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

by Frances Power Cobbe

The answer of the General of the Franciscans to Cardinal Manning’s touching appeal was,—“that he had consulted his doctor and that his doctor assured him that no such thing as Vivisection was ever practised in Italy!”

I was kindly permitted to call at Archbishop’s House and see Cardinal Manning several times; and I find the following little record of one of my first visits in a letter to my friend, written the same, or next day:—

“I had a very interesting interview with the Cardinal. I was shown into a vast, dreary dining-room quite monastic in its whitey-brown walls, poverty-stricken furniture, crucifix, and pictures of half-a-dozen Bishops who did not exhibit the ‘Beauty of Holiness.’ The Cardinal received me most kindly, and said he was so glad to see me, and that he was much better in health after a long illness. He is not much changed. It was droll to sit talking tête-à-tête with a man with a pink octagon on his venerable head, and various little scraps of scarlet showing here and there to remind one that ‘Grattez’ the English gentleman and you will find the Roman Cardinal! He told me, really with effusion, that his heart was in our work; and he promised to go to the Meeting to-morrow.... I told him we all wished him to take the chair. He said it would be much better for a layman like Lord Coleridge to do so. I said, ‘I don’t think you know the place you hold in English, (I paused and added avec intention,) Protestant estimation’! He laughed very good-humouredly and said: ‘I think I do, very well.’”

At the Meeting on the following day when he did take the chair, I had opportunities as Hon. Sec., of which I did not fail to avail myself, of a little quiet conversation with his Eminence before the proceedings.

I spoke of the moral results of Darwinism on the character and remarked how paralyzing was the idea that Conscience was merely an hereditary instinct fixed in the brain by the interests of the tribe, and in no sense the voice of God in the heart or His law graven on the “fleshly tablets.” He abounded in my sense, and augured immeasurable evils from the general adoption of such a philosophy. I asked him what was the Catholic doctrine of the origin of Souls? He answered, promptly and emphatically: “O, that each one is a distinct creation of God.”

The last day on which His Eminence attended a Committee Meeting in Victoria Street I had a little conversation with him as usual, after business was over; and reminded him that on every occasion when he had previously attended, we had had our beloved President, Lord Shaftesbury present. “Shall I tell your Eminence,” I asked, “what Mrs. F.” (now Lady B.) “told me Lord Shaftesbury said to her shortly before he died, about our Committees here? He said that ‘if our Society had done nothing else but bring you and him together, and make you sit and work at the same table for the same object, it would have been well worth while to have founded it!’” “Did Lord Shaftesbury say that?” said the Cardinal, with a moisture in his eyes, “Did he say that? I loved Lord Shaftesbury!”

And these, I reflected, were the men whom narrow bigots of both creeds, looked on as the very chiefs of opposing camps and bitter enemies! The one rejoiced at an excuse for meeting the other in friendly co-operation! The other said as his last word: “I loved him!”

I was greatly touched by this little scene, and going straight from it to the house of the friend who had told me of Lord Shaftesbury’s remark, I naturally described it to her and to Mr. Lowell, who was taking tea with us. “Ah, yes!” Lady B. said,—“I remember it well, and I could show you the very tree in the park where we were sitting when Lord Shaftesbury made that remark. But” (she added) “why did you not tell the Cardinal that he included you? What Lord Shaftesbury said was, that ‘the Society had brought the Cardinal and you and himself to work together.’” Mr. Lowell was interested in all this, and the evidence it afforded of the width of mind of the great philanthropist, so often supposed to be “a narrow Evangelical.”

Alas! he also has “gone over to the majority.” I met him often and liked him (as every one did) extremely. Though in so many ways different, he had some of Mr. Gladstone’s peculiar power of making every conversation wherein he took part interesting; of turning it off dusty roads into pleasant paths. He had not in the smallest degree that tiresome habit of giving information instead of conveying impressions, which makes some worthy people so unspeakably fatiguing as companions. I had once the privilege of sitting between him and Lord Tennyson when they carried on an animated conversation, and I could see how much the great Poet was delighted with the lesser one; who was also a large-hearted Statesman; a silver link between two great nations.

I shall account it one of the chief honours which have fallen to my lot that Tennyson asked leave, through his son, to pay me a visit. Needless to say I accepted the offer with gratitude and, fortunately, I was at home, in our little house in Cheyne Walk, when he called on me. He sat for a long time over my fire, and talked of poetry; of the share melodious words ought to have in it; of the hatefulness of scientific cruelty, against which he was going to write again; and of the new and dangerous phases of thought then apparent. Much that he said on the latter subject was, I think, crystallised in his Locksley Hall Sixty Years Later. After he had risen to go and I had followed him to the stairs, I returned to my room and said from my heart, “Thank God!” The great poem which had been so much to me for half a lifetime, was not spoiled; the Man and the Poet were one. Nothing that I had now seen and heard of him in the flesh jarred with what I had known of him in the spirit.