Mathilde Blind

“ Work is a fatiguing process, dreaded yet loved by fine and powerful natures, who frequently succumb to it. For if the artist does not fling himself into his work as unhesitatingly as Curtius did into the chasm at his feet, or as the soldier leaps into the breach, and if when there he does not toil with the energy of the miner beneath the earth, if, in short, he stays to consider difficulties instead of overcoming them like those lovers of fairyland who triumph over ever fresh difficulties to win their princesses, his work will remain unfinished and die still-born in the studio. ”

“ Amid that moving throng of men with their waving flags, of women and girls festively clad, bearing palm-branches and crowned with flowers, there went one, radiant and resolute, stepping out like a goddess of old, herself, in her immaculate strength and purity, the living realisation of the liberty they adored. We know her, walking there by the side of the austere Roland, surrounded by a small group friends; but the Revolution knew her not as yet, the highest of its heroic hearts. ”

“ It was the right book at the right time, the serene proclamation of law as he unrolled the history of humanity before me from its earliest germs—not the perplexed history of facts which vexes the soul with the confused din and uproar of purposeless flux and reflux—but the eternal underlying history which holds on its calm and even course, a history whose serenity and solemnity are like the light of stars! For wherever we do not understand there is darkness, sorrow, wrong; but wherever we do understand there is light, triumph, and unity. ”

“ For the foulest fancies bred
In a fasting hermit's head,
Such as cast a sickly blight
On all shapes of life and light.
Yea, panting and pursued and stung and driven,
The soul of Man flies on in deep distress,
As once across the world's harsh wilderness
Latona fled, chased by the Queen of heaven;
Flying across the homeless Universe
From the inveterate stroke of Juno's curse;
On whom even mother earth closed all her portals,
Refusing shelter in her cooing bowers,
Or rest upon her velvet couch of flowers,
To the most weary of all weary mortals. ”

“ ON A FORSAKEN LARK'S NEST.
Lo, where left 'mid the sheaves, cut down by the iron-fanged reaper,
Eating its way as it clangs fast through the wavering wheat,
Lies the nest of a lark, whose little brown eggs could not keep her
As she, affrighted and scared, fled from the harvester's feet.
Ah, what a heartful of song that now will never awaken,
Closely packed in the shell, awaited love's fostering,
That should have quickened to life what, now a-cold and forsaken,
Never, enamoured of light, will meet the dawn on the wing. ”

“ Never had Bastien-Lepage created a figure more poetically true than this Lorraine shepherdess, so pure, so human, so profoundly absorbed in her heroic ecstasy.
The rapid and brilliant success of the young master had ruffled the amour propre of many; they made him pay for these precocious smiles of glory by undervaluing his new work. He had hoped that the medal of honour would be given to his Jeanne d’Arc; this distinction was given to an artist of talent, but whose work had neither the originality, nor the qualities of execution, nor the importance of Bastien’s picture. ”

“ And while a young girl on the Quai de l'Horloge felt the deep stirrings of a woman's heart for a people whose suffering condition she had not apprehended as yet, another girl—also in her first bewitching bloom—ascended the throne of France, and was hailed by Burke as "just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy." ”

“ When you have once tasted life so finely, when fact has come to you sifted from all its baser constituents, when the flowers of passion have been presented to you tied in a nosegay by the supersensitive hands of a Shelley or a Heine, reality is apt to strike you as crude and commonplace, if not actually to inspire you with a sense of repulsion. In the daily round of life you will sicken with a nostalgia for that ideal country to which it is difficult to return when childhood is over. ”

“ The childhood of Tom and Maggie Tulliver is inextricably blended with this swift river, the traditions of which have been to them as fairy tales; its haunting presence is more or less with them throughout their chequered existence; and when pride and passion, when shame and sorrow have divided the brother and sister, pursued as by some tragic fate, the Floss seems to rise in sympathy, and submerges them in its mighty waters to unite them once more "in an embrace never to be parted." ”

“ Their lives of old as restlessly they fly
Across the wildernesses of the sky.
When the wild hunt is done, shall they not rest
Their heads upon some swan-white maiden's breast,
And quaff their honeyed mead with godlike zest
In golden-gated Halls whence they may see
The earth and marvellous secrets of the Sea
Whereon the clouds will lie with grey wings furled,
And in whose depths, voluminously curled,
The serpent looms whose girth engirds the world?
Far, far above now in supernal power
Those spirits rule the sunshine and the shower!
How shall he win their favour ”

“ Still, while the blasts of heaven around us hooted,
To cleave to thee and weather every shock.
I would I were the rill, and thou the river;
So might I, leaping from some headlong steep,
With all my waters lost in thine for ever,
Be hurried onwards to the unfathomed deep.
I would—what would I not? O foolish dreaming!
My words are but as leaves by autumn shed,
That, in the faded moonlight idly gleaming,
Drop on the grave where all our love lies dead. ”

“ The young girl, her short plaits falling over her shoulders, her neck bent, the form of her back, so young, so delicate, is an exquisite figure; the face of the young harvester, so energetic, so ingenuously in love, is charming in expression; the treatment of the hands, the bust, the dress, is masterly. There is in this picture a true and manly poetry, which is strengthening and refreshing, like the odour of ripe corn. ”

“ The grim towers of the Bastile, the impassable moat of the Bastile, the dumb, dull grip of the walls of the Bastile—this was the dreaded object which cast its deadly shadow on the muzzled thought of France! This was the living tomb from which they shrank back aghast, and which made so many of them, as soon as they touched English soil, breathe our heavy, fog-laden, smoke-begrimed atmosphere as if it were the very elixir of life. ”

“ There are faces which nature charges with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the simple human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations; eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes, perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing, just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it. ”

“ The perilous flood with calm unswerving hands,
The elements sustain; cleave thou the waves.
THE DEAD.
The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
They have forged our chains of being for good or ill
And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
Our perishable bodies are the mould
In which their strong imperishable will—
Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil—
Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.
Vibrations infinite of life in death,
As a star's travelling light survives its star! ”

“ I perish of cold here;" and, choked with emotion,
Gave a sob: at the low sob a shower of stars
Broke shuddering from heaven, pale flaming, and fell
Where the mid-city roared as with rumours of wars.
"Be these God's tears?" I cried, as my tears 'gan to well.
"Ah, Love, I have sought thee in temples and towers,
In shrines where men pray, and in marts where they sell;
"In tapestried chambers made tropic with flowers,
Where amber-haired women, soft breathing of spice,
Lay languidly lapped in the gold-dropping showers
"Which gladdened and maddened their amorous eyes. ”

“ Ascends to heaven as the flame leaps and falters;
Where, like a king above the Cloud control,
God sits enthroned and rules Man's subject soul.
Yet grievous here below
And manifold Man's woe;
Though he can stay the flood and bind the waters,
His hand he shall not stay
That bids him sack and slay
And turn the waving fields to fields of slaughters;
And, as he reaps War's harvest grim and gory.
Commits a thousand crimes and calls it glory. ”

“ All her life she had loved this people, even with the love of a mother yearning for her firstborn. All her life she had been ready to shed her blood for it, in the conviction that a new generation would arise which should live to enjoy the freedom for which she was content to perish. That conviction made her passage to the scaffold a triumphal path, and invested her, as she stood in the death cart, with a splendour as of victory. ”

“ The mournfulness of the misty avenue is like a feeling in the air. A mood of nature has been caught which corresponds to a mood of the human mind. The sense of desolation, decay, and impending death seems to breathe from the canvas, as from some actual presence, which though unseen, is none the less there. I cannot help thinking that the artist’s own state must, by some subtle process, have literally passed into her canvas. How intensely Marie Bashkirtseff had identified herself with this picture is shown by Julian’s remark on meeting her just after she had painted it. ”

“ In the never-to-be-forgotten divine babe, we have at once the intensest realism of presentation with the highest idealism of conception: the attitude is at once grand, easy and natural; the face is that of a child, but the child is divine: in those eyes and in that brow there is an indefinable something which, greater than the expression of the angels, grander than that of pope or saint, is to all who see it a perfect truth; we feel that humanity in its highest conceivable form is before us, and that to transcend such a form would be to lose sight of the human nature there represented. ”

“ Worn as thou art, thou shalt bloom as my bride:
"Bloom as the flower of the World for the lover
Whom thou hast found in a lost little Child."
And as he kissed my lips over and over—
Child now, or Man, was it who thus beguiled?—
Even as I looked on him, Love, waxing slowly,
Grew as a little cloud, floating enisled,
Which spreads out aloft in the blue sky till solely
It fills the deep ether tremendous in height,
With far-flashing snow-peaks and pinnacles wholly
Invisible, vanishing light within light. ”

“ Without these hurtling shocks of man's estate?
TO MEMORY.
Oh in this dearth and winter of the soul,
When even Hope, still wont to soar and sing,
Droopeth, a starveling bird whose downy wing
Stiffens ere dead through the dank drift it fall—
Yea, ere Hope perish utterly, I call
On thee, fond Memory, that thou haste and bring
One leaf, one blossom from that far-off spring
When love's auroral light lay over all. ”

“ Take only the painters of the realistic modern French school—can we not tell at a glance, in going through the Louvre, whether it is nature according to Corot, to Rousseau, or to Millet that we are looking at? For whether the realists like it or no, the world will reflect itself in their brains according to the laws of their peculiar individuality, and the preciousness of all art expression seems precisely to consist in this rare flavour which the artist’s self impresses on nature outside himself. ”

“ Whence its authority—by whom elected—none could say; but, by the occult law of revolutions, the leadership suddenly passed from the Assembly into its hands. One man at that moment was the soul of the Commune, the man who, if any one, had made the 10th of August: the man who could suffer thousands to be massacred, yet weep like a woman over the death of one he loved: the man who summed up his political practice in that famous my, "We must dare, and again dare, and without end dare!" ”

“ Left almost a beggar at his master's death, without a single human tie, all he can get for years of faithful service is a tumble-down, forsaken old inn, where he manages to keep body and soul together in a dismantled room that but partly shelters him from the inclemency of the weather. Hopeless, aimless, loveless, he grows old before his time, and the passing of the days affects him hardly more than it does a stone. But one evening, as he is sitting in front of a scanty fire repeating the Lord's Prayer, the cry as of a little child startles him from his devotion. ”

“ His blue eyes flashed wildly through tears as they fell.
Strange eyes full of horror, yet fuller of heaven,
Like eyes that from heaven have looked upon hell.
The eyes of an angel whose depths show where, burning
And lost in the pit, toss the angels that fell.
"Ah," wailed he in tones full of agonized yearning,
Like the plaintive lament of a sickening dove
On a surf-beaten shore, whence it sees past returning
The wings of the wild flock fast fading above,
As they melt on the sky-line like foam-flakes in motion:
So sadly he wailed, "I am Love! I am Love! ”

“ Nothing but the story of a humble weaver belonging to a small dissenting community which assembled in Lantern Yard, somewhere in the back streets of a manufacturing town; of a faithless love and a false friend, and the loss of trust in all things human or divine. Nothing but the story of a lone, bewildered man, shut out from his kind, concentrating every baulked passion into one—the all-engrossing passion for gold. ”

“ Every picture may be said to appeal to the spectator from two sides or points of view—the literary and the æsthetic.
A picture may tell its story to perfection—may point a moral and all the rest of it, and so fulfil the purpose of its author—and still, or, as some extreme persons would say, therefore—may be bad art, may indeed be not worthy to rank as art at all. Such pictures are frequently seen. And again, a picture may, by raising and defining to some inner sense emotions dimly felt by us before nature, leave us with a fuller sense of beauty, a feeling of something revealed to us. ”

“ Was it the premeditated act of the Commune? Had it been engendered in the monstrous imagination of Marat? Or had Danton—with his famous, "Let my name be branded and my memory perish, if only France be free!"—aimed the first blow? Or, again, did the Paris mob of its own accord turn upon its prisoners, vowing that not a Royalist should survive to triumph, if the enemy entered its walls? Each successive historian of the French Revolution, from Michelet to Lamartine and Louis Blanc, has assigned the hideous responsibility of the September massacres to different sets of men. ”

“ Came like a love-song, as, with arms entwining,
Our hearts were mixed in unison supreme.
The wind lay spell-bound in each pillared pine,
The tasselled larches had no sound or motion,
As my whole life was sinking into thine—
Sinking into a deep, unfathomed ocean
Of infinite love—uncircumscribed, divine.
Night held her breath, it seemed, with all her stars:
Eternal eyes that watched in mute compassion
Our little lives o'erleap their mortal bars,
Fused in the fulness of immortal passion,
A passion as immortal as the stars. ”

“ Now it is a Lucile, fair young wife of Desmoulins, who glides round the prison like his shadow, and, like his shadow, too, follows uncomplainingly to the guillotine.
That whole generation, while the social fabric was yielding and cracking beneath its feet, and while death encompassed it, was consumed by the thirst for life. Into its brief existence it crammed centuries of thought, action, suffering. It was ready to shatter all obstacles that hindered the current of its passions. ”

“ But Maggie has more actual affinity with poets and artists than with saints and martyrs. Her soul thrills like a finely-touched instrument to the beauty of the world around her, and though she doubts whether there may not even be a sinfulness in the indulgence of this enjoyment, yet the summer flowers and the summer sunshine put her scruples to flight. ”

“ As we might expect, therefore, she was especially successful as a portrait painter, for she has a knack of catching her sitter’s likeness with the bloom of nature yet fresh upon it. She seems to me equally good in her men and women and children, the contrast of many of her heads showing the range and variety of her power. Her portraits are noticeable for that absence of family likeness which is often seen even in the works of great painters, as if the artist had some ideal head before his mind’s eye to which he was unconsciously trying to assimilate the faces of his models. ”

“ Hope lies aghast on the ruinous floor,
The halls that were thronged once with star-browed immortals,
"With gods statue-still o'er the world-whirr and roar,
With fauns of the forest and nymphs of the river,
Are cleft as if lightning had struck to their core.
"The luminous ceilings, where soaring for ever
Dim hosts of plumed angels smoked up to the sky,
With God-litten faces that yearned to the giver
"As vapours of morning the sun draws on high,
Now ravaged with rain hear the hollow winds whistle
Through rifts in the rafters which echo their cry. ”

“ Insufficiently nourished, poorly clad, and solitary, she neither lost her courage, nor her gaiety, and, curled up on a high school desk to look out over the snow-covered roofs of Paris, she, from her lofty perch, could see the people moving like midges through the white, narrow thoroughfares, or at times would seem very near to the beatified calm when the great, still, winter moon flooded her little garret with a solemn splendour. ”

“ The whole scene is bathed in daylight and fresh air: with no great stretch of fancy one can see the corn moving, and hear the singing of the birds. One is filled with a sense of the sweetness of nature and the beauty of the open fields. And the picture is so simple—no effort in design, no artifice apparent—it impresses as a pure piece of nature.
This love of nature and resolute determination not to depart from the strict literal truth as he saw it, marks all the work of Bastien-Lepage. As far as it was possible for an artist nowadays, he appears to have been uninfluenced by the old masters. ”

“ Here, on this circumscribed arena, shaken by such fierce debates, all members turning towards her—Madame Roland might distinguish amid a confused mass of men the wintry face of Robespierre, Marat, the Angel of Death St. Just, leonine Danton, Condorcet, Brissot, the waspish Guadet, and, above all the others, brave, manly-hearted Buzot, who thrilled at the sight of her, as she entered with that proud, erect bearing of hers, such mingled dignity and sweetness in her expression that the Convention broke into thunders of applause. ”