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Mathilde Blind

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Mathilde Blind

Mathilde Blind (1841-1896). Portrait by Lucy Madox Brown. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Mathilde Blind
Born Mathilde Cohen
21 March 1841
Mannheim, Baden
Died 26 November 1896 (aged 55)
Occupation poet

Mathilde Blind (21 March 1841 - 26 November 1896) was a German-born English poet.

Life[]

Overview[]

Blind was born at Mannheim, Baden (now in Germany), but settled in London about 1849, and published several books of poetry, The Prophecy of St. Oran (1881), The Heather on Fire (1886), Songs and Sonnets (1893), Birds of Passage (1895), etc. She also translated Strauss's Old Faith and New, and other works, and wrote Lives of George Eliot and Madame Roland.[1]

Youth and education[]

Blind was born Mathilde Cohen at Mannheim, the daughter of a banker named Cohen. She subsequently adopted the name which her mother had acquired by her 2nd marriage with Karl Blind, conspicuous in the Baden insurrection of 1848-1849. After the suppression of the revolutionary movement Blind and his family, exiled from Germany and expelled from France and Belgium, took refuge in London.[2]

Mathilde received an English education and became practically an English-woman. She was nevertheless greatly influenced by the foreign refugees who frequented her step-father's house, especially Mazzini, for whom she entertained a passionate admiration, and of whom she afterwards published interesting reminiscences. At the age of 18 she travelled by herself in Switzerland, and the intimate relations she maintained with the continent throughout her life gave her literary work an especially cosmopolitan character.[2]

Career[]

Her first known production was a German ode recited at Bradford on occasion of the Schiller centenary (1859). It was followed by an English tragedy on Robespierre, praised by Louis Blanc but never printed, and by a little volume of juvenile Poems published in 1867 under the pseudonym of "Claude Lake." [2]

Visits to Scotland inspired her with 2 poems of considerable compass and pretension — The Prophecy of St. Oran (published in 1881, but written some years previously), narrating the remarkable legend of that saint; and The Heather on Fire (1886), a denunciation of indiscriminate Highland evictions.[2]

Mathildeblindselection

From A Selection from the Poems of Mathilde Blind, 1897. Courtesy Internet Archive.

Tarantella, a prose romance, was published in 1885 (2nd edit. 1886; also Boston, 1885). Tarantella is a stirring story, but too imaginative and dependent on incident to harmonise with the taste of its day. At a later period it might have obtained considerable success.[2]

In 1888 Blind produced the most ambitious of her works, The Ascent of Man, designed as the epic of evolution according to Charles Darwin.[2]

Her ambition to deal with the highest things was further evinced by her undertaking at different times the translation of the 2 contemporary continental books most famous at the moment — Strauss's The Old Faith and the New (1873 and 1874) and The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseft (1890); also by writing for the Eminent Women Series the lives of two of the most distinguished among women — George Eliot (1883; new edit. 1888) and Madame Roland (1886). The translations were good, and the biographies workmanlike.[2]

While writing the latter she was principally residing at Manchester, where she had been drawn by regard for the painter, Ford Madox Brown, then engaged in decorating the town hall with frescoes, and his wife.[2]

Later life[]

At a later period she travelled in Italy and Egypt, partly drawn by the love of nature and antiquity, partly by the failure of her health. These travels had their influence in Dramas in Miniature (1891) and Songs and Sonnets (1893), and formed the staple of Birds of Passage (1895). Her last poetical work was performed at Stratford-on-Avon, where the quiet loveliness of the Warwickshire scenery and the associations with Shakespeare inspired her with some very beautiful sonnets.[2]

She died in London, bequeathing the greater part of her property, which had mostly come to her late in life by the legacy of a step-brother, to Newnham College, Cambridge.[2]

Writing[]

There was more character in Blind than she could quite bring out in her poetry, though no effort was wanting. The consciousness of effort, indeed, is a draw-back to the enjoyment of her verse. Sometimes, however, especially in songs, sonnets, and the lyrics with which she was inspired by sympathy with the destitute and outcast classes, she achieves a perfect result; and the local coloring of her Scottish and many of her oriental poems is fine and true.[2]

Both The Prophecy of St. Oran and The Heather on Fire are full of impassioned eloquence and energy, and The Prophecy of St. Oran in particular has an ample share of the quality which Matthew Arnold denominates "Celtic magic". The Ascent of Man is fine only in parts, but the finest parts are very fine. Some of her sonnets are exceedingly impressive.[2]

She nevertheless did her powers most real justice when her singing robes were laid aside, and her reputation would be enhanced by a judicious selection from her correspondence.[2]

Critical introduction[]

by Richard Garnett

Mathile Blind's career illustrates the saying that persons exist whom to have known is an education. She was profoundly influenced by the eminent men with whom she came in contact from the days when she sat at the feet of Mazzini, as she has told us in reminiscences as remarkable for their good taste and reticence as for their interest. She also connected her name with women of genius, Madame Roland and George Eliot, of whom she was the skillful and admiring biographer; and Marie Bashkirtseff, whom she discovered for the English public, and whose journals she has translated with remarkable ability.

A traveler, continually on the move from land to land, she accumulated the impressions derived from many different regions, and many different societies. Yet her original work bears few traces of the impress of other minds. She occupies, indeed, an exceptional place among female poets, alike in her strong points and her weak ones. As a rule, it is the merit of poetesses to be easy and fluent: their fault to go playfully rippling round the difficulties with which they ought to grapple. Miss Blind, on the contrary, seems to have composed with difficulty, and to have beat out her verses upon the anvil. Cyrene wrestling with the lion will be an apt vignette for her poems when they attain an illustrated edition.

But the lion is thrown. Whatever difficulty it may have cost the authoress to work out her Prophecy of Oran, or The Heather on Fire, the thing is done, and the impression on the reader’s mind is nothing short of indelible. If the effect of The Ascent of Man is less definite, the cause is the comparative vagueness of the subject, and the necessary absence of the wonderful local coloring of the Highland poems. Dramas in Miniature, her next publication, deals again with humanity in the concrete, and is full of dramatic passion and lyrical impulse.

Miss Blind’s feeling for nature was far beyond that which merely prompts clever descriptive passages; her local poems are steeped in a local atmosphere which produces a perfect illusion. The same feeling for nature breathes through her lyrics, whose fault it is to be overcharged with the pictorial element.

When she does sing as the bird sings, no voice is sweeter. Of all lyrical forms, however, the most congenial to her powerful mind was the grave and weighty sonnet, which it is hardly possible to overload with import. Miss Blind was far more fortunate than sonnet-writers in general in finding thoughts great enough to fill fourteen lines, and some of her sonnets deserve no meaner praise than that of sublimity. Her besetting fault was one not unlikely to accompany conscious strength: an inattention to finish and polish which frequently annoys the sympathetic reader, and gives a needless handle to petty critics.

Born on the 21st of March, 1847, she began to write at a very early age, while still a child filling copybooks with her juvenile efforts in fiction, poetry, and the drama. One of these, “A Tragedy on the Death of Robespierre,” secured a word of commendation from Louis Blanc, the French historian. Her first publication was an article on Shelley, contributed to the Westminster Review; her debutt volume, The Prophecy of Oran, a narrative poem treating of the story of St. Columba and his disciples and their mission to the Hebrides, was published in 1881. “The Street Children’s Dance,” one of her most popular poems, appeared in this volume.

Her next volume, The Heather on Fire, a poem which deals with the removal of the Skye Crofters, was published in 1886. About the same time appeared her only novel, Tarantella, a highly imaginative romance, full of life, movement, and poetry, far too little known.

The Ascent of Man, upon which she was engaged for many years, followed in 1889. This latter is in many respects her most important work; in it she has endeavoured to describe the evolution of Nature through the ages, showing the development of vegetable and animal life, the growth of man and the progress of society. The 1st part, “Chants of Life,” is a series of wonderfully vivid pictures of this progress from the earliest germs of life in brute, formless claws, to the realization of poetic hopes for the future of the world. 2 noble sonnets conclude this part, which is followed by “The Pilgrim’s Soul,” an allegory of the redemption wrought through Love leading up to and concluding with the powerful “Leading of Sorrow.”[3]

Recognition[]

She was interred in Finchley cemetery, under a handsome monument erected by her firm friend, Dr. Louis Mond, to whose generosity is also to be ascribed the reissue since her death of The Ascent of Man, with an introduction by Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace (1899) and the publication of The Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind (a selection edited by Arthur Symons, with a memoir by Dr. Garnett, 1900, 8vo).[2]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

Novel[]

Non-fiction[]

Translated[]

Edited[]


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[4]

O_Moon,_Large_Golden_Summer_Moon_by_Mathilde_Blind

O Moon, Large Golden Summer Moon by Mathilde Blind

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ John William Cousin, "Blind, Mathilde," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910, 39. Web, Dec. 14, 2017.
  2. ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 Garnett (1901), 219.
  3. ↑ from Richard Garnett, Critical and Biographical Essay: Mathilde Blind (1841–1896), Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century (edited by Alfred H. Miles), London: Routledge / New York: Dutton, 1907. Bartleby.com, Web, Jan. 30, 2017.
  4. ↑ Search results = au:Mathilde Blind, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Jan. 30, 2017.

External links[]

Poems
Audio / video
Books
About

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement (edited by Sidney Lee)​. London: Smith, Elder, 1901. Original article is at: Blind, Mathilde

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