MISS COBBE'S NEW VOLUME OF ESSAYS.*
IT is impossible to read Miss Cobbe's essays and not to feel that they are written by a woman of singularly strong, fresh, and powerful impressions, brimming over with intellectual enthusiasm, but whose head is too clear and cultivation too wide to allow her fervent philanthropy to run wild. It is clear throughout that her head and her heart, both of large dimensions, are en- gaged in a rivalry and contest very serious, though friendly. But it is equally clear that the head remains on the whole sufficiently in the ascendent, and the result is a volume exceed- ingly suggestive in a variety of aspects. In the first place, it is manifest that Miss Cobbe has not feared to tread wherever a man's intellect may go. We have theological essays, philoso- phical essays, essays which if not exactly historical, involve a large atuount of subtle historical generalization. There is a powerful essay on poor laws, written with the insight of a woman and the verve of M. About. There is an essay on the morals of literature, or, if you please, the whole duty of the critic. And lastly, besides other essays, there is an essay on "Hell."
Well, that is a suggestive list of a woman's intellectual travels. And it suggests or may suggest to many a timid literary conser- vative, the men on whom a blue stocking acts like a red stocking on bulls, the not quite unnatural query, whether after such a manifold journey Miss Cobbe has not returned to her fellow- creatures exceedingly blue. No, certainly not. Miss Cobbe has not returned blue at all, except in so far as cultivation of any kind wears the colour which, in Mr. Disraeli's vocabulary, is defined the "empyrean" (though that, by the bye, suggests another colour). It is true that Miss Cobbe every now and then shows how dearly she loves a bit of downright, pointed, sweeping, manly eloquence, which takes your breath away as coming from a lady, one evidently so kind-hearted too. But that is only very much as a high-spirited girl loves a good gallop on a thorough-bred mare, or as Kate Coventry loved to take a five-barred gate with "cousin John." Miss Cobbe knows as well as any one what may become a woman. There is, however, another 4uery which crops up, and that is, whereas ethical "cousin Johns" are decidedly in a male minority, and the male ma- jority of jog-trot-going, unethical, and unmsthetical men would think the world not worth living in if they had to follow "cousin Kate" or Miss Cobbe over an elaborate series of ethical jumps, whether if women at large were like Miss Cobbe, ordinary men would not lose all the enjoyment,—in other words, all the ease, comfort, and relaxation which they look for in woman's society— men looking to women to gild their daily life in all its minor de- tails, and not to fatigue them when they want peace and happi- ness with the remorseless clanking of metaphysical fire-irons, spits, racks, and other engines of metaphysical cookery and intel- lectual torment. The answer to this is, that all women are not like Miss Cobbe, any more than all men are like Mr. Mill. If all men were like Mr. Mill, it would no doubt be extremely fortunate and very agreeable to them if all women were like Miss Cobbe. But the practical question really is, whether the sort of views entertained by Miss Cobbe, and a familiarity with the sort of subjects in which she delights, would make ordinary women who do not possess her particular genius and talents as an authoress agreeable companions to ordinary men? To this very practical question we think no man who is not too prejudiced to form an im- partial opinion could help giving an answer in the affirmative. A woman who can talk with sense and grace, taking a broad view, or at all events able to follow a broad discussion, of the way in which a poor law must affect the poor as a class can hardly be a less agree- able companion than a woman who can only count the blankets she has given, and potter about the pints of soup her housekeeper may send out to a few village paupers in the course of the week. Or, if we turn to religious questions, a woman who can enter into the different views taken by different nations in different ages of the immortality of the soul, is quite certain to be vastly more agreeable to any ordinary educated man than one who barely knows the catechism of her own creed, whose tiny and,stereotyped religion is a diminished and superficial photograph of the particular preacher under whom she sits, and who glares with cow-like eyes upon any sentiment which does not exactly square with the accustomed routine of the intellectual cut de sac in which her religious life is spent. A contemporary lately drew a very subtle, and to our mind most accurate, picture of the difference between Mr. Gladatone's variety of thought and the limitation of thought precious to the school, rapidly waning, which Mr. Gathorne
* Studies New and OW e! Ethical and Social Subjects, By Pro:lees Power Cobbe. London : Trubner,
Hardy so violently represents. That is a difference which exactly coincides with the difference between the large, warm-hearted, far-seeing, devoted, yet free and plastic thought of Miss Cobbe's class and school of female intelligence, and the narrow, stringent, ignorant, harshly defined, unbending, vehemently uncharitable sectarianism of a considerable propor- tion of the English orthodox womanhood in the present day. If the tree is to be judged by the fruits, if that is the best educa- tion for women which makes them most loving and loveable, which gives them not the exclusiveness of orthodoxy, but the inclusive- ness of Christ, then we say read this volume of essays, and whether you agree or not with all the views therein in detail, say truly whether you do not feel that you are living as you read in a broad, human, and humane atmosphere, in a warm and wholesome intellectual sunshine, whether you had not rather live by the side of such thoughts, even If you do not agree with them, than by the side of a sharp easterly wind of a barren orthodoxy, which falls upon you as a moral paralysis.
Having said this, we must add, that however suggestive Miss Cobbe's essays may be, they do not always suggest agreement, at least on our part. We cannot, for instance, entirely agree with her views in her article on " The Morals of Literature." Miss Cobbe starts from the principle that "all literature should be guided by truth," and literary truth, again, she defines to be the rendering of "the just expression of our impression." This definition enables her to distinguish between literary art and literary photo- graphy. She then applies this canon, first to biography, and concludes that a biographer is bound to give "a just expression of his impression" concerning the character which he undertakes to describe. So far this is plain sailing. Then comes the question, how far and how far not to invade the privacy of the character described,—and here the hand of the authoress, as it seems to us, begins to falter a little, and to vacillate between that which is useful unto science and that which is useful unto edifica- tion. According to our view, true science and true edification must ultimately coincide. But pending that ultimate coincidence of science and edification, there may very well be intermediate stages, in which they neither coincide nor harmonize. To which side ought we to incline the balance ? To the side of edification, Miss Cobbe seems to say. To the side of science, as leading to higher edification, the present reviewer would say.
It is evident, however, that the disquisition about biography is only introductory to that part of the essay in which the real heart and soul of the authoress overflow, and that is the part in which she denounces that class of " fiction " whose .aim is to "malign human nature."
"Reading certain classes of literature, very popular in England just now, it would seem as if nobody were offended at pictures of life which would make us all a set of crawling worms unfit to be suffered to exist, much less to be made subjects of a work of wit. If men be all mean and interested and worldly-minded, then it is no more proper to make them subjects of fiction than wasps, toads, and maggots. It is a marvellous thing how the admiration for the mere savoir faire of the clever writer, painter, sculptor, blinds men to the question whether their art is exercised on a fitting or an unfitting subject. The more people become amateurs of style, cognoscenti, or even practical artists themselves, so much greater seems the danger of their forgetting the whole scope and meaning of art in their criticism of the more or less successful way in which the effort is made to render any meaning whatever."
If we turn to the next article on "The Hierarchy in Art," we find what we might already have guessed, that the authoress looks upon beauty as the ultimate end and aim of art. No doubt beauty is the subject-matter of art. It is not necessarily the material of art. Artistic beauty, beauty in the art, is absolutely distinct from beauty in the sense in which the authoress quite unconsciously uses it, namely, of loveableness in the material upon which the art is expended. Milton's art in the description of Lucifer is beautiful art, as beautiful as the art applied to the description of the archangel Michael. is the matter equally " beautiful" in both cases ? Surely, if hatred, legitimate hatred, be a part of human nature (cultivated human nature), hatred of the mean, the base, the grovelling, the ignoble, the cowardly, the false, then the conception of the false, the cowardly, the ignoble, the grovelling, the base, and meau, is equally legitimate, and that conception, if it rises into a dramatic form, becomes art, whether it is expressed or not. Michael Angelo's conception of Moses was art, art unborn, but art before he cut that conception out in stone. A simple flash of thought, a sudden illumination which gleams and disappears, may be the perfection of art, though lost for ever. One of the saddest trials which many literary men have to endure, is the consciousness that the little they have caught and fixed is but a trifling part of what they have suddenly seen and lost, probably never to see again. If, then, art is art still, though unexpressed, if hatred has an art as well as love, we cannot see that the expression of that side of art de- serves Miss Cobbe's vehement repudiation. Without a delinea- tion of the hateful, we should lose one great instrument for express- ing the true laws of human nature. We do not say that all subjects are equally adapted to the edification of all minds. Milk, and not hyssop, is food for infants.
With much that Miss Cobbe says regarding the duty of critics we heartily agree. But it should never be lost sight of that it is almost impossible to criticize in a spirit of absolute neutrality without giving offence. If Miss Cobbe will apply her canon of giving the "just expression of her impression" concerning the ninety-nine out of every hundred books that come out every year, she will find that "the just expression of her impression," though it may seem exceedingly just to competent and impartial judges, will appear exquisitely unjust to the particular writers of those ninety-nine books. A large part of the criticism of the day necessarily consists in tasting. A tea-taster or a wine-taster is not required to eat or drink all he tastes. His criticism need be none the less sound. Of course every particular author looks upon the critic in his mind's eye very much as infallibility looks upon the heretic, and tells him he must worship first in order to judge correctly after. But the critic who has learnt his profession, and it is useless to talk of those who have not, may fairly plead the answer of the painter who asked three hundred crowns for a picture painted in three days, and when the purchaser remon- strated, drily reminded him that he had been thirty years learn- ing how to paint such a picture in three days. Putting favour and malice aside, for on this head we agree with every word Miss Cobbe says, it is only the simple truth to say of far the largest class of books which annually appear, that a genuine critic knows as much about them for all honest critical purposes after looking through them for an hour, as if he had read them on his knees or in any other reverential attitude for a month. No doubt if he went through the latter process he might find a great many more thoughts to express concerning them. But they would pro- bably add little to the writer's sense of the critic's justice, however they might enhance the critic's originality in the eyes of the general reader. Of course critics make mistakes, like all other professional men, but long use and familiarity in their case contribute to bring about much the same results, both in the direction of success and .in the direction of failure, as in all other cases.
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