Page:Life of William Blake 2, Gilchrist.djvu/425

Rh of time for reading by a rational employment of the arts of illustration—the photograph and the wood engraving. We learn in a glance, nowadays, more than our forefathers learned in a page of print; yet if William Blake had lived in these days of ample opportunity his works would have been equally at a discount. He dealt with the abiding, the abstract—with the eternal, and not the fleeting, aspects of passing life. What the Book of Job is to the Cornhill Magazine, that was the mind of Blake to 'the spirit of the age.'

* * * The influence of Blake's solitary Gothic studies during his apprenticeship to Basire is traceable all through his career. While the antique is the finest school for the study of the structure of the human form in its Adamic strength and beauty, the religious sculpture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the noblest material of study for the spiritual powers of form. The faces, though not often realising much delicacy of modelling, have far more expression than in the Greek statues. There is a mingling of ascetic severity, with contemplative repose which transfuses itself into the beholder's mind, and gains upon him stealthily but surely, till he 'forgets himself to marble.' These monuments cannot be separated from the piles of wonderful architecture to which they belong. The niche in which a figure of bishop or king is placed is a portion of a great whole. It is usually adapted to its own position and lighting—a most important fact in monumental sculpture. There is a fine passage in Rogers's Italy describing the monument by Michael Angelo, where a warrior sits musing in gigantic repose under the shadow of his helmet, which casts so deep a gloom over the upper part of his face that, to the imagination of the beholder, the soul looks out of the frowning shade, and 'like a basilisk, it fascinates and is intolerable.' A cast of the same statue may be seen at the Crystal Palace, but not with the same circumstantial advantages. The ghostly fascination of that glooming shadow is gone, though much remains. The power which the statuary of one of our old