I must not write here any personal sketch however slight of my revered friend Dr. Martineau, since he is still,—God be thanked for it!—living, and writing as profoundly and vigorously as ever, in his venerable age of 89. But the weekly sermons which I had the privilege of hearing from his lips for many years, down to 1872, beside several courses of his Lectures on the Gospels and on Ethical Philosophy which I attended, formed so very important, I might say, vital a part of my “Life” in London, that I cannot omit some account of them in my story.
Little Portland Street Chapel is a building of very moderate dimensions, with no pretensions whatever to ecclesiastical finery; whether of architecture, or upholstery, or art of any kind. But it was, I always thought, a fitting, simple place for serious people to meet to think in; not to gaze round them in curiosity or admiration, or to be intoxicated with colours, lights, incense and music; as would seem to be the intention of the administrators of a neighbouring fane! Our services, I suppose, would have been pronounced cold, bare and dull by an habitué of a Ritualistic or Romanist church; but for my own part I should prefer even to be “cold,” (which we were not) rather than allow my religious feelings to be excited through the gratification of my æsthetic sense.
On this matter, however, each one must speak and choose for himself. For me I was perfectly satisfied with my seat in the gallery in that simple chapel, where I could well hear the noblest sermons and see the preacher of whom they always seemed a part; his “Word” in the old sense; not (like many other men’s sermons) things quite apart from the speaker, as we know him in his home and in the street. Of all the men with whom I have ever been acquainted the one who most impressed me with the sense,—shall I call it of congruity? or homogeneity?—of being, in short, the same all through, was he to whom I listened on those happy Sundays.
They were very varied Sermons which Dr. Martineau preached. The general effect, I used to think, was not that of receiving Lessons from a Teacher, but of being invited to accompany a Guide on a mountain-walk. From the upper regions of thought where he led us, we were able,—nay, compelled,—to look down on our daily cares and duties from a loftier point of view; and thence to return to them with fresh feelings and resolutions. Sometimes these ascents were very steep and difficult; and I have ventured to tell him that the richness of his metaphors and similes, beautiful and original as they always were, made it harder to climb after him, and that we sometimes wanted him to hold out to us a shepherd’s crook, rather than a jewelled crozier! But the exercise, if laborious, was to the last degree mentally healthful, and morally strengthening. There was a great variety also, in these wonderful sermons. To hear one of them only, a listener would come away deeming the preacher par éminence a profound and most discriminating Critic. To hear another, he would consider him a Philosopher, occupied entirely with the vastest problems of Science and Theology. Again another would leave the impression of a Poet, as great in his prose as the author of In Memoriam in verse. And lastly and above all, there was always the man filled with devout feeling, who, by his very presence and voice communicated reverence and the sense of the nearness of an all-seeing God.
I could write many pages concerning these Sunday experiences; but I shall do better, I think, if I give my readers, who have never heard them, some small samples of what I carried away from time to time of them, as noted down in letters to my friend. Here are a few of them:
“Mr. Martineau preached of aiming at perfection. At the end he drew a picture of a soul which has made such struggles but has failed. Then he supposed what must be the feeling of such a soul entering on the future life, its regrets; and then inquired what influence being lifted above the things of sense, the nearness to God and holiness would have on it? Would it then arise? Yes! and the Father would say, ‘This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found for evermore.’ I cannot tell you how beautiful it was, how true in the sense of those deepest intuitions which I hold to be certainly true because they bear with them the sense of being absolutely highest, the echo of a higher harmony than belongs to our poor minds. He seemed, for a moment, to be talking in the old conventional way about repentance when too late; and then burst out in faith and hope, so far transcending all such ideas that one felt it came from another source.”
“Mr. Martineau gave us a magnificent sermon on Sunday. I was in great luck not to miss it. One point was this. Our moral judgments are always founded on what we suppose to be the inward motive of the actor, not on the mere external act itself, which may be mischievous or beneficent in the highest degree, without, properly-speaking, affecting our purely ethical judgment—e.g., an unintentional homicide. Now, if, (as our opponents affirm) our Moral Sense came to us ab extra, merely as the current opinion which society has attached to injurious or beneficial actions, then we should not thus decide our judgment by the internal, but by the external and visible part of the act, by which alone society is hurt or benefitted. The fact that our moral judgment regards internal things exclusively, is evidence that it springs from an internal source; and that we judge another, because we are compelled to judge ourselves in the same way.”
Here is a Note I took after hearing another Sermon:—
“‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
“There are two ways of looking at Sin common in our time. One is to proclaim it so infinitely black that God cannot forgive it except by a method of Atonement itself the height of injustice. The other is to treat it as so venial that God may be counted on as certain to pass it over at the first moment of regret; and all the threats of conscience may be looked on as those of a nurse to a refractory child, threats which are never to be executed. The first of these views seems to honour God most, but really dishonours Him, by representing Him as governing the world on a principle abhorrent to reason and justice. The second can never commend itself save to the most shallow minds who make religion a thing of words, and treat sin and repentance as trivial things, instead of the most awful. How shall we solve the mystery? It is equally unjust for God to treat the guilty as if they were innocent, and the penitent as if they were impenitent. Each fact has to be taken into account, and the most important practical consequences follow from the view we take of the matter. First we must never lose hold of the truth, that, as Cause and Effect are never severed in the natural world, and the whole order of nature would fall to ruin were God ever to interfere with them, so likewise Guilt and Pain are, in His Providence, indissolubly linked; and the order of the moral world would be destroyed were they to be divided. But beside the realm of Law, in which the Divine penalties are unalterable, there is the free world of Spirit wherein our repentance avails. When we can say to God, ‘Put me to grief—I have deserved it. Only restore me Thy love,’ the great woe is gone. We shall be the weaker evermore for our fall, but we shall be restored.”
The following remarks were in a letter to Miss Elliot:—
“I wish I could write a résumé of a Sermon which Mr. Martineau preached last Sunday. Just think how many sermons some people would make of this one sentence of his text (speaking of the longing for Rest):—‘If Duty become laborious, do it more fervently. If Love become a source of care and pain, love more nobly and more tenderly. If Doubts disturb and torture, face them with more earnest thought and deeper study!’
“This was not a peroration, but just one phrase of a discourse full of other such things.
“It seems to me that the spontaneous response of our inner souls to such ideas is just the same proof of their truth as the shock we feel in our nerves when a lecturer has delivered a current of electricity proves his lesson to be true.”
“While you were enjoying your Cathedral, I was enjoying Little Portland Street Chapel, having bravely tramped through miles of snow on the way, and been rewarded. Mr. Martineau said we were always taunted with only having a negative creed, and were often foolish enough to deny it. But all Reformation is a negation of error and return to the three pure articles of faith—God, Duty, Immortality.... The distinction was admirably drawn between extent of creed and intensity of faith.”
On February 5th, 1871, Mr. Martineau preached:—
“Philosophers might and do say that all Religion is only a projection of Man himself on Nature, lending to Nature his own feelings, brightened by a supreme Love or shadowed by infinite displeasure. Does this disprove Religion? Is there no reliance to be placed on the faculties which connect us with the Infinite? We have two sets of faculties: our Senses, which reveal the outer world; and a deeper series, giving us Poetry, Love, Religion. Should we say that these last are more false than the others? They are true all round. In fact, these are truest. Imagination is true. Affection is true. Do men say that Affection is blind? No! It is the only thing which truly sees. Love alone really perceives. The cynic draws over the world a roof of dark and narrow thoughts and suspicions, and then complains of the close, unhealthy air. Memory again is more than mere Recollection. It has the true artist-power of seizing the points which determine the character and reconstructing the image without details. Suppose there be a God. By what faculties could we know Him save by those which now tell us of Him. And why should they deceive us?”
Alas! the exercise of preaching every Sunday became too great for Dr. Martineau to encounter after 1872, and, by his physician’s orders, those noble sermons came to an end.
Beside Dr. Martineau, I had the privilege of friendship with three eminent Unitarian Ministers, now alas! all departed—Rev. Charles Beard, of Liverpool, for a long time editor of the Theological Review; the venerable and beloved John James Tayler; and Rev. William Henry Channing, to whom I was gratefully attached, both on account of religious sympathies, and of his ardent adoption of our Anti-vivisection cause, which he told me he had at first regarded as somewhat of a “fad” of mine, but came to recognise as a moral crusade of deep significance. Among living friends of the same body, I am happy to number Rev. Philip Wicksteed, the successor of Dr. Martineau in Portland Street and the exceedingly able President of University Hall, Gordon Square,—an institution, in the foundation of which I gladly took part on the invitation of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
A man in whose books I had felt great interest in my old studies at Newbridge, and whose intercourse was a real pleasure to me in London, was Mr. W. R. Greg. I intensely respected the courage which moved him, in those early days of the Fifties, to publish such a book as the Creed of Christendom. He was then a young man, entering public life with the natural ambitions which his great abilities justified, and the avowal of such exorbitant heresies (nothing short of pure Theism) as the book contained, was enough at that date to spoil any man’s career. He was a layman, too, and man of the world, “Que Diable allait il faire, writing on theology at all?” That book remains to this day a most valuable manual of arguments and evidences against the Creed of Christendom; set forth in a grave and reverent spirit and in a clear and manly style. His Enigmas of Life had, I believe, a larger literary success. The world had moved much nearer to his standpoint; and the Enigmas concern the most interesting subjects. We had a little friendly controversy over one passage in the essay, Elsewhere. Mr. Greg had laid it down that, hereafter, Love must retreat from the discovery of the sinfulness of the beloved; and that both saint and sinner will accept as inevitable an eternal separation (Enigmas, 1st Edit., p. 263). To this I demurred strenuously in my Hopes of the Human Race (p. 132–6). I said, “The poor self-condemned soul whom Mr. Greg images as turning away in an agony of shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance,—such a soul is not outside the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he not,—even assuming his guilt to be black as night,—only in a similar relation to the purest of created souls, which that purest soul holds to the All-holy One above? If God can love us, is it not the acme of moral presumption to think of a human soul being too pure to love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection? The whole problem is unreal and impossible. In the first place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls capable of equal love, and the one can never reach a height whence it may justly despise the other. And, in the second place, the higher the virtuous soul may have risen in the spiritual world, the more it must have acquired the god-like Insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the god-like Love which embraces the repentant Prodigal.
In the next edition of his Enigmas (the 7th), after the issue of my book, Mr. Greg wrote a most generous recantation of his former view. He said:—
“The force of these objections to my delineation cannot be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No doubt a soul that can so love and so feel its separation from the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qualities to win and to merit answering affection. The lovingness of a nature—its capacity for strong and deep attachment—must constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out of which to elicit and foster all other good. No doubt, again, if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness.”
Later on he asks:—
“How can the blessed enjoy anything to be called Happiness if the bad are writhing in hopeless anguish?” “Obviously only in one way. By ceasing to love, that is, by renouncing the best and purest part of their nature.... Or, to put it in still bolder language, ‘How,—given a hell of torment and despair for millions of his friends and fellow men—can the good enjoy Heaven except by becoming bad, and without being miraculously changed for the worse?’”
The following flattering letters are unluckily all which I have kept of Mr. Greg’s writing:—
“I have been solacing myself this morning, after a month of harrowing toil, with your paper in the last Theological, and I want to tell you how much it has gratified me.
“I don’t mean your appreciative cordiality towards myself, nor your criticisms on a portion of my speculations, which, however (though I fancy you have rather misread me), I will refer to again and try to profit by. I daresay you are mainly right, the more so as I see Mr. Thom in the same number remonstrates in an identical tone.
“That your paper is, I think, not only beautiful in thought and much of it original, but singularly full of rich suggestions, and one of the most real contributions to a further conception of a possible future that I have met with for long. It is real thought—not like most of mine, mere sentiment and imagination.
“I don’t know if you are still in town, or have began the villegiatura you spoke of when I last saw you, but I daresay this note will be forwarded.
“When did No. 1 appear?
“I particularly like your remark about self-reprobation, p. 456, and from 463 onward. By the way, do you know Isaac Taylor’s ‘Physical Theory of Another Life?’ It is very curious and interesting.
“I have just finished an Introduction (about 100 pp.) to a new edition of “The Creed of Christendom,” which will be published in the autumn, and it contains some thoughts very analogous to yours.”
“I have read your Town and Country Mouse with much pleasure. I should have enjoyed your Paper still more if I had not felt that it was suggested by your intention to cut London, and the desire to put as good a face upon that regrettable design as you could. However you have stated the case with remarkable fairness. I, who am a passionate lover of nature, who have never lived in Town, and should pine away if I attempted it, still feel in the decline of years the increasing necessity of creeping towards the world rather than retiring from it. I feel, as one grows old, the want of external stimulus to stave off stagnation. The vividness of youthful thought is needed, I think, to support solitude.
“I retired to Westmoreland for 15 years in the middle of life when I was much worn, and it did me good: but I was glad to come back to active life, and I think my present location—Wimbledon Common for a cottage, within 5 miles of London, and coming in five days a week—is perfection.
“I daresay you may be right; but all your friends will miss you much—I not the least.
Mr. Greg’s allusion to my Town and Country Mouse reminds me of a letter which was sent me by some unknown reader on the publication of that article. It repeats a famous story worth recording as told thus by an ear-witness who, though anonymous is obviously worthy of credit.
“Will Miss Cobbe kindly pardon the liberty taken by a reader of her delightful ‘Town and Country Mouse’ in venturing to substitute the true version of Sir George Lewis’ too famous dictum?
“In the hearing of the writer he was asked (by one of his subordinates in the Government) as they were getting into the train, returning to town,
“‘Well! How do you like life in Herefordshire?’
“‘Ah! It would be very tolerable, if it were not for the Amusements’—was his reply.
“Miss Cobbe has high Authority for the mis-quotation: for the Times invariably commits it; and the present writer has again and again intended to correct it, and failed to execute the intention.
“If they are pleasures, they are pleasures; and the paradox is absurd, instead of amusing; but the oppressive stupidity of many of the ‘Amusements’ (to the Author of ‘Influence of Authority,’ &c.!) may well call up in the mind the sort of amiable cynicism, which was a feature of his own character.
“On arriving late and unexpectedly at home for a fortnight’s Rest, he found his own study occupied by two young ladies (sisters) as a Bedroom—it being the night of Lady Theresa’s Ball! With his exquisite good nature he simply set about finding some other roost; and all the complaint he ever made was that, which has become perhaps not too famous!”
At the time of the Franco-Prussian war, as will be remembered by everyone living at the time in London, the cleavage between the sympathisers with the two contending countries was almost as sharp as it had previously been during the American War between the partizans of the North and of the South. Dean Stanley was one of our friends who took warmly the side of the Germans, and I naturally sent him a letter I had received from a Frenchman whom we both respected, remonstrating rather bitterly against the attitude of England. The Dean, in returning M. P.’s letter wrote as follows[24]:—
“Although you kindly excuse me from doing so, I cannot but express, and almost, wish that you could convey to M. P. the melancholy interest with which we have read his letter. Interesting of course it is but to us—I know not whether to you—it is deeply sad to see a man like M. P. so thoroughly blind to the true situation of his country. Not a word of repentance for the aggressive and unjust war! not a word of acknowledgment that, had the French, as they wished, invaded Germany, they would have entered Berlin and seized the Rhenish provinces without remorse or compunction!—not a spark of appreciation of the moral superiority by which the Germans achieved their successes! I do not doubt that excesses may have been committed by the German troops; but I feel sure that they have been exceeded by those of the French, and would have been yet more had the French entered Germany.
“And how very superfluous to attack us for having done just the same as in 1848! Our sad crime was not to have prevented the war by remonstrating with the French Emperor and people in July, 1870, and of that poor P. takes no account! Alas! for France!
The following is a rather important note as recording the Dean’s sentiments as regarded Cardinal Newman. I cannot recall what was the paper which I had sent him to which he alludes. I think I had spoken to him of my friendship with Francis Newman, and of the information given me by the latter that he could never remember his brother putting his hand to a single cause of benevolence or moral reform. I had asked him to solicit his support with that of Cardinal Manning (already obtained) to the cause for which I was then beginning to work,—on behalf of animals.
“I return this with many thanks. I think you must have sent it to me, partly as a rebuke for having so nearly sailed in the same boat of ignorance and inhumanity with Dr. Newman.
“I have just finished, with a mixture of weariness and nausea, his letter to the Duke of Norfolk. Even the fierce innuendoes and deadly thrusts at Manning cannot reconcile me to such a mass of cobwebs and evasions. When the sum of the theological teaching of the two brothers is weighed, will not ‘the Soul’ of Francis be found to counterbalance, as a contribution to true, solid, catholic (even in any sense of the word) Christianity, all the writings of John Henry?
“I have sent my paper on Vestments to the Contemporary.
“Read it in the light of his old letter to B. Ullathorne, published in (illegible).”
The papers on “Vestments,” to which Dean Stanley alludes, had interested and amused me much when he read it at Sion College, and I had urged him to send it to one of the Reviews. Here is a report of that evening’s proceedings which I sent next day to my friend Miss Elliot.
“I do so much wish you had been with us last night at Sion College. Dean Stanley was more delightful than ever. He read a splendid paper, full of learning, wit, and sense on Ecclesiastical Vestments. In the course of it, he said, referring to the position of the altar, &c., that on this subject he had nothing to add to the remarks of his friend, the Dean of Bristol, ‘whose authority on all matters connected with English ecclesiastical history was universally admitted to be the best.’ After the reading of his paper, which lasted an hour and a quarter, that odious Dr. L—— got up, and in his mincing brogue attacked Dean Stanley very rudely. Then they called on Martineau, and he made a charming speech, beginning by saying he had nothing to do with vestments, having received no ordination, and might for his part repeat the poem “Nothing to Wear!” Then he went on to say that if the Church were ever to regain the Nonconformists, it would certainly not be by proceeding in the sacerdotal direction. He was much cheered. Rev. H. White made, I thought, one of the best speeches of the evening. Altogether, it was exceedingly amusing.”
On the occasion of the interment of Sir Charles Lyell in Westminster Abbey, I sent the Dean, by his request, some hints respecting Sir Charles’ views and character, and received the following reply:
“Your letter is invaluable to me. Long as was my acquaintance with Sir Charles Lyell, and kind as he was to me, I never knew him intimately, and therefore most of what you tell me was new. The last time he spoke to me was in urging me with the greatest earnestness to ask Colenso to preach. Can you tell me one small point? Had he a turn for music? I must refer back to the last funeral (when I could not preach) of Sir Sterndale Bennett, and it would be a convenience for me to know this, Yes or No.
“You will come (if you come to the sermon) and any friends,—thro’ the Deanery at 2.45 on Sunday.
Some time after this I sent him one of my theological articles on the Life after Death. He acknowledged it thus kindly:—
“Many thanks. Your writing on this subject is to me more nearly to the truth—at least more nearly to my hopes and desires—than almost any others which are now floating around us.
This next letter again referred to one of my books—and to Cardinal Newman:—
“Many thanks for your book. You will see by my letter last night that I had already made good progress in it; as borrowed from the Library. I shall much value it.
Do not trouble yourself about Newman’s letter. I am much more anxious that the public should see it than that I should. I am amazed at the impression made upon me by the “Characteristics” of Newman. Most of the selections I had read before; but the net result is of a farrago of fanciful, disingenuous nonentities; all except the personal reminiscences.
One day I had been calling on him at the Deanery, and said to him, after describing my office in Victoria Street and our frequent Committee meetings there: “Now Mr. Dean, do you think it right and as it ought to be, that I should sit at that table as Hon. Sec. with Lord Shaftesbury on my right, and Cardinal Manning on my left,—and that you should not sit opposite to complete the “Reunion of Christendom?” He laughed heartily, agreed he certainly ought to be there, and promised to come. But time failed, and only his honoured name graced our lists.
The following is the last letter I have preserved of Dean Stanley’s writing. It is needless to say how much pleasure it gave me:—
“I have just finished re-reading with real admiration and consolation your “Hopes of the Human Race.” May I ask these questions: 1. Is it in, or coming into, a second edition? If the latter, is it too much to suggest that the note on p. 3 could, if not omitted, be modified? I appreciate the motive for its insertion, but it makes the lending and recommending of the book difficult. 2. Who is ‘one of the greatest men of Science’—p. 20? 3. Where is there an authentic appearance of the Pope’s reply to Odo Russell—p. 107?
I afterwards learned from Dean Stanley, one day when I was visiting him at the Deanery after his wife’s death, that he had read these Essays to Lady Augusta in the last weeks of her life, finding them, as he told me, the most satisfactory treatment of the subject he had met; and that after her death he read them over again. He gave me with much feeling a sad photograph of her as a dying woman, after telling me this. Mr. Motley the historian of the Netherlands, having also lost his wife not long afterwards, spoke to Dean Stanley of his desire for some book on the subject which would meet his doubts, and Dean Stanley gave him this one of mine.
Dean Stanley, it is needless to say, was the most welcome of guests in every house which he entered. There was something in his high-mindedness, I can use no other term, his sense of the glory of England, his love of his church (on extremely Erastian principles!) as the National Religion, his unfailing courtesy, his unaffected enjoyment of drollery and gossip, and his almost youthful excitement about each important subject which cropped up, which made him delightful to everyone in turn. There was no man in London I think whom it gave me such pleasure to meet “in the sixties and seventies” as the “Great Dean”; and he was uniformly most kind to me. The last occasion, I think, on which I saw him in full spirits was at a house where the pleasantest people were constantly to be found,—that of Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, in Cornwall Gardens. Renan and his wife were there, and I was so favoured as to be seated next to Renan; Dean Stanley being on the other side of our tactful hostess. The Dean had been showing Renan over the Abbey in the morning, and they were both in the gayest mood, but I remember Dean Stanley speaking to Renan with indescribable and concentrated indignation of the avowal Mr. Gladstone had recently made that the Clerkenwell explosion had caused him to determine on the disestablishment of the Irish Church.
I have found an old letter to my friend describing this dinner:—
“I had a most amusing evening yesterday. Kind Mrs. Simpson made me sit beside Renan; and Dean Stanley was across the corner, so we made, with nice Mrs. W. R. G. and Mr. M., a very jolly little party at our end of the table. The Dean began with grace, rather sotto voce, with a blink at Renan, who kept on never minding. His (Renan’s) looks are even worse than his picture leads one to expect. His face is exactly like a hog, so stupendously broad across the ears and jowl! But he is very gentlemanly in manner, very winning and full of fun and finesse. We had to talk French with him, but the Dean’s French was so much worse than mine that I felt quite at ease, and rattled away about the Triduos at Florence (to appease the wrath of Heaven on account of his Vie de Jésus), and had some private jokes with him about his malice in calling the Publicans of the Gospels ‘douaniers,’ and the ass a ‘baudet!’ He said he did it on purpose; and that when he was last in Italy numbers of poor people came to him, and asked him for the lucky number for the lotteries, because they thought he was so near the Devil he must know! I gave him your message about the Hengwrt MSS., and he apologised for having written about the ‘mesquines’ considerations which had caused them to be locked up, [to wit, that several leaves of the Red Book of Hergest had been stolen by too enthusiastic Welsh scholars!] and solemnly vowed to alter the passage in the next edition, and thanked you for the promise of obtaining leave for him to see them.
“I also talked to M. Renan of his Essay on the Poésie de la Race Celtique, and made him laugh at his own assertion that Irishmen had such a longing for ‘the Infinite’ that when they could not attain to it otherwise they sought it through a strong liquor ‘qui s’appelle le Whiskey.’”
Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff’s delightful volume on Renan has opened to my mind many fresh reasons for admiring the great French scholar, whose works I had falsely imagined I had known pretty well before reading it. But when all is said, the impression he has left on me (and I should think on most other people) is one of disappointment and short-falling.
M. Renan has written of himself the well-known and often laughed-at boast: “Seul dans mon siècle j’ai pu comprendre Jésus Christ et St. François d’Assise!” I do not know about his comprehension of St. Francis, though I should think it a very great tour de force for the brilliant French academician and critic to throw himself into that typical mediæval mind! But as regarded the former Person I should say that of all the tens of thousands who have studied and written about him during these last nineteen centuries, Renan was in some respects the least able to “comprehend” him. The man who could describe the story of the Prodigal as a “délicieuse parabole,” is as far out of Christ’s latitude as the pole from the equator. One abhors æsthetics when things too sacred to be measured by their standard are commended in their name. Renan seems to me to have been for practical purposes a Pantheist without a glimmer of that sense of moral and personal relation to God which was the supreme characteristic of Christ. When he translates Christ’s pity for the Magdalenes as jealousy “pour la gloire de son Père dans ces belles créatures;” and introduces the term “femmes d’une vie équivoque” as a rendering for “sinners,” he strikes a note so false that no praise lavished afterwards can restore harmony.
The late Lord Houghton was one of the men of note who I met occasionally at the houses of friends. I had known him in Italy and he was always kind to me and invited me to his Christmas parties at Frystone, which were said to be delightful, but to which I did not go. For a poet he had an extraordinarily rough exterior and blunt manner. One day we had a regular set-to argument lasting a long time. He attacked the order of things with the usual pessimist observations on all the evil in the world, and implied that I had no reasonable right to my faith. I answered as best I could, with some earnestness, and he finally concluded the discussion by remarking with concentrated contempt: “You might almost as well be a Christian!” Next day I went to Westminster Abbey and was sitting in the Dean’s pew, when, to my amusement Lord Houghton came in just below, with a party of ladies and took a seat exactly opposite me. He behaved of course with edifying propriety, but I could not help reflecting with a smile on our argument of the night before, and wondering how many members of that and similar congregations who were naturally counted by outsiders as faithful supporters of the orthodox creed, were as little so, au fond, as either Lord Houghton or I.
With Carlyle, though I saw him very frequently, I never interchanged more than a few banal words of civility. When his biography appeared, I was, (as I frankly told the illustrious biographer) exceedingly glad that I had never given him the chance of attaching one of his pungent epigrams to my poor person. I had been introduced to him by a lady at whose house he happened to call one afternoon when I was sitting with her, and where he showed himself (as it seems to me the roughest men invariably do in the society of amiable Countesses),—extremely apprivoisé. Also I continually met him out walking with one or other of his great historian friends, who were also mine, but I avoided trespassing on their good nature; or addressing him when he walked up and down alone daily before our door in Cheyne Walk,—till one day when he had been very ill, I ventured to express my satisfaction in seeing him out of doors again. He then answered me kindly. I never shared the admiration felt for him by so many able men who knew him personally, and therefore had means which I did not possess, of estimating him aright. To me his books and himself represented an anomalous sort of human Fruit. The original stock was a hard and thorny Scotch peasant-character, with a splendid intellect superadded. The graft was not wholly successful. A flavour of the old acrid sloe was always perceptible in the plum.
The following letter was received by Dr. Hoggan in reply to a letter to Mr. Carlyle concerning Vivisection:
“Mr. Carlyle has received your letter, and has read it carefully. He bids me say, that ever since he was a boy when he read the account of Majendie’s atrocities, he has never thought of the practice of vivisecting animals but with horror. I may mention that I have heard him speak of it in the strongest terms of disgust long before there was any speech about public agitation on the subject. He believes that the reports about the good results said to be obtained from the practice of vivisection to be immensely exaggerated; with the exception of certain experiments by Harvey and certain others by Sir Charles Bell, he is not aware of any conspicuous good that has resulted from it. But even supposing the good results to be much greater than Mr. Carlyle believes they are, and apart too from the shocking pain inflicted on the helpless animals operated upon, he would still think the practice so brutalising to the operators that he would earnestly wish the law on the subject to be altered, so as to make Vivisection even in Institutions like that with which you are connected a most rare occurrence, and when practised by private individuals an indictable offence.
“You are not sure that the operators on living animals ‘can be counted on your fingers.’ Mr. Carlyle with an equal share of certainty believes Vivisection and other kindred experiments on living animals to be much more largely practised, and that they are by no means uncommonly undertaken by doctors’ apprentices and ‘other miserable persons.’
“You are mistaken if you look upon the Times as a mirror of virtue; on this very subject when it at first began to be publicly discussed last winter, it printed a letter from ... which your letter itself would prove to be altogether composed of falsehoods.
“With Mr. Carlyle’s compliments and good wishes,
Mr. Carlyle supported our Anti-vivisection Society from the outset, for which I was very grateful to him; but having promised to join our first important deputation to the Home Office, to urge the Government to bring in a Bill in accordance with the recommendations of the Royal Commission, he failed at the last moment to put in an appearance, having learned that Cardinal Manning was to be also present. I was told that he said he would not appear in public with the Cardinal, who was, he thought, “the chief emissary of Beelzebub in England!” When this was repeated to me, my remark was:—“Infidels is riz! Time was, when Cardinals would not appear in public with infidels!”
Nothing has surprised me more in reading the memoirs and letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle than the small interest either of them seems to have felt in the great subjects which formed the life-work of their many illustrious visitors. While humbler folk who touched the same circles were vehemently attracted, or else repelled, by the political, philosophical and theological theories and labours of such men as Mazzini, Mill, Colenso, Jowett, Martineau and Darwin, and every conversation and almost every letter contained new facts, or animated discussions regarding them, the Carlyles received visits from these great men continually, with (it would seem) little or no interest in their aims or views one way or the other, in approval or disapproval; and wrote and talked much more seriously about the delinquencies of their own maidservants, and the great and never-to-be-sufficiently-appealed-against cock and hen nuisance.
I had known Cardinal Manning in Rome about 1861 or 1863 when he was “Monsignor Manning,” and went a little into English society, resplendent in a beautiful violet robe. He was very busy in those days making converts among English young ladies, and one with whom we were acquainted, the daughter of a celebrated authoress, fell into his net. He had, at all times, a gentle way of ridiculing English doings and prejudices which was no doubt telling. One of the stories he told me was of an Italian sacristan asking him “what was the Red Prayer Book which all the English tourists carried about and read so devoutly in the churches?” (of course Murray’s Hand-books).[25]
A few years afterwards when he had returned to England as Archbishop of Westminster, I met him pretty frequently at Miss Stanley’s house in Grosvenor Crescent. He there attacked me cheerfully one evening: “Miss Cobbe I have found out something against you. I have discovered that Voltaire was part-owner of a Slave-ship!”
“I beg you to believe,” said I, “that I have no responsibility whatever respecting Voltaire! But I would ask your Grace, whether it be not true that Las Casas, the saintly Dominican, founded Negro Slavery in America?” A Church of England friend coming up and laughing, I discharged a second barrel: “And was not the Protestant Saint, Newton of Olney,—much worse than all,—the Captain of a Slave-ship?”[26]
One evening at this pleasant house I was standing on the rug in one of the rooms talking to Mr. Matthew Arnold and two or three other acquaintances of the same set. The Archbishop, on entering shook hands with each of us, and we were all talking in the usual easy, sub-humorous, London way when a tall military-looking man, a Major G., came in, and seeing Manning, walked straight up to him, went down on one knee and kissed his ring! A bomb falling amongst us would scarcely have been more startling; and Manning, Englishman as he was to the backbone under his fine Roman feathers, was obviously disconcerted, though dignified as ever.
In a letter to a friend dated Feb. 19th, 1867, I find I said:
“I had an amusing conversation with Archbishop Manning the other night at Miss Stanley’s. He was most good-humoured, coming up to me as I was talking to Sir C. Trevelyan, about Rome, and saying ‘I am glad you think of going to Rome next winter, Miss Cobbe. It proves you expect the Pope to be firmly established there still.’ We had rather a long talk about Passaglia who he says has recanted,—[a fact I heard strongly contradicted later.] Mr. J. (now Sir H. J.) came behind him in the midst of our talk and almost pitched the Archbishop on me, with such a push as I never saw given in a drawing-room! The Dean and Lady Augusta came in later, and she asked eagerly: ‘Where was Manning?’ having never seen him. He had gone away, so I told her of the enthusiastic meeting which had afforded a spectacle to us all an hour before, between him and Archdeacon Denison. It was quite a scene of ecclesiastical reconciliation; a ‘Reunion of Christendom!’ (They had been told each that the other was in the adjoining room, and Archdeacon Denison literally rushed with both hands outspread to meet the Cardinal, whom he had not seen since his conversion.)”
In later years, I received at least half-a-dozen notes from time to time from his Eminence asking for details of our Anti-vivisection work, and exhibiting his anxiety to master the facts on which he proposed to speak at our Meetings. Here are some of these notes:—