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

by Frances Power Cobbe

And creep o’er the cottage door.

“For each, for all is a welcome given

And spread the world’s great feast;

And the King of Kings is the loving Host

And each child of man a guest.”[^[13]]

The beauty of Switzerland has at no time touched me as that of Italy has always done. There is something in the sharp, hard atmosphere of Switzerland (and I may add in the sharp, hard characters of the Swiss) which disenchants me in the grandest scenes.

The second thing one learns in a journey like mine is, of course, the wondrous achievements of human Art,—Temples and Churches, fountains and obelisks, pyramids and statues and pictures without end. But on this head I need say nothing. Enough has been said and to spare by those far more competent than I to write of it.

Lastly, there is a thing which I, at all events, learned by knocking about the world. It is the enormous amount of pure human good nature which is to be found almost everywhere. I should weary the reader to tell all the little kindnesses done to me by fellow-passengers in the railways and steamers, and by the Captains of the vessels in which I sailed; and of the trouble which strangers took to help me out of my small difficulties. Of course men do not meet—because they do not want,—such services; and women, who travel with men, or even two or three together, seldom invite them. But for viewing human nature en beau, commend me to a long journey by a woman of middle age, of no beauty, and travelling as cheaply as possible, alone.

I believe the Psychical Society has started a theory that when places where crimes have been committed are ever after “haunted” the apparitions are not exactly good, old-fashioned real ghosts, if I may use such an expression, but some sort of atmospheric photographs (the term is my own) left by the parties concerned, or sent telepathically from their present habitat (wherever that may be) to the scene of their earthly suffering or wickedness. The hypothesis, of course, relieves us from the very unpleasant surmise that the actual soul of the victims of assassination and robbery may have nothing better to do in a future life than to stand guard perpetually at the dark and dank corners, cellars, and bottoms of stone staircases, where they were cruelly done to death fifty or a hundred years before; or to loaf like detectives about the spots where their jewelry and cash-boxes (so useful and important to a disembodied spirit!) lie concealed. But the atmospheric photograph or magic-lantern theory, whatever truth it may hold, exactly answers to a sense which I should think all my readers must have experienced, as I have done, in certain houses and cities; a sense as if the crimes which had been committed therein have left an indescribable miasma, a lurid, impalpable shadow, like that of the ashes of the Polynesian volcano which darkened the sun for a year; or shall we say, like the unrecognised effluvium which probably caused Mrs. Sleeman, in her tent, to dream she was surrounded by naked murdered men, while 14 corpses were actually lying beneath her bed and were next day disinterred?[^[14]] Walking once through Holyrood with Dr. John Brown (who had not visited the place for many years), I was quite overcome by this sense of ancient crime, perpetuated as it seemed, almost like a physical phenomenon in those gloomy chambers; and on describing my sensations, Dr. Brown avowed that he experienced a very similar impression. It would almost seem as if moral facts of a certain intensity, begin to throw a cloudy shadow of Evil, as Romist saints were said to exhale an odour of sanctity.

If there be a city in the world where this sense is most vivid, I think it is Rome. I have felt it also in Paris, but Rome is worst. The air (not of the Campagna with all its fevers, but of the city itself) seems foul with the blood and corruption of a thousand years. On the finest spring day, in the grand open spaces of the Piazza del Popolo, San Pietro, and the Forum, it is the same as in the darkest and narrowest streets. No person sensitive to this impression can be genuinely light-hearted and gay in Rome, as we often are even in our own gloomy London. Perhaps this is sheer fancifulness on my part, but I have been many times in Rome, twice for an entire winter, and the same impression never failed to overcome me. On my last visit I nearly died there and it was not to be described how earnestly I longed to emerge, as if out of one of Dante’s Giri, “anywhere, anywhere out of” this Rome!