shackled by
the chains of ignorance and a helpless prey to that terrible monster
whose name is ennui. “When,” she asks, “will Perseus come to deliver the
fair Andromeda, to loosen her fetters and to set her free?” Much has
happened to better the position of women since this was written, but
much yet remains to be done.
All who knew Anna Kingsford unite in testifying to the impression
conveyed to them by her striking personality with its originality,
freshness, and force, no less than by her many-sidedness and the strange
contradictions of her character. Her biographer gives the following
description of her appearance at the date when he first met her:
Tall, slender, and graceful in form. Fair and exquisite in
complexion. Bright and sunny in expression. The hair long and
golden, but the brows and lashes dark and the eyes deep set and
hazel, and by turns dreamy and penetrating. The mouth rich, full,
and exquisitely formed. The broad brow prominent and sharply cut.
The nose delicate, slightly curved, and just sufficiently prominent
to give character to the face. And the dress somewhat fantastic as
became her looks. Anna Kingsford seemed at first more fairy than
human and more child than woman. For though really twenty-seven she
appeared scarcely seventeen, and made expressly to be caressed,
petted and indulged, and by no means to be taken seriously.
These impressions as regards her character were appreciably modified on
subsequent acquaintance, and Mr Maitland observes that “when she warmed
to her favourite themes, her whole being radiant with a spiritual light,
her utterances were those in turn of a savant, a sage, and a child, each
part suiting her as well as if it were her one and only character.”