From The Spectator. 66 " and in a by William Blake. There was one little engraving of a wicked brother saying, "I hate It is seldom, indeed, that a book appears you! to the good brother. His hair almost from which we derive so vivid an impression stands on end with fury, and the tremendous of a completely unique character and unique impression of fraternal hatred in that stiff life as this biography of William Blake. old engraving comes back on us now with This is not merely due to the authorship and full force through a vista of thirty years. editing of the book, though that is done with Another, too, we can recall, where a form, singular thoroughness, and does not appear crouching with misery, is seated in some dank to have suffered materially even by the death room, and confessing to a didactic visitor that of the biographer, Mr. Gilchrist, so earnestly Prodigality has made me poor; have his friends, Mr. D. G. Rossetti and Mr. third the stars of a brilliant night are looking W. M. Rossetti, thrown themselves into the down with wonderful vividness on the Gertask of collecting the materials of the second man pastor's improving harangues. Few volume, and completing the almost completed children who read that old-fashioned novelfirst. It is also partly due to the lavish il-lette could fail to attach peculiar sensations lustrations of Blake's genius by the to those prim little engravings. The book ings and vignettes which are scattered richly shows, at least, how curiously Blake managed through its pages, and partly to the fact that to lend some of his power even to the merest Blake's singular mind was projected, as we trifles not of his own design. Even those who may call it, on two quite distinct planes of know thoroughly his grand" inventions" to art, that of poetry as well as that of paint- the Book of Job would recognize some of the ing, though it was essentially the same in influence of his strange genius, even in those didactic little childish plates. both. engrav William Blake was much more than an unknown painter of great though mystical genius: Is is an unknown character of a perfectly unique cast, which contrived to affect everything he touched with something of its own singular power. Many persons who will not know even his name at all may remember the quaint but forcible plates in a didactic little children's novel in three small volumes, called "Elements of Morality," Blake was often thought insane, and not without reasons quite strong enough to have shut up many a man less poor and more enviable in worldly position. But, probably, the truth was simply this, that he was a visionary in the eighteenth century,—an age both the age was less able to understand him, when there was "no open vision,”- -so that and he was fretted into greater eccentricity by his age. Being from the first a dreamer which was translated from the German somcof dreams and a man of very obstinate intelwhere about 1790 for the benefit of our fa- lect, he was induced to talk as if his dreams thers' and mothers' childhood, and which has were the only truth and the world around amused the nurseries of the next two genera-London in 1757, the son of a hosier of small him comparatively a fiction. He was born in tions with the formal, stiff-jointed morality which that curious tale (less adapted for means, and never found in either the ideas of children than for stunted adults in knee-his day or his own fortunes anything but a breeches) inculcated on its young readers. strong stimulus to kick against the pricks. Thirty years ago it was a book rare but His thoughts were soon driven inward into cious to discerning children who could enjoy reverie, and he early contracted a profound the spectacle of a rapidly disappearing world diffidence in personal intercourse with his fellow-men. of didactic thought, and one of its greatest In some doggerel verses in a attractions was the singular force of those letter to a friend, he once expressed the paingrotesque plates, not designed, but engraved his own manner to do justice to his charful sense he entertained of the inadequacy of pre "Life of William Blake, Pictor Ignotus," with acter. His manner, he says, was too passelections from his Poems and other writings. By sive" and inconsistent with " the late Alexander Gilchrist. Illustrated from Blake's own Works in fac simile by W. J. Linton, and in photolithography, with a few of Blake's original plates. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. [The Living Age, a few years ago, gave a series of engravings from Blake's Designs, for Blair's Grave.] "my active physiognomy." In other words, we suppose, he had the manner of a suppressed man, together with the actively working features of an excitable man :— his vision." And Blake's intellectual visions were all of the primeval kind, of grand and free outline, with vistas of great complexity but simple elements, such as opened out everywhere to the seer in the morning of creation. Everywhere there is infinitude in them; but an intellect unaccustomed to sound its own depths assembles a confusion We can see even in the portrait prefixed to this book how instinct was his face with nervous energy, but he was alive, fortu- of symbols from all quarters of creation to nately for his own reason, to the indifference spell out its meaning in a sort of half-articuof the world, and so the eighteenth century late hieroglyphic. Terror and pity, horror succeeded in depositing round his cager vi- and innocence and primeval joy, strong desire sionary mind a crust of reserve which made and anguish unsubdued, all speak in different him brood more than ever over his visions and mysterious symbols through shrouds of and believe in them more passionately. His tempestuous darkness or an overwhelming art, his philosophy, if it can be so called, his blaze of light. The most striking characterpoetry, his faith, his manners, all express the istic of the early and sublime imagery of the chaind visionary, who would have fretted East,-such imagery as Ezekiel used in order passionately against the bonds of social hum- to shadow forth his divine inspiration,—is, drum if he had not found a safety-valve for all that it does so much more than express meanhis visions in art. "Damn braces, bless re-ing.-that it expresses meaning in the vague laxes," was one of his favorite apophthegms, sense in which music expresses meaning,—so which indicates clearly enough the sense of that a very wide fringe of imagery remains that painfully tight bracing inflicted by the over, which is, as it were, merely an accomuncongenial world upon his visionary intel-paniment of the meaning, not a part of its es lect. 66 If we had to describe Blake's intellect in a single sentence we should say that a mind moulded in the primeval intellectual world which gave rise to the Book of Job, or more nearly, perhaps, of Ezekiel, had been pat to sleep for near three thousand years, and then launched into the midst of the meaner London life in Golden Square, Battersea, Oxford Street, and the Strand, of the reign of George III. When Blake wanted to paint Nelson and Pitt, the conception, to him literally the most natural, was to design the spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the nations of the earth," and "the spiritual form of Pitt guiding Behemoth; he is that Angel who, pleased to perform the Almighty's orders, rides on the whirlwind directing the storms of war." And in both cases, as we might be sure, Blake's conceptions of the great sea beast Leviathan and the great land beast Behemoth are far more striking than his conception of the "spiritual forms" of those eighteenth-century angels, Nelson and Pitt; indeed, he regretted bitterly that the nation was not likely to order from him a monument of each in what he called " fresco," a hundred feet or more in height, like the great Assyrian monuments that he had seen in sence. So many symbols are heaped together, each of them a sort of separate hieroglyphic, that one is always in danger of over-interpreting the drift of the aggregate, and as you may miss the melody by attempting to crossexamine the notes, so you may miss the burden by attempting to separate the symbols. This is as true of Blake as if he had lived in the age of hieroglyphic. His brother artists called his house "the house of the Interpreter; " but it was rather the house of the man who most needed an Interpreter, yet, who, perhaps, after all, was better interpreted by feeling than by thought. The explanation of such hieroglyphic visions we take to be that minds of a special constitution,-one which becomes much less common as the world studies and masters its own thoughts, are almost unable to separate thoughts from things at all, but incarnate their thoughts in things, almost arbitrarily and capriciously, rather than not at all. This is especially the gift of a great visionary painter like Blake. He has a profound conflict going on in his own mind, as he takes a country walk; instead of separating his thoughts from the scenery, they pass out of him into the scenery; the sun throws out a forbidding glare,—the trees stretch their arms to hold him back from his path,-the clouds 66 scowl or smile upon his wishes, even the | piece of doggerel; but the hot thoughts which thistle under his foot looks its malice,-and thus used earth and air and sky to paint a if he paints the scene as a picture, it is a pic- mere personal conflict would have made, and ture instinct with force of expression and often did make, marvellous pictures. His feeling. But if, instead, he blunders into double and treble and quadruple visions, of mystical poetry, his awkward use of things which he was so proud, spoiled his poetry, to express what words would, in poetry, ex- and often confused his pictures; but, when press better, only looks like childish "make- not too multiplex, gave a singular depth and belief." Imaginative children have been glow to the latter. It is the painter's greatknown (secretly) to persuade themselves that est art to think through things instead of nettles were enemies, and thistles powerful words, and Blake did so. In that wonderful enchanters, whose spell was to be broken by description of his picture of the "Last Judgthe prince of schoolboys. But Blake, grown-ment," Blake gives us a glimpse of the power up, indulged himself in such notions chiefly this "double vision" gave him as an artist: because his thoughts, like the old Oriental I assert for myself," he says, "that I do thoughts, would not flow into words, but en- not behold the outward creation, and that to tered like spirits into external nature, so that nie it is hindrance and not action, What,' the world seemed to him "possessed" by it will be questioned, when the sun rises do his own feelings. For instance, when Blake you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like was living uncomfortably near Haley, at Felpa guinea?' Oh! no, no! I see an inham, in Sussex, he was once going to meet numerable company of the heavenly host, his sister at the coach, and had urgent doubts crying, Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God in his mind whether to remain at Felpham or Almighty.' I question not my corporeal eye return to London. The conflict was taken any more than I would question a window up in his usual way by the clouds and trees concerning a sight-I look through it and and plants of the country through which he not with it." And he painted the sun as he passed; by the sun in heaven, and by the describes it, not ignoring, indeed, the disc of spirits of his deceased father and brothers, fire, but making light always instinct with and particularly by a vicious-looking thistle, spiritual awe. For example, in that wonwhich appears to have suggested to him that derful plate of Blake's "Crucifixion," taken it was instinct with malignant purpose :- from his "Jerusalem," given in this book, Christ is hanging in death and otherwise in the profoundest darkness, except that a nimbus of rays streaming from behind his head, as though "the light of the world" still lingered there, casts a few reflected rays on the closed eyes, and touches here and there the relaxed body, otherwise completely shrouded by the darkness, so that every ray rests like a living thing on the body of the Lord, and the circlet of glory rescues from the night all that lies within the circle of His presence. Never was light more living in its language. "A frowning thistle implores my stay, The thistle argues viciously, and has its head beaten off by Blake's foot,-Blake evidently feeling, rather more seriously, what a schoolboy feels in a sort of make-believe way, that in destroying the thistle he is defeating a spiritual enemy. Then he confronts the sun in the same way, explains that to the outward eye it is the sun, to the inward eye the evil angel Los. Now and then, when the object of Blake's visions was not plural but singular, he succeeded in expressing his vision in singularly striking poetry, but usually his poetry assembled too many realistic symbols to be in any way intelligible. There are touches, however, of verse here and there, which mingle the mysterious depth of Wordsworth with the grand symbolism of the primeval world. Take, for example, the following: Burned that fire within thine eyes? And what shoulder and what art "What the hammer, what the chain, Knit thy strength and forged thy brain? Did He who made the lamb make thee?" There are more beautiful things than this in Blake's poems, but few that show so strongly the elemental sort of energy that breathes in the author of the "Inventions to Job," as well as the glimpses of pure beauty, through the parting shadows of divine strength. But while Blake is singularly great in imparting a kind of temporary soul to things, (for example, one of his most marvellous conceptions in a small way is his vision of the ghost of a flea, that is, the human countenance of a man so bloodthirsty that he had been, said Blake, transformed into a flea in order to limit the amount of mischief he could effect by his thirst for blood, and certainly have the complexity of experience. "Blake is damned good to steal from," said Fuseli; and so he was. For his pictures were all à priori, suggesting new ideas, new lights, new combinations of things in infinite variety of movement and expression, but only giving the form, the base, the à priori idea on which others could engraft a deeper complexity of human experience. His human faces are almost all natural types, instead of giving infinitely blended shades of expression. His idea of a good man is a very simple idea, --an innocent Adam, such as he paints Job in all his phases of anguish, terror, hope, and trust. His idea of a good woman was of “an emanation of the man," who, like Mrs. Blake, would give herself up to reflecting the masculine will. “In eternity,” he said, in his usual peremptory way, woman is the emanation of the man; she has no will of her own; there is no such thing in eternity as a female will." Blake was always/sanguine. The book is by many degrees the greatest monument of unique though creative genius we have read for many a day, and it is with difficulty we can lay it down. Let those who would understand Blake, after studying his own letters, poems, and pictures read the wonderfully graphic and delightful extracts from Mr. Henry Crabb Robinson's journals of interviews with him. There you see the real picture of the visionary, mounted on the clear field of a shrewd, lucid, and yet genuinely literary intellect, deeply impressed with the genius of the artist. One of Mr. Robinson's anecdotes is too characteristic to be lost. he seems to need it, his cruel head and retreating forehead looking something like a man in unclosed visor, while his opened mouth When Blake in his usual visionary way, reveals a double round saw adapted to the had been telling of a spiritual interview with most horrible rending),-while Blake, we Voltaire, Mr. Robinson asked suddenly what say, is singularly great in thus imparting a language Voltaire spoke. To my sensatemporary soul to things, it is very rarely, tions," said Blake, "it was English. It was indeed, that his pictures and poems are in-like the touch of a musical key: he touched it, stinct with what we call experience. One set of his poems are called " Songs of Experience," but they are rather songs of a man revolted by the attempt to gain experience and determined not to gain it. So, too, his pictures are full of elemental symbols and thoughts and natural emotions,—but never probably, French, but to my ear it became English." The visionary, it will be seen is as acute in dodging a snare as fraud itself. It is not easy to praise too highly the finish given to the unfinished work of Mr. Gilchrist by Mr. Rossetti's artistic and poetic hand. He sums up the peculiar genius of Blake in two or three lines of such truth and beauty that we will close our notice with them. The man, he says, who can understand and enjoy Blake's pictures will gain from them "some things as he first knew them, not en "But there's a tree, of many, one, cumbered behind the days of his life; things | poetical greeting from his own highest genius too delicate for memory or years since for- as an artist:gotten; the momentary sense of spring in winter sunshine, the long sunsets long ago, and falling fires on distant hills." That is Blake's essential function,-to recall by painting, now and then by poetry,-that lost sense described by Wordsworth, which moved Blake, says Mr. Robinson, to " hysterical rapture," and well it might, for it was a A single field which I have looked upon, Doth the same tale repeat; Whither is fled the visionary gleam? the soil are planted with trees; while in the Theiss provinces only about 0·03 have any at all. By detailed statistical items the lecturer further proved incontestably the close relation of treeplantations and the distress in special counties. AMONG the communications of great interest which have recently been presented to the French Academy, M. Blanchet's continuation of his researches on the application of the catheter to diseases of the duodenum must here be recorded. The first four operations of this kind, attempted for the first time by M. Blanchet, were either to facilitate the expulsion of foreign bodies fixed in MR. WENHAM has communicated the following the digestive tube, or to remove certain intestinal note, most interesting to microscopists, to the obstructions, and re-establish the circulation of Microscopical Journal for October: "Some the contents of the intestine. The sensations ex- years ago, in one of my communications to the perienced by the patients seemed to prove suffi- society (On obtaining Photographs of Microciently that the probe had penetrated considera-scopic Objects), I mentioned the very peculiar distinctness with which markings on test-objects bly beyond the pylorus. Experiments made upon a dead subject have, in fact, shown that there were shown on the screen, and expressed my opinwas no serious difficulty in penetrating with the ion that the photographs might aid in determinsophagian probe, the duodenum, and the first ing their structure. Dr. Maddox's remark having part of the jejunum. revived this impression, I placed my microscope erism will be an assistance in the diagnosis of or- in strong sunlight, illuminated the object with ganic affections of the pylorus and of the intestine, the concave mirror and an achromatic condenser of contraction, tumors, obstructions, etc.; it will of large aperture. As a consequence, the illuallow nutritious and medicinal substances to be mination was so intense that no object could be carried below the pyloric orifice, when they canlooked at directly through the microscope, as the not be supported by the sick stomach; it will eye would not endure the light for an instant. allow of the evacuation of the gases which To look for markings was precisely like attemptsometimes accumulate in the intestine, and are ing to discern spots on the sun's disc through a productive of serious results. M. Blanchet's telescope without the protection of sun-glas fifth operation was for the purpose of introducing but, by taking the red and green glasses off any into the small intestines below the duodenum sextant (which, combined, gave a pleasant neusome nourishment for a sick person whose stom-tral tint to the sun), and laying them on the ach was incapable of taking anything. This new mode of cathet In With the achromatic This caps of the eye-pieces, the light was toned down to just the right pitch, and the markings on all the most difficult tests were easily and quickly THE eminent Hungarian agriculturalist, Ladis brought out with remarkable distinctness. laus von Korizmick, at the recent meeting of Hun-objects of extreme difficulty, the parabolic congarian physicians and naturalists in Pesth, read denser may be employed, directing the sunlight a paper on the present drought in Hungary. with the plane mirror. After first pointing out that the meteorological condenser and direct sunlight, the sap circulaconditions in 1790 were the same as those of the tion in Anacharis is beautifully shown." present year, he stated the want of plantations note of Mr. Wenham's is followed by another of trees and the unequal division of water to be from Mr. Maddox, which renders it very evident the chief reasons of this misfortune. Of the en- that this method of observation is of much more tire country of Hungary, only 22-66-at most importance than its very great simplicity would 23-parts are planted with trees, which in itself ead us to imagine. would not be so bad a proportion were the plantations not so unequally divided. In the Marmarose Comitate, for instance, about 23 parts of "DIEU le Veut Croisade pour la Pologne," by Belmontel, has appeared. |