decoration or ornament to his work. It was, as we said, his element of
life, inhaled at every breath with the common air, mixed into his veins
with their natural blood. It was an element almost painfully tangible and
actual; an absolute medium or state of existence, inevitable,
inexplicable, insuperable. To him the veil of outer things seemed always
to tremble with some breath behind it: seemed at times to be rent in
sunder with clamour and sudden lightning. All the void of earth and air
seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and palpitate under
the pressure of conscious feet. Flowers and weeds, stars and stones, spoke
with articulate lips and gazed with living eyes. Hands were stretched
towards him from beyond the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to
support, to guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest
allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were literal, all
literal things symbolic. About his path and about his bed, around his ears
and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed
or shone and sang. Spirits imprisoned in the husk and shell of earth
consoled or menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels; the pulse of
every minute sounded as the falling foot of God; under the rank raiment of
weeds, in the drifting down of thistles, strange faces frowned and white
hair fluttered; tempters and allies, wraiths of the living and phantoms of
the dead, crowded and made populous the winds that blew about him, the
fields and hills over which he gazed. Even upon earth his vision was
"twofold always;" singleness of vision he scorned and feared as the sign
of mechanical intellect, of talent that walks while the soul sleeps, with
the mere activity of a blind somnambulism. It was fourfold in the
intervals of keenest inspiration and subtlest rapture; threefold in the
paradise of dreams lying between earth and heaven, lulled by lighter airs
and lit by fainter stars; a land of night and moonlight, spectral and
serene. These strange divisions of spirit and world according to some dim
and mythologic hierarchy were with Blake matters at once serious and
commonplace. The worlds of Beulah and Jerusalem, the existence of Los god
of Time and Enitharmon goddess of Space, the fallen manhood of Theotormon,
the imprisoned womanhood of Oothoon, were more to him even than
significant names; to the reader they must needs seem less. This monstrous
nomenclature, this jargon of miscreated things in chaos, rose as by nature
to his lips, flowed from them as by instinct. Time, an incarnate spirit
clothed with fire, stands before him in the sun's likeness; he is
threatened with poverty, tempted to make himself friends of this world;
and makes answer as though to a human tempter:
"My hands are laboured day and night
And rest comes never in my sight;
My wife has no indulgence given
Except what comes to her from heaven;
We eat little, we drink less;
This earth breeds not our happiness."
He beheld, he says, Time and Space as they were eternally, not as they are
seen upon earth; he saw nothing as man sees: his hopes and fears were
alien from all men's; and upon him and his the light of prosperous days
and the terrors of troubled time had no power.
"When I had my defiance given
The sun stood trembling in heaven;
The moon, that glowed remote below,
Became leprous and white as snow;
And every soul of man on the earth
Felt affliction and sorrow and sickness and dearth."
In all this we may see on one side the reflection and refraction of outer
things, on the other side the projection of his own mind, the effusion of
his individual nature, throughout the hardest and remotest alien matter.
Strangely severed from other men, he was, or he conceived himself, more
strangely interwoven with them. The light of his spiritual weapons, the
sound of his spiritual warfare, was seen, he believed, and was heard in
faint resonance and far reverberation among men who knew not what such
sights and sounds might mean. If, worsted in this "mental fight," he
should let "his sword sleep in his hand," or "refuse to do spiritual acts
because of natural fears and natural desires," the world would be the
poorer for his defection, and himself "called the base Judas who betrays
his friend." Fear of this rebuke shook and wasted him day and night; he
was rent in sunder with pangs of terror and travail. Heaven was full of
the dead, coming to witness against him with blood-shedding and with
shedding of tears:
"The sun was hot
With the bows of my mind and with arrows of thought."
In this spirit he wrought at his day's work, seeing everywhere the image
of his own mood, the presence of foes and friends. Nothing to him was
neutral; nothing without significance. The labour and strife of soul in
which he lived was a thing as earnest as any bodily warfare. Such
struggles of spirit in poets or artists have been too often made the
subject of public study; nay, too often the theme of chaotic versifiers. A
theme more utterly improper it is of course impossible to devise. It is
just that a workman should see all sides of his work, and labour with all
his might of mind and dexterity of hand to make it great and perfect; but
to use up the details of the process as crude material for cruder
verse--to invite spectators as to the opening of a temple, and show them
the unbaked bricks and untempered mortar--to expose with immodest violence
and impotent satisfaction the long revolting labours of mental
abortion--this no artist will ever attempt, no craftsman ever so perform
as to escape ridicule. It is useless for those who can carve no statue
worth the chiselling to exhibit instead six feet or nine feet of shapeless
plaster or fragmentary stucco, and bid us see what sculptors work with; no
man will accept that in lieu of the statue. Not less futile and not less
indecent is it for those who can give expression to no great poem to
disgorge masses of raw incoherent verse on the subject of verse-making: to
offer, in place of a poem ready wrought out, some chaotic and convulsive
story about the way in which a poet works, or does not work.
To Blake the whole thing was too grave for any such exposure of spiritual
nudity. In these letters he records the result of his "sore travail;" in
these verses he commemorates the manner of his work "under the direction
of messengers from heaven daily and nightly, not without trouble or care;"
but he writes in private and by pure instinct; he speaks only by the
impulse of confidence, in the ardour of faith. What he has to say is said
with the simple and abstract rapture of apostles or prophets; not with the
laborious impertinence and vain obtrusion of tortuous analysis. For such
heavy play with gossamer and straws his nature was too earnest and his
genius too exalted. This is the mood in which he looks over what work he
has done or has to do: and in his lips the strange scriptural language
used has the sincerity of pure fire. "I see the face of my Heavenly
Father; He lays His hand upon my head, and gives a blessing to all my
work. Why should I be troubled? why should my heart and flesh cry out? I
will go on in the strength of the Lord; through hell will I sing forth His
praises; that the dragons of the deep may praise Him, and that those who
dwell in darkness and in the sea-coasts may be gathered into His kingdom."
So did he esteem of art, which indeed is not a light thing; nor is it
wholly unimportant to men that they should have one capable artist more or
less among them. How it may fare with artisans (be they never so
pretentious) is a matter of sufficiently small moment. One blessing there
assuredly was upon all Blake's work; the infinite blessing of life; the
fervour of vital blood.
In spite however of all inspiration and of all support, sickness and
uncongenial company impeded his hours of labour and corroded his hours of
repose. A trial on the infamous charges of sedition and assault, brought
by a private soldier whose name of Scholfield was thus made shamefully
memorable, succeeded finally in making the country unendurable to him. It
must be said here of the hapless Hayley that he behaved well in this time
of vexation and danger: coming forward to bail "our friend Blake," and
working hard for the defence in a tumultuous and spluttering way: he
"would appear in public at the trial, living or dying," and did, with or
without leave of doctors, appear and speak up for the accused. Blake's
honourable acquittal does not make it less disgraceful that the charge
should at all have been entertained. His own courage, readiness of wit,
and sincerity of spirit are fully shown in the letter relating this short
and sharp episode in his quiet life. Some months later he returned to
London once for all, and once for all broke off relations with Felpham:
commending, it may be hoped, Hayley to the Muses and Scholfield to the
halberts.
Having read these letters, we are not lightly to judge of Blake as of
another man. Thoughts and creeds peculiar to his mind found expression in
ways and words peculiar to his lips. It was no vain or empty claim that he
put forward to especial insight and individual means of labour. If he
spoke strangely, he had great things to speak. If he acted strangely, he
had great things to do. "Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because
the Lord descended on it in fire." Let the tree be judged by its fruit. If
the man who wrote thus had nothing to do or to say worth the saying or the
doing, it may fairly be said that he was mad or foolish. The involving
smoke, here again, implied the latent fire. Where the particles of dust
are mere hardened mud, where the cloud is mere condensing fog hatched from
the stagnation of a swamp, one may justly complain of the obstruction and
the obscurity. There is here indeed too much of mist, but it is at least
clear; the air that breeds it is high, the moisture that feeds it is pure.
This man had never lived in the low places of thought. In the words of a
living poet,[4] whose noble verses are worthy to stand thus near Blake's
own--
"He had seen the moon's eclipse
By the fire from Etna's lips,
With Orion had he spoken,
His fast with honey-dew had broken."
His dialect was too much the dialect of a far country; but it was from a
far country that he came, from a lofty station that he spoke. To a poet
who has given us so much, to an artist who has done great things to such
great purpose, we may give at least some allowance and some toleration.
The distance is great which divides a fireside taper from the eclipsed
moon on Etna. Rules which are useful or necessary for household versifiers
may well be permitted to relax or even to dissolve when applied to one who
has attained to see with unblinded eyes and to speak with adequate words
of matters so far above them.
The next point noticeable by us in the story of Blake's life is his
single-handed duel with Cromek and Stothard; and of this we need not wish
to speak at much length. The engraver, swift and sharp in all his
dealings--never scrupulous, insolent sometimes, and always cunning--had
an easy game to play, and played it without shame; not even taking the
trouble to hide his marked cards or to load his dice in private. In spite
or in consequence of this rapacity and mendacity,[5] Cromek was evidently
of some use to Blake. And even for the exercise of these special talents
he is perhaps not to be blamed; the man did but work with such qualities
as he had; did but put out to use his natural gifts and capacities. But
that he should have done this at Blake's expense is and must remain
unpardonable: and therefore he must be left to hang with the head
downwards from the memorial gallows to which biography has nailed him; a
warning to all such others to choose their game more warily. A tradesman
who, by their own account, swindled Blake and robbed Scott can hardly
expect to be allowed safe harbourage under the compassionate shelter of
complete oblivion or behind the weather-tight screen of simple contempt.
It may be worth while to condense the evidence as to his dealings with
Blake and Stothard. One alone of these three comes out clear from the
involved network of suspicious double-dealing. In the matter of the
engravings to Blair, Cromek had entrapped and cheated Blake from the
first. In the matter of the drawing from Chaucer, he had gone a step
further down the steep slope of peculation. After the proposal to employ
Schiavonetti, Blake might at once have thrown him over as a self-detected
knave. He did not; and was accordingly plundered again in a less dexterous
and a more direct manner. It is fortunate that the shameful little history
has at last been tracked through all its scandalous windings by so keen an
eye and so sure a hand as Mr. Gilchrist's. Two questions arise at first
sight; did Cromek give Blake a commission for his design of the
"Pilgrims"? did Stothard, when Cromek proposed that he should take up the
same subject, know that the proposal was equivalent to the suggestion of a
theft? Both these questions Blake would have answered in the affirmative;
and in his dialect the affirmative mood was distinct and strong. Further
evidence on the first head can be wanted by no one of decent insight or of
decent candour. That Cromek, with more than professional impudence, denied
the charge, is an incident in the affair neither strange nor important.
The manner of his denial may be matched for effrontery with the tone of
his insolent letter to Blake on the subject of the designs to Blair. With
the vulgarities and audacities, the shifts and the doubles of this
shuffling man of prey, no one need again be troubled. That a visitor
caught with the spoons in his pocket should bluster, stammer, and grin as
he pleads innocence or affects amazement, is natural and desirable; for
every word and gesture, humble or shameless, incoherent or intrepid,
serves to convict him twice over. Undoubtedly he saw Blake's sketch, tried
to conjure it into his pocket, and failed; undoubtedly, finding that the
artist would not again give up his work to be engraved by other hands, he
made such approach to an honest offer as was compatible with his
character; undoubtedly also he then made money in his uncleanly way out of
the failure by tossing the subject to another painter as a bait. No man
has a right to express wonder that Blake refused to hold Stothard
blameless. It is nothing whatever to the purpose that, while Cromek's
somewhat villainous share in the speculation was as yet under cover, Blake
may have bestowed on Stothard's unfinished design his friendly counsel and
his frank applause. After the dealer's perfidy had been again bared and
exposed by his own act, it was, and it is yet, a stretch of charity to
suppose that his associate was not likewise his accomplice. And the manner
of Stothard's retort upon Blake, when taxed by him with unfair dealing,
was not of a sort qualified to disperse or to allay suspicion. He charged,
and he permitted Cromek to charge, the plundered man with the act of
plunder. Even though we, who can now read the whole account without
admixture of personal feeling, may acquit Stothard of active or actual
treachery, as all must gladly do who remember how large a debt is due from
all to an artist of such exquisite and pleasurable talent, it is hopeless
to make out for him a thoroughly sufficient case. The fellowship of such
an one as Cromek leaves upon all who take his part at least the suspicion
of a stain. All should hope that Stothard on coming out of the matter
could have shown clean hands; none can doubt that Blake did. That on
Stothard's part irritation should have succeeded to surprise, and rancour
to irritation, is not wonderful. If he was indeed injured by the fault of
Cromek and the misfortune of Blake, it would doubtless have been admirably
generous to have controlled the irritation and overcome the rancour; but
in that case the worst that should be said of him is that he did not adopt
the noblest course of action possible to him. Admitting this, he is not
blameable for choosing to throw in his lot with Cromek; but we must then
suppose not merely that Cromek had abstained from any avowal of his
original treachery, but that Stothard was unhappily able to accept in good
faith the bare assertion of Cromek in preference to the bare assertion of
Blake. If we believe this, we are bound to admit no harsher feeling than
regret that Cromek should so have duped and blinded his betters; but in
common fairness we are also bound to restrict the question within these
limits. For Stothard a door of honourable escape stands open; and all must
desire rather to widen than to narrow the opening. No one can wish to
straiten his chance of acquittal, or to inquire too curiously whether
there be not a pretext for closing the door that now stands ajar. But for
the rest, it is simply necessary to choose between Blake's authority and
Cromek's; and to consider this alternative seriously for a moment would be
at once an act of condescension towards Cromek and of impertinence towards
Blake, equally unjustifiable on either side. It is possible that Blake was
not wronged by Stothard; it is undeniable that he was wronged through him.
It is probable that Stothard believed himself to be not in the wrong; it
is certain that Blake was in the right.[6]
About the close of this quarrel, and before the publication of Blake's
designs to Blair as engraved for Cromek by Schiavonetti, a book came out
which would have deserved more notice and repaid more interest than has
yet been shown it. The graceful design by Blake on its frontispiece is not
the only or even the chief attraction of Dr. Malkin's "Memoirs of his
Child." The writer indeed treads ponderously and speaks thickly; but there
is extant no picture at once so perfect and so quaint of a purely
childlike talent. Even supreme genius, which usually has a mind now and
then to try, has never given us the complete and vivid likeness which a
child has for once given of himself. Even Shakespeare, even Hugo, even
Blake, has not done this. The husky dialect of his father suffices to
express something; and the portrait is significant and pleasant,
reproducing as it does the solid grace and glad gravity proper to
children; a round and bright figure, with no look of over-training or
disease. But the child's own scraps and scrawls contain the kernel and
jewel of the book. His small drawings are certainly firmer, clearer, more
inventive than could have been looked for in a six-year-old artist. Any
slight imitative work in a child implies the energy which impels invention
in a man. His little histories and geographies are delightful for
illogical sequence of events and absurd coherence of fancy. Only a child
could have invented and combined such unimaginable eccentricities of
innocence. The language and system of proper names strongly recall
Blake's own habits of speech. The province of Malleb and the city of
Tumblebob are no unfit abodes for Hand and Hyle, Kwantok and Kotope. The
moral polity of Allestone is not unlike that which prevails among the
Emanations "who in the aggregate are called Jerusalem." The pamphlet,
condensed and compressed into a form more thoroughly readable, would be
worth republishing.
It seems probable that the verses following were written by Blake about
this time, as Mr. Gilchrist refers the design of the "Last Judgment,"
executed on commission for Lady Egremont, to the year 1807. They are
evidently meant to match the beautiful dedication of the designs to Blair,
which were not brought out till the next year. Less excellent in
workmanship, they are not less important by way of illustration. The
existence of some mythical or symbolic island of Atalantis, where the arts
were to be preserved as in paradise, now walled round or washed over by
the blind and bitter waters of time, was a favourite vision with Blake. At
a first reading some of these verses seemed to refer to the subsequent
series of designs from Dante; but there is no evidence of any such later
commission as we must in that case take for granted.
"The caverns of the grave I've seen,
And these I showed to England's queen;
But now the caves of Hell I view,
Who shall I dare to show them to?
What mighty soul in beauty's form
Shall dauntless view the infernal storm?
Egremont's Countess can control
The flames of hell that round me roll.
If she refuse, I still go on,
Till the heavens and earth are gone;
Still admired by noble minds,
Followed by Envy on the winds.
Re-engraved time after time,
Ever in their youthful prime,
My designs unchanged remain;
Time may rage, but rage in vain;
For above Time's troubled fountains,
On the great Atlantic mountains,
In my golden house on high,
There they shine eternally."
Blake was always looking westward for his islands of the blest. All
transatlantic things appear to have a singular hold upon his fancy.
America was a land of misty and stormy morning, struck by the fierce and
fugitive fires of intermittent war and nascent freedom. In a dim confused
manner, he seems to mix up the actual events of history with the formless
and labouring legends of his own mythology; or rather to cast
circumstances into the crucible of vision, and extract a strange amalgam
of metals unfit for mortal currency and difficult to bring to any test.
In 1808 the illustrations to "Blair's Grave" appeared, and found some
acceptance; a success on which the shameful soul of Cromek fed exultingly
and fattened scandalously. The ravenous gamester had packed his cards from
the first with all due care, and was able now to bluster without fear as
he had before swindled without shame. Twenty pounds of the profits fell to
the share of the designer for some of the most admirable works extant in
that line. The sweetness and vivid grace of these designs are as
noticeable as the energy and rapidity of imagination implied by them. Even
in Blake's lifetime their tender and lofty beauty drew down some
recognition; and incautious criticism, as it praised them, forgot that the
artist was not dead yet. The generous oversight was afterwards amply and
consistently redeemed. For the moment it was perhaps not wonderful that
even so much excellence should obtain something of mistrustful admiration.
The noble passion and exaltation of spirit here made visible burnt its way
into notice for a time; and Cromek was allowed to claim applause for his
invention of Blake. We will choose two designs only for reference. None
who have seen can well forget the glorious violence of reunion between
soul and body, meeting with fierce embraces, with glad agony and rage of
delight; with breasts yearning and eyes wide, with sweet madness of
laughter at their lips; the startled and half-arisen body not less divine
already than the descending soul, though the earth clings yet about his
knees and feet, and though she comes down as with a clamour of rushing
wind and prone impulse of falling water, fresh from the stars and the
highest air of heaven. But for perfect beauty nothing of Blake's can be
matched against the design of the soul departing; in this drawing the body
lies filled as it were and clothed with the supreme sleep of flesh, no man
watching by it; with limbs laid out and covered, with eyelids close; and
the soul, with tender poise of pausing feet, with painless face and sad
pure eyes, looks back as with a serene salutation full of pity, before
passing away into the clear air and light left at the end of sunset on
heaven and the hills; where outside the opened lattice a soft cold land of
rising fields and ridged moorland bears upon it the barren beauty of
shadow and sleep, the breath and not the breeze of evening. The sweet and
grave grace of this background, with a bright pallor in the sky and an
effect upon field and moor of open air without wind, brings with it a
sense as of music.
A year later Blake advertised and opened his exhibition; which he was
about as qualified to manage as little Malkin might have been. Between
anger, innocence, want of funds and sense of merit, he would assuredly
have ruined a better chance than he ever had. With the exception of his
_Canterbury Pilgrims_, the choice of pictures and designs for exhibition
seems to have been somewhat unhappy.[7] The admirable power and high
dramatic quality of that singular but noble picture, the latent or
superincumbent beauty which corrects and redeems its partial ugliness, the
strong imagination and the fanciful justice of the entire work, were
invisible to all but such spectators as Charles Lamb; if indeed there were
ever another capable of seeing them to such purpose. Whatever portion of
the like merit there may have been in the other works exhibited was still
more utterly lost upon the few who saw them at all; for of these we have
scarcely any record beyond Blake's own. One journal alone appears to have
noticed the exhibition. An angry allusion of Blake's to some assault of
the _Examiner_ newspaper upon his works and character has been hitherto
left unexplained, presumably through a not irrational contempt. That Blake
may be cleared from any charge of perversity, a brief account of the
quarrel is here appended. Contemptible as are both the journeyman writer
and his poor day's work, they have been found worth tracking down on
account of the game flown at.