Joseph Blanco White was born in Seville, Spain, July 11, 1775. He was educated for the priesthood, and was ordained in 1799. But he left the communion of the Roman Church a few years later, and in 1810 went to England, where he united with the Anglican Church. In London he edited with great ability a monthly entitled El Español, which was discontinued at the close of the Peninsular war in 1814, and thereafter White enjoyed a government pension of £250. He edited Las Variedades, a Spanish quarterly, in 1822–25, and the “London Review” in 1829. His publications in book form were: “Letters from Spain,” 1822; “Practical and Internal Evidence against Catholicism,” 1825; “The Poor Man’s Preservative against Popery,” 1825; and “Second Travels of an Irish Gentleman in Search of a Religion,” as an answer to Moore’s, 1833. He removed to Liverpool in 1839, and died there May 20, 1841. His autobiography, with selections from his correspondence, edited by J. H. Thorn, appeared in 1845.

Personal

  He is remarkably intelligent, and his conversation peculiarly prepossessing. He expresses himself with force and fluency such as one rarely hears from a native Englishman, with the slightest tinge of foreign accent.

  The full value of this Autobiography for those who will study it as the religious history of an individual man, endowed with the noblest qualities of Intellect and Heart, but placed in circumstances the most fitted to suppress and limit the natural character. Of the countless thousands similarly situated, how few have burst their original chains, or, if they have seen light, have come forth out of their circumstances to announce the truth of their souls! The history of one who stands out, and by individual veracity attracts the notice of mankind, should, and on grounds altogether apart from religious dogmas or doubtful controversies, be as precious to the world as Martyr’s blood…. So little, indeed, did some of his former friends who had stereotyped their minds, understand his true nature, that they commonly described him as a man intellectually unsteady, fickle, and apt to change. It was a libel. Every page of these “Memoirs” will disprove it, and show that his affections would have made him a Conservative in every thing,—that Honesty, not speculativeness, enforced each change,—that he never stepped off any old ground of Faith, until he could no longer stand upon it without moral culpability, and that he never moved away from old friendships at all.

  Such a life as Mr. Blanco White’s is, in a minor way, a blow struck at Christianity, and a blow which will not be unfelt, perhaps, in some quarters. Christianity has had many blows struck at it in the course of its earthly career, and more than one in this country within the last century. Hume’s argument against miracles was a blow; Gibbon’s Roman History was a blow. Christianity simply received them, allowed them to tell and have influence upon this or that portion of society, and went on its way. A feebler blow in the same direction is Mr. Blanco White’s autobiography. His mind is a deep, narrow well, out of which infidelity springs up with wonderful genuineness and life. The infidel objection he raises has a clearness and transparency which can result only from the reality of the thought in his mind. It is surprising to see the old objection which Butler’s Analogy has long ago dealt with, and which one thought had now had its day, springing up again with the freshness of life, and with as seemingly clear a sensation of its unanswerableness as if the fountain-head of truth itself were speaking. In this light the present autobiography is not an unimportant book.

  We cannot then entertain the smallest confidence that, if he had been permitted a few more years of mental activity, he would not have crushed into dust the fragments of belief, which at the period of his death had not yet been decomposed. In that case, the warning which he has left behind him, written by the dispensation of Providence for our learning, would have been even more forcible, but the picture itself would have been in proportion more grievous. And truly, as it is, it has abundant power both to convey instruction and to excite pity. As to the last, what can be more deeply moving than to see one who was endowed from birth upwards with more than an ordinary share of the best worldly goods, and dedicated to the immediate service of God, after he has once fallen into atheism and has been recovered from it, again loosened from his hold, tossed about by every wind of doctrine, pursuing in turn a series of idle phantoms, each more shadowy than that which it succeeds, and terminating his course in a spiritual solitude and darkness absolutely unrelieved but for one single star, and that too of flickering and waning light? And all this under the dismal delusion that he has been a discoverer of truth—that he has been elected from among men to this nakedness and destitution—that with the multitude of his accumulating errors he has acquired a weight of authority, increasing in proportion to the years which he has consumed in weaving the meshes that entangle him.

  I cannot remember who it was that introduced me to Mr. White, or more correctly to M. Blanco, he having adopted the name of “White,” which is merely the transition of his Spanish name Blanco, but I remember that I called upon him for some purpose, the object of which I have forgotten. He resided in lodgings at Chelsea. I found him pale, almost sickly-looking, dressed in black, with much of the character of a Roman Catholic priest. He spoke English well, telling me he had persevered in thinking in that language in place of his own Spanish tongue for the space of several years. There was a character of unhappiness, if not querulousness, depicted in his countenance, and he had much of the peculiar bearing which is characteristic of his countrymen,—that gravity which we attach unconsciously to the hero of Cervantes’s immortal satire. I may be mistaken, but, if I recollect aright, he said his mother was an Englishwoman.

  Every Oriel man of that day may look back with regret at the little use made of what was really the very interesting episode of Blanco White’s connection and residence…. He was really incapable of rest and composure, for his head and heart alike were in a continual flutter and turmoil, and his memory was heavily charged with painful sores. He had probably never enjoyed a day’s thorough rest, or a night’s uninterrupted sleep, in his life. A small bottle of cayenne pepper, of exceptional pungency, the gift of some city friend, was his inseparable companion at dinners, and without it his digestion was powerless even for the plainest food…. He was the most sensitive of men, and, as is often the case with such men he seemed doomed to small annoyances…. Nothing could exceed Blanco White’s kindness to those who would receive favors from him, seek information, and show that they valued his opinion. He might have been happy in a world of such cases as long as the illusion lasted or the performances could be kept up.

General

  The finest and most grandly conceived Sonnet [“Night and Death”] in our Language,—(at least, it is only in Milton’s and in Wordsworth’s Sonnets that I recollect any rival).

  Poor Blanco White’s book has at length appeared: that is, his first book. I suppose after his death there will be a second. It is as bad as can be. He evidently wishes to be attacked. I hope as far as possible he will be let alone; it will do him most good. He is not contented till he is talked about, and he has a morbid pleasure in being abused.

  We do not say that Blanco White’s is not a deep mind—far from it; but a literary and a dilettante mind may easily be a deep one. There are different kinds of depth—of real depth. Blanco White has one kind, not the most solid. His mind is a penetrating, but not a large one. He perforates, but he does not spread; he grasps particular ideas very tight, but does not take in a field of balance and comparison. He dips under, and comes up again; he disappears, and comes up instantly in the same place; he brings up something solid with him from the metaphysical bottom, but he has not stayed there long enough to see its large and awful extent. He is content with seeing very clearly and pointedly what he does see, and does not feel the enlarging swell and movement of the inner mind, which suspects narrowness, and wants to have as many ideas under its eye at a time as possible—to think as many things at once as possible. We mention it more as a philosophical than a moral fault in him, that he is far too satisfied with the mere clearness of an intellectual view, and luxuriates in metaphysical point and local accuracy.

  The “Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy” contain many just, instructive, and profound suggestions, and show that the author’s mind, in regard to the subjects here treated of, has been continually advancing. But, we regret to say, it is less likely to be generally read, or generally popular even among those by whom it is read, than either of his preceding works; partly from the nature of the topics, and partly also from an apparent want of a close and logical connexion in the train of ideas, and of a clear and distinct apprehension of the leading and fundamental idea to be enforced.

  Blanco White—half English, half Spanish by descent—was one of the most striking cases I have known of “that painful thinking which corrodes the clay.” He lived in an atmosphere of doubts and gloomy thoughts, all directed to religious questions and the destinies of man. His writings and the acts of his life show, what his countenance and conversation well depictured, the unceasing and painful restlessness of his mind on these topics. He sent for me frequently; but the inborn temperament of the man was too strong to allow of remedy, and any relief I could give was speedily lost in the chaos of changeful thoughts and speculations, which haunted him to the hour of his death. The persistent kindness of Archbishop Whately to Blanco White, in spite of some obloquy incurred thereby, was one of the many traits which do honour to the memory of that excellent but eccentric prelate.

  Blanco White would make an interesting study by himself, with all his spiritual vicissitudes and pathetic ways…. Influenced in some degree he must have been, for he was the most sensitive and radiating of mortals, either giving or receiving light every day of his life. But curious and touching as he is in himself, I have failed to trace any definite impulse communicated by him to the Oriel School, or even to the religious thought of his time. Like many other men who have been trained in close systems of thought, when the spirit of doubt was awakened in him, he merely fell out of one system into another—Romanism, Atheism, Anglicanism, Unitarianism. He had little conception of true inquiry, or of the patience of thought which works through all layers of systems to the core of truth beneath.

  Blanco White owes an enduring fame to a single sonnet—but this sonnet is one of the noblest in any language. There is quite a “Blanco White” literature concerning the famous fourteen lines headed “Night and Death.” It is strange that the man who wrote this should do nothing else of any importance, and its composition must either have been a magnificent accident or the outcome of a not very powerful poetic impulse coming unexpectedly and in a moment to white heat, and therein exhausting itself for ever.

  Of Blanco White’s positive influence, it is not too much to say that he is the real founder of the modern Latitudinarian school in the English Church…. Blanco White’s was a much more powerful mind than Whately’s…. It is within the truth to say that but for Blanco White’s visit to Oxford, Hampden’s Bampton Lectures could never have been written.

  Eccentricities of inspiration, which sometimes result in productions that may almost be called fortuitous, occur in poetry as in other departments of art; and single poems, like single speeches and single pictures, sometimes baffle all accounting for. Of such the famous sonnet “To Night.”… is perhaps the most striking example…. He wrote little verse, and, with the exception of the sonnet on Night and Death, none that calls for remark. This sonnet Coleridge characterized as “the finest and most greatly conceived sonnet in our language;” and Leigh Hunt declared that for thought it “stands supreme perhaps above all in any language, nor can we ponder it too deeply or with too hopeful a reverence.” As Mr. Sharp pointed out … quite a Blanco-White literature has grown up around this sonnet.