Tender Human Tie The unconventional intimacy of Ford Madox Brown and Mathilde Blind From The Times Literary Supplement October 10, 2008

In his more prosperous days in Fitzrovia Ford Madox Brown, the painter of “Work” and “The Last of England” (voted one of Britain’s ten favourite pictures in a BBC Radio 4 poll in 2005), threw brilliant parties, hosted animated debates and even fashionable séances. On one such occasion, James McNeill Whistler, one of Madox Brown’s guests, met “the most wonderful people, Swinburne, anarchists, poets, and musicians, all kinds and sorts, and in an inner room Rossetti and Mrs Morris sitting side by side in state, being worshipped”. Admirers thought Madox Brown the handsomest man in London and the best conversationalist. Though he was never formally a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, his art had been so closely associated with theirs that he was sometimes called King of the Pre-Raphaelites. During his party days he was known as a King of Hearts. The most masculine of men, his life was shaped by the sympathy – and complexities – of four women central to it: his two secret loves, the artist Marie Spartali and the author Mathilde Blind, and his two wives and models, Elisabeth Bromley and Emma Hill. All of them exploded any conventional notions about the artist’s silent muse. In a sense, with their distinct talents and opinions, they represented a route towards modernity that made a piquant impact on Madox Brown’s whole oeuvre, from intense private pictures to spectacular public art. He kept his beard and hair long, and his second wife Emma cut it blunt and square so that he looked like the playing card king. But as he aged, he cultivated a King Lear-like appearance. Shakespeare’s tragedy had engaged him throughout his career: as a young man in Paris in the 1840s he made a series of powerful drawings to illustrate it. He loved the stage, especially Shakespeare, and blocked his pictures with the instincts of a theatre director.

One day, two years after the death of his first wife in 1846, “a girl as loves me came in and disturbed me”. With un-Victorian directness Emma Hill simply walked into Madox Brown’s life – and his art. There was a recurrence of the artist’s involvement with King Lear when he made his first extant portrait of Emma, a delicate profile head, dated Christmas 1848, a preliminary study for his painting “Cordelia at the Bedside of Lear”. With its ideal regularity, Emma’s face could become a princess’s but also represent Everywoman – as the emigrant wife in “The Last of England”. Emma was no longer the uneducated girl she had been when she and Madox Brown first met. But she could never match the intellectual rapport that Mathilde Blind, another of their party guests, could offer him.

Mathilde Blind, née Cohen, a young German-Jewish writer, committed feminist and agnostic, published her Poems in 1867, under the androgynous pseudonym of Claude Lake. She arrived in England, aged eleven, in 1852 as an asylum seeker, along with her mother, Friederike Cohen, and her (Protestant) stepfather, Karl Blind, a leader of German revolution in 1848. The Blinds’ home near Swiss Cottage became a focus for Continental exiles. Marx had been an early associate, Mazzini a frequent visitor and Mathilde’s special hero. In 1866, Mathilde’s brother, Ferdinand, shot but failed to assassinate Bismarck, killing himself in despair at the police station. Mathilde came from an unconventional European background of rational freethinking and practical action. She had radical credentials.

Her education had been an academically distinguished one, in Germany, Belgium and England. But it was her passion for Shelley which linked her to Pre-Raphaelite circles in bohemian London. After losing his beloved art student, Marie Spartali, to marriage in 1871, Madox Brown lamented that “everyone was somewhere else”. Within weeks he chose Lynmouth, the Devon resort with Shelleyan connections, for his summer holiday and invited Mathilde to join the family. Petite, dark and intense in vivid striped silks, Mathilde whirled in on them with a storm of talk and German argument, driven by a literary quest. She tracked down an old woman, Mary Blackmore, who remembered Shelley. “I am going to draw her”, wrote Madox Brown, and “Miss Blind is to make an article about her.” Artist and poet were drawn together in the excitement of a shared project.

In her late twenties, twelve years younger than Brown’s corn-blonde wife Emma, and twenty years junior to the artist, Mathilde was mesmerizing. For Richard Garnett, superintendent of the British Museum Reading Room, she was “one of the most magnetic young women in London” and he fell in love with her. Joaquin Miller, an American poet and adventurer, proposed to her, and it was rumoured that even Swinburne might marry her. Mathilde had many friends and admirers – of both sexes – but she gravitated towards married men: Garnett, William Michael Rossetti, and, most enduringly and passionately, Ford Madox Brown. From now on, she lived intermittently but persistently in the Madox Browns’ London home.

In September 1877, Manchester’s new Town Hall, designed by Alfred Waterhouse, received its ceremonial opening. However, it lacked the historical murals envisaged by the architect for its Great Hall. The councillors were nervous about appointing Madox Brown, whose paintings were simply “too outré” for them. A Manchester city councillor, Charles Rowley, explained that his art was “not pitched in a key popular enough for most of us but I think we could get him to compromise a little in that line”. Compromise was not an element in Madox Brown’s personality, but by 1878 mediation brought him the commission. He and Emma moved to Manchester in 1880 – where Mathilde soon joined them. The ménage à trois was no more tenable in the North than it had proved to be in London, so Mathilde moved out to nearby lodgings. This was a pattern repeated, with variations, throughout their friendship.

As the Madox Browns and Mathilde tried to acclimatize to “cold & boisterous” Manchester, they all teetered on the tightrope of their awkward threesome. Mathilde and Madox Brown were recovering from overwork and ill health. Emma was often unwell. The painter was working punishing days at Manchester Town Hall, “10 a.m. to 10 p.m. & 7 days per week – consequently no dinner, or little trips to friends”. At the same time, Mathilde was reading Shelley and Darwin, and researching for her biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, “transgressive” female subjects who reflected her personal philosophy. In a similar way, although the murals were, on the face of it, a visual history for the people of Manchester to read, a modern equivalent to the Bayeux Tapestry, they provided an opportunity for the artist to embed his own values in them.

One of the most dramatic panels was “The Trial of Wycliffe”. Madox Brown, by now a confirmed agnostic, if not an atheist, nevertheless recognized the power of religious subjects in art. The Nonconformist figure of Wycliffe sorted well with the post-Darwinian, secular philosophy Madox Brown shared with Mathilde. Her poem “The Prophecy of St. Oran” was so shocking in its challenge to conventional Christianity that the publisher, Newman and Co, took fright and withdrew it from circulation because of its “atheistic character”. Oran was one of Columba’s most devoted monks but “his pulses thrilled” with love for Mona, a beautiful pagan. He tries to convert her to Christianity but she simply cannot understand “his joy-killing creed”, nor fathom “of what she should repent”. Oran fights to keep faith with chastity, until neither he nor Mona can restrain their love:

What boots it thus to struggle with his sin,
So much more sweet than all his virtues were?
Like a great flood let all her love roll in
And his soul stifle mid her golden hair!
And so he barters his eternal bliss
For the divine delirium of her kiss!

As they labour to build God’s holy house on Iona, Columba’s monks are thwarted by violent storms, and local people revert to their pagan gods. Suspecting a curse on their work, Columba asks “what man among you all / Living in deadly sin, yet wears the mask / Of sanctity?”. Oran denies his sin but is flushed out by the arrival of Mona, like the ghost of a Druid princess, wildly searching for her lover. Columba sentences Oran to be buried alive. Three days later, Oran’s bloodless face breaks out of the clay and speaks: “Lo, I come back from the grave, – / Behold, there is no God to smite or save”. He reports there is no devil, no heaven, no hell. Instead, he tells them, “Ye can have Eden here! . . . Cast down the crucifix, take up the plough!”. There is indeed a God: “that God is Love”, the “tender human tie” that Oran knows with Mona. Although Columba orders his instant re-burial, Oran’s voice is stronger and reverberates after the grave is shut and the poem ended.

Mathilde’s extraordinary poem could be read as a blasphemous reworking of the Resurrection or as an expression of nineteenth-century humanism. Madox Brown’s Wycliffe and Mathilde Blind’s Oran were both modernizing voices. Their bodies could be buried alive or burned – as Wycliffe’s was after his death – but they could not be silenced.

Artist and poet also shared democratic principles. Madox Brown’s long identification with Oliver Cromwell was still apparent, after earlier works depicting Cromwell, in the final mural he made for Manchester, “Bradshaw’s Defence of Manchester”. It was a heroic subject, heroically undertaken after his painting hand was paralysed by a stroke, in honour of his Cromwellian principles. Mathilde, too, championed democratic rights, particularly those of uprooted Highland crofters in her protest poem “The Heather on Fire”.

By August 1882, Mathilde was exhausted. She had just finished her biography of George Eliot. In the author, who also lived in an irregular union with a married man, Mathilde found a modern, literary heroine with special relevance to her own relationship with Madox Brown and their erratic ménage. But biography was not Mathilde’s natural genre. It had been hard labour to corral facts in “luminous arrangement”. At last she felt she could lay down her pen, “go out and actually stay out as long as ever I liked”. Perhaps her independent wandering over the hills was partly the cause of a serious “tiff” between her and Madox Brown. For in spite of uplifting views from their holiday cottage at Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire, it was here that Mathilde and Madox Brown had a cantankerous falling-out.

They walked out on each other in turn, and the breach was still not healed by September when the Madox Browns returned to Manchester. The artist attempted to appease Mathilde’s “soreness” by letter but Mathilde did not relent. “Stiff and unyielding”, she regarded “their intimate friendship as at an end”. William Rossetti found the stand-off “certainly very ungrateful and foolish on Mathilde’s part, as Brown has for some years past made her practically a member of his family, housing and supporting her”. What sort of family role did William, or other observers, consider Mathilde played in relation to Madox Brown? Two years senior to his eldest child, was she an “adopted” extra daughter, resented by Lucy and Cathy? Or was she a live-in competitor to Emma, a mistress in the head if not in the bed? It seems probable that she slipped between both roles at different times. The intensity of the row between Mathilde and Madox Brown betrayed the complexity of their emotional relationship.

Mathilde seized an opportunity to mend the quarrel some months later when Madox Brown fell seriously ill and, though warily and not immediately, she took the train to be at his side. But this time she stayed outside the family home. The artist recovered slowly, reporting that Emma and Mathilde “keep well on the whole”. They had established a domestic truce and a diurnal rhythm. “Mathilde works in her lodgings all the early part of the day and walks here usually by 4 or 5 and then reads us what she may have done – or else poetry of some kind and we chat”.

After the virtual completion of the Manchester murals and Emma’s death in 1890, Madox Brown was again living in London, with Mathilde close by. Contemporary speculation murmured that the two planned to marry – or had already married. In these years Madox Brown’s mind was brought back to Shakespeare when Henry Irving commissioned him to design three majestic sets for his King Lear in 1892. Irving’s Lear and Ellen Terry’s Cordelia wore the same combination of “Roman-pagan-British” costumes that Madox Brown had shown in his earlier Lear pictures. Reviewers found the settings “gorgeous throughout”. Mathilde saw the production and told Irving how “extraordinarily moved” she had been by his performance.

On Sunday October 1, 1893, Ford Madox Brown worked for an hour or two on his replica of the Wycliffe cartoon. He felt inexplicably tired. As Cathy Hueffer, his widowed younger daughter, helped him upstairs to bed, he said to her, “Well, my dear, my work’s done now”. On Monday he stayed in bed, at his home hung with golden wallpaper at 1 St Edmund’s Terrace, adjacent to Primrose Hill, in north London. Later Lucy Rossetti, his eldest daughter, visited for a painful farewell – wasted by tuberculosis, she was leaving the next day to winter in Italy. At this point, either Cathy or her son, the young Ford Madox Hueffer (Ford), decided to summon Mathilde back from her writing holiday at Wendover with Mona Caird. Lucy was implacably opposed to Mathilde’s liaison with her father and no one wanted to take the risk of the two women colliding on the stairs. However, Cathy was less intransigent than her half-sister on the subject of Mathilde. Although his talent was for fiction rather than biography, Ford Madox Ford later maintained that his grandfather’s “last quite coherent words” were spoken either to Lucy on the eve of her departure, or to Mathilde “whilst advising some alterations” to her work in progress. Madox Brown’s partisanship of Mathilde’s work had always fuelled their relationship. “He listened with his usual vivid sympathy”, she said, “to some poems I had lately written” (while on holiday with Mona Caird). Mathilde’s love poems were partly disguised autobiography, and fused her tumultuous feelings for various people and places.

No one wanted to believe the artist was on his deathbed: they were planning for the future. “At his express wish”, Mathilde “went to Tunbridge Wells”, one of her favourite health retreats, “to look for rooms for himself, Mrs. Hueffer, and her daughter [Juliet]. The idea of going there seemed to please him greatly”. However, on Tuesday, Madox Brown suffered an attack of apoplexy (stroke or cerebral event) and remained comatose for three days. Cathy called in Dr Gill of Russell Square and Dr Roberts of Harley Street. On the morning of Friday October 6, the seventy-two-year-old artist regained consciousness briefly, had breakfast, relapsed into a coma and died at 4.30 pm. Mathilde went into mourning, alone, in Tunbridge Wells, at one of the dozens of lodgings she used throughout her peripatetic life.

The funeral took place in the unconsecrated part of St Pancras Cemetery at East Finchley five days later. Many members of the family, friends and representatives from Manchester Corporation convened at the graveside. The Daily Graphic reported the unusual procedure. “As soon as the mourners had gathered round under the shadow of a fine sycamore, of which the leaves have just faded into a beautiful golden brown, the coffin was lowered.” Then Moncure Conway, the American freethinker in whose honour Conway Hall in London was later named, delivered a moving and entirely secular address. Many newspapers described Mathilde Blind’s beautiful foliage wreath with a “line from Blake woven in gold on a ribbon of black silk: – ‘Death is the mercy of eternity’”. In fact, Mathilde had deliberately revised Blake’s gnomic words from Milton. The original line reads “Time is the mercy of eternity”. Mathilde’s reworking, while still ambiguous, presumably hints at the agnosticism she shared with the artist. Neither Mathilde nor Madox Brown envisaged an afterlife. In a curious slip, several newspapers reported Mathilde’s name incorrectly and called her “Mathilde Brown”.

Today Madox Brown’s grave is hidden from view in a remote section of the cemetery. A few steps away, in a more accessible position, stands an elegant monument to Mathilde Blind in Carrara marble carved by Edouard Lanteri. It shows Mathilde as a classical goddess, presiding over two graceful female figures, Philosophy and Poetry. Cut beneath her name is the same line she had chosen for Madox Brown’s wreath – DEATH IS THE MERCY OF ETERNITY.

Mathilde’s own summation of her nomadic life can be found in her unpublished Commonplace Book, in the Bodleian Library. “I have been an exile in this world. Without a God, without a country, without a family.” This was the force that impelled the passionate attachments of her life. Her liaison with Madox Brown had been her most meaningful, sustained relationship. “The death of a friend is a grievous affliction but the death of a friendship ‘works like madness in the brain’”, she thought. “Dear Mathilde”, wrote Richard Garnett, “I can very well enter into the sorrow you so touchingly express in your letter, knowing what an incomparable friend you have lost in Madox Brown, and how much you have mutually been to each other.” When he published his Memoir of Mathilde, Garnett tactfully categorized Mr and Mrs Ford Madox Brown “above all” in a list of her intimate friends. But in careful code he gestured towards the relationship between Mathilde and the painter as “singularly beautiful”.

 

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