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WILLIAM BLAKE: THE MAN
_All Rights Reserved_
[Illustration: THE BURIAL OF MOSES.
_Reproduced by kind permission of Mr Sydney Morse._]
WILLIAM BLAKE
THE MAN
BY CHARLES GARDNER
AUTHOR OF "VISION AND VESTURE,"
"THE REDEMPTION OF RELIGION," ETC.
"The men that were with me saw not the vision"
DANIEL
LONDON: J. M. DENT & SONS LIMITED
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.
MCMXIX
To MONICA
Preface
This book is an attempt to trace the mental and spiritual growth of
William Blake as disclosed in his works. After meditating on these for
some years an image of the man has risen in my mind. This I have tried to
present with the aid of such biographical details as are to be found in
Gilchrist's _Life_. My warm thanks are due to Mr and Mrs Sydney Morse for
permission to reproduce their beautiful _Prayer of the Infant Jesus_, and
_The Burial of Moses_. The photographs were taken by Mr Albert Hester.
Also I must thank Mr J. M. Dent for the two designs from an original and
invaluable _Job_ series in his possession. The rest of the illustrations
are from the Print Room of the British Museum.
C. G.
CONTENTS
PAGE
TITLE-PAGE 3
DEDICATION 5
PREFACE 7
CONTENTS 9
ILLUSTRATIONS 10
CHAPTER
I. CHILDHOOD AND APPRENTICESHIP 11
II. COMING OF AGE AND MARRIAGE 21
III. THE BLUE-STOCKINGS 26
IV. EARLY MARRIED LIFE AND EARLY WORK 37
V. WESLEY, WHITEFIELD, LAVATER, AND SWEDENBORG 46
VI. THE REBELS 81
VII. ACTION AND REACTION 102
VIII. WILLIAM HAYLEY 114
IX. THE BIG PROPHETIC BOOKS 131
X. CROMEK, SIR JOSHUA, STOTHARD, AND CHAUCER 153
XI. THE SUPREME VISION 165
XII. DECLINING YEARS AND DEATH 169
XIII. EPILOGUE 189
INDEX 195
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
THE BURIAL OF MOSES _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
GLAD DAY 24
LAVATER 50
THE ANCIENT OF DAYS 100
URIZEN IN CHAINS 106
LOS 108
MIRTH AND HER COMPANIONS 124
ALBION 144
THE PRAYER OF THE INFANT JESUS 166
JOB SERIES, DESIGN V 182
JOB SERIES, DESIGN XIV 184
FROM DANTE SERIES 186
WILLIAM BLAKE: THE MAN
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD AND APPRENTICESHIP
William Blake was born on November 28th, 1757, at 28 Broad Street, Carnaby
Market, Golden Square.
To-day a large house stands in Broad Street numbered 28, to which is
attached a blue disk announcing that William Blake, Poet and Artist, was
born there. The house looks old and shabby, and may well have stood a
hundred years; but on inquiry one finds that it is a recent erection, and
that of Blake's actual house not one stone has been left upon another. One
walks through Broad Street and its neighbouring streets hoping to see at
least one group of buildings as Blake saw them. But all has changed, and
except for a block of houses on one side of Golden Square, there is
nothing to remind one of the sharp transitions that a few years can
effect. Even the sounds have changed. From the doors and windows of Number
28 is heard day and night the whir of machinery ceaselessly at work to
supply the inhabitants of Pall Mall and St James's with electric light.
Carnaby Market has vanished, and its glowing colours have reappeared in
Berwick Street, where fruits are displayed on public stalls, and where
from time to time titled ladies are known to explore in search of a pair
of boots, or some other indispensable article of clothing. Great ugly
buildings--a brewery, an infirmary given up during the war to Belgian
refugees, warehouses--afflict the eye at every turn; and through the open
windows of the upper stories the social regenerator may detect the
countless bent backs and expert fingers of tailor hands turning out
perfect equipments for noblemen all over the country who come to Regent
Street, Maddox Street, and Conduit Street to be measured and fitted and
tried.
In Blake's day the transitions in Broad Street were more clearly defined.
It had been a fashionable quarter, and still retained a vivid memory of
its past glory. The new buildings were shops of a good solid kind, which
struck the eye like vivid green paint as they sprang up side by side with
the older private houses that time had softened and mellowed.
Blake's father was a hosier. His name was James, he was married to
Catherine, and they had five children, William being the second. James was
a dissenter, but, like so many dissenters, he liked such important
functions as baptism, marriage, and burial to be performed by the Church
of England, that there might be no mistake about them. Accordingly,
William was taken on December 11th, when he was a fortnight old, to be
christened at St James's Church in a Grinling Gibbons font, the highly
ornate character of which was fortunately not observed by the tender
recipient of baptismal grace.
William was a solitary, imaginative boy. His imagination was first
stimulated and nourished by town. His father's home, in sharp contrast
with the older houses in the neighbourhood, made him perceive that there
was a meaning Past as well as a so-far unmeaning Present: and the moment
his imagination escaped into the past it tended to abstraction, but knew
no bounds.
Very soon in his solitary walks he found his way into the country,
emerging from London on the south side and exploring as far as Peckham
Rye, Dulwich, Streatham, and Sydenham. His first glimpse of the country
was to him as our first trip abroad to us. The trees, the hills, the grass
and the cattle spoke obliquely to an imagination that already had a bias.
He loved them--with discretion. To him London was older than the country.
Nature has a way of disguising her great age in an ever renewed youthful
present. London's present drives one to the past. Nature bewitches her
children and will not allow them to transcend her. A great city with its
pulsing life carries the exuberant spirit in its mighty rhythm, and yet
drives it back to the ancient primeval sources concealed in the eternal
kingdom of the imagination. Wordsworth, Nature's lover, soothes and lulls
our restlessness and pain, but fails to carry us into the promised land.
Blake, the inspired citizen, pierces with his sword through Nature, and
will not rest until in England's green and pleasant land he has built
Jerusalem, wherein we may feast as comrades and be satisfied with the wine
of eternity.
Little William Blake was not like other children, or he might have romped
with his three brothers, John, James, and Robert, and his sister,
Catherine. But from the first he was peculiar, sensitive, and liable to
visions. His first recorded vision was in Peckham Rye. There he saw a tree
filled with angels. He was neither startled nor surprised. It seemed
entirely natural, and, childlike, he told his vision to his parents when
he reached home. Visions were not in his father's line of business. In the
dark days of popish supremacy there had been idle monks who thrashed and
starved themselves till they saw visions. Even the reformed Church of
England knew better than that, and a dissenter of the eighteenth century
who spent his spare hours from the shop in reading knew precisely what
were the things from which he dissented. He must nip William's visions in
the bud, and he would thrash him. Happily, Mrs. Blake stepped between. It
was a jarring shock to an over-sensitive child that a heavy penalty
awaited the mention of visions. He continued to see them, but he kept them
to himself. His brothers and sister were like his father. Robert, who in
after years would have understood, was in the middle of his teething, and
it did not yet appear what he would be. Hence all things worked together
to separate William from his family and to thrust him into the world of
imagination.
At this time--he was about nine years old--he became a devourer of books.
His mental bias was sufficiently strong to draw to him the books that
would nourish him. Percy's _Reliques_, which was sure to be among his
father's books, was entirely congenial to him, as later to little Walter
Scott. Also Shakespeare and some of the Elizabethans, of whom Ben Jonson
was certainly one, were absorbed into his being. Spencer's _Faery Queen_
and later poets of his own time--Rowley, Thomson, Chatterton--were his
daily companions: and above all he adored with passionate idolatry the
then famous _Ossian_ of Macpherson.
Swinburne has expressed astonishment that the child Blake could admire
such "lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style" as
Macpherson supplied to an undiscerning generation. We must remember that
in spite of the Highland Society, then meeting in London, Blake had no
easy access to the times of Fingal and Ossian, such as we have to-day.
There was something in his genius which made him crave for the society of
the Celtic heroes and gods. If Macpherson's poetic stream was muddy,
Blake's thirst was too consuming to allow of criticism. What is
disconcerting is that the mature Blake should retain his admiration of
Macpherson and bracket him with the greatest poets of any age. We can only
say that what we have loved with our whole heart in childhood, and has
entered for better or worse into the very tissue of our being, we cannot
criticize; and simple, trustful Blake to the end of his days would have
reckoned himself guilty of impious disloyalty if he had admitted even to
himself that there were spots in his sun.
Blake's reading had effected an invaluable service for him--it peopled his
world of imagination. There was terror in his first approach on the
threshold, a terror never forgotten and often reproduced in his designs.
But when he was pushed beyond the threshold and its covering shadow, he
gradually grew accustomed to the changed lights, and he began to discern
its forms and its outlines and its colours. These in their turn reacted on
the outer world until he saw it not as a hard unsurpassable fact, but a
mirror of the inner things which in reality were the substance, the form,
and the foundation. Henceforth he valued the forms and outlines of things
because they were a sign and pledge to him of the inner resplendent City
which was not only built on an eternal foundation but was actually the
home of his spirit. As soon as he apprehended the significance of outline
he developed an ardent desire to draw.
This impulse was quickly observed by his father and encouraged by him.
William was sent to learn drawing from a Mr Pars, who kept a
drawing-school in the Strand. Here he copied plaster casts and odd-and-end
plaster bits of the human body, the body itself being left severely alone.
A certain amount of technical facility was thus acquired, but his
education in art advanced more surely from his desultory wanderings in
sale-rooms and in the private galleries of munificent noblemen. At the
sale-rooms he bought prints often for a few pence, and his little store of
prints was added to by gifts from his father, who also presented him with
models of the Gladiator, Hercules, Venus of Medici. In this way he gained
his first enthusiastic knowledge of Raphael, Michael Angelo, Martin
Hemskerck, Albert Duerer and Julio Romano, who were exactly the right
teachers for him. Michael Angelo and the Florentine School believed that
drawing was the foundation of all great art. Albert Duerer and his great
German successors were of the same opinion. William Blake, the little
citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem, had known the horror of indefiniteness,
and worked through his apprenticeship to joy only when he discovered that
the blessed City stood four-square, and was bounded by great walls on its
four sides. Hence his selection of prints was instinctive. He knew without
being told what helped him to find himself, and he escaped once for all,
while still a child, the seductive elegance of his own age.
These were happy years. His mind was already stored with unfashionable
knowledge, gleaned chiefly from the robust Elizabethan age, and his
spirit, like a mirror, reflected the things he saw with his spiritual eye.
His happiness was creative, and he burst into song when he was only eleven
in strains that savoured of Ben Jonson, but were wholly fresh and
captivating because they were inspired by the first fresh vision of his
childhood. There is surely nothing in any language written by a boy of
eleven to touch the song: _How sweet I roam'd from field to field_. It is
a sudden spring of sparkling water that can never lose its purity.
Blake remained four years with Pars, and then his father, willing that his
son should become an artist, apprenticed him in 1771 to Basire in Great
Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields.
We who stand far apart from Blake's day can see that this was the best
thing that could have happened. Had his father been a rich man, able to
pay a heavy premium that his son might be taught by one of the popular
engravers of the day, we should have had the distressing picture of Blake
moulded different and moulded wrong by a Woollett, a Bartolozzi, or an
Angelica Kaufmann, and his whole soul in rebellious and ineffectual
protest. As it was, Basire was master of the technical part of his craft,
he believed in accurate, definite outline, and not being a man of genius,
did not think it necessary that his pupils should turn out servile copies
of himself. Blake learnt to handle his tools, to lay a good foundation,
and technical proficiency. In after years, when engraving was to be a
chief means of expressing his own original vision, he was saved from the
painful necessity of having to unlearn much or all of his master's
teaching.
After two quiet years with Basire a providential thing happened. Two more
apprentices were taken on by him. These were wholly products of the time,
and Blake found himself in violent collision with them in aims, methods,
and tastes. To keep the peace, Blake was separated from them and sent to
draw in Westminster Abbey.
Gothic architecture was as intoxicating a revelation to Blake as the
discovery of Michael Angelo and Albert Duerer in the sale-rooms of Christie
and Langford. The Chapel of Edward the Confessor, recently piled up with
sand-bags to protect it from the desecration of German bombs, became to
Blake a little sanctuary. Here his thoughts travelled without fatigue many
hundred years back, and the dim background of the Chapel became a fit
setting for his bright visions of the past. He copied with silent
intensity the monuments of the Confessor, Henry III, Queen Elinor,
Philippa, and the beautiful work of Aymer de Valence. These days were
decisive for his lifetime. Gothic architecture was germane to his own
soul. Its spirit sank inwards and appeared again and again in the
architectural fragments of his own designs. There remained for him one
more great formative heritage from the past, and then, with his roots well
set, he was to reach forward to the future and prophesy in rhythmic words
that are meat and drink to us in the twentieth century.
Blake remained with Basire for seven years. During these years he had
glimpses of a world different from the one in which his family moved.
Oliver Goldsmith, with his fine head, came as a shining messenger, and
actually walked into Basire's. Oh! that he might grow up to have such a
head! Woollett was a visitor, and a sufficiently frequent one to cease to
be dazzling even to an overtrustful and enthusiastic apprentice. "One of
the most ignorant fellows I ever met," he wrote of him who never at any
time could have been congenial to his spirit. Many others appeared there
also--silently marked and measured in a way that would have astonished
them had they been worthy to know.
Blake's time was not wholly spent in copying the works of others. In his
spare hours he threw off songs and designs of his own. These latter were
sometimes partly copies of a much-loved master. Thus, _Joseph of Arimathea
among the Rocks of Albion_ was suggested by Michael Angelo's Crucifixion
of St Peter in the Vatican, and the figure of Joseph is a copy.[1] Blake
himself had written "engraved by W. Blake, 1773, from an old Italian
Drawing"; "Michael Angelo, Pinxit." But already there is more of Blake in
this design than of his master. He wrote between the lines, "This is one
of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark
Ages, wandering about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; of whom the World was
not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages." From which we may
gather that Blake was fully conscious that his being a Christian--and his
Art was inseparable from his Christianity--had already consigned him to a
solitary life in which he might expect persecutions, but certainly not a
resting-place.
Blake's apprenticeship with Basire came to a peaceful end in 1778, when he
was twenty-one years old. He was now a man, peering forward into a dim and
cloudy future, looking backward on a childhood of clearest visions that
were already passing, and as it was, according to all precedent, had
overstayed their time. One thing was entirely clear--he must earn his own
living. Another thing he was conscious of was that he was slowly and
surely leaving the past behind. Yet so far, seated amidst the ruins of the
Old World, he knew not whither his religious aspirations would lead him.
He had fine memories, he had religious and art instincts that refused to
be separated, he was finding himself daily in opposition to the admired
religionists and artists of his time, and he felt within the strength of
immense passion which would surely drive him to the building of the
heavenly Jerusalem if he could but get his vision clear again, and know
the path which God had before marked out for him to walk in. His vision
was to clear after many years. Meanwhile there were tempests and storms to
be endured that would reduce still more effectually to wreckage the last
remains of the Old World. That World had spoken with dignity and power
through the lips of Dr Johnson, who was himself breaking up and died in
1784. With the death of Johnson the Old World died, to reappear only in a
kind of after-mirage; and young Blake was struggling through the
tempestuous years of his passionate youth, turning with pain his eyes from
the Past to the Future, and wistfully hoping that the mighty creative
power that was already astir in him might fashion a new order in which he
and his fellows could live at peace.