The Popular Library of Art
ALBRECHT DÜRER (37 Illustrations).
By LINA ECKENSTEIN.
ROSSETTI (53 Illustrations).
By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
REMBRANDT (61 Illustrations).
By AUGUSTE BRÉAL.
FRED. WALKER (32 Illustrations and Photogravure).
By CLEMENTINA BLACK.
MILLET (32 Illustrations).
By ROMAIN ROLLAND.
LEONARDO DA VINCI (44 Illustrations).
By Dr GEORG GRONAU.
GAINSBOROUGH (55 Illustrations).
By ARTHUR B. CHAMBERLAIN.
THE FRENCH IMPRESSIONISTS (50 Illustrations).
By CAMILLE MAUCLAIR.
BOTTICELLI (37 Illustrations).
By JULIA CARTWRIGHT (Mrs ADY).
VELAZQUEZ (51 Illustrations).
By AUGUSTE BRÉAL.
WATTS (33 Illustrations).
By G. K. CHESTERTON.
RAPHAEL (50 Illustrations).
By JULIA CARTWRIGHT (Mrs ADY).
HOLBEIN (50 Illustrations).
By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
ENGLISH WATER COLOUR PAINTERS (42 Illustrations).
By A. J. FINBERG.
WATTEAU (35 Illustrations).
By CAMILLE MAUCLAIR.
PERUGINO (50 Illustrations).
By EDWARD HUTTON.
THE PRE-RAPHAELITE BROTHERHOOD (38 Illustrations).
By FORD MADOX HUEFFER.
CRUIKSHANK (55 Illustrations).
By W. H. CHESSON.
WHISTLER (26 Illustrations).
By BERNHARD SICKERT.
HOGARTH (48 Illustrations).
By EDWARD GARNETT.
WILLIAM BLAKE (33 Illustrations).
By G. K. CHESTERTON.
[Illustration: FROM “SONGS OF INNOCENCE”
1789]
WILLIAM BLAKE
BY
G. K. CHESTERTON
AUTHOR OF “ROBERT BROWNING,” ETC.
[Illustration]
=LONDON=: DUCKWORTH & CO.
NEW YORK =E. P. DUTTON & CO.=
PRINTED BY
TURNBULL AND SPEARS,
EDINBURGH
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
THE LAMB _Frontispiece_
THE LILLY (1789) 13
THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789) 21
THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (1789) 27
THE SWAN (1789) 35
SPACE (1793) 43
OOTHOON (1793) 49
SPELLS OF LAW (1793) 55
FRONTISPIECE TO “AMERICA” (1793) 63
PRELUDIUM (1793) 69
A PROPHECY (1793) 77
A FEMALE DREAM (1793) 84
THE TYGER (1794) 91
HOLY THURSDAY (1794) 97
ARIEL 105
PRELUDIUM TO URIZEN (1794) 112
HAR AND HEVA (1795) 117
PHILANDER’S DUST (1796) 121
A GROUP (1804) 129
THE WATERS OF LIFE (1804) 136
PLOUGHING THE EARTH (1804) 141
THE EAGLE (1804) 147
“ALBION! AROUSE THYSELF!” (1804) 153
THE CRUCIFIXION (1804) 159
THE JUDGMENT DAY (1806) 165
THE TOMB (1806) 171
THE SELFHOOD OF DECEIT (1807) 177
THE SHEPHERDS (1821) 183
THE MORNING STARS (1821) 189
THE WHIRLWIND (1825) 195
THE JUST UPRIGHT MAN (1825) 202
FOR HIS EYES ARE UPON THE WAYS OF MAN (1825) 207
William Blake would have been the first to understand that the
biography of anybody ought really to begin with the words, “In the
beginning God created heaven and earth.” If we were telling the story
of Mr Jones of Kentish Town, we should need all the centuries to
explain it. We cannot comprehend even the name “Jones,” until we have
realised that its commonness is not the commonness of vulgar but of
divine things; for its very commonness is an echo of the adoration of
St John the Divine. The adjective “Kentish” is rather a mystery in that
geographical connection; but the word Kentish is not so mysterious as
the awful and impenetrable word “town.” We shall have rent up the roots
of prehistoric mankind and seen the last revolutions of modern society
before we really know the meaning of the word “town.” So every word
we use comes to us coloured from all its adventures in history, every
phase of which has made at least a faint alteration. The only right
way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning--at the beginning
of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way,
for the sake of brevity. If Blake wrote the life of Blake it would not
begin with any business about his birth or parentage.
Blake was born in 1757, in Carnaby Market--but Blake’s life of Blake
would not have begun like that. It would have begun with a great deal
about the giant Albion, about the many disagreements between the spirit
and the spectre of that gentleman, about the golden pillars that
covered the earth at its beginning and the lions that walked in their
golden innocence before God. It would have been full of symbolic wild
beasts and naked women, of monstrous clouds and colossal temples; and
it would all have been highly incomprehensible, but none of it would
have been irrelevant. All the biggest events of Blake’s life would have
happened before he was born. But, on consideration, I think it will
be better to tell the tale of Blake’s life first and go back to his
century afterwards. It is not, indeed, easy to resist temptation here,
for there was much to be said about Blake before he existed. But I will
resist the temptation and begin with the facts.
* * * * *
WILLIAM BLAKE was born on the 28th of November 1757 in Broad
Street, Carnaby Market. Like so many other great English artists and
poets, he was born in London. Like so many other starry philosophers
and flaming mystics, he came out of a shop. His father was James Blake,
a fairly prosperous hosier; and it is certainly remarkable to note how
many imaginative men in our island have arisen in such an environment.
Napoleon said that we English were a nation of shopkeepers; if he had
pursued the problem a little further he might have discovered why we
are a nation of poets. Our recent slackness in poetry and in everything
else is due to the fact that we are no longer a nation of shopkeepers,
but merely a nation of shop-owners. In any case there seems to be no
doubt that William Blake was brought up in the ordinary atmosphere
of the smaller English bourgeoisie. His manners and morals were
trained in the old obvious way; nobody ever thought of training his
imagination, which perhaps was all the better for the neglect. There
are few tales of his actual infancy. Once he lingered too long in the
fields and came back to tell his mother that he had seen the prophet
Ezekiel sitting under a tree. His mother smacked him. Thus ended the
first adventure of William Blake in that wonderland of which he was a
citizen.
His father, James Blake, was almost certainly an Irishman; his
mother was probably English. Some have found in his Irish origin an
explanation of his imaginative energy; the idea may be admitted,
but under strong reservations. It is probably true that Ireland, if
she were free from oppression, would produce more pure mystics than
England. And for the same reason she would still produce fewer poets.
A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man
who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who
separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. Broadly the
English type is he who sees the elves entangled in the forests of
Arcady, like Shakespeare and Keats: the Irish type is he who sees the
fairies quite distinct from the forest, like Blake and Mr W. B. Yeats.
If Blake inherited anything from his Irish blood it was his strong
Irish logic. The Irish are as logical as the English are illogical. The
Irish excel at the trades for which mere logic is wanted, such as law
or military strategy. This element of elaborate and severe reason there
certainly was in Blake. There was nothing in the least formless or
drifting about him. He had a most comprehensive scheme of the universe,
only that no one could comprehend it.
If Blake, then, inherited anything from Ireland it was his logic. There
was perhaps in his lucid tracing of a tangled scheme of mysticism
something of that faculty which enables Mr Tim Healy to understand
the rules of the House of Commons. There was perhaps in the prompt
pugnacity with which he kicked the impudent dragoon out of his front
garden something of the success of the Irish soldier. But all such
speculations are futile. For we do not know what James Blake really
was, whether an Irishman by accident or by true tradition. We do not
know what heredity is; the most recent investigators incline to the
view that it is nothing at all. And we do not know what Ireland is; and
we shall never know until Ireland is free, like any other Christian
nation, to create her own institutions.
Let us pass to more positive and certain things. William Blake grew
up slight and small, but with a big and very broad head, and with
shoulders more broad than were natural to his stature. There exists a
fine portrait of him which gives the impression of a certain squareness
in the mere plan of his face and figure. He has something in common, so
to speak, with the typically square men of the eighteenth century; he
seems a little like Danton, without the height; like Napoleon, without
the mask of Roman beauty; or like Mirabeau, without the dissipation
and the disease. He had abnormally big dark eyes; but to judge by this
plainly sincere portrait, the great eyes were rather bright than dark.
If he suddenly entered the room (and he was likely to have entered it
suddenly) I think we should have felt first a broad Bonaparte head
and broad Bonaparte shoulders, and then afterwards realised that the
figure under them was frail and slight.
His spiritual structure was somewhat similar, as it slowly built
itself up. His character was queer but quite solid. You might call
him a solid maniac or a solid liar; but you could not possibly call
him a wavering hysteric or a weak dabbler in doubtful things. With
his big owlish head and small fantastic figure he must have seemed
more like an actual elf than any human traveller in Elfland; he was
a sober native of that unnatural plain. There was nothing of the
obviously fervid and futile about Blake’s supernaturalism. It was not
his frenzy but his coolness that was startling. From his first meeting
with Ezekiel under the tree he always talked of such spirits in an
everyday intonation. There was plenty of pompous supernaturalism in the
eighteenth century; but Blake’s was the only natural supernaturalism.
Many reputable persons reported miracles; he only mentioned them. He
spoke of having met Isaiah or Queen Elizabeth, not so much even as if
the fact were indisputable, but rather as if so simple a thing were not
worth disputing. Kings and prophets came from heaven or hell to sit to
him, and he complained of them quite casually, as if they were rather
troublesome professional models. He was angry because King Edward I.
would blunder in between him and Sir William Wallace. There have been
other witnesses to the supernatural even more convincing, but I think
there was never any other quite so calm. His private life, as he laid
its foundations in his youth, had the same indescribable element; it
was a sort of abrupt innocence. Everything that he was destined to
do, especially in these early years, had a placid and prosaic oddity.
He went through the ordinary fights and flirtations of boyhood; and
one day he happened to be talking about the unreasonable ways of
some girl to another girl. The other girl (her name was Katherine
Boucher) listened with apparent patience until Blake used some phrase
or mentioned some incident which (she said) she really thought was
pathetic or, popularly speaking, “hard on him.” “Do you?” said William
Blake with great suddenness. “Then I love you.” After a long pause the
girl said in a leisurely manner, “I love you too.” In this brief and
extraordinary manner was decided a marriage of which the unbroken
tenderness was tried by a long life of wild experiments and wilder
opinions, and which was never truly darkened until the day when Blake,
dying in an astonishing ecstasy, named her only after God.
To the same primary period of his life, boyish, romantic, and
untouched, belongs the publication of his first and most famous books,
“Songs of Innocence and Experience.” These poems are the most natural
and juvenile things Blake ever wrote. Yet they are startlingly old and
unnatural poems for so young and natural a man. They have the quality
already described--a matured and massive supernaturalism. If there is
anything in the book extraordinary to the reader it is clearly quite
ordinary to the writer. It is characteristic of him that he could write
quite perfect poetry, a lyric entirely classic. No Elizabethan or
Augustan could have moved with a lighter precision than--
“O sunflower, weary of time,
That countest the steps of the sun.”
But it is also characteristic of him that he could and would put into
an otherwise good poem lines like--
“And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,
Would not have bandy children, nor fasting nor birch”;
lines that have no sense at all and no connection with the poem
whatever. There is a stronger and simpler case of contrast. There is
the quiet and beautiful stanza in which Blake first described the
emotions of the nurse, the spiritual mother of many children.
“When the voices of children are heard in the vale,
And laughter is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.”
And here is the equally quiet verse which William Blake afterwards
wrote down, equally calmly--
“When the laughter of children is heard on the hill,
And whisperings are in the dale,
The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,
My face turns green and pale.”
That last monstrous line is typical. He would mention with as easy
an emphasis that a woman’s face turned green as that the fields were
green when she looked at them. That is the quality of Blake which is
most personal and interesting in the fixed psychology of his youth.
He came out into the world a mystic in this very practical sense,
that he came out to teach rather than to learn. Even as a boy he was
bursting with occult information. And all through his life he had the
deficiencies of one who is always giving out and has no time to take
in. He was deaf with his own cataract of speech. Hence it followed that
he was devoid of patience while he was by no means devoid of charity:
but impatience produced every evil effect that could practically have
come from uncharitableness: impatience tripped him up and sent him
sprawling twenty times in his life. The result was the unlucky paradox,
that he who was always preaching perfect forgiveness seemed not to
forgive even imperfectly the feeblest slights. He himself wrote in a
strong epigram--
“To forgive enemies Hayley does pretend,
Who never in his life forgave a friend.”
[Illustration: THE LILLY (1789)]
But the effect of the epigram is a little lost through its considerable
truth if applied to the epigrammatist. The wretched Hayley had himself
been a friend to Blake--and Blake could not forgive him. But this was
not really lack of love or pity. It was strictly lack of patience,
which in its turn was due to that bursting and almost brutal mass of
convictions with which he plunged into the world like a red-hot cannon
ball, just as we have already imagined him plunging into a room with
his big bullet head. His head was indeed a bullet; it was an explosive
bullet.
Of his other early relations we know little. The parents who are often
mentioned in his poems, both for praise and blame, are the abstract
and eternal father and mother and have no individual touches. It might
be inferred, perhaps, that he had a special emotional tie with his
elder brother Robert, for Robert constantly appeared to him in visions
and even explained to him a new method of engraving. But even this
inference is doubtful, for Blake saw the oddest people in his visions,
people with whom neither he nor any one else has anything particular to
do; and the method of engraving might just as well have been revealed
by Bubb Doddington or Prester John or the oldest baker in Brighton.
That is one of the facts that makes one fancy that Blake’s visions
were genuine. But whoever taught him his own style of engraving, an
ordinary mortal engraver taught him the ordinary mortal style, and
he seems to have learnt it very well. When apprenticed by his father
to a London engraving business he was diligent and capable. All his
life he was a good workman, and his failures, which were many, never
arose from that common idleness or looseness of life attributed to the
artistic temperament. He was of a bitter and intolerant temper, but not
otherwise unbusiness-like; and he was prone to insult his patrons, but
not, as a rule, to fail them. But with this part of his character we
shall probably have to deal afterwards. His technical skill was very
great. This and a certain original touch also attracted to the young
artist the attention and interest of the sculptor Flaxman.
The influence of this great man on Blake’s life and work has been
gravely underrated. The mistake has arisen from causes too complex
to be considered, at any rate at this stage; but they resolve
themselves into a misunderstanding of the nature of classicism and
of the nature of mysticism. But this can be said decisively: Blake
remained a Flaxmanite to the day of his death. Flaxman as a sculptor
and draughtsman stood, as everybody knows, for classicism at its
clearest and coldest. He would admit no line into a modern picture
that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even foreshortening
and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque
about them--as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly
considered, than the fact that one’s own father is a pigmy if he stands
far enough off. Perspective really is the comic element in things.
Flaxman vaguely felt this; Flaxman shrank from the almost insolent
foreshortenings of Rubens or Veronese as he would have shrank from the
gigantic boots in the foreground of an amateur photograph. For him high
art was flat art in painting or drawing, everything could be done by
pure line upon a single plane. Flaxman is probably best known to the
existing public by his illustrations in line to Pope’s “Homer,”--which
have certainly copied most exquisitely the austere limitations of Greek
vases and reliefs. Anger may be uttered by the lifted arm or sorrow by
the sunken head, but the faces of all those gods and heroes are, as
you may think them, beautiful or foolish, like the faces of the dead.
Above all, the line must never falter and come to nothing; Flaxman
would regard a line fading away in such a picture as we should regard a
railway line fading away upon a map.
This was the principle of Flaxman; and this remained to the day of
his death one of the firmest principles of William Blake. I will not
say that Blake took it from the great sculptor, for it formed an
integral part of Blake’s individual artistic philosophy; but he must
have been encouraged to find it in Flaxman and strengthened in it by
the influence of an older and more famous man. No one can understand
Blake’s pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his
epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise
that William Blake was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line. The
thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline
which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin
Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thing he
hated most in art was the thing which we now call Impressionism--the
substitution of atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint,
the cloudland of the mere colourist. With that cyclopean impudence
which was the most stunning sign of his sincerity, he treated the
greatest names not only as if they were despicable, but as if they were
actually despised. He reasons mildly with the artistic authorities,
saying--
“You must admit that Rubens was a fool,
And yet you make him master in your school,
And give more money for his slobberings
Than you will give for Raphael’s finest things.”
And then, with one of those sudden lunges of sense which made him a
swordsman after all, he really gets home upon Rubens--
“I understood Christ was a carpenter
And not a brewer’s drayman, my good sir.”
In another satire he retells the fable of the dog, the bone, and the
river, and permits (with admirable humour) the dog to expatiate upon
the vast pictorial superiority of the bone’s reflection in the river
over the bone itself; the shadow so delicate, suggestive, rich in tone,
the real bone so hard and academic in outline. He was the sharpest
satirist of the Impressionists who ever wrote, only he satirised the
Impressionists before they were born.
[Illustration: THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789)]
The ordinary history of Blake would obviously be that he was a man
who began as a good engraver and became a great artist. The inner
truth of Blake could hardly be better put than this: that he was a
good artist whose idea of greatness was to be a great engraver. For
him it was no mere technical accident that the art of reproduction
had to cut into wood or bite into stone. He loved to think that even
in being a draughtsman he was also a sculptor. When he put his lines
on a decorative page he would have much preferred to carve them out
of marble or cut them into rock. Like every true romantic, he loved
the irrevocable. Like every true artist, he detested india-rubber.
Take, for the sake of example, all the designs to the Book of Job.
When he gets the thing right he gets it suddenly and perfectly right,
as in the picture of all the sons of God shouting for joy. We feel
that the sons of God might really shout for joy at the excellence of
their own portrait. When he gets it wrong he gets it completely and
incurably wrong, as in the preposterous picture of Satan dancing among
paving-stones. But both are equally final and fixed. If one picture
is incurably bad, the other picture is incurably good. Courage (which
is, with kindness, the only fundamental virtue in man), is present and
prodigious in both. No coward could have drawn such pictures.
The chief movement of Blake either in art or literature was the first
publication of the batch of his own allegorical works. “The Gates of
Paradise” came first, and was followed by “Urizen” and the “Book of
Thel.” With these he introduced his own mode of engraving and began his
own style of decorative illustration. That style was steeped in the
Blake and Flaxman feeling for the hard line and the harsh and heroic
treatment. There were, of course, many other personalities besides
that of Flaxman which were destined to influence the art of William
Blake. Among others, the personality of William Blake influences it
not inconsiderably. But no influence ever disturbed the love of the
absolute academic line. If the reader will look at any of the designs
of Blake, many of which are reproduced in this book, he will see the
main fact which I mention here. Many of them are hideous, some of
them are outrageous, but none of them are shapeless; none of them are
what would now be called “suggestive”; none of them (in a word) are
timid. The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster.
The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake.
About this same time Blake began to illustrate books, decorating
Blair’s “Grave” and the Book of Job with his dark but very definite
designs. In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he
errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment. The beauty
of the angel upside down who blows the trumpet in the face of Blair’s
skeleton is the beauty of a perfect Greek athlete. And if the beauty
is the beauty of an athlete, so the ugliness is the ugliness of an
athlete--or perhaps of an acrobat. The contortions and clumsy attitudes
of some of Blake’s figures do not arise from his ignorance of the
human anatomy. They arise from a sort of wild knowledge of it. He is
straining muscles and cracking joints like a sportsman racing for a cup.
These book illustrations by Blake are among the simplest and strongest
designs of his pencil, which at its best (to do him justice) tended
to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for instance) could well be
more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate
Blair’s elephantine epic called “The Grave.” It was as well that Blake
and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in
common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth
century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have
seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of
all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child
of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries; he was the father of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and even of the “Yellow Book.” But of
all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all
probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting
point is this: that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory,
from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for
instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the
black grotto of the grave is a fine piece of drawing, apart from its
meaning, and is all the finer for its simplicity. But wherever he errs
it is always in being too hard and harsh, not too faint or fanciful.
Blake was a greater man than Flaxman, though a less perfectly poised
man. He was harder than his master, because he was madder. The figure
upside down blowing the trumpet is as perfect as a Flaxman figure: only
it is upside down. Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake.
[Illustration: THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (1789)]
* * * * *
SUCH an elementary statement of Blake’s idea of art is not out
of place at this stage; for his convictions had formed and hardened
unusually early, and his career is almost unintelligible apart from his
opinions. It is fairly eccentric even with them. Flaxman had introduced
him to literary society, especially to the evening parties of a
Blue-stocking named Mrs Matthews. Here his force of mind was admitted;
but he was not personally very popular. Most of his biographers
attribute this to his “unbending deportment,” and a certain almost
babyish candour which certainly belonged to him. But I cannot help
thinking that the fact that he was in the habit of singing his own
poems to tunes invented by himself may perhaps have had something to
do with it. His opinions on all subjects were not only positive but
aggressive. He was a fierce republican and denouncer of kings. But Mrs
Matthews was probably accustomed to fierce republicans who denounced
kings. She may have been less accustomed to a gentleman who insisted on
wearing a red cap of liberty in ordinary society. It is due to Blake to
say that his politics showed nevertheless that eccentric practicality
which was mixed up with his unworldliness; it was certainly through his
presence of mind that Tom Paine did not perish on the scaffold.
But Blake had none of the marks of the poetical weakling, of the mere
moon-calf of mysticism. If he was a madman, one can emphasise the word
man as well as the word mad. For instance, in spite of his sedentary
trade and his pacific theories, he had extraordinary physical courage.
Not that reasonable minimum of physical courage which is guaranteed
by certain conventional sports, but intrinsic contempt of danger,
a readiness to put himself into unknown perils. He would suddenly
attack men much bigger and stronger than himself, and that with such
violence that they were often defeated by their own amazement. He
attacked a huge drayman who was harsh to some women and beat him in
the most excited manner. He leapt upon a Lifeguardsman who came into
his front garden, and ran that astonished warrior into the road by the
elbows. The vivacity and violence of these physical outbreaks must
be remembered and allowed for when we are judging some of his mental
outbreaks. The most serious blot (indeed, the only serious blot) on
the moral character of Blake was his habit of letting his rage get the
better not only of decency but of gratitude and truth. He would abuse
his benefactors as virulently as his enemies. He left epigrams lying
about in which he called Flaxman a blockhead and Hayley (as far as the
words can be understood) a seducer and an assassin. But the curious
thing is that he often did justice to the same people both before and
after such eruptions. The truth is, I fancy, that such writings were
like sudden attitudes or bodily movements. We talk of a word and a
blow; with Blake a word had the same momentary character as a blow. It
was not a judgment, but a gesture. He had little or no feeling of the
idea that “litera scripta manet.” He did not see any particular reason
why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man
a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the
man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than
masculine.
He had many friends and acquaintances of distinction besides Flaxman.
Among them was the great Priestley, whose speculations were the life
of early Unitarianism and whose Jacobin sympathies led to something
not far from martyrdom; other friends were the wild optimist Godwin
and his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft. But although he gained many new
acquaintances he gained only one new helper. This was a Mr Thomas
Butts, who lived in Fitzroy Square, and ought to have a statue there,
for he is an eternal model and monument for all patrons of art. While
in all other respects apparently a sane and rational British merchant,
he conceived an affection for Blake’s allegorical designs. But he gave
no commissions for pictures; he simply gave Blake money for pictures
as fast as Blake chose to paint them. The subject and size and medium
were left entirely to the artist. One day Blake might leave at Fitzroy
Square a little water-colour of the “Soul of a Porcupine”; the next
day a gorgeous and intricate illumination in gold of the obstetrics
and birth of Cain; the next day an enormous mural painting of Hector
capturing the arms of Patroclus; the following day a simple pen and ink
drawing of the prophet Habbakuk taken from life. All these Mr Thomas
Butts of Fitzroy Square received with solid benevolence and paid for in
solid coin. Many modern writers and painters may think of such a patron
somewhat dreamily. He had his reward, though it was unique rather than
particularly practical. Blake regarded him with a serene affection
which was never ruffled by the flying storms that were too frequent
in his friendships. No allusions can be found in his poetry to the
effect that Thomas Butts was a Spectre from Satan’s Loins. No epigram
was discovered among Blake’s papers accusing Mr Butts of bereaving
anybody’s life. If to have kept one’s own temper with Blake was a large
achievement (and it was not a small one), it was certainly a truly
noble achievement to have kept Blake’s temper for him. And this Mr
Butts and Mrs Blake can alone really claim to have done. For Blake was
to pass under a patron who showed him how different is kindness from
sympathy.
In the year 1800 he effected a change of residence which was in many
ways an epoch in his life. He was a Londoner, though doubtless a
Londoner of the time when London was small enough to feel itself on
every side to be on the edge of the country. Still Blake had never in
any true sense been in the heart of the country. In his earliest poems
we read of seraphs stirring in the trees; but we have somehow a feeling
that they were garden trees. We read of saints and sages walking in
the fields, and we almost have the feeling that they were brickfields.
The perfect landscape is pastoral to the point of conventionality; it
has not in any sense the actual smell of England. The sights of the
town are evidently as native (one might say vital) with him as any
of the sights of the country. The black chimney-sweep is as obvious as
the white lamb. What is worse still, the white lamb of England is no
more natural or native than the alien golden lion of Africa. He was, in
fact, a Cockney, like Keats; and Cockneys as a class tend to have too
poetical and luxuriantly imaginative a view of life. Blake was about
as little affected by environment as any man that ever lived in this
world. Still he did change his environment, and it did change him.
[Illustration: THE SWAN (1789)]
There lived about this time near the little village of Eartham, in
Sussex, a simple, kind-hearted but somewhat consequential squire of the
name of Hayley. He was a landlord and an aristocrat; but he was not
one of those whose vanity can be wholly fulfilled by such functions.
He considered himself a patron of poetry; and indeed he was one; but,
alas! he had a yet more alarming idea. He also considered himself a
poet. Whether any one agreed with that opinion while he still ruled the
estates and hunted the country it is difficult now to discover. It is
sufficiently certain that nobody agrees with it now. “The Triumphs of
Temper,” the only poem by Hayley that any modern person can remember,
is probably only remembered because it was used to round off scornfully
one of the ringing sentences in Macaulay’s Essays. Nevertheless in his
own time Hayley was a powerful and important man, quite unshaken as yet
as a poet, quite unshakeable as a landed proprietor. But like almost
all quite indefensible English oligarchs, he had a sort of unreasonable
good nature which somehow balanced or protected his obvious unfitness
and ineptitude. His heart was in the right place, though he was in
the wrong one. To this blameless and beaming lord of creation, too
self-satisfied to be arrogant, too solemnly childish to be cynical,
too much at his ease to doubt either others or himself, to him Flaxman
introduced, at him rather Flaxman threw, the red-hot cannon-ball called
Blake. I wonder whether Flaxman laughed. But laughter convulses and
crumples up the pure outline of the Greek profile.
Hayley, who was in his way as munificent as Mæcenas (and I suspect
that Mæcenas was quite as stupid as Hayley), gave Blake a cottage in
Felpham, a few miles from his own house, a cottage with which Blake
almost literally fell in love. He writes as if he had never seen an
English country cottage before; and perhaps he never had. “Nothing,”
he cries in a kind of ecstasy, “can ever be more grand than its
simplicity and usefulness. Simple and without intricacy, it seems to
be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to the wants of
man. No other formed house can ever please me so well.” It is probably
true that none ever did. All that was purest and most chivalrous in his
poetry and philosophy flowered in the great winds that pass and repass
between the noble Sussex hills and the sea. He was always a happy man,
since he had a God. But here he was almost a contented man.
By this time had passed over Blake’s head first the beginning and then
the growing blackness of the great French terror. Blake was now in a
world in which even he could not venture to walk about in a red cap.
Moreover, like most of the men of genius of that age and school, like
Coleridge and like Shelley, he seems to have been slightly sickened
with the full sensational actuality of the French tragedy; and
somewhat unreasonably having urged the rebels to fight, complained
because they killed people. If sincere revolutionists like Blake and
Coleridge were disappointed at the Revolution, the English Government
and governing class were against it with a solidity of desperation.
People talk about the reign of terror in France; but allowing for the
difference of national temperament and national peril, the two things
were twin; there was a reign of terror in England. A gentleman was
sent to penal servitude (which some gentlemen find worse than the
guillotine) if he said that the Prince Regent was fat. Our terror was
as cruel as Robespierre’s, but more cowardly, just as our press-gang
was as cruel as conscription, only more cowardly. Everywhere that the
Government could knock down an enemy as if by accident, could brain a
Jacobin with some brutal club of legal coincidence, the thing was done.
Many such blows were struck in that time, and one of them was struck at
Blake.
On a certain morning in the August of 1803 Blake walked out into his
garden and found standing there a trooper of the 1st Dragoons
in a scarlet coat, surveying the landscape with a satisfied air of
possession. Blake expressed a desire that the dragoon should leave the
garden. The dragoon expressed a desire to knock out Blake’s eyes, “with
many abominable imprecations.” Blake sprang upon the man with startling
activity, and catching him from behind by both elbows ran him out of
the garden as if he were a perambulator. The man, who was probably
drunk and must certainly have been surprised, went off with many verbal
accusations, but none of a political nature. A little while afterwards,
however, he turned up with a grave legal statement to the effect that
Blake had taken the opportunity to utter these somewhat improbable
words: “Damn the king, damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers,
they are all slaves: when Bonaparte comes it will be cut-throat for
cut-throat. I will help him.” The impartial critic will be inclined to
say that few persons would have even the breath to utter such political
generalisations while at the same time running one of the Dragoon
Guards bodily out of the gate; and it was not alleged that the incident
took more than half a minute. Blake may possibly or even probably have
said “damn,” but the rest of the sentence originated, I imagine, in the
mind of someone else. But although most of Blake’s biography treats the
case as a mere clumsy accident, I can hardly think that it was so. It
involves too much of a coincidence. Why did not the dragoon wander into
some other garden? Why did not some other poet have to deal with the
dragoon? It seems odd that the man of the red cap should be the one man
to wrestle with the man of the red coat. It was a time of tyranny, and
tyranny is always full of small intrigues. It is not at all impossible
that the police, as we should now put it, really tried to entrap
Blake. But there entered upon the scene something which in England is
stronger even than the police. Hayley, not the small Hayley who was
the author of the “Triumphs of Temper,” but the colossal Hayley, who
was the squire of Eartham and Bognor, entered the court with the extra
aristocratic charm of an accident in the hunting-field. He defended
Blake with generosity and good sense, such as seldom fail his class on
such occasions; and Blake was acquitted. It was said that the evidence
was incomplete; but I fancy that if Hayley had not come the evidence
would have been complete enough.
[Illustration: SPACE (1793)]
It is unfortunate that this excellent attitude of Hayley nevertheless
coincides to a great extent with the solution of the bonds that bound
him to Blake. “The Visions were angry with me at Felpham,” said the
poet, which was his way of stating that he was somewhat bored with the
benevolence of the English gentry. “Voices of celestial inhabitants
were _not_ more distinctly heard, nor their forms more distinctly
seen,” in the neighbourhood of the Squire of Eartham than in that of Mr
Butts of Fitzroy Square; and Blake abruptly returned to London, taking
lodgings just off Oxford Street. He started at once on a work with the
promising title, “Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion.” I say
there is a certain pathos in this parting from Hayley, for he was now
to fall into the power of a much more unpleasant kind of capitalist.
Poor Blake fell indeed from bad to worse in the matter of patrons.
Butts was sensible and sympathetic, Hayley was honest and silly. And
his last protector seems to have been something very like a swindler.
The name of this benevolent being was Richard Hartley Cromek, a
Yorkshireman, and a publisher. He found Blake in bitter poverty after
his breach with Hayley (he and his wife lived on 10s. a week), and his
method of sweating was of the simplest and most artistic character. He
used to go to Blake, tell him that he would give him the engraving of
a number of designs; he would easily make Blake talk enthusiastically,
show his sketches and so on; then having got the sketches he would go
away and give the engraving to somebody else. This annoyed Blake. It
is pleasant to reflect that it was about Cromek that the best of his
epigrams was written--
“A petty sneaking knave I knew ...
Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”
Blake’s irritation broke out, as was common with him, not over the
clearest but over the most confused case of Cromek’s misconduct.
The publisher had seen a design by Blake of Chaucer’s “Canterbury
Pilgrims,” and commissioned Blake to complete it. A few days
afterwards Cromek found himself in the studio of the popular painter
Stothard, and suggested the subject to him. Stothard finished his
picture first and it appeared before Blake’s. Blake went into one of
his worst rages and wrote one of his best pieces of prose.
* * * * *
A BROTHER artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity,
“He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical
as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual
wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What
he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a
halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his
mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It
is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was
literally packed with ideas--with ideas which required unpacking. In
him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they
were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond
and turn it into twenty farms, so the plagiarist of Blake might steal
a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes. It was profitable to steal
an epigram from Blake for three reasons--first, that the original
phrase was small and would not leave a large gap; second, that it was
cosmic and synthetic and could be applied to things in general; third,
that it was unintelligible and no one would know it again. I could give
innumerable instances of what I mean; I will let one instance stand
for the rest. In the middle of that long poem which is so disconnected
that it may reasonably be doubted whether it is a long poem at all (I
mean that commonly bearing the title “The Auguries of Innocence”), he
introduces these two lines:
“When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.”
A careless and honest man would read these lines and make nothing of
them. A careful thief might make out of them a whole entertaining and
symbolic romance, like “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Erewhon.” The idea
obviously is this;--that we still for some reason admit the tools of
destruction to be nobler than the tools of production, because
decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword
has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a
thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state.
Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court
wearing imitation flails. It is fascinating to reflect how fantastic
a story might be written upon this hint by Blake. But Blake does not
write the story; he only gives the hint, and that so hurriedly that
even as a hint it may hardly be understood.
[Illustration: OOTHOON (1793)]
Most of Blake’s quarrels were trivial, and some were little short of
discreditable. But in his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard he does
really stand as the champion of all that is heroic and ideal, as
against all that is worldly and insincere. The celebrated Stothard was
at this time in the height of his earlier success; he occupied somewhat
the same relation to art and society that has been occupied within our
own time by Frederic Leighton. He was, like Leighton, an accomplished
draughtsman, a man of slight but genuine poetic feeling, an artist
who thoroughly realised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin
said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no
thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness
of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence; his work
has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice;
he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is
there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and
good-natured as his pictures. It may be that he began his _Canterbury
Pilgrims_ without any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took
the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception
had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek treated Blake badly is beyond
dispute; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved; but Blake was
not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard,
I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was
intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed
this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his
fantastic malice, is a solid and powerful contribution to artistic and
literary criticism.
Stothard, the elegant gentleman, the man of sensibility, the eighteenth
century æsthete, cast his condescending eye upon the Middle Ages. He
was of that age and school that only saw the Middle Ages by moonlight.
Chaucer’s Pilgrims were to him a quaint masquerade of hypocrisy or
superstition, now only interesting from its comic or antiquated
costume. The monk was amusing because he was fat, the wife of Bath
because she was gay, the Squire because he was dandified, and so on.
Blake knew as little about the Middle Ages as Stothard did; but Blake
knew about eternity and about man; he saw the image of God under all
garments. And in a rage which may really be called noble he tore in
pieces Stothard’s antiquarian frivolity, and asked him to look with a
more decent reverence at the great creations of a great poet. Stothard
called the young Squire of Chaucer “a fop.” Blake points out forcibly
and with fine critical truth that the daintiness of the Squire’s dress
is the mere last touch to his youth, gaiety, and completeness; but
that he was no fop at all, but a serious, chivalrous, and many-sided
gentleman who enjoyed books, understood music, and was hardy and prompt
in battle. Moreover, he is definitely described as humble, reverent,
and full of filial respect. That such a man should be called a fop
because of a frill or a feather Blake rightly regarded as a sign of the
mean superficiality of his rival’s ideas. Stothard spoke of “the fair
young wife of Bath”; Blake placidly points out that she had had four
husbands, and was, as in Blake’s picture, a loud, lewd, brazen woman
of quite advanced age, but of enormous vitality and humour. Stothard
makes the monk the mere comic monk of commonplace pictures, shaped like
a wine barrel and as full of wine. Blake points out that Chaucer’s monk
was a man, and an influential man; not without sensual faults, but also
not without dignity and authority. Everywhere, in fact, he reminds his
opponent that in entering the world of Chaucer he is not entering a
fancy-dress ball, but a temple carved with colossal and eternal images
of the gods of good and evil. Stothard was only interested in Chaucer’s
types because they were dead; Blake was interested in them because
they cannot die. In many of Blake’s pictures may be found one figure
quite monotonously recurrent--the figure of a monstrously muscular old
man, with hair and beard like a snowstorm, but with limbs like young
trees. That is Blake’s root conception; the Ancient of Days; the thing
which is old with all the awfulness of its past, but young with all the
energies of its future.
[Illustration: SPELLS OF LAW (1793)]