William Blake must have been the happiest man that ever lived; not
the doubtful happiness of a fool's paradise, but a sharply defined
ecstasy that was his companion from his earliest years to his very
death-bed; that bed on which he passed away "singing of the things
he saw in heaven," to the tune of his own improvised strange music.
He seems to have been the solitary man in art history who really
fulfilled Walter Pater's test of success in life: "To burn always
with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Blake easily
maintained it. His face shone with it. Withal he was outwardly sane
in matters of mundane conduct, sensitive and quick to resent any
personal affront, and by no means one of those awful prophets going
about proclaiming their self-imposed mission. An amiable man, quick
to fly into and out of a passion, a gentleman exquisite in manners,
he impressed those who met him as an unqualified genius. Charles Lamb
has told us of him; so have others. I possess an engraving of his head
after Linnell's miniature, and while his Irish paternity has never
been thoroughly established--Yeats calls him an Irishman--there can
be little doubt of his Celtic origin. His is the head of a poet, a
patriot, a priest..The brow is lofty and wide, the hair flamelike in
its upcurling. The eyes are marvellous--true windows of a soul vividly
aware of its pricelessness; the mystic eye and the eye of the prophet
about to thunder upon the perverse heads of his times. The full lips
and massive chin make up the ensemble of a singularly noble, inspired,
and well-balanced head. Symmetry is its keynote. A God-kindled face.
One looks in vain for any indication of the madman--Blake was called
mad during his lifetime, and ever since he has been considered mad by
the world. Yet he was never mad as were John Martin and Wiertz the
Belgian, or as often seems Odilon Redon, who has been called--heaven
knows why!--the "French Blake." The poet Cowper said to Blake: "Oh,
that I were insane always.... Can you not make me truly insane?...
You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us--over us all--mad
as a refuge from unbelief--from Bacon, Newton, and Locke." The arid
atheism of his century was doubtless a contributory cause to the
exasperation of Blake's nerves. He believed himself a Christian despite
his heterodox sayings, and his belief is literal and profound. A true
Citizen of Eternity, as Yeats named him, and with all his lack of
academic training, what a giant he was among the Fuselis, Bartolozzis,
Stothards, Schiavonettis, and the other successful mediocrities.
His life was spent in ignoble surroundings, an almost anonymous life,
though a happy one because of its illuminating purpose and flashes of
golden fire. Blake was born in London (1757) and died in London (1827).
He was the son of a hosier, whose real name was not O'Neill, as some
have maintained. The boy, at the age of fourteen, was apprenticed to
Ryland the engraver, but the sight of his master's face caused him
to shudder and he refused to work under him, giving as a reason that
Ryland would be hanged some day. And so he was, for counterfeiting.
The abnormally sensitive little chap then went to the engraver Basire,
with whom he remained a year. His precocity was noteworthy. In 1773
he put forth as a pretended copy of Michaelangelo a design which he
called Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion. At that early
age he had already begun to mix up Biblical characters and events with
the life about him. The Bible saturated his imagination; it was not a
dead record for him, but a living, growing organism that overlapped
the spiritual England of his day. The grotesqueness of his titles, the
mingling of the familiar with the exotic--the sublime and the absurd
are seldom asunder in Blake--sacred with secular, were the results
of his acquaintance with the Scriptures at a period when other boys
were rolling hoops or flying kites. Blake could never have been a
boy, in the ordinary sense; yet he was to the last day of his life a
child in the naïveté of his vision. "I am ever the new-born child," he
might have said, as did Goethe to Herder. At the age of four he said
God put his face in the window, and he ran screaming to his parents
to bear witness to the happening. He had seen a tree bright with
angels at Peckham Rye, and his life long he held converse with the
spirits of Moses, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. He
adored Michaelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer and Swedenborg completed the
conquest--perhaps the unsettlement--of his intellect. He hated Titian,
Rubens, and Rembrandt. They were sensualists, they did not in their art
lay the emphasis upon drawing, and as we shall see presently, drawing
was the chief factor for Blake, colour being a humble handmaiden.
In 1782 Blake married for love Catharine Boucher, or Boutcher, of whom
Mr. Swinburne has said that she "deserves remembrance as about the
most perfect wife on record." She was uneducated, but learned to read
and write, and later proved an inestimable helpmate for the struggling
and unpractical Blake. She bound his books and coloured some of his
illustrations. She bore long poverty uncomplainingly, one is tempted
to say with enthusiasm. Once only she faltered. Blake had his own
notions about certain Old Testament customs, and he, it is said on the
authority of a gossip, had proposed to add another wife to the poor
little household. Mrs. Blake wept and the matter was dropped. Other
gossip avers that the Adamite in Blake manifested itself in a not
infrequent desire to cast aside garments and to sit in paradisiacal
innocence. Whether these stories were the invention of malicious
associates or were true, one thing is certain: Blake was capable of
anything for which he could find a Biblical precedent. In the matter
of the unconventional he was the _Urvater_ of English rebels. Shelley,
Byron, Swinburne were timid amateurs compared to this man, who with a
terrific energy translated his thoughts into art. He was not the idle
dreamer of an empty day nor a mooning mystic. His energy was electric.
It sounds a clarion note in his verse and prose, it reveals itself in
the fiery swirlings of his line, a line swift and personal. He has
been named by some one a heretic in the Church of Swedenborg; but like
a latter-day rebel--Nietzsche, who renounced Schopenhauer--Blake soon
renounced Swedenborg. But Michelangelo remained a deity for him, and in
his designs the influence of Angelo is paramount.
Blake might be called an English Primitive. He stems from the
Florentines, but _à la gauche_. The bar sinister on his artistic
coat of arms is the lack of fundamental training. He had a Gothic
imagination, but his dreams lack architectonics. Goethe, too, had
dreams, and we are the richer by Faust. And no doubt there are in his
works phrases that Nietzsche has seemed to repeat. It is the fashion
just now to trace every idea of Nietzsche to some one else. The truth
is that the language of rebellion through the ages is the same. The
mere gesture of revolt, as typified in the uplifted threatening arm of
a Cain, a Prometheus, a Julian the Apostate, is no more conventional
than the phraseology of the heretic. How many of them have written
"inspired" bibles, from Mahomet to Zarathustra. Blake, his tumultuous
imagination afire--remember that the artist doubled the poet in his
amazing and versatile soul--poured forth for years his "sacred" books,
his prophecies, his denouncements of his fellow-man. It was all sincere
righteous indignation; but the method of his speech is obscure; the
Mormon books of revelation are miracles of clarity in comparison. Let
us leave these singular prophecies of Blake to the mystics. One thing
is sure--he has affected many poets and thinkers. There are things in
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Shaw might have said had not Blake
forestalled him. Such is the cruelty of genius.
Symons makes apt comparison between Blake and Nietzsche: "There is
nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices ... vices in the
natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world."
This might have appeared over Nietzsche's signature in Beyond Good
and Evil. And the following in his marginalia to Reynolds--Sir Joshua
always professed a high regard for the genius of Blake. "The Enquiry
in England is not whether a man has Talents and Genius, but whether he
is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass." The vocabulary of rebellion
is the same. Still more bitter is his speech about holiness: "The fool
shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven, let him be ever so pious."
Blake glorified passion, which for him was the highest form of human
energy. His tragic scrolls, emotional arabesques, are testimony to his
high and subtle temperament. The intellect he worshipped. Of pride
we cannot have too much! As a lyric poet it is too late in the day to
reiterate that he is a peer in the "holy church of English literature."
The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience have given him a place
in the anthologies and made him known to readers who have never heard
of him as a pictorial genius. "Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the
forests of the night," is recited by sweet school-misses and pondered
for its philosophy by their masters. And has Keats ever fashioned a
lovelier image than: "Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; spread
silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver"?
Whatever he may not be, William Blake is a great singer.