Mathilde Blind

Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters

James Diedrick, Andrew Stauffer, Herbert F. Tucker, Andrew Stauffer, Herbert F. Tucker

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780813939322
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

With Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841–1896), a freethinking radical feminist.

Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty, become a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the 1880s she had become widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged contemporary issues such as the Woman Question, the forced eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and Darwin's evolutionary theory. She subsequently emerged as a prominent voice and leader among New Woman writers at the end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with leading male decadent writers of the fin de siècle, most notably, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons.

Despite her extensive contributions to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of letters, Mathilde Blind underscores the importance of her poetry and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Strauss and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de siècle.

1

The Making of a Cosmopolitan

1841–1867

It was a big leap from the schoolroom of the Plymouth sister schoolmistress to the group of brilliant Revolutionists with whom after a week or two I was on the most intimate terms.

—Mathilde Blind, undated autobiographical narrative

IN THE EARLY 1870S MATHILDE BLIND CAST OFF THE MALE PSEU-donym she used for her first volume of verse (Poems, by Claude Lake, 1867) and announced herself as a formidable literary critic, a provocative poet, and a fearless freethinker. In January 1870 she delivered a lecture on Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Church of Progress in London, stressing the poet’s political radicalism; in July of that year she published a review essay on William Michael Rossetti’s edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Westminster Review that earned the praise of Algernon Charles Swinburne and led Rossetti to issue a corrected edition in 1878. While Blind’s name was not attached to this essay, her authorship was well known in London’s literary community, though even her friends and colleagues may have been surprised by her bold praise of Prometheus Unbound as an “enfant terrible” of a poem designed to “take by storm” “that triple-headed power which rules the world”: “theology, monarchy, and matrimony.” One year later, Blind took to the pages of the Dark Blue, a new Oxford-based journal that during its brief and shining moment published prose and art by many of Britain’s leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. Her wide-ranging publications in this journal are those of a feminist aesthete who could write haunting poems about haunted lovers, erudite essays on Icelandic poetry, and short fiction exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In the fall of 1872, as her association with the Dark Blue was ending, she began reviewing contemporary poetry and fiction for the Athenaeum, where over the next fifteen years she passed judgment on a wide range of contemporary writers, from William Morris to Margaret Oliphant. Before the year was out she published Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors containing an introductory “Memoir” of Shelley’s life, and in the following year, she brought out her translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s Der Alte und der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntnis (The Old Faith and the New: A Confession). In this book Strauss follows the demythologizing impulse first expressed in Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus, translated into English by George Eliot in 1853) to its logical conclusion, abandoning the Hegelian principles to which he had previously adhered and embracing a distinctly antitheist form of historical and scientific materialism.

The generic range of these early works (poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, translation), as well as their subject matter and themes (female autonomy and agency, antitheism, aestheticism, the interrelationship of literary and political radicalism), indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind’s career. They also indicate the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook. The same year she issued her Shelley edition, another Anglo-Jewish writer, Benjamin Disraeli, delivered his Crystal Palace speech in which he castigated those who, like Blind, professed cosmopolitan views—in terms that indicate the politically charged nature of late-Victorian cosmopolitanism. Delivered two years before Disraeli would return as prime minister to lead the Tory government for the next four years, this speech illuminates the reasons Blind’s career and writing mattered to her contemporaries, and why her story still speaks to contemporary cultural debates. Disraeli aligns the Conservatives with “nationalism” and the Liberals (and their leader William Gladstone) with “cosmopolitansm,” which he equates with radicalism on the Continent. He also attempts to enlist the British working classes in the Conservative cause, claiming they “repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our sovereign and members of such an empire.”¹ Blind’s anti-monarchical, antitheist, anti-imperialist ideas, not to mention her socialism, made her an unnamed target of Disraeli’s speech.

Disraeli’s dichotomies obscure what are in fact a range of complex political positions. His opposition of “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism,” for example, leaves no room for Blind and her friend William Morris, socialists who also “adhered” to “national principles” in the sense that they were English citizens who organized to support national movements in Germany and Italy. Moreover, Blind and Morris were simultaneously cosmopolitans, socialists and aesthetes, and their careers challenge those who have cast the aesthetic movement as the apolitical precursor to the avant-garde.² As Elizabeth Prettejohn has suggested, the motto “art for art’s sake” should be understood “not as the name of an art theory, but rather as the statement of the problem.”³ Since much of Blind’s writing contributed to a tradition of aestheticist political intervention, this emphasis is particularly important. Borrowing a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche, Regina Gagnier describes late-Victorian cosmopolitans like William Morris as “citizens of the world” who “perceived no conflict between individualism and the social state, who never fell “into the depoliticized idealism that that phrase evokes today.”⁴ This is especially relevant to Blind, whose career coincided with the revival of socialist internationalism in Britain, Europe, the Americas, and Australasia (the Second International was formed in Paris in 1889, the year Blind published The Ascent of Man, many of whose poems express a kind of apocalyptic socialism). Like her countryman Nietzsche—whose books Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human her friend Helen Zimmern would translate into English—Blind writes from the perspective of those “free spirits” or “good Europeans” who in Nietzsche’s words are characterized by “a dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world,” one that “flames and flickers up in all the senses.”⁵ Blind uses a similar metaphor to express this same curiosity in Birds of Passage, her last volume of poetry. Implicitly rejecting Western exceptionalism, Blind invites her readers in one poem to honor the Egyptian god Horus:

In manifold disguises,

And under many names,

Thrice-holy son of Isis,

We worship him who rises

A child-god fledged in flames.

In order to understand late-Victorian cosmopolitanism, Gagnier writes, “we need to give up vulgar notions of socialism that see it as incompatible with individualism or with the freedoms and choice that modern citizens have come to expect. But we also need to give up modern market notions of individualism that see it as unimpeded personal sovereignty.”⁶ Morris, for instance, determined to balance the Fine (the domain of the aesthetic) and the Good (the domain of ethics and politics), insisted in 1889 that “variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom.”⁷ Blind anticipates this argument in her 1870 essay on Rossetti’s edition of Shelley when she argues for the inseparability of what she calls the Beautiful, the True, and the Good. Asking “what would become of the Beautiful if, securely dammed up against the influx of moral convictions and the speculations and discoveries of the reasoning faculties, it were subsisting in proud isolation only on and through itself,” she answers that the world would be deprived of such epics as The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as well as all of tragic drama, which “has its foundations laid in the ethical convictions of mankind” (86). Morris and other “forced and voluntary Victorian cosmopolitans,” in Gagnier’s words, “conceived of themselves and were perceived by others as international comrades, international feminists, translators, Europeans, and even world citizens.”⁸ For Blind, whom Richard Garnett would describe as a “traveler, continually on the move from land to land,” who “accumulated the impressions derived from many different regions, and many different societies,”⁹ this self-conception was part of her birthright and her status as an expatriate.

Blind’s cosmopolitan identity is distinct from that of Morris, however, and not only because of her gender. In William Michael Rossetti’s loaded words, “She was of Jewish race.”¹⁰ Though she was thoroughly secular in her outlook, and unlike her friend Amy Levy did not self-identify as Jewish, she was often identified as such in ways that also cast her as an outsider. This is important because one of the late-century debates concerning cosmopolitanism is directly bound up in questions of Jewish identity and citizenship. Were Jews considered “rooted” citizens of their nations, or “rootless cosmopolitans”? Anti-Semites cited Svengali (in fiction) and the Rothschild banking family (in fact) as proof of the latter. In this debate, “cosmopolitan” is a pejorative term meaning stateless and not deserving of a state, as in the myth of the Wandering Jew. Though Blind was herself a self-confessed wanderer, and frequently traveled on the Continent, she also thought of herself and described herself as English. In the words of her friend William Sharp, “Nothing ever so disconcerted or even offended her as the imputation that she spoke or wrote English marvelously well for a German.”¹¹ She would have been especially offended by the brief summary of her career in the 9 June 1900 issue of the London Times, occasioned by the posthumous Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, which insisted on her outsider status, calling her a “clever and vehement writer” who never attained the status of poet because “she never learnt to use our speech with perfect freedom.”

At the same time, she identified and sympathized with those struggling for self-determination on the Continent as well as in Scotland and Ireland—a sympathy linked in part to her awareness of the Jews’ history of being treated as aliens. For this reason Nathan Sznaider’s Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order provides a valuable framework for discussing Blind’s subject position, especially his appropriation of Anthony Appiah’s concept of “rooted cosmopolitanism.”¹² Sznaider’s observation that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, living in a constant tension between particularism and universalism, also relates to two other late-Victorian debates. The first concerns nationalism and internationalism. Though Disraeli’s simplifications elide this fact, both liberal and socialist versions of internationalism were circulating at the time of his speech, as well as positions that combined them. The liberal version derived from Kant’s essay “Perpetual Peace,” in which he first advocated a “league of nations”—the inspiration for the League of Nations established after World War I (which Blind’s half sister Ottilie would campaign for). The socialist version envisions the eventual disappearance of nation-states. While Blind supported the formation of independent national states (the goal of the European revolutions of 1848) and later Irish Home Rule, she was also one of those who looked toward an altogether different future. In the words she used to translate David Strauss’s unsympathetic definition of cosmopolitanism in The Old Faith and the New, she “would have the large consolidated states resolve themselves into groups of small confederated republics, organized on the socialistic principle, between which, thenceforth, differences of language and nationality could no longer act as barriers, or prove the cause of strife” (301).¹³

This links Blind and her career to a related late-century debate, that concerning particularism and universalism. Sznaider writes that the Jewish experience “straddles the interstices of universal identifications and particular attachments,” and that cosmopolitanism “combines appreciation of difference and diversity with efforts to conceive of new democratic forms of political rule beyond the nation-state.”¹⁴ Blind was a German-born child of the Enlightenment who imbibed the totalizing ideas of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss, and Marx—and later Comte, Wollstonecraft, and J. S. Mill. And her own universalist ideals—concerning universal suffrage, equality of the sexes, the religion of humanity, and socialism—were shaped by them. Yet they were also productively complicated by her particular experiences of alienation—as a Jewish female, a sexual nonconformist, a political radical, and an expatriate. She understood that those who formulated universalist ideals often ignored the realities of race, class, and (in particular) gender. Her writing does not. Like “cosmopolitanism” as defined by Sznaider, “it is sensitive to historic cultural particularities, respecting the specific dignity and burden of a group, a people, a culture.”¹⁵ The next two sections of this chapter will explore the particular ways in which Blind’s childhood experiences and early education contributed to her becoming a rooted cosmopolitan in her adopted home.

She was born Mathilda Cohen on 21 March 1841 in Mannheim, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden in southwestern Germany (Germany would not become a unified nation for another thirty years).¹⁶ The Cohen Family Book lists her parents as Jacob Abraham Cohen and Friederike (née Ettlinger), Jewish citizens of Mannheim. Mathilde’s mother, whom Garnett described as a woman possessing “the beauty which, equally with many of her mental characteristics, became her daughter’s heritage,”¹⁷ had married Jacob Cohen in 1839, when she was nineteen and he was forty-nine. The couple had two children, Mathilde and Ferdinand, born in 1844. (Jacob’s first marriage had produced a son, Meyer Jacob, who would make Mathilde the main beneficiary of his will in 1892.) While the Cohen Family Book describes Jacob’s occupation as “partikulier,” or merchant entrepreneur, Garnett calls him “a retired banker of independent means.”¹⁸ Given Mannheim’s importance as a commercial shipping center, it is quite possible he was both at different times in his career.

Whatever the sources of Jacob Cohen’s income, it helped fund the revolutionary activities of both Friederike and Karl Blind, even before Cohen’s death in 1848. Friederike met Karl Blind in 1845, when she was twenty-six and he was nineteen. Blind was a Protestant, working-class radical and a scholarship student at Heidelberg University, though in 1846 he was expelled for writing an article denouncing the punishment of a freethinking soldier. Despite their different class and religious backgrounds, both were committed to a united Germany under a republican government with a socialist constitution, and by 1847 they were combining forces—which also suggests that Friederike was estranged from her husband by this time. Karl and Friederike traveled together to Bavaria in August 1847, with Mathilde and Ferdinand in tow. Karl Blind describes this trip in part 1 of his self-aggrandizing five-part series “In Years of Storm and Stress” in the Cornhill Magazine, written some thirty years after the events it describes. “These were glorious August days,” he writes. “A hot sun shone when we made a trip, with Friederike’s children and their governess, to Neustadt on the Haardt—a little town known for the advanced views of its inhabitants, which were then shared by the large majority of the people of Rhenish Bavaria.”¹⁹ They were there to disseminate Karl Peter Heinzen’s pamphlet The German Famine and the German Princes, appealing to the working classes to participate in demonstrations known as the “bread and potato riots,” and when they did so they were arrested, tried, and imprisoned on charges of high treason. “After a short examination, we were separately caged. . . . The children were sent back with the governess to Durkheim, and afterwards to Mannheim. They were Mathilde, who later became distinguished in Eng...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology
• 1 The Making of a Cosmopolitan: 1841–1867
• 2 Romancing Shelley and Others: 1868–1870
• 3 A Pioneering Female Aesthete: 1871–1872
• 4 Translating Strauss, Traveling in Scotland: 1873–1874
• 5 Freethinkers and Feminists: 1874–1881
• 6 Biographer, Novelist, Polemical Poet: 1882–1887
• 7 A Leading New Woman: 1888–1893
• 8 “But a Bird of Passage”: 1893–1896
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index