Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 52300-h.htm or 52300-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/52300/pg52300-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52300/52300-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/gri_33125007593565
[Illustration: _London. Published as the Act directs March 8. 1823 by
Willm Blake N3 Fountain Court Strand_
_The Sons of God. Design from the Book of Job._]
WILLIAM BLAKE
Painter and Poet
by
RICHARD GARNETT, LL.D.
Keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum
[Illustration]
London
Seeley and Co. Limited, Essex Street, Strand
New York, Macmillan and Co.
1895
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_PLATES_
PAGE
The Sons of God. From the Book of Job _Frontispiece_
The Lamb, and Infant Joy. Songs of Innocence _to face_ 20
The Fly, and the Tiger. Songs of Experience ” ” 24
The Book of Thel, title-page. In facsimile by W. Griggs ” ” 33
” ” page vi. ” ” ” ” 36
America, page ” ” 42
” page ” ” 48
_ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT_
Morning, or Glad Day. From an engraving by W. Blake 11
Illustration from “David Simple.” Engraved by W. Blake after
T. Stothard, R.A. 17
From a coloured copy of the “Songs of Innocence and Experience.”
British Museum 22
Frontispiece of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Stories” 24
Page of Young’s “Night Thoughts.” Illustrated by W. Blake 26
I want! I want!--Help! Help!--Aged Ignorance!--Death’s Door 28
Design from the “Book of Urizen.” By W. Blake 34
The Ancient of Days setting a Compass to the Earth. From a
water-colour drawing by W. Blake. British Museum 39
Sweeping the Parlour in the Interpreter’s House 40
Design from “Milton.” By W. Blake 47
Portrait of William Blake. From the engraving by L. Schiavonetti,
after T. Phillips, R.A. 50
The Reunion of Soul and Body. From Blair’s “Grave,” illustrated
by W. Blake 53
The Babylonian Woman on the Seven-headed Beast. From a water-colour
drawing by W. Blake. British Museum 55
Portrait of Wilson Lowry. By John Linnell. Engraved by Blake
and Linnell 61
The Resurrection of the Dead. From a water-colour drawing by
W. Blake. British Museum 63
Woodcut from Thornton’s Pastoral 64
The Destruction of Job’s Sons and Daughters. From the “Book of
Job.” By W. Blake 67
With dreams upon my bed thou scarest me. From the “Book of Job.”
By W. Blake 69
Behemoth and Leviathan. From the “Book of Job.” By W. Blake 71
WILLIAM BLAKE
CHAPTER I
_Preliminary observations--Blake’s
Birth--Education--Marriage--Early Poems--Drawings and
Engravings._
The position of William Blake among artists is exceptional. Of no
other painter of like distinction, save Dante Rossetti, can it be said
that his fame as a poet has fully rivalled his fame as a painter; much
less that, in the opinion of some, his fame as a seer ought to have
exceeded both. Many painters, from Reynolds downwards, have written
admirably upon art; in some instances, notably Haydon’s, the worth of
their precepts greatly exceeds that of their performance. But, Rossetti
always excepted, perhaps no other painter of great distinction,
save Michael Angelo alone, has achieved high renown in poetry, and
the compass of Michael Angelo’s poetical work is infinitesimal in
comparison with his work as an artist. Again, the literary achievements
of an Angelo or a Reynolds admit of clear separation from their
performances as artists. The critic who approaches them from the
artistic side may, if he pleases, omit the literary side entirely from
consideration. This is impossible with Blake, for not only do the
artistic and the poetical monuments of his genius nearly balance each
other in merit and in their claim upon the attention of posterity,
but they are the offspring of the same creative impulse, and are
indissolubly fused together by the process adopted for their execution.
A study of Blake, therefore, must include more literary discussion
than would be allowable in a monograph on any other artist. The poet
and painter in Blake, moreover, are but manifestations of the more
comprehensive character of seer, which suggests inquiries alien to both
these arts; while the personal character of the man is so fascinating,
and his intellectual character so perplexing, that the investigation
of either of them might afford, and often has afforded, material for
a prolonged discussion. In the following pages it will be our object,
whenever compelled to quit the safe ground of biographical narrative,
to subordinate all else to the consideration of Blake as an artist;
but the Blake of the brush is too emphatically the Blake of the pen
to be long dissociated from him, and neither can be detached from the
background of abnormal visionary faculty.
* * * * *
From a certain point of view, artists may be regarded as divisible into
three classes: those who regard the material world as an unquestionable
solid reality, whose accurate representation is the one mission of
Art; those to whom it is a mere hieroglyphic of an essential existence
transcending it; and those who, uniting the two conceptions, are at the
same time idealists and realists. The greatest artists generally belong
to the latter class, and with reason, for a literal adherence to matter
of fact almost implies defect of imagination; while an extravagant
idealism may be, to say the least, a convenient excuse for defects of
technical skill. It is difficult to know whether to class the works
of the very greatest artists as realistic or idealistic. Take Albert
Dürer’s _Melancholia_. It is a hieroglyph, a symbol, an expression
of something too intense to be put into words; a delineation of what
the painter beheld with the inner eye alone. Yet every detail is as
correct and true to fact as the most uninspired Dutchman could have
made it. Take Titian’s _Bacchus and Ariadne_, and observe how separate
details which the artist may have actually noticed, are combined into
a whole which has never been beheld, save by the spiritual vision,
since the last thyrsus was brandished by the last Mænad. Yet, though
the creators of such scenes are the greatest, some realists, such as
Velasquez, have in virtue of surpassing technical execution asserted
a nearly equal rank. The case is different when we come to the
enthusiasts and visionaries, whose art is wholly symbolic, who have
given us little that can be enjoyed as art for art’s sake, without
reference to the ideas of which it is made the vehicle. In many very
interesting artists, such as Wiertz and Calvert and Vedder, and in
many isolated works of great masters, such as Giorgione’s _Venetian
Pastoral_, the feeling is so much in excess of the execution--admirable
as this may be--that the result is rather a poem than a picture. But
only one artist who has deliberately made himself the prophet of this
tendency, who has avowedly and defiantly discarded all purpose from his
works save that of spiritual suggestiveness, seems to have ever been
admitted as a candidate for very high artistic honours, and he is our
countryman, William Blake.
This circumstance alone should render Blake an interesting object of
study, even for those who can see no merit in his works: indeed, the
less the merit the more remarkable the phenomenon. He is, moreover,
a most peculiar and enigmatical character, both intellectually and
morally. As an art critic he is of all the most dogmatic, trenchant,
and revolutionary. As a poet, were nineteen-twentieths of his
compositions to be discarded as rubbish, lyrics would remain not only
exquisite in themselves, but possessing the incommunicable and Sapphic
quality that a single stanza, even a single phrase, would often suffice
to make the writer immortal. The question of his sanity is as well
adapted to furnish the world with an interminable subject of discussion
as the execution of Charles I. or the assassination of Cæsar. Finally,
it is very significant that while no man ever wilfully put more
obstacles into the way of his success than Blake, whether as artist,
thinker, or poet, and he did in fact succeed in condemning himself to
poverty and obscurity, the verdict of his contemporaries is now so far
reversed that the drawings which a kind friend overpaid, as he thought,
at fifty guineas, are worth a thousand pounds.
What manner of man was he to whose shade the world has made this
practical apology?
William Blake was born on November 28th,[1] 1757, at 28, Broad Street,
Golden Square. By a singular coincidence this was the very year which
a still more celebrated mystic, Swedenborg, had announced as that
of the Last Judgment in a spiritual sense, which was by no means to
preclude the world from going on in externals pretty much as usual.
Blake’s father, James Blake, was a hosier in moderately prosperous
circumstances, whose father is stated by Blake’s most elaborate
commentators, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, to have been originally named
O’Neil, and to have assumed his wife’s name as a means of escape from
pecuniary difficulties. This wife, however, was not the mother of
James. This genealogy is not supported by any strong authority, and
is at variance with another, also indifferently supported, according
to which the artist’s family were connected with the admiral’s. We
must leave the question where we find it, merely remarking that
Blake’s parents were certainly Protestants, and that we can detect no
specifically Irish trait in his character or his works. He had three
brothers--one, James, mild and unassuming like his father; another,
Robert, who died young, apparently with more affinity to William; the
third, John, a scapegrace. There was also a sister who never married,
and is described as a thorough gentlewoman, reserved and proud. None of
the family except William and Robert seem to have shown any artistic
talent. With William it must have been precocious, for, ere he had
attained the age of ten, his father, who as a small tradesman might
rather have been expected to have thwarted the boy’s inclinations,
placed him at “Mr. Pars’ drawing school in the Strand.” Here he learned
to draw from plaster casts--the life was denied him--and with the aid
of his father and a friendly auctioneer collected prints, then to be
picked up cheap, showing from the very first, as he afterwards related,
a complete independence of the pseudo-classic taste of the day. At four
he had had his first vision, when “God put his forehead to the window,
which set him screaming.” At eight or ten he saw a tree filled with
angels, and angelic figures walking among haymakers. “The child is
father to the man.”
At the age of fourteen Blake was apprenticed to the engraver
Basire. Ryland had been thought of, but Blake, according to a story
which he must have narrated, but may not improbably have imagined,
demurred, declaring that the fashionable engraver looked as if he
would one day be hanged, as he actually was. Basire’s practice lay
chiefly in engraving antiquities, and the last five years of Blake’s
apprenticeship were chiefly spent in drawing tombs and architectural
details in Westminster Abbey a most advantageous discipline, which
imbued his mind with the Gothic spirit, an influence already in the
air, evincing itself in Götz von Berlichingens, Rowley Poems, Percy
Relics, and Castles of Otranto; and, by directing him to English
history and Shakespeare, powerfully stimulated and felicitously guided
the poetical genius of which he was shortly to give proof. He drew,
Malkin tells us, the monuments of kings and queens in every point
of view he could catch, frequently standing on them. The heads he
considered as portraits, and all the ornaments appeared as miracles
of art to his Gothicised imagination. Nor could a better environment
for a mystic be desired than the venerable and generally solitary
temple, “the height, the space, the gloom, the glory,” with its music,
its memories, and its constant sense of the presence of the dead.
The bent of his mind at the time is shown by his first engraving,
_Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion_, copied, as he states,
from a scarce Italian print. If this was indeed the case, it may be
queried whether the title at least was not his--Joseph, according
to the legend, having been the first missionary to Britain. The
original, if original there was, certainly was not the work of Michael
Angelo, to whom Blake chose to attribute it. Scarcely was he out of
his articles than he produced (1779) two engravings from the history
of England, _The Penance of Jane Shore_ and _King Edward and Queen
Eleanor_. These were after two water-colour drawings, selected from a
much greater number with which he had amused the leisure hours of his
apprenticeship. Mr. Gilchrist says that these and other works of the
period have little of the peculiar Blakean quality, except the striking
design _Morning, or Glad Day_, dated 1780, a facsimile of which is
given here. This, indeed, is Blake all over, and would have made an
excellent frontispiece for the poems with which he was about to herald
the dawn of a new era in English poetry, though in all probability
designed as an illustration of the lines in _Romeo and Juliet_;
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
A naked Apollo-like figure, wearing the dawn for a halo, in whom one
fancifully traces a resemblance to Goethe, alights throbbing with joy
and victory on the peak of a mountain, while the waning moon, as would
seem, sets behind him, and a winged beetle scuds away.
The poems to which reference has been made had meanwhile been slowly
accumulating; if the language of the advertisement which heralded their
publication is to be taken literally, they were now complete. Before
appearing as a poet, however, Blake had to undergo his probation as
a lover. He became enamoured of a pretty girl variously called Polly
or Clara Woods. She rejected him. He fell into a melancholy, and was
sent to Richmond for change of air. There he lodged with a nursery
gardener named Boucher. The daughter of the house, Catherine, had been
frequently asked whom she would like to marry, and had always replied
that she had not seen the man. Coming on the night of Blake’s arrival
into the room where he was sitting with the rest of the family, she
grew faint from the presentiment that she beheld her destined husband.
On subsequently hearing of his disappointment with Clara Woods, she
told him that she pitied, and he told her that he loved. They were
married on August 18, 1782, Blake having, it is said, proved their
mutual constancy by refraining from seeing her for a year, while he was
toiling to save enough to render their marriage not utterly imprudent.
His first care afterwards was to teach her to read and write, to which
he afterwards added enough of the pictorial art to enable her to colour
his drawings. A more devoted wife never lived, though her devotion wore
in the eyes of strangers an aspect of formality, and was always tinged
with awe.
_Poetical Sketches_, 1783, were the first-fruits of Blake’s genius,
composed, as asserted in the advertisement prefixed by his friends,
between 1768 and 1777.[2] They are the only examples of his literary
work devoid of artistic illustration; we ought not, consequently, to
spend much time upon them, yet they are the most memorable of his
works, for they are nothing short of miraculous, and alone among his
productions mark an era. For a hundred and thirty years English poetry
had been mainly artificial, the product of conscious effort ranging
down from the superb art of _Paradise Lost_ to the prettinesses
of Pope’s imitators, but seldom or never wearing the aspect of a
spontaneous growth. This young obscure engraver was the first to show
that it was still possible to sing as the bird sings; he and no other
was the morning star which announced the new day of English poetry. Had
even the verses been of inferior quality, such inspiration would have
sufficed for fame, but Blake is as exquisite as original, and warbles
such nightingale notes as England had not heard since Andrew Marvell
forsook song for satire. The songs of Dryden, indeed, have great merit,
but how they savour of the study compared with the artless melody of a
strain like this!
[Illustration: _Morning, or Glad Day. From an engraving by W. Blake._]
How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer’s pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!
He showed me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phœbus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
This is such a song as Marlowe might have written, but for a delicate
eighteenth-century suggestion in the style, whose aroma is not quite
that of the Elizabethan era. It is none the less one of the pieces
which none but Blake could have produced. The characteristics of his
style, indeed, are much less apparent in this early volume than in his
subsequent productions. They are most conspicuous in the _Mad Song_,
but a more pleasing if less intense example is the following:
SONG.
Love and harmony combine,
And around our souls entwine,
While thy branches mix with mine
And our roots together join.
Joys upon our branches sit,
Chirping loud and singing sweet;
Like gentle streams beneath our feet
Innocence and virtue meet.
Thou the golden fruit dost bear,
I am clad in flowers fair;
Thy sweet boughs perfume the air,
And the turtle buildeth there.
There she sits and feeds her young,
Sweet I hear her mournful song;
And thy lovely leaves among,
There is Love: I hear his tongue.
There his charm’d nest he doth lay,
There he sleeps the night away,
There he sports along the day,
And doth among our branches play.
Not the least remarkable of the _Poetical Sketches_ are “Samson” and
other short pieces in blank verse. They are marvellously Tennysonian;
if imitation there was, it obviously was not on Blake’s part. Who would
have hesitated to ascribe these lines, addressed to the Evening Star,
to the Laureate?
Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver.
Even more marvellous than the sentiment is the metre, which cannot be
judged by a short passage. Well might it be said, “Thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes,” when
the secret of melodious blank verse, withheld since the Civil War from
all the highly cultured and in many respects highly gifted bards of
England, is disclosed on the sudden to this half-educated young man.
It is exemplified on a larger scale by the accompanying fragments of
an intended tragedy on _Edward the Third_, which proves two things:
first, that Blake was destitute of all dramatic faculty; secondly,
that, notwithstanding, few have so thoroughly assimilated Shakespeare.
Shakespeare stands almost alone among great poets in having had hardly
any direct imitators. Every one, of course, has profited by the study
of his art; but those most deeply indebted to him in this respect have
felt the least disposed to reproduce his style. The reason is evident.
Other writers are partial, Shakespeare is universal; the model is too
vast for study. A deliberate imitation of Shakespeare would assuredly
be a failure: imitation is only practicable when it is not deliberate
but unconscious, the effluence of a mind so saturated with Shakespeare
that it can for the time only express itself in Shakespearian numbers,
and think under Shakespearian forms. Blake must have been in such a
situation when he attempted _Edward the Third_, the direct fruit of
his roamings among the regal tombs in the Abbey with Shakespeare’s
historical plays in his hand. The drama is childish, but the feeling
approaches Shakespeare as nearly as Keats’s early poems approach
Spenser. The imitation, being spontaneous and unsought, is never
senile, but every line reveals a youth whose soul is with Shakespeare,
though his body may be in Golden Square. Yet the reproduction of
Shakespeare’s manner is never so exact as to conceal the fact that the
poet is writing in the eighteenth and not in the sixteenth century.
The following passage may serve as an example both of the closeness of
Blake’s affinity with Shakespeare and of the _nuances_ of difference
that serve to vindicate his originality.
Last night beneath
The moon I walked abroad when all had pitched
Their tents, and all were still.
I heard a blooming youth singing a song
He had composed, and at each pause he wiped
His dropping eyes. The ditty was “If he
Returned victorious he should wed a maiden
Fairer than snow and rich as midsummer.”
Another wept, and wished health to his father.
I chid them both, but gave them noble hopes.
These are the minds that glory in the battle,
And leap and dance to hear the trumpet sound.
This is beautiful description, sentiment and metre, but these beauties
sum up the attractions of Blake’s dramatic fragment. The dramatic
element is wanting, there is no action. This deficiency runs through
his whole work, pictorial as well as literary, and explains why one
capable of such sublime conceptions was nevertheless incapable of
taking rank with the Miltons and Michael Angelos. His productions
are full of tremendous scenes, the strivings and agonies of colossal
unearthly powers realised by his own mind with a vividness which proves
the intensity of his conceptions. Yet he seldom impresses the beholder
with any sentiment of awe or terror. The cause is not solely the
fantastic character of these conceptions, for the effect is the same
when he deals with mankind, and represents it in the most thrilling
crises of which humanity is capable. His representation of the plague,
for instance, engraved in Gilchrist’s biography, excites strong
interest and curiosity, but nothing of the shuddering dismay with which
we should view such a scene in actual life, and which is so powerfully
conveyed in such works as Géricault’s _Wreck of the Medusa_ and Poole’s
_Solomon Eagle_. The reason seems to be that Blake was not only a
visionary but also a mystic, and that mysticism is hardly compatible
with tragic passion. The visionary, as in the instances of Dante and
Bunyan, may realise every detail of his ideal conceptions with the
force of actual perception, but it is the very essence of the mystic’s
creed that things are not what they seem, and the man who knows himself
to be depicting a hieroglyphic will never grasp his subject with the
force of him who feels that he is dealing with a concrete reality. The
Hindoos are a nation of mystics who regard existence as an illusion,
and their art labours under the same defects as Blake’s; their drama
especially, with all the charm of lovely arabesque, makes nothing of
the strongest situations, save when these are of the pathetic order.
For although the mystic cannot be exciting, he can be tender: and while
Blake’s efforts at the delineation of frantic passion or overwhelming
catastrophes usually (there are exceptions) leave us unmoved, nothing
can be more pathetic than some of his delineations, such, for example,
as the famous illustration to Blair, of an old man approaching the
grave.
It seems almost strange that verses, as contrary to the spirit of
the age that gave them birth as prophetic of the ideals of the age
to come, should have found friends willing to defray their cost. If,
however, it is true that Flaxman was among these friends, Blake had
met with one congenial spirit. A clergyman named Matthews, incumbent
of Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, is mentioned as another patron,
and as the writer of the well-meaning but too apologetic preface.
Through him Blake seems to have become acquainted with Flaxman. To the
few then able to appreciate the poems, they might well have seemed
indicative of a great poetical career, for they are exactly the sweet,
wild, untaught, prelusive music wherewith youth, as yet unschooled by
criticism and unawakened to its really profound problems, is wont to
essay its art. Why was it that Blake, though rivalling these early
attempts in his _Songs of Innocence_ and _Songs of Experience_, never
progressed further; and in by far the greater part of his subsequent
poetry went off altogether upon a wrong track, so far at least as
concerned poetry? Partly, we think, because his mind was almost
entirely deficient in the plastic element. He could reproduce a scene
ready depicted for him, as in his illustrations to Job; he could embody
a solitary thought with exquisite beauty, whether in poetry or in
painting; but he could not combine his ideas into a whole. His faculty
was purely lyrical, and when this evanescent endowment forsook him,
devoid as he was of all plastic literary power, he had no Oenone or
Ulysses to replace his Claribels and Eleanores. His verse became a mere
accompaniment of his pictorial art, and harmonising with its vagueness
and obscurity, necessarily lacked the symmetry with which a colourist
can dispense, but which is essential to a poet. Even more remarkable
than the music of Blake’s early verses, unparalleled in their age, is
the fact, vouched for by J. T. Smith, the biographer of Nollekens and
Keeper of Prints at the British Museum, that he had composed tunes for
them, which he could only repeat by ear from his ignorance of musical
notation. Some of these, Smith says, were exquisitely beautiful.
At the appearance of the _Poetical Sketches_ (1783), Blake had for a
year been a married man, and was actively striving to make a living
as an engraver. Most of his work of this nature at this time was
executed after Stothard. It cannot be disputed that this graceful
artist largely influenced Blake’s style in its more idyllic aspects;
whether, as he was afterwards inclined to assert, Stothard’s invention
owed something to him is not easy to determine. In 1784 he lost his
father, a mild, pious man, who had well performed his duty to his son.
Blake’s elder brother James took his business, and the artist, who had
probably inherited some little property, returned from Green Street
to Broad Street, and, establishing himself next door to his brother,
launched into speculation as a print-seller in partnership with a
former fellow apprentice named Parker, taking his brother Robert as a
gratuitous pupil. In 1785 he sent four drawings to the Academy. Three,
illustrative of the story of Joseph, were shown in the International
Exhibition of 1862, and are described by Gilchrist as “full of soft
tranquil beauty, specimens of Blake’s earlier style; a very different
one from that of his later and better-known works.” This is probably
as much as to say that he then wrought much under the influence of
Stothard, after whom he engraved the subject from _David Simple_ given
here; for the earlier design illustrative of the passage in _Romeo and
Juliet_ is characteristically Blakean. Mr. Gilchrist adds, “the design
is correct and blameless, not to say tame (for Blake), the colour full,
harmonious and sober.” Mr. Rossetti says that the figure of Joseph, in
the third drawing, “is especially pure and impulsive.”
[Illustration: _Illustration from “David Simple.” Engraved by W. Blake
after T. Stothard, R.A._]
In 1787 Blake’s experiment in print-selling came to an end, through
disagreements, it is said, with his partner; but as neither appears to
have afterwards pursued the calling, it is probable that it had never
been profitable. Parker obtained some distinction as an engraver,
chiefly after Stothard, and died in 1805. In February, 1787, Blake had
sustained a severe loss in the death of his brother and pupil Robert.
Blake himself nursed the patient for some weeks, and when at last
the end came, it is not surprising that he should have beheld his
brother’s spirit “arise and clap its hands for joy.” Not long after,
as he asserted, the spirit appeared to him in a dream, and revealed to
him that process of printing from copper plates which, as we shall see,
had the most decisive influence upon his work as an artist. Writing
to Hayley in 1800, he says, “Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and
with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him
in remembrance in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice,
and even now write from his dictate.” “The ruins of Time,” he finely
subjoins, “build mansions in Eternity.”
From this time Blake’s sole assistant was his wife, whom he carefully
instructed, and who tinted many of the coloured drawings which
henceforth form the more characteristic portion of his work. After
giving up his business as a print-seller, he removed from Broad Street
to 28, Poland Street. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats conjecture that this may
have been to escape the blighting influence of his commercial brother
next door, but it is more probable that his venture had impoverished
him, and that he was obliged to give up housekeeping.