'No individual ought to appropriate to Himself

Or to his Emanation, any of the Universal

Characteristics

Of David or of Eve, of the Woman, of the Lord,

Of Reuben or of Benjamin, of Joseph or Judah or

Levi.

Those who dare appropriate to themselves Universal

Attributes

Are the Blasphemous Selfhoods and must be broken

asunder.

A Vegetable Christ and a Virgin Eve, are the

Hermaphroditic

Blasphemy: by his Maternal Birth he put off that

Evil One,

And his Maternal Humanity must be put off

Eternally,

Lest the Sexual Generation swallow up

Regeneration:

Come, Lord Jesus, take on Thee the Satanic Body of

Holiness!'

Exactly what is meant here will be seen more clearly if we

compare it with a much earlier statement of the same doctrine, in

the poem 'To Tirzah' in the _Songs of Experience_, and the

comparison will show us all the difference between the art of Blake

in 1794, and what seemed to him the needful manner of his message

ten years later. 'Tirzah' is Blake's name for Natural Religion.

'Whatever is Born of Mortal Birth

Must be consumed with the Earth,

To rise from Generation free:

Then what have I to do with thee?

The Sexes sprung from Shame and Pride

Blow'd in the morn; in evening died;

But Mercy changed Death into Sleep;

The Sexes rose to work and weep.

Thou Mother of my Mortal part

With cruelty didst mould my Heart,

And with false, self-deceiving Tears

Didst bind my Nostrils, Eyes, and Ears;

Didst close my Tongue in senseless clay,

And me to Mortal Life betray:

The Death of Jesus set me free:

Then what have I to do with thee?

Here is expressed briefly and exquisitely a large part of the

foundation of Blake's philosophy: that birth into the world,

Christ's or ours, is a fall from eternal realities into the material

affections of the senses, which are deceptions, and bind us under

the bondage of nature, our 'Mother,' who is the Law; and that

true life is to be regained only by the death of that self which

cuts us off from our part in eternity, which we enter through the

eternal reality of the imagination. In the poem, the death of Jesus

symbolises that deliverance; in the passage from _Jerusalem_

the Church's narrow conception of the mortal life of Jesus is

rebuked, and its universal significance indicated, but in how different,

how obscure, how distorted a manner. What has brought about this

new manner of saying the same thing?

I think it is an endeavor to do without what had come to seem

to Blake the deceiving imageries of nature, to express the truth

of contraries at one and the same time, and to render spiritual

realities in a literal translation. What he had been writing was

poetry; now what he wrote was to be prophecy; or, as he says

in _Milton_:

'In fury of Poetic Inspiration,

To build the Universe Stupendous, Mental Forms

Creating.'

And, seeking always the 'Minute Particulars,' he would make

no compromise with earthly things, use no types of humanity, no

analogies from nature; for it was against all literal acceptance of

nature or the Bible or reason, of any apparent reality, that he

was appealing. Hence:

'All Human Forms identified, even Tree, Metal, Earth,

and Stone, all

Human Forms identified, living, going forth, and

returning wearied

Into the planetary lives of Years, Months, Days, and

Hours.'

Hence the affirmation:

'For all are Men in Eternity, Rivers, Mountains,

Cities, Villages;'

And the voice of London saying:

'My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination.'

Hence the parallels and correspondences, the names too well known

to have any ready-made meaning to the emotions (London or Bath), the

names so wholly unknown that they also could mean nothing to the

emotions or to the memory (Bowlahoola, Golgonooza), the whole inhuman

mythology, abstractions of frigid fire. In _Jerusalem_ Blake

interrupts himself to say:

'I call them by their English names; English, the

rough basement.

Los built the stubborn structure of the Language,

acting against

Albion's melancholy, who must else have been a

Dumb despair.'

In the Prophetic Books we see Blake laboring upon a 'rough

basement' of 'stubborn' English; is it, after all this 'consolidated

and extended work,' this 'energetic exertion of his talent,' a building

set up in vain, the attempt to express what must else have been,

and must now for ever remain, 'a dumb despair'?

I think we must take the Prophetic Books not quite as Blake

would have had us take them. He was not a systematic thinker,

and he was not content to be a lyric poet. Nor indeed did he ever

profess to offer us a system, built on logic and propped by

reasoning, but a myth, which is a poetical creation. He said in

_Jerusalem_:

'I must Create a System, or be enslaved by another

Man's.

I will not Reason or Compare: my business is to

Create.'

To Blake each new aspect of truth came as a divine gift,

and between all his affirmations of truth there is no contradiction,

or no other than that vital contradiction of opposites equally true.

The difficulty lies in co-ordinating them into so minutely articulated

a myth, and the difficulty is increased when we possess, instead of the

whole body of the myth, only fragments of it. Of the myth itself it

must be said that, whether from defects inherent in it or from the

fragmentary state in which it comes to us, it can never mean anything

wholly definite or satisfying even to those minds best prepared to

receive mystical doctrine. We cannot read the Prophetic Books either

for their thought only or for their beauty only. Yet we shall find in

them both inspired thought and unearthly beauty. With these two

things, not always found together, we must be content.

The Prophetic Books bear witness, in their own way, to that

great gospel of imagination which Blake taught and exemplified.

In _Jerusalem_ it is stated in a single sentence: 'I know of

no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both

of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination:

Imagination, the real and eternal World of which this Vegetable

Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our

Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies

are no more.' 'O Human Imagination, O Divine Body I have Crucified!'

he cries; and he sees continually:

'Abstract Philosophy warring in enmity against

Imagination,

Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus, blessed

for ever.'

He finds the England of his time generalising Art and Science till

Art and Science is lost,' making:

'A pretence of Art, to destroy Art, a pretence of

Liberty

To destroy Liberty, a pretence of Religion to destroy

Religion.'

He sees that:

'The Visions of Eternity, by reason of narrowed

perceptions,

Are become weak visions of Time and Space, fix'd

into furrows of death.'

He sees everywhere 'the indefinite Spectre; who is the Rational

Power,' crying out:

'I am God, O Sons of Men! I am your Rational

Power!

Am I not Bacon and Newton and Locke who teach

Humility to Man?

Who teach Doubt and Experiment: and my two

kings, Voltaire, Rousseau.'

He sees this threefold spirit of doubt and negation overspreading

the earth, 'brooding Abstract Philosophy,' destroying Imagination;

and, as he looked about him:

'Every Universal Form was become barren mountains

of Moral

Virtue: and every Minute Particular harden'd into

grains of sand:

And all the tenderness of the soul cast forth as filth

and mire.'

It is against this spiritual deadness that he brings his protest, which

is to awaken Albion out of the sleep of death, 'his long and cold repose.'

'Therefore Los,' the spirit of prophecy, and thus Blake, who 'kept the

Divine Vision in time of trouble,' stands in London building Golgonooza,

'the spiritual fourfold London,' the divine City of God. Of the real or

earthly London he says in _Jerusalem_:

'I see London blind and age bent begging thro' the

Streets

Of Babylon, led by a child, his tears run down his

beard!'

Babylon, in Blake, means 'Rational Morality.' In the _Songs of

Innocence_ we shall see the picture, at the head of the poem

called 'London.' In that poem Blake numbers the cries which go up

in 'London's chartered streets,' the cry of the chimney-sweeper,

of the soldier, of the harlot; and he says:

'In every cry of every man,

In every infant's cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear.'

Into these lines he condenses much of his gospel. What Blake

most hated on earth were 'mind-forged manacles.' Reason seemed

to him to have laid its freezing and fettering hand on every warm joy,

on every natural freedom, of body and soul; all his wrath went out

against the forgers and the binders of these fetters. In his earlier

poems he sings the instinctive joys of innocence; in his later, the

wise joys of experience; and all the Prophetic Books are so many

songs of mental liberty and invectives against every form of mental

oppression. 'And Jerusalem is called Liberty among the Children of

Albion.' One of the Prophetic Books, _Ahania_, can be condensed

into a single sentence, one of its lines: 'Truth has bounds; Error has

none.' Yet this must be understood to mean that error is the

'indefinite void 'and truth a thing minutely organized; not that truth

can endure bondage or limitation from without. He typifies Moral

Law by Rahab, the harlot of the Bible, a being of hidden, hypocritic

cruelty. Chastity is no more in itself than a lure of the harlot,

typifying unwilling restraint, a negation, and no personal form of

energy.

'No individual can keep the Laws, for they are death

To every energy of man, and forbid the springs

of life.'

It is energy that is virtue, and, above all, mental energy. 'The

treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities

of intellect, from which all the passions emanate, uncurbed in their

eternal glory.' 'It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

that brought sin into the world by creating distinctions, by calling

this good and that evil.' Blake says in _Jerusalem_:

'And in this manner of the Sons of Albion in their

strength;

They take the Two Contraries which are called Qualities,

with which

Every Substance is clothed, they name them Good and

Evil,

From them they make an Abstract, which is a Negation

Not only of the Substance from which it is derived,

A murderer of its own Body: but also a murderer

Of every Divine Member: it is the Reasoning Power,

An Abstract objecting power, that Negatives

everything.

This is the Spectre of Man: the Holy Reasoning

Power,

And in its Holiness is closed the Abomination of

Desolation.'

The active form of sin is judgment, intellectual cruelty,

unforgivingness, punishment. 'In Hell is all self-righteousness;

there is no such thing as forgiveness of sins.' In his picture of

the 'Last Judgment' he represents the Furies by men, not women;

and for this reason: 'The spectator may suppose them clergymen

in the pulpit, scourging sin instead of forgiving it.' In _Jerusalem_

he says:

'And the appearance of a Man was seen in the

Furnaces,

Saving those who have sinned from the punishment

of the Law

(In pity of the punisher whose state is eternal

death),

And keeping them from Sin by the mild counsels of

his love.'

And in his greatest paradox and deepest passion of truth, he

affirms:

'I care not whether a Man is Good or Evil; all that I

care

Is whether he is a Wise Man or a Fool. Go, put off

Holiness

And put on Intellect.'

That holiness may be added to wisdom Blake asks only that

continual forgiveness of sins which to him meant understanding,

and thus intellectual sympathy; and he sees in the death of Jesus

the supreme symbol of this highest mental state.

'And if God dieth not for Man and giveth not himself

Eternally for Man, Man could not exist, for Man is love,

As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little

Death

In the Divine Image, nor can Man exist but by

Brotherhood.'

Of Blake it may be said as he says of Albion: 'He felt that

Love and Pity are the same,' and to Love and Pity he gave

the ultimate jurisdiction over humanity.

Blake's gospel of forgiveness rests on a very elaborate structure,

which he has built up in his doctrine of 'States.' At the head

of the address to the Deists in the third chapter of _Jerusalem_,

he has written: 'The Spiritual States of the Soul are all Eternal.

Distinguish between the Man and his present State.' Much of his

subtlest casuistry is expended on this distinction, and, as he makes

it, it is profoundly suggestive. Erin says, in _Jerusalem_:

'Learn therefore, O Sisters, to distinguish the Eternal

Human

That walks about among the stones of fire, in bliss

and woe

Alternate, from those States or Worlds in which the

Spirit travels:

This is the only means to Forgiveness of Enemies.'

The same image is used again:

'As the Pilgrim passes while the Country permanent

remains,

So Men pass on; but States remain permanent for

ever;'

And, again, in almost the same words, in the prose fragment on the

picture of the 'Last Judgment': 'Man passes on, but states remain for

ever; he passes through them like a traveller, who may as well suppose

that the places he has passed through exist no more, as a man may

suppose that the states he has passed through exist no more:

everything is eternal.' By states Blake means very much what we

mean by moods, which, in common with many mystics, he conceives

as permanent spiritual forces, through which what is transitory in man

passes, while man imagines that they, more transitory than himself,

are passing through him. It is from this conception of man as a traveller,

and of good and evil, the passions and virtues and sensations and ideas

of man, as spiritual countries, eternally remaining, through which he

passes, that Blake draws his inference: condemn, if you will, the state

which you call sin, but do not condemn the individual whose passage

through it may he a necessity of his journey. And his litany is:

'Descend, O Lamb of God, and take away the imputation

of Sin

By the creation of States and the deliverance of

Individuals evermore. Amen....

Come then, O Lamb of God, and take away the

remembrance of Sin.'

VIII

Blake had already decided to leave Felpham, 'with the full

approbation of Mr. Hayley,' as early as April 1803.'But alas!'

he writes to Butts, 'now I may say to you--what perhaps I should

not dare to say to any one else--that I can alone carry on my

visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may converse

with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and

prophesy, and speak parables unobserved, and at liberty from

the doubts of other mortals.' 'There is no medium or middle

state,' he adds, 'and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual

life while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real

enemy.' Hayley, once fully realized, had to be shaken off, and we

find Blake taking rooms on the first-floor at 17 South Molton

Street, and preparing to move to London, when an incident occurs

which leaves him, as he put it in a letter to Butts, 'in a bustle to

defend myself against a very unwarrantable warrant from a justice

of the peace in Chichester, which was taken out against me by a

private in Captain Leathes' troop of 1st or Royal Dragoon Guards,

for an assault and seditious words.' This was a soldier whom Blake

had turned out of his garden, 'perhaps foolishly and perhaps not,'

as he said, but with unquestionable vigor. 'It is certain,' he commented,

'that a too passive manner, inconsistent with my active physiognomy,

had done me much mischief.' The 'contemptible business' was tried at

Chichester on January 11, 1804, at the Quarter Sessions, and Blake

was acquitted of the charge of high treason; 'which so gratified the

auditory,' says the _Sussex Advertiser_ of the date, 'that the

court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their

noisy exultations.'

London, on his return to it, seemed to Blake as desirable as

Felpham had seemed after London; and he writes to Hayley: 'The

shops in London improve; everything is elegant, clean, and neat;

the streets are widened where they were narrow; even Snow Hill is

become almost level and is a very handsome street, and the narrow part

of the Strand near St. Clement's is widened and become very elegant.'

But there were other reasons for satisfaction. In a letter written before

he left Felpham, Blake said: 'What is very pleasant, every one who hears

of my going to London applauds it as the only course for the interest

of all concerned in my works; observing that I ought not to be away

from the opportunities London affords of seeing fine pictures, and the

various improvements in works of art going on in London.' In October

1804 he writes to Hayley, in the most ecstatic of his letters, recording

the miracle or crisis that has suddenly opened his eyes, vitalizing the

meditations of Felpham. 'Suddenly,' says the famous letter, '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.... 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.' Some of this new radiance may be seen in the water-color

of 'The River of Life,' which has been assigned by Mr. Russell to

this year; and in those 'Inventions' in illustration of Blair's

_Grave_, by which Blake was to make his one appeal to the

public of his time.

That appeal he made through the treacherous services of a

sharper named Cromek, an engraver and publisher of prints, who

bought the twelve drawings for the price of twenty pounds, on the

understanding that they were to be engraved by their designer;

and thereupon handed them over to the fashionable Schiavonetti,

telling Blake 'your drawings have had the good fortune to be engraved

by one of the first artists in Europe.' He further caused a difference

between Blake and Stothard which destroyed a friendship of nearly

thirty years, never made up in the lifetime of either, though Blake

made two efforts to be reconciled. The story of the double commission

given by Cromek for a picture of Chaucer's _Canterbury Pilgrims_,

and of the twofold accusation of plagiarism, is told clearly enough in the

narrative of J. T. Smith (p. 368 below), while Cunningham does his

best to confuse the facts in the interests of Cromek. It has been

finally summed up by Mr. Swinburne, who comes to this reasonable

conclusion: 'It is probable that Stothard believed himself to be not

in the wrong; it is certain that Blake was in the right.' As for Cromek,

he has written himself down for all time in his true character, naked

and not ashamed, in a letter to Blake of May 1807, where the

false bargainer asserts: 'Herein I have been gratified; for I was

determined to bring you food as well as reputation, though, from

your late conduct, I have some reason to embrace your wild opinion,

that to manage genius, and to cause it to produce good things, it is

absolutely necessary to starve it; indeed, the opinion is considerably

heightened by the recollection that your best work, the illustrations

of _The Grave_, was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were

reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week.' Cromek

published the book by subscription in August 1808, with an 'advertisement'

invoking the approval of the drawings as 'a high and original effort

of genius' by eleven Royal Academicians, including Benjamin West,

Flaxman, Lawrence, and Stothard. 'To the elegant and classical taste

of Mr. Fuseli,' he tells us further, 'he is indebted for the excellent

remarks on the moral worth and picturesque dignity of the Designs

that accompany this Poem.' Fuseli praises pompously the 'genuine

and unaffected attitudes,' the 'simple graces which nature and the heart

alone can dictate, and only an eye inspired by both, discover,' though

finding the artist 'playing on the very verge of legitimate invention.'

It is by the designs to Blair's _Grave_ that Blake is still

perhaps chiefly known, outside his own public; nor was he ever so clear,

or, in a literal way, so convincing in his rendering of imaginative

reality. Something formal tempers and makes the ecstasy explicit;

the drawing is inflexibly elegant; all the Gothic secrets that had been

learnt among the tombs in Westminster Abbey find their way into

these stony and yet strangely living death-beds and monuments

of death. No more vehement movement was ever perpetrated than

that leap together of the soul and body meeting as the grave opens.

If ever the soul was made credible to the mind through the eyes,

it is in these designs carved out of abstract form, and planned

according to a logic which is partly literal faith in imagination and

partly the curtailment of scholastic drawing.

The book contains the names of more than five hundred subscribers,

but only one contemporary notice has been found, a notice of

two columns, mere drivel and mere raving, signed by the happily

undiscovered initials R. H., in the thirty-second number of

Leigh Hunt's paper, _The Examiner_ (August 7, 1808, pp. 509,

510). It is under the heading 'Fine Arts,' and is called 'Blake's

edition of Blair's _Grave._' The notice is rendered specially

grotesque by its serious air of arguing with what it takes to be

absurdity coupled with 'an appearance of libidinousness' which

'intrudes itself upon the holiness of our thoughts and counteracts

their impression.' Like most moralists of the press, this critic's

meaning is hard to get at. Here, however, is a specimen: 'But a

more serious censure attaches to two of these most heterogeneous

and serio-fantastic designs. At the awful day of judgment, before

the throne of God himself, a male and female figure are described in

most indecent attitudes. It is the same with the salutation of a man

and his wife meeting in the pure mansions of Heaven.' Thus sanctified

a voice was it that first croaked at Blake out of the 'nest of villains'

which he imagined that he was afterwards to 'root out' of _The

Examiner._

A quite different view of him is to be found in a book which

was published before the _Grave_ actually came out, though it

contains a reference to the designs and to the 'ardent and encomiastic

applause' of 'some of the first artists in the country.' The book, which

contained an emblematic frontispiece designed by Blake and engraved

by Cromek, was _A Father's Memoirs of his Child_, written by

Benjamin Heath Malkin, then headmaster of Bury Grammar School,

in which the father gives a minute and ingenuous account of his child,

a prodigy of precocious intellect, who died at the age of nearly seven

years. The child was accustomed to do little drawings, some of which

are reproduced in the book in facsimile, and the father, after giving

his own opinion of them, adds: 'Yet, as my panegyric on such a subject

can carry with it no recommendation, I subjoin the testimony of Mr.

Blake to this instance of peculiar ingenuity, who has given me his

opinion of these various performances in the following terms:--

'"They are all firm, determinate outlines, or identical form. Had

the hand which executed these little ideas been that of a plagiary,

who works only from the memory, we should have seen blots, called

masses; blots without form, and therefore without meaning. These

blots of light and dark, as being the result of labour, are always

clumsy and indefinite; the effect of rubbing out and putting in, like

the progress of a blind man, or of one in the dark, who feels his

way, but does not see it. These are not so. Even the copy of Raphael's

cartoon of St. Paul preaching is a firm, determinate outline, struck

at once, as Protogenes struck his line, when he meant to make himself

known to Apelles. The map of Allestone has the same character of the

firm and determinate. All his efforts prove this little boy to have had

that greatest of all blessings, a strong imagination, a clear idea, and

a determinate vision of things in his own mind.'" It is in the lengthy

dedication of the book to Thomas Johnes, the translator of Froissart,

that Dr. Malkin gives the very interesting personal account of Blake

which is reprinted on p. 307 below.

It is not certain whether Blake had ever known little Thomas

Malkin, and it would be interesting to know whether it was through

any actual influence of his that the child had come to his curious

invention of an imaginary country. He drew the map of this country,

peopled with names (Nobblede and Bobblobb, Punchpeach and Closetha)

scarcely more preposterous than the names which Blake was just

then discovering for his own spiritual regions, wrote its chronicles,

and even made music for it. The child was born in 1795 and died in

1802, and Blake had been at Felpham since September 1800; but,

if they had met before that date, there was quite time for Blake's

influence to have shown itself. In 1799 the astonishing child

'could read, without hesitation, any English book. He could spell

any words.... He knew the Greek alphabet'; and on his fourth birthday,

in that year, he writes to his mother saying that he has got a Latin

grammar and English prints. In October 1800 he says: 'I know a deal

of Latin,' and in December he is reading Burns's poems, 'which I am

very fond of.' Influence or accident, the coincidence is singular, and

at least shows us something in Blake's brain working like the brain

of a precocious child.

In 1806 Blake wrote a generous and vigorous letter to the

editor of the _Monthly Review_ (July 1, 1806) in reply to a

criticism which had appeared in _Bell's Weekly Messenger_

on Fuseli's picture of Count Ugolino in the Royal Academy. In 1808

he had himself, and for the fifth and last time, two pictures in the

Academy, and in that year he wrote the letter to Ozias Humphrey,

describing one of his many 'Last Judgments,' which is given, with

a few verbal errors, by J. T. Smith. In December he wrote to George

Cumberland, who had written to order for a friend 'a complete set of all

you have published in the way of books colored as mine are,' that

'new varieties, or rather new pleasures, occupy my thoughts; new

profits seem to arise before me so tempting that I have already

involved myself in engagements that preclude all possibility of

promising anything.' Does this refer to the success of Blair's

_Grave_, which had just been published? He goes on: 'I have,

however, the satisfaction to inform you that I have myself begun to

print an account of my various inventions in Art, for which I have

procured a publisher, and am determined to pursue the plan of

publishing, that I may get printed without disarranging my time,

which in future must alone be designing and painting.' To this

project, which was never carried out, he refers again in the

prospectus printed in anticipation of his exhibition, a copy of

which, given to Ozias Humphreys, exists with the date May 15,

1809. A second prospectus is given by Gilchrist as follows:--

'Blake's Chaucer, the Canterbury Pilgrims. This Fresco Picture,

representing Chaucer's Characters, painted by William Blake, as it

is now submitted to the public.

'The designer proposes to engrave in a correct and finished

line manner of engraving, similar to those original copper-plates

of Albert Dürer, Lucas Van Leyden, Aldegrave, and the old original

engravers, who were great masters in painting and designing; whose

methods alone can delineate Character as it is in this Picture, where

all the lineaments are distinct.

'It is hoped that the Painter will be allowed by the public

(notwithstanding artfully disseminated insinuations to the contrary)

to be better able than any other to keep his own characters and

expressions; having had sufficient evidence in the works of our own

Hogarth, that no other artist can reach the original spirit so well as

the Painter himself, especially as Mr. B. is an old, well-known, and

acknowledged graver.

'The size of the engraving will be three feet one inch long by

one foot high. The artist engages to deliver it, finished, in one year

from September next. No work of art can take longer than a year:

it may be worked backwards and forwards without end, and last a

man's whole life; but he will, at length, only be forced to bring it

back to what it was, and it will be worse than it was at the end of

the first twelve months. The value of this artist's year is the criterion

of Society; and as it is valued, so does Society flourish or decay.

'The price to Subscribers, Four Guineas; two to be paid at the

time of subscribing, the other two, on delivery of the print.

'Subscriptions received at No. 28, corner of Broad Street,

Golden Square, where the Picture is now exhibiting, among other

works, by the same artist.

'The price will be considerably raised to non-subscribers.'

The exhibition thus announced was held at the house of James

Blake, and contained sixteen pictures, of which the first nine are

described as 'Frescoes' or 'experiment pictures,' and the remaining

seven as drawings,' that is, drawings in water-color. The Catalogue

(which was included in the entrance fee of half a crown) is Blake's

most coherent work in prose, and can be read in Gilchrist, ii. 139-163.

It is called 'A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical

Inventions, painted by William Blake, in Water-Colors, being the

ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored; and Drawings, for Public

Inspection, and for Sale by Private Contract.' Crabb Robinson, from

whom we have the only detailed account of the exhibition, says

that the pictures filled 'several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house'

(see p. "From Crabb Robinson's Reminiscences," below.) He mentions

Lamb's delight in the Catalogue,[5] and his declaring 'that Blake's

description was the finest criticism he had ever read of Chaucer's

poem.' In that letter to Bernard Barton (May 15, 1824), which is

full of vivid admiration for Blake ('I must look on him as one

of the most extraordinary persons of the age'), Lamb speaks

of the criticism as 'most spirited, but mystical and full of

vision,' and says: 'His pictures--one in particular, the "Canterbury

Pilgrims," (far above Stothard's)--have great merit, but hard,

dry, yet with grace.' Southey, we know from a sneer in _The

Doctor_ at 'that painter of great but insane genius, William Blake,'

also went to the exhibition, and found, he tells us, the picture

of 'The Ancient Britons,' 'one of the worst pictures, which is

saying much.' A note to Mr. Swinburne's _William Blake_ tells

us that in the competent opinion of Mr. Seymour Kirkup this

picture was 'the very noblest of all Blake's works.' It is now lost;

it was probably Blake's largest work, the figures, Blake asserts,

being 'full as large as life.' Of the other pictures the seventh,

eighth, ninth, tenth, and sixteenth are lost; the ninth exists

in a replica in 'fresco,' and the sixteenth in what is probably

a first sketch.

Blake's reason for giving this exhibition was undoubtedly

indignation at what he took to be Stothard's treachery in the

matter of the 'Canterbury Pilgrims.' This picture (now in the

National Gallery, No. 1163) had been exhibited by Cromek throughout

the kingdom, and he had announced effusively, in a seven page

advertisement at the end of Blair's _Grave_, the issue of

'a print executed in the line manner of engraving, and in the

same excellent style as the portrait of Mr. William Blake, prefixed

to this work, by Louis Schiavonetti, Esq., V. A., the gentleman

who has etched the prints that at once illustrate and embellish

the present volume.' The _Descriptive Catalogue_ is full

of angry scorn of 'my rival,' as Blake calls Stothard, and of the

'dumb dollies' whom he has 'jumbled together' in his design,

and of Hoppner for praising them in the letter quoted in the

advertisement. 'If Mr. B.'s "Canterbury Pilgrims" had been done

by any other power than that of the poetic visionary, it would

have been as dull as his adversary's,' Blake assures us, and, no

doubt, justly. The general feeling of Blake's friends, I doubt

not, is summed up in an ill-spelled letter from young George

Cumberland to his father, written from the Pay Office, Whitehall,

October 14, 1809, which I copy in all its literal slovenliness from

the letter preserved in the Cumberland Papers: 'Blakes has published

a Catalogue of Pictures being the ancient method of Frescoe

Painting Restored you should tell Mr. Barry to get it, it may be

the means of serving your friend. It sells for 2/6 and may be

had of J. Blake, 28 Broad St., Golden Square, at his Brothers--the

Book is a great curiosity. He as given Stothard a complete set down.'

The Catalogue is badly printed on poor paper in the form

of a small octavo hook of 66 pages. It is full of fierce, exuberant

wisdom, which plunges from time to time into a bright, demonstrative

folly; it is a confession, a criticism, and a kind of gospel of sanctity

and honesty and imagination in art. The whole thing is a thinking

aloud. One hears an impetuous voice as if saying: 'I have been

scorned long enough by these fellows, who owe to me all that

they possess; it shall be so no longer.' As he thinks, his pen

follows; he argues with foes actually visible to him; never does

he realize the indifferent public that may glance at what he has

written, and how best to interest or convince it if it does. He

throws down a challenge, and awaits an answer.

What answer came is rememberable among the infamies of journalism.

Only one newspaper noticed the exhibition, and this was again

_The Examiner._ The notice appeared under the title 'Mr.

Blake's Exhibition' in No. 90, September 17, 1809, pp. 605-6,

where it fills two columns. It is unsigned, but there can be no

doubt that it was written by the R. H. of the former article. The

main part of it is taken up by extracts from the _Descriptive

Catalogue_, italicized and put into small capitals 'to amuse

the reader, and satisfy him of the truth of the foregoing remarks.'

This is all that need be quoted of the foregoing remarks:

'But when the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken

for the sallies of genius by those whose works have exhibited the

soundest thinking in art, the malady has indeed attained a pernicious

height, and it becomes a duty to endeavor to arrest its progress.

Such is the case with the productions and admirers of William

Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness

secures him from confinement, and, consequently, of whom no

public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced on the

notice and animadversion of _The Examiner_, in having been

held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors

as a genius in some respect original and legitimate. The praises which

these gentlemen bestowed last year on this unfortunate man's

illustrations to Blair's _Grave_ have, in feeding his vanity,

stimulated him to publish his madness more largely, and thus

again exposed him, if not to the derision, at least to the pity of

the public.

...Thus encouraged, the poor man fancies himself a great master,

and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible

allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature

representation, and the whole "blotted and blurred," and very badly

drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published

a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness,

and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain.

One of the pictures represents Chaucer's Pilgrims, and is in every

respect a striking contrast to the admirable picture of the same

subject by Mr. Stothard, from which an exquisite print is forthcoming

from the hand of Schiavonetti.'

The last great words of the Catalogue, 'If a man is master

of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and, if

he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he

will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretenses of the

ignorant, while he has every night dropped into his shoe, as

soon as he puts it off, and puts out the candle, and gets into

bed, a reward for the labours of the day such as the world cannot

give, and patience and time await to give him all that the world

can give': those noble, lovely, pathetic and prophetic words, are

quoted at the end of the article without comment, as if to quote

them was enough. It was.

In 1803 William Blake sold to Thomas Butts eleven drawings

for fourteen guineas. In 1903 twelve water-color drawings in

illustration of L'_Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ were sold

for £1960, and the twenty-one water-color drawings for _Job_

for £5600. These figures have their significance, but the significance

must not be taken to mean any improvement in individual taste. When

a selection from the pictures in the Butts collection was on view at

Sotheby's I heard a vulgar person with a loud voice, a dealer or

a dealer's assistant, say with a guffaw: 'It would make me sick to have

these things round my room.' That vulgar person represents the

eternal taste of the multitude; only, in the course of a hundred

years, a few men of genius have repeated after one another that

Blake was a man of genius, and their united voices have carried

further than the guffaws of vulgar persons, repeated generation

after generation. And so in due course, when Blake has been

properly dead long enough, there is a little public which, bidding

against itself, gambles cheerfully for the possession of the scraps

of paper on which he sent in his account, against the taste of his

age and the taste of all the ages.

Blake himself had never any doubt of his own greatness as an

artist, and some of the proud or petulant things which he occasionally

wrote (the only outbreaks of impatience in a life wholly given up to

unceasing and apparently unrewarded labour) have been quoted

against him as petty or unworthy, partly because they are so incalculated

and so childlike. Blake 'bore witness,' as he might have said, that he

had done his duty: 'for that I cannot live without doing my duty, to

lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined,' he writes from

Felpham. And he asserted the truth of his own genius, its truth in the

spiritual sense, its divine origin, as directly and as emphatically as he

asserted everything which he had apprehended as truth. He is merely

stating what seems to him an obvious but overlooked fact when he

says: 'In Mr. B.'s Britons the blood is seen to circulate in their limbs:

he defies competition in coloring'; and again: 'I am, like other men,

just equal in invention and execution of my work,' All art, he had

realized, which is true art, is equal, as every diamond is a diamond.

There is only true and false art. Thus when he says in his prospectus

of 1793 that he has been 'enabled to bring before the Public works

(he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with

the productions of any age or country,' he means neither more nor

less than when he says in the _Descriptive Catalogue_ of 1809:

'He knows that what he does is not inferior to the grandest antiques.

Superior it cannot be, for human power cannot go beyond either

what he does or what they have done; it is the gift of God, it is

inspiration and vision.

...The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy

Ghost.' It is in humility rather than in pride that he equals

himself with those who seemed to him the genuine artists, the

humility of a belief that all art is only a portion of that 'Poetic

Genius, which is the Lord,' offered up in homage by man, and

returning, in mere gratitude, to its origin. When he says, 'I do not

pretend to paint better than Rafael or Michael Angelo, or Julio

Romano, or Albert Dürer, but I do pretend to paint finer than Rubens,

or Rembrandt, or Titian, or Correggio,' he merely means, in that odd

coupling and contrasting of names, to assert his belief in the

supremacy of strong, clear, masculine execution over what seemed

to him (to his limited knowledge, not false instinct) the heresy

and deceit of 'soft and effeminate' execution, the 'broken lines,

broken masses, and broken colors' of the art which 'loses form.'

In standing up for his ideal of art, he stands up himself, like a

champion. 'I am hid,' he writes on the flyleaf of Reynolds's

_Discourses_, and, in the last sentence of that 'Public

Address' which was never printed, he declares: 'Resentment for

personal injuries has had some share in this public address, but

love to my art, and zeal for my country, a much greater.' And

in the last sentence of the _Descriptive Catalogue_, he sums

up the whole matter, so far as it concerned him, finally, and

with a 'sure and certain hope' which, now that it has been realized,

so long afterwards, comes to us like a reproach.

'Shall Painting,' asks Blake in his _Descriptive Catalogue_,

'be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of

merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and

music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and

visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting, as well as

poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts.' It

was to restore this conception of art to England that Blake devoted

his life. 'The Enquiry in England,' he said, in his marginalia to

Reynolds, 'is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but

whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass.' He says there:

'Ages are all Equal, but Genius is always above the Age.' He looks

on Bacon and Locke and Burke and Reynolds as men who 'mock Inspiration

and Vision.' 'Inspiration and Vision,' he says, 'was then, and now is,

and I hope will always Remain, my Element, my Eternal Dwelling-place.'

'The Ancients did not mean to Impose when they affirmed their belief

in Vision and Revelation. Plato was in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest.

They believed that God did visit Man Really and Truly.' Further,

'Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is not to be Acquired. It is born with us....

Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted and Sown. This World is

too poor to produce one Seed.'

What Blake meant by vision, how significantly yet cautiously

he interchanged the words 'seen' and 'imagined,' has been already

noted in that passage of the _Descriptive Catalogue_, where

he answers his objectors: 'The connoisseurs and artists who have

made objections to Mr. B.'s mode of representing spirits with real

bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the

Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are, all of them,

representations of spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the

ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied

and organized in solid marble. Mr. B. requires the same latitude,

and all is well.' Then comes the great definition, which I will not

repeat: 'He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments.'

'The world of imagination,' he says elsewhere, 'is infinite and

eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite

and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities

of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.'

What is said here, transmuted by an instinct wholly an artist's into

a great defense of the reality of imagination in art, is a form of the

central doctrine of the mystics, formulated by Swedenborg in something

very like Blake's language, though with errors or hesitations which is

what Blake sets himself to point out in his marginalia to Swedenborg.

As, in those marginalia, we see Blake altering every allusion to

God into an allusion to 'the Poetic Genius,' so, always, we shall find

him understanding every promise of Christ, or Old Testament prophecy,

as equally translatable into terms of the imaginative life, into terms of

painting, poetry, or music. In the rendering of vision he required above

all things that fidelity which can only be obtained through 'minutely

particular' execution. 'Invention depends Altogether upon Execution

or Organisation; as that is right or wrong, so is the Invention perfect

or imperfect. Whoever is set to Undermine the Execution of Art is set

to destroy Art. Michael Angelo's Art depends on Michael Angelo's

Execution Altogether.... He who admires Rafael Must admire Rafael's

Execution. He who does not admire Rafael's Execution can not admire

Rafael.' Finally, 'the great and golden rule of art as well as of life,'

he says in the _Descriptive Catalogue_, '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 imagination, plagiarism, and bungling.... What is it that

distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wiry line of

rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions? Leave out

this line, and you leave out life itself. All is chance again, and the

line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it again, before

man or beast can exist.'

In Blake's work a great fundamental conception is rarely lacking,

and the conception is not, as it has often been asserted, a literary,

but always a pictorial, one. At times imagination and execution

are wholly untired, as in the splendid water-color of 'Death on

the Pale Horse,' in which not only every line and color is alive with

passionate idea, the implacable and eternal joy of destruction,

but also with a realized beauty, a fully grasped invention. No

detail has been slurred in vision, or in the setting down of the

vision: the crowned old man with the sword, the galloping horse,

the pestilential figure of putrid scales and flames below, and the

wide-armed angel with the scroll-above. In the vision of 'Fire'

there is grandeur and, along with it, something inadequately seen,

inadequately rendered. Flame and smoke embrace, coil, spire,

swell in bellying clouds, divide into lacerating tongues, tangle and

whirl ecstatically upward and onward, like a venomous joy in action,

painting the air with all the color of all the flowers of evil. But the

figures in the foreground are partly academic studies, partly

archaic dolls, in which only the intention is admirable. In 'Job

Confessing his Presumption to God' one sees all that is great

and all that is childish in Blake's genius. I have never seen so

sufficing a suggestion of disembodied divine forces as in this

whirling cloud of angels, cast out and swept round by the wind

of God's speed, like a cascade of veined and tapering wings, out

of which ecstatic and astonished heads leap forward. But in the

midst of the wheel a fierce old man, with outstretched arms

(who is an image of God certainly not corrected out of any authentic

vision), and, below, the extinguished figure of Job's friends, and

Job, himself one of Blake's gnome-like old men with a face of

rigid awe and pointing fingers of inarticulate terror, remain no

more than statements, literal statements, of the facts of the

imagination. They are summarized remembrances of vision, not

anything 'imagined in stronger and better lineaments, and in

stronger and better light, than the perishing mortal eye can see.'

Or, might it not be said that it is precisely through this minute

accuracy to the detail of imagination that this visionary reality

comes to seem to us unreal? In Blake every detail is seen with

intensity, and with equal intensity. No one detail is subordinated

to another, every inch of his surface is equally important to him; and

from this unslackening emphasis come alike his arresting power and

the defect which leaves us, though arrested, often unconvinced.

In his most splendid things, as in 'Satan exulting over Job' and 'Cain

fleeing from the Grave of Abel,' which are painted on wood, as if

carved or graved, with a tumult of decorative color, detail literally

overpowers the sense of sight, like strong sunlight, and every outline

seizes and enters into you simultaneously. At times, as in 'The Bard

of Gray,' and 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt' in the National Gallery, he is

mysteriously lyrical in his paint, and creates a vague emotion out of a

kind of musical color, which is content to suggest. Still more rarely,

as in the ripe and admirable 'Canterbury Pilgrims,' which is a picture

in narrative, as like Chaucer as Chaucer himself, but unlike any other

picture, he gives us a vision of worldly reality; but it was of this

picture that he said: 'If Mr. B.'s "Canterbury Pilgrims" had been done

by any other power than that of the poetic visionary, it would have

been as dull as his adversary's.' Pure beauty and pure terror creep

and flicker in and out of all his pictures, with a child's innocence;

and he is unconscious of how far he is helped or hindered, as an

artist, by that burden of a divine message which is continually upon

him. He is unconscious that with one artist the imagination may

overpower the technique, as awe overpowers the senses, while to

another artist the imagination gives new life to the technique.

Blake did not understand Rembrandt, and imagined that he hated him;

but there are a few of his pictures in which Rembrandt is strangely

suggested. In 'The Adoration of the Three Kings' and in 'The Angel

appearing to Zacharias' there is a lovely depth of color, bright in

dimness, which has something of the warmth and mystery of Rembrandt,

and there are details in the design of 'The Three Kings' (the

door open on the pointing star in the sky and on the shadowy

multitude below) which are as fine in conception as anything in the

Munich 'Adoration of the Shepherds.' But in these, or in the almost

finer 'Christ in the Garden, sustained by an Angel' (fire flames about

the descending angel, and the garden is a forest of the night),

how fatal to our enjoyment is the thought of Rembrandt! To Rembrandt,

too, all things were visions, but they were visions that he saw with

unflinching eyes; he saw them with his hands; he saw them with

the faces and forms of men, and with the lines of earthly habitations.

And, above all, Rembrandt, all the greatest painters, saw a picture

as a whole, composed every picture consciously, giving it unity

by his way of arranging what he saw. Blake was too humble towards

vision to allow himself to compose or arrange what he saw, and he saw

in detail, with an unparalleled fixity and clearness. Every picture of

Blake, quite apart from its meaning to the intelligence, is built up

in detail like a piece of decoration; and, widely remote as are

both intention and result, I am inclined to think he composed as

Japanese artists compose, bit by bit, as he saw his picture come

piece by piece before him. In every picture there is a mental idea,

and there is also a pictorial conception, working visually and

apart from the mental idea. In the greatest pictures (in the

tremendous invention, for instance, of the soldiers on Calvary

casting lots for the garments of Christ), the two are fused, with

overwhelming effect; but it happens frequently that the two

fail to unite, and we see the picture, and also the idea, but

not the idea embodied in the picture.

Blake's passion for detail, and his refusal to subordinate

any detail for any purpose, is to be seen in all his figures, of

which the bodies seem to be copied from living statues, and in

which the faces are wrung into masks of moods which they are

too urgent to interpret. A world of conventional patterns, in which

all natural things are artificial and yet expressive, is peopled by

giants and dolls, muscular and foolish, in whom strength

becomes an insane gesture and beauty a formal prettiness. Not

a flower or beast has reality, as our eyes see it, yet every flower

and beast is informed by an almost human soul, not the mere

vitality of animal or vegetable, but a consciousness of its own

lovely or evil shape. His snakes are not only wonderful in their

coils and colors, but each has his individual soul, visible in

his eyes, and interpreting those coils and colors. And every leaf,

unnatural yet alive, and always a piece of decoration, peers with

some meaning of its own out of every corner, not content to

be forgotten, and so uneasily alive that it draws the eye to

follow it. 'As poetry,' he said, 'admits not a letter that is

insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade

of grass insignificant--much less an insignificant blur or

mark.' The stones with which Achan has been martyred live each

with a separate and evil life of its own, not less vivid and violent

than the clenched hands raised to hurl other stones; there is

menacing gesture in the cloud of dust that rises behind them. And

these human beings and these angels, and God (sometimes an old

bowed Jew, fitted into a square or lozenge of winged heads) are full

of the energy of a life which is betrayed by their bodies. Sometimes

they are mere child's toys, like a Lucifer of bright baubles, painted

chromatically, with pink hair and blushing wings, hung with bursting

stars that spill out animalculæ. Sometimes the whole man is a gesture

and convulses the sky; or he runs, and the earth vanishes under him.

But the gesture devours the man also; his force as a cipher

annihilates his very being.

In greatness of conception Blake must be compared with the

greatest among artists, but the difference between Blake and

Michelangelo is the difference between the artist in whom imagination

overpowers technique, as awe overpowers the senses, and the artist

in whom imagination gives new life to technique. No one, as we have

seen, was more conscious of the identity which exists in the work of

the greatest artists between conception and execution. But in speaking

of invention and execution as equal, he is assuming, as he came to do,

the identity of art and inspiration, the sufficiency of first thoughts

in art. 'Be assured,' he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham, 'that there is

not one touch in those drawings and pictures but what came from

my head and heart in unison.... If I were to do them over again, they

would lose as much as they gained, because they were done in the

heat of my spirit.' He was an inexhaustible fountain of first thoughts,

and to him first thoughts only were of importance. The one draughtsman

of the soul, he drew, no doubt, what he saw as he saw it; but he lacked

the patience which is a part of all supreme genius. Having seen his

vision, he is in haste to record what he has seen hastily; and he leaves

the first rough draft as it stands, not correcting it by a deliberate

seeing over again from the beginning, and a scrupulous translation

of the terms of eternity into the terms of time. I was once showing

Rodin some facsimiles of Blake's drawings, and telling him about

Blake, I said: 'He used to literally see these figures; they are not

mere inventions.' 'Yes,' said Rodin, 'he saw them once; he should

have seen them three or four times.' There, it seems to me, is the

fundamental truth about the art of Blake: it is a record of vision

which has not been thoroughly mastered even as vision. 'No man,'

said Blake, 'can improve an original invention; nor can an original

invention exist without execution organized, delineated, and articulated,

either by God or man.' And he said also: 'He who does not imagine

in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light,

than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.' But

Blake's imagination is in rebellion, not only against the limits of

reality, but against the only means by which he can make vision

visible to others. And thus he allows himself to be mastered by

that against which he rebels: that power of the hand by which

art begins where vision leaves off.

IX

Nothing is known of Blake's life between 1809, the date of

his exhibition, and 1818, when he met the chief friend and helper of

his later years, John Linnell. Everything leads us to believe that those

nine years were years of poverty and neglect. Between 1815 and 1817

we find him doing engraver's task-work for Flaxman's _Hesiod_,

and for articles, probably written by Flaxman, on Armour and Sculpture

in Bees's _Encyclopoedia._ Gilchrist tells a story, on the authority

of Tatham, of Blake copying the cast of the Laocoon among the

students at the Royal Academy, and of Fuseli, then the keeper,

coming up with the just and pleasant remark that it was they who

should learn of him, not he of them. The _Milton_ and the

_Jerusalem_, both dated 1804, were printed at some time

during this period. Gilchrist suggests that the reason why Blake issued

no more engraved books from his press was probably his inability

to pay for the copper required in engraving; and his suggestion is

confirmed in a letter to Dawson Turner, a Norfolk antiquary, dated

June 9, 1818, a few days before the meeting with Linnell. Blake

writes: 'I send you a list of the different works you have done me the

honor to inquire after. They are unprofitable enough to me, though

expensive to the buyer. Those I printed for Mr. Humphry are a

selection from the different books of such as could be printed

without the writing, though to the loss of some of the best things;

for they, when printed perfect, accompany poetical personifications

and acts, without which poems they never could have been executed:--

_£_ _s._ _d._

America, 18 prints folio, 5 5 0

Europe, 17 do. do., 5 5 0

Visions, 8 do. do., 3 3 0

Thel, 6 do. quarto, 2 2 0

Songs of Innocence, 28 prints

octavo, 3 3 0

Songs of Experience, 26 do.

octavo, 3 3 0

Urizen, 28 prints quarto, 5 5 0

Milton, 50 do. do., 10 10 0

12 large prints, size of each

about 2 ft. by 1 1/2 ft.,

historical and poetical,

printed in colours, each 5 5 0

The last twelve prints are unaccompanied by any writing. The few I

have printed and sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation

as an artist, which was the chief thing intended. But I have never been

able to produce a sufficient number for general sale by means of a

regular publisher. It is therefore necessary to me that any person

wishing to have any or all of them should send me their order to

print them on the above terms, and I will take care that they shall be

done at least as well as any I have yet produced.'

If we compare this list with the printed list of twenty-five years

back (see above "William Blake, chapter III.") we shall see that the

prices are now half as many guineas as they were once shillings;

in a letter to Cumberland, nine years later, they have gone up by

one, two, or three guineas apiece, and Blake tells Cumberland

that 'having none remaining of all that I had printed, I cannot print

more except at a great loss. For at the time I printed these things

I had a little house to range in. Now I am shut up in a corner,

therefore I am forced to ask a price for them that I can scarce

expect to get from a stranger. I am now printing a set of the _Songs

of Innocence and Experience_ for a friend at ten guineas, which I

cannot do under six months consistent with my other work, so that

I have little hope of doing any more of such things. The last work is

a poem entitled _Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion_,

but find that to print it will cost my time to the value of twenty

guineas. One I have finished. It contains 100 plates, but it is

not likely that I shall get a customer for it.'[6]

Gilchrist tells us, by an error which was pointed out in the life

of Palmer by his son, in 1892, that Blake met Linn ell in 1813.

It was in 1818, and the first entry relating to Blake in Linnell's

journal is dated June 24. In a letter communicated to me by Mr.

Sampson, Mr. John Linnell, junior, states that his father took in

October or November 1817 the greater part of a house at 38 Rathbone

Place, where he lived till the end of 1818; he then took a house at

Cirencester Place, Fitzroy Square. Mr. Linnell gives the following

extract from his father's autobiographical notes: 'At Rathbone Place,

1818... here I first became acquainted with William Blake, to whom

I paid a visit in company with the younger Mr. Cumberland. Blake

lived then in South Molton Street, Oxford Street, second floor. We

soon became intimate, and I employed him to help me with an

engraving of my portrait of Mr. Upton, a Baptist preacher, which

he was glad to do, having scarcely enough employment to live by

at the prices he could obtain; everything in Art was at a low ebb

then.... I soon encountered Blake's peculiarities, and somewhat

taken aback by the boldness of some of his assertions, I never

saw anything the least like madness, for I never opposed him

spitefully, as many did, but being really anxious to fathom, if

possible, the amount of truth which might be in his most startling

assertions, generally met with a sufficiently rational explanation

in the most really friendly and conciliatory tone.'

From 1818 Linnell became, in his own independent way, the

chief friend and disciple of Blake. Himself a man of narrow but

strong individuality, he realized and accepted Blake for what he

was, worked with him and for him, introduced him to rich and

appreciative buyers like Sir Thomas Lawrence, and gave him, out

of his own carefully controlled purse, a steady price for his work,

which was at least enough for Blake to live on. There are notes in his

journal of visits to picture-galleries together; to the Academy, the

British Gallery, the Water-Color Exhibition, the Spring Gardens

Exhibition; 'went with Mr. Blake to see Harlow's copy of the

Transfiguration' (August 20, 1819), 'went with Mr. Blake to British

Museum to see prints' (April 4 and 24, 1823). In 1820 there are

notes of two visits to Drury Lane Theatre. It was probably early in

1819 that Linnell introduced Blake to his friend John Varley, the

water-color painter and astrologer, for whom Blake did the famous

'visionary heads.' A vivid sketch of the two arguing, drawn by Linnell,

is given in Mr. Story's Life of Linnell. Varley, though an astrologer on

the mathematical side, was no visionary. He persuaded Blake to do a

series of drawings, naming historical or legendary people to him, and

carefully writing down name and date of the imaginary portraits which

Blake willingly drew, and believing, it has been said, in the reality of

Blake's visions more than Blake himself. Cunningham, in his farcical

way, tells the story as he may have got it from Varley (see "(VIII.) Life

of Blake by Allan Cunningham." below), for he claims in a letter

to Linnell to have 'received much valuable information from him.'

But the process has been described, more simply, by Varley himself

in his _Treatise of Zodiacal Physiognomy_ (1828), where the

'Ghost of a Flea' and the 'Constellation Cancer' are reproduced in

engraving. Some of the heads are finely symbolical, and I should

have thought the ghost of a flea, in the sketch, an invention

more wholly outside nature if I had not seen, in Rome and in

London, a man in whom it is impossible not to recognize the

type, modified to humanity, but scarcely by a longer distance than

the men from the animals in Giovanni della Porta's 'Fisonomia

dell' Huomo.'

It was in 1820, the year in which Blake began his vast picture

of the 'Last Judgment,' only finished in the year of his death, that

he did the seventeen woodcuts to Thornton's _Virgil_, certainly

one of his greatest, his most wholly successful achievements. The book

was for boys' schools, and we find Blake returning without an effort to

the childlike mood of the _Songs of Innocence and Experience._

The woodcuts have all the natural joy of those early designs, an equal

simplicity, but with what added depth, what richness, what passionate

strength! Blake was now engraving on wood for the first time, and he

had to invent his own way of working. Just what he did has never been

better defined than in an article which appeared in the _Athenaeum_

of January 21, 1843, one of the very few intelligent references to

Blake which can be found in print between the time of his death and

the date of Gilchrist's _Life._ 'We hold it impossible,' says

the writer, 'to get a genuine work of art, unless it come pure and

unadulterated from the mind that conceived it.... Still more strongly

is the author's meaning marked in the few wood-engravings which

that wonderful man Blake cut himself for an edition of Thornton's

_Pastorals of Virgil._ In token of our faith in the principle

here announced, we have obtained the loan of one of Blake's

original blocks, from Mr. Linnell, who possesses the whole series,

to print, as an illustration of our argument, that, amid all drawbacks,

there exists a power in the work of the man of genius, which no one

but himself can utter fully. Side by side we have printed a copy of an

engraver's improved version of the same subject. When Blake had

produced his cuts, which were, however, printed with an apology,

a shout of derision was raised by the wood-engravers. "This will

never do!" said they; "we will show what it ought to be,"--that

is, what the public taste would like--and they produced

the above amendment! The engravers were quite right in their

estimate of public taste; and we dare say many will agree with

them even now: yet, to our minds, Blake's rude work, utterly

without pretension, too, as an engraving--the merest attempt

of a fresh apprentice--is a work of genius; whilst the latter

is but a piece of smooth, tame mechanism.'

Blake lived at South Molton Street for seventeen years. In

1821, 'on his landlord's leaving off business, and retiring to France,'

says Linnell, he removed to Fountain Court, in the Strand, where

he took the first floor of 'a private house kept by Mr. Banes, whose

wife was a sister of Mrs. Blake.' Linnell tells us that he was at this

time 'in want of employment,' and, he says, 'before I knew his

distress he had sold all his collection of old prints to Messrs.

Colnaghi and Co.' Through Linnell's efforts, a donation of £25

was about the same time sent to him from the Royal Academy.

Fountain Court (the name is still perpetuated on a metal slab)

was called so until 1883, when the name was changed to Southampton

Buildings. It has all been pulled down and rebuilt, but I remember it

fifteen years ago, when there were lodging-houses in it, by the side

of the stage-door of Terry's Theatre. It was a narrow slit between the

Strand and the river, and, when I knew it, was dark and comfortless,

a blind alley. Gilchrist describes the two rooms on the first floor,

front and back, the front room used as a reception-room; a smaller

room opened out of it at the back, which was workroom, bedroom,

and kitchen in one. The side window looked down through an opening

between the houses, showing the river and the hills beyond; and Blake

worked at a table facing the window. There seems to be no doubt, from

the testimony of many friends, that Crabb Robinson's description,

which will be seen below, with fuller detail than has yet been

printed, conveys the prejudiced view of a fastidious person, and

Palmer, roused by the word 'squalor,' wrote to Gilchrist, asserting

'himself, his wife, and his rooms, were clean and orderly; everything

was in its place.' Tatham says that 'he fixed upon these lodgings

as being more congenial to his habits, as he was very much accustomed

to get out of his bed in the night to write for hours, and return to bed

for the rest of the night.' He rarely left the house, except to fetch

his pint of porter from the public-house at the corner of the Strand.

It was on one of these occasions that he is said to have been cut by a

Royal Academician whom he had recently met in society. Had not the

Royal Academy been founded (J. T. Smith tells us in his _Book for

a Rainy Day_, under date 1768) by 'members who had agreed to

withdraw themselves from various clubs, not only in order to be more

select as to talent, but perfectly correct as to gentlemanly conduct'?

It was about this time that Blake was discovered, admired,

and helped by one who has been described as 'not merely a poet

and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose,

an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful,

but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle

and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.' This was

Lamb's 'kind, lighthearted Wainewright,' who in the intervals of his

strange crimes found time to buy a fine copy of the _Songs of

Innocence_ and to give a jaunty word of encouragement or

advertisement to _Jerusalem._ Palmer remembers Blake stopping

before one of Wainewright's pictures in the Academy and saying, 'Very

fine.'

In 1820 Blake had carried out his last commission from Butts

in a series of twenty-one drawings in illustration of the Book of

Job. In the following year Linnell commissioned from him a duplicate

set, and in September 1821 traced them himself from Butts's

copies; they were finished, and in parts altered, by Blake. By an

agreement dated March 25, 1823, Blake undertook to engrave the

designs, which were to be published by Linnell, who gave £100 for

the designs and copyright, with the promise of another £100 out of

the profits on the sale. There were no profits, but Linnell gave

another £50, paying the whole sum of £150 in weekly sums of

£2 or £3. The plates are dated March 8, 1825, but they were not

published until the date given on the cover, March 1826. Gilchrist

intimates that 'much must be lost by the way' in the engraving of the

water-color drawings; but Mr. Russell, a better authority, says that

'marvelous as the original water-color drawings unquestionably

were, they are in every case inferior to the final version in the

engraving.' It is on these engravings that the fame of Blake as an

artist rests most solidly; invention and execution are here, as he

declared that they must always be in great art, equal; imagination

at its highest here finds adequate expression, without even the

lovely strangeness of a defect. They have been finally praised and

defined by Rossetti, in the pages contributed to Gilchrist's life

(i. 330-335), of which Mr. Swinburne has said, with little exaggeration,

that 'Blake himself, had he undertaken to write notes on his designs,

must have done them less justice than this.'

Before Blake had finished engraving the designs to 'Job' he

had already begun a new series of illustrations to Dante, also a

commission from Linnell; and, with that passionate conscientiousness

which was part of the foundation of his genius, he set to work to

learn enough Italian to be able to follow the original with the help

of Cary's translation. Linnell not only let Blake do the work he

wanted to do, paying him for it as he did it, but he took him to see

people whom it might be useful for him to know, such as the Aders,

who had a house full of books and pictures, and who entertained

artists and men of letters. Mrs. Aders had a small amateur talent of her

own for painting, and from a letter of Carlyle's, which is preserved

among the Crabb Robinson papers, seems to have had literary knowledge

as well. 'Has not Mrs. Aders (the lady who lent me _Wilhelm Meister_)

great skill in, such things?' he asks in a letter full of minute inquiries

into German novels. Lamb and Coleridge went to the house, and it

was there that Crabb Robinson met Blake in December 1825. Mr. Story,

in his Life of Linnell, tells us that one of Linnell's 'most vivid

recollections of those days was of hearing Crabb Robinson recite

Blake's poem, "The Tiger," before a distinguished company gathered

at Mrs. Aders's table. It was a most impressive performance.' We

find Blake afterwards at a supper-party at Crabb Robinson's, with

Linnell, who notes in his journal going with Blake to Lady Ford's, to

see her pictures; in 1820 we find him at Lady Caroline Lamb's.

Along with this general society Blake now gathered about him

a certain number of friends and disciples, Linnell being the

steadiest friend, and Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George

Richmond the chief disciples. To these must be added, in 1826,

Frederick Tatham, a young sculptor, who was to be the betrayer

among the disciples. They called Blake's house 'the House of the

Interpreter,' and in speaking of it afterwards speak of it always as

of holy ground. Thus we hear of Richmond, finding his invention

flag, going to seek counsel, and how Blake, who was sitting at tea

with his wife, turned to her and said: 'What do we do, Kate, when

the visions forsake us?' 'We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.' It is

Richmond who records a profoundly significant saying of Blake:

'I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it.'

Palmer tells us that Blake and his wife would look into the fire

together and draw the figures they saw there, hers quite unlike

his, his often terrible. On Palmer's first meeting that Blake, on

October 9, 1824, he tells us how Blake fixed his eyes upon him

and said: 'Do you work with fear and trembling?' 'Yes, indeed,'

was the reply. 'Then,' said Blake, 'you'll do.'

The friends often met at Hampstead, where Linnell had, in

1824, taken Collins's Farm, at North End, now again known by

its old name of 'Wyldes.' Blake disliked the air of Hampstead,

which he said always made him ill; but he often went there to

see Linnell, and loved the aspect from his cottage, and to sit

and hear Mrs. Linnell sing Scotch songs, and would sometimes

himself sing his own songs to tunes of his own making. The children

loved him, and would watch for him as he came, generally on

foot, and one of them says that she remembers 'the cold winter

nights when Blake was wrapped up in an old shawl by Mrs. Linnell,

and sent on his homeward way, with the servant, lantern in hand,

lighting him across the heath to the main road.' It is Palmers son

who reports it, and he adds: 'It is a matter of regret that the record

of these meetings and walks and conversations is so imperfect,

for in the words of one of Blake's disciples, to walk with him was

like "walking with the Prophet Isaiah."' Once when the Palmers

were staying at Shoreham, the whole party went down into the

country in a carrier's van drawn by eight horses: Calvert tells

the story, with picturesque details of Blake's second-sight, and

of the hunt with lanterns in Shoreham Castle after a ghost, who

turned out to be a snail tapping on the broken glass of the window.

From the end of 1825 Blake's health began to fail, and most

of his letters to Linnell contain apologies for not coming to

Hampstead, as he is in bed, or is suffering from a cold in the

stomach. It was the beginning of that sickness which killed him,

described as the mixing of the gall with the blood. He worked

persistently, whether he was well or ill, at the Dante drawings,

which he made in a folio book given him by Linnell. There were

a hundred pages in the book, and he did a drawing on every page,

some completely finished, some a mere outline; of these he had

only engraved seven at the time of his death. He sat propped up in

bed, at work on his drawings, saying, 'Dante goes on the better,

which is all I care about.' In a letter to George Cumberland, on April

12, 1827, he writes: 'I have been very near the gates of death,

and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering,

but not in the spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination,

which liveth for ever.' And indeed there is no sign of age or weakness

in these last great inventions of a dying man. 'Flaxman is gone,'

he adds, 'and we must soon follow, every one to his own eternal

house, leaving the delusive Goddess Nature to her laws, to get

into freedom from all law of the numbers, into the mind, in

which every one is king and priest in his own house. God send

it so on earth, as it is in heaven.'

Blake died on August 12, 1827, and the ecstasy of his death

has been recorded by many witnesses. Tatham tells us how, as

he put the finishing touches to a design of 'The Ancient of Days'

which he had been coloring for him, he 'threw it down suddenly

and said: "Kate, you have been a good wife; I will draw your portrait."

She sat near his bed, and he made a drawing which, though not a

likeness, is finely touched and expressed. He then threw that down,

after having drawn for an hour, and began to sing Hallelujahs and

songs of joy and triumph which Mrs. Blake described as being truly

sublime in music and in verse.' Smith tells us that he said to his wife,

as she stood to hear him, 'My beloved, they are not mine, no, they

are not mine.' And a friend quoted by Gilchrist says: 'He died on

Sunday night, at six o'clock, in a most glorious manner. He said he was

going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed

himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before

he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he

burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven.' 'Perhaps,' he

had written not long before, 'and I verily believe it, every death is an

improvement of the state of the departed.'

Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields, where all his family had been

buried before him, but with the rites of the Church of England,

and on August 17 his body was followed to the grave by Calvert,

Richmond, Tatham, and Tatham's brother, a clergyman. The burial

register reads: 'Aug. 17, 1827. William Blake. Age, 69 years. Brought

from Fountain Court, Strand. Grave, 9 feet; E. & W. 77: N. & S. 32.

19/' The grave, being a 'common grave,' was used again, and the

bones scattered; and this was the world's last indignity against

William Blake.

Tatham tells us that, during a marriage of forty-five years,

Mrs. Blake had never been separated from her husband 'save for

a period that would make altogether about five weeks.' He does

not remind us, as Mr. Swinburne, on the authority of Seymour

Kirkup, reminds us, of Mrs. Blake's one complaint, that her husband

was incessantly away 'in Paradise.' Tatham adds: 'After the death

of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this,

whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her,

until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for

her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere

affection and regard.' Before going to Tatham's she had spent

nine months at Linnell's house in Cirencester Place, only leaving

it in the summer of 1828, when Linnell let the house. After

leaving Tatham she took lodgings in 17 Upper Charlotte Street,

Fitzroy Square, where she died at half-past seven on the morning

of October 18, 1831, four years after the death of her husband,

and within three months of his age. Tatham says: 'Her death not

being known but by calculation, sixty-five years were placed upon

her coffin,' and in the burial register at Bunhill Fields we read:

'Oct. 23, 1831. Catherine Sophia Blake. Age, 65 yrs. Brought

from Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Grave, 12 feet;

E. & W. 7: N. & S. 31, 32. £1, 5s.' She was born April 24, 1762,

and was thus aged sixty-nine years and six months.

Mr. Swinburne tells us, on the authority of Seymour Kirkup,

that, after Blake's death, a gift of £100 was sent to his widow

by the Princess Sophia, which she gratefully returned, as not

being in actual need of it. Many friends bought copies of Blake's

engraved books, some of which Mrs. Blake colored, with the help

of Tatham. After her death all the plates and manuscripts passed

into Tatham's hands. In his memoir Tatham says that Blake on

his death-bed 'spoke of the writer of this as a likely person to

become the manager' of Mrs. Blake's affairs, and he says that

Mrs. Blake bequeathed to him 'all of his works that remained

unsold at his death, being writings, paintings, and a very great

number of copperplates, of whom impressions may be obtained.'

Linnell says that Tatham never showed anything in proof of his

assertion that they had been left to him. Tatham had passed

through various religious phases, and from being a Baptist, had

become an 'angel' of the Irvingite Church. He is supposed to

have destroyed the whole of the manuscripts and drawings in

his possession on account of religious scruples; and in the life of

Calvert by his son we read: 'Edward Calvert, fearing some fatal

_dénouement_, went to Tatham and implored him to reconsider

the matter and spare the good man's precious work; notwithstanding

which, blocks, plates, drawings, and MSS., I understand, were

destroyed.'

Such is the received story, but is it strictly true? Did Tatham

really destroy these manuscripts for religious reasons, or did he

keep them and surreptitiously sell them for reasons of quite another

kind? In the _Rossetti Papers_ there is a letter from Tatham

to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, dated Nov. 6, 1862, in which he says: 'I have

sold Mr. Blake's works for thirty years'; and a footnote to Dr. Garnett's

monograph on Blake in the _The Portfolio_ of 1895 relates

a visit from Tatham which took place about 1860. Dr. Garnett told

me that Tatham had said, without giving any explanation, that he

had destroyed some of Blake's manuscripts and kept others by him,

which he had sold from time to time. Is there not therefore a

possibility that some of these lost manuscripts may still exist?

whether or not they may turn out to be, as Crabb Robinson tells

us that Blake told him, 'six or seven epic poems as long as Homer,

and twenty tragedies as long as _Macbeth._'

X

There are people who still ask seriously if Blake was mad. If

the mind of Lord Macaulay is the one and only type of sanity,

then Blake was mad. If imagination, and ecstasy, and disregard of

worldly things, and absorption in the inner world of the mind, and

a literal belief in those things which the whole 'Christian community'

professes from the tip of its tongue; if these are signs and suspicions

of madness, then Blake was certainly mad. His place is where he saw

Teresa, among 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press

of Love'; and, like her, he was 'drunk with intellectual vision.' That

drunkenness illuminated him during his whole life, yet without

incapacitating him from any needful attention to things by the way.

He lived in poverty because he did not need riches; but he died

without leaving a debt. He was a steady, not a fitful worker, and his

wife said of him that she never saw his hands still unless he was

reading or asleep. He was gentle and sudden; his whole nature

was in a steady heat which could blaze at any moment into a flame.

'A saint amongst the infidels and a heretic with the orthodox,'

he has been described by one who knew him best in his later years,

John Linnell; and Palmer has said of him: 'His love of art was so

great that he would see nothing but art in anything he loved; and

so, as he loved the Apostles and their divine Head (for so I believe

he did), he must needs say that they were all artists.' 'When opposed by

the superstitious, the crafty, or the proud,' says Linnell again, 'he

outraged all common-sense and rationality by the opinions he

advanced'; and Palmer gives an instance of it: 'Being irritated by the

exclusively scientific talk at a friend's house, which talk had turned

on the vastness of space, he cried out, "It is false. I walked the other

evening to the end of the heath, and touched the sky with my finger."'

It was of the essence of Blake's sanity that he could always

touch the sky with his finger. 'To justify the soul's frequent joy

in what cannot be defined to the intellectual part, or to calculation':

that, which is Walt Whitman's definition of his own aim, defines

Blake's. Where others doubted he knew; and he saw where others

looked vaguely into the darkness. He saw so much further than

others into what we call reality, that others doubted his report,

not being able to check it for themselves; and when he saw truth

naked he did not turn aside his eyes. Nor had he the common

notion of what truth is, or why it is to be regarded. He said: 'When

I tell a truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not

know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.' And his

criterion of truth was the inward certainty of instinct or intuition,

not the outward certainty of fact. 'God forbid,' he said, 'that Truth

should be confined to mathematical demonstration. He who does

not know Truth at sight is unworthy of her notice.' And he said:

'Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burned

up, and then, not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned

up the moment men cease to behold it.'

It was this private certainty in regard to truth and all things

that Blake shared with the greatest minds of the world, and men

doubted him partly because he was content to possess that certainty

and had no desire to use it for any practical purpose, least of all to

convince others. He asked to be believed when he spoke, told the truth,

and was not concerned with argument or experiment, which seemed

to him ways of evasion. He said:

'It is easy to acknowledge a man to be great and good,

while we

Derogate from him in the trifles and small articles of

that goodness,

Those alone are his friends who admire his minutest

powers.'

He spoke naturally in terms of wisdom, and made no explanations,

bridged none of the gulfs which it seemed to him so easy to fly

over. Thus when he said that Ossian and Rowley were authentic,

and that what Macpherson and Chatterton said was ancient was

so, he did not mean it in a strictly literal sense, but in the sense

in which ancient meant authentic: true to ancient truth. Is a thing

true as poetry? then it is true in the minutest because the most

essential sense. On the other hand, in saying that part of

Wordsworth's Preface was written by another hand, he was merely

expressing in a bold figure a sane critical opinion. Is a thing false

among many true things? then it is not the true man who is writing

it, but some false section of his brain. It may be dangerous

practically to judge all things at an inner tribunal; but it is only by

such judgments that truth moves.

And truth has moved, or we have. After _Zarathustra, Jerusalem_

no longer seems a wild heresy. People were frightened because

they were told that Blake was mad, or a blasphemer. Nietzsche,

who has cleared away so many obstructions from thought, has

shamed us from hiding behind these treacherous and unavailing

defenses. We have come to realize, what Rossetti pointed out long

ago, that, as a poet, Blake's characteristic is above all things that

of 'pure perfection in _writing verse._' We no longer praise

his painting for its qualities as literature, or forget that his design

has greatness as design. And of that unique creation of an art out

of the mingling of many arts which we see in the 'illuminated printing'

of the engraved books, we have come to realize what Palmer meant

when he said long ago: 'As a picture has been said to be something

between a thing and a thought, so, in some of these type books over

which Blake had long brooded with his brooding of fire, the very

paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it--not with

a mortal life, but an indestructible life.' And we have come to realize

what Blake meant by the humble and arrogant things which he said

about himself. 'I doubt not yet,' he writes in one of those gaieties

of speech which illuminate his letters, 'to make a figure in the great

dance of life that shall amuse the spectators in the sky.' If there are

indeed spectators there, amused by our motions, what dancer among

us are they more likely to have approved than this joyous, untired,

and undistracted dancer to the eternal rhythm?

[Footnote 1: Compare the lines written in 1800:

'I bless thee, O Father of Heaven and Earth, that ever I saw

Flaxman's face.

Angels stand round my spirit in Heaven, the blessed of

Heaven are my friends upon Earth.

When Flaxman was taken to Italy, Fuseli was given to me

for a season ...

And my Angels have told me that seeing such visions, I

could not subsist on the Earth,

But by my conjunction with Flaxman, who knows to forgive

nervous fear.']

[Footnote 2: Gilchrist (I. 98) gives a long account of the house which

he took to be Blake's, and which he supposed to be on the west

side of Hercules Road. But it has been ascertained beyond a doubt,

on the authority of the Lambeth rate-books, confirmed by Norwood's

map of London at the end of the eighteenth century, that Blake's

house, then numbered 13 Hercules Buildings, was on the east side

of the road, and is the house now numbered 23 Hercules Road.

Before 1842 the whole road was renumbered, starting at the south

end of the western side and returning by the eastern side, so that

the house which Gilchrist saw in 1863 as 13 Hercules Buildings

was what afterwards became 70 Hercules Road, and is now pulled

down. The road was finally renumbered in 1890, and the house

became 23 Hercules Road.]

[Footnote 3: The text of _Vala,_ with corrections and additional errors,

is now accessible in the second volume of Mr. Ellis' edition of Blake's

_Poetical Works._]

[Footnote 4: They are now to be read in Mr. Russell's edition of _The

Letters of William Blake._]

[Footnote 5: We know from Mr. Lucas's catalogue of Lamb's

library that Lamb bound it up in a thick 12mo volume with his own

_Confessions of a Drunkard_, Southey's _Wat Tyler_, and Lady

Winchilsea's and Lord Rochester's poems.]

[Footnote 6: I take the text of this letter, not from Mr. Russell's

edition, but from the fuller text printed by Mr. Ellis in _The Real

Blake._]