Mathilde Blind

“ Nor when my shuddering hands were doomed to close
⁠The unshrinking eyelids of the stony dead;—
⁠Not then I missed my God, not then—but said:
"Let me not burden God with all men's woes!"
But when resurgent from the womb of night
⁠Spring's Oriflamme of flowers waves from the Sod;
⁠When peak on flashing Alpine peak is trod
By sunbeams on their missionary flight;
When heaven-kissed Earth laughs, garmented in light;
⁠That is the hour in which I miss my God.
HEART'S-EASE. ”

“ The relief from the arduous task of Madame Roland's biography, and the generally desultory character of her occupations for some time, left her open to new impressions, and she suddenly felt herself nerved to grapple with a theme which had at various periods dimly floated before her, the celebration in verse of the theory of Evolution. A grand subject indeed! and truly worthy of an inspired pen, rebuking the little faith of Coleridge when he deemed all subjects for epic exhausted saving the Fall of Jerusalem. ”

“ Having once recognised Mathilde as a woman of genius, his faith in her was undoubting; though ready and able to amend minutiæ, he would have been incapable of assuming a negative attitude, and Mathilde was sure of finding in him the encouragement needed to combat her frequent accesses of self- distrust. His was, moreover, a nature of great depth as well as simplicity. No man was more given to enunciate, in a quiet, homely way, maxims of wisdom so profound and true that they sometimes seemed to have been fetched up from the depths below "the brief fathom-line of thought or sense." ”

“ 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. ”

“ She had quitted Baden too late to escape the harsh South German intonation, which told heavily against her. And, in truth, her eloquence, though striking, was not the kind of eloquence that lends itself to a set speech. She shone principally in conversation, her brilliant things were sparks struck out from the collision of mind with mind. Always fluent and animated, never disposed to engross conversation unduly, she was admirable whether in a téte—téte or as the centre of a group of congenial spirits. ”

“ Like all objects belonging to the gods, the balance is magic. Truth squats upon one of the scales; Thoth places the heart upon the other, and, alwaj's merciful, bears upon the side of Truth, that judgment may be favourably inclined. ”

“ The soul first advanced to the foot of the throne, carrying on its outstretched hands the image of its heart or of its eyes, agents and accomplices of its vices and virtues. It humbly 'smelt the earth,' then arose, and with uplifted hands recited its profession of faith. ”

“ Excess of truthfulness and excess of earnestness, however, are not failings to which humanity is so prone as to necessitate the discouragement of them with any great severity. Mathilde Blind would have been more popular if she had been less ardent and more conciliating; she would have been a more accomplished writer if the passion for essential truth had not made her unduly indifferent to artistic finish; but after every allowance has been made her poetry remains noble in execution as in aspiration, and her character was even more noble than her poetry. ”

“ Perhaps the re-publication of Mathilde Blind's poems is less fitly described as a monument to the authoress than as a reviviscence of the authoress herself. They are, indeed, far from expressing the entire force and depth of her nature; but they are its faithful reflection. Nothing was more characteristic of her than her absolute truthfulness; she might take refuge in reserve, but she could not speak without manifesting her real mind. In her poetical works she has bequeathed an image of the strong and weak points of her temperament and intellect. ”

“ If I do not mistake, he is of a positive, practical, iron nature, inwhich reason preponderates, and possesses a kind of frozen enthusiasm, which is the most dangerous of all. There is something masterful in his full dark eyes, and in many small particulars they are like those of a man accustomed to quell wild animals with his glance—totally different from the mild dignity which lies in Garibaldi's eyes."
From the age of about five-and-twenty onwards the question of raising the status of women occupied a large share in Mathilde's thoughts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Soon afterwards, however, Mathilde went to Germany and Switzerland, and I lost sight of her for some years; and then came her long stay in Manchester with Madox Brown's family. In her later life I often met her again, but she was then known and admired by so large a circle of friends that our subsequent meetings as women can tell nothing new. It is in her early girlhood and young womanhood that she stands out, a vivid memory to me for all time. ”

“ That lit our life when life was very fair,
And leaps our heart towards eyes and mouth and hair;
Oblivious of the undying love grown cold,
Or body sheeted in the churchyard mould.
We stretch out yearning hands and grasp—the air. ”

“ It was natural that with these feelings she should be especially attracted by those female writers who have shown that in certain fields woman can rival man. George Eliot she admired enthusiastically, George Sand more temperately, but few books of the age impressed her so powerfully as Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh." She there found the confirmation of her own thoughts on "soulless, unspiritual education, where everything is nipped in the bud and crushed to nothingness," and "the first revelation of the world through poetry." ”

“ Of all her longer poems it is the most powerful, the most original, and the most artistically wrought, without a line too much or too little. The striking theme is derived from an ecclesiastical legend holding a place in hagiological literature akin to that which, in the opinion of some, the Book of Job occupies in the Hebrew Canon—the resurrection of a saint to intimate that the faith in which he died is not true. Mathilde's conception of early Christianity on its strongest side displays deep insight as well as a truly catholic spirit, and gained her an approving letter from a Bishop. ”

“ Where, mid coy buds and winking flowers around.
⁠She blushed a rarer rose than roses can,
⁠To greet her Will—even Him, fair Avon's Swan—
Whose name has turned this plot to holy ground?
To these dear walls, once dear to Shakespeare's eyes,
⁠Time's Vandal hand itself has done no wrong;
⁠This nestling lattice opened to his song.
When, with the lark, he bade his love arise
In words whose strong enchantment never dies—
⁠Old as these flowers, and, like them, ever young.
II.— ANNE HATHAWAY.
His Eve of Women! ”

“ With patience infinite and stubborn strain.
Strive as thou mayest, spare neither time nor pain.
⁠To screen thy burden from all chance of ill;
⁠Push, push, with all a beetle's force of will,
Thy ball, alas! rolls ever down again. ”

“ You need experience to unravel it. Religion deals with the home-truths of morality in a much simpler way, besides giving them a sanction which puts them beyond the reach of appeal. In making the love of God the basis of man's relation to man it brings home to the humblest the immutability of law.
"In a certain sense I had turned Christian for a time. I did not trouble my head about the evidences of Christianity. I put aside all troublesome inquiries about the possibility of reconciling its tenets with the known order of the universe. ”

“ The Alps, aglow like mountains of roses round a heavenly Jerusalem, receding range beyond range into airier infinitudes of light, a vision like the last part of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony turned into visible form and beckoning something deep down usually ignored or apparently non-existent in some depth of being below an habitual consciousness—something latent within leaping up, irresistibly yearning to that glorified region as if they two belonged to each other from everlasting to everlasting. ”

“ Mathilde in 1830 would have felt exactly as Mazzini still felt in 1860. Though not placing Byron on the pedestal accorded to him by his English contemporaries and Continental imitators, Mathilde did not lack enthusiasm for the poet whose letters she was afterwards to edit; she had read "Childe Harold" eight times, and almost knew it by heart. On matters more immediately affecting her own personality Mazzini was the same helpful and inspiring teacher to Mathilde as he was to all within the range of his influence. ”

“ Mathilde quickly found inquiry synonymous with martyrdom, and, hard as the saying seems, it is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise. The inquiries, which, though no doubt they might with advantage have been deferred to a later period of her career, were merely representatives of a phase through which every thinking young person had passed, was passing, or would pass, produced results comparable in a small way with Shelley's expulsion from the University of Oxford. ”

“ Those who knew her only in later life can, nevertheless, easily realise the charm and at the same time the singularity which must have attached to her childhood. Lovely with a rare loveliness she must have been, but there is a difficulty in conceiving her with the tastes and pursuits of ordinary girlhood. ”

“ Our panting hearts beneath their burdens swoon
To thee, O star-eyed comforter, we creep,
Earth's ill-used step-children to thee make moan.
As hiding in thy dark skirts' ample sweep;
—Poor debtors whose brief life is not their own ”

“ All Germany was speedily in a blaze, and nowhere did a fiercer agitation prevail than in the Grand Duchy of Baden, to which Mathilde Blind belonged by birth. Here the movement assumed a republican complexion, unhke the more general feeling of Germans that new life might yet be infused into the old forms, Mr. Karl Blind, who, although a young man, was already well known as an ardent republican, and the subject of prosecutions for offences of the press, ending in acquittals, threw himself with ardour into the revolutionary movement. ”

“ You will always compare ordinary folk with those ideal types which are the final results of the finest selection by the finest minds which is the secret of art.
"Yet art, with the exception of the noble Greek drama, is not a good preparation for life. ”

“ It seems unlikely that she would have attained to distinguished excellence in art or literature, unless possibly as a critic. Fine as is her description of Gambetta's funeral, the faculty of picturesque word-painting is not rare. But her passionate eagerness for fame, and other remarkable mental traits, made her a psychological, and, it must be added, a pathological, study of extreme interest. Mathilde resolved that the most distinguished Continental voice of the hour should be heard in England. ”

“ In 1871, Mathilde, while maintaining affectionate relations with her family, took a home for herself, and from this time it is less easy to trace the continuous story of her life. She rarely remained long in one place, for even if she conceived no distaste to her quarters impulse was continually calling her away to rural beauty in England, or romantic" scenery in Scotland, or Switzerland, or Italy. ”

“ Neither Italy nor Egypt, however, afforded Mathilde more pleasure than the tranquil, rural beauty of the English midland counties. Her work on George Eliot had taken her to Warwickshire some years before; and Shakespeare associations now drew her to Stratford-on-Avon, which proved a perfect source of inspiration to her, many of the most beautiful poems of her later years dating from her visit. Another attraction appears to have been the neighbourhood of Dr. and Mrs. Philpot, who had a temporary residence at Stratford, and were among the best and kindest friends of her closing years. ”

“ The interval, so far as devoted to literature, was mainly occupied by two prose works, undertaken con amore, but which cost the authoress an amount of labour disproportionate to their extent. It was a passion with her to celebrate illustrious women, which the publication of the "Eminent Women Series," edited by her friend, Mr. J. H. Ingram, enabled her to gratify. For this she wrote the lives of George Eliot and Madame Roland, with abundant enthusiasm, but not without effort. ”

“ Moncure Conway; not possessing enough business habits and organising talent to be of any service upon a committee, while her public addresses transcended the ordinary range of thought. Though she could not avoid being professedly an advocate of female franchise, she in reality only cared for it inasmuch as the concession would have removed what she regarded as a stigma, the apparent consecration by law of the principle of woman's inferiority to man. ”

“ He also said that he wished to speak of Poland—that one ought not to let Poland die—for she gave an example that all peoples ought to imitate; everything ought to be done to succour Poland; she alone threw herself against tyrants, she did not cry for help like other peoples, not for money nor for arms; if she had no sword she took an axe ”

“ Mazzini said on one occasion: "All that I have achieved in my life has only succeeded through perseverance." His influence on Mathilde Blind was shown by his inducing her to undertake a task of all others most repugnant to her nature, that of sturdy begging for patriotic objects. No one who knew her will doubt that it would have been easier for her to have herself contributed a pound than to have asked another person for a penny ”

“ I pace along the darkening wintry sea.
Now romid the yule-log and the glittering tree
Twinklmg with festive tapers, eyes as bright
Sparkle vith Christmas joys and young delight,
As each one gathers to his family.
But I—a waif on earth where'er I roam—
Uprooted with life's bleeding hopes and fears
From that one heart that was my heart's sole home
Feel the old pang pierce through the severing years,
And as I think upon the years to come
That fair star trembles through my fallmg tears.
THE EVENING OF THE YEAR.
Wan mists enwrap the still-born day ”

“ There is no saying what might for a time have befallen the impulsive girl, thus introduced to an order of ideas possessing so much attraction for tender and sensitive minds, but for a counter influence developed at the same time. Mathilde had another school friend: —
"Blanche often broached the subject of the plenary inspiration of the Bible, and as we had some books on geology in concert she again and again came back to the strange discrepancies between the account of Creation in Genesis and the history of our globe as revealed to us by the rocks and stones. ”

“ Mathilde Blind's enthusiasm for her heroines had much to do with her success in depicting them: she could not have achieved the biography of a person indifferent to her, though she might have compassed that of an object of particular aversion. Madame Roland was more congenial to her than even George Eliot, and mainly for this reason her biography (1886) is the more important and the better executed of the two, although this is partly to be ascribed to the greater abundance of material and the more inspiring character of the story. ”

“ Mathilde Blind also had the advantage of listening to a conversation between Garibaldi and Ledru-Rollin, from which it evidently appeared that these champions of liberty did not object to a despotism so long as they were the despots, Ledru-Eollin asserting, and Garibaldi agreeing, that the French Republic of 1848 perished for want of a temporary dictator. Ledru-Eollin no doubt thought that the dictator could be no other man than himself, but it is by no means certain that a corresponding idea occurred to the modest Garibaldi. ”

“ After her return from Switzerland Mathilde spent several years with her family in England—an existence varied by frequent visits to the Continent, upon one occasion extending as far as Italy, and by a happy summer, of which she long afterwards spoke with rapture, spent in Wales with her friend, the present Mrs. Wolfsohn. Otherwise, her time seems to have been chiefly given to self-culture; at one time she studied Kant with enthusiasm; and she became well versed in the Bible, Shakespeare, and Goethe. ”