WILLIAM BLAKE

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FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”: THE LAST JUDGMENT

Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s design. 1808

WILLIAM BLAKE

A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND
ART WORK

BY
IRENE LANGRIDGE

LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1904

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

PREFACE

Some years ago, I became deeply interested in William Blake, and made myself familiar with all that our public collections in London contain of his art-work. It seemed to me that this work was still so little known and appreciated by the public, that a short book might well be written to serve as a pointer to our national Blake treasures. The standard works on Blake—Gilchrist’s Life, Mr. A. C. Swinburne’s Critical Essay, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ exhaustive volumes, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s Aldine Essay—are of great literary excellence and high critical quality, and must ever remain the great authorities on the subject; but, owing to these works being either out of print, very lengthy, very expensive, or unillustrated, a want may be supplied by, and an opportunity of usefulness open to, such a book as the present one. Different in scope as it is from any other book on Blake, and modest in aim, it deals with the poet-artist as he is manifested in those works of his which are accessible to the public.

In seeking to sketch again his artistic personality, I have been guided by the conclusions of his eminent biographers and critics wherever they coincided with my own intuitive convictions. But in the study of a character and work so out of the usual, so exotic and strange as those of Blake, unanimity of opinion and judgement is hardly to be hoped for, and the variety of points of view from which each new student sees him, may assist to the rounding and filling out of the portrait drawn in so masterly a manner in the first instance by Alexander Gilchrist.

My best thanks are due to Mr. A. B. Langridge for reading my proofs and for the photographs which he took expressly to illustrate this volume. Also to Mr. Frederic Shields for numerous acts of kindness and the loan of original Blake drawings, to Sir Charles Dilke, to Messrs. Chatto and Windus, to Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. G. K. Fortescue, and to Dr. G. C. Williamson for help given to me in various ways.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

BOOKS ON BLAKE

Binyon, Robert Laurence. “William Blake: being all his woodcuts photographically reproduced in facsimile.” London, 1902. 4^o. [The Unicorn Press: Little Engravings, No. 2.]

Cunningham, Allan. “The Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” London, 1829-33. 12^o. [Part of “The Family Library,” 6 vols.] Note: a second edition of this work was published in 1830-37, in 16^o, 6 vols.

Ellis, E. J., and Yeats, W. B. “The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical.” Edited with lithographs of the illustrated “Prophetic Books,” and a memoir and interpretation. London, B. Quaritch, 1893. 8^o. 3 vols.

Garnett (Sir) Richard. “William Blake, Painter and Poet.” London, 1895. 80 pp. folio. [“The Portfolio Monographs,” No. 22.]

Gilchrist, Alexander. “The Life of W. Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus.’” With selections from his poems and other writings. Edited by Anne Gilchrist, with the assistance of D. G. and W. M. Rossetti. London, 1863. 8^o. 2 vols. Note: a second enlarged edition was published in 1880. London, Macmillan & Co. 8^o. 2 vols.

Malkin, Thomas W. “A Father’s Memoirs of his Child.” London, 1806. 8^o.

Rossetti, W. M. “The Poetical Works of William Blake.” Edited with a prefatory memoir. London, 1874. 8^o. [“The Aldine Poets.” George Bell & Sons.]

Scott, William Bell. “Exhibition of the Works of William Blake.” With introductory memoir. London, The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1876. 4^o.

Scott, William Bell. “William Blake.” Etchings from his works (with descriptive text). London, Chatto and Windus, 1878. Folio.

Smetham, James. “Essay on Blake.” (Reprinted in Gilchrist’s work, q.v., from the “London Quarterly Review”).

Swinburne, A. C. “William Blake.” A critical essay, with illustrations from Blake’s designs in facsimile, coloured and plain. Second edition. London, 1868. 8^o.

WILLIAM BLAKE

WILLIAM BLAKE

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

The work of one of the greatest spirits that ever made Art his medium has yet its way to make among the general public. The world entertained the angel unawares, for three-quarters of a century have passed since the death of William Blake, and still his name and his work are but indifferently known. Yet to those that know them, the designs from his pencil, and the poems from his pen, are among the most precious things that Art has bequeathed to us.

It is my purpose in the following pages to tell over again the main outlines of his life, quite shortly and simply, for the great biography on Blake (that of Alexander Gilchrist) can be consulted by all, and contains almost every detail known about him. To this monumental work, and to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’s more recently issued and exhaustive Commentary on Blake, I owe all my facts.

A brief memoir is a necessary preface to the review I propose making of those engraved and painted books, pictures, drawings and engravings of Blake’s which our National Collections possess.

William Blake was one of those unique beings who live above this actual world, in the high places of imagination. At four years old he saw his first vision, as his wife reminded him in old age, in the presence of Mr. Crabb Robinson: “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and He put His head to the window and set you screaming.” Quaintly, crudely, as the story is told by Mrs. Blake, it bears testimony to the fact that the visionary faculty was developed in Blake from the beginning. Imagination claimed him definitely as her child from that early day when, having rambled far afield into the country (as it was his pastime to do throughout life), he saw, in a meadow near Dulwich, a tree amongst whose branches glistening angels clustered and sang. It may be, as one of Blake’s critics suggests, that Nature was herself the basis of the supernatural beauty he saw, though he was all unwitting of it. Standing beneath a tree laden with delicate pink blossom, and gazing up into the rosy gloom, Blake may well have translated this pulsating beauty into a miracle. Above among the greenery he may have seemed to catch glimpses of aspiring hands and faces among the crowding wings of flame and rose and sun-kissed gold. A little breeze would set angelic wings and garments all a-moving and a-fluttering, and a thrush’s voice suddenly cleaving the silence seem an angel’s song indeed, too exquisite to be endured without tears, to the quivering, spell-bound wanderer. Such may have been the explanation of this early vision, but Blake himself never attributed any natural cause to such spiritual manifestations. Everything was alive to him with a strange inner life: the “vegetable world,” as he called it, was but the shadow of the real world of imagination, whose spiritual population was more clearly discernible to his highly-wrought consciousness, than natural phenomena themselves. Narrowly did he escape a whipping from his father, the worthy hosier, for what that matter-of-fact man could not but consider a most impudent invention on the child’s part. The incident was a foreshadowing of the poet-painter’s life. The mysterious regions in which his spirit wandered so fearlessly, and which his poems and his drawings represented to the world, had but scanty attraction for his time. It would be truer perhaps to say that they were more often regarded with fear and repulsion. The mortal who dares to raise even the corner of the veil that so discreetly hides from our material world the many other existent conditions of consciousness, the great Beyond of Spirit Life, does so at his own risk, and with the certainty of earning his fellow men’s distrust and disapproval. The outlook on that immensity has a tendency, it is true, to endanger the perfect mental equilibrium; but though the age—professing faith in a set of decent religious formulae, but in reality sceptical of all spiritual life and destiny—called Blake mad, he was recognized by a few chosen spirits as a great master and seer. The story of his life contains but few incidents, but through these incidents we see a soul travelling.

William Blake was born in 1757 at 28, Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Soho. The old house still stands, but looks very dirty and depressing, like the street, which, since Blake played in it, has suffered a dingy declension. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have added some biographical details to Gilchrist’s Life, state that William’s father, the hosier, James Blake, was the son of an Irishman, one John O’Neil. John O’Neil married a girl from Rathmines, Dublin, called Ellen Blake, and as he soon afterwards got into debt and trouble of one sort and another, he dropped his name of O’Neil and adopted his wife’s maiden name. This fact, if established beyond doubt, would seem to be of singular importance, as the presence of Irish blood in William Blake would account for several strange characteristics which are not otherwise understandable. The Kelts are always particularly sensitive and open to spiritual experience. Imagination, second sight, and acute psychic consciousness, seem to be the peculiar attributes of the race; and these gifts are seldom to be found in a pure Anglo-Saxon. There were four other children, James, of whom we shall hear again, Robert, our artist’s beloved younger brother, John, a ne’er-do-weel, and a girl of whom not much is known.

Very early William developed a taste for art, and his father, with more sense than usually characterizes the parents of great men, allowed him to follow his bent, and sent him, from the age of ten to fourteen, to the drawing class of one Pars, in the Strand. We read of his attending picture sales and occasionally buying drawings and prints after Raphael, Michael Angelo, Albert Dürer, and other old masters at prices which would make the modern collector green with envy. But we do not hear of Blake’s attending any other school either before or after leaving Pars for the purpose of furthering his general education. All the knowledge that he acquired outside Art was self-chosen and self-taught. A sound general education is the firmest basis on which to build a tower of observation from which the world and life may be surveyed with judgement. Blake’s beautiful and fantastic house of thought, however, was erected on no such foundation. Perhaps instinct guided his choice of mental food: certain it is that the peculiar education he gave himself enabled him to preserve his own personality in all its vital energy. Pars appears to have been the Squarcione of that generation. He had been sent to Greece by the Dilettante Society to study ruined temples and broken statues. On his return to England he set up a school in the Strand to teach drawing from plaster casts after the antique.

When he was fourteen, with a view to getting a trade by which he could earn his daily bread, Blake’s father determined to apprentice him to an engraver. He took him first to Rylands, an eminent engraver with a Court appointment, but the boy said after the interview, “Father, I do not like that man’s face. He looks as if he would live to be hanged.” Strange forecast this proved to be, for in 1783 Rylands was indeed hanged for forgery. Blake was finally apprenticed to Basire, a sound craftsman, but of a somewhat hard and dry manner. Basire’s style as an engraver set its stamp on Blake, there is no doubt. It would have hampered most men severely, rendering their work formal and immobile, but Blake turned it to a strange account, and it became expressive in his hands. When in his later years he found that he had outgrown it, he modified it to suit his new requirements, but it had been a laborious and useful servant, if not a gracious one. During his apprenticeship Basire set him to draw all the mediaeval tombs and monuments in Westminster Abbey and other churches for a certain publication to be brought out by the firm. In doing this Blake imbibed large draughts of the intense and fervent Gothic spirit. Its deep innerness, its passionate aspiration, its whimsicality, and its quaint decorative exuberance, expressed alike in angels and gargoyles, found and touched a vibrating chord in his heart. Gothic art entered into him and became part of him. Its influence was strong, though it took a characteristically Blakeian expression always, and those long mornings spent among the slanting sunbeams and the whispering silence of the chapels around the King Confessor’s tomb, were among the truly eventful incidents of his life.

In many of his designs a Gothic church with spires and buttresses like Westminster,—often a mere symbol sufficient to recall it, occasionally carefully and elaborately drawn in—stands as an embodiment of Blake’s idea of worship.

Strange thoughts must have come to him among those forests of slender pillars and arches! Some hint of them is conveyed by an engraving he did during the period of drawing in the Abbey. It is after a drawing (probably one bought by him cheap at a sale room) by Michael Angelo, and has the imaginative inscription written on it by Blake, “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion. This is one of the Gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the dark ages, wandering about in sheepskin and goatskin, of whom the world was not worthy.” Joseph of Arimathea, it will be remembered, is supposed to have come to Glastonbury in 63 A.D. and built the first Christian Church.

He did not always work in the Abbey in quiet. There is a story told by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, of how he was plagued by the Westminster boys till he laid his grievance before the Dean, who thereupon deprived the boys of the right to wander about the Abbey at their pleasure, a right denied to them to this day.

At twenty, Blake’s apprenticeship to Basire being ended, he attended the Academy schools and drew from the antique under Keeper Moser, picking out for his chief delight and most ardent study the drawings of Michael Angelo and Raphael—a very barbaric choice it was considered, according to the decadent taste of the period. Moser recommended him to give up poring over “those old hard, stiff, dry, unfinished works of art,” and to turn his attention to Le Brun and Rubens, some of whose drawings he fetched out for Blake’s inspection. Blake, however, who was never able to conceal his thoughts, nor to express them in anything but forcible terms, burst out, “These things that you call finished, are not even begun; how then can they be finished?” and comments on the incident, which he relates in his MS. notes on “Reynolds’ Discourses,” made in his old age, “that the man who does not know the beginning, cannot know the end of art.” By this he meant, that to be preoccupied as were Rubens and Le Brun, with the merely faithful representation of the beauty of the body, to dwell as an end in itself on the wonder of white shoulders, tapering fingers, and too luscious flesh, to linger in the folds and intricacies of silk and velvet robes, and to spend strength and power on these things, was mere foolishness and blundering.

Physical beauty, splendour of colour, only thrilled and arrested him when he recognized in them the symbols of an idea, when they seemed to hint of things rarer and more excellent than any purely natural or intrinsic attribute. If he could discriminate its eternal inner message, and could make it visible to the world, then was physical beauty worthy of reproduction. But he seldom dwelt on beauty for its own sake, but only when it was spiritually significant; so it is easy to see why he was inaccessible to the influence of such artists as Rubens and Le Brun.

At the Academy Schools he had the opportunity of drawing from the living model, and profited by it to a certain limited extent. But he always had an aversion to it, declaring that to his whimsical nature it “smelt of mortality.” However he might and did justify his negligence of this important branch of technique, his art was necessarily weakened by it. Technique is the language of art, and is only to be obtained by frequent and laboriously faithful reference to nature. It is true that Blake’s strong power of generalizing, along with his marvellous gift of recalling at desire things discriminated by him, made the achievement of technique through methods of life study a less urgent necessity to him than to other men who had no such retentive artistic memories. Essential lines Blake never failed to give, but by intention rather than from any inability he seldom gives more than these essential lines in the figures he drew and painted.

After all it is possible that his power of delineating swift movement, and the great range of emotions that correspond to that, might have been injured or lost by too close an application to the artificially posed human figure. We have seen much life lost in the too close study of life, as in the otherwise exquisite work of Lord Leighton.

Blake believed that to draw from the typical forms seen by him in vision was his true purpose and aim, and the study of individual human forms filled his eye with confusion, for, as he was for ever asserting, Nature seemed to him but a faint and garbled version of the grand originals seen in imagination, that is, in truth.

While Blake was educating himself in art, he had to earn his livelihood by engraver’s work, and between 1779 and 1782 one or two booksellers employed him to engrave designs after various artists. Among these artists was Stothard, to whom, in 1782, Blake was introduced. Stothard brought Flaxman and Blake together, and the three became warm friends. It was only after many years, and then through the machinations of an evil man (the publisher Cromek), that Blake became estranged from Stothard, and partially also from Flaxman.

In 1780 Blake exhibited his first picture in the Academy, “The Death of Earl Godwin.” It was only the twelfth exhibition of the institution, and the first to be held at Somerset House. How curiously do its four hundred and eighty-seven exhibits (including wax work and a design for a fan) contrast with our mammoth Academies of to-day! Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mary Moser, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, Cosway and Fuseli, were all contributors in the year of grace 1780. Blake was in sympathy with none of them save Fuseli, who, although a man greatly overrated in his day, had a real sense of the potency of the invisible world, mainly, however, of that portion of it concerned with arch-fiends, witches, demons, and baleful omens.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Bouchier, and set up housekeeping in Green Street. It appears that he had been much in love with a girl called Pollie Wood, who had jilted him. Going to stay at Richmond in a state of deep depression, he made the acquaintance of Catherine Bouchier. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have added this detail to the first biographer’s story. When she first entered the room where he sat, she was overcome by such intense emotion that she had to withdraw for awhile. She afterwards admitted that at that moment she became suddenly aware that she was in the presence of her future husband.

Small wonder that Blake felt an irresistible affinity for this charming dark-eyed girl whose fervent susceptible spirit responded so mysteriously to his own. No marriage was ever more happy. Catherine was of humble origin, and practically no education, for at the time of her marriage she was unable to read or write, but nevertheless she possessed the rare and delicate qualities necessary for the mate of a man like Blake. She early realized that the man she had married was no ordinary one, and to be of service to her dear “Mr. Blake” (as she always called him with quaint reverence), to enter into his thoughts, to smooth the path of his material life, and to conform her young and unlessoned girlhood to his difficult standard of plain living and high thinking, became her one absorbing object.

There were a few rough passages in the early days of married life, which Gilchrist indicates, but they soon disappeared. It was merely the friction and heat given off, before the two strong natures were fused into a perfect union. Catherine’s nature appears to have been a compound of ardent worship and pregnant sympathy. Never did a woman so forget herself in reverencing, nigh worshipping, the man she had chosen to marry.

During an unusually long, and in many respects a peculiarly isolated life, these two lived together, the one master mind and purpose informing both.

No words could do full justice to the beautiful life of Catherine Blake. It is true that no ordinary man could have drawn such harmony from the vivacious, impulsive, passionate nature of the girl. All the generous love that her nature possessed she lavished on Blake, and her complete absorption in him seems to have satisfied the maternal cravings which were to have no other satisfaction, for William and Catherine had no children. The work of caring for the few rooms which were all that Blake’s means allowed, and his ambition desired, for the housing of their bodies, this Catherine did with the thoroughness of the true aesthete. She cooked, sewed, swept, dusted, and washed, and yet found time to learn from her husband how to read and write, the use of the graver, and even to colour with neat and precise hand some of the prints he made. Added to this she was soon able to read with intelligence the books he praised, and listened wondering to the songs he made, finding them of a heavenly significance and beauty; and when his tense nerves and superabundant physical energy drove Blake forth to stretch his limbs and cool his brain in long country walks of thirty, and occasionally forty miles at a stretch, Catherine went with him, and cheerfully tramped along beside him, silent or responsive as he set the mood.

Again, when in the night time visions appeared to his teeming ever-inventive brain, and he must needs get up and write or draw while the divine “mania” was upon him, then Catherine arose softly and sat beside that wondrous husband in her white nightgown, her whole consciousness hanging upon his least movement or utterance, and her whole being thrilling sympathetically to those invisible presences which moved his spirit. Like Mary, “she kept all these things in her heart and pondered them.”

Speaking of his wife, one cannot but recall that in Blake’s mysterious and unorthodox creed the doctrine of free love was a very favourite one, on which in his poetry he was never tired of insisting. Yet he seems to have desired freedom, only, as Mr. Swinburne finely shows, “for the soul’s sake.” If love is bound, he argued, what merit is there in faithfulness? Love, to be what love in perfect development should be,—to be what Love in its very essence predicates,—must be free. Such a creed, proclaimed by the lips of the most austere of men in matters sensual, seems to shadow forth one dimly apprehended aspect of a truth, which may be realized perhaps, in a future and more perfect state of society.

“In a myrtle shade,” and “William Bond,” are two among the poems in Blake’s MS. book, which have their origin in thoughts about free love.

The year after his marriage, 1782-83, Blake had to turn to engraving in real earnest to pay for the necessities of the modest ménage in Green Street. We find him engaged mainly in engraving plates after Stothard’s refined and graceful designs. In after years, when he was estranged from Stothard, Blake used to say that many of these same designs contained ideas stolen from himself. There can be small doubt that Stothard did owe something to Blake’s influence. Fuseli frankly declared that “Blake is damned good to steal from,” and accordingly adopted his ideas, and in one instance, at least, a complete design.

A kind and appreciative couple, the Rev. Henry and Mrs. Mathew, received Blake in their drawing-room about this time, and gave him an honoured place among their guests. It was they who paid in part for the production of his “Poetical Sketches,” and Flaxman, who had always a strong admiration of Blake’s poetical genius, helped,—an act of beautiful generosity in a young artist with his own way to make.

The “Poetical Sketches” are among the tenderest lyric notes uttered by Blake, and their bird-like spontaneity and lilt recall, says Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “the best period of English song-writing, whose rarest treasures lie scattered among the plays of our Elizabethan dramatists.” These wild wood-notes gushing unselfconscious from a heart glad with youth and fair visions are in strange contrast to the artificial, trifling, and unsatisfying poetry of the age. Blake himself writes in the “Poem to the Muses”:

How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy’d in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few.

What can be said of that perfect lyric, written when Blake was but fourteen, “My silks and fine array,” and that other which I shall surely be forgiven for quoting as it stands:

How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer’s pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide.
He show’d me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet Maydews my wings are wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.

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PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF EXPERIENCE,” 1794

To a poetically sensitive mind, verses like these remain like a beautiful echo in the memory, having a musical charm apart from the sense of the words. Although in this little book it is my purpose to dwell mainly on Blake’s manifestation of himself as a designer and painter, I cannot avoid lingering sometimes on his poetical expression. For the creative impulse that clothed its thought in a garment of words is the same as that which is embodied in plastic forms and symbolic colouring. Blake’s invention had two outlets, but was itself one stream of energy only.

The lines to the Evening Star are incomparably sweet and haunting:

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy brilliant torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves, and whilst thou drawest round
The curtains of the sky, scatter thy dew
On every flower that closes its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And then the lion glares through the dim forest,
The fleeces of our flocks are covered with
Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence.

The lingering subtle and most musical sweetness of such lines as those quoted above, “Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, and wash the dusk with silver,” can be surpassed by none of the great masters of melody. So unaccustomed were the ears of the time to such perfectly natural bursts of song, that the Rev. Henry Mathew considered it necessary to apologize to the refined and fastidious for calling attention to them, “hoping their poetic originality merits some respite from oblivion.” Blake might well seem strange to these borné people, for he was no other than the herald and forerunner of the poetic renaissance of the beginning of the nineteenth century.

In the Mathew’s drawing-room, surrounded by a wondering group of dilettanti, above whom he towered head and shoulders intellectually, he was encouraged to sing his “Songs of Innocence,” which he had already written, though not produced, to his own music. Blake had then a mode of musical expression as well as an artistic and a literary one, though no record of it has been preserved. With these three keys he unlocked the doors of materialism outwards, on to the vistas of God-thrilled Eternity.

In 1784 Blake exhibited two drawings in the Royal Academy, “War, unchained by an Angel—Fire, Pestilence and Famine following,” and “A Breach in the City—the Morning after a Battle.” It is obvious from these that his style was already formed in all its strength and almost terrifying individuality.

During this year Blake’s father died, and William and Catherine returned to Broad Street and took up their abode next to the paternal dwelling now occupied by the elder brother James. James, though a Swedenborgian and accounting himself a godly person, was also a busy seeker after this world’s good things, and seems to have had little in common with William, though for some years friendly relations were maintained between them. Blake set up a shop as printseller and engraver in Broad Street in company with a man named Parker, whose acquaintance he had made in the old Basire days, but it was a short-lived affair, and soon came to an end.

It was in this year that William’s younger brother Robert became his pupil. Nothing much can be discovered about the personality of Robert, but from Blake’s own writings and designs we are able to see how close a tie of affection existed between these two brothers.

Robert only lived three years after becoming William’s house-mate and pupil. In his final illness it was not Catherine but William who nursed him day and night untiringly, with passionate love and care; and when at last the end came, Blake saw his brother’s soul fare forth, clapping its hands for joy, from the mortal tenement—a vision to bear fruit afterwards in his designs for Blair’s “Grave.” Then he was beset with sheer physical exhaustion, and going to bed, slept for three days and three nights. Many years after we find him going back into this period of personal sorrow, to extract therefrom comfort for Hayley, who had lost his son.

“I know,” he writes to him, “that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in remembrance in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice and even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish all to partake of, since it is to me a source of immortal joy, even in this world. May you continue to be so more and more, and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of time build mansions in Eternity”:—from all of which it is easy to see that Robert’s influence on the soul of William augmented after his death.

In 1788 Blake removed from Broad Street to No. 28, Poland Street, which lies in its immediate neighbourhood. A coolness may have sprung up between James and William, for the brothers saw little of each other now.

The following characteristic story, taken from Mr. Tatham’s MS., and retold by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, helps to draw in Blake’s psychological portrait.

In Poland Street Blake’s windows looked over Astley’s Yard,—Astley of circus fame. One day on looking out he saw a boy limping up and down, dragging a heavy block chained to his foot. It was a hobble used for horses, and Blake, with his brain on fire and pity and rage tearing at his heart, was soon down in the yard among the circus company. He gave them a passionate speech on liberty, appealed to them as true men and Britons not to punish a fellow-countryman in a manner that would degrade a slave, and finally saw the crowd yield to his eloquence, and his point was gained. The boy was loosed, and Blake returned to his own world of work and vision.

Some hours after, Mr. Astley, who had been out during the incident related, called on Blake, and stormed and raved at what he called his interference. At first Blake was as angry as Astley, his blood was up, and there seemed every prospect of a very violent quarrel. But suddenly, in the midst of his anger, Blake remembered that the amelioration of the boy’s condition was his first object, and, quickly changing his tactics, he so worked on the higher moral nature which Astley evidently possessed, that he completely won him over to his views, and the two men parted—friends. Ever after, however, as Messrs. Ellis and Yeats point out, the chain remained with Blake as the symbol of cruel oppression and slavery, and we shall see him using it in his designs again and again as such.

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PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF INNOCENCE,” 1789

In 1790 he produced the “Songs of Innocence,” printed and published, as well as designed, engraved, and composed by himself. In the long and romantic history of art, nothing is more strange than the story of how this little book came into being. Blake was unknown to the world and had no credit with publishers, nor had he the wherewithal to publish at his own expense the poems which he had written and called “Songs of Innocence.” Yet he greatly desired to see them set forth in a book with appropriate and significant designs. But how was this to be accomplished? He pondered the matter long, till at last light and leading came. In the silence of one midnight his dead brother Robert appeared to him and instructed him as to the method—an entirely original one—which he should use. The very next day, Blake being urgent to begin his work, his wife went out early with half-a-crown (all the money they had in the world), and laid out one and tenpence on the necessary material. And in faith and gladness, relying on that mystical power in himself which took and used his hand and eye and brain almost without his will, he began to make the first of his lovely engraved and painted books. This is the alpha of a long series of engraved books which issued from his hand at intervals for some years. While in Poland Street he wrote, but did not publish till long after, the “Ghost of Abel,” in 1789 the “Book of Thel,” in 1790 the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and in 1791 a poem, the first of a projected series of seven books, called “The French Revolution.”

This so-called poem owed its birth to the fact that about this period Blake became one of a literary, artistic, and political set who met at the house of Johnson the publisher. At these gatherings Mary Wollstonecraft arrayed her charms to storm the citadel of Fuseli’s cynical heart, unavailingly. Among other guests were Tom Paine, author of “The Rights of Man,” whom eventually Blake was the means of saving, by a timely word of warning, from arrest in England. He judiciously advised his flight to France, at the right moment for his safety. Godwin and Holcroft and several revolutionary dreamers were members of this coterie. Blake’s enthusiasm was set all aglow by a philosophy which saw in the French Revolution a great renovating process,—the fire to burn up the ignorance and superstition and class boundaries of the ancient order, the introduction of a new reign of righteousness and peace.

In effect, this new philosophy which fired the imagination of Blake had a basis of materialism and violence which would have found no answering response in his soul, had he sought to investigate it. His sympathy with the group was intellectual, and with the higher manifestations of its creed alone. It led to no political action. He had far other work to do than that of a political agitator, but all expansive doctrines which made for liberty and individuality fired the imagination and fed the intellect of Blake. Democracy was his ideal, and democratic virtues won his admiration; indeed, he dared to flaunt the “bonnet rouge” of liberty in London streets in this agitated period, but after the Days of Terror in ’92 he tore off the white cockade and never again donned the Cap of Liberty. But if his work was not to be in the political arena, he was in his own way hastening the coming of that better and more immaterial kingdom which these young liberators only half conceived.

In 1792 died the great leader of English art, Sir Joshua Reynolds. His work, concerned as it was with the exquisite graces of this passing world, had nothing to say to Blake, who regarded it in the light of his own artistic standpoint, with positive aversion. It often happens that a man who feels it his burning mission to work out and reveal some hitherto neglected or unseen aspect of truth, does so at the cost of a one-sidedness which is a necessary defect of his quality. Blake could no more appreciate Sir Joshua—at least at this stage of his being—than Sir Joshua could appreciate Blake. The veteran Reynolds once told him, when a young man, “to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to correct his drawing.” Blake never got over that. We can imagine the suppressed heat with which he listened choking to the advice of the popular artist who was so utterly ignorant of his aims and ideals. To us, who may enter into the soul of each, it is given to realize that they, and all the company of the world’s great artists, have furthered the true work of art; have all helped, and are helping, according to their gifts and in their degree, to rear the walls and set with windows and crown with battlements and towers, the palace of beauty for the soul of man to dwell in with delight and worship. That the workers have not always recognized each other is matter for regret, though it is scarcely perhaps to be wondered at, seeing that each is set on emphasizing and relieving against its background the one point which seems to him necessary and valuable.

The characteristic notes which Blake appended to Reynolds’ “Discourses” many years later, express much of his dislike. Truly, it is easy to conceive of a mind offering nothing but delight and admiration to Reynolds’ practice, yet excited to a grave disapproval by much of his theory, or what he states as his theory. For Reynolds actually taught that genius—such as his own, for instance—was a state to be inducted into by precept, and evolved through study, instead of being a thing of fire, a tongue of flame from on high, set on a man as a seal, from which he cannot escape. I am reminded of Rossetti here, who quite sincerely told Mr. Hall Caine, “I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic.” Ah! that such genius might thus be taught!

However, Reynolds, his practice and theory alike, were by Blake swept into a limbo of unconditional condemnation, though occasionally, in spite of the prejudice he nursed against Sir Joshua, he flashed out notes of emphatic approval, on certain utterances in the great man’s “Discourses.”

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PAGE FROM “AMERICA, A PROPHECY,” 1793

Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy

CHAPTER II

LIFE AT FELPHAM

In 1793 Blake removed across the river to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, where he lived for seven years of great mental and spiritual vitality, seeing visions and dreaming dreams and embodying them in beautiful designs. He was a tireless worker, never resting, and sleeping much less than other men. These Lambeth days were days of comparative prosperity with the Blakes, whose wants were so simple and few. The little house in which they lived possessed rustic charms—a garden with a summer-house, and a vine climbing over the back of the house, whose leaves made a pleasant rustling in summer. A view of the river, too, could not have failed to add a significant charm to the place. On its shining surface might be descried ships like souls faring to the world’s great market-place, to barter and to receive merchandise; while others, with white sails set, slipped quietly down the river and out to the wide mysterious sea. Blake had a few pupils, too, and at this period he made the acquaintance of Mr. Butts, who was a staunch friend and true appreciator for thirty years. During all that time he was a constant buyer of our artist’s work, and bought sometimes at the rate of one drawing a week. In time Mr. Butts’ spacious house in Fitzroy Square became a regular Blake Gallery. The average price he paid was £1 to 30s. a design or picture. To Mr. Butts’ great honour be it said that he never assumed the airs of a patron, never tried to bind or hamper Blake’s genius, or to dictate or direct his choice of subjects or treatment of them. He seems to have realized that this man was “a prince in Israel,” and the lordship of his ideas not to be questioned, but accepted humbly and with gratitude.

In a future chapter I hope to deal with the Blake drawings and easel pictures done for Mr. Butts, which were available to the public in the Exhibition at Messrs. Carfax’s Rooms in Ryder Street, held in 1904.

Blake seems to have enjoyed a little wave of recognition at Lambeth—popularity it can hardly be called—but it was not long-lived. At one time he was even suggested as drawing-master to the Royal Family, but declined the position, not from modesty, but from devotion to his true métier—the preservation and expression of spiritual ideas—with which such a post would probably have interfered.

Two acts of secret and most munificent generosity are recorded by Tatham, and quoted by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, concerning Blake while at Lambeth.

He gave £40 (he seldom after had half as much money beside him) to a friend in distress, and his deep sympathetic heart being moved by the sight of a sick young man, an artist, who daily passed their door, he and his Kate made the young man’s acquaintance, and for the love of Christ and in memory of brother Robert, finally took him into their house and tended him till his death some months later.

While at Lambeth he made three large and important drawings—“Nebuchadnezzar,” an enlarged edition of the bearded figure on hands and knees which occurs in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; “The Lazar House” and “The Elohim creating Adam.” He also made designs for Young’s “Night Thoughts.” There were 537 designs made, and Blake only took a year to do them. A selected few were engraved. While at Lambeth he printed also his “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” “America,” “Europe,” “Urizen,” “The Gates of Paradise,” “The Book of Los,” “The Song of Los,” and “Ahania.” The list implies steady application, and untiring intellectual and spiritual energy.

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THE LAZAR HOUSE, FROM MILTON

Water-colour, 1795

The introduction of our painter, in 1800, by his old friend Flaxman, to Hayley, poetaster and dilettante, marks the beginning of a new epoch in his life.

Hayley, the friend of Gibbon and, later, of Cowper (whose biography he wrote), was a characteristic product of the last quarter of the eighteenth century,—that age of complaisant preoccupation with trifles.

This poetically barren interval before the birth of the wonderful new school of poetry had, since the best days of Cowper, but one star above its horizon—or was it a will-o’-the-wisp?—the soi-disant poet Hayley. Complaisantly he twinkled on his admiring world, and, striking the lyre with gracious hand, sang with modest satisfaction “The Triumphs of Temper.” This now forgotten work earned him the position of “greatest of living poets,” and he assumed his high seat in the literary world with bustling alacrity. Above all things he aspired to culture, not at the expense of a very continuous effort or strain, it is true, but he loved to collect around him artists and men of letters to whom he could play the part of a somewhat undersized Lorenzo de’ Medici. That they would respond gracefully, and take their parts becomingly in this garden-comedy, was all that he required of his court.

It will be remembered that Romney was one of his artist friends, and that the connection proved in a way economically disastrous to the painter, for Hayley was an extravagant man, though he professed simple tastes, and encouraged poor Romney in his mania for building and other lavish expenditure.

His influence, such as it was, was stimulating to none of his friends, though he meant well and kindly enough. He affected the part of the country gentleman, as well as that of the high priest of culture, and delighted in patronage.

Soon after his acquaintance with Blake began, his old friend Cowper died under tragic conditions, and a week later Hayley’s only child (an illegitimate son) died also. The boy was a youth of promise, and had been a pupil of Flaxman. So he had gratified as well as filled the poor father’s heart. Hayley’s trouble called forth a letter from Blake, which I quoted when writing on the death of Robert, and it seems to have touched, perhaps comforted, Hayley, who even in his deep affliction assumed a pose not natural or spontaneous.

Blake was recommended by Flaxman as an engraver and designer (if the latter should be required), and Hayley proposed that the Blakes should come and live at Felpham, near his own place of Eartham in Sussex, in order that his new protégé might engrave the illustrations to the life of Cowper which he was now about to write, under Hayley’s own eye.

The idea pleased Blake, while Mrs. Blake, he wrote, “is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels, whenever she hears it named.” As a matter of fact, Hayley did not live at Eartham now, as the place was an expensive one to keep up, but had built himself a wonderful turretted marine “cottage,” with a library and covered court for equestrian exercise at Felpham.

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PLATE FROM “EUROPE,” PRINTED 1794

Coloured by hand

In the September of 1800, Blake being then forty-three years old, the husband and wife took up their abode in a pretty little cottage by the sea at Felpham, and began a new manner of life. If Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, had afforded Blake hints and types of spiritual life and light, how much larger a vista must have opened to him at Felpham. He used to wander musing along the seashore, and more than once saw the yellow sands peopled by a host of souls long since departed from this earth—Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton: “all,” Blake said, “majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the common height of men.” Many visions came to him at first. It is not wonderful that this should have been so, for there was nothing that did not teem with suggestions to his subjective mind, and when he received a new influx of spiritual light, as he seemed to have had at Felpham, then, indeed, were blossoms, stars and stones, nay, the very air he breathed, alive with a strange, sentient, crowding population, to whose spiritual utterances he listened, whose forms he strained his mental sight to realize.

In a letter to Flaxman, beginning, “Dear Sculptor of Eternity,” Blake writes in the first effervescence of delight: “Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen.”

For a while all went very well indeed, and the first part of his sojourn at Felpham was a sort of charmed circle in his life. “Mr. Hayley acts like a prince,” “Felpham is the sweetest spot on earth,” “work will go on here with God-speed,” “Find that I can work with greater pleasure than ever,” are phrases which occur in the enthusiastic letters of the period. But gradually Hayley’s constant companionship, his amiable but fatuous and gushing friendship, acted like the hated chain of slavery on Blake’s electric and expansive temperament. Hayley’s mind was set on little things, trivial business and futile undertakings, and his vanity and self-satisfaction about all his doings came at last to be exasperating to Blake. In spite of his generosity, his lavish but undiscerning praise, and the commissions for engraving and designs with which he supplied our artist, Blake little by little found himself goaded to madness by the ever-flowing stream of Hayley’s conventionality and watery enthusiasms. Hayley attempted to enlarge Blake’s education by reading to him Klopstock and translating as he went along—a proceeding that must have bored our fiery genius to tears. He also, with the kindest intentions in the world, obtained commissions for Blake to paint miniatures—hardly, one would think, a congenial form of art to him, but one which at the beginning appears to have interested him nevertheless.

A couplet he wrote in the Note-book at the time evidences the irritated nerves that Hayley’s unspiritual contact set on edge:

Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache.
Do be my enemy for friendship’s sake.

The letters, too, to Mr. Butts give direct insight into his state of mind, and the points of sharp disagreement and intellectual misunderstanding between the two men are easily traced.

It appears that “Hayley was as much averse to a page of Blake’s poetry as to a chapter in the Bible.”

Blake the creator and artist was unintelligible and foreign to Hayley, who, always satisfied with his own judgement, sought to turn Blake from designing and to chain him to the hack work of engraving.

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LOS, ENITHARMON AND ORC

Colour-print from “Urizen,” 1794

By degrees the visions that had so often and radiantly appeared to Blake on his first coming to Felpham seemed to forsake him. As he became involved in Hayley’s pursuits, and sought to work out Hayley’s plans for him, the visions even appeared to be angry with him. Then, indeed, it seemed that he was in danger of “bartering his birthright for a mess of pottage.” He writes to Mr. Butts:

“My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explored too narrowly, might hurt my pecuniary circumstances, as my dependence is on engraving at present, and particularly the engravings I have in hand for Mr. H., and I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live. This has always pursued me.... This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. H. will bring me back again. For that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my mind.... But,” he goes on to say, “if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears and natural desires, who can describe the dismal torments of such a state? I too well remember the threats I heard” (i.e., in vision). “If you, who are organized by Divine Providence for spiritual commission, refuse and bury your talents in the earth, even though you should want natural bread—sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity. Everyone in eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was crowned with glory and honour by his brethren and betrayed their cause to their enemies. You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend.”

Blake was the apostle and martyr of this devotion to the high spiritual mission of Art. He would make no compromise with the world.

In a letter to Mr. Butts dated April 25th, 1803, he writes:

“I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy and speak parables, unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals, perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but doubts are always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends. Christ is very decided on this point: ‘He who is not with me is against me;’ there is no medium or middle state; and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life, while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy; but the man may be the friend of my spiritual life while he seems the enemy of my corporeal, though not vice versâ.”

This enemy to Blake’s spiritual life is certainly Hayley.

He writes with unmistakable frankness of the Hermit of Eartham in a later letter:

“Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both Poet and Painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius, as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter.” He goes on to say that he will relinquish all engagements to design for Hayley, “unless altogether left to my own judgement, as you, my dear friend, have always left me; for which I shall never cease to honour and respect you.” And for which, we may add, posterity also has good reason to laud and acclaim Mr. Butts.

Blake was not the man to be the creature of any patron, spending his time and all his magnificent powers as the servant of another man’s brain—especially when that brain was Hayley’s.

If the engravings and designs done for his patron had earned him thousands instead of a mere competence, such work could not have tempted him from his chosen path of spiritual art. Finally, in 1803, he threw off the yoke decisively, turned his back on patronage, and returned with his faithful Kate to the liberty and poverty of rooms in South Molton Street, London, after a three years’ rural seclusion. Just before leaving Felpham Blake became involved in a very disagreeable affair with a drunken soldier named Schofield, which resulted in a trial for sedition. The soldier, who was forcibly removed by Blake from his cottage garden, where he was trespassing, trumped up in revenge a set of ridiculous charges against him, saying he had used seditious language against the king and government. In the practical difficulties that all this gave rise to, Hayley came forward to Blake’s assistance, and putting all the weight of his local position and popularity on the artist’s side, materially helped him before and at the time of the trial. Although he had been thrown from his horse and hurt a few days previously, he insisted on being present to give evidence in his protégé’s favour, who was of course acquitted. Warm-hearted Blake felt a generous inrush of the old affection for his friend, and a deep sense of gratitude helped to re-establish the old cordial relations between the two men. It must not be inferred from this, however, that Blake had altered his opinion that Hayley was his spiritual enemy. That, he held, Hayley had proved himself to be. But he now recognized that it was not malignity, but deficiency of spiritual knowledge and insight that had made him act as he did. It was the law of his being, and Blake, having learned this through experience of his three years’ stay at Felpham, expected no more from him than his capacity warranted, and gave him his dues, dwelling with gratitude on the fact that Hayley was at least a true “corporeal friend.”

The stress and strain connected with the trial had a bad effect on Blake’s highly-sensitive nerves, and is painfully apparent in the writing of the time. The time at Felpham, and the period that succeeded on his return to London, have much light shed on them by the Note-book. The MS. book to which reference has been made was a sort of safety valve, which Blake kept ever at his elbow, and in which he wrote long dissertations on Art and Religion—the “Public Address,” the “Vision of the Last Judgment,” and many of the poems published under the title (which heads the Note-book itself) of “Ideas of Good and Evil.” Along with, and interspersed with these connected and finished utterances, are splenetic epigrams, rude rather than humorous caricature couplets, little scraps of unconsidered verse written to illustrate some incident of the day, and drawings here, there, and everywhere. The MS. Note-book is a very intimate part of Blake. On its first page Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote the inscription written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who possessed it till his death:

“I purchased this original MS. of Palmer, an attendant at the Antique Gallery of the British Museum, on the 30th April, 1849. Palmer knew Blake personally, and it was from the artist’s wife that he had the present MS., which he sold me for 10s. Among the sketches are one or two profiles of Blake himself.” Unfortunately it has now passed by purchase into the possession of a collector at Boston, U.S.A. I say unfortunately, because our own National Museum should have secured such a treasure, but its present owner courteously lent it for a prolonged period to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have embodied the main part of it in their exhaustive and most interesting work. The Note-book was deeply studied by Gilchrist, and was one of Rossetti’s dearest treasures, leaving its impress on his mind and work.

The work Blake did during the Felpham period included the designs and engraving of animals to Hayley’s “Ballads,” some of the engravings for “The Life of Cowper,” and, above all, the writing of two long prophetic books, the “Milton” and the “Jerusalem,” which, however, he did not finish till he had returned to London.

CHAPTER III

THE PROCESSION OF THE PILGRIMS

Blake’s course was now definitely chosen. He had turned his back on patronage and voluntarily married poverty, like St. Francis, in order that he might be free to work out his own poetic and artistic ideas without reference to popularity, patronage, or pecuniary advantage. His wants and Catherine’s were simple indeed, and to pay for them, from week to week, was all he desired. South Molton Street, in which they now took up their abode, was closely shut in by streets and houses. There was no garden, no summer-house or vine with pattering green leaves against the window as at Lambeth,—no trees even to recall the natural beauties of Felpham. But Blake seems to have been almost glad to be delivered from the agitating beauty of the natural or “vegetative world,” as he called it, which was to him error and not truth—the visible shadow that darkened and hid invisible and eternal ideas. Now indeed, with nothing to distract him, he could open his eyes inward into the “World of Thought,” into “Eternity,” which is imagination. Gilchrist’s Life enables us to realize how he could live in this imaginative world, and yet, at the same time, fulfil with great practical ability such a work, for instance, as collecting material for Hayley for the “Life of Romney,” which the latter was now beginning. The letters he wrote to Hayley at the time, which are all given in the Life, are the letters of a kindly business-like man, intent on giving only such information as will be useful. The good sense, the sanity, the mediocrity (I had almost said) of these letters are a pledge of Blake’s ability to act and express himself as other men when he wished so to do.

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FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”: THE RE-UNION OF
THE SOUL AND THE BODY

Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s design. Published 1808

Hayley was his good “corporeal friend,” to whom he was grateful for “corporeal acts” of kindness, and as such he treated him.

In one of the letters alone there bursts forth a great full-throated shout of joy, as it were, because he has suddenly achieved a great advance in his art. As the passage gives valuable insight into his mind at the time, I shall take liberty to quote it:

“O glory! O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty; thank God, I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife’s feet are free from fetters....

“Suddenly on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of Pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window shutters. Consequently I can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am engraving after Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of Art. O, the distress I have undergone, and my poor wife with me; incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well. Every one of my friends was astonished at my faults, and could not assign a reason; they knew my industry and abstinence from every pleasure for the sake of study, and yet—and yet—and yet there wanted proofs of industry in my works. I thank God with entire confidence that it shall be so no longer: he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a brother who was my enemy. Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark but very profitable years. I thank God that I courageously pursued my course through darkness.”

All of which tense and highly-figurative language means that Blake had suddenly received enlightenment on various technical methods from the silent witness of Raphael’s and Michael Angelo’s and other masters’ achievement. He could never learn by verbal advice, precept or criticism, but when shown great work, the artist in him dwelt on every line, absorbing and assimilating its principles. The spectrous fiend to whom he refers is, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, his own “selfhood.” He held that every man contained in himself a devil and an angel, the devil being the natural man, the angel the God in man. Of this idea of his more hereafter.

Blake’s work, when done in the heat of his spirit, is always noble, characteristic, and largely, often wholly, right (I am speaking of the execution, not the ideas expressed), but when “incessant labour” was expended without the incessant reference to nature which an elaborate technique demands, it is not wonderful that “incessant spoiling” should have been the result.

Now, indeed, he seems to have seen how it was with himself, and to have gained a new mastery of material through studying the manner of other men’s work.

In 1804 Blake brought out his “Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” a poem which he told Mr. Butts was descriptive of the “spiritual acts of his three years’ slumber on the banks of Ocean.”

“Milton” was also produced in the same year.

In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek, whilom engraver, but now publisher and printseller, “discovered” Blake in his self-chosen retirement, and proposed giving him employment. The story of his treacherous dealings is an evil one.

Cromek, who had learnt engraving in the studio of Bartolozzi, found it laborious and slow work, so exchanged its drudgery for the calling of a publisher, but, having good taste but no capital, he was hard pressed indeed to make both ends meet.

One day a piece of luck came in his way. He paid a visit to Blake’s working and living room in South Molton Street. Many beautiful things were to come into being in that room, but none more so than the drawings for Blair’s “Grave” which Blake had designed, intending to print and publish them in the usual way. Cromek found them, and seized upon them, gloating. He persuaded Blake to relinquish the idea of publishing them himself, and to surrender the undertaking to Cromek as one more fitted to push them and bring them before the notice of the public.

Blake was very poor at the time. In an insulting letter written by Cromek to Blake some two years later, he refers with contemptible want of feeling and taste to this fact. “Your best work, the illustrations to the ‘Grave,’” he says, “was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week!”

Blake sold the twelve drawings to him for £1 10s. each, with the assured verbal agreement that he was himself to engrave them for the projected edition—a promise which of course entailed considerable further payment for the work of engraving later on.

Cromek in possession of the copyright conveniently forgot his promise. Impregnated as he was with the fluent and graceful style of Bartolozzi’s school, Blake’s manner of engraving seemed to him grim, austere and archaic. He thought that the noble drawings translated by the hand of the popular and graceful engraver, Lewis Schiavonetti, would insure the success of the designs with the public as Blake could never have done were he to have engraved them himself.

It may be that there was truth in it. Some critics hold that the illustrations to Blair’s “Grave” have a suavity, a felicity superimposed by the engraver on the stern and original work of Blake which was just what was needed to render his work attractive to the public. To Blake’s true lovers, however, his own graver is the rightful interpreter of his own drawings, and, whether Cromek were right or not in this critical matter of taste, he was dishonest and mean to break the engagement on the basis of which alone he had obtained the drawings.

While Blake was looking forward with “anxious delight” to the engraving of his designs, Cromek had other schemes afoot. He called often at South Molton Street, hoping to pounce on some other work of genius which he could turn into money for himself. He was arrested one day before a pencil sketch of a new and hitherto untreated subject—the Procession of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. He tried to get Blake to make a finished drawing of it, with a view of course to getting it out of the artist’s hands, and then having it engraved by someone else. Negotiations on this basis failing, he gave Blake a commission (verbal again) to execute the design in a finished picture and an engraving from it. On the strength of this, Blake’s friends circulated a subscription paper for the engraving, and he himself set to work on the picture. Cromek, however, had not done. He was in love with the subject. Sure of Blake’s conception being thoughtful and strong, but probably wishful that it might be invested with a more earthly grace and interest than he would put upon it, he went to Stothard and suggested the subject to him, suppressing all mention of Blake. Probably he assisted the suggestion by hints as to its treatment derived from what he had actually appreciated in Blake’s conception. He commissioned him to paint the picture for sixty guineas, an engraving from which was to be done by Bromley, though Schiavonetti was eventually substituted for him.

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PILGRIMAGE TO CANTERBURY

Engraving after Stothard’s Canterbury Pilgrimage. Published October, 1817

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CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY PILGRIMS

Engraved by Blake in 1810 after his own “fresco” of the Canterbury Pilgrimage

When Blake learned that Cromek denied having given him a commission, and came to know that Stothard, his old friend, was to paint a picture on his stolen idea, to supersede his own, his rage and indignation knew no bounds, and he became bitterly estranged from Stothard, believing in his haste “that all men are liars,” and that this man had been a party to the whole mean transaction. Gilchrist is almost sure that Stothard knew nothing of Cromek’s previous deal with Blake on the subject of the Canterbury Pilgrimage.

During 1806 Blake was moved to make some designs to Shakespeare which were neither commissioned nor engraved. Judging from the one reproduced in the Life,—“Hamlet and the Ghost of his Father,”—they must have been wild and powerful indeed. He had always a profound reverence for, and joy in, Shakespeare, whose works were among his favourite books.

A strange and characteristic collection were those books which fed his fiery imagination. Could we have glanced along the row, we should have seen Shakespeare cheek by jowl with Lavater and Jacob Boehmen, while Macpherson’s “Ossian,” Chatterton’s “Rowley,” and the “Visions” of Emmanuel Swedenborg helped to fill in the ranks. Milton held perhaps the most honoured place of all, while Ovid, St. Theresa’s works, and De la Motte Fouqué’s “Sintram” were among the heterogeneous collection. Chaucer was also cheerfully conspicuous, and, towards the close of Blake’s life, Dante’s “Divine Comedy” came to join the silent company in the bookshelves.

In 1806 Blake became acquainted with a good and kindly man, Dr. Malkin, Head Master of Bury Grammar School. He gave him a commission for the frontispiece of Malkin’s “Memorials of his Child,” and in the preface wrote an account of the childhood and youth of the designer. Ozias Humphrey, the miniature painter, and a staunch friend of Blake, bought many of his engraved books, and it was he who obtained a commission for him from the Countess of Egremont to paint a picture elaborated from the Blair drawing of the “Last Judgment.” The paper called by the same name in the MS. book is descriptive of this picture, and in its intimité and demonstration of Blake’s bed-rock foundations of thought and artistic principles, gives profound insight into his mind.

These things occupied him during 1807. During that year Stothard’s cabinet picture was publicly exhibited, and drew thousands of gazers. Blake doggedly continued to work at his own “Canterbury Pilgrimage,” which he wrought in a water-colour medium which he arbitrarily termed “fresco.” It was finished about the end of 1808. In the autumn of that year the twelve beautiful engravings after his designs for Blair’s “Grave” were produced by Cromek, with a flowery introduction by Fuseli. The list of subscribers for the book at two-and-a-half guineas a copy was so large—thanks to Cromek’s skilful manipulation—that the amount realized by its sale came to £1,800. Of this Blake received twenty guineas and Schiavonetti about £500. I cannot omit to mention that leave to dedicate to Queen Charlotte having previously been obtained, Blake made a vignette drawing with some grave and beautiful verses to accompany it, and sent it to Cromek as an additional plate, asking the modest price of four guineas for it.

The design and verses were returned with a long letter from Cromek, closely packed with insults and slanders, and exhibiting a meanness too contemptible for expression. At the end of the letter he thus refers to the subject of the Pilgrimage, of which one would suppose he would be too ashamed to speak: “Why did you so furiously rage at the success of the little picture of the Pilgrimage? Three thousand people have now seen it and have approved of it. Believe me, yours is ‘the voice of one crying in the wilderness.’

“You say the subject is low and contemptibly treated. For his excellent mode of treating the subject the poet has been admired for the last four hundred years; the poor painter has not yet the advantage of antiquity on his side, therefore with some people an apology may be necessary for him. The conclusion of one of Squire Simpkins’ letters to his mother in the ‘Bath Guide’ will afford one. He speaks greatly to the purpose:

I very well know
Both my subject and verse is exceedingly low,
But if any great critic finds fault with my letter,
He has nothing to do but to send you a better.

“With much respect for your talents,
“I remain, Sir,
“Your real friend and well-wisher,
“R. H. Cromek.”

Perhaps it was that last jeering taunt which determined Blake to show his “Canterbury Pilgrimage” to the public, and make it the occasion of a little exhibition of his own. It was opened in May, 1809. Poor unworldly Blake, enraged and baffled, was the last man to organize an undertaking of this sort. Cromek could afford to laugh at the modest show on the first floor of James Blake’s shop at the corner of Broad Street, all unadvertised and unpatronized as it was.

The exhibition comprised, besides the “Pilgrimage,” sixteen “Poetical and Historical Inventions,” ten “frescoes,” and seven drawings—“a collection,” as Gilchrist remarks, “singularly remote from ordinary sympathies or even ordinary apprehension.”

Few of the general public penetrated here, but Blake’s friends, his few buyers, and many contemporary artists probably went through the rooms with no little curiosity. Seymour Kirkup—the discoverer of Giotto’s portrait of Dante in the Bargello,—and Henry Crabb Robinson were among the number of those who went and purchased catalogues. With the catalogue were issued subscription papers for the engraving of the “Canterbury Pilgrimage,” which, in spite of Cromek and Stothard, Blake intended to execute.

Blake drew up a Descriptive Catalogue to interpret his pictures, and in it gave free rein, unfortunately, to his personal antipathy to Stothard, but he also expressed at some length, and with characteristic fire and intemperance, his views on art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was intensely sympathetic with his artistic forerunner, says that the Descriptive Catalogue, and the “Address to the Public,” “abound in critical passages, on painting and poetry, which must be ranked without reserve among the very best things ever said on either subject.”

It may be remarked, however, with all respect and honour, that neither Blake nor Rossetti were critics in any exact sense of the word. The unprejudiced and scientific character of mind which analyses, classifies, and lays bare with sharp dissecting knife the structure, bones, muscles, heart, of an artistic creation, belonged to neither of them. The analytic and synthetic qualities are seldom united in one mind. (Goethe recognized this when he wrote, “I, being an artist, prefer that the principles through which I work should be hidden from me.”) Both Blake and Rossetti leaped with unerring instinct and the artistic intuition at all noble and right work, and loved it with passion, rather than appreciated it with cold reason. Blake’s affinities in art, for instance, especially as he grew older, were much more catholic than it would be supposed. Although the Descriptive Catalogue would induce us to believe that works of art which he did not worship were loathed by him, this was only the case when he was doing battle for certain cherished principles, and then he would hit blindly to right and left in the heat of his partisanship. Mr. Samuel Palmer spoke of evenings spent with him in his old age looking over reproductions of the pictures of various masters, which Blake enjoyed greatly, dwelling on whatever was beautiful and true in each. The Catalogue and Address were written by him with a pen steeped in wormwood. His attacks were mainly directed against the “Venetian and Flemish demons,” with their “infernal machine Chiaro Oscuro,” and the “hellish brownness” with which he says they and their school and modern followers load their paintings. It is true that the English school of the day feared colour, and gave a brown tone to nearly all its pictures, but probably Blake had never seen good examples of the Venetians, whose chief glory is that they “conceived colour heroically.” He enunciated his own principle in these words: “The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling.” His mood was exasperated, truculent, passionately prejudiced, though there is much here of artistic insight and originality. It must be admitted that a great deal is painful reading, but through all the unmeasured language one feels the labouring, overstrained, noble, human heart, tormented beyond endurance. He had been galled to this state of Titanic fury by a policy of calumny, plagiarism, and neglect, used against him by the little souls, of what was in many respects a little age, with no mercy and little intermission for many years.

Since the production of Blair’s “Grave,” he had been held up to public ridicule as an artist, in a paper called the “Examiner,” edited by Leigh Hunt, and the occasion of this exhibition called forth another article in its columns full of crass misunderstanding of his aims and the superior sneers of a self-satisfied and material-minded writer. In it he was termed “an unfortunate lunatic whose personal unoffensiveness secures him from confinement.”

But the “most unkindest cut of all” had been Cromek’s, in making his own friend of thirty years’ standing the supplanter of his work, the thief of his idea.

All these things had inflamed his tremulous and excitable nerves to a point beyond self-control.

Material disagreements of the kind I have related had a sad effect on him, and drove him to an expression of bitterness very difficult to reconcile with the benign, gentle and courteous nature to which all his friends and acquaintances have affectionately testified. There is no doubt that during the period of middle life he developed a hard and violent strain which did not mix with, diminish, or distemper the fine and beautiful qualities of his heart and spirit, but shot through them like a barbed wire among a tangle of honeysuckle. In great part, it was the irritation of capricious and highly-strung nerves, the tension of an overheated and excitable brain, and not a quality of the mind or character at all.

The expression of this condition of Blake’s must, therefore, be taken as an undisciplined and wilfully exaggerated statement of his intellectual convictions, with a deep note of truth at the bottom. It seems strange that in the matter of the “Pilgrimage” he did not go straight to Stothard and invite him to clear himself of the suspicions with which he regarded him. But like all guileless people, and perhaps especially those of the artistic temperament, when once they have been deceived they find it easy to believe that all the world is in league against them.

Before people who were not intimate, who were, in fact, antipathetic to him, Blake would abuse Stothard roundly and criticise him wantonly. But to the immediate circle of his personal friends or sympathisers—those who, knowing how he had suffered, and how black the case looked for Stothard, would have understood anything he might have said,—he maintained complete silence on the subject of the “Pilgrimage,” and the name of the popular artist was mentioned without comment and listened to in grave silence by him. Once, many years after, he met Stothard at a dinner, and went up to him impulsively with outstretched hand. It was refused with coldness. Another time, hearing that Stothard was ill, Blake’s heart softened and warmed to the old friend, and he rushed off impetuously to call and make up the quarrel in which he ever believed Stothard to have been the aggressor. But Stothard would not receive him, desired no reconciliation.

In the year 1808 Blake exhibited, for the fifth and last time, at the Royal Academy, two pictures in “fresco,” “Christ in the Sepulchre guarded by Angels,” and “Jacob’s Dream.” The engraving of Blake’s “Canterbury Pilgrimage” was issued in October, 1810.

It was altogether unadvertised and unheralded, and the public held itself coldly aloof, neither admiring nor buying. The original picture was taken by the ever-faithful Mr. Butts. Stothard’s picture was not finished engraving till a year or two later, for adverse fortunes overtook it. Lewis Schiavonetti died in the middle of the work, and another hand had to finish it. Notwithstanding all of which misadventures, it was one of the most popular engravings ever issued.

We shall compare the two compositions in a succeeding chapter.

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SATAN POURING THE PLAGUE OF BOILS ON JOB

Water-colour drawing. Reproduced by kind permission of Sir Charles Dilke

CHAPTER IV

DECLINING YEARS

Seventeen years of quiet productiveness and unceasing work, marked by the increasing neglect of the world, were passed by Blake at 17, South Molton Street.

When finally abandoned by the public to the deep solitude which he created for himself in the midst of the roar of the city, the years are a record of much peaceful labour, of beautiful and strange work, produced as the result of his spiritual meditations and visions.

“That he should do great things for small wages,” writes Mr. Swinburne, “was a condition of his life,” and the poverty which had knocked at his door for almost half a century, now raised the latch and came in, to live with the Blakes as accustomed house-mate to the end. Mrs. Blake had often to remind him of the bare larder and purse by setting an empty plate before him, when he turned to his task-work of engraving to earn the needful money whereby they might live.

In the last years of his life Blake said significantly to Crabb Robinson, “I should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has, is so much taken from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy.” And so indeed he was.

But he wrote in the Note-book these lines also, indicative of the loneliness and misunderstanding of his whole life:

The Angel who presided at my birth,
Said, “Little creature formed for joy and mirth,
Go, Love, without the help of anything on earth.”

The struggle between himself and the world being over, and his intractable genius relegated by the influential and great persons of his age to a limbo of neglect and contempt, then did he reach out his hands as to a friend, and pulled Poverty across the threshold; and stretching his limbs and shaking back his gray old head in relief and content, he settled in to the unhindered and undistracted contemplation of “those things which really are”—the eternal inner world of the imagination.

“They pity me,” Blake said of Sir Thomas Lawrence and other popular artists of the day, “but ’tis they are the just objects of pity. I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Gradually the ranks of Blake’s old friends were thinned till but two remained, Fuseli and Flaxman, both of whom, however, died before him.

Johnson the bookseller died in 1809, in 1810 Ozias Humphrey; Mr. Butts, always a staunch friend, had no room in his house for more pictures, and fell off as a buyer; Hayley and Blake had long ceased to have a thought in common. Flaxman still continued to find engraving to be done by Blake, being determined that he should at least have money enough to live. Designing, which he would so far rather have done, was out of Flaxman’s power to give, for the public had now sedulously turned its back on Blake. Much of this part of his life seems to have been lived in drudgery, but always cheerfully and happily. He was too poor to afford the outlay necessary for printing and producing his books in the old wonderful way, and often made unsuccessful applications to regular publishers. “Well, it is published elsewhere,” he would say quietly, “and beautifully bound.”

Our artist had never been sympathetic to the decadent age of crumbling institutions and fallow literary and intellectual life that the last part of the eighteenth century presented; and now in the first years of a new century, a generation of new-born song, of enthusiastic lovers of liberty, of strong original and romantic minds, was to supplant the old artificial, social and literary ideals. Blake felt the pristine thrills of the great new birth in the poetry of Wordsworth, introduced to him by Mr. Crabb Robinson, and also in personal acquaintance with Coleridge, a genius somewhat akin to himself.

Mr. George Cumberland introduced Blake in 1818 to John Linnell, afterwards held high in honour and renown as one of England’s greatest landscape painters. At that time he painted portraits for a living, and engraved them afterwards. In this work he got Blake to help him, and it was through him that the latter became acquainted with a younger generation of artists, among whom he soon made many congenial friends. Of John Linnell it must be recorded, that from this time forth till Blake’s death, he occupied a quite unique relation to him, constituting himself the old man’s chief stay and solace, and according him the attentions and the admiring love given by a son to a beloved father.

A new circle of friends and enthusiastic admirers, very young men for the most part, rose up around Blake, whose hearts, expanding in unison with the awakening life of the age, recognized in him a brother, a teacher, and inspired prophet. To them he showed his benign and childlike side, to them he talked, not in the old dogmatic sledge-hammer fashion, but in a spirit of rhapsodic revelation, of peaceful and joyous wisdom.

As the years went by, a new fellowship with mankind, a large toleration and deep tenderness, bore golden fruit in his intercourse with this favoured band of young friends and disciples. As Walter Pater wrote of Michael Angelo, so might it be said of Blake, “This man, because the Gods loved him, lingered on to be of immense patriarchal age, till the sweetness it had taken so long to secrete in him was found at last. Out of the strong came forth sweetness, ex forti dulcedo.”

Among the new friends were John Varley, the father of English water-colours, as he has been affectionately termed, Richter and Holmes, both leaders of the new school. These men were the forerunners of Turner, Copley-Fielding, De Wint, Cotman, Prout, David Cox and William Hunt, and though in these days they are little remembered, and the glory of them has been eclipsed by their great successors, their somewhat timid and delicate work in South Kensington Museum will repay a visit and establish their pioneer claims to our regard.

It was for John Varley that Blake drew the celebrated visionary heads, the only work of his with which he is associated by many people. Varley was by way of being an astrologer, and took the deepest interest in the occult and the spiritualistic. Blake’s talk of visions, of the actual appearances vouchsafed him from the other world, had a significance to Varley’s matter-of-fact mind much more vulgar and material than he intended.

Our artist had cultivated imagination till it became vision, and what he thought, that he saw, for, as Mr. Smetham wrote, “thought crystallized itself sharply into vision with him.” So that when his friend asked him to draw the portraits of men long dead and gone, such as Edward III, William Wallace, Richard I, Wat Tyler, or unknown personages, such as “the man who built the Pyramids,” or “the man who taught Mr. B. painting in his dreams,” and (most remarkable of all!) “the Ghost of a Flea,” Blake had but to command his visionary faculty and summon before his gaze the desired sitters. The one which has been the most talked about is the Ghost of a Flea, and Varley gives the following description of the manner in which it sat for its portrait: “This spirit visited his (Blake’s) imagination in such a figure as he never anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct investigation in my power of the truth of these visions, on hearing of this spiritual apparition of a flea, I asked him if he could draw for me the resemblance of what he saw. He instantly said, ‘I see him now before me.’ I therefore gave him paper and a pencil with which he drew the portrait.... I felt convinced by his mode of proceeding that he had a real image before him; for he left off and began on another part of the paper to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the flea, which, the spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the first sketch till he had closed it.”

Various explanations of these portraits of “spectres” (as Varley has it) have been put forward. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats write of them, “All are pictorial expressions of personality, pictorial opinions, drawn, as Blake believed, from influences set going by the character of the men, and permanently affecting the atmosphere, finer than air or ether, into which his imagination looked for their lineaments.”

A large and curious collection of these heads, executed by Blake at nocturnal sittings at Varley’s house, is still in existence, but not in the British Museum, unfortunately. They mostly bear the date, August, 1820.

In 1820 Blake illustrated Thornton’s “Virgil’s Pastorals.” These, along with his other art-work, will be considered in a later portion of this book. They are the only woodcuts Blake ever made, and are unique, strong and suggestive as anything he ever did. In the same year he made a drawing of Laocoon, to illustrate an article in Rees’ “Cyclopaedia” (to such hack-work as this he was frequently reduced to replenish the household purse). He went to the Academy Schools, and took his place humbly among the young men to draw from the cast of Laocoon there.

“What! you heer, Meesther Blake,” said his old friend Fuseli; “we ought to come and learn of you, not you of us.”

In 1821 Blake moved to No. 3, Fountain Court, in the Temple, his last dwelling-place on earth. It was at that time an old-fashioned respectable court, very quiet, though removed but a few paces from the bustling Strand. The two rooms on the first floor which the Blakes inhabited have been more graphically described than any other of Blake’s homes. The front room had its walls covered with his pictures and served as a reception room for his friends, while the back room was living room, kitchen, sleeping apartment and studio all in one. One of his friends wrote, “There was a strange expansion and sensation of freedom in those two rooms, very seldom felt elsewhere”; while another, speaking of them to Blake’s biographer Gilchrist, exclaimed, “Ah! that divine window!” It was there that Blake’s working table was set, with a print of Albrecht Dürer’s “Melancholia” beside it; and between a gap in the houses could be seen the river, with its endless suggestions, memories and “spiritual correspondences.”

It is to the credit of the Royal Academy that in the year after Blake’s last move, 1822, a grant of £25 was given to this least popular but greatest of her children.

Allan Cunningham and the fastidious Crabb Robinson give the impression that Blake lived in squalor at the end, but the insinuation is refuted by all those who knew him well. Says one, “I never look upon him as an unfortunate man of genius. He knew every great man of his day, and had enough”; while one of the most attached of his friends and disciples (a young artist of the band I have mentioned, who attained success as a painter of “poetic landscape,” Mr. Samuel Palmer) wrote to Gilchrist, “No, certainly,—whatever was in Blake’s house, there was no squalor. Himself, his wife and his rooms, were clean and orderly; everything was in its place. His delightful working corner had its implements ready, tempting to the hand. The millionaire’s upholsterer can furnish no enrichments like those of Blake’s enchanted rooms.”

It would seem that Blake, having won “those just rights as an artist and a man” for which he had striven with Hayley and Cromek in the old days, and having now established his claim to live as he pleased in honourable poverty for the sake of the imaginative life, gained a tardy recognition and respect among the intellectual spirits of the time during his last years. One of the friendly acquaintances of this period was Thomas Griffiths Wainwright, a strange character of great artistic capacity and sensibilities, and yet destined to be a secret poisoner and murderer. I wonder if Blake was thinking of him when he said in one of his conversations with Crabb Robinson, “I have never known a very bad man who had not something very good in him.” Palmer Samuel has given a never-to-be-forgotten picture of Blake at the Academy looking at a picture of Wainwright’s.

“While so many moments better worthy to remain are fled,” wrote Palmer, “the caprice of memory presents me with the image of Blake looking up at Wainwright’s picture; Blake in his plain black suit and rather broad-brimmed but not quakerish hat, standing so quietly among all the dressed-up, rustling, swelling people, and myself thinking, ‘How little you know who is among you!’” These few graphic and reverential words touch the heart by their simple directness and love, for to Samuel Palmer, Blake was “the Master.” The names of Frederick Tatham the elder, and his son the sculptor must be appended to the tale of Blake’s friends; Edward Calvert, who used to go long walks with Blake, made memorable by high conversation; F. O. Finch, a member of the old Water Colour Society; and the distinguished painter Richmond, who was a mere boy when he fell under the spell of the inspired old man. Blake showed this group of young men the most fatherly kindness, encouraged them to appeal to him for advice and counsel, and gathered them around him and talked to them simply, directly and earnestly, of his high and spiritual views on life and art. He poured his noble enthusiasm and other-worldliness into receptive hearts, and his words bore fruit in their works in after life. For this group learned from Blake that Art must express the spirit, and must interpret natural phenomena esoterically. Richmond tells the following characteristic story of how once, “finding his invention flag during a whole fortnight, he went to Blake, as was his wont, for some advice and comfort. He found him sitting at tea with his wife. He related his distress: how he felt deserted by the power of invention. To his astonishment, Blake turned to his wife suddenly and said, ‘It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together when the visions forsake us? What do we do then, Kate?’ ‘We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.’”

To these earnest young men Blake was as the prophet Ezekiel, and the home in Fountain Court got to be called by them significantly enough, “The House of the Interpreter.”

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BLAKE’S LIVING-ROOM AND DEATH-ROOM IN FOUNTAIN COURT

Reproduced from the sketch by Mr. Frederic J. Shields, kindly lent by the artist

Mr. Frederick Shields (who, like Blake and many other great artists, will doubtless be honoured as he deserves to be when nothing further can touch him, and this world may not lay at his living feet its due meed of recognition and gratitude,) made a sketch of the sombre little living room in Fountain Court. His friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti was so profoundly touched on seeing it that he eased his heart in a sonnet:

This is the place. Even here the dauntless soul,
The unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook,
As on that very bed, his life partook
New birth and passed. Yon river’s dusky shoal,
Whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll,
Faced his work window, whence his eyes would stare,
Thought wandering, unto nought that met them there,
But to the unfettered irreversible goal.
This cupboard, Holy of Holies, held the cloud
Of his soul writ and limned; this other one,
His true wife’s charge, full oft to their abode
Yielded for daily bread, the martyr’s stone,
Ere yet their food might be that Bread alone,
The words now home-speech of the mouth of God.

The house in Fountain Court has been pulled down lately. The footprints of the great and gentle soul in his passage through this world to the “unfettered irreversible goal” have almost all disappeared in the dust and scurry of the last century. We can still think of him, and of those long rapt mornings he spent in our glorious Abbey. Full as it is—pent up and overflowing—with the associations of centuries, it will henceforth hold this one more—Blake worked there, Blake dreamed there, Blake caught inspiration from the enchanted forests of its aisles.

We may think of him, too, as standing in the Diploma Gallery of Burlington House, gazing with all his flaming spirit in his eyes at Marco d’Oggione’s beautiful copy of Da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” Of the apostles he said, “Every one of them save Judas looks as if he had conquered the natural man.”

Mr. Linnell, always during this period Blake’s truest, closest friend, introduced him to a rich and cultivated gentleman, a collector of pictures of the German school, a Mr. Aders, at whose table Blake met Crabb Robinson and Coleridge. Crabb Robinson thus describes our artist’s appearance: “He has a most interesting appearance. He is now old—sixty-eight—pale, with a Socratic countenance, and an expression of great sweetness, though with something of languor about it, except when animated, and then he has about him an air of inspiration.” Lamb was an habitué at the house also. Gotzenburger, the German painter, met Blake at Mr. Aders, and he declared on his return to Germany that he saw but three men of genius in England—Coleridge, Flaxman and Blake, and the greatest of these was Blake.

Much happy time was spent by the old man among the Linnell family at the painter’s house, Collins Farm, at North End, Hampstead. Here he often went of a Saturday, and was always welcomed with keen delight by the children and glad affection by their parents. Mrs. Linnell sang his favourite Scotch songs to him, John Linnell talked to him of art and listened appreciatively to his wild poetic conversation. The latter made happy the last few years of his life by a commission to engrave a set of plates after water-colour drawings, already executed, illustrating the Book of Job.

The congeniality of this task, which was to result in the crowning achievement of his life, fired Blake to put his whole soul into the monumental inventions. Linnell also commissioned him to make a series of drawings from the “Divine Comedy.” It is interesting to note that at sixty-seven Blake set to work and learned Italian, in order to read his author in the original. His health had long been failing, and before the drawings were finished Death came to him like a friend who loved him, and took him from this cold and unsympathetic world (where, however, he had been strangely happy) to that other one, with which he had always had so close and mystical a communion. The review of his life, from a worldly point of view, is of one whose means were painfully straitened, whose genius was baffled and powers crippled, by poverty and want of encouragement; to whom the world’s acknowledgement was lacking, and the fame of the painter and poet denied.

His own assessment of life, however, was very different. Gilchrist relates that a rich and influential lady (Mrs. Aders?) brought her little golden-haired daughter to see him. When this child was old she recalled the strangeness of the words said to her, a radiant spoilt child of fortune, by the poor shabby old man: “May God make this world as beautiful to you, my child, as it has been to me!” he said, stroking her golden curls.

I cannot forbear to quote from Gilchrist the passage which describes his death.

“The final leave-taking came which he had so often seen in vision; so often and with such child-like simple faith sung and designed. With the same intense high feeling he had depicted the ‘Death of the Righteous Man,’ he enacted it, serenely, joyously; for life and design and song were with him all pitched in one key, different expressions of one reality. No dissonances there! It happened on a Sunday, the 12th of August, 1827, nearly three months before completion of his seventieth year. On the day of his death ... he composed and uttered songs to his Maker so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine, that, when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately, said, ‘My beloved! they are not mine! No! they are not mine.’”

The last things Blake did were to execute and colour the design of the “Ancient of Days” from the Europe for the young Mr. Tatham. When that was done, “his glance fell on his loving Kate.... As his eyes rested on the once-graceful form, thought of all she had been to him in these years filled the poet-artist’s mind. ”Stay,” he cried, “keep as you are! you have been ever an angel to me; I will draw you.” And he made what Mr. Tatham describes as “a phrenzied sketch of some power, highly interesting, but not like.”

In that plain back room where he had worked so contentedly he closed his eyes on this world, about six of a summer evening, to open them on the glorious visions of the next. Those beloved nervous hands which Mrs. Blake said she had never once seen idle, were laid to rest at last in the cold sleep of death.

The year of Blake’s death, 1827, was that of Beethoven’s. Of both of them it may be said that they were but strangers and sojourners here, and the language they spoke was the language of a far country. Catherine, the devoted wife, only survived her husband four years, during the whole of which time she felt his spiritual presence close to her. Blake, though so poor, left no single debt, and his MSS., pictures, and printed books realized sufficient to keep Mrs. Blake in comfort for those few years. John Linnell and Tatham piously cared for and tended their lost leader’s widow. She died as Blake died, joyfully, and her body was laid to rest beside his in Bunhill Fields. There is no sign to-day to show where those graves lie, but it is as well.

“The vegetative earth” has absorbed the two dear bodies that the spirits of William Blake and his wife may shine the clearer; their bright radiance glimmers through the century like a guiding star, to lead men’s thoughts out into the endless vistas of the infinite life which transcends our present limited consciousness.

CHAPTER V

HIS RELIGIOUS VIEWS

It seems to me that it would be quite vain and useless to go on to a review of Blake’s art, and, incidentally, his poetry, without a preliminary examination—as concise as may be—of the fundamental religious and intellectual conceptions which made him the man he was, and gave him so strange and subjective a point of view. Blake is no ordinary painter, whose art-work is the only key to his inner life or to his perceptions of beauty in the natural world.

He is an artist and a poet of the highest spiritual order, but he is also a mystic. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats tell us that his rank as a mystic entitles him to far more admiration and patient study than any claims he may have as a mere painter and poet! Be that as it may (and some of us cannot but hold the artist as the most glorious manifestation of the divine on this earth!), it is certainly necessary to apprehend Blake the mystic before we can enter into the spirit of Blake the artist.

His was a strange religious creed. It is evident that in early life he obtained somehow or other many of the works of the great mystics and studied them with passionate attention. Among them Swedenborg (whom, however, he frequently criticised harshly) and Jacob Boehmen, the wonderful shoemaker of the sixteenth century, seem to have exerted the most lasting influence on his mind.

Swedenborg’s doctrine of correspondences—the theory that natural phenomena actually represent, or rather shadow, unseen spiritual conditions and existence—attracted Blake at first reading, and became so much a part of his mental fibre that one feels certain he would have eventually fought his intellectual way out into this channel of thought had Swedenborg never written. Nature seemed to Blake but the confused and vague copy of something definite and perfect in “Imagination” or “Spirit.” “All things exist in the human imagination,” and “in every bosom a universe expands,” he wrote, and in the human imagination and its reverend preservation and cultivation lay man’s only source of divine illumination, he believed.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his cavern,” are illuminating words of his. Blake’s whole effort in life seemed to be the cleansing and spiritualizing of the portals of the senses that he might see and hear and receive as much of the infinite spirit as his humanity could hold.

The mission which he put clearly before him always, he expressed in these words in his prophetic poem of “Jerusalem”:

I rest not from my great task
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the Immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards; into the Worlds of Thought, into Eternity
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the Human Imagination.

No man ever sought more gallantly to batter down the walls of materialism which were closing round the souls of men, to let in the sweet breath of Spirit, and to unveil the Vision of the Universal Life. The immemorial struggle between the body and the soul of man was never lost sight of by him, though he sometimes seems to deny it, and his letters to Butts from Felpham show something of his acute consciousness of the difficulty of subduing his spectre or “selfhood.” “Nature and religion,” he announces passionately, “are the fetters of Life.” The orthodox narrow unspiritual religion of his time and all times was repugnant to Blake, and aroused all his fiery combative qualities. It seemed to him to be as actually a fetter to the spirit as the carnal nature of man. Religion was to him a matter of intuition, and not a question of creed or dogma at all. He gives a picture of ordinary religious conceptions in the poem called the “Everlasting Gospel”:

The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision’s greatest enemy.
Thine is the friend of all mankind;
Mine speaks in parables to the blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy heaven-doors are my hell-gates.
Socrates taught what Miletus
Loathed as a nation’s bitterest curse;
And Caiaphas was, in his own mind,
A benefactor to mankind.
Both read the Bible day and night;
But thou read’st black where I read white.

The last line is very significant of Blake. The world which made so decent and respectable a thing out of Christianity, which called success and opportunism the favour of God, and hailed the Prince of this world by the name of Christ, excited Blake’s utmost antagonism. He announced definite counter doctrines on his part, and advocated in his vehemence, almost as partial a view of things, as in their own way, did the materialists of his time. “La vérité est dans une nuance,” Renan has declared, but the swing of the pendulum of opinion must alternate from one extreme to the other before the precise “nuance” can be determined. Blake’s noble but often impractical views have yet a practical utility, for only through a knowledge of the extreme, can the mean be discriminated. Of his own personal religion it might be said that certain fantastic and strange tenets he chose to believe because they pleased him, as we may choose to believe in this or that section of the Catholic Church; but the most quintessential, intimate, and spiritual of his views were not beliefs at all, but simply and purely knowledge. He knew, by an intuition beyond reason, things outside the ken of ordinary men.

The deep melodies of the super-sensible universe reverberated through his soul, and he could never therefore think much of the hum and clamour of this material world. From this intuitive and rapt knowledge of the mystic there is no appeal, for it transcends human experience, and when Blake had it, he was prophet (teller of hidden things) indeed. But when he chose to believe and assert complex and sometimes contradictory doctrines, the affair is different, and we may give or withhold our intellectual sympathy as we will. In any case the spiritual and unorthodox creed which was the lamp of truth to this beautiful soul is worthy of deep reverence, but I cannot altogether agree with Messrs. Ellis and Yeats that a consistent basis of mysticism underlies Blake’s writings. Even a system of mystic philosophy requires to be stated comprehensibly and in a recognizable literary form, and the prophetic books (in which the greater part of Blake’s views are expressed) have no form nor sequence, and are as chaotic and dim as dreams. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, it is true, have constructed an elaborate, imaginative and very coherent thought-structure out of Blake’s prophetic writings, but owing to the looseness, confusion and unintelligible character of the greater part of the symbolic books themselves, the deftly woven web of mysticism which they present to us as Blake’s does not carry conviction with it. It is suggestive, deeply sympathetic with Blake—sometimes radiantly illuminating—but seems an independent treatise rather than an exposition. Deeply as all students of Blake must feel themselves indebted to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats for their learned work, and the real help it has afforded to a clearer view of his unique personality, I cannot but think that every man will—nay must—interpret Blake for himself. He was too erratic, too emotional, too much the artist, the apostle of discernment and the enemy of reason and science, to have constructed the closely-reasoned, carefully-articulated system of thought which they describe so graphically. Blake was an intuitive mystic, not a systematic or learned one. However, if Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have appreciated Blake’s mysticism, in all its strange convolutions and cloudy gyrations, they have done so not by following his expressed thoughts but by stating from a sympathetic insight denied to others, what he himself left unexpressed. This does not materially concern the student of Blake’s art and poetry, but it does deeply concern them that they should ascertain the main opinions which we know he held and the nature of the spiritual insight that obviously moulded his intellect, and hence his art.

He had a startlingly naïve and original mental perspective, and he focussed profound and virgin thought on Life, Spirit and Art. Virgin thought it was indeed, for tradition had little hold on him, and the social, political and intellectual movements of his time passed by him, washing round the rock on which he sat isolated, but leaving him almost untouched by their influence and atmosphere. He was never swept into the current of contemporary life, but was as removed from the London of his time as if his rooms had been an Alpine tower of silence, instead of being in the very heart and turmoil of the city.

He belonged to no particular age. We could never think of him, for instance, like Rossetti or William Morris, as an exile from the middle ages who had fallen upon an uncongenial nineteenth century. He lived apart in a world of spirit, and concerned himself with the great elementary problems of all ages, bringing none of the bias or characteristic mental hamper of his generation to bear upon these considerations. His art necessarily ranges in the same primeval world, not yet thoroughly removed from chaos.

Mr. Swinburne, in his eloquent critical essay on Blake, finds him largely pantheistic in his views. There is something in Blake of the rapt indifference to externals, found in the Buddhist.

Here is a characteristic assertion of his:

“God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man: our Lord is the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its essence is God.” Here certainly speaks the pantheist.

From the study of Blake’s writings the following points—and they are important to our future understanding of his art-work—stand out clearly defined. He believed in a great permeating unconditioned spirit—God—of whose nature men also partake, but subjected to the conditions and moral nature which result from sexual and generative humanity. And beside the unnameable supreme God there is another God, the creator Urizen, who is a sort of divine demon. He it is who has divided humanity into sexes, and inclosed the universal soul in separate bodies, and set up a code of morals which bears no relation to the supreme God, Who being altogether removed from, and above, the generative nature of man, does not Himself conform to “laws of restriction and forbidding.”

Urizen, who imprisons and torments conditioned humanity, is somehow subduable by this same humanity of his own invention, and Christ, the perfect man filled as full as may be with the Divine Spirit (for “a cup may not contain more than its capaciousness”), rises in the hearts of humanity, and effects its freedom, by aspiring past the Creator, to the Altogether Divine, and uniting with it.

Jehovah addressing Christ, as the highest type and flower of humanity, says to him, in the poem called the “Everlasting Gospel”:

If thou humblest thyself thou humblest me.
Thou art a man: God is no more:
Thine own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my spirit of life.

This makes us think of Blake’s follower, Walt Whitman, who in the same sort of turgid and chaotic poetry in which Blake wrote the prophetic books, but with no mystic clouds to shroud the meaning, has consistently developed this thought: “One’s self I sing, a simple separate person,” and “none has begun to think how divine he himself is,” etc.

In Blake’s conversations with Crabb Robinson, this mystic view of Christ is very apparent. “On my asking,” writes Mr. Robinson, “in what light he viewed the great questions of the duty of Jesus,” he said, “He is the only God. But then,” he added, “and so am I, and so are you.”

Keeping this point in view,—Blake’s belief in the identity of the Spirit of God behind all phenomena, the homogeneous character of the great creative Energy or Imagination expressing Itself through various forms and organisms,—another extract from Crabb Robinson’s diary will help us still nearer home to Blake’s point of view. He writes: “In the same tone, he said repeatedly, ‘The Spirit told me.’ I took occasion to say, ‘You express yourself as Socrates used to do. What resemblance do you suppose there is between your spirit and his?’ ‘The same as between our countenances.’ He paused and added, ‘I was Socrates,’ and then, as if correcting himself, ‘a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.’ I suggested on philosophic grounds the impossibility of supposing an immortal being created an a parte post without an a parte ante. His eye brightened at this, and he fully concurred with me. ‘To be sure, it is impossible. We are all co-existent with God, members of the Divine Body. We are all partakers of the Divine Nature.’”

The latter words seem as ordinary and orthodox as on first reading his assertion that he was Socrates seems wild and mad. But all Blake really meant (and I think Crabb Robinson only half took his meaning) was, that the vegetative universe being a mere shadow, so are the accidents of personality, the age one is born into, the organic form which incloses the spirit. So his personality and that of Socrates, their imprisonment in the “vegetative” life were differences of no account, being transitory. But he and Socrates were one (or at least related) at the point where their spirits (the eternal verity) touched, and melted each into the other.

He understood the Bible in its spiritual sense. As to the natural sense, “Voltaire was commissioned by God to expose that. I have had much intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, ‘I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.’” This affords an instance of the manner in which Blake intuitively probed beneath the appearance, and divined the spirit beneath, discarding the fact or body with which it clothed itself. Another characteristic opinion of Blake’s, and one that moulded much of his work, is the following: