William Blake, Painter and Poet

FOOTNOTES The Destruction of Job’s Sons and Daughters. From the “Book of Job.” By W. Blake. A very important witness to Blake’s demeanour and opinions in his later years is Henry Crabb Robinson the diarist, whom we have already met as a visitor to Blake’s exhibition, and who had made him the subject of an essay in a German periodical. Robinson was the right man in the right place, not being a mystic or enthusiast to fall down at Blake’s feet, nor yet a man of the world to deride him as a visionary, but an inquisitive observer of great intellectual range and most kindly and tolerant disposition, ready to allow that things might exist of which his philosophy had not dreamed, and whom abnormal opinions, if held in evident sincerity, might startle but could hardly shock. “It is strange,” says he, “that I who have no imagination, nor any power beyond that of a logical understanding, should yet have a great respect for religious mystics.” Thrown into Blake’s company in 1825, he has recorded his conversations with him at considerable length in his delightful diary, as yet but partially published. His description of Blake’s “interesting appearance” agrees with that of his own circle. “He is 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. The tone and manner are incommunicable. There are a natural sweetness and gentility about him which are delightful.” Having heard of Blake’s visions, Robinson was not surprised to find him asserting that the visionary gift was innate in all men, and only torpid for want of cultivation; but he must have had much ado to digest such statements as that the world was flat, that Wordsworth was a Pagan, and that “what are called the vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world.” Not understanding that by atheism Blake meant, in his own words, “whatever assumes the reality of the natural and unspiritual world,” Robinson was naturally aghast when Locke was classed with atheists, and ventured what must have appeared to him the conclusive rejoinder that Locke had written in defence of Christianity. Blake, who probably understood Robinson’s definition of atheism as little as Robinson did his, “made no reply.” Some of Blake’s remarks are well worthy of preservation. “Art is inspiration. When Michael Angelo, or Raphael, or Mr. Flaxman does any of his fine things, he does them in the spirit.” “Irving is a sent man. But they who are sent go further sometimes than they ought.” “Dante saw devils where I see none.” With Dreams upon my Bed thou scarest me. From the “Book of Job.” By W. Blake. Dante must have been much in Blake’s thoughts just then, for Robinson found him occupied with the long series of illustrations of the poet commissioned by Linnell, the last important work of his life. The history of the commission is thus related by Linnell’s biographer, Mr. Story. “Although the Job had been paid for, Linnell continued to give him money weekly. Blake said, ‘I do not know how I shall ever repay you.’ Linnell replied, ‘I do not want you to repay me. I am only too glad to be able to serve you. What I would like, however, if you do anything for me, is that you should make some designs for Dante’s Inferno , Purgatorio , and Paradiso .’ Blake entered upon the work with alacrity, concurrently with the engraving of the Job designs, and the two together occupied the old man for the rest of his life.” During all this period Linnell was remitting Blake money, as the latter’s notes in acknowledgment prove. Linnell undoubtedly acquired the designs at a low price, but immediately upon Blake’s death he endeavoured to dispose of them for the benefit of the widow. Failing in this he kept them, never attempting to make anything by them; and they are still in the possession of his family. Blake studied Italian to qualify himself more effectually for his task, and is said to have acquired it; when Robinson saw him, however, at an early stage of the commission it is true, he was working by the aid of Cary’s English version. He executed no less than ninety-eight drawings, several of which were left in an unfinished state. Seven have been engraved. The merits of the series have been variously estimated. Mr. Rossetti considers them “on the whole a very fine series, though not uniformly equal in merit.” Mr. Yeats, so well qualified by his own imaginative gift to enter into the merit of Blake’s work, thinks them the finest of all his productions. Robinson, who saw Blake at work upon them, says, “They evince a power I should not have anticipated of grouping, and of throwing grace and interest over conceptions monstrous and horrible.” For our own part, we must regretfully admit that when we saw them at the Old Masters’ exhibition the monstrosity and horror appeared more evident than the grace and interest. We could not deem Dante’s conceptions adequately rendered; the colour, too, often seemed harsh and extravagant. Blake went on working upon them until his death, when Mrs. Blake sent them to Linnell. They thus escaped the fate of Blake’s other artistic and literary remains left in his widow’s possession, which after her death were appropriated, apparently without any legal authority, by a person named Tatham, who had been much about Blake in his later years, and who ultimately destroyed them in deference to the mandate of a religious sect with which he had become connected! [9] Behemoth and Leviathan. From the “Book of Job.” By W. Blake. The end was now near. During 1827 Blake’s health greatly failed from catarrh and dysentery, and he could no longer go up to Hampstead to see Linnell. Linnell wished him to quit the damp neighbourhood of the river, and live in his own house in Cirencester Place, part only of which he used as a studio. But Blake said, “I cannot get my mind out of a state of terrible fear at such a step.” He also said, “I am too much attached to Dante to think much of anything else.” One of his last works was the colouring of The Ancient of Days for the elder Tatham, who paid him at a higher rate than he was accustomed to receive. Blake accordingly worked his hardest, and when it was finished “threw it from him, and with an air of exulting triumph exclaimed, ‘There, that will do, I cannot mend it.’” Later still he exclaimed to his wife, “You have ever been an angel to me, I will draw you,” and produced a sketch, “interesting, but not like.” On August 12 he died, “composing and uttering songs to his Maker.” He was buried in Bunhill Fields, in a grave which cannot now be identified. It is little to the honour of his countrymen that no public memorial of him should exist. A better one could not be than his own Death’s Door in the illustration to Blair’s Grave , treated as a bas-relief with the necessary modifications. The artist whose life had been spent in a condition so little remote from penury did not leave a single debt, and the accumulated stock of his works sufficed to support his widow in comfort for the four years for which she survived him. Friends, indeed, aided, Linnell and Tatham successively giving her house-room, and others assiduously recommending her stores of drawings to wealthy patrons. She died in Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, and was buried beside her husband in Bunhill Fields. The artistic processes used by Blake are a subject of considerable discussion. Notwithstanding his constant description of his pictures as “frescoes,” it seems certain that he never resorted to fresco in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Linnell, who must have been exceedingly familiar with his work, told Mr. Gilchrist: “He evidently founded his claim to the name fresco on the material he used, which was water-colour on a plaster ground (literally glue and whiting); but he always called it either fresco, gesso, or plaster.” Linnell added that when he himself obtained from Italy the first copy that ever came to England of Cennino Cennini’s Trattato della Pittura , a sixteenth-century treatise, edited in 1822 from the original MS., Blake, who was soon able to read it, “was gratified to find that he had been using the same materials and methods in painting as Cennini describes, particularly the carpenter’s glue.” “Unfortunately,” says Linnell, “he laid this ground on too much like plaster to a wall,” and when this was so applied to canvas or linen the picture was sure to crack, and many of Blake’s best works have suffered great injury. Oil he disliked and vituperated. The reason probably was that, contrary to what might have been expected, his system of execution was by no means bold and dashing, but deliberate and even slow. He drew a rough dotted line with pencil, then with ink, then colour, filling in cautiously and carefully. All the grand efforts of design, he thought, depended on niceties not to be got at once. He seems, in fact, to have worked very much in the spirit of the mediæval illuminators, and the general aspect of a page of one of his Prophetical Books reminds us forcibly of one of their scrolls. Whether any direct influence from them upon him is traceable would be difficult to determine. Keats had evidently seen illuminated manuscripts, and been deeply impressed by them; but nearly forty years elapsed between the publication of the first of Blake’s Prophetical Books and the composition of Keats’s Eve of St. Mark . In one respect Blake certainly differed from the ancient miniaturists; he wrought mainly from reminiscence, and disliked painting with his eye on the object. His memory for natural forms must have been very powerful. Blake is endowed in a very marked degree with the interest ascribed by Goethe to Problematische Naturen , men who must always remain more or less of a mystery to their fellows. In ancient times, and perhaps in some countries at the present day, he would have been accepted as a seer; in his own age and country the question was rather whether he should be classed with visionaries or with lunatics. A visionary he certainly was, and few will believe either that his visions had any objective reality, or that he himself intended them to be received merely as symbols. “You can see what I do, if you choose,” he said to his friends. He thus confused fancy with fact; unquestionably, therefore, he laboured under delusions. But delusions do not necessarily amount to insanity, and, however Blake erred in form, it may be doubted whether in essentials he was not nearer the truth than most so-called poets and artists. Every poet and artist worthy of the name will confess that his productions, when really good for anything, are the suggestion of a power external to himself, of an influence which he may to a certain extent guide, but cannot originate or summon up at his will; and in the absence of which he is helpless. In personifying this influence as the Muse, or howsoever he may prefer to describe it, such an one is usually fully aware that, in obedience to a law of the human mind, he is bestowing personality and visibility upon what is actually invisible and impersonal, but not on that account unreal. Some there are, however, whose perceptions are so lively, or their power of dealing with abstractions so limited, that the mental influences of which they are conscious appear to them in the light of personalities. Such was Blake, and the peculiarity in him was probably closely connected with the childlike disposition which rendered him so amiable as a man. As a child it naturally never occurred to him to question the reality of his visions, and he grew up without acquiring the critical habit of mind which would have led him to do so. With him “the vision splendid” did not Die away, And fade into the light of common day. Such a state of mind is quite compatible with sanity. The question is not whether the person Gives to airy nothings A local habitation and a name, but whether he allows his conduct to be actuated by them to the extent of inverting the rules of right and wrong, wasting his substance, or becoming offensive to others or dangerous to himself. It is even possible to travel far in this direction without arriving at the confines of insanity. Prince Polignac brought the monarchy of the Restoration to ruin in deference to imaginary revelations from the Virgin Mary, yet no court of law would ever have placed him under restraint. With Blake not the faintest suggestion of such a thing is possible. Except for one or two incidents, related upon doubtful authority, he appears throughout his life in the light of an exemplary citizen, and in his unselfishness and unworldliness contrasts with his Sadducæan neighbours in a way that forbids us to call him mentally diseased, though he may have been mentally warped. The value of his mystical utterances is quite another question. The occasional splendour of the poetry in which they are couched will not be disputed, any more than their general confusion and obscurity. Commentators have striven hard to elicit the sunbeam from the cucumber; we pass no judgment on their efforts, further than may seem to be implied in the observation that in our opinion the chief mission of Blake’s mystical poetry was to be the vehicle of his finest and most characteristic art. His ideas, many profound and worthy of close attention, may, we think, be more advantageously collected from his prose aphorisms and the fragments of his conversation; and in this respect he is by no means singular. The one great achievement which unquestionably entitles him to the distinction of an inspired man, is to have produced in boyhood, without set purpose or any clear consciousness of what he was doing, lyrics recalling the golden prime of English poetry, and instinct with a music to which, since Chatterton was no more, no contemporary save Burns was capable of making the slightest approach. It is true that reaction against artifice and conventionality was in the air of the time, and was already announced by evident symptoms. To compare, however, the highly creditable efforts in this direction of even such poets as Cowper and Mickle with the achievements of this stripling is to become sensible at once of the difference between talent and inspiration. Blake’s gifts and shortcomings as an artist are sufficiently revealed by the examples of his work which accompany this essay. It need merely be remarked here that, apart from the great army of artists of genius who move on recognised lines, transmitting the succession from the age of Zeuxis and Phidias to our own, there is, as it were, a parallel column skirting it on the by-roads of art; and that at certain periods of Art’s history the genius which has forsaken the more conspicuous of her manifestations has seemed to take refuge with etchers, or designers, or delineators of the life of the people. It has frequently happened of late that men whose work was chiefly done for books and periodicals, and who during their lives were scarcely regarded as artists at all, have upon their deaths been deservedly exalted to very high places. Blake is perhaps the most striking and remarkable example of this class. Blake’s peculiarities as a man, and the anecdotes of which he became the subject, secured him earlier attention as artist and poet than his works would have obtained on their own account. Not long after his death he was made (1830) the subject of one of Allan Cunningham’s Lives of British Painters , in the main a fair and impartial biography, rather in advance of than behind its time. Cunningham, however, possessed no sort of spiritual kinship with Blake, who found his first really congenial commentator in a veteran philosopher, still happily spared to us, Dr. James Garth Wilkinson, who in 1839, the year of the first collected edition of Shelley’s poems, republished Songs of Innocence and Experience with an anonymous preface claiming for Blake something like his proper position as a lyric poet, and accompanied by judicious remarks upon his paintings. Dr. Wilkinson would probably have expressed himself still more decidedly if he had written a few years later, but the movement towards the exaltation of the more spiritual aspects of English poetry as typified in Wordsworth and Shelley was as yet but incipient, and the stars of Tennyson and Browning were hardly above the horizon. Little further seems to have been done for Blake, until, about 1855, the late Mr. Alexander Gilchrist began to write his biography, published in 1862, a labour of love and diligence which will never be superseded, especially since the revision it has received in the definitive edition of 1880, brought out by his widow. The value of Gilchrist’s labours is greatly enhanced by the accompanying illustrations, which allow a fairly adequate conception to be formed of Blake’s pictorial genius, by the reprint of much of his most characteristic literary work, and by the copious descriptions of his drawings by Mr. W. M. Rossetti and Mr. F. Shields. Since Gilchrist wrote, Mr. Swinburne (1868) has investigated Blake’s thought with special reference to its Pantheistic tendency, and Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, in a most comprehensive work in three volumes (1891), including additional biographical particulars and copious illustrations, which comprise the previously unpublished “Vala,” have striven to present Blake’s mysticism as a coherent system of thought. Valuable monographs are also prefixed to the editions of Blake’s poems by Rossetti (1883) and Yeats (1893), and to the selection from his literary works by Mr. Housman (1893), this last perhaps on the whole, after Gilchrist’s biography, the most desirable possession for the literary student of Blake. Of the numerous detached essays upon Blake the most important, perhaps, are that by the late Mr. Smetham, republished in his Essays, and in the second volume of Gilchrist’s biography, and that by James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful Night , appended to his Shelley, a Poem (1884). It is exceedingly difficult to obtain a proper idea of Blake as an artist, from the extent to which his designs depend upon colouring, and the great inequality of this colouring, which is often not his own. In Mr. Gilchrist’s opinion, the copy of The Song of Los , in the Print Room of the British Museum, and a volume of miscellaneous designs, in the same collection, represent him with adequate fairness; and these fortunately are public property. The finest specimens of his work seen by his biographer are apparently in the collection of the Earl of Crewe, and therefore not generally accessible. Those belonging to private collectors must of necessity be continually changing hands, and few students have the time or the opportunity to make the thorough investigation of them accomplished by Mr. Rossetti. Fortunately the illustrations in Gilchrist’s biography, where the whole of the Job series is reissued, suffice to establish Blake’s genius as a designer, even though destitute of the charm of colour. Mr. Bell Scott has executed effective etchings after him; Mr. Quaritch has republished the drawings for Comus ; in 1876 the Songs of Innocence and Experience and the Prophetic Books up to Los were reprinted together, but only to the extent of a hundred copies, nor was the execution very satisfactory. It cannot be said that Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have entirely overcome the difficulties of reproduction; yet, perhaps, for those unable to obtain access to the copies tinted by the artist, or even to the uncoloured plates in the original edition, nothing so well displays the wilder and more weird aspects of his genius as the reprints in their third volume, especially those from Jerusalem . Blake’s character and works will long remain the subject of criticism and speculation, for the world does not easily forgo its interest in what Goethe calls “problematic natures.” By another famous saying of Goethe’s he cannot profit, “He who has sufficed his own age has sufficed all ages,” nor can he be reckoned among those who have been in advance of their age, except in those exquisite early songs which died away before the actual arrival of the better time. But it would not be too much to say of him that he revealed possibilities, both in poetry and painting, which without him we should hardly have suspected, and which remain an unexhausted seed-field of inspiration for his successors. It is labour lost to strive to make him transparent, but even where he is most opaque Sparks spring out of the ground, Like golden sand scattered upon the darkness. Nor is the general tendency of art towards a world of purity, harmony, and joy unrepresented in him; sometimes this even seems the conclusion to which all else is merely subservient, as in the series of illustrations to Job, the ideal representation of his own history. Sweeping the Parlour in the Interpreter’s House. FOOTNOTES [1] November 20 has been stated as the date, but the above is shown to be correct by the horoscope drawn for November 28, 7.45 P.M. in Urania, or the Astrologer’s Chronicle , 1825, published therefore in Blake’s lifetime, and undoubtedly derived from Varley. [2] If, however, the “Kitty” of “I love the jocund dance” is Catherine Boucher, this poem at least must be later than 1780, unless the name has been substituted for another, as has been known to happen. [3] As for example “Man lies by a rock-bound shore, his thoughts flying forth from him in likeness of delicate airy figures driven by the wind to perish in the endless sea as soon as born.” In the absence of the drawings themselves such descriptions affect us like the projects for unwritten stories in Hawthorne’s American Note Book . [4] Poetis nos laetamur tribus, Pye, Petro Pindar, parvo Pybus; Si ulterius ire pergis, Adde his Sir James Bland Burges. [5] Blake is seldom detected in borrowing, but when he tells us that Milton’s shadow fell Precipitant, loud thundering, into the sea of Time and space, he is clearly, though perhaps unconsciously, reminiscent of Dyer’s Towers Tumbling all precipitate down dashed, Rattling around, loud thundering to the Moon. [6] The same remark is the subject of one of the finest passages of Lucretius:— Praeterea, magnae legiones quom loca cursu Camporum complent, belli simulacra cientes, Fulgur ibi ad cœlum se tollit, totaque circum Aere renidescit tellus, subterque virum vi Excitur pedibus sonitus, clamoreque montes Icti rejectant voces ad sidera mundi; Et circumvolitant equites, mediosque repente Tramittunt, valido quatientes impete, campos; Et tamen est quidam locus altis montibus, unde Stare videntur, et in campis consistere fulgur. [7] Not always without assistance from the eyes of others; for the portrait of Edward the First is clearly a reminiscence of that which in Blake’s time adorned Goldsmith’s History. [8] It is observable that Job’s wife, so disadvantageously treated in Scripture, is by Blake represented as the sufferer’s loving companion throughout. This was probably out of tenderness to Mrs. Blake, from whom, indeed, upon a comparison between her portrait as a young woman and the ideal representation of the Patriarch’s spouse, his model for the latter would seem to have been derived; but if so the inference seems justified that Blake regarded the story of Job as emblematic of his own history. [9] It must be now about thirty-five years since we received a visit from this person; how he had found us out we cannot recollect. He stated that he had lived by painting miniatures, and, having been deprived of his customers by photography, proposed to devote himself to historical painting, to the great prospective advantage of British art. He considered his forte to be the delineation of bare arms, and wished to be recommended to a subject which would afford scope for the exercise of this department of the pictorial faculty. We suggested the interment of the young princes in the Tower; he thanked us and departed; and we saw no more of him. He admitted having parted with all the relics of Blake that had been in his possession, but sought to convey that they had been sold, not destroyed, which may be partly true. INDEX “America,” 29 , 38 , 40 , 52 “Appeal to the Public,” 52 Aspland, Mr., 62 “Babylonian Woman, The”, 52 Bain, Thomas, 29 “Bard, The”, 56 Basire, James, 8 Blair’s Grave , Illustrations to, 49 , 51 , 52 , 72 Blake, Catherine, 10 , 18 , 20 , 29 , 66 , 70 Blake, James, 7 , 8 , 16 Blake, John, 8 Blake, Robert, 8 , 17 , 18 Blake, William; his birth and parentage, 7 ; sent to Pars School, 8 ; apprenticed to Basire, 9 ; marries Catherine Boucher, 10 ; settles in Poland Street, 18 ; removes to Lambeth, 28 ; his sojourn at Felpham and intercourse with Hayley, 47 ; returns to London, 49 ; his friendship with Linnell and Varley, 59 , 60 ; his death, 72 Bognor, 41 “Book of Ahaniah, The”, 29 Boucher, Catherine see Blake, Catherine British Museum, 22 , 62 , 77 Butts, Thomas, 29 , 43 , 44 , 52 , 61 , 62 Calvert, Edward, 66 “Canterbury Pilgrims, The”, 52 , 56 Carey, William, 58 Cennini, Cennino, 73 “Christ in the Sepulchre,” 54 “Comus,” 62 Cowper, William, 41 , 43 , 44 , 75 Crewe, Earl of, 38 , 46 , 62 , 77 Cromek, Robert, 49 , 51 , 52 Cumberland, George, 59 Cunningham, Allan, 30 , 56 , 76 Dante, Illustrations to, 69 , 70 “Death on the Pale Horse,” 58 Descriptive Catalogue by Blake, 52 Deville, 38 Eartham, 41 “Edward III.,” 13 , 31 Ellis and Yeats, Messrs., 8 , 18 , 30 , 32 , 33 , 35 , 38 , 45 , 51 , 54 , 70 , 76 , 77 “Europe,” 31 “Everlasting Gospel, The”, 33 Felpham, 27 , 41 , 42 , 44 , 45 , 48 Finch, G. O., 66 Flaxman, 15 , 28 , 41 , 42 , 59 , 69 Fuseli, 27 , 44 , 59 “Gates of Paradise, The”, 29 , 30 , 52 Gilchrist, Alexander, 9 , 14 , 16 , 19 , 27 , 29 , 31 , 38 , 46 , 49 , 51 , 52 , 54 , 60-62 , 65 , 66 , 68 , 73 , 76 Godwin, William, 27 Gray, Illustrations to works of, 62 Hamilton, Duke of, 62 Hayley, William, 18 , 42-44 , 49 Holcroft, 27 Housman, 48 , 77 “Jacob’s Dream,” 52 “Jerusalem,” 42 , 45 , 46 , 48 Job, Illustrations to the Book of, 62 , 64 , 70 , 77 , 78 Johnson (publisher), 27 , 44 “Joseph of Arimathæa,” 9 Lamb, Charles, 20 , 51 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 21 , 59 Linnell, John, 30 , 59 , 60 , 62 , 64 , 69 , 72 , 73 “Los, The Song of”, 29 Malkin, 9 , 52 “Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The”, 29 , 36 Matthews, 15 “Milton,” 46 , 48 , 49 “Morning,”, 9 “Nelson guiding Leviathan,” 56 O’Neil, 8 Ossian, 31 Paine, Tom, 27 Palmer, Samuel, 57 , 66 , 68 Paradise Lost , Illustrations for, 62 Parker, Robert, 16 , 17 Pars, William, 8 “Penance of Jane Shore,” 9 Phillips, Thomas, 49 Piroli, 28 “Pitt guiding Behemoth,” 56 “Poetical Sketches,” 10 , 13 , 16 , 19 , 43 “Prophecies of America,” 37 “Proverbs of Hell,” 36 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 57 , 59 Richmond, George, 66 Robinson, Crabb, 32 , 51 , 59 , 68-70 Rossetti, Dante, 38 Rossetti, William, 17 , 20 , 33 , 38 , 51 , 61 , 62 , 65 , 70 , 76 , 77 Ryland, William, 8 “Samson,” 31 “Satan calling up his Legions,” 56 Schiavonetti, 49 , 51 Shields, Frederick, 29 , 76 “Simple, David”, 16 Smetham, 77 Smith, J. T., 16 “Songs of Experience,” 15 , 20 , 21 , 23-25 , 27 , 35 , 76 , 77 “Songs of Innocence,” 15 , 20 , 21 , 23 , 25 , 27 , 29 , 35 , 43 , 76 , 77 Stothard, Thomas, 16 , 17 , 51 , 54 , 59 Strange, J. C., 62 Swinburne, A. C., 30 , 47 , 56 , 76 Tatham, 70 , 71 , 72 “Thel, The Book of”, 29 , 31 , 33 , 36 , 40 , 47 Thomson, James, 77 Thornton, Dr., 65 “Tiriel,” 30 “Urizen,” 29 , 43 “Vala,” 29 , 77 Varley, John, 56 , 60 “Vision of the Daughters of Albion,” 29 , 37 Whitman, Walt, 31 Wilkinson, J. Garth, 76 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 27 Woollett, 54 Young’s Night Thoughts , Illustrations to, 29

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