The last time I saw Canon Kingsley was one day late in the autumn some months before he died. Somebody who, I thought, he would like to meet was coming to dine with me at short notice, and I went to Westminster in the hope of catching him and persuading him to come without losing time by sending notes. The evening was closing, and it was growing very dark in the cloisters, where I was seeking his door, when I saw a tall man, strangely bent, coming towards me, evidently seeing neither me nor anything else, and absorbed in some most painful thought. His whole attitude and countenance expressed grief amounting to despair. So terrible was it that I felt it an intrusion on a sacred privacy to have seen it; and would fain have hidden myself, but this was impossible where we were standing at the moment. When he saw me he woke out of his reverie with a start, pulled himself together, shook hands, and begged me to come into his house; which of course I did not do. He had an engagement which prevented him from meeting my guest (I think it must have been Keshub Chunder Sen), and I took myself off as quickly as possible. I have often wondered what dreadful thought was occupying his mind when I caught sight of him that day in the gloomy old cloisters of Westminster in the autumn twilight.
The quotation made a few pages back of Sir Charles Lyell’s observations on belief in Immortality reminds me that I repeated them soon after he had made them, to another great man whom it was my privilege to know—John Stuart Mill. We were spending an afternoon with him and Miss Helen Taylor at Blackheath; and a quiet conversation between Mr. Mill and myself having reached this subject, I told him of what Sir C. Lyell had said. In a moment the quick blood suffused his cheeks and something very like tears were in his eyes. The question, it was plain, touched his very heart. This wonderful sensitiveness of a man generally supposed to be “dry” and devoted to the driest studies, struck me, I think, more than anything about him. His special characteristic was extreme delicacy of feeling; and this showed itself, singularly enough, for a man advanced in life, in transparency of skin, and changes of colour and expression as rapid as those in a mountain lake when the clouds shift over it. When Watts painted his fine portrait of him, he failed to notice this peculiarity of his thin and delicate skin, and gave him the common thick, muddy complexion of elderly Englishmen. The result is that the èthos of the face is missing—just as in the case of the portrait of Dr. Martineau he is represented with weak, sloping shoulders and narrow chest. The look of power which essentially belongs to him is not to be seen. I remarked when I saw this picture first exhibited: “I should never have ‘sat under’ that Dr. Martineau!” Mill and I, of course, met in deep sympathy on the Woman question; and he did me the honour to present me with a copy of his “Subjection of Women” on its publication. He tried to make me write and speak more on the subject of Women’s Claims, and used jestingly to say that my laugh was worth—I forget how much!—to the cause. I insert a letter from him showing the minute care he took about matters hardly worthy of his attention.
“Avignon, Feb. 23rd, 1869.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have lately received communication from the American publisher Putnam, requesting me to write for their Magazine, and I understand that they would be very glad if you would write anything for them, more especially on the Women question, on which the Magazine (a new one) has shown liberal tendencies from the first. The communications I have received have been through Mrs. Hooker, sister of Mrs. Stowe and Dr. Ward Beecher, and herself the author of two excellent articles in the Magazine on the suffrage question, by which we had been much struck before we knew the authorship. I enclose Mrs. Hooker’s last letter to me, and I send by post copies of Mrs. Hooker’s articles and some old numbers of the Magazine, the only ones we have here; and I shall be very happy if I should be the medium of inducing you to write on this question for the American public.
“My daughter desires to be kindly remembered, and I am,
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“Very truly yours,
“J. S. Mill.
“P.S.—May I ask you to be so kind as to forward Mrs. Hooker’s letter to Mrs. P. A. Taylor, as she will see by it that Mrs. Hooker has no objection to put her name to a reprint of her articles.”