on Blake's personal life will regret, not it may be without a keen
suppressed sense of vain vexation, that the author did not live to get
sight of the letters which have since been found and published. They will
at least observe with how much reason the editor of the _Life_ has desired
us to notice the close and complete confirmation given by that
correspondence to the accuracy of these chapters. No tribute more valuable
could be devised to the high sincerity, the clear sagacity, the vigorous
sense of truth and lucid power of proof, which have left us for the first
time an acceptable and endurable portrait of Blake. All earlier attempts
were mere masses of blot and scratch, evidently impossible and false on
the face of them, and even pitifully conscious that they could not be
true, not being human. The bewildered patronage, fear, contempt, goodwill
and despair which Blake had excited among those hapless biographers have
left in their forlorn failures a certain element of despicable pathos. We
have now, thanks to no happier chance, but solely to the strenuous ability
and fidelity of a man qualified to study and to speak upon the matter, a
trustworthy, perspicuous, and coherent summary of the actual facts of
Blake's life, of the manner in which he worked, and of the causes which
made his work what it was.
Among these late labours of Blake the "Dante" may take a place of some
prominence. The seven published plates, though quite surprisingly various
in merit, are worth more notice than has yet been spared them. Three at
least, for poetical power and nobility of imaginative detail, are up to
the artist's highest mark. Others have painted the episode of Francesca
with more or less of vigour and beauty; once above all an artist to whom
any reference here must be taken as especially apposite has given with the
tenderest perfection of power, first the beauty of beginning love in the
light and air of life on earth, then the passion of imperishable desire
under the dropping tongues of flame in hell. To the right the lovers are
drawn close, yearning one toward another with touch of tightened hands and
insatiable appeal of lips; behind them the bower lattice opens on deep
sunshine and luminous leaves; to the left, they drift before the wind of
hell, floated along the misty and straining air, fastened one upon another
among the fires, pale with perpetual division of pain; and between them
the witnesses stand sadly, as men that look before and after. Blake has
given nothing like this: of personal beauty and special tenderness his
design has none; it starts from other ground. Often as the lovers had been
painted, here first has any artist desired to paint the second circle
itself. To most illustrators, as to most readers, and (one might say) to
Dante himself, the rest are swallowed up in those two supreme martyrs.
Here we see, not one or two, but the very circle of the souls that sinned
by lust, as Dante saw it; and as Keats afterwards saw it in the dream
embalmed by his sonnet; the revolution of infinite sorrowing spirits
through the bitter air and grievous hurricane of hell. Through strange
immense implications of snake-shaped fold beyond fold, the involved chain
of figures that circle and return flickers in wan white outline upon the
dense dark. Under their feet is no stay as on earth; over their heads is
no light as in heaven. They have no rest, and no resting-place: they
revolve like circles of curling foam or fire. The two witnesses, who alone
among all the mobile mass have ground whereon to set foot, stand apart
upon a broken floor-work of roots and rocks, made rank with the slime and
sprawl of rotten weed and foul flag-leaves of Lethe. Detail of drawing or
other technical work is not the strong point of the design; but it does
incomparably well manage to render the sense of the matter in hand, the
endless measured motion, the painful and fruitless haste as of leaves or
smoke upon the wind, the grey discomforted air and dividing mist. Blake
has thoroughly understood and given back the physical symbols of this
first punishment in Dante; the whirling motion of his figures has however
more of blind violence and brute speed than the text seems to indicate:
they are dashed and dragged one upon another like weed or shingle torn up
in the drift of a breaking sea: overthrown or beaten down, haled or
crushed together, as if by inanimate strength of iron or steam: not moved
as we expect to see them, in sad rapidity of stately measure and even time
of speed. The flame-like impulse of idea natural to Blake cannot
absolutely match itself against Dante's divine justice and intense innate
forbearance in detail; nor so comprehend, as by dint of reproduction to
compete with, that supreme sense of inward and outward right which rules
and attunes every word of the _Commedia_.
Two other drawings in this series are worth remark and praise; the sixth
and seventh in order. In the sixth, Dante and Virgil, standing in a niche
of rifted rock faced by another cliff up and down which a reptile crowd
of spirits swarms and sinks, look down on the grovelling and swine-like
flocks of Malebolge; lying tumbled about the loathsome land in hateful
heaps of leprous flesh and dishevelled deformity, with limbs contorted,
clawing nails, and staring horror of hair and eyes: one figure thrown down
in a corner of the crowded cliff-side, her form and face drowned in an
overflow of ruined raining tresses. The pure grave folds of the two poets'
robes, long and cleanly carved as the straight drapery of a statue, gain
chastity of contrast from the swarming surge and monstrous mass of all
foulest forms beneath, against the reek of which both witnesses stop their
noses with their gowns. Behind and between, huge outlines of dark hill and
sharp curves of crag show like stiffened ridges of solid sea, amid heaving
and glaring motion of vapour and fire. Slight as the workmanship is of
this design also, alien as is perhaps its structure of precipice and
mountain from the Dantesque conception of descending circles and narrowing
sides, it has a fiery beauty of its own; the background especially, with
its climbing or crawling flames, the dark hard strength and sweep of its
sterile ridges, seen by fierce fits of reflected light, washed about with
surf and froth of tideless fire, and heavily laden with the lurid languor
of hell. In the seventh design we reach the circle of traitors; the foot
of the passenger strikes against one frost-bound face; others lie
straight, with crowned congealing hair and beard taken in the tightening
rivets of ice. To the right a swarm of huge and huddled figures seems
gathering with moan or menace behind a veil of frozen air, a mask of
hardening vapour; and from each side the bitter light of ice or steel
falls grey in cruel refraction. Into the other four designs we will not
enter; some indeed are too savagely reckless in their ugly and barren
violation of form or law, to be redeemed by even an intenser apprehension
of symbol and sense; and one at least, though with noble suggestions
dropped about it, is but half sketched in. In that of the valley of
serpents there is however a splendid excess of horror and prodigal agony;
the ravenous delight of the closing and laughing mouths, the folded
tension of every scale and ring, the horrible head caught and crushed with
the last shriek between its teeth and the last strain upon its eyelids, in
the serrated jaws of the erect serpent--all have the brand of Blake upon
them.
These works were the last he was to achieve; out of the whole Dantesque
series, seven designs alone have ever won their way into such notice as
engraving could earn for them. The latest chapters of Blake's life are
perhaps also the noblest. His poverty, if that word implies anything of a
destitute or sordid way of living, seems to have grown and swollen
somewhat beyond its actual size in the dim form of report. Stories have
come to hand of late, which, being seemingly accurate in the main, though
not as yet duly fixed in detail or date, remove any such ground of fear.
They do better; they bring proof once again of the noble charity, the
tender exaltation of mind, the swift bounty of hand, which would have made
memorable a man meaner in talent. Once, it is said, he lent L40 to some
friend in distress, which friend's wife, having laid out most of her
windfall in dress, thought Mrs. Blake might like to see _that_ by way of
change for her husband's money. Once too they received into their lodging
(into which does not yet seem certain) a young student of art, sick and
poor, who died some time after upon their hands. These things, and such as
these, we know dimly. One or two such deeds, seen through such dull vague
obstruction, in the midst of so many things forgotten, should be taken to
imply much. How few we know of, it is easy to say; how many there must
have been, it is not easy. This also may be remembered, that the man so
liberal when he had little might once have had much to give, and would not
take it at the price. It is recorded on the authority of a personal
friend, that some proposal had once been made to "engage Blake as teacher
of drawing to the royal family"; a proposal declined on his part from no
folly or vulgarity of prepossession, but from a simple and noble sense of
things reasonable and right. For once, it is also said, some samples of
his work were laid before the king, not then, unluckily, in his
strait-waistcoat; "Take them away!" spluttered the lunatic--not quite as
yet "blind, mad, despised, and dying," as when Byron and Shelley embalmed
him in corrosive rhymes; not all of these as yet. But as a great man then
alive and yet living[8] has well asked--"What mortal ever heard Any good
of George the Third?" Blake's MSS. contain an occasional allusion
expressive of no ardent reverence for the person or family of that insane
Dagon, so long left standing as the leaden rather than brazen idol of
hypocrites and dunces. As to the arts, it was well for Blake to keep clear
of the patron of West. All he ever got from government was the risk of
hanging, or such minor penalty as that equitable time might have
inflicted on seditious laxity of speech and thought.
In smaller personal matters, Blake was as fearless and impulsive as in his
conduct of these graver affairs. Seeing once, somewhere about St. Giles's,
a wife knocked about by some husband or other violent person, in the open
street, a bystander saw this also--that a small swift figure coming up in
full swing of passion fell with such counter violence of reckless and
raging rebuke upon the poor ruffian, that he recoiled and collapsed, with
ineffectual cudgel; persuaded, as the bystander was told on calling
afterwards, that the very devil himself had flown upon him in defence of
the woman; such Tartarean overflow of execration and objurgation had
issued from the mouth of her champion. It was the fluent tongue of Blake
which had proved too strong for this fellow's arm: the artist, doubtless,
not caring to remember the consequences, proverbial even before Moliere's
time, of such interference with conjugal casualties.
These things, whenever it was that they happened, were now of the past; as
were many labours of many days, to be followed by not many more. Among a
few good friends, and not without varieties of changed scene and company,
Blake drew daily nearer to death. Of all the records of these his latter
years, the most valuable perhaps are those furnished by Mr. Crabb
Robinson, whose cautious and vivid transcription of Blake's actual speech
is worth more than much vague remark, or than any commentary now possible
to give. A certain visible dislike and vexation excited by the mystic
violence of Blake's phrases, by the fierce simplicity of his mental
bearing, have not been allowed to impair the excellent justice of tone
and evident accuracy of report which give to these notes their singular
value. In his correspondence, in his conversation, and in his prophecies,
Blake was always at unity with himself; not, it seems to us, actually
inconsistent or even illogical in his fitful varieties of speech and
expression. His faith was large and his creed intricate; in the house of
his belief there were many mansions. In these notes, for instance, the
terms "atheism" and "education" are wrested to peculiar uses; education
must mean not exactly training, but moral tradition and the retailed
sophistries of artificial right and wrong; atheism, as applicable to
Dante, must mean adherence to the received "God of this world"--that
confusion of the Creator with the Saviour which was to Blake the main rock
of offence in all religious systems less mystic than his own; being
indeed, together with "Deism," the perpetual butt of his prophetic slings
and arrows. All this, however, we must leave now for time to enlighten in
due course as it best may; meanwhile some last word has to be said
concerning Blake's life and death.
To a life so gentle and great, so brave and stainless, there could be but
one manner of end, come when and how it might; a serene and divine death,
full of placid ardour and hope unspotted by fear. Having lived long
without a taint of shame upon his life, having long laboured without a
stain of falsehood upon his work, it was no hard task for him to set the
seal of a noble death upon that noble life and labour. He, it might be
said, whom the gods love well need not always die young; for this man died
old in years at least, having done work enough for three men's lives of
strenuous talent and spirit. After certain stages of pain and recovery and
relapse, the end came on the second Sunday in August 1827. A few days
before he had made a last drawing of his wife--faithful to him and loving
almost beyond all recorded faith and love. Forty-five years she had cloven
to him and served him all the days of her life with all the might of her
heart; for a space of four years and two months they were to be divided
now. He did not draw her like, it appears: that which "she had ever been
to him," no man could have drawn. Of her, out of just reverence and
gratitude that such goodness should have been, we will not say more. All
words are coarse and flat that men can use to praise one who has so
lived.[9] It has been told more than once in print--it can never be told
without a sense of some strange and sweet meaning--how, as Blake lay with
all the tides of his life setting towards the deep final sleep, he made
and sang new fragments of verse, the last oblations he was to bring who
had brought so many since his first conscience of the singular power and
passion within himself that impels a man to such work. Of these songs not
a line has been spared us; for us, it seems, they were not made. In
effect, they were not his, he said. At last, after many songs and hours,
still in the true and pure presence of his wife, his death came upon him
in the evening like a sleep.[10]
Only such men die so; though the worst have been known to die calmly and
the meanest bravely, this pure lyric rapture of spirit and perfect music
of sundering soul and body can only be given to these few. Knowing nothing
of whence and whither, the how and the when of a man's death we can at
least know, and put the knowledge to what uses we may. In this case, if we
will, it may help us to much in the way of insight and judgment; it may
show us many things that need not be wrought up into many words. For what
more is there now to say of the man? Of the work he did we must speak
gradually, if we are to speak adequately. Into his life and method of work
we have looked, not without care and veneration; and find little to
conclude with by way of comment. If to any reader it should not by this
time appear that he was great and good among the chief of good and great
men, it will not appear for any oration of ours. Most funeral speeches
also are cheap and inconclusive. Especially they must be so, or seem so,
when delivered over the body of a great man to whom his own generation
could not even grant a secure grave. In 1831 his wife was buried beside
him: where they are laid now no man can say: it seems certain only that
their graves were violated by hideous official custom, and their bones
cast out into some consecrated pit among other nameless relics of poor
men. It might not have hurt them even to foresee this; but nevertheless
the doers of such a thing had better not have done it. Having missed of a
durable grave, Blake need not perhaps look for the "weak witness" of any
late memorial. Such things in life were indifferent to him; and should be
more so now. To be buried among his nearest kin, and to have the English
burial service read over him, he did, we are told, express some wish; and
this was done. The world of men was less by one great man, and was none
the wiser; while he lived he was called mad and kept poor; after his death
much of his work was destroyed; and in course of time not so much as his
grave was left him. All which to him must matter little, but is yet worth
a recollection more fruitful than regret. The dead only, and not the
living, ought, while any trace of his doings remains, to forget what was
the work and what were the wages of William Blake.
II.--LYRICAL POEMS.