Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

After the sudden and unexpected termination of my connection with the Echo I accepted gladly an engagement, not requiring personal attendance, on the staff of the Standard, and wrote two or three leaders a week for that newspaper, for a considerable time. At last the Vivisection controversy came in the way, when I resigned my post in consequence of the appearance of a pro-vivisecting paragraph. The editor assured me generally of his approval of my crusade, and I wrote a few articles more, but the engagement finally dropped. My time had indeed become too much absorbed by the other work to carry on regular Journalism with the needful vigour.

It may interest women who are entering the profession in which I found such pleasure and profit, to know that as regards “filthy lucre,” I found it more remunerative than writing for the best monthly or quarterly periodicals. I did both at the same period; often sitting down to spend some hours of the afternoon over a “Study of Eastern Religion” or some such subject, when I had gone to the Strand and written my leader and notes in the forenoon. Putting all together and the profits of my books, (which were small enough,) I made by my literary and journalistic work at one time a fair income. This golden epoch ended, however, when I threw myself into the Anti-vivisection movement, after which date I do not think I have ever earned more than £100 a year, and for the last 12 years not £20. I suppose in my whole life I have earned nearly £5,000, rather more than my whole patrimony. What my poor father would have felt had he known that his daughter eked out her subsistence by going down in all weathers to write articles for a half-penny newspaper in the Strand, I cannot guess. My brothers happily had no objection to my industry, and the eldest—who drew, as usual with elder sons in our class, more money every year from the family property than I received for life,—kindly paid off my charges on the estate and added £100 a year to the proceeds, so that I was thenceforth, for my moderate wants, fairly well off, especially since I had a friend who shared all expenses of housekeeping with me.

In reviewing my whole literary and journalistic life as I have done in these two chapters, I perceive that I have been from first to last an Essayist; almost pur et simple. I have done very little in any other way than to try to put forward—either at large in a book or in a magazine article, or, lastly, in a newspaper-leader—which was always a miniature essay,—an appeal for some object, an argument for some truth, a vindication of some principle, an exposure of what I conceived to be an absurdity, a wrong, a falsehood, or a cruelty. At first I had exaggerated hopes of success in these endeavours. Books had been a great deal to me in my own solitary life, and I far over-estimated their practical power. When editors and publishers readily accepted my articles and books, and reviewers praised them, I fancied, (though they never sold very freely,) that I was really given the great privilege of moving many hearts. But by degrees as years went on I felt the sorrowful limitation of literary influence. Sometimes I was wild with disappointment and indignation when critics lauded the “style” of my books while they never so much as noticed the purpose for sake of which I had laboured to make them good and strong literature.

For my own part I have shunned Review-writing; partly (as regarded newspaper criticism) for the rather sordid reason that it involves the double labour of reading and writing for the same pay per column, but generally, and in all cases, because I cannot say,—as dear Fanny Kemble used to remark in a sepulchral voice (quite falsely), “I am nothing if not critical.” On the contrary, I am several other things, and very little critical; and the pain and deadly injury I have seen inflicted by a severe review is a form of cruelty for which I have no predilection. It is necessary, no doubt, in the literary community that there should be warders and executioners at the public command to birch juvenile offenders, and flog garrotters, and hang anarchists; but I never felt any vocation for those disagreeable offices. The few reviews I have ever written have been properly Essays on given subjects, taking some book which I could honestly praise for a peg. As in the old Egyptian Book of the Dead the soul of the deceased protests, among his forty-two abjurations,—“I have not been the cause of others’ tears,”—so, I hope, I may say, I have given no brother or sister of the pen the wound (and often the ruinous loss) of a damaging critique of his or her books. If my writings have given pain to any persons, it can only have been to men whose dead consciences it would be an act of mercy to awaken, and towards whom I feel not the smallest compunction. Briefly I conclude in this book, (doubtless my last), a long and moderately successful literary life, with no serious regrets, but with much thankfulness and rejoicing for all the interest, the pleasure and the warm and precious friendships which the profession of letters has brought to me ever since I entered it,—just forty years ago,—when William Longman accepted my Intuitive Morals.

CHAPTER
XVII.
MY LIFE IN LONDON IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES.
SOCIAL.

When we had settled down, as we did rapidly, into our pretty little house in South Kensington, we began soon to enjoy many social pleasures of a quiet kind. Into Society (with a big S!), we had no pretensions to enter, but we had many friends, very genuine and delightful ones, ere long; and a great many interesting acquaintances. Happily death has spared not a few of these until now, and, of course, of them I shall not write here; but of some of those who have “gone over to the majority” I shall venture to record my recollections, interspersed in some cases with their letters. I may premise that we were much given to dining out, but not to attending late evening parties; and that in our small way we gave little dinners now and then, and occasionally afternoon and evening parties,—the former held sometimes in summer under the lime trees behind our house. I attribute my long retention of good health to my persistence in going to bed before eleven o’clock, and never accepting late invitations.

I hope I shall be acquitted of the presumption of pretending to offer in the scrappy souvenirs I shall now put together any important contribution to the memoirs of the future. At best, a woman’s knowledge of the eminent men whom she only meets at dinner parties, and perhaps in occasional quiet afternoon visits, is not to be compared to that of their associates in their clubs, in Parliament and in all the work of the world. Nevertheless as all of us, human beings, resemble diamonds in having several distinct facets to our characters, and as we always turn one of these to one person and another to another, there is generally some fresh side to be seen in a particularly brilliant gem. The relation too, which a good and kindly man (and such I am happy to say were most of my acquaintances) bears to a woman who is neither his mother, sister, daughter, wife or potential wife, but merely a reasonably intelligent listener and companion of restful hours, is so different from that which he holds to his masculine fellow-workers,—rivals, allies or enemies as they may be,—that it can rarely happen but that she sees him in quite a different light from theirs. Englishmen are not eaten up with Invidia, like Italians and Frenchmen, such as made D’ Azeglio say to me that it was a positive danger to a statesman to win a battle, or gain a diplomatic triumph, so much envy did it excite among his own party. In our country, men, and still more emphatically, women, glory enthusiastically in the successes of their friends, if not of others. But the masculine mind, so far as I have got to the bottom of it, (as George Eliot says, “it is always so superior—what there is of it!”), is not so quick in gathering impressions of character as ours of the softer (and therefore, I suppose, more waxlike) sex; and when fifty men have said their say on a great man I should always wish to hear also what the women who knew him socially had to add to their testimony. In short, dear Fanny Kemble’s “Old Woman’s Gossip” seems to me admissible on the subject of the character and “little ways” of everybody worthy of record.

It was certainly an advantage to us in London to be, as we were, without any kind of ulterior aim or object in meeting our friends and acquaintances, beyond the pleasure of the hour. We never had anything in view in the way of social ambition; not even daughters to bring out! It was not “de l’Art pour l’Art,” but la Société pour la Société, and nothing beyond the amusement of the particular day and the interest of the acquaintanceships we had the good fortune to make. We had no rank or dignity of any kind to keep up. I think hardly any of our friends and habitués even knew who we were, from Burke’s point of view! I was really pleased once, after I had been living for years in London, to find at a large dinner-party, where at least half the company were my acquaintances, that not one present suspected that I had any connection with Ireland at all. Our host (a very prominent M.P. at the time) having by chance elicited from me some information on Irish affairs, asked me, “What do you know about Ireland?” “Simply that the first 36 years of my life were spent there,” was my reply; which drew forth a general expression of surprise. The few who had troubled themselves to think who I was, had taken it for granted that I belonged to a family of the same name, minus the final letter, in Oxfordshire. In a country neighbourhood the one prominent fact about me, known and repeated to everyone, would have been that I was the daughter of Charles Cobbe of Newbridge. I was proud to be accepted and, I hope, liked, on the strength of my own talk and books, not on that of my father’s acres.

We did not (of course) live in London all the year round, but came every summer to Wales to enable my friend to look after her estate; and I went every two or three years to Ireland, and more frequently to the houses of my two brothers in England,—Maulden Rectory, in Bedfordshire, and Easton Lyss, near Petersfield,—where they respectively lived, and where both they and their wives were always ready to welcome me affectionately. I also paid occasional visits at two or three country houses, notably Broadlands and Aston Clinton, where I was most kindly invited by the beloved owners; and twice or three times we let our house for a term, and went to live on one occasion in Cheyne Walk, and another time at Byfleet. We always fell back, however, on our dear little house in Hereford Square, till we let it finally to our old friend Mrs. Kemble, and left London for good in the spring of 1884.

I think the first real acquaintances we made in London (whether through Mrs. Somerville or otherwise I cannot recall) were Sir Charles and Lady Lyell, and their brother and sister, Col. and Mrs. Lyell. The house, No. 73, Harley Street—in after years noticeable by its bright blue door, (so painted to catch Sir Charles’ fading eyesight on his return from his daily walks), became very dear to us, and I confess to a pang when it was taken by Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone after the death of our dear old friends. Like Lord Shaftesbury’s house in Grosvenor Square, pulled down after his death and replaced by a brand new mansion in the latest Londonesque architecture, there was a “bad-dreaminess” about both transformation scenes. The Lyells regularly attended Mr. Martineau’s chapel in Little Portland Street, as we did; and ere long it became a habit for us to adjourn after the service to Harley Street and spend some of the afternoon with our friends, discussing the large supply of mental food which our pastor never failed to lay before us. Those were never-to-be-forgotten Sundays.