THE TIGER
From 'Songs of Experience'
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burned that fire within thine eyes?
On what wings dared he aspire?
What the hand dared seize the fire?
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand formed thy dread feet?
What the hammer, what the chain,
Knit thy strength and forged thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
CHARLES BLANC
(1813-1882)
e have few personal details of Charles Blanc. We know that he lived in a luminous world of form and thought, a life in harmony with his work; we have books containing his conception of art; we know that art was his one absorbing passion: and this should satisfy us, for it was his own opinion that all which does not tend to illustrate an artist's conception of art is of but secondary importance in his life.
Of Franco-Italian extraction, Charles Blanc was born in Castres, France, on the 15th of November, 1813. When in 1830 he and his brother Louis, youths of eighteen and nineteen, came to Paris, their aged father, an ex-inspector of finance whose career had been ruined by the fall of Napoleon, was dependent on them for support. Louis soon procured work on a newspaper; but Charles, whose ambition from his earliest years was to become a painter, spent his days in the Louvre, or wandering about Paris looking in the old-print-shop windows, and he thus learned much that he afterwards developed in his works. As his brother's position improved, he was enabled to study drawing with Delaroche and engraving with Calamatta. His masters gave him but little encouragement, however, and he soon turned his thoughts to literature, his maiden effort being a description of the Brussels Salon of 1836 for his brother's paper.
Exquisite sensitiveness and responsiveness to beauty eminently fitted Charles Blanc for the position of art critic, and gave a charm to his earliest writings. He brought to his new task the technical knowledge of an artist, and a penetrating critical insight which, aided by study, ripened rapidly. The evidence of talent afforded by his first art criticism induced Louis Blanc to confide to him successively the editorship of several provincial papers. But Charles's inclinations were toward the calm atmosphere of art; he was, and ever remained, indifferent to politics, and looked upon the fiery, active Louis with astonishment, even while catching his energy and ambition. On his return to Paris he began a history of the 'French Painters of the Nineteenth Century,' but one volume of which appeared; and the 'Painters of All Schools,' completed in 1876. Very little was then known of the lives of the painters. By illustrating each biographical sketch with engravings of the artists' pictures, Blanc met a long-felt want. As the work was intended for the general reader, it was not overloaded with erudition: but numerous anecdotes, combined with vivacity of style, aroused interest in painting and created a public for the more purely technical works which followed. Though assisted by others in this undertaking, Blanc himself planned the method of treatment, and wrote the history of the Dutch and French schools; and the work justly retains his name.
The Socialists had taken a prominent part in the events of February, 1848, which led to the overthrow of Louis Philippe; and they yielded to the universal desire by appointing Charles Blanc Director of Fine Arts--a position which he had prophesied to his friends several years before that he would one day fill. When he assumed office, the position of artists was critical; as, owing to social convulsions, government and private orders had dwindled into insignificance. Thanks to his energy, work was resumed on public monuments, and the greater part of the sum of 900,000 francs, voted by the National Assembly for the Champs de Mars festival, was devoted to work which gave employment to a legion of decorative painters and sculptors. After the Salon of 1848, as the government coffers were depleted, he obtained 80,000 francs' worth of Sèvres porcelain from the Minister of Commerce, to give as prizes. He combated a proposition made by the Committee on Finance to suppress the Louvre studios of molding; he opposed the motion to reduce the corps of professors at the School of Fine Arts, and defended the School of Rome, threatened with suppression.