Johanna Christina Emerentia Bassalik-de Vries

“ The phenomena in this world are only vague shadows of another, deeper world behind, and what we behold here are tokens and warnings, we are always surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, but whereas Blake's faith easily solves the problems which lie at the bottom of existence, Rossetti's mind cannot get at the bottom of this mystery, the feelings of tension are present, the feelings of relaxation are wanting. ”

“ The Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience, Blake's splendid sequels of lyrics, are entirely original; here the poet is altogether himself, free from any influence. It is difficult to delineate the charms, which these poems possess. They form a unity and have a mutual relation to each other and should, in order to be fully appreciated, be read as a whole. The Songs of Innocence give us glimpses of a primitive, naive world, where men and beasts alike are filled with innocent, youthful happiness and joy. ”

“ Man is law to himself. "Nor is it possible to thought a greater than itself to know". The divine human body may not be divided into two parts, body and soul, labelling the one as evil the other as good (The voices of the devil. Marriage of Heaven and Hell) . In his Books of America and Europe he expands on the triumph of free love and throughout all Blake's works we find, that he preaches free indulgence in all bodily desires, though always with a sub-idea that only in this way the spirit can be made free. ”

“ As Blake had done thirty years before, they stood up in arms against the degeneration of the English art, now in the hands of men like Wilkie, Leslie and Mulready, men who traded with cheap emotions and conventional optimism, who had no fundamental conception, no imagination, no force of expression. ”

“ As said above Dante Gabriel Rossetti has neither poems nor pictures to match these in joyfulness and lightheartedness. We always move in an atmosphere of mystery, the inscrutability of which is never lost sight of, and the melancholy and thoughts without hope which are the result of this mysterious sadness, are apparent in all his poems and pictures. This sense of sadness and mystery is not always very pronounced. Sometimes hardly definable, we merely feel that it is there ”

“ Human life is figured as a vase, sculptured with a bas-relief, representing a young man running a race, which he wins. A certain man of genius does not like others to crowd round the vase, he masters its imaged significance. He fills it with the rapid and ardent experiences of his career and at last it will hold its ashes. (William M. Rossetti) .
In many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's later sonnets we find again Blake's theory of "states". ”

“ With Flaubert, Rossetti might have said of himself: "Je suis mystique et je ne crois à rien". This lack of faith which is highly characteristic for the modern mystic in general of course, makes an essential difference between the mysticism of William Blake and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and changes all the doctrines which Rossetti took from the latter. From childhood naturally prone to the marvellous and supernatural, the mysteries of life and death were continually present to the mind of Rossetti, and it could not be but that Blake's theory of "correspondences" made a deep impression upon him. ”

“ Faith in mysticism, in supernatural agency, in heavenly inspiration, in the exulting purifying influence of the art of the visionary could not be expressed in the solid worldliness of style of the aforenamed painters, neither exist in the minds of men who accepted nothing that had not been sufficiently proved. For Blake to whom "imagination was the principal goddess" this was ample reason for violent hatred. It was not against the art itself of those painters he revolted, but against the meaning and influence of it. ”

“ Blake found that the typical in art had a higher effect on the mind than the individual; this he sees in Raphael and Michael-Angelo, while in Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt he sees the individual, the form of the model who sat for the pictures. Further he accuses those painters of generalizing viz. of an arrangement of effects of colouring, texture and shadow so put together as to prevent a picture to present clearly its individual parts, limbs or features. This last fault he thinks no oil-painting escapes, hence his preference for water colours and drawings. ”

“ The principal doctrine which Blake never abandoned, which was more and more approved of by his imagination, which was constantly affirmed by his visions, changed every idea that he otherwise would have found in religion, and affected the standard of his poetry, was Swedenborg's doctrine of universal correspondence. This theory teaches that bodies are the generation and expression of souls; it makes all things into signs as well as powers, and the smallest things as well as the greatest are omens, warnings, and instructions. ”

“ In his youth Blake racked his mind over the riddle of human existence. In the Book of Thel, which forms a transition between his lyrical poems and his prophetic books, he laments the limitations of the flesh. All other animate and inanimate things seem happy in the conscious discharge of their earthly duties; why does man alone suffer from a perversion of the senses by some tyrannical law? ”

“ Soon however this spirit of doubt is taken from Blake. The immemorial struggle between the body and the soul, the man principle and the woman principle, Satan and the redeeming powers, the cause of all human suffering is the result of the fall of mankind; a fall from a hermaphroditic state into generative life, from the kingdom of Imagination, the celestial, into the natural world, the vegetative. This division of mankind into sexual life tended to a closing up of men into separate selfhoods ”

“ But though Blake stood up against untruth and conventionality in art, his too fantastical mind and the unfortunate outward circumstances of his life were the cause, that he could not change the current conception about art; the genius of Rossetti was wanted to mould his ideas into proper form and have them accepted by a large circle of artists. ”

“ In these Blake illustrates in a beautiful allegory one of his favourite doctrines viz. the physical nature has a right to be indulged in. It is true, and this holds good for Blake's Songs of Experience in general, that we do not easily catch the meaning of these poems; but then the language is so musical, the rhymes are so natural and profuse, the bold images so highly imaginative, that we feel that here we read true poetry of the highest kind. ”

“ Never once he despaired of his mission, never he doubted of the heavenly origin of his visions, or of his writings. "I may praise them, since I dare not pretend to be other than the secretary, the authors are in Eternity", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts 1802 about the Prophetic books. And though poverty and want are at his door, he never makes concessions in order to see his books printed and earn a little money. With infinite patience and care he continues writing down his weird fancies and illuminating them with his fantastic drawings. ”

“ It is interesting to see how he tries all different styles of painting and of colouring and slowly through many phases finds the way of expressing his emotions and ideas best fitted to his exotic genius, and gives us that strange series of half and three-quarter length female figures which to most people are all that is meant in art by the name of Rossetti. ”

“ Rossetti was a painter of imagination from the very first of his artistic career. The idea that the art of his day, in order to rise from its low ebb, ought to be brought into contact again with the world of intellectual and emotional ideals Rossetti found in Blake's doctrines on art and in his works. This idea he adopted enthusiastically from the very first, and never abandoned it throughout his life. Hence the relatively small attention he pays to technical shortcomings in his paintings. Always the idea predominates over the matter; actions are allowed to appear as strained ”

“ He begins to paint "emotions", "states", and whereas Blake found as representatives for his "states" the male and female figures, Rossetti took the figure of woman alone. In a world where everything else might be a shadow, the physical beauty of woman formed a solid basis of reality, and was accepted by Rossetti as the centre from which all emotions proceed. ”

“ A male, naked figure descends from above; just alighted, he with one foot touches the earth; a flood of radiance still encircles his head; his arms are outspread, exultingly he brings joy and solace to this lower world, announcing the birth of a new day, full of glory. ”

“ This voluntary seclusion of a man so highly imaginative as Blake of course had as a result, that he altogether lost contact with the world. He simply writes down his abstract fancies as he sees them before his mental eye, never troubling himself with the thoughts of the impression these fancies would make on the minds of other persons. ”

“ It must not be forgotten at what a low ebb the English art of the beginning of the nineteenth century was, and how difficult a position Blake had taken up against the current ideas of conventionalism.
As landscape painters we find Callcott, Thomas Creswick, Stanfield and Frederick Lee, all good executants but not free from artificiality. ”

“ In nearly all his poems he sings of love in one of its many aspects; in the "Songs of Innocence" the divine love is dwelled upon in The Lamb, The Divine Image, On Another's Sorrow. In the Songs of Experience Love appears in its earthly garb, the temptations and struggles of love are put forth. ”

“ When considering the influence of Blake's literary productions, I found that it was greatly surpassed by Blake's influence as a philosopher and also that the works of several other poets made as deep or perhaps a deeper impression on the mind of Rossetti. In the first place Dante must be named here, whose sonnets' sequel "Vita Nuova" was translated by Rossetti and greatly influenced the sonnets of The House of Life. Further I found the influence of the Italian poet Cavalcanti [12] (namely in Rossetti's Italian songs) ”

“ Here Rossetti follows Blake in representing the good part of the emotion as a female (In one more instance we find this in his works, viz. in the mystic story "Hand and Soul", where the "emanation" of the human body, the soul, visits a young painter in the form of a woman) . ”

“ Indeed, beyond the mere acknowledgement that such an influence did exist I found nowhere a single effort for a somewhat thorough investigation. I think that it suffices for this purpose when I show the influence Blake has exercised on Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Not because he was the greatest of the Praeraphaelites, [3] for indeed G. F. Watts [4] far excelled him as a painter, creating new myths, whereas Rossetti's genius concentrated itself principally in the reproduction of single female figures; Robert Browning was a greater poet ”

“ It has the hard outline and glowing colours of the quattrocento paintings, at the same time the dreadful spiritual love of Isabella hints, though it has an awful ascetic power, at the perversity of E. A. Poe, or perhaps O. Wilde's Salome. ”

“ Like German Romanticism the Praeraphaelitic movement was a revolt against the prosaic acceptance, pseudo-classicism, and thoughtless imitation of the foregoing century, and as such, as it were an aftergrowth of the great romantic school in Germany, its distinguishing feature was its mysticism, which can be traced through all the works of the Praeraphaelites, be they literary or artistic. ”

“ Besides this drawing many others of Rossetti use Blake's way of expressing emotions or ideas. In a water colour "The Gate of Memory" a woman half hidden behind a pillar sees the past years of her life before her in the figures of ever so many maidens. The same allegorical image Blake uses in one of his illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts where a virtuous old man converses with the past hours of his life, some of the hours, winged females, bring their report to heaven, others crowd around him. ”

“ We find in these works a great preference for the Gothic style; Blake, in 1773, when an apprentice to Basire, the engraver, had been sent to make drawings in Westminister Abbey. For five years he was occupied in copying the monuments of the Abbey, and his love for the Gothic style never left him during all his life. "Gothic" he would say "is living form". Nowhere he has given more perfect expression ol his love for it than in his Illustrations of the Book of Job. ”

“ We hear of social gatherings, where the wits of the day, the modish painters and dramatists united in brillant "conversazione". They are now forgotten these literary luminaries of those days; even their names, should I enumerate them, would sound meaningless. ”

“ And gradually there appear the long row of three-quarter length portraits in water-colours and oil paint, or in crayon which all of them represent as many "Stimmungen", all of them are as many personified "states". There is an unmistakable likeness between them, (do not all "emotions" resemble each other more or less?) ”

“ Exactly as in Blake's lyrics, a profuse use of alliteration has been made; we also find the repetition of the same words, the same phrases or occasionally the same stanzas. Of Rossetti's use of alliteration I will not give examples, as there are hardly any poems in which no alliterative lines occur. ”

“ Joseph Knight [15] speaks of Rossetti being inspired when writing this poem by the pictures of the early Italian painters; even if these influences do exist they are very vague; far more real is in this instance Blake's influence; here indeed Rossetti owes much to this author.
We find in this poem, that physical facts have been introduced in an abstract subject, a very bold thing to do which Rossetti achieved with splendid tact. The Blessed Damozel is represented as standing on the rampart of Heaven; she sees the souls pass by her like thin flames, and ”