Human nature is impatient of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out
of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to
the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little
ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither
and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the
ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained to belong,
a new rank shall be created to receive it, rather than that it shall be
left to roam up and down, baffling, defiant, and alone. Indeed, so great
is our abhorrence of outlying, unclassified facts, that we are often
ready to accept classification for explanation; and having given our
mystery a niche and a name, we cease any longer to look upon it as
mysterious. The village-schoolmaster, who displayed his superior
knowledge to the rustics gazing at an eclipse of the sun by assuring
them that it was "only a phenomenon," was but one of a great host of
wiseacres who stand ready with brush and paint-pot to label every new
development, and fancy that in so doing they have abundantly answered
every reasonable inquiry concerning cause, character, and consequence.
When William Blake flashed across the path of English polite society,
society was confounded. It had never had to do with such an apparition
before, and was at its wits' end. But some Daniel was found wise enough
to come to judgment, and pronounce the poet-painter mad; whereupon
society at once composed itself, and went on its way rejoicing.
There are a few persons, however, who are not disposed to let this
verdict stand unchallenged. Mr. Arthur Gilchrist, late a barrister of
the Middle Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to
weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon
insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously
and ably opposed the theory of insanity. From this book, chiefly, we
propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man
who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions
of his own or of any age.
One word, in the beginning, regarding the book before us. The death of
its author, while as yet but seven chapters of his work had been
printed, would preclude severe criticism, even if the spirit and purpose
with which he entered upon his undertaking, and which he sustained to
its close, did not dispose us to look leniently upon imperfections of
detail. Possessing that first requisite of a biographer, thorough
sympathy with his subject, he did not fall into the opposite error of
indiscriminate panegyric. Looking at life from the standpoint of the
"madman," he saw how fancies could not only appear, but be, facts; and
then, crossing over, he looked at the madman from the world's
standpoint, and saw how these soul-born facts could seem not merely
fancies, but the wild vagaries of a crazed brain. For the warmth with
which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set
facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the
defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble
persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto
received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our
gratitude. But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the
greater is our regret for superficial defects. The continued oversight
of the author would doubtless have removed many infelicities of style;
yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the
first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so
complicated and so obscure. The worst faults of Miss Sheppard's worst
style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had
no part nor lot. Not unfrequently a sentence Is a conglomerate in which
the ideas to be conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at
arrangement, unity, or completeness. Surely, it need be no presumptuous,
but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these
chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and
sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love
so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.
To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few
sentences, taken at random from the memoir:--
"Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile
Art-Academy line, _vice_ Shipley retired."
"The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to
one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the
Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course,
and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the
virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing
once more into the foreground, are those least practised now."
"In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of
this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he
asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had
then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions--as to motive
and composition his own, that is."
"And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities,
as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always
ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly
welcomed in this country."
Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a
fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of
boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of
regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fancies should have
been consigned to the damp and dismal dulness of that crowded city; but,
in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind
dinginess and dimness were not. Through the grayest gloom golden palaces
rose before him, silver pavements shone beneath his feet, jewelled gates
unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair
country. What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest
darkness a "light that never was on sea or land"? Rambling out into the
pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the
breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of angels attended him. They walked
between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the
apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars. For him there was
neither awe nor mystery, only delight. Angels were no more unnatural
than apples. But the honest hosier, his father, took different views.
Never in all his life had that worthy citizen beheld angels perched on
tree-tops, and he was only prevented from administering to his son a
sound thrashing for the absurd falsehood by the intercession of his
mother. Ah, these mothers! By what fine sense is it that they detect the
nascent genius for which man's coarse perception can find no better name
than perverseness, and no wiser treatment than brute force?
The boy had much reason to thank his mother, for to her intervention it
was doubtless largely due that he was left to follow his bent, and haunt
such picture-galleries as might be found in noblemen's houses and public
sale-rooms. There he feasted his bodily eyes on earthly beauty, as his
mental gaze had been charmed with heavenly visions. From admiration to
imitation was but a step, and the little hands soon began to shape such
rude, but loving copies as Raffaelle, with tears in his eyes, must have
smiled to see. His father, moved by motherly persuasions, as we can
easily infer, bought him casts for models, that he might continue his
drawing-lessons at home; his own small allowance of pocket-money went
for prints; his wistful child-face presently became known to dealers,
and many a cheap lot was knocked down to him with amiable haste by
friendly auctioneers. Then and there began that life-long love and
loyalty to the grand old masters of Germany and Italy, to Albrecht
Dürer, to Michel Angelo, to Raffaelle, which knew no diminution, and
which, in its very commencement, revealed the eclecticism of true
genius, because the giants were not the gods in those days.
But there came a time when Pegasus must be broken in to drudgery, and
travel along trodden ways. By slow, it cannot be said by toilsome
ascent, the young student had reached the vestibule of the temple; but
"Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,"
which, alas! to him were wanting. Nothing daunted, his sincere soul
preferred to be a doorkeeper in the house of his worship rather than a
dweller in the tents of Mammon. Unable to be an artist, he was content
for the time to become an artisan, and chose to learn engraving,--a
craft which would keep him within sight and sound of the heaven from
which he was shut out. Application was first made to Ryland, then in the
zenith of his fame, engraver to the King, friend of authors and artists,
himself a graceful, accomplished, and agreeable gentleman. But the
marvellous eyes that pierced through mortal gloom to immortal glory saw
also the darkness that brooded behind uncanny light. "I do not like the
man's face," said young Blake, as he was leaving the shop with his
father; "it looks as if he will live to be hanged." The negotiation
failed; Blake was apprenticed to Basire; and twelve years after, the
darkness that had lain so long in ambush came out and hid the day:
Ryland was hanged.
His new master, Basire, was one of those workmen who magnify their
office and make it honorable. The most distinguished of four generations
of Basires, engravers, he is represented as a superior, liberal-minded,
upright man, and a kind master. With him Blake served out his seven
years of apprenticeship, as faithful, painstaking, and industrious as
any blockhead. So great was the confidence which he secured, that, month
after month, and year after year, he was sent out alone to Westminster
Abbey and the various old churches in the neighborhood, to make drawings
from the monuments, with no oversight but that of his own taste and his
own conscience. And a rich reward we may well suppose his integrity
brought him, in the charming solitudes of those old-time sanctuaries.
Wandering up and down the consecrated aisles,--eagerly peering through
the dim, religious light for the beautiful forms that had leaped from
many a teeming brain now turned to dust,--reproducing, with patient
hand, graceful outline and deepening shadow,--his daring, yet reverent
heart held high communion with the ages that were gone. The Spirit of
the Past overshadowed him. The grandeur of Gothic symbolism rose before
him. Voices of dead centuries murmured low music down the fretted vault.
Fair ladies and brave gentlemen came up from the solemn chambers where
they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with their olden
grace. Shades of nameless poets, who had wrought their souls into a
cathedral and died unknown and unhonored, passed before the dreaming
boy, and claimed their immortality. Nay, once the Blessed Face shone
through the cloistered twilight, and the Twelve stood roundabout. In
this strange solitude and stranger companionship many an old problem
untwined its Gordian knot, and whispered along its loosened length,--
"I give you the end of a golden string:
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem wall."
To an engraving of "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion,"
executed at this time, he appends,--"This is one of the Gothic artists
who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about
in sheepskins and goatskins; of whom the world was not worthy. Such were
the Christians in all ages."
Yet, somewhere, through mediæval gloom and modern din, another spirit
breathed upon him,--a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the
freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of
young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in
hand with Painting, and beguiled his loneliness with wild, sweet
harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of
the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down
through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and
smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in
Shakspeare's verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath his hand. The
little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life
among the gross creations of those old Afreets who
"Stood around the throne of Shakspeare,
Sturdy, but unclean,"
carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine,
fleeting fantasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos,
laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths,
draped in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile
sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their
play,--sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to
the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace,
modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate,
evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our
tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land. Often rude in form, often
defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than
these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire. "The
Spirit of the Age," moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle
with this sterner stuff. From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson's
realm did the boy bring such an opal as this