Frances Power Cobbe

“ Let Reformed Judaism relight the old golden candlestick, and set it aloft, and it will give light unto all which are in the house,—not only the House of Israel, but in the House of Humanity. A glorious future may in God’s Providence await such purified, emancipated Judaism. It is true, it may not exhibit the special form of religion which one party or another among us altogether desires to see extended in the world. Some radical reformers who sympathize in its general scope would wish to find it stripping off altogether its Jewish character, and torn up from the root of Mosaism. ”

“ Obviously, in some of us the passion for Nature and natural beauty is so prominent that, if it be starved (as it must needs be in a great city) or only tantalized by the sight of pictures reminding us of woods and hills and fresh breezes when we are stifled and jostled in the crowded rooms of Burlington House or the Grosvenor Gallery, we miss so much out of life that nothing can make up for it, and no pleasures of the intellect in the company of clever people, or gratification of taste in the most luxurious home, are sufficient to banish the regret. ”

“ The distance between Walter Scott and Zola measures that between Art and Science in Fiction.
To many readers it may appear that the antagonism of Science to Art may be condoned in favor of her high claim to be the guide, not to Beauty, but to Truth. But is it indeed Truth, in the sense which we have hitherto given to that great and sacred word, at which Physical Science is now aiming? Can we think of Truth merely as a vast heap of Facts, piled up into an orderly pyramid of a Science, like one of Timur’s heaps of skulls? ”

“ A reformed, enlightened, world-wide creed, which a cultivated gentleman may frankly avow and defend in the salons of London, Paris, Berlin, or New York, and in the progress of which he may feel some enthusiasm,—a creed which will make him free to adopt from Christianity all that he recognizes in it of spiritually lofty and morally beautiful,—such a creed may have a future before it of which no end need be foreseen. ”

“ A moment’s reflection will surely enable the reader to corroborate the remark that we seldom think out the subject of a new book or article, or elaborate a political or philanthropic scheme, a family compact, or the menu of a large dinner, with so much precision and lucidity as when gazing with vacant respectfulness at a gentleman expatiating with elaborate stupidity on theology or science. The voice of the charmer as it rises and falls is almost as soothing as the sound of the waves on the shore, but not quite equally absorbing to the attention ”

“ We are quite enamoured, when we first turn our steps from the smoky city, with the trees and fields; and we enjoy indescribably our rides and drives and walks, the varied aspects of nature, and the beasts and birds wherewith we are surrounded. But one thing we have not bargained for, and that is—country Society. Of course we love our friends and relations in whose homes we are received with kindness and affection, whom we know to be the salt of the earth for goodness, and who love us enough to feel an interest even in our towniest gossip. ”

“ The real nursery of religion is one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy, beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other; and where the spectacle of Nature’s loveliness is forever suggesting the thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all the ground his love-tokens of flowers. ”

“ The critical spirit, which is the inevitable accompaniment of high erudition, is obviously a good way off from that ovine frame of mind which divines, in all ages, have extolled as the proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in a truer and better sense than that of the open-mouthed credulity so idly inculcated, it must be owned that, short of that really great knowledge of which Bacon spoke and which allies itself with the infinite wisdom of love and faith, there are few things more hurtful to a man than to be aware that he knows a great deal more than those about him. ”

“ And yet again, when some ardent lad has passed through school and college, foregoing all the sports of his age, and receiving prizes and honors, till he stands a first-class man of Oxford or Cambridge, and his father’s sacrifices and his mother’s yearnings and all his own gallant and self-denying labors seem on the point of reaping their reward, how often does it come to pass that with the close of the struggle come the reaction, the decline, the hasty journey abroad, the hoping against hope, and then—death! ”

“ It is not only the health of life’s noon and evening which is more or less compromised by study, but the morning hours of life’s glorious prime, hours such as never can come again on this side heaven, which are 152given to dull, dog’s-eared books and dreary “copies,” and sordid slates, instead of to cowslips and buttercups, the romp in the hay-field, and the flying of the white kite, which soars up into the deep dark blue and carries the young eyes after it where the unseen lark is singing and the child-angels are playing among the rolling clouds of summer. ”

“ Of course among the first recognized pleasures of the country is the constant intercourse with, or rather bathing in, Nature. We are up to the lips in the ocean of fresh air, grass, and trees. It is not one beautiful object or another which attracts us (as sometimes happens in town) , but, without being interrupted by thinking of them individually, they influence us en masse. Dame Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us with her own lullaby. ”

“ The light of Science is a “dry” one. She leaves no glamour, no tender mystery anywhere. Nor has she more pity than Nature for the weak who fall in the struggle for existence. There is, indeed, a scientific contempt quite sui generis for the “poor in spirit,” the simple, the devoutly believing,—in short, for all the humble and the weak,—which constitutes of the Scientific Spirit of the Age a kind of Neo-Paganism, the very antithesis of Christianity. ”

“ A man may feel the heart-ache in the country, and wander mourning by the solitary shore or amid the silent winter woods. But let him go, after receiving a piece of sad intelligence, into the busy London streets, and be obliged to pick his way amid the crowd; to pass by a score of brilliant shops, avoid being run over by an omnibus, give a penny to a streetsweeper, push through the children looking at Punch, close his ears to a German band, hail a hansom and drive to his office or his chambers,—and at the end of the hour how many thoughts will he have given to his sorrow? ”

“ By some such change as this, or, more probably, by the pressure of a hundred sources of change, it is probable, nay, it is certain, that the old form of country life (which I have been describing, perhaps, rather as it was a few years ago than it is now) will pass away and become a thing of memory. When that time arrives, I cannot but think that England and the world will lose a phase of human existence which, with all its lights and shadows, has been, perhaps, the most beautiful and perfect yet realized on earth. ”

“ Like my little nibbling prototype who served his feast ‘sur un tapis de Turquie,’ I like everything, down to the little card on which my menu is written, to be perfect about me. The less I am reminded by disagreeable sensations of my animal part, the more room is left for the exercise of my higher intellectual functions. The ascetic who lives on locusts and wild honey, and catches the locusts, has far less leisure to think about better things than the alderman who sits down every day to ten courses, served by a well-trained staff of London servants. ”

“ The adoption of the dogma of a Future Life has scarcely even yet, after some fifty generations, imprinted on the Jewish mind the full consciousness of
“That great world of light which lies
Behind all human destinies.” Jews have, it would appear, essentially the esprit positif. They are content to let the impenetrable veil hang between their eyes and the future world,—that veil which the Aryan soul strives impatiently, age after age, to tear away, or on which it throws a thousand phantasms from the magic-lanthorn of fancy. ”

“ Science appeals to the Intellect, Art to the Emotions; and we are so constituted that our Intellects and Emotions are like buckets in a well. When our Intellects are in the ascendant, our Emotions sink out of sight; when our Emotions rise to the surface, our busy Intellects subside into quiescence. It is only the idolatry of Science which could make intelligent men overlook the fact that she and Art resemble two leashed greyhounds pulling opposite ways, and never running together unless there be some game (shall we surmise an endowment of public money?) ”

“ After all, if we analyze the exquisite pleasure afforded us by brilliant and suggestive conversation, one of its largest elements will be found to be that it has quickened our thoughts from a heavy amble into a gallop. A really fine talk between half a dozen well-matched and thoroughly cultivated people, who discuss an interesting subject with their manifold wealth of allusions, arguments, and illustrations, is a sort of mental Oaks or Derbyday, wherein our brains are excited to their utmost speed, and we get over more ground than in weeks of solitary mooning meditation. ”

“ Yet notwithstanding all its splendid achievements, if it only foster our lower mental faculties while it paralyzes and atrophies the higher; if Reverence and Sympathy and Modesty dwindle in its shadow; if Art and Poetry shrink at its touch; if Morality be undermined and perverted by it; and if Religion perish at its approach as a flower vanishes before the frost,—then, I think, we must deny the truth of Sir James Paget’s assertion, that “nothing can advance human prosperity so much as science.” ”

“ As time goes by, and one after another of those who made youth blessed have dropped away, and we begin to count the years of those who remain, and watch gray hairs thickening on heads we remember golden, and talk of the hopes and ambitions of early days as things of the past,—things which might have been, but now, we know, will never be on earth,—when all this comes to pass, then the sense of the tragedy of life becomes too strong for us. ”

“ His admirations are adored, the objects of his sneers despised, and every opinion he enunciates is an oracle. And it is these professors and teachers, forsooth, whose opinions on ethics, theology, and politics it is not thought worth while to ascertain before installing them in their Chairs to become the guides of the young men and women who are the hope of the nation!
It does not require any direct, or even indirect, inculcation of opinion on the teacher’s part to do mischief. It is the contagion of his emotions which is to be feared, if those emotions be base or bad. ”

“ If a man have any ambition, here it may best be pursued. If he desire to contend for any truth or any justice, here is his proper battle-field. If he love pleasure, here are fifty enjoyments at his disposal for one which he can obtain in the country. The mere sense of forming part of this grand and complicated 183machine, whereof four millions of men and women work the wheels, makes my pulse beat faster, and gives me a sense as if I were marching to the sound of trumpets. Then the finish and completeness of London life is delightful to the thoroughly civilized mind. ”

“ The man has received the impulse of religion from that particular direction. It has come to him colored by the hues of his friend’s piety, and he accepts it, doctrines and all, as he finds it. The matter has been one of emotional contagion, not of critical argument on either side.
It is impossible to form the faintest estimate of the good—the highest kind of good—which a single devout soul may accomplish in a lifetime by spreading the holy contagion of the Love of God in widening circles around it. ”

“ And yet beneath our cowardice there is the longing that our little race should round itself once again to the old starting point; that where we spent our blessed childhood, and rested on our mother’s breast, and lisped our earliest prayers, there also we should lay down the burden of life, and repent its sins, and thank the Giver for its joys, and fall asleep,—to awaken, we hope, in the eternal Home. ”

“ As to the graver and more durable affections nourished in the old home,—the fond attachment of brothers and sisters, the reverence for the father, the love, purest and deepest of all earthly loves, of mother for child and child for mother,—there can be little doubt that their growth in the calm, sweet country life must be healthier and deeper rooted than it can well be elsewhere. ”