to the beautiful obliquities

Woolf and Firth: Charles Lamb would have had to forgive both of them. “I can pardon her [his sister, disguised as “Bridget”] blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one—the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous,—but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle” (Mackery End, in Hertfordshire). Firth acknowledges Lamb's intelligence; Firth praises him.

Certainly his larger sympathy, and keener insight, enabled him to perceive in the style and in the writer those finer qualities which the more conventional judgment of Pepys had refused to recognise.

Lamb is loving, Lamb loves; he inserts her into a discussion of bookbinding where she did not have to be but he will mention her, “thrice noble” again in the Two Races of Men: “the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle.” Horace Walpole had an opinion of her: “pedant.” Pepys, as already mentioned, had his opinion, “I do not like her at all.” Walpole had read her works but Pepys had seen her and listened to her speak. Her clothes annoyed him. He thought he had watched one of her plays but it was her husband's play instead. On Wednesday the 18th of March in the year 1668 he looked through one of her books and disliked it, “the ridiculous History of My Lord Newcastle.” Lamb venerated that same book in the early 1800s: “no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.” “[I]t may be taken for granted that his [Pepys'] recollections of the authoress influenced his judgment of her book,” writes Firth, pointing out, also, that the diarist had been suffering from bad eyes that night. “So to bed, my eyes being very bad.”

Fitzmaurice opens his Introduction to the Garland Sociable Letters with these words: “Over the last three hundred and fifty years, Margaret Cavendish and her writing have elicited a variety of reactions.” There are so many reactions that Firth won't decide between them. He says, “To decide between these conflicting sentences [Pepys', Lamb's, those of “learned bodies” at the University of Cambridge], and expound the precise amount of truth contained in each, would be a tedious and ungrateful task.”

Fitzmaurice lists some of the people I've mentioned as well as a couple of others, Frederic Rowton, for example, who wrote The Female Poets of Great Britain (1853), and Mary Evelyn, Pepys' contemporary, whose word for Cavendish is “rambling,” although it's curious of Fitzmaurice to refer to Evelyn's husband John as “the famous diarist” without quoting him on Cavendish as well. He described her as he saw her on the day when she visited a meeting at the Royal Society, “a mighty pretender to learning.”

John Evelyn is writing on May 30th, 1667, and Pepys, writing on the same day, describes the same event. “I find much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle who had desired to be invited to the Society.” Evelyn says that they showed her experiments and Pepys says so too. Pepys chooses to describe the experiments and Evelyn does not. “Several fine experiments were shown her of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors among others, of one that did, while she was there, turn a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood, which was very rare.” The Society's minutes for that meeting have the experiments like this: “Dutchess of newcastle intertaynd wth. 1 weighing the air in a glasse Recr. of 9 gallons & 3 pints. which exhausted weighed & opend to let in air weighed 1 ounce & 71 caratts more than when exhausted. Expt. of mixing colours. 3 cold liquors by mixture made hott. 4 water boyle in Rarifying engine . and making a bladder swell 5 bodys floating in medio aquae. 2 marbles separated by 47ll.“

proceed to general propositions and discourses

What was Woolf thinking of when she wrote “wildest fancies,” I ask myself; what had she read that I haven't, which passage was going through her mind? “[M]any scholars and critics today would agree with Woolf's view that Cavendish lacked discipline,” wrote James Fitzmaurice. C.H. Firth referred to her “facile pen.” When he wanted to criticise her plays he complained that “her characters are mere abstractions, qualities, and humours, uttering the fantastic speeches and quaint conceits which she loved to write.”

Firth's opinions might have affected Woolf's, seeing that he edited at least one of the books that she is reviewing in her essay (The Life of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, Etc). In fact, stopping and considering, I think his introduction has the answer to my question. Woolf might not have been thinking about a piece of Cavendish. She might have been thinking of this, written by Firth.

… the ponderous tomes on science and philosophy which the Duchess published are entirely valueless. This was not only due to the ignorance of the writings of others, which the Duchess admits, but to the method which she adopted in reasoning on physical science. One of her correspondents, Glanville, points this out to her. "There are two sorts of reasoning," he says, "those that the mind advanceth from its inbred store, such are all metaphysical contemplations; and those natural researches which are raised from experiment and the objects of sense. Now, what I have said about these matters is to tie down the mind in physical things to consider nature as it is, to lay a foundation in sensible collections, and from thence to proceed to general propositions and discourses. So that my aim is that we may arise according to the order of nature, from the exercise of our senses to that of our reason; which indeed is most noble and most perfect when it concludes aright, but not so when it is mistaken; and that it may so conclude and arrive to that perfection it must begin in sense; and the more experiments our reasons have to work on, by so much they are the more likely to be certain in their conclusions, and consequently more perfect in their actings." Whilst the Royal Society and all those to whom the progress of physical science in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century was due were eagerly pursuing the experimental method, the Duchess continued to spin her "metaphysical cogitations" like a spider, as she says, from her own brain.

Which is another way of saying that she was making “wildest fancies” – the wildness especially noticeable by Firth and Woolf because they knew that she was going against the advice of people who were already established in the areas where she wanted to speculate. She rejected them in favour of her personal metaphysics. "I desire all those that are friends to my book to believe that whatsoever is new is my own, which I hope all is; for I never had any guide to direct me, nor intelligence from any authors to advertise me, but writ according to my own natural cogitations." (Preface to Philosophical Opinions (1655), quoted by Firth.) “Her love of singularity amounted to a passion.” (Firth.) Powys again.