THE PROCESSION OF THE PILGRIMS
Blake's course was now definitely chosen. He had turned his back on
patronage and voluntarily married poverty, like St. Francis, in order that
he might be free to work out his own poetic and artistic ideas without
reference to popularity, patronage, or pecuniary advantage. His wants and
Catherine's were simple indeed, and to pay for them, from week to week,
was all he desired. South Molton Street, in which they now took up their
abode, was closely shut in by streets and houses. There was no garden, no
summer-house or vine with pattering green leaves against the window as at
Lambeth,--no trees even to recall the natural beauties of Felpham. But
Blake seems to have been almost glad to be delivered from the agitating
beauty of the natural or "vegetative world," as he called it, which was to
him error and not truth--the visible shadow that darkened and hid
invisible and eternal ideas. Now indeed, with nothing to distract him, he
could open his eyes inward into the "World of Thought," into "Eternity,"
which is imagination. Gilchrist's Life enables us to realize how he could
live in this imaginative world, and yet, at the same time, fulfil with
great practical ability such a work, for instance, as collecting material
for Hayley for the "Life of Romney," which the latter was now beginning.
The letters he wrote to Hayley at the time, which are all given in the
Life, are the letters of a kindly business-like man, intent on giving
only such information as will be useful. The good sense, the sanity, the
mediocrity (I had almost said) of these letters are a pledge of Blake's
ability to act and express himself as other men when he wished so to do.
[Illustration: FROM BLAIR'S "GRAVE": THE RE-UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY
Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after Blake's design. Published 1808]
Hayley was his good "corporeal friend," to whom he was grateful for
"corporeal acts" of kindness, and as such he treated him.
In one of the letters alone there bursts forth a great full-throated shout
of joy, as it were, because he has suddenly achieved a great advance in
his art. As the passage gives valuable insight into his mind at the time,
I shall take liberty to quote it:
"O glory! O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his
station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last
passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is
the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient
Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which
has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have
had twenty; thank God, I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a
slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these
devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and
liberty, and my feet and my wife's feet are free from fetters....
"Suddenly on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of Pictures,
I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which
has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by
window shutters. Consequently I can, with confidence, promise you ocular
demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am engraving after
Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to
the light of Art. O, the distress I have undergone, and my poor wife with
me; incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well.
Every one of my friends was astonished at my faults, and could not assign
a reason; they knew my industry and abstinence from every pleasure for the
sake of study, and yet--and yet--and yet there wanted proofs of industry
in my works. I thank God with entire confidence that it shall be so no
longer: he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a
brother who was my enemy. Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather
madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a
pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I
have not been for twenty dark but very profitable years. I thank God that
I courageously pursued my course through darkness."
All of which tense and highly-figurative language means that Blake had
suddenly received enlightenment on various technical methods from the
silent witness of Raphael's and Michael Angelo's and other masters'
achievement. He could never learn by verbal advice, precept or criticism,
but when shown great work, the artist in him dwelt on every line,
absorbing and assimilating its principles. The spectrous fiend to whom he
refers is, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, his own "selfhood." He
held that every man contained in himself a devil and an angel, the devil
being the natural man, the angel the God in man. Of this idea of his more
hereafter.
Blake's work, when done in the heat of his spirit, is always noble,
characteristic, and _largely, often wholly, right_ (I am speaking of the
execution, not the ideas expressed), but when "incessant labour" was
expended without the incessant reference to nature which an elaborate
technique demands, it is not wonderful that "incessant spoiling" should
have been the result.
Now, indeed, he seems to have seen how it was with himself, and to have
gained a new mastery of material through studying the manner of other
men's work.
In 1804 Blake brought out his "Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant
Albion," a poem which he told Mr. Butts was descriptive of the "spiritual
acts of his three years' slumber on the banks of Ocean."
"Milton" was also produced in the same year.
In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek, whilom engraver, but now publisher and
printseller, "discovered" Blake in his self-chosen retirement, and
proposed giving him employment. The story of his treacherous dealings is
an evil one.
Cromek, who had learnt engraving in the studio of Bartolozzi, found it
laborious and slow work, so exchanged its drudgery for the calling of a
publisher, but, having good taste but no capital, he was hard pressed
indeed to make both ends meet.
One day a piece of luck came in his way. He paid a visit to Blake's
working and living room in South Molton Street. Many beautiful things were
to come into being in that room, but none more so than the drawings for
Blair's "Grave" which Blake had designed, intending to print and publish
them in the usual way. Cromek found them, and seized upon them, gloating.
He persuaded Blake to relinquish the idea of publishing them himself, and
to surrender the undertaking to Cromek as one more fitted to push them and
bring them before the notice of the public.
Blake was very poor at the time. In an insulting letter written by Cromek
to Blake some two years later, he refers with contemptible want of feeling
and taste to this fact. "Your best work, the illustrations to the
'Grave,'" he says, "was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so
low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week!"
Blake sold the twelve drawings to him for L1 10_s._ each, with the
assured verbal agreement that he was himself to engrave them for the
projected edition--a promise which of course entailed considerable further
payment for the work of engraving later on.
Cromek in possession of the copyright conveniently forgot his promise.
Impregnated as he was with the fluent and graceful style of Bartolozzi's
school, Blake's manner of engraving seemed to him grim, austere and
archaic. He thought that the noble drawings translated by the hand of the
popular and graceful engraver, Lewis Schiavonetti, would insure the
success of the designs with the public as Blake could never have done were
he to have engraved them himself.
It may be that there was truth in it. Some critics hold that the
illustrations to Blair's "Grave" have a suavity, a felicity superimposed
by the engraver on the stern and original work of Blake which was just
what was needed to render his work attractive to the public. To Blake's
true lovers, however, his own graver is the rightful interpreter of his
own drawings, and, whether Cromek were right or not in this critical
matter of taste, he was dishonest and mean to break the engagement on the
basis of which alone he had obtained the drawings.
While Blake was looking forward with "anxious delight" to the engraving of
his designs, Cromek had other schemes afoot. He called often at South
Molton Street, hoping to pounce on some other work of genius which he
could turn into money for himself. He was arrested one day before a pencil
sketch of a new and hitherto untreated subject--the Procession of
Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. He tried to get Blake to make a finished
drawing of it, with a view of course to getting it out of the artist's
hands, and then having it engraved by someone else. Negotiations on this
basis failing, he gave Blake a commission (verbal again) to execute the
design in a finished picture and an engraving from it. On the strength of
this, Blake's friends circulated a subscription paper for the engraving,
and he himself set to work on the picture. Cromek, however, had not done.
He was in love with the subject. Sure of Blake's conception being
thoughtful and strong, but probably wishful that it might be invested with
a more earthly grace and interest than he would put upon it, he went to
Stothard and suggested the subject to him, suppressing all mention of
Blake. Probably he assisted the suggestion by hints as to its treatment
derived from what he had actually appreciated in Blake's conception. He
commissioned him to paint the picture for sixty guineas, an engraving from
which was to be done by Bromley, though Schiavonetti was eventually
substituted for him.
[Illustration: PILGRIMAGE TO CANTERBURY
Engraving after Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrimage. Published October, 1817]
[Illustration: CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY PILGRIMS
Engraved by Blake in 1810 after his own "fresco" of the Canterbury
Pilgrimage]
When Blake learned that Cromek denied having given him a commission, and
came to know that Stothard, his old friend, was to paint a picture on his
stolen idea, to supersede his own, his rage and indignation knew no
bounds, and he became bitterly estranged from Stothard, believing in his
haste "that all men are liars," and that this man had been a party to the
whole mean transaction. Gilchrist is almost sure that Stothard knew
nothing of Cromek's previous deal with Blake on the subject of the
Canterbury Pilgrimage.
During 1806 Blake was moved to make some designs to Shakespeare which were
neither commissioned nor engraved. Judging from the one reproduced in the
Life,--"Hamlet and the Ghost of his Father,"--they must have been wild and
powerful indeed. He had always a profound reverence for, and joy in,
Shakespeare, whose works were among his favourite books.
A strange and characteristic collection were those books which fed his
fiery imagination. Could we have glanced along the row, we should have
seen Shakespeare cheek by jowl with Lavater and Jacob Boehmen, while
Macpherson's "Ossian," Chatterton's "Rowley," and the "Visions" of
Emmanuel Swedenborg helped to fill in the ranks. Milton held perhaps the
most honoured place of all, while Ovid, St. Theresa's works, and De la
Motte Fouque's "Sintram" were among the heterogeneous collection. Chaucer
was also cheerfully conspicuous, and, towards the close of Blake's life,
Dante's "Divine Comedy" came to join the silent company in the
bookshelves.
In 1806 Blake became acquainted with a good and kindly man, Dr. Malkin,
Head Master of Bury Grammar School. He gave him a commission for the
frontispiece of Malkin's "Memorials of his Child," and in the preface
wrote an account of the childhood and youth of the designer. Ozias
Humphrey, the miniature painter, and a staunch friend of Blake, bought
many of his engraved books, and it was he who obtained a commission for
him from the Countess of Egremont to paint a picture elaborated from the
Blair drawing of the "Last Judgment." The paper called by the same name in
the MS. book is descriptive of this picture, and in its _intimite_ and
demonstration of Blake's bed-rock foundations of thought and artistic
principles, gives profound insight into his mind.
These things occupied him during 1807. During that year Stothard's cabinet
picture was publicly exhibited, and drew thousands of gazers. Blake
doggedly continued to work at his own "Canterbury Pilgrimage," which he
wrought in a water-colour medium which he arbitrarily termed "fresco." It
was finished about the end of 1808. In the autumn of that year the twelve
beautiful engravings after his designs for Blair's "Grave" were produced
by Cromek, with a flowery introduction by Fuseli. The list of subscribers
for the book at two-and-a-half guineas a copy was so large--thanks to
Cromek's skilful manipulation--that the amount realized by its sale came
to L1,800. Of this Blake received twenty guineas and Schiavonetti about
L500. I cannot omit to mention that leave to dedicate to Queen Charlotte
having previously been obtained, Blake made a vignette drawing with some
grave and beautiful verses to accompany it, and sent it to Cromek as an
additional plate, asking the modest price of four guineas for it.
The design and verses were returned with a long letter from Cromek,
closely packed with insults and slanders, and exhibiting a meanness too
contemptible for expression. At the end of the letter he thus refers to
the subject of the Pilgrimage, of which one would suppose he would be too
ashamed to speak: "Why did you so _furiously rage_ at the success of the
little picture of the Pilgrimage? Three thousand people have now _seen it
and have approved of it_. Believe me, yours is 'the voice of one crying in
the wilderness.'
"You say the subject is _low_ and _contemptibly treated_. For his
excellent mode of treating the subject the poet has been admired for the
last four hundred years; the poor painter has not yet the advantage of
antiquity on his side, therefore with some people an apology may be
necessary for him. The conclusion of one of Squire Simpkins' letters to
his mother in the 'Bath Guide' will afford one. He speaks greatly to the
purpose:
I very well know
Both my subject and verse is exceedingly low,
But if any _great critic_ finds fault with my letter,
_He has nothing to do but to send you a better_.
"With much respect for your talents,
"I remain, Sir,
"Your real friend and well-wisher,
"R. H. CROMEK."
Perhaps it was that last jeering taunt which determined Blake to show
_his_ "Canterbury Pilgrimage" to the public, and make it the occasion of a
little exhibition of his own. It was opened in May, 1809. Poor unworldly
Blake, enraged and baffled, was the last man to organize an undertaking of
this sort. Cromek could afford to laugh at the modest show on the first
floor of James Blake's shop at the corner of Broad Street, all
unadvertised and unpatronized as it was.
The exhibition comprised, besides the "Pilgrimage," sixteen "Poetical and
Historical Inventions," ten "frescoes," and seven drawings--"a
collection," as Gilchrist remarks, "singularly remote from ordinary
sympathies or even ordinary apprehension."
Few of the general public penetrated here, but Blake's friends, his few
buyers, and many contemporary artists probably went through the rooms with
no little curiosity. Seymour Kirkup--the discoverer of Giotto's portrait
of Dante in the Bargello,--and Henry Crabb Robinson were among the number
of those who went and purchased catalogues. With the catalogue were issued
subscription papers for the engraving of the "Canterbury Pilgrimage,"
which, in spite of Cromek and Stothard, Blake intended to execute.
Blake drew up a Descriptive Catalogue to interpret his pictures, and in it
gave free rein, unfortunately, to his personal antipathy to Stothard, but
he also expressed at some length, and with characteristic fire and
intemperance, his views on art. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who was intensely
sympathetic with his artistic forerunner, says that the Descriptive
Catalogue, and the "Address to the Public," "abound in critical passages,
on painting and poetry, which must be ranked without reserve among the
very best things ever said on either subject."
It may be remarked, however, with all respect and honour, that neither
Blake nor Rossetti were critics in any exact sense of the word. The
unprejudiced and scientific character of mind which analyses, classifies,
and lays bare with sharp dissecting knife the structure, bones, muscles,
heart, of an artistic creation, belonged to neither of them. The analytic
and synthetic qualities are seldom united in one mind. (Goethe recognized
this when he wrote, "I, being an artist, prefer that the principles
through which I work should be hidden from me.") Both Blake and Rossetti
leaped with unerring instinct and the artistic intuition at all noble and
right work, and loved it with passion, rather than appreciated it with
cold reason. Blake's affinities in art, for instance, especially as he
grew older, were much more catholic than it would be supposed. Although
the Descriptive Catalogue would induce us to believe that works of art
which he did not worship were loathed by him, this was only the case when
he was doing battle for certain cherished principles, and then he would
hit blindly to right and left in the heat of his partisanship. Mr. Samuel
Palmer spoke of evenings spent with him in his old age looking over
reproductions of the pictures of various masters, which Blake enjoyed
greatly, dwelling on whatever was beautiful and true in each. The
Catalogue and Address were written by him with a pen steeped in wormwood.
His attacks were mainly directed against the "Venetian and Flemish
demons," with their "infernal machine Chiaro Oscuro," and the "hellish
brownness" with which he says they and their school and modern followers
load their paintings. It is true that the English school of the day feared
colour, and gave a brown tone to nearly all its pictures, but probably
Blake had never seen good examples of the Venetians, whose chief glory is
that they "conceived colour heroically." He enunciated his own principle
in these words: "The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is
this: that the more distinct, sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more
perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the
evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism and bungling." His mood was
exasperated, truculent, passionately prejudiced, though there is much here
of artistic insight and originality. It must be admitted that a great deal
is painful reading, but through all the unmeasured language one feels the
labouring, overstrained, noble, human heart, tormented beyond endurance.
He had been galled to this state of Titanic fury by a policy of calumny,
plagiarism, and neglect, used against him by the little souls, of what was
in many respects a little age, with no mercy and little intermission for
many years.
Since the production of Blair's "Grave," he had been held up to public
ridicule as an artist, in a paper called the "Examiner," edited by Leigh
Hunt, and the occasion of this exhibition called forth another article in
its columns full of crass misunderstanding of his aims and the superior
sneers of a self-satisfied and material-minded writer. In it he was termed
"an unfortunate lunatic whose personal unoffensiveness secures him from
confinement."
But the "most unkindest cut of all" had been Cromek's, in making his own
friend of thirty years' standing the supplanter of his work, the thief of
his idea.
All these things had inflamed his tremulous and excitable nerves to a
point beyond self-control.
Material disagreements of the kind I have related had a sad effect on him,
and drove him to an expression of bitterness very difficult to reconcile
with the benign, gentle and courteous nature to which all his friends and
acquaintances have affectionately testified. There is no doubt that during
the period of middle life he developed a hard and violent strain which did
not mix with, diminish, or distemper the fine and beautiful qualities of
his heart and spirit, but shot through them like a barbed wire among a
tangle of honeysuckle. In great part, it was the irritation of capricious
and highly-strung nerves, the tension of an overheated and excitable
brain, and not a quality of the mind or character at all.
The expression of this condition of Blake's must, therefore, be taken as
an undisciplined and wilfully exaggerated statement of his intellectual
convictions, with a deep note of truth at the bottom. It seems strange
that in the matter of the "Pilgrimage" he did not go straight to Stothard
and invite him to clear himself of the suspicions with which he regarded
him. But like all guileless people, and perhaps especially those of the
artistic temperament, when once they have been deceived they find it easy
to believe that all the world is in league against them.
Before people who were not intimate, who were, in fact, antipathetic to
him, Blake would abuse Stothard roundly and criticise him wantonly. But to
the immediate circle of his personal friends or sympathisers--those who,
knowing how he had suffered, and how black the case looked for Stothard,
would have understood anything he might have said,--he maintained complete
silence on the subject of the "Pilgrimage," and the name of the popular
artist was mentioned without comment and listened to in grave silence by
him. Once, many years after, he met Stothard at a dinner, and went up to
him impulsively with outstretched hand. It was refused with coldness.
Another time, hearing that Stothard was ill, Blake's heart softened and
warmed to the old friend, and he rushed off impetuously to call and make
up the quarrel in which he ever believed Stothard to have been the
aggressor. But Stothard would not receive him, desired no reconciliation.
In the year 1808 Blake exhibited, for the fifth and last time, at the
Royal Academy, two pictures in "fresco," "Christ in the Sepulchre guarded
by Angels," and "Jacob's Dream." The engraving of Blake's "Canterbury
Pilgrimage" was issued in October, 1810.
It was altogether unadvertised and unheralded, and the public held itself
coldly aloof, neither admiring nor buying. The original picture was taken
by the ever-faithful Mr. Butts. Stothard's picture was not finished
engraving till a year or two later, for adverse fortunes overtook it.
Lewis Schiavonetti died in the middle of the work, and another hand had to
finish it. Notwithstanding all of which misadventures, it was one of the
most popular engravings ever issued.
We shall compare the two compositions in a succeeding chapter.
[Illustration: SATAN POURING THE PLAGUE OF BOILS ON JOB
Water-colour drawing. Reproduced by kind permission of Sir Charles Dilke]