BLAKE has had many admirers; he is _a laudatis laudatus_; that he should
have called forth the outspoken and elaborate admiration of Mr.
Swinburne and the two Rossettis is of itself a title to consideration.
He has had, and will have detractors, though they are mostly of the kind
that are converted to an artist's merits when high prices are paid for
his work: and that has long been the case with Blake. When some drawings
of his were shown to George III., the King cried out pettishly, "Take
them away, take them away"; yet we do not hold this to be a crowning
proof of Blake's artistic merits, as some of his critics have done. The
observation may have been purely fretful, but we believe that it arose
from a deeper psychological cause than mere want of appreciation--the
timid sympathy of insanity. Blake's sweeping fiery forms, his globular
ebullition of light, his insight into all that coils and writhes, are
the instinctive creation of a brain which, if not under the actual
pressure of madness, was, as Dr. Johnson said, "at least not sober."
Blake has had, we say, his admirers and his detractors, but he has never
had a critic. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Gilchrist, Ellis, Yeats, they are
sympathetic, appreciative, instructive. Given the admiration for Blake
they are the most delicate of commentators; but they are none of them
critical.
It will be convenient to summarise shortly Blake's life. He was born in
1757, his father a comfortable hosier; he received a haphazard artistic
education, writing original verse at the age of twelve, apprenticed to
an engraver at fourteen, under whom he acquired a love for Gothic art
which never deserted him--the fact was that to avoid collisions between
Blake and his other pupils, Basire, his master, sent him sketching in
the summer months in the old London churches. He engraved an original
print in 1773. In 1778 he began to earn a precarious existence by
engraving for the booksellers; in 1782 he married Catherine Boucher,
daughter of a market-gardener, and went to live in Queen Street,
Leicester Fields. After a brief and unsatisfactory venture as a
print-seller, he began to work for himself, but could find no market for
_Songs of Innocence_. His brother Robert, then lately deceased, revealed
a secret method of working up these designs, "in a dream," and the book
went out into the world, printed, coloured and bound by the husband and
wife. Four years later followed _Songs of Experience_. In 1793 he moved
to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth--there designing forty-three
illustrations for Young's _Night Thoughts_. In 1800 he settled for three
years at Felpham, under the auspices of Hayley, a Sussex squire and
_litterateur_, author of a Life of Cowper, but grew weary of Hayley's
polite disapprobation, and returned to South Molton Street. In 1820 he
moved to 3, Fountain Court, Strand, where he died in 1827. He seems to
have had the same feeling for London that Samuel Johnson and Charles
Lamb had: he could not live elsewhere. It was in these last years that
he executed his finest work--_Inventions to the Book of Job_. He was
always very poor.
The object of this essay will be to criticise, and, if possible, to
define Blake's position as a poet and as an artist. We will turn to his
writings first.
The union of artistic and poetical gifts is not an uncommon combination:
artistic success argues a certain depth of poetical qualities, and if it
is rare to find artists who have achieved a marked success in
literature, it is simply accounted for by the exigencies of technical
study--a high vocation is apt to drain a life dry of other excellences,
and in literature, as in art, there are few instances of permanent
success apart from the quality of patient elaboration. In our own days
we may quote Rossetti and Thackeray as instances of this alliance of
gifts, though in the case of the latter such artistic success as he
achieved was the result rather of natural facility than technical
excellence. Michael Angelo's sonnets, Henry VIII.'s music, Benvenuto
Cellini's autobiography, Mr. Lecky's poetry, Archbishop Sumner's
water-colour drawings, Mr. Gladstone's Homeric studies, Mr. Arthur
Balfour's philosophical works, are dependent for their interest not so
much upon the qualities of the work, as on the revelation in an
unfamiliar medium of great personalities. Sometimes, it is true, we have
instances such as Spohr's autobiography--a singularly unimpressive
book--Lord Tennyson's dramas, Milton's Paraphrase of the Psalms, which
seem to prove that excellence in one line is apt to be a limited, almost
a mechanical faculty--that the artist is, so to speak, ahead of his own
personality in one respect, and that in such cases the art is not the
casual efflorescence of a vivid nature, but the concentrated bloom of an
otherwise unproductive or mediocre stock.
Blake, in spite of the extravagant claims made for him by his admirers,
must be held to have been primarily an artist. If he had not been an
artist his poems could hardly have survived at all. Mr. D. G. Rossetti
says of the _Songs of Innocence_ that they are almost flawless in
essential respects. But few will be found to endorse this verdict. The
fact is, that those who are carried off their feet by the magnificent
originality of Blake's artistic creations, read in between the lines of
his delicate and fanciful, but faulty and careless verse, an inspiration
to which he laid no claim.
Blake's poetry is, from beginning to end, childish; it has the fresh
simplicity, but also the vapid deficiences of its quality--the metre
halts and is imperfect; the rhymes are forced and inaccurate, and often
impress one with the sense that the exigencies of assonance are so far
masters of the sense, that the word that ends a stanza is obviously not
the word really wanted or intended by the author, but only approximately
thrown out at it. This may be illustrated by a line from the Nurse's
song in the _Songs of Experience_, where he says
Your spring and your day are wasted in play,
And your winter and night in _disguise_.
where the sense requires some such word as "disgust" or "weariness."
Again, his use of single words is often so strained and unnatural as to
rouse a suspicion that really he did not know the precise meaning of
some word employed. We may cite such an instance as the following from
"London" (_Songs of Experience_)--
I wander thro' each _chartered_ street
Near where the _chartered_ Thames doth flow.
And also in the "Ideas of Good and Evil," the first two lines of "Thames
and Ohio"--
Why should I care for the men of Thames
And the cheating waters of _chartered_ streams...?
Whatever the word 'chartered' means, it is obvious, from its iteration,
that Blake attached some importance to it; but what does it mean? In
ordinary speech the word of course means 'licensed,' in a metaphorical
sense, 'enjoying some special immunity,' as 'chartered buffoon.' Is it
possible that Blake confused it with 'chart,' and meant 'mapped out' or
'defined'? Conjecture is really idle in the case of a man who maintained
that many of his poems were merely dictated to him, and that he
exercised no volition of his own with regard to them.
His rhymes too are incredibly careless--we have 'lambs' rhyming with
'hands,' 'face' with 'dress,' 'peace' with 'distress,' 'vault' with
'fraught,' 'Thames' with 'limbs,' and so forth, in endless measure.
It may be urged that it is hypercritical to note these defects in a poet
like Blake; it may be said that he was a child of nature, and that it is
in the untamed and untrained character of his poems that his charm
lies. "I regard fashion in poetry," he wrote, "as little as I do in
painting." But Blake was a foe to slovenliness in the other branch of
his art; in his trenchant remarks upon engraving, in the "Public
Address," he is for ever insisting on the value of form; he is for ever
deploring the malignant heresy that engravers need not, nay ought not to
be draughtsmen. He maintains that this degrading of the engraver into a
mere mechanical copyist has killed the art; so had he devoted himself
scientifically to poetry, he would have been the first to realise and
preach that it is the duty of the artist to acquire a technical
precision, so sure, so instinctive, that it ceases to hamper thought.
Blake's work in literature may be roughly divided into three periods:
(1) his early Elizabethan period, (2) his original lyrics, (3) his
prophetic writings.
The Elizabethan lyrics are to some the most attractive; they are
penetrated with the spirit of the Shakesperean age; but when one has
said that they are exquisite imitations one has classified them: no
imitations, however perfect, can rank with original work; poetry must
develop in natural and orderly sequence; the recovery of earlier
traditions, however perfect the workmanship, however intimate the
insight, is within the grasp of talent. As Tennyson exquisitely says,
"All can raise the flower now, for all have got the seed."
In the present century we have often encountered what may be called the
neo-Jacobean play. Its characteristics are strikingly Shakesperean:
isolated lines would be referred by critics unhesitatingly to the
Shakesperean outburst of dramatic poetry; but the knack is one that is
capable of being learnt, and not an original gift. "My silks and fine
array," "How sweet I roamed from field to field," "Memory hither come,"
and the delicate poem to the muses which ends with the well-known line,
"The sound is forced, the notes are few," are worthy of a place in
anthologies, but they are not Blake. Such expressions as "fired my vocal
rage" are not what the Romans would call _ingenuus_--they are not native
but exotic. Even these poems published in 1783 contain strange lapses
characteristic of Blake's later manner: "where white and brown is our
lot" is a monstrous line, alluding, I believe, to bread. Among this
collection, however, are included two poems which are interesting as
containing the germ (it is hard to believe otherwise) of Keats' "Ode to
Autumn," where the poet sees the merry sun-browned summer smiling under
the oak.
To this period also belongs the unfinished play of Edward III., with
some beautiful lines, but wholly incoherent; yet we may linger in
pleasure over such a couplet as "The eagle that doth gaze upon the sun,
Fears the small fire that plays about the fens," which contains just
the kind of fantastic image belonging to the mystic side of nature that
comes naturally to few poets.
It would of course be idle alike to analyse or deny the charm that many
have found in the _Songs of Innocence_. Charles Lamb, perhaps the most
surefooted critic we have ever raised among us, was one of the first to
recognise it, though in a humorous spirit, luxuriating in them as in the
rich absurdities of a childish poem. "The Tiger" he calls "Glorious,"
though he maliciously altered "Tom Dacre" in the "Chimney Sweep" to "Tom
Toddy."
In the poems of natural description there is a certain visionary
inspiration, with the freedom of large airs and moving light. And there
is at times the poetical realisation of some deep life-truth, as in
"Barren Blossom":
I feared the fury of my wind
Would blight all blossoms fair and true;
And my sun it shined and shined,
And my wind it never blew;
But a blossom fair and true
Was not found on any tree,
For all blossoms grew and grew
Faithless, false, though fair to see.
This lyric is born out of the spirit of Blake's life; there was no man
better fitted to understand the dangers of the sheltered existence, or
with a more visible appreciation of the discipline of life and labour.
"I don't understand what you mean by the want of a holiday," he said; "I
never stop for anything--I work on whether ill or not:" we may take the
lines as applying to, and perhaps suggested by, Blake's dilettante
friend and patron, Hayley, the hermit of Eartham, a feeble and profuse
poetaster, who mistook the gentlemanly celebrity of a country squire who
wrote verses, for the fame of the laborious poet.
A certain lyric, pre-eminently praised by Mr. Swinburne, has a solemn
music of its own, but is less what a lyric should be, the flash of a
single mood, a passing experience, than the opening of a stately
prelude:
Silent, silent night
Quench the holy light
Of thy torches bright.
For possessed of Day,
Thousand spirits stray
That sweet joys betray.
Why should joys be sweet
Used with deceit,
Nor with sorrows meet?
There is but one more stanza, and in that, inspiration seems suddenly to
flag and falter as if the hand had grown weary. And so it is all
through--many poems have, especially at the beginning, passages of the
rarest lyrical beauty, and then comes some lapse of rhyme or sense that
makes the reader feel that the writer either did not know what
perfection was, or that he mistook for inspiration the sudden flow and
ebb of a mood; many poets must have this experience, that of a mood not
lasting quite long enough to stamp the "thoughts that breathe" on "words
that burn;" the intellectual faculty fails first--and then succeeds the
power which Wordsworth thought so characteristic of the true poet, the
power of rendering remembered emotion. Blake seems to have had none of
that; the mood flashed without his control, the words flowed, and good
or bad there was no mending them. Edward FitzGerald, one of the sanest
and surest of critics, lays his finger on this blot: he recognises the
genius of Blake, but he says there is not a single poem which retains
its inspiration all through.
For instance, it seems almost incredible that the same hand can have
written, in the _Songs of Experience_, within a few pages,
The Holy Word
That walked among the ancient trees,
Calling the lapsed soul,
And weeping in the evening dew,
That might control
The starry pole
And fallen, fallen light renew--
and when we turn the page, in the "Human Vagabond,"
And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting, nor birch--
which is gross and unintelligible.
At the same time, treating them strictly as sketches, Blake's poems are
seldom without interest, and as we have said, occasionally rise into
flights of lyrical beauty. All art is necessarily incomplete, but it is
not mere incompleteness that we blame--it is the almost total absence of
the critical faculty; the inability to separate what is mediocre and
fatuous from what is high and great.
The third period is that of the prophetical books; and into this maze of
obscurity and futility we will not venture to enter; they are
accompanied with glorious designs, many of them, and, but for that, we
must honestly say they would have been long ago consigned to oblivion:
Mr. Swinburne has penetrated their deepest abysses, solved their
enigmas, materialised their allegories, and extracted from them a system
of philosophy; and it must be added that their latest champions, Messrs.
Ellis and Yeats, consider that not only did Blake never write a page
without distinct meaning, but that the utterances combine into a great
mythic system. Mr. Rossetti takes his leave of them with the somewhat
ambiguous remark that if a man was cast on a desert island with nothing
but Blake's poetical works, and came away with an increased admiration
for them, he might have a right to his opinion, but it would not agree
with Mr. Rossetti's. They are written in a rhythm which appears to be
irregular, but which Blake assures us was carefully weighed and
calculated. Their language is the language of one who is saturated with
Biblical models, and the solemn, if tedious, rhapsodies of Ossian, for
whom Blake had a strange admiration. The author considered them direct
revelations from God. He said of the "Jerusalem" that it was the
grandest poem that this world contains; when each was refused by
publisher after publisher, he would say with pathetic faith, "Well,
well, it is published elsewhere--and beautifully bound;" a touching
instance of how the visionary clung to the material expression of his
work. He wrote to Flaxman the sculptor, saying, "I am more famed in
heaven for my works than I could well conceive." There have been no
signs, if we except Gilchrist and Mr. Swinburne, of the terrestrial
public taking the same view. It reminds us of the satirical Princess
who, on being told that her husband's previous morganatic marriage was a
marriage in the sight of God, said that she was quite content to leave
it so, if she could be assured that it was not one in the sight of men.
It would be easy to make merry over the prophetical books by quoting
passages; but it is a pious duty to refrain from so doing. What value,
however, can be attached to writings where three mythical personages,
Kox, Kotope, and Skofeld, spirits of evil, with sway over certain
English counties, appear to be nothing more than Messrs. Cox and
Courthope, Sussex acquaintances of Blake's, and Scholfield, the drunken
soldier who revenged himself on the prophet for a brawl in a
public-house, by taking out a summons against him for seditious talk at
the Quarter Sessions?
As to their prophetical value, we are hardly in a position to judge; we
feel with George Eliot that of all the mistakes we commit, prophecy is
probably the most gratuitous.
The fact is that what Blake wanted was culture; in literature he is a
good type of how ineffective genius may be, if it is too narrow in its
republicanism. Blake was self-absorbed and obstinate. His sympathy with
certain qualities and aspects of life--simplicity, innocence, natural
purity, faith, devotion--was innate and deep; but he had no idea of
making himself appreciate what he did not at once understand: he was his
own standard. Consequently, within certain limits, he has left beautiful
and refined work, though never with the added charm of elaborateness;
the imagination is pleased with Blake's poetry as it may be attracted by
an innocent face, a wild flower, a thrush's song; the heart may hanker
after a purity that it has lost or possibly never enjoyed. But Blake can
only charm idyllically: he can never satisfy intellectually: he has not
the simplicity, let us say, of the Gospel, which enters into and subdues
the complexity of human hopes and desires. Like the little maid that
attended Guinevere, "who pleased her with a babbling heedlessness, that
often lured her from herself," it is away from the true and myriad-sided
self of man that he wins; his is not the poverty of spirit which comes
of renunciation, but the cleanness of soul which results from
inadequacy. Self-reverence he has, but not self-knowledge, nor the
self-control, the need of which comes home to the human heart through
its imperious passions. Wordsworth proposed the remedy of simplicity for
healing the diseases of the soul, but Blake's simplicity is not
medicinal; it is the calm of the untroubled spirit, not the deeper
content which comes of having faced and cured the heaven-sent maladies
of mortal nature. Thus it is that his _Songs of Innocence_ have a charm
denied to the _Songs of Experience_, because he was at home in the
former region, and did not really understand the meaning of the latter.
The critical faculty, the power of seeing the merits latent in work
whose scope and aim is not sympathetic, the gift of delicate
appreciation was, in Blake, almost wholly in abeyance. He praised and
condemned wholesale, vehemently, violently, as a child might judge,
deciding from the superficial aspect of the object. Occasionally, as
for instance, when he said of Milton in the Spiritual world, "his house
is Palladian, not Gothic," he uttered a deep and suggestive criticism.
But such sayings are very rare. Probably his own work gained in
originality. The man who could work from morning to night at his
engraving, for a period of two years, in London, without ever stepping
into the open air except to fetch his meat and drink, is to be
congratulated no doubt upon his fund of steady enthusiasm, but he is not
cast in the mould of other men, still less is he the prey of the
temptations which, if they sometimes also degrade, are at least needed
to develop in the artist the intimate sympathy with human passion which
must be the basis of his work.
But with Blake's pictorial art we step into a different region: it is
full of errors and ungainliness; it is often rough and trivial, but it
is full of insight and strength and tragic intensity; he touched, as few
have done, the secret springs of horror. His methods were of course his
own. To take a common instance--the _Songs of Innocence_--the groundwork
of each design was rough copper-plate, used like a stereotype, and
containing the main lines of the decoration and the poem. This was then
filled up and tinted by hand, sometimes by Blake himself, sometimes by
Mrs. Blake; and the latter bound the books.
The very variations in the copies are in themselves a source of
confusion. A man might study certain examples, even of some of Blake's
finest creations, and see nothing. The design is confused in many cases
with colour blotched and blurred, and seemingly laid on rather with the
knife than with the brush. In the British Museum there are two instances
of one design: in the one, something--it may be a snake, or some
monstrous sea-worm, dark, and rude, and violent in colour--seems knotted
in strange tangles on an uncertain back-ground of crude green; the
picture is like the ugly imagination of a child and its imperfect
performance; it scarcely touches the mind except with a shuddering
disgust for anything so vile. In the next we see what the truth is: the
scale comes out; it is a league-long Behemoth, with gaping jaws crowded
with venomous teeth, slipping along, coil after coil, in a surging
foaming sea, with a low sun weltering in a distant horizon; it is like
some relic of primeval chaos, passing with brute indifference from shore
to shore, imagined by a poet, depicted by an artist; and similar
instances are by no means rare.
The first characteristic of Blake's plastic work, as revealed to the
average student, is his mastery of _form_. In the majority of his
pictures everything is made subservient to this; backgrounds are
selected not so much for their own intrinsic features as to give
prominence to the main figure: he is full of the poetry of motion. Let
any one study the designs in the _Europe_, where the male and female
figures of the Mildew and Blight, blowing the corruption that rushes, as
straight as sound, from their long horns on to the festooned ears of
barley that droop down the page. The figures seem to fly directly away
from the eye, to use a homely metaphor, like a rising partridge--or as
the eye watches the last carriage of an express train, is even deceived
into substituting for known velocity an imagined contraction of mere
dimension.
The _Jerusalem_, one of the prophetic books, contains perhaps the most
striking of Blake's figure designs. We see the best instance here of
what seems to have been a favourite design of Blake's, as it occurs in
more than one work--in Blair's "Grave" for instance, with the addition
of another figure. It is that of an old man stumbling to a shadowy door
in the hill-side, and blown forwards, with his garments sweeping in
front of him, as if drawn in by some strong current of air, as he
approaches. It is worth noticing how exquisitely Miss Jean Ingelow has
used this in her "Song of the Going Away."
Here again is the strange mythical figure, half-swan, half-woman,
floating on the stream; or the gigantic Cyclopean gate of piled stones,
with the wistful crowd about it, and the crescent moon seen through the
huge orifice; or that mysterious design of the little bewildered
figure, with arms outspread in agony and despair, stumbling between the
huge firmly set feet of a gigantic being, to whose ankle-bone he hardly
reaches.
Yet with all this subservience of accessories to form, Blake's anatomy
is far from perfect. He had a trick of attenuating and elongating the
thigh, as in one of the cases we mentioned above, where the young figure
in the rising light kneels on the top of the mound into which the old
bent man is being urged; or in the three melancholy beings represented
on p. 51 of the _Jerusalem_--Vala, Hyle, and Skofeld, the anatomy of the
second figure being of the stiffest kind--the attitude aimed at being
that of prostration or abandonment, the head between the knees, as in
the story of Elijah.
Neither is it universally true that he spends no pains on backgrounds or
distances. Occasionally there is some salient and distant point flashed
in with a delicacy that reminds you of Albert Durer, as in one of the
coarsely engraved woodcuts, done in 1820 to illustrate Philips's
pastorals, where in a background between two heavily outlined hills
appears a distant town on the hillside, with spires and roofs lying in
its own circle of sunlight, divinely delicate and airy.
Or those rude swathes of newly cut corn that lie beside the wrinkled
oak, whose diminished top bows in the tempest that fills the sky with a
flickering rain, half-lighted by the crescent moon. In such pictures it
is the feeling for nature, in many of them strangely resembling Bewick,
which rises above the obvious coarseness of the drawing, and is indeed
rather concealed than suggested, as a great artist might cover a superb
and glowing work with a filthy cloth of service, and replace it almost
fretfully while still the gazer looked. And this quality one is never
surprised at others for not recognising, as it depends for its effect
upon no technical excellence, but simply on the fact that there was
poetical inspiration behind it which demands poetical sympathy. But the
most brilliant lesson of Blake's suggestiveness is to be drawn from the
rude designs of _Gates of Paradise_: the spirits of the elements are
among the rudest and yet the most poetical of these. "Air" looks from
his perch in clouds, drawn as hardly as boulder stones, and clasps his
dizzy brow. "Water" sits brooding complacently with outspread hands, in
a universal dissolution (the face, be it noted, bears a strange
resemblance to that of Mr. Gladstone). Blake was a prophet, and it is
impossible to say at what moments, present and to come, his visions may
not be found illuminating our history.
But it is in the region of pure fancy--fancy, it must be confessed,
which, though sometimes of the essence of the purest poetry, is often
on the border line of insanity, that Blake is at his best. Such a
design as that from the _Daughters of Albion_, of God measuring the
world with a pair of golden compasses, which contrives to give an
impression of vastness and mystery in spite of the precise delineation
of hands and hair; the original sketch of this is in the British Museum,
and it is interesting to note how much it is altered in the finished
design--the position of the chief figure being improved, and the details
carefully worked out.
Again in "America" there is a notable design, a drowned man lying at the
bottom of an unfathomed sea, still undecayed, though the sunken ribs and
stiffening limbs show that he has been long dead, and is suffering a sea
change: the worms crawl round him and beneath him, and the fish with
large eyes poise in the gloom--notable because, though harshly and
literally drawn, and crudely coloured, nothing hinted save what is
actually seen, there is a dark suggestiveness about it which fairly
takes captive the sense. In "Los" again there is a design of little
figures, male and female, of a fairy kind (such perhaps as at the
roseleaf burial, of which Blake in a waking vision was the spectator),
seated among the petals of a huge lily, with a background of night and
stars. This, in the British Museum collection, is coarsely coloured, the
night having no aerial quality, no distance, and the lily itself and
the vestures of the pigmies being disagreeably strained in tint. But
there is a latent spirit which many a more delicately painted study
lacks.
But it is as the delineator of immensity and secret horror that Blake by
his temperament was pre-eminent. Most people know, and none can
describe, a certain nightmare sense of vastness and weight, which is
neither near nor far, but of ambiguous horror. This, which is a mental
effect of some disordered brain cell, is suggested instinctively by
certain of Blake's pictures. Horror is a quality difficult to produce
deliberately; it tends to become instantly grotesque, and to provoke
mere laughter unless it is based on some secret dismay. Look, for
instance, at the work of Henry Fuseli, a contemporary of Blake's, and
obviously indebted to him for such a picture as his Nightmare, which
aims at producing, and fails to produce, the very impression which Blake
awakens, so easily, that it is by no means certain that he always
intended it. It is easy to multiply instances of this, but we will take
only two. One is the terrible picture in the Job series, where Satan
with a look of hard fury turns with his hand the nozzle of an inky
cloud, which, swelling into bigness, fills all the sky behind and above,
on the body of the prostrate saint. And again in the well-known design
for Hamlet's Ghost, the drawing of which is in the British Museum, the
stiff arms and hanging hands are lit with a difficult light, that seems
to strike upwards from some unknown source. The background is a waste
line of sea; on the young man's head, as he kneels, the hair appears to
knot itself in terror, while the agony of the woeful eyes of the spirit,
which seem to claim pity and revenge, and yet to be too distraught for
either, can never be forgotten.
The noble designs of the Book of Job, given by Gilchrist in full,
contain the summary of Blake's best qualities: it would be out of place
to discuss them here, but a student of Blake's art must make them his
first and last study.
It is strange to find that, as a critic, one drifts unconsciously into
making the very excuse for his art that one cannot permit to be made for
his poetry. The luminous soul shines through, the critic says. But is
not much right in art that is not right in literature? Through plastic
art we appeal directly to the sensibilities of many untutored souls,
that we could not touch through literature. Granted that primarily the
object of both art and literature is to gladden and refine, art of the
two has the wider scope, and reaps a larger harvest, out of spirits that
have never been touched and never can be touched, for want of culture,
by anything worth calling literature at all.
Blake's republicanism in art was such that he chose his masters by a
theory of his own: Raphael, Michael Angelo, Albert Durer and Giulio
Romano were his idols; Titian, Rubens, Correggio and Rembrandt he
abhorred and despised. The selection on the whole did him credit, at the
time when it was made. At the same time the attitude which he adopts
towards the _profanum vulgus_ is almost sacerdotal in its claims. It
never for a moment conceals that the artist must please his audience
first; but his eye, as he chides, is on the beast. He flouts the verdict
of his contemporaries on himself, while he holds the verdict of
posterity over the head of his enemies. The attitude is neither
dignified nor even rational. "To imitate," he wrote, "I abhor. I
obstinately adhere to the true style of art, such as Michael Angelo,
Giulio Romano, Raphael and Albert Durer left it. I demand therefore of
the amateurs of art the encouragement which is my due. If they continue
to refuse, theirs is the loss, not mine, and theirs is the contempt of
posterity. I have enough in the appreciation of fellow-labourers; this
is my glory and my exceeding great reward: I go on and nothing can
hinder my course."
With respect to Blake's character as exhibited in his life, it is
difficult, treating him as a sane man, to understand the estimate formed
of him by his admirers. There is too much puerile violence and loud
self-complacency, too much aggravating childishness and wilful
eccentricity, not to offend and even disgust. But treat him as a man of
unbalanced brain, and these variations are the very things we should
expect, and the hypothesis at once clears the ground.
Both Mr. Rossetti and Mr. Gilchrist have been at pains to prove that
Blake was not mad. Perhaps he was not, as they would define madness; but
when we find gravely alleged as testimony the fact that his intimate
friends did not think him mad, and, on the other hand, the _Examiner_,
or some popular journal of the day, speaking of Blake's little
exhibition of pictures "as the production of an unfortunate lunatic who
owes his freedom from restraint solely to his personal inoffensiveness"--we
know what view we are compelled to take. If Blake was not a madman, he
was a fraudulent impostor. Perhaps Hamlet was not mad; perhaps Cowper
was not mad. No doubt madness is a divine attribute, and our madmen are
our only sane thinkers; but the use of such a term is only a question of
majorities, and it is ill to tinker with definitions. A man who saw God
Almighty for the first time when he was four years old--"_you know, my
dear, he put his face to the window and set you screaming,_" as good
Mrs. Blake said; a tree filled with bright angels near Islington at the
age of ten; and a ghost in Hercules Buildings at Lambeth, "_scaly,
speckled, very awful,_" stalking downstairs, is not as other men. He may
have been a philosopher, a poet, an angel; but the world has a right to
call such men mad, and will do so to the end of the chapter. Mr.
Gilchrist says, in the _Dictionary of National Biography_: "As a boy, he
perhaps believed these were supernatural visions: as a man, it must be
gathered from his explicit utterances that he understood their true
nature as mental creations." And again: "Blake was wont to say to his
friends respecting these 'visions,' 'You can see what I do if you
choose. Work up imagination to the state of vision, and the thing is
done.'"
Putting aside Blake's visions for a moment, I would be content to rest
my case on the following letter:
* * *
_Letter to Flaxman, written from Felpham._
"DEAR SCULPTOR OF ETERNITY,
"We are safe arrived at our cottage, which is more beautiful than I
thought it, and more convenient. It is a perfect model for cottages,
and, I think, for palaces of magnificence--only enlarging, not altering
its proportions, and adding ornaments and not principles. Nothing can be
more grand than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple without intricacy,
it seems to be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to the
wants of man. No other-formed house can ever please me so well, nor
shall I ever be persuaded, I believe, that it can be improved either in
beauty or use.... 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; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and
sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace.... And now begins
a new life because another covering of earth is shaken off. I am more
famed in heaven for my works than I could well conceive. In my brain are
studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old which I wrote
and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life; and these works
are the delight and study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious
about the riches or fame of mortality? The Lord, our Father, will do for
us and with us according to his divine will for our good.
"You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel--my friend and companion
from eternity. In the divine bosom is our dwelling-place. I look back
into the regions of reminiscence and behold our ancient days, before the
earth appeared in its vegetated mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I
see our houses of eternity, which can never be separated though our
mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each
other.
"Farewell, my best friend. Remember me and my wife in love and
friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to
entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold. And believe me for
ever to remain your grateful and affectionate
"WILLIAM BLAKE.
"FELPHAM,
"_Sept._ 21, 1800, _Sunday morning_."
* * *
This letter seems to me to bear traces of that cloud on the brain which
is involuntary, and beyond the reach of affectation. Or take another
episode--that of the visionary heads, of which the "Ghost of a Flea"
remains as one of the most diabolically inspired creations of the human
fancy; the bloodthirsty eye, the remorseless jaw, the plated mail of the
neck, the suppressed look of lustful fury, combine to give it a peculiar
horror.
"Varley, water-colour painter and astrologer, it was," says Gilchrist,
"who encouraged Blake to take authentic sketches of certain among his
most frequent spiritual visitants. The visionary faculty was so much
under control, that at the wish of a friend he could summon before his
abstracted gaze any of the familiar forms and faces he was asked for."
This was during the favourable and befitting hours of night, from nine
or ten in the evening till one or two, or perhaps three or four o'clock
in the morning; Varley sitting by, "sometimes slumbering and sometimes
waking." Varley would say, "Draw me Moses," or "David"; or would call
for a likeness of Julius Caesar, or Cassivelaunus, or Edward III., or
some other great historical personage. Blake would answer, "There he
is." And paper and pencil being at hand, he would begin drawing with the
utmost alacrity and composure, looking up from time to time as if he had
a real sitter before him.... Sometimes Blake had to wait for the
vision's appearance: sometimes it would come at call. At others, in the
midst of his portrait, he would suddenly leave off, and, in his ordinary
quiet tones, and with the same matter-of-fact air another might say, "It
rains," would remark, "I can't go on--it is gone: I must wait till it
returns;" or--"It has moved--the mouth is gone;" or--"He frowns: he is
displeased with my portrait of him." In sober daylight, if criticisms
were hazarded by the profane on the character or drawing of any of these
visions, "Oh, it's all right," Blake would calmly reply. "It _must_ be
right: I saw it so."
Among the personages whom Blake then drew were the Builder of the
Pyramids, Edward III.--with a peculiar protrusion of skull, said by
Blake to be characteristic of tyrants in the spirit world--a man who
instructed Blake in painting in his dreams, David, Uriah, Bathsheba, the
Ghost of a Flea--to which allusion has been made above--Joseph and Mary
and the room they were seen in, Old Parr at the age of forty, and many
others which are still extant.
But allowing this want of balance to account for the abnormal variations
of vanity, jealousy, and violence, we have a residuum of manly
independence, sweet austerity, and faithful devotion that is rare in any
annals, most of all in the annals of art. What a touching story it is of
the young artist who came to Blake and complained that he was deserted
by his inspiration. Blake turned to his faithful wife: "_It is just so
with us (is it not?) for weeks together, when the visions desert us.
What do we do then, Kate?" "We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake._" What
pathetic dignity there is in his often-repeated saying, when time after
time his prophetical books were returned upon his hands--"_Well, it is
published elsewhere_--_and beautifully bound._"
Blake is one of the few artists who worked all their life long under the
pressure of poverty, of whom we can safely assert that he would have
worked as hard had he been possessed of a competence; on the other hand,
it is equally true that his work would not have been so lasting; the
need of finding subsistence kept him saner than he wished to be; had he
been a wealthy man, we should have had perhaps twice as many prophetical
books--in which his heart was all the time--and no Book of Job.
FitzGerald said there was hardly a single poem of Blake's that was good
all through. But the man was one of those few who do with simple
seriousness whatever comes to their hand, from an illustrated show-list
for Wedgwood to the sublimest and most stupendous designs of heaven and
hell. The consequence is that some of his crudest designs, almost
childish in their execution, have a suggestive insight that is
altogether out of proportion to the artistic value of the work. It would
be easy to multiply examples. But take the familiar instance of the
early wood-cut, "_I want, I want,_" where the little group of
enthusiasts have set from a bald shoulder of the globe, as it swims in
dark space, a filmy ladder to the crescent moon.
The great value of Blake's life, after all, apart from his productions,
is that he is one of the saints of art. That is the problem! To retain
simplicity, naturalness, unselfishness in the service of art. Art seems
almost to demand self-absorption, self-cultivation, however noble be the
ultimate end it sets in view. The duty of cultivating sensitiveness to
impressions is hard to reconcile with high and pure devotion. We in this
century feel the contrast perhaps too painfully. The fashionable habit
of seeking amusement and interest in the problems of others, and on the
other hand the blind, dark pressure of Democracy on life, throw into
painful prominence the fastidious seclusion of the artist. Nowadays, for
a man to throw himself blunderingly into philanthropy, disguising his
own reckless hankering after power and influence under the name of duty,
is held to have something of heroism about it. Even failure there is
thought to be honourable. But the artist who, in obedience to as
inevitable, as high an impulse, isolates himself in the sacred pursuit
of beauty in all her forms, is called by hard names if he does not make
himself a reputation; and if he does attain notoriety, his selfishness,
at all events, acquires prestige. It is in reality a far more arduous
undertaking. Fiction and life are full of memorable failures. _Roderick
Hudson_ is a magnificent presentation of the failure of character to
sustain the devotion of art. The life of one of Blake's greatest
admirers, D. G. Rossetti, must be forgiven in the light of his
achievements, but cannot be forgotten as one of the most dark and
shuddering tragedies ever played upon the human stage. But, on the other
hand, such a life as Edward FitzGerald's, with its scanty and fortuitous
successes, is yet lifted by its dignity and austerity as high and higher
than that of many professional saints. The message that we are in need
of is something that will introduce the loving simplicity of the
Christian Revelation into the world of beauty; for, comprehensive as
that revelation claims to be, it is difficult to define the exact place
in the Christian economy which is reserved for hearts haunted by the
tyrannical instinct of beauty. Such a life as Blake's is an attempt at
the reconciliation of the matter. He seems to get nearer the divine
principle than many professed religionists; as he himself wrote, "I have
laboured hard indeed, and been borne on angels' wings."