 |
Essays
on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the
Love of Mankind, Illustration by William Blake |
Crabb Robinson's interest in William Blake
extended to an effort to make Blake known in Germany. The
following article clarifies Robinson's rational for writing
his Essay for publication in a German magazine. As a
contemporary of Blake, he gave an impression of Blake as an Englishman
who shared romantic aspirations with the political and
artistic movement taking place in Germany.
This passage is from an article by Karen Junod, published
online: 06 Jul 2012 Crabb
Robinson, Blake, and Perthes's Vaterländisches Museum
(1810–1811)
"Crabb Robinson's essay on Blake was published anonymously in
the single issue of the second volume of the Vaterländisches
Museum, immediately after the review of Bouterwek's
work, thus representing a bibliographic and symbolic extension
of the latter's history of European literature. Crabb
Robinson's was the last item to be published before the
magazine's demise, and the third to be devoted to a visual
artist – the other two being Raphael and Goethe's friend,
Wilhelm Tischbein (Vaterländisches Museum 1810, 120–23
and 230–42 respectively). Crabb Robinson's piece was not the
first account of Blake in Germany. By 1789 the artist was
known well enough to be listed in Carl Heinrich von
Heinecken's Dictionnaire des artistes (1778–1790),
published in Leipzig (Heinecken iii, 3). Blake's 1797
engravings for Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–1745),
which had been circulating in Germany since approximately
1800, had also been commented upon by the novelist Jean Paul
Richter in several of his letters.9 Richter had received a
copy of Young's Night Thoughts from Emil Leopold
August, Duke of Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg, though he feigned
to ignore the identity of his benefactor (Bentley, Blake
Records 113–15).
Crabb Robinson started to think more carefully about his
piece on Blake when Perthes, whom he had met during his
second stay in Hamburg between January and September 1807,
asked him to “send him an article for a new German magazine
entitled Vaterländische Annalen” (Bentley, Blake Records
296). Crabb Robinson had just seen Blake's works at an
exhibition at 28 Broad Street, in London's Golden Square,
and had been fascinated by the talents of this “insane poet
painter & engraver” (Bentley, Blake Records
296). Years later, in his Reminiscences, Crabb
Robinson also confessed that he had been “deeply interested
by the Catalogues as well as the pictures” of Blake, and
that he therefore “took four copies” (Bentley, Blake
Records 298–99). It is this catalogue that provided
the main inspiration for his essay in the Vaterländisches
Museum, though Crabb Robinson also gleaned some
biographical details from Benjamin Heath Malkin's own
account of the artist in A Father's Memoirs of his Child
(1806) and from Henry Fuseli's introduction to the 1808
edition of Blair's Grave. The essay was originally
written in English and was subsequently translated into
German by a certain Dr Julius, a doctor and friend of
Perthes with whom he co-edited the Vaterländisches
Museum (Wright 138–39).
Crabb Robinson acknowledged that the primary goal of his
essay was to make Blake “as well known as possible,” though
he did confess that he knew “too little of his history to
claim to give a complete account of his life” (Bentley, Blake
Records 601 and 594). Crabb Robinson's modest
rhetorical style further surfaces in the assertion that his
piece had “nothing in it of the least value” (Bentley, Blake
Records 594). Crabb Robinson's self-effacing
conviction may have partly stemmed from the fact that his
observations were based entirely on Blake's texts and
pictures; they did not include any personal details on the
artist, whom the writer had not yet met in person.
Introduced by an epigraph from Shakespeare's Midsummer
Night's Dream – “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
/ Are of imagination all compact,” – Crabb Robinson's essay
quickly moves on to some fleeting observations about the
complex yet “attractive” (Bentley, Blake Records
594) union of genius and madness. Crabb Robinson manifestly
saw Blake as an unusual artist and individual, describing
him as the most prominent and representative member in the
whole race of “ecstatics, mystics, seers of visions, and
dreamers of dreams” (Bentley, Blake Records 594).
Throughout the essay, Crabb Robinson underlines Blake's
eccentric singularity and his stubbornness in following his
own artistic path. He believes that the painter's emerging
genius is distinguished by its lack of interest and concern
for the “usual, ordinary employment” (Bentley, Blake
Records 595) of his friends and fellow artists.
Although Crabb Robinson views Blake's artistic deviance and
his obstinate wish for aesthetic independence as a sign of
strength and superior talent, he also believes that the
artist's insistence on self-reliance was a decisive element
in keeping him confined to relative obscurity, especially at
the beginning of his career.
Throughout, Crabb Robinson's essay combines aesthetic
judgement and factual information; it includes details about
Blake's birth in London, his apprenticeship with the
engraver James Basire, his passion for Gothic architecture,
his drawing excursions to Westminster Abbey, and his
activity as a collector of engravings (Bentley, Blake
Records 594). The main bulk of his piece, however,
focuses on describing the technique and the meaning of
Blake's art and poetry. Several paragraphs are devoted to
Blake's linear designs: “His greatest enjoyment,” Crabb
Robinson writes, “consists in giving bodily form to
spiritual essence” (Bentley, Blake Records 597).
Crabb Robinson interprets Blake's intercourse with the
spiritual world as congruent with that of Emanuel
Swedenborg, whom Crabb Robinson sees as a direct source of
inspiration for the artist. The author's commentaries on
Blake's pictures and linear style are articulated in the
idiom of a connoisseur. His disapproval of Blake's sweeping
condemnation of the Dutch and Venetian masters – whom the
artist qualifies as “most cruel . . . and most outrageous
demons” (Bentley, Blake Records 596) – also
testifies to Crabb Robinson's knowledge of the visual arts
and his understanding of contemporary aesthetic currents.
The remarks Crabb Robinson makes about Blake's poetic
activities are less powerful. Although he admits that
Blake's “poems breathe the same spirit and are distinguished
by the same peculiarities as his drawings and his critical
prose” (Bentley, Blake Records 600), he believes
that the metre of the poems included in the Poetical
Sketches “is usually [so] loose and careless as to
betray a total ignorance of the art.” Nonetheless, Crabb
Robinson admits that “there is a wildness and loftiness of
imagination in certain dramatic fragments which testifies to
genuine poetical feeling” (Bentley, Blake Records
600–1). Several poems are inserted in the essay, in the
original and in translation, including “To the Muses,” the
“Introduction” from the Songs of Innocence, “Holy
Thursday,” “The Tyger,” and “The Garden of Love.” Crabb
Robinson's critical appreciation of these texts usually
consists of brief, undeveloped commentaries: whilst he
believes that Blake's Songs of Innocence are
“child-like songs of the greatest beauty and simplicity,” he
remains puzzled as to the significance of Songs of
Experience, which he reads as “metaphysical riddles
and mystical allegories” (Bentley, Blake Records
601).10 Crabb Robinson also
confesses his inability to give a sufficient account of
several poems, including Europe, Prophecy,
and America, which he finds are too “obscure . . .
mysterious and incomprehensible” (Bentley, Blake Records
602).
Significantly, Crabb Robinson concludes his essay by
emphasizing the German character of Blake's art and poetry
and the appropriateness of his subject for a German
periodical. Crabb Robinson clearly counted upon a more
widespread appreciation in Germany for the mystery and
obscurity surrounding Blake's personality and work – an
obscurity, he adds in his essay, “which one would expect
from a German rather than an Englishman,” and which
“assuredly cannot lessen the interest which all men, Germans
in a higher degree even than Englishmen, must take in the
contemplation of such a character” (Bentley, Blake
Records 603). Crabb Robinson's evaluation was the
first of a long series of other statements that have
acknowledged the proximity between Blake's aesthetics and
those of the German Frühromantik.11 Blake's affinities with
his German contemporaries were certainly no coincidence. If
such affinities might be attributed to parallel developments
from similar literary, visual, and philosophical sources,
including Jacob Boehme, they were also the result of several
direct encounters with Henry Fuseli and Johann Jacob
Lavater, whose frontispiece to the Aphorisms on Man
(1789) Blake engraved.12 In Lavater's work, in
particular, Blake had found support for his more
transcendental and idealistic tendencies, and his belief
that external, physionomical appearances reflect internal
realities (Earle).
...
Like Runge, Blake was highly inspired by
Flaxman's purified designs. In fact, Blake's belief in the
primacy of the line at the expense of colours resurfaces in
Crabb Robinson's own essay, when the latter writes about
Blake's disparagement of the Venetian and Flemish schools.
Crabb Robinson's further reference to one of Blake's aesthetic
“doctrines,” namely that “The great and golden rule of art, as
well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and
wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art”
(Bentley, Blake Records 596) emphasises the redemptive
function of the line and its defining role in the concept of
art and life. Crabb Robinson's observation, quoted above, that
Blake's greatest enjoyment consisted “in giving bodily form to
spiritual essence” (Bentley, Blake Records 597) is
another instance in the essay which underpins Blake's
conviction as to the metaphorical associations that link the
line with human identity.20 Blake's own designs for
his Songs of Innocence and of Experience include many
linear shapes, which Crabb Robinson describes as either forms
resembling “monstrous hieroglyphs of the Egyptians” or,
paradoxically, as “not ungraceful arabesques” (Bentley, Blake
Records 601).Anglo-German Connections and Common
Language
......
If we bear in mind the cultural and political context in
which Perthes's magazine was published, the decision to
include Crabb Robinson's piece on Blake in the Vaterländisches
Museum may appear less surprising than at first
sight. The text, with its implicit and explicit references
to the Germanic character of Blake's art and poetry,
underpinned Perthes's aim to promote Germanic art,
literature, and culture, indeed to keep alive and
strengthen the Germanic spirit among his readers. Besides
Blake's aesthetic affinities with Runge, and Crabb
Robinson's overt admission of the Germanic-ness of his
subject at the end of his essay, other, perhaps more
oblique, references in his article underline the close
connections between England and Germany. Having
acknowledged that among Blake's “aberrations,” there were
also “gleams of reason” (Bentley, Blake Records
598), Crabb Robinson writes that “The Protestant author of
Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders
created the character of a Catholic in whom religion and
love of art are mixed into one essence, and this same
person, remarkably enough, has turned up in Protestant
England” (Bentley, Blake Records 599). Crabb
Robinson's allusion to Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder's
influential book (first published anonymously in Berlin in
1797) is particularly significant for several reasons. Not
only does it identify Blake as the English re-incarnation
of a fictive German artist who succeeded in producing an
art that was the product of both emotional feelings and
religious devotion – a characteristic, as we have seen,
essential for Pietists like Runge and Perthes:21 significantly, Crabb
Robinson's reference to Wackenroder's Herzensergiessungen
is also an allusive reference to medieval art and
literature, and especially to the “sacred” Albrecht Dürer.
In truth, Wackenroder's assessment of Dürer was
instrumental in changing certain views that
eighteenth-century critics had articulated about the
artist, including his provincialism and his desire to
remain in Germany (Sanford 446). Rather than interpreting
Dürer's localism as a lack of artistic ambition,
Wackenroder presented Dürer's provincialism as a laudable
mark of national pride.
In his biographical essay, Crabb Robinson specifically
singles out Dürer as one of Blake's idols.22 The implicit and
explicit presence of Dürer in Crabb Robinson's piece was
thus highly symbolic: on the one hand, it underpinned the
patriotic message of Perthes's magazine (Dürer, we
remember, acquired his iconic status during the rise of
German nationalism); on the other hand, however, by its
transfer of the protagonist of the Herzensergiessungen
from Germany to England, it simultaneously undermined and
neutralized the more nationalistic element latent in the Herzensergiessungen
and relocated Dürer within a more international and
cosmopolitan environment.
...
Conclusion
Clearly, Perthes's Vaterländisches Museum
negotiated the binary and antagonistic impulses between
nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between the local and the
general, between the German and the Germanic. Although
Perthes's periodical served political and nationalistic
ends in its effort to infuse a sense of power and
self-confidence into its readers and stir them into
action, the Vaterländisches Museum still in some
measure espoused the cosmopolitan outlook of the time,
putting forward the idea that all human beings belong to
the human community.
Within such a political and cultural framework, Crabb
Robinson's piece on Blake articulated the very tension
with which Perthes was dealing. Implicitly as well as
explicitly, Blake emerged as a figure that channelled
Perthes's conflicting loyalties. Interestingly, the format
of the periodical itself and the position of Crabb
Robinson's essay, sandwiched as it was between the review
of Bouterwek's Von der neuesten englischen Poesie
and the Schluss-Anmerkung, moulded Blake's
reputation in two reconcilable ways: not only did it
present him as a figure whose art contained and could
transmit elements of German culture and German identity,
but at the same time it also introduced the English poet
as a quintessentially cosmopolitan artist, a man speaking
a language that went beyond borders and beyond
nationalities.
The initial success of Perthes's periodical exceeded all
expectations. It was, however, short-lived. Only one year
after its first issue, in 1811, the Vaterländisches
Museum ceased publication. The purpose and ideals at
the core of Perthes' project were suddenly dashed by
Napoleon's annexation of Hamburg to the French Empire in
1811. Indeed, Perthes argued that because he no longer had
a “Vaterland,” there could be no Vaterländisches
Museum anymore. Deeply affected by the turn of
political events, and increasingly aware of the dangers of
pursuing his publishing activities, Perthes brought the
publication of his journal to an end."
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 27, (E 44)
A Song of Liberty
15. Down rushd beating his wings in vain the jealous king: his
grey brow'd councellors, thunderous warriors, curl'd veterans,
among helms, and shields, and chariots horses, elephants:
banners, castles, slings and rocks,
16. Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona's
dens.
17. All night beneath the ruins, then their sullen flames faded
emerge round the gloomy king,
18. With thunder and fire: leading his starry hosts thro' the
waste wilderness he promulgates his ten commands,
glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay,
19. Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the
morning plumes her golden breast,
20. Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony
law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night,
crying
Empire is no more! and now the lion & wolf shall cease.
Chorus
Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn, no longer in deadly
black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy. Nor his accepted
brethren whom, tyrant, he calls free; lay the bound or build the
roof. Nor pale religious letchery call that virginity, that
wishes but acts not!
For every thing that lives is Holy"
