This pleasant intercourse with an illustrious man was, like many other pleasant things, brought to a close for me in 1875 by the beginning of the Anti-vivisection crusade. Mr. Darwin eventually became the centre of an adoring clique of vivisectors who (as his Biography shows) plied him incessantly with encouragement to uphold their practice, till the deplorable spectacle was exhibited of a man who would not allow a fly to bite a pony’s neck, standing forth before all Europe (in his celebrated letter to Prof. Holmgren of Sweden) as the advocate of Vivisection.
We had many interesting foreign visitors in Hereford Square. I have mentioned the two Parsee gentlemen who came to thank me for having made (as they considered) a just estimate of their religion in my article “The Sacred Books of the Zoroastrians.” The elder of them, Mr. Nowrozjee Furdoonjee, was President of the Parsee Society of Bombay; but resided much in England, and had an astonishing knowledge of English and American theological and philosophic literature. He asked me one day to recommend him the best modern books on ethics. My small library contained a good many, but he not only knew every one I possessed, but almost all others which I named as worthy of his attention. We talked very freely on religious matters and with a good deal of sympathy. I pressed him one day with the question, “Do you really believe in Ahriman?” “Of course I do!” “What! In a real personal Evil Being, who is as much a person as Ormusd?” “O no! I did not mean that! I believe in Evil existing in the world;”—and obviously in nothing more!
My chief Eastern visitors, however (and they were so numerous that my artist-minded friend was wont to call them my “Bronzes”), were the Brahmos of Bengal, and one or two of the same faith from Bombay. There were very remarkable young men at that date, members of the “Church of the One God;” nearly all of them having risen from the gross idolatry in which they had been educated into a purer Theistic faith, not without encountering considerable family and social persecution. Their leader, Keshub Chunder Sen at any other age of the world, would have taken his place with such prophets as Nanuk (the founder of the Sikh religion) and Gautama; or with the mediæval Saints like St. Augustine and St. Patrick, who converted nations. He was, I think, the most devout man with whose mind I ever came in contact. When he left my drawing-room after long conversations on the highest themes,—sometimes held alone together, sometimes with the company of my dear friend William Henry Channing—the impression left on me was one never-to-be-forgotten. I wrote of one such interview at the time to my friend as follows (April 28, 1870):
“Keshub came and sat with me the other evening, and I was profoundly impressed, not by his intellect but by his goodness. He seems really to live in God, and the single-mindedness of the man seemed to me utterly un-English; much more like Christ! He said some very profound things, and seemed to feel that the joy of prayer was quite the greatest thing in life. He said, ‘I don’t know anything about the future, but I only know that when I pray I feel that my union with God is eternal. In our faith the belief in God and in Immortality are not two doctrines but one.’ He also said that we must believe in intercessory prayer, else the more we lived in Prayer the more selfish we should grow. He told me much of the beginning of his own religious life, and, wonderful to say, his words would have described that of my own! He said, indeed, that he had often laid down my books when reading them in India, and said to himself: ‘How can this English woman have felt all this just as I?’”
In his outward man Keshub Chunder Sen was the ideal of a great teacher. He had a tall, manly figure, always clothed in a long black robe of some light cloth like a French soutane, a very handsome square face with powerful jaw; the complexion and eyes of a southern Italian; and all the Eastern gentle dignity of manner. He and his friend Mozoomdar and several others of his party spoke English quite perfectly; making long addresses and delivering extempore sermons in our language without error of any kind, or a single betrayal of foreign accent. Keshub in particular, was decidedly eloquent in English. I gathered many influential men to meet him and they were impressed by him as much as I was.
The career of this very remarkable man was cut short a few years after his return from England by an early death. I believe he had taken to ascetic practices, fasting and watching; against which I had most urgently warned him, seeing his tendency towards them. I had argued with him that, not only were they totally foreign to the spirit of simple Theism, but dangerous to a man who, living habitually in the highest realms of human emotion, needed all the more for that reason that the physical basis of his life should be absolutely sound and strong, and not subject to the variabilities and possible hallucinations attendant on abstinence. My friendly counsels were of no avail. Keshub became, I believe, somewhat too near a “Yogi” (if I rightly understand that word) and was almost worshipped by his congregation of Brahmos. The marriage of his daughter—who has since visited England—to the Maharajah of Coosh Behar, involved very painful discussions about the legal age of the bride and the ceremonies of a Hindoo marriage, which were insisted on by the bridegroom’s mother; and the last year or two of Keshub’s life were, I fear, darkened by the secessions from his church which followed an event otherwise gratifying.
Oddly enough this Indian Saint was the only Eastern it has ever been my chance to meet who could enjoy a joke thoroughly, like one of ourselves. He came to me in Hereford Square one day bursting with uncontrollable laughter at his own adventures. Lord Lawrence, when Governor-General of India, had been particularly friendly to him and had bidden him come and see him when he should arrive in England. Keshub’s friends had found a lodging for him in Regent’s Park, and having resolved to go and pay his respects to Lord Lawrence at once, he sent for a four-wheeled cab, and simply told the cabman to drive to that nobleman’s house; fondly imagining that all London must know it, as Calcutta knew Government House. The cabman set off without the remotest idea where to go; and after driving hither and thither about town for three hours, set his fare down again at the door of his lodgings; told him he could not find Lord Lawrence; and charged him fourteen shillings! Poor Keshub paid the scandalous charge, and then referred to an old letter to find Lord Lawrence’s address, “Queen’s Gate.” Oh, that was quite right! No doubt the late Governor-General naturally lived close to the Queen! “Drive to Queen’s Gate.” The new cabman drove straight enough to “Queen’s Gate”; but about 185 houses appeared in a row, and there was nothing to indicate which of them belonged to Lord Lawrence; not even a solitary sentinel walking before the door! After knocking at many doors in vain, the cabman had an inspiration! “We will try if the nearest butcher knows which house it is;” and so they turned into Gloucester Road, and the excellent butcher there did know which number in Queen’s Gate belonged to Lord Lawrence, and Keshub was received and warmly welcomed. But that he should have to seek out a butcher’s shop (in his Eastern eyes the most degraded of shops) to learn where he could find a man whom he had last seen as Viceroy of India, was, to his thinking, exquisitely ridiculous.
Ex-Governors-General and their wives must certainly find some difficulty in descending all at once so many steps from the altitude of the viceregal thrones of our great dependencies to the level of private citizens, scarcely to be noticed more than others in society, and dwelling in ordinary London houses unmarked by the “guard of honour” of even a single policeman!
At a later date I had other Oriental visitors, one a gentleman who had made a translation of the Bhagvat-Gita, and who brought his wife and children to England, and to my tea-table. The wife wore a lovely, delicate lilac robe wrapped about her in the most graceful folds, but the effect was somewhat marred by the vulgar English side-spring boots, (very short in the leg), which the poor soul had found needful for use in London! The children sat opposite me at the tea-table, silently devouring my cakes and bon-bons; staring at me with their large black eyes, veritable wells of mistrust and hatred, such as only Eastern eyes can speak! I like dark men and women very well, but when the little ones are in question, I must confess that a child is scarcely a child to me unless it be a little Saxon, with golden hair and those innocent blue eyes which make one think of forget-me-nots in a brook. Where is the heart which can help growing soft at sight of one of these little creatures toddling in the spring grass picking daisies and cowslips, or laughing with sheer ecstacy in the joy of existence? A dark child may be ten times as handsome, but it has no pretension, to my mind, to pull one’s heart-strings in the same way as a blonde babykins.
A Hindoo lady, Ramabai, for whom I have deep respect, came to me before I left London and impressed me most favourably. She, and a few other Hindoo women who are striving to secure education and freedom for their sisters, will be honoured hereafter more than John Howard, for he strove only to mitigate the too severe punishment of criminals and delinquents; they are labouring to relieve the quite equally dreadful lot of millions of innocent women. An American Missionary, Mr. Dall, long resident in India, told me that thousands of these unhappy beings never put their feet to the earth or go a step from the house of their husbands (to which they are carried from their father’s Zenana at 9 or 10 years old) till they were borne away as corpses! All life for them has been one long imprisonment; its sole interest and concern the passions of the baser sort of love and jealousy! While writing these pages I have come across the following frightful testimony by the great traveller Mrs. Bishop (née Isabella Bird) to the truth of the above observation concerning the dreadful condition of the women of India:—