Of one gift possessed by her she early learnt to repress the manifestation. This was the faculty for seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people. For she was a born seer. But the inability of her elders to comprehend the faculty, and their consequent ascription of it to pathological causes, were wont to lead to references to the family doctor with results so eminently disagreeable and even injurious to her, as soon to suggest the wisdom of keeping silence respecting her experiences.
Her first published compositions were written at the age of thirteen[11], the editors who accepted her contributions to their magazines being under the impression that they came from a grown-up person and not from the mere child that she was. They cost her, she assured me, little labour, especially the poems, but seemed to come to her ready-made, and to flow through her spontaneously. And whatever the country in which their scene lay, the local colouring and descriptions were always faithful and vivid, as if the places and their inhabitants were familiar and even actually visible to her.
It was not, however, to any encouragement of her peculiar gifts that such excellency as she exhibited was due. Rather were they severely repressed, especially in respect of drawing, singing and music, lest she should be tempted to follow them as a profession; a fear which had been excited by the suggestions of her masters that she would be certain of success in any of those lines.
Her innate consciousness of a mission seemed to her to indicate her as destined for some redemptive work, not only for others, but also for herself. For, while the instincts of the Champion and the Saviour were potent in her, she was dimly conscious of its possessing also an expiatory element, in virtue of which her own salvation would largely depend upon her endeavours to save others. She had as yet no theory whereby to explain this or any other of the problems she was to herself. All that she knew was that she possessed, or rather was possessed of, these feelings and impulses. It was easy to see by her account of herself that she was as one driven of the Spirit long before the Spirit definitely revealed itself to her. The two departments of humanity which she felt especially impelled to succour and save were her own sex and the animals. For she would recognise no hard and fast line between masculine and feminine, human and animal, or even between animal and plant. In her eyes everything that lived was humanity, only in different stages of its unfoldment. Even the flowers were persons for her.
As she approached womanhood she found herself looking forward to marriage far less for its own sake than as a means of emancipation from restrictions on her choice of a career. Her father died while she was yet wanting two or three years of her majority, leaving her mistress of an income ample for a single woman. And when at length she became engaged to Algernon Godfrey Kingsford, a cousin to whom she had some time been attached, it was on the understanding that she should remain unfettered in this respect. He held at the time a post in the Civil Service; but soon after their marriage, which took place on the last day of 1867, determined to read for holy orders. This gave her an opportunity for making herself acquainted with Anglican theology, of which—thirsting for knowledge of all kinds—she eagerly availed herself, accompanying him in all his studies, and greatly facilitating them by her admirable scholarly methods. This proved to be the first great step in her religious and intellectual training for her destined mission.
One of the occupations of her early married life was the editing of a lady's magazine, which she purchased with a view of making it an instrument for the dissemination of her ideas especially in regard to her sex. And she accordingly took an active part in the movement then recently originated for the enfranchisement of women, achieving an extraordinary success as a public speaker. But, becoming convinced that their cause would be best advanced by the practical demonstration of their fitness for the promotion they sought, and also feeling her own need for the discipline of a severe intellectual training to balance the emotional side of her nature, she soon withdrew from active participation in the movement. She moreover recognised as a grave mistake the disposition evinced by her fellow-workers to suppress their womanliness in favour of a factitious masculinity, under the impression that they would thereby exalt their sex; her idea being, that their true policy lay in magnifying rather than in depreciating their womanhood. Meanwhile she had given birth to a daughter, her only child.
Her magazine was given up after a couple of years, the results failing to justify the expenditure of time, labour and money, requisite for its continuance. Not that it lacked adequate support; but the principles on which she insisted on conducting it proved to be incompatible with commercial success. She resolutely refused all advertisements of articles, whether of food or of clothing, of which she disapproved; and she had adopted the pythagorean regimen and discarded as unhygienic sundry articles of attire ordinarily deemed indispensable by her sex. It was in her magazine that she first struck the note which proved the initiation of the holy warfare since waged against the horrors of the physiological laboratory, a warfare in which she bore a foremost part and developed the malady of which she died.
In 1870, a long and severe illness, which compelled her return to her mother's house at Hastings to be nursed, led to her entry upon another phase in her inner life, and a further stage in the process of her education for her mission. She had early recoiled from the faith in which she had been reared. This was Protestantism in its most unlovely form, cold, harsh, narrow, dogmatic. Her closer acquaintance with it as a clergyman's wife had done nothing to mitigate her judgment of it. Explaining nothing and lacking fervour and poetry, it left head and heart alike unsatisfied. Her residence as an invalid at Hastings brought her into intimacy with some devout Catholics, the effect of which was to intensify the repugnance already set up. She attended the Catholic services, and visited the sisters in the convent, reading their books of devotion and even making an extended study of Catholic doctrine, for she would do nothing by halves. She found what satisfied her heart and artistic tastes. But the chief determining cause of the change upon which she at length resolved, was her reception by night of sundry visitations, purporting to be of angelic nature, and enjoining on her, for the sake of the mission to which she was called—the knowledge of which, she was told, would in due time be revealed to her—that she join the Roman communion. Well aware that the confession of such experiences, whether to her relations or to a minister of her own Church, would elicit only a smile of pity or contempt, with a recommendation to seek medical advice, and involve other contingencies equally distasteful, she resolved to see how the same confession would be treated by a Catholic priest. The result of the essay was that she was listened to with respect and sympathy, and informed that the Church fully recognised such visitations as coming within the divine order, and as being a token of high spiritual favour and grace; and while it refrained from pronouncing positively on them, considered that they ought not to be lightly disregarded. She was soon afterwards received into the Roman Church, being baptised on September 14, 1870. On June 9, 1872, she was confirmed by Archbishop Manning, who admonished her to utilise her attractions in making converts. And on each occasion she received additional names, in virtue of which she now bore the names of all the five women who were by the Cross and at the Sepulchre.
None the less, however, did she retain her independence of mind and conduct. She accepted no direction, and professed no tenet that she did not understand. And it was soon made clear to her that the Spirit, of whom she was being impelled, did not intend her to regard her adoption of Catholicism as more than a step in her education for the work required of her. For the following year saw her bent on seeking a medical degree, under the impression that such a step was in some way related to the mission of which she had received such and so many mysterious intimations. And she had scarcely commenced her study of medicine when this impression was reinforced by the following incident, the scene of which was her home in Shropshire, in the parish of which her husband had then recently become incumbent, and where I first visited them.
This was the receipt of a letter from a lady who was a stranger to her, written from a distant part of the country, and saying that she, the writer, had read with profound interest and admiration a story[12] of Mrs Kingsford which, after appearing in her magazine, had been published as a book, and that after reading it she had received from the Holy Spirit a message for her which was to be delivered in person. After some hesitation as to what reply to make, Mrs Kingsford—whose account I am following exactly—agreed to receive her; an appointment was made, and the stranger duly presented herself. She was tall, erect, distinguished looking, with hair of iron-grey and strangely brilliant eyes, and was perfectly calm and collected of demeanour. The message was to the effect that Mrs Kingsford was to remain in retirement for five years, continuing the studies and mode of life on which she had entered, whatever they might be—for that the messenger did not know—and to suffer nothing and no one to draw her aside from them. That when these probationary five years were past, the Holy Spirit would bring her forth from her seclusion, and a great work would be given her to do. All this was uttered with a rapt and inspired expression, as though she had been a Sibyl pronouncing an oracle. After delivering her message, the messenger kissed her on both cheeks and departed, first asking only whether she thought her mad; a question to which for a moment Mrs Kingsford found it somewhat difficult to make reply. But only for a moment. For then there rushed on her the conviction that it was all genuine and true, and was but a fresh unfoldment of the mystery of her life and destiny, and in full accordance with her own foreshadowings from the beginning.