MISS COBBE'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. * AT a moment when the surface, if
not more than the surface currents of society and literature are obstructed by the litter and refuse of decadent faiths and discarded traditions, a book like Miss Cobbs's autobiography should be welcome to all who are not in love with stagnation. Within the limits of its two volumes, there is enough of wholesome energy, hearty enthusiasm, and honest thankfulness for the various blessings of a long and useful life, to flush the exhausted channels of vitality in the most languid of fin-de-siècle readers, if not with new vigour, at least with salutary shame. Miss Cobbe is at no pains to conceal her contempt for the general decay of animal spirits and joy in living, which she notes as a sign of the times. On the other hand, she makes no merit of her own optimism,—recognising indeed that it may be only the natural outcome of robust physical health and good digestion, in circumstances of material plenty. But she is, none the less, exuberantly thankful for the good gift, and she says more than once that it is mainly because she has never ceased to rejoice in life, or to think it reasonable so to rejoice, in spite of personal sorrow and suffering, and of the existence of cruel social evils, which she feels more keenly than personal sufferings,—that she has thought it worth while to tell the story of her life. She re- members her childhood as an unusually happy one, counting it no small blessing to have grown up in large and easy cir- cumstances; and she dwells affectionately on the spacious corridors and nurseries, the quadrangle, and the stables and the kennels, as well as the park and the lawns and the terraces of Newbridge—her father's place near Dublin—in the liberty and solitude of which she enjoyed a good many of the advan- tages without the drawbacks of an only child's lot. Her early circumstances were particularly free from those occasions of friction, which quite as often spoil temper as discipline it, ancl particularly favourable to the development of independent individuality; at the same time, she never knew the want of ordinary home affections. To the kindness and the wisdom of her parents she bears cordial testimony. All her brothers—she never had a sister—were sufficiently older than herself to be schoolboys while she was a nursery child, and to treat her with protecting kindness when they came home for the holidays.
"If," she says, "I have become a Woman's Rights woman in mature years, it has not been because in my own person I have been made to feel a woman's wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers' kindness and tenderness to me have been unfailing from infancy."
For a little time she had the companionship of a. boy-cousin of her own age, whose second name, like her own, was" Power ; " and every time the two children heard in church the words, "the Heavens and all the Powers therein," they congratulated themselves on being included by name among the Host of Heaven. She was less happy at the Brighton School, to which she was sent at sixteen, where an extraordinary number of subjects were taught by an extraordinary number of professors—and the instruction culminated in a complete course of science, given in nine lectures, on Electricity, Galvanism, Optics, Hydrostatics, Mechanics, Pneumatics, and Astronomy. For two years of this comprehensive teaching her parents paid BLOW, and Miss Cobbe came home to Newbridge, confident that she knew all anybody need know, and thinking "what a delightful thing to have done with
• Life of Frances Power Cobb.. By Herself. With Illustrations. 2 rob. London : Bentley and Bon. study," and be able to read novels and amuse herself for the rest of her life. This phase of satisfaction did not last long, and within a few months of leaving school she had begun a severe course of self-education. She devoted four years to the study of history, learned Greek and geometry from the clergyman of the parish, and read as many of the great books of the world as she could get access to :- "Making it a rule always (whether bored or not) to go to the end of each, and also following generally Gibbon's advice, viz., to rehearse in one's mind in a walk before beginning a great book all that one knows before of the subject, and then having finished it, to take another walk, and register how much has been added to our own store of ideas. In these ways I read all The Faery Queen,' all Milton's poetry, and the Dinina Commedia and Gerusa- lemma Liberals in the originals. Also (in translations) I read through the Iliad, Odyssey, Aneid, rharsalia, and all, or nearly all, 2Esehylus, Sophoeles, Euripides, Ovid, Tacitus, Xenophon, lierodotus, Thucydides, &c."
And besides all this solid reading and study, she took up hobbies such as astronomy, architecture, and heraldry; and thanks to a strong brain and good memory, was able to retain all that was most important with almost verbal accuracy. It will probably seem less odd to most of her readers than it did to herself, that at the same period she had such a very imper- fect recollection of living persons and everyday incidents, that she found it necessary to keep a book of memoranda of the characters and circumstances of all the servants who left her parents' house, in order to give them fair recommendations when necessary. By degrees, her interest in all these studies and their results centred more and more in the great question of the truth of revealed religion, as to which doubts had visited her even in early girlhood. She describes with perfect sim- plicity, and unmistakable sincerity, the pain it cost her to realise that she could no longer conscientiously hold the Evangelical faith she had learned from her mother. It would be out of place in a review like this to discuss critically the mental processes by which the passage from belief to unbelief was made, We can only consider its results as they illustrate her character, and from this point of view there is much in this part of the narrative to command sympathy and admiration even from those who differ widely from her conclusions. Recognising in the first crisis of doubt—what afterwards became less clear to her— the dependence of the moral law of Christendom upon the truth of the Christian revelation, it seemed to her that she had only the choice, on the one band— "To accept a whole mass of dogmas against which my reason and conscience rebelled ; on the other, to abandon those dogmas and strive no more to believe the incredible, or to revere what I instinctively condemned; and then, as a necessary sequel, to cast aside the laws of Duty which I had hitherto cherished ; to cease to pray or to take the Sacrament ; and to relinquish the hope of a life beyond the grave. It was not very wonderful if, as I think I can recall, my disposition underwent a considerable change for the worse while all these tremendous questions were being debated in my solitary walks in the woods and by the seashore, and in my room at night over my Gibbon or my Bible. I know I was often bitter and morose and selfish ; and then came the alternate spell of paroxysms of self-reproach and painful tormentings."
At length the struggle ceased, and she realised with a sort of calm that she neither believed nor disbelieved in God, but was, in fact, an Agnostic before the word was current. And then very soon came the thought that, even though all the "scaffolding of the higher life" had fallen away, she might "rise up once more, conquer her faults, and live up to her idea of what was right and good,"—a thought that was instantly converted into a resolution, and almost imme- diately the habit of prayer came back, and—never to leave her more—her faith in God. Not so, however, in dogmatic Christianity. As is pretty generally known, the religion of Miss Cobbe's life has been, ever since this period of spiritual conflict, an impassioned form of Theism, coloured by Christian sentiment and tradition, but excluding all that which, following Dr. Martineau, she calls "the apocalyptic side of Christianity." The confession of her heterodoxy to her father—she had kept it secret do long as her mother lived—was the occasion of a temporary estrangement during which she suffered keenly, but in speaking of which she makes no complaint of harshness. She was commanded to leave Newbridge, and for ten months remained in exile, not knowing whether she should ever be allowed to return. At the end of that time she was summoned home, and she kept her father's house very happily until he died eight years later.
Two chapters headed "Ireland in the Thirties and Forties,"
contain much interesting information about the lives of the Irish peasantry in the years of the famine, the fever, and Smith O'Brien's rebellion ; they abound also in lively sketches of social and family life among the upper classes, and in good stories of Irish character. Here is a capital dialogue between Miss Cobbe and the waiter at an inn where she and her father had to put up in the course of a driving tour What can we have for dinner I' Anything you please, ma am—anything you please.'—' Well but exactly, what can we have P'—(Waiter, triuniphant/y) : 'You can have a pair of ducks.' - I am sorry to say Mr. Cobbe cannot eat ducks. What else P They are very fine ducks, ma'am.'—' I daresay, but what else?' - You might have the ducks boiled, ma'am.'—' No, no. Can we have mutton P-4 Well, not mutton to-day, ina'aml—' Same beef?'—' No, mteam.'—' Some veal?'—' Not any veal, I'm afraid.' — ' Well, then, a fowl P We haven't got a fowl.'—' What on earth have you got then? '—' Well then, ma'am, I'm afraid if you won't have the fine pair of ducks, there's nothing for it but bacon and eggs.'" The uprooting caused by the death of her father hi 1850 was practically the beginning of what may be called Miss Cobbe's public career. After a year's travel in Italy, Greece, and the East, which she regarded as a completion of her course of self-education, she settled at Bristol with her friend, Miss Mary Carpenter, and worked with her in ragged-schools and reformatories,—gaining much experience, and making many friends in all classes. Her active work among the poor went on till her lameness out her off from it ; and then she discovered, with her usual frank rejoicing, that she could turn her various experiences to literary account, and make money by writing for magazines and newspapers. She had already been for four years a frequent contributor to _Macmillan and Fraser, the Daily News, the Reader, the Economist and the Spectator when she came to London in 1807, and in the following year she began her seven-years' course of leader-writing for the Echo. Of her delight in this occupation she writes with a gusto that is in refreshing con- trast to the tone of depreciation in which too many people speak of the work they live by :— "Journalism is to my thinking a delightful profession, full of interest and. promise of never-ending usefulness. To be in touch with the most striking events of the whole world, and enjoy the privilege of giving your opinion on them to eighty thousand or one hundred thousand readers within a few hours ; this struck me, when I first recognised that such was my business as a leader writer, as something for which many prophets and preachers of old would have given a houseful of silver and gold. And I was to be paid for accepting it. It is one thing to be a "Vox Clarnantis in Deserto," and quite another to speak in Fleet Street, and without lifting up one's voice, to reach all at once, as many men as formed the population of ancient Athens, not to say that of Jerusalem."
It is her boast that during the whole seven years she never once failed (except when away for her yearly holiday) to be at the Echo office three days a week and write her article. Neither snow nor fog nor illness ever kept her at home. She wrote on all subjects except politics, on which her opinions were not those of the editor, but she chose by preference those which had an ethical or social interest—or those which made "an opening for a little fun." Then, as always with Miss Cobbe, writing and active philanthropy went hand-in-hand- and she remarks, as if it were quite a matter of course, that it became her duty to be continually inquiring into cases of misery and want that cropped up in the reports of coroners' inquests, so that she became at this time a constant visitor among the London poor. As her many friends remember with pleasure, she found time and spirits for a great deal of social enjoyment during the same years. A great surgeon had said that if she lived in South Kensington, and went to dinner-parties, she would be a victim to gout. But she records triumphantly :—" I lived in South Kensington for just twenty years, and went out, I should think, to some two thousand dinners, great and small, and I never had the gout at all, but on the contrary, by my own guidance, got rid of the tendency before I left London." Her description of these dinner-parties in the sixties, and of her enjoyment of them, is so entirely and delightfully characteristic of Miss Cobbe on the social side that we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting it :•■• "There were scarcely any teetotalers, men or women, at the time I speak of, in the circles to which I belonged ; and the butlers who went round incessantly with half-a. dozen kinds of wine and (after dinner) liqueurs, were not, as now, continually interrupted in their courses by No wine, thank you! Have you Apoilinaris or Seltzer ?" I never saw- any one the worse for the sherry and the milk-punch and the hock or chablis, and champagne and claret ; but certainly there was generally a little more gaiety of a well-bred sort towards the end of the long meals. My cousins kept a particularly good cook and good cellar, and their guests— especially some who hailed from the City—certainly enjoyed at their table other "feasts" besides those of reason. And so I must confess did I, in those days of good appetite after a long day's literary work ; and I sincerely pitied Dean Stanley, who had no sense of taste, and scarcely knew the flavour of anything which he put into his mouth. When the company was not quite up to his mark, the tedium must have been dreadful to him ; whereas in my case, I could always—provided the menu was good .--entertain myself satisfactorily with my plate and knife and fork."
The only thing that seems ever to have seriously detracted from Miss Cobbe's enjoyment of life, was her poignant
realisation of the cruelties practised upon animals in the mistaken interest of humanity. And it is pathetic to note
the diminution of vivacity in the narrative as the subject of vivisection comes to the fore. Her ardent and self-sacrificing championship of the victims of vivisection, is too well known for it to be necessary for us to enlarge upon the chapters she devotes to the painful subject. But readers who are too young to remember the revolting revelations which in 1863 first awakened general interest in the question, may find, in reading of them freshly in Miss Cobbe's autobiography, some excuse for unintentional injustice done in the heat of con- troversy to some of the vivisectors of to-day, by one who has been bearing the burden of the battle against scientific cruelty for a period of thirty years. For Miss Cobbe's own sake as well as for the sake of the cause she has so nobly served, we cannot but regret that she has thought fit to publish so many letters expressing the admiration of all sorts of people for her work. It is a policy that can hardly fail to give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme. Far more eloquent, and far truer to the spirit in which the work has been done, is the modestly apologetic account she gives of her attitude at different periods of her life to the sport of fishing. Her geniality and savoir-vivre, not seldom run over into a rather disconcerting
joviality, but here she strikes a note of sincere and delicate feeling, with which we are glad to conclude our notice of her book :—
" When I was a little child, living in a house where hunting, coursing, shooting, and fishing, were carried on by all the men and boys, I took such field-sports as part of the order of things, and learned with delight from my father to fish in our ponds on my own account. Somehow it came to pass that, when at sixteen my, mind went through that strange process which Evangelicals call 'Conversion,' among the first things which my freshly. awakened moral sense pointed out was,—that I must give up fishing !—I reflected that the poor fishes were happy in their way in their proper element ; that we did not in the least need, or indeed often use, them for food ; and that I must no longer take pleasure in giving pain to any creature of God. It was a little effort to me to relinquish this amusement in my very quiet, uneventful life; but as the good Quakers say, it was borne in on me' that I had to do it, and from that time I have never held a rod or line, though I freely admit that tingling scarcely comes under the head of cruelty at all, and is perfectly justifiable when the fish are wanted for food and are killed quickly. I used to stand sometimes, after I had ceased to fish, over one of the ponds in our park, and watch the bright creatures dart hither and thither, and say in my heart a little thanksgiving on their behalf, instead of trying to catch them."
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