“Shaftesbury.”
The most remarkable woman I have known, not excepting Mrs. Somerville (described in my chapter on Italy), Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs. Beecher Stowe, was, beyond any doubt or question, my dear friend, Fanny Kemble. I have told of the droll circumstances of our first meeting at Newbridge in the early Fifties. From that time till her death in 1892, her brilliant, iridescent genius, her wit, her spirit, her tenderness, the immense “go” and momentum of her whole nature, were sources of endless pleasure to me. When I was lame, I used to feel that for days after talking with her I could almost dispense with my crutches, so much did she, literally, lift me up!
Mrs. Kemble paid us several visits here in Wales, and was perhaps even more delightful in our quiet country quarters than in London. She would sit out for many hours at a time in our beautiful old garden, which she said was to her “an idyll;” and talk of all things in heaven and earth; touching in turn every note in the gamut of emotion from sorrowful to joyous. One summer she came to us early, and thus sat daily under a great cherry tree “in the midst of the garden,” which was at the time a mass of odorous and snowy blossoms. Alas! the blossoms have returned and are blooming as I write;—but the friend sleeps under the sod in Kensal Green.
Mr. Henry James’ obituary article and Mr. Bentley’s generous-hearted letter concerning her in the Times—in rebuke of the mean and grudging notice of her which that paper had published,—seem to me to have been by far the most truthful sketches which appeared of the “grand old lioness;” as Thackeray called her. Everybody could admire, and most people a little feared her; but it needed to come very close to her and brush past her formidable thorns of irony and sarcasm, to know and love her, as she most truly deserved to be loved.
There is always something startling and perhaps the reverse of attractive to those of us who have been brought up in the usual English way to repress our emotions, in women who have been trained reversely by histrionic life, to give all possible outwardness and vividness of expression to those same emotions. It is only when we get below both the extreme demonstrativeness on one hand, and the conventional reserve and self-restraint on the other, and meet on common ground of deep sympathies, that real friendship is established; a friendship which in my case was at once an honour and a delight.
Mrs. Kemble in her generous affection made a present to me of the MSS. of her Memoirs, which subsequently I induced her to take back, and publish herself, as her “Old Woman’s Gossip,” her Records of a Girlhood and Records of Later Life. Beside these, which, as I have said, I returned to her one after another, she gave me, and I still possess, an immense packet of her own old letters to her beloved H. S. (Harriet St. Leger) and others; and the materials of five large and thick volumes of autograph letters addressed to her, extending over more than 50 years. They include whole correspondences with W. Donne, Edward Fitzgerald, Henry Greville, Mrs. Jameson, John Mitchell Kemble, George Combe, and several others; and besides these there are either one or half-a-dozen letters from almost every man and woman of eminence in England in her time. Mr. Bentley has very liberally purchased from me for publication about 100 letters from Edward Fitzgerald to Mrs. Kemble. The rest of the Mrs. Kemble’s correspondence I have, as I have mentioned, bound together in five volumes, and I do not intend to publish them. Had any of Mrs. Kemble’s “Records” remained inedited at the time of her death I should have undertaken, (as she no doubt intended me to do) the task of writing her biography. The work was, however, so fully done by herself in her long series of volumes that there was neither need nor room for more. I am happy to add, in conclusion, that in the arrangements I have made regarding my dear old friend’s literary remains, I have the consent and approval of her daughters.
I knew Mrs. Gaskell a little, but not enough to harmonize in my mind the woman I saw in the flesh with the books I liked so well as Mary Barton and Libbie Marsh’s Three Eras. Of Mrs. Stowe’s delightful conversation on the terrace of our villa on Bellosguardo, I have written my recollections, and recorded the glimpses I had of Mrs. Browning. I have also described Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur; our sculptor and painter friends, from the latter of whom I have just (1898) received the kindest letters and her impressive photograph; and Mary Carpenter, my leader and fellow-worker at Bristol. I must not speak here of the affection and admiration I entertain for my dear, living friend Anna Swanwick, the translator of Æschylus and Faust; and for Louisa Lee Schuyler, one of the leaders in the organization of relief in the great Civil War of America and who founded and carried to its present marvellous extent of power and usefulness the State Charities Aid Association of New York. Again, I have known in England Mdme. Bodichon (who furnished Girton with its first thousand pounds); Mrs. Josephine Butler; Mrs. Webster the classic poetess; and Mrs. Emily Pfeiffer, another poetess and very beautiful woman at whose house I once witnessed an interesting scene,—a large party of ladies and gentlemen dressed in the attire of Athenians of the Periclean age. Miss Swanwick and I, who were alone permitted to attend in English costume, were immensely impressed by the ennobling effect of the classic dress, not only on young and graceful people, but on those who were quite the reverse.
I never saw Harriet Martineau; but was so desirous of doing it that I intended to make a journey to Ambleside for the purpose, and with that view begged our mutual friend, the late Mrs. Hensleigh Wedgwood, to ask leave to introduce me to her. It was an unfortunate moment, and I only received the following kind message:—
“I need not say how happy I should have been to become acquainted with Miss Cobbe; but the time is past and I am only fit for old friends who can excuse my shortcomings. I have lost ground so much of late that the case is clear. I must give up all hopes of so great a pleasure. Will you say this to her and ask her to receive my kind and thankful regards, I venture to send on the grounds of our common friendships?”
Of my living, beloved and honoured friends, Mrs. William Grey, Lady Mount-Temple, Miss Shirreff, Mrs. Fawcett, Miss Caroline Stephen, Miss Julia Wedgwood, Lady Battersea, and Miss Florence Davenport Hill, I must not here speak. I have had the pleasure also of meeting that very fine woman-worker Miss Octavia Hill.