From Blackwood's Magazine.
ILLUSTRATION.

fore, we should say, without the possession of it; for an apt illustration, an exquisite simile, will out if it flashes into the brain. There is a certain concentration in the matter in hand-the scene, the situation

PERHAPS there is no intellectual gift that conveys a greater sense of power than that of ready and felicitous illustration, or one that wins its possessor a more which stands the writer instead of any undisputed pre-eminence. It is one of other gift, and dispenses with all ornathose points on which it may be said that ment. This, we should say, is the case all people know themselves, and are forced with Mr. Trollope, whose metaphor, when to acknowledge a superior. A man may he uses it, is from the open, acknowledged, talk nonsense and not know it, or write familiar stock of all mankind; and recommonplace in full persuasion that he is markably with Miss Austen, in whose original, or uphold his fallacies against the whole range of writings no original figure conclusions of the ablest logician; but he occurs to us, unless it be Henry Tilney's cannot help knowing when he is no hand ingenious parallel between partners in at an illustration. There is no room for matrimony and partners in a countryself-delusion or rivalry. Not only does it dance. Her experienee probably prenot come readily, but he beats his brain sented her with no example of ready illusfor it in vain. It would be a curious in- tration, and she painted men and women quiry how many men live and die, re- as she found them, making a failure when spected and useful members of society too, she tried; like Lydia Bennet, who flourwithout once hitting off a happy simile. ished her hand with its wedding-ring, and We are convinced they would immeasura- "smiled like anything;" or, adding tritebly outnumber that formidable array of ness to common dulness, as in Mr. Collins, figures telling the difference between the whose letter found favour with Mary; sexes, which causes so much anxiety in the the idea of the olive-branch is not wholly present day. Of course it is competent to new, but I think it is well expressed." people to say that they do not care for When we say that most men are without illustration that it proves nothing. the gift in question, it is obvious that we that it is a mere "toy of thought," inter- mean of original illustration. Only a fering with and often perplexing the busi- poet could first invest Time with wings; Less of reason and action; but whether but we talk of the flight of time now withwe like ourselves as well without this out pretending to any share of his gift. faculty or not, it is impossible not to en- There are certain figures incorporated joy its exercise in another. We may in the language which we cannot speak treat it as a superfluity; it may lack the without using. We are all poetical by solid satisfaction of reason and demon- proxy. Such common property is the stration, and be only like the nard pistic imagery connected with sunrise and the Jeremy Taylor talks of, the perfume of dawn; sunset and twilight; sun, moon, which is very delightful when the box is stars, and comets; lightning and storm; newly broken, but the want of it is no seas, rivers, frost, and dew; the road, the trouble we are well enough without it; "path, the ladder; the rose, the lily, and but the sudden fresh fragrance is not the the violet; the dying lamp and its exless delicious while it lasts, and invigorat- tinguisher; angels, the grave; the lion, ing to the spirits.

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the tiger, the wolf, and the lamb; the We use the word illustration as em- eagle, the dove, and the parrot; the goose bracing the widest field, and including the and the monkey. But indeed the list of whole figurative machinery of fancy and incorporated metaphor is endless, and it imagination — metaphor, simile, imagery, has required a real poet these several figure, comparison, impersonation - in hundred years past to hit off anything fact, every method of elucidation through new out of the subjects of it. But they their agency. Of course invention may be are all capable in his hands of a sudden actively and delightfully employed without illumination, of figuring in new characany use of this charming gift, and there- ters, of imparting the surprise which is the

-

very essence of the illustration proper.
And once a surprise is always a surprise
- that is, the flash in the poet's mind
plays and coruscates round it always. We
may weary of the hackneyed use of it; in
dull hands it may sound stale; but no
taint destroys the first freshness when we
come upon it in its right place. There it
still delights us to read how

"The weak wanton Cupid
Shall from your neck unloose his amorous fold,
And like a dew-drop from the lion's mane
Be shook to air."

"And wildly dash'd on tower and tree,

The sunbeam strikes along the world."

The grandeur of the comparison when These images and epithets are all obPandemonium rose like an exhalation, vious enough as we read them, but in their never sinks to common-place. The sug place, we recognize them as the poet's gestions of what is noble, beautiful, and own coinage. There is no borrowed air familiar in nature, are really endless, how about them. Byron tinges opening and ever the soil may seem exhausted to closing day with his own spleen and disprosaic minds, which are yet quite capable content, and makes them sentimental, of being freshened into awakened interest when he throws upon their shoulders the by a new epithet or an original collision task of making life just bearable. After a of ideas, revealing some undiscovered lovely description of sunset, wit its transympathy with human feeling. Every sient glories, his own temper speaks in the poet adds something to the common stock person of Myrrha in Sardanapalus," of imagery, and so enlarges our percep"And yet tions. Shakespeare, on saluting a beautiful woman as Day of the World, quickens our sense of beauty alike in nature and in man. It needed imagination first to affix the idea of sovereignty to the morning, but it was at once adopted by the general mind

"Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain-tops with sovran eye." Wordsworth first endued it with "innocence," in which we own an equal fit

ness

"The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet."

Often as the dawn comes round, we do not know that anybody has called it confident before Mr. Browning in his "Lost Leader": :

And blends itself into the soul, until
It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul,
Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love; which they who mark

not

Know not the realms where those twin genii

.. build the palaces,

Where their fond votaries repose and breathe
Briefly; but in that brief cool calm inhale
Enough of heaven to enable them to bear
The rest of common, heavy, human hours,
And dream them through in placid sufferance."

The fitness of a metaphor to its place may give novelty to the most familiar analogies —

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Put out the light, and then put out the light." When the Ancient Mariner tells his unwilling hearer, “I pass like night from land to land," he imparts to matter-of-fact

"Life's night begins: let him never come back minds a newly-conceived mystery of mo

to us,

There would be doubt, hesitation, and pain; Forced praise on our part, the glimmer of twilights,

Never glad confident morning again."

Or associated dew with the memory as
Mr. Tennyson does

tion to the most familiar of nature's phenomena. Nothing is more common than to liken girlish beauty to the rose; but, nevertheless, George Eliot's picture of Hetty awakes a more lively and amused sense of the fitness of the simile-"If ever a girl was made of roses, it was Hetty

that Sunday morning;" and familiar as world, perfectly familiar with the little the type of the road is as conveying a cares, the homely objects, the minor pleasmoral, we find no triteness in Crabbe ures, troubles, inconveniencies, which bewhen, satirizing the learning-made-easy set ordinary humanity, and taking them of some teachers of his day, he clenches it

with

Illustration is an amiable gift - amiable at least to the reader. It seeks constantly to relieve the tedium of attention and fixed thought. It is modest, and labours to save him the irksomeness of elaborate demonstration.

It renders things clear and plain, with least trouble to ourselves, and throws in a good thing into the bargain. Constantly, indeed, it is a necessity. We can know some things only through vivid illustration. How, for instance, can a stay-at-home receive any idea of the Stourbach but through such a picture as Tennyson draws of

in precisely the same spirit. In his discourse on fanatical scruples of conscience, “And some to Heaven itself their byway know." it is very agreeable, for instance, to find Jeremy Taylor illustrating a deep quesNothing is so trite through other men's tion of casuistry by a simile open to the use that it may not be invested with new comprehension of every man, woman, and qualities, or brightened with renewed child who has ever worn a shoe. Scruples, glory by the poet; but in speaking of he says, are like a stone in the shoe if illustration, of course we more particularly you put your foot down it hurts you; if mean a fresh coinage altogether - that you lift it up you cannot go on. Its apthappy fit and neat adjustment of things ness, allied to its homeliness, tickles the not coupled together before, which brings fancy like wit. No subject can be dull the matter illustrated with sudden force under such handling. to the reader or hearer. The gift of doing this implies very wide powers, and unremitting industry in the use of them: an activity of observation possessed by very few; a lifelong habit of taking in what passes before eyes and ears and reasoning upon them; an exceptional memory, and method in the training of it. What the illustrator observes he arranges in his mind, storing its treasures on a system which can produce them at the right moment. Most of us have an illustration to the point if we could find it; but our minds, even if they be busy' ones, are furnished too much on the plan, or want of plan, of Dominie Sampson's - stowed with goods of every description, like a pawnbroker's shop, but so cumbrously Its serious office is to help along an abpiled together, and in such total disorga-stract argument, to lighten and facilitate nization, that the owner can never lay his the discussion of grave topics, to adminishands on any one article at the moment ter a fillip to infirm attention, and arrest a he has occasion for it. This at least may straggling wayward fancy. Illustrations be the case with the conversational blun- don't prove a point, but they help us to derers who lead up to where they expect tide over the labour of proof, and sweeten an apt simile, tumble up and down for it, the extreme effort to most men of steady and do not find it. But a good illustrator thought. Of all gifts this secures readers has not only his attention alive and awake, for weighty and toilsome questions on morand thinks to purpose - he has sympathy als, politics, and religion; and is the only with his kind in all those fields of observa- legitimate method of lightening these, extion from which he derives his fund of cept, indeed, extreme neatness and preillustration. And this is one main bond cision of expression, which can for a time of union. We recognize a mind interested dispense with all ornament or alleviation in what interests ourselves. Nothing is whatever to the severity of the topic under more charming, for instance, than to find treatment. Locke, through an illustration, a man of genius, whose thoughts and inflicts a sense of shame on the reader who aspirations might all be supposed to circle has not thought for himself, which no reabove the heads of the common work-a-day | proof in sterner shape would impart; and

"The Alpine ledges, with their wreaths of dangling water smoke."

at the same time, by a second metaphor, gives a stimulus to endeavours. In his Preface we read: "He who has raised himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinion sets his own thoughts on work to find and follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter's satisfaction; every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with some delight, and he will have reason to think his time not ill spent, even when he cannot boast of any great acquisition."

Of passion; was obedient as a lute
That waits upon the touches of the wind."

obedience to these varying moods. When
Every object in nature takes a colour in
apostrophizing the daisy, the "wee modest
flower," he finds likenesses for it in things
most opposite. It is a nun; it is a spright-
ly maiden; it is

"A queen in crown of rubies drest, A starveling in a scanty vest." But, Protean as these resemblances may be, nothing in nature can affect the poet but through his sympathy with man. The waning moon allies itself in Bryant's mind with waning intellect.

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Shine thou for forms that once were bright,
For sages, in the mind's eclipse,

For those whose words were spells of might,
But falter now with stammering lips."

All

We have said that the illustrator habitually keeps his attention alive; but this, of course, applies only to a mind of very wide sympathies. Most people are oneeyed; half the world is a blank to themthey do not observe it. It was said of Tasso that he never departed from the woods that is, all his comparisons were taken from the country. We can imagine pity for nature's deoay and weakhim, indeed, as passing over the common ness can only arise through this unconlife of cities with eyes that saw nothing. scious comparison with the same in ourNot so with Ariosto; his verse is enlivened, selves. his story illustrated, by a hundred familiar allusions to the manners and habits of his time. One of his heroes, for example, passes from one danger to a worse, or, as it is expressed, out of the frying-pan into object, the fire. Dante has appropriate illustra-ters,

Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven,
As falls the plague on men.'

Mrs. Browning draws from the familiar -a shadow cast on running waa sad but just illustration of

tion for everything alike, when he conde- faith and constancy misplaced, thus givscends to use it, nature in its grandeur ing the key-note of the poem which it and repose, the pulpit, the studio, and the opens: workshop.

In every case, and however it is applied, metaphor may be said to be the natural link between man and the world he lives in; neither can be brought home to the feelings but through the help of the other. When nature is the theme, man's labours, his humours and passions, are necessary to give force to the picture: when man and his works occupy the front, then nature and in nature we include all that is not man and those works-is instinctively sought into for means towards that comparison and likeness the mind craves for. We all think mistily in this veia. The poet gives it expression. Thus Wordsworth, in the history of his own mind, portrays. the faculty of illustration:

"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
E'en the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life; I saw them feel,
Or linked them to some feeling:
Add that whate'er of Terror or of Love,
Or Beauty, Nature's daily face put on
From transitory passion, unto this
I was as sensitive as waters are

To the sky's influence in a kindred mood

"The lady's shadow lies

Upon the running river;
It lieth no less in its quietness
For that which resteth never,
Most like a trusting heart
Upon a passing faith,
Or as upon the course of life

The steadfast doom of death.”

It is not necessary to a poet of genius to have seen either the illustration or the thing illustrated. Milton had neither seen Satan "rear from off the pool his mighty stature," nor witnessed anything at all approaching to the convulsion of nature to which he compares the demon standing erect

"As when the force
Of subterranean wind transports a hill,
Torn from Pelorus, or the shattered side
Of thundering Etna, whose combustible
And fuell'd entrails thence conceiving fire,
Sublimed with mineral fury, aid the winds,
And leave a singèd bottom, all involved
With stench and smoke: such resting found the
sole

Of unblest feet."

Neither had Bacon's outward ear caught the tones of Greek music when he describes