Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/59

Rh 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's zeal for Madame Roland and her times did indeed so superabound that the book when completed was adjudged a third too long, and was only reduced to the needful proportion under pressure of a threat from the editor that he would otherwise perform the task of abridgment himself. So Madame Roland was decapitated for the second time.

At this period Mathilde was residing at Manchester with Mr. and Mrs. Madox Brown, whose house was for several years almost a home to her. The friendship between her and the painter was in many respects singularly beautiful. Madox Brown had many remarkable characteristics, but chief among these, perhaps, was an unusual singleness of nature. His belief in everything that he admired, and animosity to everything that he disliked, were wholly without reserve; whatever his proficiency in artistic chiaroscuro, as a man he was little skilled in the distribution of light and shade. 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