Adrian Van Sinderen

If you are a book collector or a devotee of William Blake, and if you find Blake: The Mystic Genius (Syracuse UP, 1949) in a used/rare bookstore, grab it. It’s a treasure. (There are currently twenty-five copies listed with AbeBooks.com, ranging from $8 to $55.)

Why would one want a copy of this book?

Not the for the text, though the comments by the book collector Adrian Van Sinderen may be interesting to you. He begins, for instance,”To the uninitiated the book collector is a benighted being, a hobbyist, victim of an uncontrollable malady which causes him to wander from shop to shop in an admittedly innocent but slightly crazy manner in quest of first editions, unknown manuscripts, and unpublished prints.” (Mea culpa.)

Nor for the black and white reproductions of Blake’s work. Though the two pages from his Illustrations to the Book of Job are nice, that complete work is available in better reprints elsewhere.

No, what you will treasure are the color plates of Blake’s illustrations to John Milton’s poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” When I found this book almost fifty years ago (at the time, I was teaching Milton in a course surveying British literature), it turned me into a Blakean for life.

In some of Blake’s most subtle colors and lavish designs, Mirth and her companions seduced me immediately, and when the Great Sun burst upon my sight, I was captivated from that moment on. There are six designs for each poem, more or less parallel, not altogether unlike the parallels in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience.. For “L’Allegro,” there is the comely nude Mirth with her leaping, dancing, flying companions: “Jest and youthful Jollity, / Quips and Cranks, and wanton Wiles, / Nods, and Becks, and Wreathéd Smiles.” Then for “Il Penseroso,” there is the demure nun Melancholy, robed in diaphanous black, along with her companions: calm Peace, and Quiet, Spare Fast, retired Leisure, and the Cherub Contemplation. There is the Great Sun in the one and then Milton’s vision of the Moon in the other. Each poem has a poet’s dream. “L’Allegro” has a Sunshine Holiday more or less parallel in design to the Peaceful Hermitage at the end of “Il Penseroso.”

Unlike many of Blake’s other illustrations, these are almost exact, literal illustrations of the details in the poems. Even so, the designs are replete with manifestations of Blake’s fourfold vision. And occasionally the astute viewer will find Urizenic figures, Orcs emerging on the scene, emanations like Enitharmon waiting to be awakened. Reason, passion, the five senses, and the imagination all appear to be personified in archetypal forms.

But the Great Sun shines forth. No round gold coin, like a guinea, for Blake, but a young Apollonian figure, clothed in flames, accompanied by multitudes of angelic figures, stepping forward into and overpowering our world, which appears in miniature under his feet. He demands imaginative vision; he represents sense experience transformed by imaginative vision.

The color plates in the book are well reproduced. As a bonus, in addition to the texts of the two poems, there are facsimiles of Blake’s own handwritten copy with his notes on the illustrations. Of “The Young Poet’s Dream” in “L’Allegro,” for instance, Blake’s notes say, “The Youthful Poet, sleeping on a bank by the Haunted Stream by Sun Set, sees in his dream the more bright Sun of Imagination under the auspices of Shakespeare and [Ben Jonson] . . . .”

How did the American book collector Van Sinderen come to possess such a treasure? His notes quote Dr. Geoffrey Keynes, an early Blake scholar: “This series [dated with a watermark of 1816] was formerly in the collection of Thomas Butts [a contemporary, friend, and collector of Blake] and must have been among the last works which he bought from Blake. It was no doubt afterwards acquired from Butts’s son by Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, and [eventually]. . . was sold at Sotheby’s on March 30, 1903. It was then taken to America.”

Van Sinderen then continues with his own account: “The drawings became the property of Mr. Alfred T. White of Brooklyn, New York, and on his death in 1921 were inherited by his daughter, Mrs. Adrian Van Sinderen.” So. Eager to share these treasures, the Van Sinderens apparently sponsored this publication.

The last design, “The Peaceful Hermitage” pictures Milton in his old age, sitting with his book and candle in a ”Mossy Cell.” Blake’s notes proclaim that he “bursts forth into a rapturous Prophetic Strain.” Of course, this is John Milton, but could it not also be William Blake, also in his old age, sitting in his humble quarters, impoverished, unrecognized, but bursting forth among his Apostles in rapturous prophetic strains? One aware of Blake’s ambivalent attitude toward Milton can see limitations as well as threats in the scene, hints of a paradise lost as well as one, hopefully, regained. With an open but blank book under his upraised left arm and an idealisstic vision of Eden under his right, Milton looks dolefully upward to a night sky (not the Great Sun), and what he sees are the constellations dominated by a bearded Orion, with starry belt and sword held high, looking more Urizenic than one might like, with his left hand beckoning to Milton and, perhaps, to us. Prophets tell the whole story: there are lovers in Beulah land, but old Nobodaddy is always lurking somewhere nearby in the shadows.… (lisätietoja)