THE NOBILITY AND LOVE-WORTHINESS OF HUMAN NATURE.”
In Miss Cobbe’s nature a gift of humour was joined to strong practical sense. No one who ever lived less deserved the term “Faddist” or “Sentimentalist.” Miss Cobbe was impatient of fads. She liked “normal” people best—those who ate and drank, and dressed and lived according to ordinary conventions. Though, for convenience sake, she had adopted a style of dress for herself to which she kept, letting “Fashions” come and go unheeded, she was not indifferent to dress in other women, and admired colours and materials, or noted eccentricities as quickly as anyone. She once referred laughingly to her own dress as “obvious.” For many years dressmaker’s dresses would have been impossible to her; but she had no sympathy with the effort some women make to look peculiar at all costs. She could thoroughly enjoy a good story, or even a bit of amusing gossip. With her own strong religious convictions, she had the utmost respect for other people’s opinions. Her chosen friends held widely different creeds, and I do not think that she ever dreamt of proselytising.
No literary person, surely, ever had less self-conceit. What she had written was not flourished in one’s face; other people’s smallest doings were not ignored. One felt always on leaving her that every one else was lacking in something indefinable—was dull, uninteresting and common-place. One felt, too, that the whole conception of womanhood was raised. This was what a woman might be. Whatever her faults, they were the faults of a great-hearted, noble nature—faults which all generous persons would be quick to forget. Nothing small or mean could be tolerated by her.
Her character, as I read it, was drawn on large and simple lines, and was of a type that is out of fashion to-day. She had many points of resemblance to Samuel Johnson. With a strong and logical brain, she scorned all sophistries, evasions, compromises, and half measures, and was impatient of the wire-drawn subtleties in which modern moralists revel. With intensely warm affections, she was, like the great doctor, “a good hater.” He would undoubtedly have classified her as “a clubbable woman”; and his famous saying, “Clear your mind of cant,” would have come as appropriately from her lips as from his. If a sin was hateful to her, she could not feel amiably towards the sinner; and for the spiritual sins of selfishness, hypocrisy, avarice, cruelty, and callousness, she had no mercy, ranking them as far more fatal to character than the sins of the flesh. Like Johnson, too, she valued good birth, good breeding, and good manners, and was instinctively conservative, though liberal in her religious and political opinions.
She intensely disliked the license of modern life, both in manners and morals, and had no toleration for the laxity so often pardoned in persons of social or intellectual eminence. Her mind and her tastes were strictly pure, orderly, and regular. It is characteristic of this type of mind that she most admired the classical in architecture, the grand style in art, the polished and finished verse of Pope and Tennyson in poetry. These were the two whose words she most frequently quoted, though she tells us that Shelley was her favourite poet.
Her gift of order was exemplified in the smallest details and the kindred power of organisation was equally well marked. It was the combination of impulsiveness and enthusiasm with practical judgment and a due sense of proportion that made her so splendid a leader in any cause she championed.
Miss Cobbe was what is often called “generous to a fault.” It was a lesson in liberality to go with her into the garden when she cut flowers to send away. She did not look for the defective blooms, or for those which would not be missed. It was always the best and the finest which she gave. How often I have held the basket while she cut rose after rose, or great sprays of rhododendron or azælea with the knife she wielded so vigorously. “Take as much as you like,” she would say, if she sent you to help yourself. She gave not only material things, but affection, interest sympathy, bountifully.
She hated a lie of any kind; her first instinct was always to stamp it out when she came across one. Perhaps, in her stronger days, she “drank delight of battle with her peers,” and did not crave over much for peace. But she was not quarrelsome, and could differ without wrangling, and dispute without bitterness.
A woman without husband or child is fortunate if, in her old age, she has one or two friends who really love her. Miss Cobbe was devotedly loved by a large number of men and women. Indeed, I do not think that anyone could come close to her and not love her. She was so richly gifted, and gave so freely of herself.
To many younger women she had become the inspiration of and guide to a life of high endeavour, and the letters of gratitude and devotion which were addressed to her from all parts of the world bear witness, as nothing else can, to the extent of her splendid influence upon the characters of others. Only a day or two before her death she received letters from strangers who had lately read her autobiography and felt impelled to write and thank her for this story of a brave life. It is in the hope that through it her influence may go on growing, and that her spirit of self-sacrifice, of service to humanity, and faithfulness to the Divine law may spread until the causes she fought for so valiantly are victorious, that this new edition of the “Life of Frances Power Cobbe” is sent out.