F.B. was Frances, daughter of a diamond merchant some time dead. The family was of French descent, the name de Blogue having been somewhat unfortunately anglicised into Blogg. They had fallen from considerable wealth into a degree of poverty that made it necessary for the three daughters to earn a living. Frances was never strong and Gilbert has told how utterly exhausted she was at the end of each day's toil—"she worked very hard as secretary of an educational society in London."* The family lived in Bedford Park, a suburb of London that went in for artistic housing and a kind of garden-city atmosphere long before this was at all general. Judging by their photographs the three girls must all have been remarkably pretty, and young men frequented the house in great numbers, among them Brimley Johnson who was engaged to Gertrude, and Lucian Oldershaw who later married Ethel. Some time in 1896, Oldershaw took Gilbert to call and Gilbert, literally at first sight, fell in love with Frances.
[* Autobiography, p. 153.]
TO MY LADY
God made you very carefully
He set a star apart for it
He stained it green and gold with fields
And aureoled it with sunshine
He peopled it with kings, peoples, republics
And so made you, very carefully.
All nature is God's book, filled with his rough sketches for you.*
[* The Notebook.]
When almost forty years later Gilbert was writing his Autobiography, Frances asked him to keep her out of it. The liking they both had for keeping private life private made him call it "this very Victorian narrative." Nevertheless he tells us something of the early days of their acquaintance. Gilbert had mentioned the moon:
She told me in the most normal and unpretentious tone that she hated the moon. I talked to the same lady several times afterwards; and found that this was a perfectly honest statement of the fact. Her attitude on this and other things might be called a prejudice; but it could not possibly be called a fad, still less an affectation. She really had an obstinate objection to all those natural forces that seemed to be sterile or aimless; she disliked loud winds that seemed to be going nowhere; she did not care much for the sea, a spectacle of which I was very fond; and by the same instinct she was up against the moon, which she said looked like an imbecile. On the other hand, she had a sort of hungry appetite for all the fruitful things like fields and gardens and anything connected with production; about which she was quite practical. She practised gardening; in that curious cockney culture she would have been quite ready to practise farming; and on the same perverse principle, she actually practised a religion. This was something utterly unaccountable both to me and to the whole fussy culture in which she lived. Any number of people proclaimed religions, chiefly oriental religions, analysed or argued about them; but that anybody could regard religion as a practical thing like gardening was something quite new to me and, to her neighbours, new and incomprehensible. She had been, by an accident, brought up in the school of an Anglo-Catholic convent; and to all that agnostic or mystic world, practising a religion was much more puzzling than professing it. She was a queer card. She wore a green velvet dress barred with grey fur, which I should have called artistic, but that she hated all the talk about art; and she had an attractive face, which I should have called elvish, but that she hated all the talk about elves. But what was arresting and almost blood-curdling about her, in that social atmosphere, was not so much that she hated it, as that she was entirely unaffected by it. She never knew what was meant by being "under the influence" of Yeats or Shaw or Tolstoy or anybody else. She was intelligent, with a great love of literature, and especially of Stevenson. But if Stevenson had walked into the room and explained his personal doubts about personal immortality, she would have regretted that he should be wrong upon the point; but would otherwise have been utterly unaffected. She was not at all like Robespierre, except in a taste for neatness in dress; and yet it is only in Mr. Belloc's book on Robespierre that I have ever found any words that describe the unique quality that cut her off from the current culture and saved her from it. "God had given him in his mind a stone tabernacle in which certain great truths were preserved imperishable."*
[* Autobiography, pp. 151-3.]
A letter to a friend, Mildred Wain, who was now engaged to Waldo d'Avigdor, makes the future tolerably easy to foresee.
. . . My brother wishes me to thank you with ferocious gratitude for the music, which he is enjoying tremendously. It reminds me rather of what Miss Frances Blogg—but that is another story.