Title: William Blake
Author: Symons, Arthur
Language: English
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WILLIAM BLAKE

BY

ARTHUR SYMONS

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY

1907



TO
AUGUSTE RODIN
whose work is the
marriage of
heaven and hell



CONTENTS


PREFACE

PART I
INTRODUCTION
WILLIAM BLAKE

PART II--RECORDS FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES
(I.) EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY, LETTERS, AND REMINISCENCES OF HENRY
CRABB ROBINSON, TRANSCRIBED FROM THE ORIGINAL MSS. IN DR. WILLIAMS'S
LIBRARY (1810-1852)
(1) FROM CRABB ROBINSON'S DIARY
(2) FROM A LETTER OF CRABB ROBINSON TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH
(3) FROM CRABB ROBINSON'S REMINISCENCES
(II.) FROM 'A FATHER'S MEMOIRS OF HIS CHILD,' BY BENJAMIN
HEATH MALKIN (1806)
(III.) FROM LADY CHARLOTTE BURY'S DIARY (1820)
(IV.) BLAKE'S HOROSCOPE (1825)
(V.) OBITUARY NOTICES IN THE LITERARY GAZETTE' AND 'GENTLEMAN'S
MAGAZINE' (1827)
(VI.) EXTRACT FROM VARLEY'S ZODIACAL PHYSIOGNOMY (1828)
(VII.) BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF BLAKE BY J. T. SMITH (1828)
(VIII.) LIFE OF BLAKE BY ALLAN CUNNINGHAM (1830)



PREFACE


It was when Mr. Sampson's edition of Blake came into my hands in the
winter of 1905 that the idea of writing a book on Blake first presented
itself to me. From a boy he had been one of my favorite poets, and I
had heard a great deal about him from Mr. Yeats as long ago as 1893, the
year in which he and Mr. Ellis brought out their vast encyclopaedia,
_The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical._ From
that time to this Blake has never been out of my mind, but I have always
hesitated to write down anything on a subject so great in itself, and
already handled by great poets. Things have been written about Blake by
Rossetti which no one will ever surpass; and in Mr. Swinburne's book
Blake himself seems to speak again, as through the mouth of a herald.
I read these, I read everything that had been written about him; gradually
I got to know all his work, in all its kinds; and when I found, in Mr.
Sampson's book, the rarest part of his genius, disentangled at last from
the confusions of the commentators, I caught some impulse--was
it from the careful enthusiasm of this editor, or perhaps straight from
Blake?--and began to write down what now filled and overflowed
my mind. Having begun on an impulse, I laid my plans as strictly as I
could, and decided to make a book which would be, in its way, complete.
There was to be, first, my own narrative, containing, as briefly as
possible, every fact of importance, with my own interpretation of what
I took to be Blake's achievements and intentions. But this was to be
followed by a verbatim reprint of documents. These documents were
the material of Gilchrist, but, even after Gilchrist's use of them, they
remain of primary and undiminished importance:  they are the main
evidence in our case.

The documents which form the second part of my book contain
every personal account of Blake which was printed during his lifetime,
and between the time of his death and the publication of Gilchrist's
_Life_ in 1863, together with the complete text of every reference
to Blake in the _Diary, Letters, and Reminiscences_ of Crabb
Robinson, transcribed for the first time from the original manuscripts.
All these I have given exactly as they stand, not correcting their errors,
for even errors have their value as evidence. The only other document
of the period which exists was written by Frederick Tatham, within two
years of the appearance of Cunningham's _Life_, and bound up
at the beginning of a colored copy of Blake's _Jerusalem_, now in
the possession of Captain Archibald Stirling. This manuscript was
consulted by Mr. Swinburne and afterwards by Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats;
but though many extracts have been made from it, it was printed for
the first time by Mr. Archibald G. B. Russell in his edition of _The
Letters of William Blake_ (Methuen, 1906). This very important
volume completes the task which I have here undertaken: the reprint
of every record of Blake from contemporary sources.

The mere contact with Blake seems to awaken the natural generosity
of those who have concerned themselves with him. To Mr. John Sampson,
the editor of the only accurate edition of Blake's poems, I am indebted
for more help and encouragement than I can hope to express in detail; and
particularly for prompting me to a search among birth and marriage and
death registers, by which I have been enabled to settle several disputed
points of some interest. To Mr. A. G. B. Russell I owe constant personal
help, and the very generous loan of the proofs of his edition of Blake's
_Letters_, and of Tatham's _Life_, with free leave to use them
in the narrative which I was writing at a time when his book had not yet
appeared. Through this favour I have been able to take such facts as
Tatham is responsible for directly from Tatham, and not at secondhand.
I am also indebted to Mr. Russell for reading my proofs and saving me from
some errors of fact. I have to thank Mr. Buxton Forman for allowing me
to read and describe the unpublished manuscript in Blake's handwriting
in his possession. Finally, my particular thanks are due to the Librarian
of Dr. Williams's Library, Mr. Francis H. Jones, for permission to copy
and print the full text of all the references to Blake in the Crabb
Robinson Manuscripts.


LONDON, _April_ 1907.



LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED


1.  _Life of William Blake_. By ALEXANDER GILCHRIST. Two volumes.
Macmillan, 1863. New and enlarged edition, 1880.

2.  _William Blake: A Critical Essay_. By ALGERNON CHARLES
SWINBURNE. John Camden Hotten, 1868. New edition, Chatto & Windus,
1906.

3.  _The Poetical Works of William Blake_. Edited by W. M.
ROSSETTI. Aldine Edition. Bell & Sons, 1874.

_4.  The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer_. By A. H.
Palmer. Seeley & Co., 1892.

5.  _The Life of John Linnell_. By ALFRED T. STORY.
Two volumes. Bentley, 1892.

6.  _A Memoir of Edward Calvert_. By his third son [SAMUEL
CALVERT]. S. LOW & Co., 1893.

7.  _The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical_.
Edited, with lithographs of the illustrated Prophetic Books, and a Memoir
and Interpretation, by EDWIN JOHN ELLIS and WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.
Three volumes. Quaritch, 1893.

8.  _The Poems of William Blake_. Edited by W. B. YEATS.
'The Muses' Library.' Lawrence & Bullen, 1893.

9.  _William Blake: his Life, Character, and Genius_.
By ALFRED T. STORY. Sonnenschein & Co., 1893.

10. _William Blake: Painter and Poet_. By RICHARD GARNETT.
'Portfolio,' 1895.

11. _Ideas of Good and Evil_. By W. B. YEATS. (William Blake
and the Imagination, William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine
Comedy.) A. H. Bullen, 1903.

12. _The Rossetti Papers_ (1862 _to_ 1870); a Compilation
by W. M. ROSSETTI. Sands & Co., 1903.

13. _The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem_.
Edited by E. R. D. MACLAGAN and A. G. B. RUSSELL. Bullen, 1904.

14. _The Poetical Works of William Blake_. Edited by
JOHN SAMPSON. Oxford, 1905.

15. _The Letters of William Blake_; together with a Life
by FREDERICK TATHAM. Edited by ARCHIBALD G. B. RUSSELL. Methuen,
1906.

16. _The Poetical Works of William Blake_. Edited and annotated
by EDWIN J. ELLIS. Two volumes. Chatto & Windus, 1906. (The only edition
containing the Prophetic Books.)

17. _William Blake_. Vol. I. Illustrations of the Book of Job,
with a general Introduction by LAURENCE BINYON. Methuen, 1906.

18. _The Real Blake_. A Portrait Biography. By EDWIN J. ELLIS.
Chatto & Windus, 1907.



PART I



INTRODUCTION



I


When Blake spoke the first word of the nineteenth century there was
no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation
from reality through the 'shaping spirit of imagination,' has penetrated
the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first
utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar.
Thought to-day, wherever it is most individual, owes either force or
direction to Nietzsche, and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the
Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear of God or
man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche's name against the ideas of
Nietzsche. No one can think, and escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has
come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes.

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ anticipates  Nietzsche
in his most significant paradoxes, and, before his time, exalts energy
above reason, and Evil, 'the active springing from energy' above Good,
'the passive that obeys reason.' Did not Blake astonish Crabb Robinson
by declaring that 'there was nothing in good and evil, the virtues and
vices'; that 'vices in the natural world were the highest sublimities in
the spiritual world'? 'Man must become better and wickeder,' says
Nietzsche in _Zarathustra_; and, elsewhere; 'Every man must
find his own virtue.' Sin, to Blake, is negation, is nothing; 'everything
is good in God's eyes'; it is the eating of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil that has brought sin into the world: education, that
is, by which we are taught to distinguish between things that do not
differ. When Nietzsche says: 'Let us rid the world of the notion of sin,
and banish with it the idea of punishment,' he expresses one of Blake's
central doctrines, and he realizes the corollary, which, however, he does
not add. 'The Christian's soul,' he says, 'which has freed itself from
sin is in most cases ruined by the hatred against sin. Look at the faces
of great Christians. They are the faces of great haters.' Blake sums up
all Christianity as forgiveness of sin:


'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.'


The doctrine of the Atonement was to him a 'horrible doctrine,'
because it seemed to make God a hard creditor, from whom pity
could be bought for a price. 'Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on
condition that it shall be paid? ... That debt is not forgiven!' he says
in _Jerusalem._ To Nietzsche, far as he goes on the same road,
pity is 'a weakness, which increases the world's suffering'; but to
Blake, in the spirit of the French proverb, forgiveness is understanding.
'This forgiveness,' says Mr. Yeats, 'was not the forgiveness of the
theologian who has received a commandment from afar off, but of
the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in a mystical
vision, "that the imagination is the man himself," and believes he
has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect
sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect
life.' He trusted the passions, because they were alive; and, like
Nietzsche, hated asceticism, because:


'Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs and flaming hair,
But desire gratified
Plants fruits of life and beauty there.'


'Put off holiness,' he said, 'and put on intellect,' And 'the fool
shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.' Is not
this a heaven after the heart of Nietzsche?

Nietzsche is a Spinoza à _rebours._ The essence of the
individual, says Spinoza, 'is the effort by which it endeavors to
persevere in its own being.' 'Will and understanding are one and
the same.' 'By virtue and power I understand the same thing.'
'The effort to understand is the first and sole basis of virtue.' So
far it might be Nietzsche who is speaking. Only, in Spinoza, this
affirmation of will, persistent egoism, power, hard understanding,
leads to a conclusion which is far enough from the conclusion of
Nietzsche. 'The absolute virtue of the mind is to understand; its
highest virtue, therefore, to understand or know God.' That, to
Nietzsche, is one of 'the beautiful words by which the conscience
is lulled to sleep.' 'Virtue is power,' Spinoza leads us to think,
because it is virtue; 'power is virtue,' affirms Nietzsche, because
it is power. And in Spinoza's profound heroism of the mind, really
a great humility, 'he who loves God does not desire that God should
love him in return.' Nietzsche would find the material for a kind of
desperate heroism, made up wholly of pride and defiance.

To Blake, 'God-intoxicated' more than Spinoza, 'God only acts
and is, in existing beings and men,' as Spinoza might also have said;
to him, as to Spinoza, all moral virtue is identical with understanding,
and 'men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and
governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their
understandings.' Yet to Blake Spinoza's mathematical approach to
truth would have been a kind of negation. Even an argument from
reason seemed to him atheistical: to one who had truth, as he
was assured, within him, reason was only 'the bound or outward
circumference of energy,' but 'energy is the only life,' and, as to
Nietzsche, is 'eternal delight.'

Yet, to Nietzsche, with his strange, scientific distrust of the
imagination, of those who so 'suspiciously' say 'We see what others
do not see,' there comes distrust, hesitation, a kind of despair,
precisely at the point where Blake enters into his liberty. 'The habits
of our senses,' says Nietzsche, 'have plunged us into the lies and
deceptions of feeling.' 'Whoever believes in nature,' says Blake,
'disbelieves in God; for nature is the work of the Devil.' 'These
again,' Nietzsche goes on, 'are the foundations of all our judgments
and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or
by-way into the real world.' But the real world, to Blake, into which
he can escape at every moment, is the world of imagination, from
which messengers come to him, daily and nightly.

Blake said 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of
instruction,' and it is partly in what they helped to destroy that
Blake and Nietzsche are at one; but destruction, with Blake, was
the gesture of a hand which brushes aside needless hindrances,
while to Nietzsche it was 'an intellectual thing,' the outer militant
part of 'the silent, self-sufficient man in the midst of a general
enslavement, who practices self-defense against the outside world,
and is constantly living in a state of supreme fortitude.' Blake rejoins
Nietzsche as he had rejoined Spinoza, by a different road, having
fewer devils to cast out, and no difficulty at all in maintaining his
spiritual isolation, his mental liberty, under all circumstances.
And to Blake, to be 'myself alone, shut up in myself,' was to be in no
merely individual but in a universal world, that world of imagination
whose gates seemed to him to be open to every human being. No
less than Nietzsche he says to every man:  Be yourself, nothing else
matters or exists; but to be myself, to him, was to enter by the
imagination into eternity.

The philosophy of Nietzsche was made out of his nerves and
was suffering, but to Blake it entered like sunlight into the eyes.
Nietzsche's mind is the most sleepless of minds; with him every
sensation turns instantly into the stuff of thought; he is terribly
alert, the more so because he never stops to systematize; he must
be for ever apprehending. He darts out feelers in every direction,
relentlessly touching the whole substance of the world. His apprehension
is minute rather than broad; he is content to seize one thing at a time,
and he is content if each separate thing remains separate; no theory ties
together or limits his individual intuitions. What we call his philosophy
is really no more than the aggregate of these intuitions coming to us
through the medium of a remarkable personality. His personality stands
to him in the place of a system. Speaking of Kant and Schopenhauer,
he says: 'Their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of the
soul.' His thoughts are the passionate history of his soul. It is for this
reason that he is an artist among philosophers rather than a pure
philosopher. And remember that he is also not, in the absolute sense,
the poet, but the artist. He saw and dreaded the weaknesses of the
artist, his side-issues in the pursuit of truth. But in so doing he
dreaded one of his own weaknesses.

Blake, on the other hand, receives nothing through his sensations,
suffers nothing through his nerves. 'I know of no other Christianity,'
he says, '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.' To Nietzsche the sense
of a divine haunting became too heavy a burden for his somewhat
inhuman solitude, the solitude of Alpine regions, with their steadfast
glitter, their thin, high, intoxicating air. 'Is this obtrusiveness of
heaven,' he cries, 'this inevitable superhuman neighbor, not enough
to drive one mad?' But Blake, when he says, 'I am under the direction
of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly,' speaks out of natural
joy, which is wholly humility, and it is only 'if we fear to do the
dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us,' it is
only then that he dreads, as the one punishment, that 'every one in
eternity will leave him.'



II


'There are three powers in man of conversing with Paradise,'
said Blake, and he defined them as the three sons of Noah who
survived the flood, and who are Poetry, Painting, and Music. Through
all three powers, and to the last moments of his life on earth, Blake
conversed with Paradise. We are told that he used to sing his own
songs to his own music, and that, when he was dying, 'he composed
and uttered songs to his Maker,' and 'burst out into singing
of the things he saw in heaven.' And with almost the last strength
of his hands he had made a sketch of his wife before he 'made
the rafters ring,' as a bystander records, with the improvisation of
is last breath.

Throughout life his desire had been, as he said, 'to converse
with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy
and speak parables unobserved.' He says again:


'I rest not from my great task
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal
eyes
Of Man inwards into the worlds of thought, into
eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human
imagination.'


And, writing to the uncomprehending Hayley (who had called him
'gentle, visionary Blake'), he says again: 'I am really drunk with
intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.'
To the newspapers of his time, on the one or two occasions when they
mentioned his name, he was 'an unfortunate lunatic'; even to Lamb,
who looked upon him as 'one of the most extraordinary persons of
the age,' he was a man 'flown, whither I know not--to Hades or
a madhouse.' To the first editor of his collected poems there seemed
to be 'something in his mind not exactly sane'; and the critics of to-day
still discuss his sanity as a man and as a poet.

It is true that Blake was abnormal; but what was abnormal in him
was his sanity. To one who believed that 'The ruins of Time build
mansions in eternity,' that 'imagination is eternity,' and that 'our
deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent
to our mortal part,' there could be none of that confusion at the edge
of mystery which makes a man mad because he is unconscious of the
gulf. No one was ever more conscious than Blake was of the limits of
that region which we call reality and of that other region which we call
imagination. It pleased him to reject the one and to dwell in the other,
and his choice was not the choice of most men, but of some of those
who have been the greatest saints and the greatest artists. And, like
the most authentic among them, he walked firmly among those realities
to which he cared to give no more than a side-glance from time to time;
he lived his own life quietly and rationally, doing always exactly what
he wanted to do, and with so fine a sense of the subtlety of mere worldly
manners, than when, at his one moment of worldly success, in 1793, he
refused the post of drawing-master to the royal family, he gave up all
his other pupils at the same time, lest the refusal should seem ungracious
on the part of one who had been the friend of revolutionaries. He saw
visions, but not as the spiritualists and the magicians have seen them.
These desire to quicken mortal sight until the soul limits itself again,
takes body, and returns to reality; but Blake, the inner mystic, desired
only to quicken that imagination which he knew to be more real than
the reality of nature. Why should he call up shadows when he could
talk in the spirit with spiritual realities? 'Then I asked,' he says in
_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, 'does a firm persuasion
that a thing is so, make it so?' He replied, "All poets believe that it
does."

In the _Descriptive Catalogue_ to his exhibition of pictures
in 1809, Blake defines, more precisely than in any other place, what
vision was to him. He is speaking of his pictures, but it is a plea for
the raising of painting to the same 'sphere of invention and visionary
conception' as that which poetry and music inhabit. 'The Prophets,'
he says, 'describe what they saw in vision as real and existing men,
whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs; the
Apostles the same; the clearer the organ, the more distinct the
object. A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy
supposes, a cloudy vapor, or a nothing. They are organized and
minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature
can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments
and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can
see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all
his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more
minutely organized than anything seen by his mortal eye.' 'Inspiration
and vision,' he says in one of the marginal notes to Reynolds's
_Discourses_, 'was then, and now is, and I hope will always
remain, my element, my eternal dwelling-place.' And 'God forbid,'
he says also, 'that Truth should be confined to mathematical
demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is not worthy
of her notice.'

The mind of Blake lay open to eternity as a seed-plot lies open
to the sower. In 1802 he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham: 'I
am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what ought to be
told--that I am under the direction of messengers from heaven,
daily and nightly.' 'I have written this poem,' he says of the
_Jerusalem_, 'from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes
twenty or--thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even
against my will.' 'I may praise it,' he says in another letter, 'since
I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are
in eternity.' In these words, the most precise claim for direct
inspiration which Blake ever made, there is nothing different in kind,
only in degree, from what must be felt by every really creative artist
and by every profoundly and simply religious person. There can hardly
be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are
under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the
artist should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem
is not written by the man who says: I will sit down and write a poem;
but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing an impulse,
hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does
not remember, in some 'close corner of his brain,' and exerts the only
energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his
particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure
desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and,
aiming at most other things in the world than pure beauty, produced it.
Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for
him to remember that the result, the end, must be judged, not by the
impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought
to serve, but by its success or failure in one thing: the creation of
beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he
has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness
of what he is doing. Only in the greatest do we find vision and the
correction of vision equally powerful and equally constant.

To Blake, as to some artists and to most devout people, there was
nothing in vision to correct, nothing even to modify. His language in
all his letters and in much of his printed work is identical with the
language used by the followers of Wesley and Whitefield at the time
in which he was writing. In Wesley's journal you will find the same
simple and immediate consciousness of the communion of the soul
with the world of spiritual reality: not a vague longing, like Shelley's,
for a principle of intellectual beauty, nor an unattained desire after
holiness, like that of the conventionally religious person, but a literal
'power of conversing with Paradise,' as Blake called it, and as many
Methodists would have been equally content to call it. And in Blake,
as in those whom the people of that age called 'enthusiasts' (that word
of reproach in the eighteenth century and of honor in all other
centuries), there was no confusion (except in brains where 'true
superstition,' as Blake said, was 'ignorant honesty, and this is beloved
of God and man') between the realities of daylight and these other
realities from the other side of day. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote a
mysterious note written in Blake's handwriting, with a reference
to Spurzheim, page 154. I find that this means Spurzheim's _Observations
on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity_ (1817),
and the passage in the text is as follows: 'Religion is another fertile
cause of insanity. Mr. Haslam, though he declares it sinful to consider
religion as a cause of insanity, adds, however, that he would be
ungrateful, did he not avow his obligations to Methodism for its
supply of numerous cases. Hence the primitive feelings of religion may
be misled and produce insanity; that is what I would contend for,
and in that sense religion often leads to insanity.' Blake has written:
'Methodism, etc., p. 154. Cowper came to me and said: "Oh! that I
were insane, always. I will never rest. Can not you make me truly
insane? I will never rest till I am so. Oh! that in the bosom of God
I was hid. You retain health and yet are mad as any of us all-over
us all--mad as a refuge from unbelief--from Bacon, Newton, and
Locke."' What does this mean but that 'madness,' the madness of
belief in spiritual things, must be complete if it is to be effectual,
and that, once complete, there is no disturbance of bodily or mental
health, as in the doubting and distracted Cowper, who was driven mad,
not by the wildness of his belief, but by the hesitations of his doubt?

Attempts have been made to claim Blake for an adept of magic.
But whatever cabbalistical terms he may have added to the somewhat
composite and fortuitous naming of his mythology ('all but names of
persons and places,' he says, 'is invention, both in poetry and
painting'), his whole mental attitude was opposed to that of the
practicers of magic. We have no record of his ever having evoked a
vision, but only of his accepting or enduring visions. Blake was,
above all, spontaneous: the practiser of magic is a deliberate craftsman
in the art of the soul. I can no more imagine Blake sitting down to juggle
with symbols or to gaze into a pool of ink than I can imagine him
searching out words that would make the best effects in his lyrics,
or fishing for inspiration, pen in hand, in his own ink-pot. A man does
not beg at the gate of dreams when he is the master for whose entrance
the gate stands open.

Of the definite reality of Blake's visions there can be no question;
no question that, as he once wrote, 'nothing can withstand the fury
of my course among the stars of God, and in the abysses of the accuser.'
But imagination is not one, but manifold; and the metaphor, professing
to be no more than metaphor, of the poet, may be vision as essential as
the thing actually seen by the visionary. The difference between
imagination  in Blake and in, say, Shakespeare, is that the one (himself
a painter) has a visual imagination and sees an image or metaphor as
a literal reality, while the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a
more purely mental way, adds a 'like' or an 'as,' and the image or
metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation, and takes you
less by surprise. But to Blake it was the universe that was a metaphor.



WILLIAM BLAKE



I


The origin of the family of William Blake has not yet been found;
and I can claim no more for the evidence that I have been able to gather
than that it settles us more firmly in our ignorance. But the names of his
brothers and sister, their dates and order of birth, and the date of his
wife's birth, have never, so far as I know, been correctly given. Even the
date of his own birth has been contested by Mr. Swinburne 'on good
MS. authority,' which we know to be that of Frederick Tatham, who
further asserts, wrongly, that James was younger than William, and
that John was 'the eldest son.' Gilchrist makes no reference to John,
but says, wrongly, that James was 'a year and a half William's senior,'
and that William had a sister 'nearly seven years younger than himself';
of whom, says Mr. Yeats, we hear little, and among that little not
even her name.' Most of these problems can be settled by the entries
in parish registers, and I have begun with the registers of the church
of St. James, Westminster.

I find by these entries that James Blake, the son of James and
Catherine Blake, was born July 10, and christened July 15, 1753; John
Blake ('son of John and Catherine,' says the register, by what is probably
a slip of the pen) was horn May 12, and christened June I, 1755; William
Blake was born November 28, and christened December 11, 1757; another
John Blake was born March 20, and christened March 30, 1760; Richard
Blake was born June 19, and christened July 11, 1762; and Catherine
Elizabeth Blake was born January 7, and christened January 28, 1764.
Here, where we find the daughter's name and the due order of births,
we find one perplexity in the name of Richard, whose date of birth fits
the date given by Gilchrist and others to Robert, William's favorite
brother, whose name he has engraved on a design of his 'spiritual form'
in _Milton_, whom he calls Robert in a letter to Butts, and whom
J. T. Smith recalls not only as Robert, but as 'Bob, as he was familiarly
called.' In the entry of 'John, son of John and Catherine Blake,' I can
easily imagine the clerk repeating by accident the name of the son
for the name of the father; and I am inclined to suppose that there
was a John who died before the age of five, and that his name was
given to the son next born. Precisely the same repetition of name is
found in the case of Lamb's two sisters christened Elizabeth, and
Shelley's two sisters christened Helen. 'My brother John, the evil one,'
would therefore be younger than William; but Tatham, in saying that
he was older, may have been misled by there having been two sons
christened John.

There are two theories as to the origin of Blake's family; but neither
of them has yet been confirmed by the slightest documentary evidence.
Both of these theories were put forth in the same year, 1893, one by Mr.
Alfred T. Story in his _William Blake,_ the other by Messrs. Ellis
and Yeats in their _Works of William Blake_. According to Mr. Story,
Blake's family was connected with the Somerset family of the Admiral,
through a Wiltshire family of Blakes; but for this theory he gives merely
the report of 'two ladies, daughters of William John Blake, of
Southampton, who claim to be second cousins of William Blake,'
and in a private letter he tells me that he has not been able to procure
any documentary evidence of the statement. According to Messrs. Ellis
and Yeats, Blake's father was Irish, and was originally called O'Neil. His
father, John O'Neil, is supposed to have changed his name, on marrying
Ellen Blake, from O'Neil to Blake, and James O'Neil, his son by a previous
union, to have taken the same name, and to have settled in London,
while a younger son, the actual son of Ellen Blake, went to Malaga. This
statement rests entirely on the assertion of Dr. Carter Blake, who claimed
descent from the latter; and it has never been supported by documentary
evidence. In answer, to my inquiry, Mr. Martin J. Blake, the compiler of
two volumes of _Blake Family Records_ (first series, 1300-1600;
second series, 1600-1700), writes: 'Although I have made a special study
of the genealogies  of the Blakes of Ireland, I have not come across any
Ellen Blake who married John O'Neil who afterwards (as is said by Messrs.
Ellis and Yeats) adopted the surname of Blake.'

Mr. Sampson points out that Blakes father was certainly a Protestant.
He is sometimes described as a Swedenborgian, always as a Dissenter,
and it is curious that about half of the Blakes recorded in the
_Dictionary of National Biography_ were also conspicuous as
Puritans or Dissenters. Mr. Sampson further points out that Blake
in one of his poems speaks of himself as 'English Blake.' It is true that
he is contrasting himself with the German Klopstock; yet I scarcely think
an Irishman would have used the expression even for contrast. Blake
is nowhere referred to as having been in any way Irish, and the only
apparent exception to this is one which I am obliged to set up with one
hand and knock down with the other. In the index to Crabb Robinson's
_Diary_ one of the references to Blake shows us Mr. Sheil speaking
at the Academical Society while 'Blake, his countryman, kept watching
him to keep him in order.' That this does not refer to William Blake I
have found by tracking through the unpublished portions of the
_Diary_ in the original manuscript the numerous references to
'a Mr. Blake' who was accustomed to speak at the meetings of the
Academical Society. He is described as 'a Mr. Blake who spoke with
good sense on the Irish side, and argued from the Irish History and
the circumstances which attended the passing of the bills.' He afterwards
speaks 'sharply and coarsely,' and answers Mr. Robinson's hour-long
contention that the House of Commons should, or should not, 'possess
the power of imprisoning for a breach of privilege,' by 'opposing the
facts of Lord Melville's prosecution, the Be version Bill, etc., etc., and
Burke's Reform Bill'; returning, in short, 'my civility by incivility.'
This was not the learning, nor were these the manners, of William
Blake.

I would again appeal to the evidence of the parish register. I find
Blakes in the parish of St. James, Westminster, from the beginning of
the eighteenth century, the first being a William Blake, the son of
Richard and Elizabeth, who was born March 19, 1700. Between the
years 1750 and 1767 (the time exactly parallel with the births of the
family of James and Catherine Blake) I find among the baptisms the
names of Frances, Daniel, Reuben, John Cartwright, and William
(another William) Blake; and I find among the marriages, between 1728
and 1747, a Robert, a Thomas, a James, and a Richard Blake. The wife
of James, who was married on April 15, 1738, is called Elizabeth, a name
which we have already found as the name of a Mrs. Blake, and which we
find again as the second name of Catherine Elizabeth Blake (the sister of
William Blake), who was born in 1764. I find two Williams, two Richards,
and a John among the early entries, at the beginning of the eighteenth
century. It is impossible to say positively that any of these families,
not less than nine in number, all bearing the name of Blake, all living
in the same parish, within a space of less than forty years, were related
to one another; but it is easier to suppose so than to suppose that one
only out of the number, and one which had assumed the name, should have
found itself accidentally in the midst of all the others, to which the
name may be supposed to have more definitely belonged.

All that we know with certainty of James Blake, the father, is that
he was a hosier ('of respectable trade and easy habits,' says Tatham;
'of fifty years' standing,' says Cunningham, at the time of his
death), that he was a Dissenter (a Swedenborgian, or inclined to
Swedenborgianism), and that he died in 1784 and was buried on July 4
in Bunhill Fields. The burial register says: 'July 4, 1784. Mr. James
Blake from Soho Square in a grave, 13/6.' Of his wife Catherine all
that we know is that she died in 1792, and was also buried in Bunhill
Fields. The register says: 'Sept. 9, 1792. Catherine Blake; age 70;
brought from St. James, Westminster. Grave 9 feet; E. & W. 16;
N. & S. 42-43. 19/-.' Tatham says that 'even when a child, his mother
beat him for running and saying that he saw the prophet Ezekiel
under a tree in the fields.' At eight or ten he comes home from Peckham
Rye saying that he has seen a tree filled with angels; and his father is
going to beat him for telling a lie; but his mother intercedes. It was the
father, Tatham says, who, noticing to what great anger he was moved
by a blow, decided not to send him to school.

The eldest son, James, Tatham tells us, 'having a saving,
somniferous mind, lived a yard and a half life, and pestered his brother
with timid sentences of bread and cheese advice.' On his father's death
in 1784 he carried on the business, and it was at his house that Blake
held his one exhibition of pictures in 1809. 'These paintings filled
several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house,' says Crabb Robinson
in his _Reminiscences_; and, telling how he had bought four copies
of the catalogue, 'giving 10/-, I bargained that I should be at liberty
to go again. "Free! as long as you live!" said the brother, astonished
at such a liberality, which he had never experienced before nor I dare
say did afterwards.' Crabb Robinson had at first written 'as long as you
like,' and this he altered into 'as long as you live,' as if fancying, so
long afterwards as 1852, that he remembered the exact word; but
in the entry in the _Diary_, in 1810, we read 'Oh! as often as
you please!' so that we may doubt whether the 'honest, unpretending
shopkeeper,' who was looked upon by his neighbors, we are told, as
'a bit mad,' because he would 'talk Swedenborg,' can be credited with
all the enthusiasm of the later and more familiar reading. James and
William no longer spoke to one another when, after retiring from
business, James came to live in Cirencester Street, near Linnell. Tatham
tells us that 'he got together a little annuity, upon which he supported
his only sister, and vegetating to a moderate age, died about three years
before his brother William.'

Of John we know only that he was something of a scapegrace
and the favorite son of his parents. He was apprenticed, at some cost,
to a candle-maker, but ran away, and, after some help from William,
enlisted in the army, lived wildly, and died young. Robert, the favorite
of William, also died young, at the age of twenty-five. He lived with
William and Catherine from 1784 to the time of his death in 1787,
at 27 Broad Street, helping in the print-shop of 'Parker and Blake,'
and learning from his brother to draw and engrave. One of his original
sketches, a stiff drawing of long, rigid, bearded figures staring in
terror, quite in his brother's manner, is in the Print Room of the
British Museum. A story is told of him by Gilchrist which gives us
the whole man, indeed the whole household, in brief. There had
been a dispute between him and Mrs. Blake. Blake suddenly interposed,
and said to his wife: 'Kneel down and beg Robert's pardon directly,
or you will never see my face again.' She knelt down (thinking
it, as she said afterwards, 'very hard,' for she felt herself to be in the
right) and said: 'Robert, I beg your pardon; I am in the wrong.' 'Young
woman, you lie,' said Robert, 'I am in the wrong.'

Early in 1787 Robert fell ill, and during the last fortnight
William nursed him without taking rest by day or night, until, at
the moment of death, he saw his brother's soul rise through the
ceiling 'clapping its hands for joy'; whereupon he went to bed and
slept for three days and nights. Robert was buried in Bunhill Fields
on February 11. The register says: "Feb. 11, 1787. Mr. Robert Blake
from Golden Square in a grave, 13/6." But his spiritual presence was
never to leave the mind of William Blake, whom in 1800 we find
writing to Hayley: 'Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his
spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in
remembrance, in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice,
and even now write from his dictate.' It was Robert whom he saw
in a dream, not long after his death, telling him the method by
which he was to engrave his poems and designs. The spiritual
forms of William and of Robert, in almost exact parallel, are
engraved on separate pages of the Prophetic Book of _Milton._

Of the sister, Catherine Elizabeth, we know only that she
lived with Blake and his wife at Felpham. He refers to her in
several letters, and in the poem sent to Butts on October 2, 1800,
he speaks of her as 'my sister and friend.' In another poem,
sent to Butts in a letter dated November 22, 1802, but written, he
explains, 'above a twelvemonth ago, while walking from Felpham
to Lavant to meet my sister,' he asks strangely:


'Must my wife live in my sister's bane,
Or my sister survive on my Love's pain?'


But from the context it is not clear whether this is meant
literally or figuratively. When Tatham was writing his life of Blake,
apparently in the year 1831, he refers to 'Miss Catherine' as still
living, 'having survived nearly all her relations.' Mrs. Gilchrist, in
a letter written to Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 1862, reports a rumour,
for which she gives no evidence, that 'she and Mrs. Blake got on
very ill together, and latterly never met at all,' and that she died
in extreme penury.



II


Of the childhood and youth of Blake we know little beyond
what Malkin and Smith have to tell us. From the age of ten to the
age of fourteen he studied at Pars' drawing-school in the Strand,
buying for himself prints after Raphael, Dürer, and Michelangelo
at the sale-rooms; at fourteen he was apprenticed to Basire, the
engraver, who lived at 31 Great Queen Street, and in his shop
Blake once saw Goldsmith. 'His love for art increasing,' says
Tatham,  and the time of life having arrived when it was deemed
necessary to place him under some tutor, a painter of eminence was
proposed, and necessary applications were made; but from the huge
premium required, he requested, with his characteristic generosity,
that his father would not on any account spend so much money on
him, as he thought it would be an injustice to his brothers and
sisters. He therefore himself proposed engraving as being less
expensive, and sufficiently eligible for his future avocations.
Of Basire, therefore, for a premium of fifty guineas, he learnt the
art of engraving.' We are told that he was apprenticed, at his own
request, to Basire rather than to the more famous Ryland, the
engraver to the king, because, on being taken by his father to
Ryland's studio, he said: 'I do not like the man's face: it looks
as if he will live to be hanged.' Twelve years later Ryland was
hanged for forgery.

Blake was with Basire for seven years, and for the last five
years much of his time was spent in making drawings of Gothic
monuments, chiefly in Westminster Abbey, until he came, says
Malkin, to be 'himself almost a Gothic monument.' Tatham tells
us that the reason of his being 'sent out drawing,' as he fortunately
was, instead of being kept at engraving, was 'for the circumstance
of his having frequent quarrels with his fellow--apprentices
concerning matters of intellectual argument.'

It was in the Abbey that he had a vision of Christ and the
Apostles, and in the Abbey, too, that he flung an intrusive
Westminster schoolboy from the scaffolding, 'in the impetuosity
of his anger, worn out with interruption,' says Tatham, and then
laid a complaint before the Dean which has caused, to this day,
the exclusion of Westminster schoolboys from the precincts.

It was at this time that Blake must have written the larger
part of the poems contained in the _Poetical Sketches_, printed
(we cannot say published) in 1783, for in the 'Advertisement'
at the beginning of the book we are told that the 'following Sketches
were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth,
and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year,' that
is to say, between the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written
while Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may believe
these dates) after Chatterton's death, but before his poems had been
published. Ossian had appeared in 1760, Percy's _Reliques_ in
1765. The _Reliques_ probably had their influence on Blake,
Ossian certainly, an influence which returns much later, curiously mingled
with the influence of Milton, in the form taken by the Prophetic Books.
It has been suggested that some of Blake's mystical names, and his
'fiend in a cloud,' came from Ossian; and Ossian is very evident in the
metrical prose of such pieces as 'Samson,' and even in some of the
imagery ('Their helmed youth and aged warriors in dust together lie,
and Desolation spreads his wings over the land of Palestine'). But the
influence of Chatterton seems not less evident, an influence which could
hardly have found its way to Blake before the year 1777. In the fifth
chapter of the fantastic _Island in the Moon_ (probably written
about 1784) there is a long discussion on Chatterton, while in the seventh
chapter he is again discussed in company with Homer, Shakespeare, and
Milton. As late as 1826 Blake wrote on the margin of Wordsworth's preface
to the _Lyrical Ballads_: 'I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton
that what they say is ancient is so,' and on another page, 'I own myself
an admirer of Ossian equally with any poet whatever, of Rowley and
Chatterton also.' Whether it be influence or affinity, it is hard to say,
but if the 'Mad Song' of Blake has the hint of any predecessor in our
literature, it is to be found in the abrupt energy and stormy masculine
splendor of the High Priest's song in 'Aella,' 'Ye who his yn mokie ayre';
and if, between the time of the Elizabethans and the time of 'My silks
and fine array' there had been any other song of similar technique and
similar imaginative temper, it was certainly the Minstrel's song in
'Aella,' 'O! synge untoe mie roundelaie.'

Of the direct and very evident influence of the Elizabethans we
are told by Malkin, with his quaint preciseness: 'Shakespeare's
_Venus and Adonis_, _Tarquin and Lucrece,_ and his _Sonnets_...
poems, now little read, were favorite studies of Mr. Blake's early
days. So were Jonson's _Underwoods_ and his _Miscellanies._'
'My silks and fine array' goes past Jonson, and reaches Fletcher, if
not Shakespeare himself. And the blank verse of 'King Edward the
Third' goes straight to Shakespeare for its cadence, and for something
of its manner of speech. And there is other blank verse which, among
much not even metrically correct, anticipates something of the richness
of Keats.

Some rags of his time did indeed cling about him, but only by
the edges; there is even a reflected ghost of the pseudo-Gothic
of Walpole in 'Fair Elenor,' who comes straight from the _Castle
of Otranto_, as 'Gwin, King of Norway,' takes after the Scandinavian
fashion of the day, and may have been inspired by 'The Fatal Sisters' or
'The Triumphs of Owen' of Gray. Blind-man's Buff,' too, is a piece of
eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it is in the ode 'To the Muses'
that Blake for once accepts, and in so doing clarifies, the smooth
convention of eighteenth--century classicism, and, as he
reproaches it in its own speech, illuminates it suddenly with the light
it had rejected:


'How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoyed in you!
The languid strings do scarcely move,
The sound is forced, the notes are few!'


In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music, and from this
time forward we find in the rest of Blake's work only a proof of his own
assertion, that 'the ages are all equal; but genius is above the age.'

In 1778 Blake's apprenticeship to Basire came to an end, and for
a short time he studied in the Antique School at the newly founded
Royal Academy under Moser, the first keeper. In the Life of Reynolds
which prefaces the 1798 edition of the _Discourses_, Moser is
spoken of as one who 'might in every sense be called the Father of the
present race of Artists.' Blake has written against this in his copy: 'I
was once looking over the prints from Raphael and Michael Angelo
in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said,
"You should not study these old hard, stiff, and dry unfinished works
of art. Stay a little, and I will show you what you should study." He then
went and took down Le Brun's and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly
rage: I also spoke my mind. I said to Moser, "These things that you call
finished are not even begun: how can they then be finished? The man
who does not know the beginning never can know the end of art."'
Malkin tells us that Blake 'professed drawing from life always to have
been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more like death, or
smelling of mortality. Yet still he drew a good deal from life, both at
the Academy and at home.' A water-color drawing dating from this time,
'The Penance of Jane Shore,' was included by Blake in his exhibition of
1809. It is the last number in the catalogue, and has the note: 'This
Drawing was done above Thirty Years ago, and proves to the Author,
and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of
our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential respects.' He
also did engravings, during several years, for the booksellers, Harrison,
Johnson, and others, some of them after Stothard, who was then working
for the _Novelist's Magazine._ Blake met Stothard in 1780, and
Stothard introduced him to Flaxman, with whom he had himself just
become acquainted. In the same year Blake met Fuseli, who settled near
him in Broad Street, while Flaxman, on his marriage in 1781, came to
live near by, at 27 Wardour Street. Bartolozzi and John Yarley were
both, then or later, living in Broad Street, Angelica Kauffmann in Golden
Square. In 1780 (the year of the Gordon Biots, when Blake, carried along
by the crowd, saw the burning of Newgate) he had for the first time a
picture in the Royal Academy, the water-color of 'The Death of Earl
Godwin.'

It was at this time, in his twenty-fourth year, that he fell in
love with 'a lively little girl' called Polly Wood. Tatham calls her
'a young woman, who by his own account, and according to his
own knowledge, was no trifler. He wanted to marry her, but she
refused, and was as obstinate as she was unkind.' Gilchrist says
that on his complaining to her that she had 'kept company' with
others besides himself, she asked him if he was a fool. 'That cured
me of jealousy,' he said afterwards, but the cure, according to Tatham,
made him so ill that he was sent for change of air to 'Kew, near Richmond'
(really to Battersea), to the house of 'a market-gardener whose name
was Boutcher.' While there, says Tatham, 'he was relating to the daughter,
a girl named Catherine, the lamentable story of Polly Wood, his implacable
lass, upon which Catherine expressed her deep sympathy, it is supposed,
in such a tender and affectionate manner, that it quite won him. He
immediately said, with the suddenness peculiar to him, "Do you pity
me? Yes, indeed I do," answered she. "Then I love you," said he again.
Such was their courtship. He was impressed by her tenderness of mind,
and her answer indicated her previous feeling for him: for she has often
said that upon her mother's asking her who among her acquaintances
she could fancy for a husband, she replied that she had not yet seen
the man, and she has further been heard to say that when she first came
into the room in which Blake sat, she instantly recognized (like Britomart
in Merlin's wondrous glass) her future partner, and was so near fainting
that she left his presence until she recovered.' Tatham tells us that Blake
'returned to his lodgings and worked incessantly' for a whole year,
resolving that he would not see her until he had succeeded' in making
enough money to be able to marry her. The marriage took place at
Battersea in August 1762.

Gilchrist says that he has traced relatives of Blake to have been
living at Battersea at the time of his marriage. Of this he gives no
evidence; but I think I have found traces, in Blake's own parish, of
relatives of the Catherine Boucher whom he married at Battersea.
Tatham, as we have seen, says that she was the daughter of a
market-gardener at 'Kew, near Richmond,' called Boutcher, to whose
house Blake was sent for a change of air. Allan Cunningham says that
'she lived near his father's house.' I think I have found the reason for
Cunningham's mistake, and the probable occasion of Blake's visit to
the Bouchers at Battersea. I find by the birth register in St. Mary's,
Battersea, that Catherine Sophia, daughter of William and Ann Boucher,
was born April 25, and christened May 16, 1762. Four years after this,
another Catherine Boucher, daughter of Samuel and Betty, born March 28,
1766, was christened March 31, 1766, in the parish church of St. James,
Westminster; and in the same register I find the birth of Gabriel, son of
the same parents, born September 1, and christened September 20, 1767;
and of Ann, daughter of Thomas and Ann Boucher, born June 12, and
christened June 29, 1761. Is it not, therefore, probable that there were
Bouchers, related to one another, living in both parishes, and that
Blake's acquaintance with the family living near him led to his going
to stay with the family living at Battersea?

The entry of Blake's marriage, in the register of St. Mary's Battersea,
gives the name as Butcher, and also describes Blake as 'of the parish
of Battersea,' by a common enough error. It is as follows:--


1782.

Banns of Marriage.

No. 281 William Blake of the Parish of Battersea Batchelor and
Catherine Butcher of the same Parish Spinster were Married in this
Church by License this Eighteenth Day of August in the Year One
Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty two by me J. Gardnor Vicar.
This Marriage was solemnized between Us.

William Blake
The mark of X Catherine Butcher.

In the presence of Thomas Monger Butcher.

Jas. Blake
Robt. Munday Parish Clerk.


I imagine that Thomas Monger Butcher was probably Catherine's
brother; there are other Mongers not far off in the register, as if the
name were a family name. His handwriting is mean and untidy, James
Blake's vague but fluent; Catherine makes her mark somewhat faintly.
As the register lies open there are entries of seven marriages; out of
these, no fewer than three of the brides have signed by making their
mark. The name William Blake stands out from these 'blotted and
blurred' signatures; the ink is very black, as if he had pressed hard
on the pen; and the name has a 'firm and determinate outline.'

Gilchrist describes Catherine Boucher as 'a bright-eyed, dark-haired
brunette, with expressive features and a slim, graceful form.' This
seems to be merely a re-writing of Allan Cunningham's vague statement
that she 'was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, the
brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding
with his own notions of sylphs and naiads.' But if a quaint and lovely
pencil sketch in the Rossetti MS., representing a man in bed and a
woman sitting on the side of the bed, beginning to dress, is really, as
it probably is, done from life, and meant for Mrs. Blake, we see at once
the model for his invariable type of woman, tall, slender, and with
unusually long legs. There is a drawing of her head by Blake in the
Rossetti MS. which, though apparently somewhat conventionalized,
shows a clear aquiline profile and very large eyes; still to be divined
in the rather painful head drawn by Tatham when she was an old woman,
a head in which there is still power and fixity. Crabb Robinson, who met
her in 1825, says that she had 'a good expression in her countenance,
and, with a dark eye, remains of beauty in her youth.'

No man of genius ever had a better wife. To the last she called
him 'Mr. Blake,' while he, we are told, frequently spoke of her as 'his
beloved.' The most beautiful reference to her which I find in his letters
is one in a letter of September 16, 1800, to Hayley, where he calls her
'my dear and too careful and over-joyous woman,' and says 'Eartham
will be my first temple and altar; my wife is like a flame of many colours
of precious jewels whenever she hears it named.' He taught her to
write, and the copy-book titles to some of his water-colors are probably
hers; to draw, so that after his death she finished some of his designs;
and to help him in the printing and coloring of his engravings. A story
is told, on the authority of Samuel Palmer, that they would both look
into the flames of burning coals, and draw grotesque figures which they
saw there, hers quite unlike his. 'It is quite certain,' says Crabb
Robinson, 'that she believed in all his visions'; and he shows her to
us reminding her husband, 'You know, dear, the first time you saw
God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the
window, and set you a-screaming,' She would walk with him into the
country, whole summer days, says Tatham, and far into the night. And
when he rose in the night, to write down what was 'dictated' to him,
she would rise and sit by him, and hold his hand. 'She would get up
in the night,' says the unnamed friend quoted by Gilchrist, 'when he
was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would
tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or
whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible
a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent;
only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot; this for hours,
and night after night.' 'His wife being to him a very patient woman,'
says Tatham, who speaks of Mrs. Blake as 'an irradiated saint,' 'he
fancied that while she looked on him as he worked, her sitting quite
still by his side, doing nothing, soothed his impetuous mind; and he
has many a time, when a strong desire presented itself to overcome
any difficulty in his plates or drawings, in the middle of the night,
risen, and requested her to get up with him, and sit by his side, in
which she as cheerfully acquiesced.' 'Rigid, punctual, firm, precise,'
she has been described; a good housewife and a good cook; refusing
to have a servant not only because of the cost, but because no servant
could be scrupulous enough to satisfy her. 'Finding,' says Tatham '(as
Mrs. Blake declared, and as every one else knows), the more service
the more inconvenience, she... did all the work herself, kept the house
clean and herself tidy, besides printing all Blake's numerous engravings,
which was a task sufficient for any industrious woman.' He tells us in
another place: 'it is a fact known to the writer, that Mrs. Blake's
frugality always kept a guinea or sovereign for any emergency, of which
Blake never knew, even to the day of his death.'

Tatham says of Blake at the time of his marriage: 'Although not
handsome, he must have had a most noble countenance, full of
expression and animation; his hair was of a yellow brown, and curled
with the utmost crispness and luxuriance; his locks, instead of falling
down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like
radiations, which with his fiery eye and expressive forehead, his
dignified and cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appearance
truly prepossessing.' In another place he says: 'William Blake in stature
was short [he was not quite five and a half feet in height], but well
made, and very well proportioned; so much so that West, the great
history painter, admired much the form of his limbs; he had a large
head and wide shoulders. Elasticity and promptitude of action were the
characteristics of his contour. His motions were rapid and energetic,
betokening a mind filled with elevated enthusiasm; his forehead was
very high and prominent over the frontals; his eye most unusually
large and glassy, with which he appeared to look into some other
world.' His eyes were prominent, 'large, dark, and expressive,' says
Allan Cunningham; the flashing of his eyes remained in the memory
of an old man who had seen him in court at Chichester in 1804. His
nose, though 'snubby,' as he himself describes it, had 'a little clenched
nostril, a nostril that opened as far as it could, but was tied down at
the end.' The mouth was large and sensitive; the forehead, larger
below than above, as he himself noted, was broad and high; and the
whole face, as one sees it in what is probably the best likeness we have,
Linnell's miniature of 1827, was full of irregular splendor, eager,
eloquent, ecstatic; eyes and mouth and nostrils all as if tense with a
continual suction, drinking up 'large draughts of intellectual day' with
impatient haste. 'Infinite impatience,' says Swinburne, 'as of a great
preacher or apostle--intense  tremulous vitality, as of a great
orator--seem to me to give his face the look of one who can
do all things but hesitate.'

After his marriage in August 1782 (which has been said to have
displeased his father, though Tatham says it was 'with the approbation
and consent of his parents'), Blake took lodgings at 23 Green Street,
Leicester Fields (now pulled down), which was only the square's length
away from Sir Joshua Reynolds. Flaxman had married in 1781, and had
taken a house at 27 Wardour Street and it was probably he who, about
this time, introduced Blake to 'the accomplished Mrs. Matthew,' whose
drawing-room in Rathbone Place was frequented by literary and artistic
people. Mr. Matthew, a clergyman of taste, who is said to have 'read the
church service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,'
had discovered Flaxman, when a little boy, learning Latin behind the
counter in his father's shop. 'From this incident,' says J. T. Smith in
his notice of Flaxman, 'Mr. Matthew continued to notice him, and, as
he grew up, became his first and best friend. Later on, he was introduced
to Mrs. Matthew, who was so kind as to read Homer to him, whilst he
made designs on the same table with her at the time she was reading.'
It was apparently at the Matthews' house that Smith heard Blake sing
his own songs to his own music, and it was through Mrs. Matthew's
good opinion of these songs that she 'requested the Rev. Henry Matthew,
her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying
the expense of printing them': to which we owe the '_Poetical
Sketches_, by W. B.'; printed in 1783, and given to Blake to dispose
of as he thought fit. There is no publisher's name on the book, and
there is no reason to suppose that it was ever offered for sale.

'With his usual urbanity,' Mr. Matthew had written a foolish
'Advertisement' to the book, saying that the author had 'been
deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets,
as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye,' 'his
talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence
in his profession.' The book is by no means incorrectly printed, and it
is not probable that Blake would under any circumstances have given
his poems more 'revisal' than he did. He did at this time a good deal
of engraving, often after the designs of Stothard, whom he was afterwards
to accuse of stealing his ideas; and in 1784 he had two, and in 1785
four, watercolor drawings at the Royal Academy. Fuseli, Stothard, and
Flaxman[1] seem to have been his chief friends, and it is probable
that he also knew Cosway, who practiced magic, and Cosway may have
told him about Paracelsus, or lent him Law's translation of Behmen,
while Flaxman, who was a Swedenborgian, may have brought him still
more closely under the influence of Swedenborg.

In any case, he soon tired of the coterie of the Matthews, and we
are told that it soon ceased to relish his 'manly firmness of opinion.'
What he really thought of it we may know with some certainty from
the extravaganza, _An Island in the Moon_, which seems to
belong to 1784, and which is a light-hearted and incoherent satire,
derived, no doubt, from Sterne, and pointing, as Mr. Sampson justly
says, to Peacock. It is unfinished, and was not worth finishing, but it
contains the first version of several of the _Songs of Innocence_,
as well as the lovely song of Phoebe and Jellicoe. It has the further
interest of showing us Blake's first, wholly irresponsible attempt to
create imaginary worlds, and to invent grotesque and impossible
names. It shows us the first explosions of that inflammable part of
his nature, which was to burst through the quiet surface of his life
at many intervals, in righteous angers and irrational suspicions. It
betrays his deeply rooted dislike of science, and, here and there,
a literary preference, for Ossian or for Chatterton. The original MS.
is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and in this year, 1907, Mr.
Edwin J. Ellis has done Blake the unkindness of printing it for the first
time in full, in the pages of his _Real Blake._ Blake's satire is
only occasionally good, though occasionally it is supremely good; his
burlesque is almost always bad; and there is little probability that he
ever intended to publish any part of the prose and verse which he
threw off for the relief of personal irritations and spiritual
indignations.

In _An Island in the Moon_ we see Blake casting off the
dust of the drawing-rooms, finally, so far as any mental obstruction was
concerned; but he does not seem to have broken wholly with the Matthews,
who, no doubt, were people of genuinely good intentions;  and it is
through their help that we find him, in 1784, on the death of his father,
setting up as a print-seller, with his former fellow-apprentice, James
Parker, at No. 27 Broad Street, next door to the house and shop which
had been his fathers, and which were now taken on by his brother James.
Smith says that he took a shop and a first-floor;  and here his brother
Robert came to live with him as his pupil, and remained with him till his
death in February 1787.



III


After Robert's death Blake gave up the print-shop and moved out of
Broad Street to Poland Street, a street running between it and Oxford
Street. He took No. 28, a house only a few doors down from Oxford
Street, and lived there for five years. Here, in 1789, he issued the
_Songs of Innocence_, the first of his books to be produced
by the method of his invention which he described as 'illuminated
printing.' According to Smith, it was Robert who 'stood before him in
one of his visionary imaginations, and directed him in the way in which
he ought to proceed.' The process is thus described by Mr. Sampson:
'The text and surrounding design were written in reverse, in a medium
impervious to acid, upon small copper-plates, which were then etched
in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work stood in relief as in a
stereotype. From these plates, which to economize copper were in
many cases engraved upon both sides, impressions were printed,
in the ordinary manner, in tints made to harmonise with the color
scheme afterwards applied in water-colors by the artist.' Gilchrist
tells an improbable story about Mrs. Blake going out with the last
half-crown in the house, and spending 1s 10d of it in the purchase
of 'the simple materials necessary.' But we know from a MS. note
of John Linnell, referring to a somewhat later date: 'The copper-plates
which Blake engraved to illustrate Hayley's life of Cowper were, as he
told me, printed entirely by himself and his wife in his own press--a
very good one which cost him forty pounds.' These plates were engraved
in 1803, but it is not likely that Blake was ever able to buy more than
one press.

The problem of 'illuminated printing,' however definitely it may
have been solved by the dream in which Robert 'stood before him and
directed him,' was one which had certainly occupied the mind of Blake for
some years. A passage, unfortunately incomplete, in _An Island in the
Moon_, reads as follows: "Illuminating the Manuscript--Ay,"
said she, "that would be excellent. Then," said he, "I would have all
the writing engraved instead of printed, and at every other leaf a high
finished print, all in three volumes folio, and sell them a hundred pounds
a piece. They would print off two thousand. Then," said she, "whoever
will not have them, will be ignorant fools and will not deserve to live."'
This is evidently a foreshadowing of the process which is described and
defended, with not less confident enthusiasm, in an engraved prospectus
issued from Lambeth in 1793. I give it in full:--


_October_ 10, 1793.

TO THE PUBLIC.

The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been
proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault
of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such
works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and
Shakespeare could not publish their own works.

This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following
productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method
of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental,
uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works
at less than one-fourth of the expense.

If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet
is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds
in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward.

Mr. Blake's powers of invention very early engaged the attention of
many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose means he has been
regularly 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: among which are two large highly finished engravings
(and two more are nearly ready) which will commence a Series of subjects
from the Bible, and another from the History of England.

The following are the Subjects of the several Works now published
and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth:--

1. Job, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 7 1/2  in. by 1 ft. 2 in.
Price 12s.

2. Edward and Elinor, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 6 1/2 in. by
1 ft. Price 10s. 6d.

3. America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 18
designs. Price 10s. 6d.

4. Visions of the Daughters of Albion, in Illuminated Printing. Folio,
with 8 designs. Price 7s. 6d.

5. The Book of Thel, a Poem in Illuminated Printing. Quarto, with 6
designs. Price 3s.

6. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Illuminated Printing. Quarto,
with fourteen designs. Price 7s. 6d.

7. Songs of Innocence, in Illuminated Printing. Octavo, with 25
designs. Price 5 s.

8. Songs of Experience, in Illuminated Printing. Octavo, with 25
designs. Price 5s.

9. The History of England, a small book of Engravings. Price 3 s.

10. The Gates of Paradise, a small book of Engravings. Price 3 s.

The Illuminated Books are Printed in Colors, and on the most beautiful
wove paper that could be procured.

No Subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked,
for none are wanted; but the Author will produce his works, and offer them
to sale at a fair price.


By this invention (which it is absurd to consider, as some have
considered it, a mere makeshift, to which he had been driven by
the refusal of publishers to issue his poems and engravings according
to the ordinary trade methods) Blake was the first, and remains the only,
poet who has in the complete sense made his own books with his own
hands: the words, the illustrations, the engraving, the printing, the
coloring, the very inks and colors, and the stitching of the sheets into
boards. With Blake, who was equally a poet and an artist, words and
designs came together and were inseparable; and to the power of inventing
words and designs was added the skill of engraving, and thus of
interpreting them, without any mechanical interference from the outside.
To do this must have been, at some time or another, the ideal of every
poet who is a true artist, and who has a sense of the equal importance of
every form of art, and of every detail in every form. Only Blake has
produced a book of poems vital alike in inner and outer form, and, had
it not been for his lack of a technical knowledge of music, had he but
been able to write down his inventions in that art also, he would have
left us the creation of something like an universal art. That universal
art he did, during his own lifetime, create; for he sang his songs to his
own music; and thus, while he lived, he was the complete realization of
the poet in all his faculties, and the only  complete realization that has
ever been known.

To define the poetry of Blake one must find new definitions for
poetry; but, these definitions once found, he will seem to be the only
poet who is a poet in essence; the only poet who could, in his own words,
'enter into Noah's rainbow, and make a friend and companion of one of
these images of wonder, which always entreat him to leave mortal things.'
In this verse there is, if it is to be found in any verse, the 'lyrical
cry'; and yet, what voice is it that cries in this disembodied ecstasy?
The voice of desire is not in it, nor the voice of passion, nor the cry of
the heart, nor the cry of the sinner to God, nor of the lover of nature
to nature. It neither seeks nor aspires nor laments nor questions. It is
like the voice of wisdom in a child, who has not yet forgotten the world
out of which the soul came. It is as spontaneous as the note of a bird,
it is an affirmation of life; in its song, which seems mere music, it is
the mind which sings; it is lyric thought. What is it that transfixes one
in any couplet such as this:


'If the sun and moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out'?


It is no more than a nursery statement, there is not even an image
in it, and yet it sings to the brain, it cuts into the very flesh of the
mind, as if there were a great weight behind it. Is it that it is an
arrow, and that it comes from so far, and with an impetus gathered
from its speed out of the sky?

The lyric poet, every lyric poet but Blake, sings of love; but
Blake sings of forgiveness:


'Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
Such are the gates of Paradise.'


Poets sing of beauty, but Blake says:


'Soft deceit and idleness,
These are Beauty's sweetest dress.'


They sing of the brotherhood of men, but Blake points to the 'divine
image':


'Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face;
Terror the human form divine,
And Secrecy the human dress.'


Their minds are touched by the sense of tears in human things, but
to Blake 'a tear is an intellectual thing.' They sing of 'a woman like a
dewdrop,' but Blake of 'the lineaments of gratified desire.' They shout
hymns to God over a field of battle or in the arrogance of material
empire; but Blake addresses the epilogue of his _Gates of Paradise_
'to the Accuser who is the God of this world':


'Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce,
And dost not know the garment from the man;
Every harlot was a virgin once,
Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan.
Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night's decline,
The lost traveller's dream under the hill.'


Other poets find ecstasy in nature, but Blake only in imagination.
He addresses the Prophetic Book of _The Ghost of Abel_
'to Lord Byron in the wilderness,' and asks: 'What doest thou here,
Elijah? Can a poet doubt of the visions of Jehovah? Nature has no
outline, but Imagination has. Nature has no time, but Imagination has.
Nature has no supernatural, and dissolves. Imagination is eternity.' The
poetry of Blake is a poetry of the mind, abstract in substance, concrete
in form; its passion is the passion of the imagination, its emotion
is the emotion of thought, its beauty is the beauty of idea. When it is
simplest, its simplicity is that of some 'infant joy' too young to have
a name, or of some 'infant sorrow' brought aged out of eternity into
the 'dangerous world,' and there:


'Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.'


There are no men and women in the world of Blake's poetry, only
primal instincts and the energies of the imagination.

His work begins in the garden of Eden, or of the childhood of the
world, and there is something in it of the naïveté of beasts: the lines
gambol awkwardly, like young lambs. His utterance of the state of
innocence has in it something of the grotesqueness of babies, and
enchants the grown man, as they do. Humour exists unconscious of
itself, in a kind of awed and open-eyed solemnity. He stammers into
a speech of angels, as if just awakening out of Paradise. It is the
primal instincts that speak first, before riper years have added
wisdom to intuition. It is the supreme quality of this wisdom that
it has never let go of intuition. It is as if intuition itself ripened.
And so Blake goes through life with perfect mastery of the terms
of existence, as they present themselves to him: 'perfectly happy,
wanting nothing,' as he said, when he was old and poor; and able
in each stage of life to express in art the corresponding stage of
his own development. He is the only poet who has written the songs
of childhood, of youth, of mature years, and of old age; and he died
singing.



IV


Blake lived in Poland Street for five years, and issued from it the
_Songs of Innocence_ (1789), and, in the same year, _The Book
of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ in 1790, and, in 1791,
the first book of _The French Revolution: a Poem in Seven Books_,
which Gilchrist says was published anonymously, in ordinary type,
and without illustrations, by the bookseller Johnson. No copy of this
book is known to exist. At this time he was a fervent believer
in the new age which was to be brought about by the French Revolution,
and he was much in the company of revolutionaries and freethinkers,
and the only one among them who dared wear the 'bonnet rouge' in
the street. Some of these, Thomas Paine, Godwin, Holcroft, and others,
he met at Johnson's shop in St. Paul's Churchyard, where Fuseli and
Mary Wollstonecraft also came. It was at Johnson's, in 1792, that Blake
saved the life of Paine, by hurrying him off to France, with the warning,
'You must not go home, or you are a dead man,' at the very moment
when a warrant had been issued for his arrest. Johnson himself was in
1798 put into gaol for his republican sympathies, and continued to give
his weekly literary dinners in gaol.

Blake's back-windows at Poland Street looked out on the yard of
Astley's circus, and Tatham tells a story of Blake's wonder, indignation,
and prompt action on seeing a wretched youth chained by the foot to a
horse's hobble. The neighbor whom he regarded as 'hired to depress
art,' Sir Joshua Reynolds, died in 1792. A friend quoted by Gilchrist
tells us: 'When a very young man he had called on Reynolds to show him
some designs, and had been recommended to work with less extravagance
and more simplicity, and to correct his drawing. This Blake seemed to
regard as an affront never to be forgotten. He was very indignant when
he spoke of it.' There is also a story of a meeting between Blake and
Reynolds, when each, to his own surprise, seems to have found the
other very pleasant.

Blake's mother died in 1792, at the age of seventy, and was buried in
Bunhill Fields on September 9. In the following year he moved to 13
Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,[2] where, during the next seven years,
he did engraving, both of his own designs and of those of others, and
published the engraved book of designs called _The Gates of Paradise_
(1793), the poems and illustrations of the _Songs of Experience_
(1794), and the greater part of the Prophetic Books, besides writing,
apparently in 1797, the vast and never really finished MS. of _The
Four Zoas._ This period was that of which we have the largest and
most varied result, in written and engraved work, together with a large
number of designs, including five hundred and thirty-seven done on the
margin of Young's _Night Thoughts_, and the earliest of the
color-prints. It was Blake's one period of something like prosperity,
as we gather from several stories reported by Tatham, who says that
during the absence of Blake and his wife on one of their long country
walks, which would take up a whole day, thieves broke into the house,
and 'carried away plate to the value of £60 and clothes to the amount
of £40 more.' Another £40 was lent by Blake to 'a certain freethinking
speculator, the author of many elaborate philosophical treatises,' who
complained that 'his children had not a dinner.' A few days afterwards
the Blakes went to see the destitute family, and the wife 'had the
audacity to ask Mrs. Blake's opinion of a very gorgeous dress, purchased
the day following Blake's compassionate gift.' Yet another story is of a
young art-student who used to pass the house every day carrying a
portfolio under his arm, and whom Blake pitied for his poverty and sickly
looks, and taught for nothing and looked after till he died. Blake had
other pupils too, among 'families of high rank,' but being 'aghast' at
the prospect of 'an appointment to teach drawing to the Royal Family,'
he gave up all his pupils, with his invariably exquisite sense of
manners, on refusing the royal offer.

It was in 1799 that Blake found his first patron, and one of his
best friends, in Thomas Butts, 'that remarkable man--that
great patron of British genius,' as Samuel Palmer calls him, who, for
nearly thirty years, with but few intervals, continued to buy whatever
Blake liked to do for him, paying him a small but steady price, and
taking at times a drawing a week. A story which, as Palmer says, had
'grown in the memory,' connects him with Blake at this time, and may
be once more repeated, if only to be discredited. There was a
back-garden at the house in Hercules Buildings, and there were vines
in it, which Blake would never allow to be pruned, so that they grew
luxuriant in leaf and small and harsh in fruit. Mr. Butts, according to
Gilchrist, is supposed to have come one day into 'Blake's Arcadian
Arbour,' as Tatham calls it, and to have found Blake and his wife
sitting naked, reading out Milton's _Paradise Lost_ 'in character,'
and to have been greeted with: 'Come in, it is only Adam and Eve.'
John Linnell, in some notes written after reading Gilchrist, and quoted
in Story's _Life of Linnell_, writes with reason: 'I do not think
it possible. Blake was very unreserved in his narrations to me of all
his thoughts and actions, and I think if anything like this story had
been true, he would have told me of it. I am sure he would have
laughed heartily at it if it had been told of him or of anybody else,
for he was a hearty laugher at absurdities.' In such a matter, Linnell's
authority may well be final, if indeed any authority is required, beyond
a sense of humour, and the knowledge that Blake possessed it.

Another legend of the period, which has at least more significance,
whether true or not, is referred to by both Swinburne and Mr. W. M.
Rossetti, on what authority I cannot discover, and is thus stated by
Messrs. Ellis and Yeats: 'It is said that Blake wished to add a concubine
to his establishment in the Old Testament manner, but gave up the
project because it made Mrs. Blake cry.' 'The element of fable,' they
add, 'lies in the implication that the woman who was to have wrecked
this household had a bodily existence.... There is a possibility that he
entertained mentally some polygamous project, and justified it on some
patriarchal theory. A project and theory are one thing, however, and a
woman is another; and though there is abundant suggestion of the
project and theory, there is no evidence at all of the woman.' I have
found in the unpublished part of Crabb Robinson's _Diary_ and
_Reminiscences_ more than a 'possibility' or even 'abundant
suggestion' that Blake accepted the theory as a theory. Crabb
Robinson himself was so frightened by it that he had to confide it
to his _Diary_ in the disguise of German, though, when he
came to compile his _Reminiscences_ many years later he
ventured to put it down in plain English which no editor has yet
ventured to print. Both passages will be found in their place in the
verbatim reprint given later; but I will quote the second here:


'13_th June_ (1826).--I saw him again in June. He
was as wild as ever, says my journal, but he was led to-day to make
assertions more palpably mischievous and capable of influencing other
minds, and immoral, supposing them to express the will of a responsible
agent, than anything he had said before. As for instance, that he had
learned from the Bible that wives should be in common. And when I
objected that Marriage was a Divine institution he referred to the Bible,
"that from the beginning it was not so." He affirmed that he had committed
many murders, and repeated his doctrine, that reason is the only Sin, and
that careless, gay people are better than those who think, etc., etc.'

This passage leaves no doubt as to Blake's theoretical view of
marriage, but it brings us no nearer to any certainty as to his practical
action in the matter. With Blake, as with all wise men, a mental decision
in the abstract had no necessary influence on conduct. To have the
courage of your opinions is one thing, and Blake always had this; but
he was of all people least impelled to go and do a thing because he
considered the thing a permissible one to do. Throughout all his work
Blake affirms freedom as the first law of love; jealousy is to him the
great iniquity, the unforgivable selfishness. He has the frank courage
to praise in _The Visions of the Daughters of Albion_:


'Infancy, fearless, lustful, happy, nestling for delight
In laps of pleasure! Innocence, honest, open, seeking
The vigorous joys of morning light';


And of woman he asks, 'Who taught thee modesty, subtle modesty?'
In the same book, which is Blake's Book of Love, Oothoon offers 'girls
of mild silver or of furious gold' to her lover; in the paradisal state of
_Jerusalem_ 'every female delights to give her maiden to her
husband.' All these things are no doubt symbols, but they are symbols
which meet us on every page of Blake, and I no not doubt that to him
they represented an absolute truth. Therefore I think it perfectly
possible that some 'mentally polygamous project' was at one time or
another entertained by him, and 'justified on some patriarchal theory.'
What I am sure of, however, is that a tear of Mrs. Blake ('for a tear is
an intellectual thing') was enough to wipe out project if not theory,
and that one to whom love was pity more than it was desire would have
given no nearer cause for jealousy than some unmortal Oothoon.

It was in 1794 that Blake engraved the _Songs of Experience._
Four of the Prophetic Books had preceded it, but here Blake returns to
the clear and simple form of the _Songs of Innocence_, deepening it
with meaning and heightening it with ardor. Along with this fierier art
the symbolic contents of what, in the _Songs of Innocence_, had
been hardly more than a child's strayings in earthly or divine Edens,
becomes angelic, and speaks with more deliberately hid or doubled
meanings. Even 'The Tiger,' by which Lamb was to know that here was
'one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' is not only a sublime
song about a flame-like beast, but contains some hint that 'the tigers
of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.' In this book, and in
the poems which shortly followed it, in that MS. book whose contents
have sometimes been labelled, after a rejected title of Blake's, _Ideas
of Good and Evil_, we see Blake more wholly and more evenly himself
than anywhere else in his work. From these central poems we can
distinguish the complete type of Blake as a poet.

Blake is the only poet who sees all temporal things under the
form of eternity. To him reality is merely a symbol, and he catches at
its terms, hastily and faultily, as he catches at the lines of the
drawing-master, to represent, as in a faint image, the clear and shining
outlines of what he sees with the imagination; through the eye, not with
it, as he says. Where other poets use reality as a spring-board into
space, he uses it as a foothold on his return from flight. Even Wordsworth
seemed to him a kind of atheist, who mistook the changing signs of
'vegetable nature' for the unchanging realities of the imagination.
'Natural objects,' he wrote in a copy of Wordsworth, 'always did and
now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth
must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in nature.'
And so his poetry is the most abstract of all poetry, although in a sense
the most concrete. It is everywhere an affirmation, the register of
vision; never observation. To him observation was one of the daughters
of memory, and he had no use for her among his Muses, which were all
eternal, and the children of the imagination. 'Imagination,' he said, 'has
nothing to do with memory.' For the most part he is just conscious that
what he sees as 'an old man grey' is no more than a 'frowning thistle':


'For double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me.
With my inward eyes, 'tis an old man grey,
With my outward, a thistle across my way.'


In being so far conscious, he is only recognizing the symbol, not
admitting the reality.

In his earlier work, the symbol still interests him, he accepts it
without dispute; with, indeed, a kind of transfiguring love. Thus he
writes of the lamb and the tiger, of the joy and sorrow of infants, of
the fly and the lily, as no poet of mere observation has ever written of
them, going deeper into their essence than Wordsworth ever went into
the heart of daffodils, or Shelley into the nerves of the sensitive plant.
He takes only the simplest flowers or weeds, and the most innocent or
most destroying of animals, and he uses them as illustrations of the
divine attributes. From the same flower and beast he can read contrary
lessons without change of meaning, by the mere transposition of qualities,
as in the poem which now reads:


'The modest rose puts forth a thorn,
The humble sheep a threatening horn;
While the lily white shall in love delight,
Nor a thorn, nor a threat, stain her beauty bright.'


Mr. Sampson tells us in his notes: Beginning by writing:


"The rose puts envious ..."


He felt that "envious," did not express his full meaning, and deleted
the last three words, writing above them "lustful rose," and finishing the
line with the words "puts forth a thorn." He then went on:


"The coward sheep a threatening horn;
While the lily white shall in love delight,
And the lion increase freedom and peace;"


At which point he drew a line under the poem to show that it was
finished. On a subsequent reading he deleted the last line, substituting
for it:


'"The priest loves war, and the soldier peace;"


But here, perceiving that his rhyme had disappeared, he cancelled
this line also, and gave the poem an entirely different turn by changing
the word "lustful" to "modest," and "coward" to "humble," and completing
the quatrain (as in the engraved version) by a fourth line simply
explanatory of the first three.' This is not merely obeying the idle
impulse of a rhyme, but rather a bringing of the mind's impulses
into that land where 'contraries mutually exist.'

And when I say that he reads lessons, let it not be supposed
that Blake was ever consciously didactic. Conduct does not concern
him; not doing, but being. He held that education was the setting of
a veil between light and the soul. 'There is no good in education,' he
said. 'I hold it to be wrong. It is the great sin. It is eating of the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was the fault of Plato.
He knew nothing but the virtues and vices, and good and evil. There
is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' And, as he
says with his excellent courage: 'When I tell the 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, again, with still more excellent
and harder courage: 'When I am endeavoring to think rightly, I must
not regard my own any more than other people's weaknesses'; so,
in his poetry, there is no moral tendency, nothing that might not
be poison as well as antidote; nothing indeed but the absolute
affirmation of that energy which is eternal delight. He worshipped
energy as the wellhead or parent fire of life; and to him there was
no evil, only a weakness, a negation of energy, the ignominy of wings
that droop and are contented in the dust.

And so, like Nietzsche, but with a deeper innocence, he finds
himself 'beyond good and evil,' in a region where the soul is naked
and its own master. Most of his art is the unclothing of the soul,
and when at last it is naked and alone, in that 'thrilling' region
where the souls of other men have at times penetrated, only to
shudder back with terror from the brink of eternal loneliness, then
only is this soul exultant with the supreme happiness.



V


It is to the seven years at Lambeth that what may be called the first
period of the Prophetic Books largely belongs, though it does not indeed
begin there. The roots of it are strongly visible in _The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell_, which was written at Poland Street, and they may
be traced even further back. Everything else, until we come to the last
or Felpham period, which has a new quality of its own, belongs to
Lambeth.

In his earlier work Blake is satisfied with natural symbols, with
nature as symbol; in his later work, in the final message of the
Prophetic Books, he is no longer satisfied with what then seems to
him the relative truth of the symbols of reality. Dropping the tools
with which he has worked so well, he grasps with naked hands after
an absolute truth of statement, which is like his attempt in his
designs to render the outlines of vision literally, without translation
into the forms of human sight. He invents names harsh as triangles,
Enitharmon, Theotormon, Rintrah, for spiritual states and essences,
and he employs them as Wagner employed his leading motives, as a
kind of shorthand for the memory. His meaning is no longer apparent
in the ordinary meaning of the words he uses; we have to read him with
a key, and the key is not always in our hands; he forgets that he is
talking to men on the earth in some language which he has learnt in
heavenly places. He sees symbol within symbol, and as he tries to
make one clear to us, he does but translate it into another, perhaps
no easier, or more confusing. And it must be remembered, when
even interpreters like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats falter, and confess 'There
is apparently some confusion among the symbols,' that after all we
have only a portion of Blake's later work, and that probably a far
larger portion was destroyed when the Peckham 'angel,' Mr. Tatham
(copartner in foolish wickedness with Warburton's cook), sat down
to burn the books which he did not understand. Blake's great system of
wheels within wheels remains no better than a ruin, and can but at
the best be pieced together tentatively by those who are able to trace
the connection of some of its parts. It is no longer even possible to
know how much consistency Blake was able to give to his symbols,
and how far he failed to make them visible in terms of mortal
understanding. As we have them, they evade us on every side, not
because they are meaningless, but because the secret of their meaning
is so closely kept. To Blake actual contemporary names meant even
more than they meant to Walt Whitman. 'All truths wait in all things,'
said Walt Whitman, and Blake has his own quite significant but
perplexing meaning when he writes:


'The corner of Broad Street weeps; Poland Street
languishes
To Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn: all is distress
and woe.'


He is concerned now only with his message, with the 'minutely
particular' statement of it; and as he has ceased to accept any mortal
medium, or to allow himself to be penetrated by the sunlight of earthly
beauty, he has lost the means of making that message visible to us.
It is a miscalculation of means, a contempt for possibilities; not, as
people were once hasty enough to assume, the irresponsible rapture
of madness. There is not even in these crabbed chronicles the wild
beauty of the madman's scattering brain; there is a concealed sanity,
a precise kind of truth, which, as Blake said of all truth, 'can never be
so told as to be understood, and not be believed.'

Blake's form, or apparent formlessness, in the Prophetic Books,
was no natural accident, or unconsidered utterance of inspiration.
Addressing the public on the first plate of _Jerusalem_ he
says: 'When this verse was first dictated to me, I considered
a monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare
and all writers of English blank verse, derived from the bondage
of rhyming, to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse.
But I soon found that in the mouth of a true orator such monotony
was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself. I have
therefore produced a variety in every line, both of cadences and
number of syllables. Every word and every letter is studied and
put into its fit place; the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific
parts, the mild and gentle for the mild and gentle parts, and the
prosaic for inferior parts; all are necessary to each other,' This desire
for variety at the expense of unity is illustrated in one of Blake's
marginal notes to Reynolds' _Discourses._ 'Such harmony
of coloring' (as that of Titian in the Bacchus and Ariadne) 'is
destructive of Art. One species of equal hue over all is the cursed
thing called harmony. It is the smile of a fool.' This is a carrying to
its extreme limit of the principle that 'there is no such thing as
softness in art, and that everything in art is definite and minute...
because vision is determinate and perfect'; and that 'coloring does
not depend on where the colors are put, but on where the lights and
darks are put, and all depends on form or outline, on where that is
put.' The whole aim of the Prophetic Books is to arrive at a style as
'determinate and perfect' as vision, unmodified by any of the
deceiving beauties of nature or of the distracting ornaments
of conventional form. What is further interesting in Blake's statement
is that he aimed, in the Prophetic Books, at producing the effect, not
of poetry but of oratory, and it is as oratory, the oratory of the
prophets, that the reader is doubtless meant to take them.

'Poetry fettered,' he adds, 'fetters the human race,' and I doubt
not that he imagined, as Walt Whitman and later _vers-libristes_
have imagined, that in casting off the form he had unfettered the spirit
of poetry. There seems never to have been a time when Blake did not
attempt to find for himself a freer expression than he thought verse
could give him, for among the least mature of the _Poetical Sketches_
are poems written in rhythmical prose, in imitation partly of Ossian,
partly of the Bible. An early MS. called _Tiriel_, probably
of hardly later date, still exists, written in a kind of metre of fourteen
syllables, only slightly irregular in beat, but rarely fine in cadence. It
already hints, in a cloudy way, at some obscure mythology, into which
there already come incoherent names, of an Eastern color, Ijim and
Mnetha. Tiriel appears again in _The Book of Urizen_ as Urizen's
first-born, Thiriel, 'like a man from a cloud born.' Har and Heva reappear
in _The Song of Los. The Book of Thel_, engraved in 1789,
the year of the _Songs of Innocence_, is in the same metre of
fourteen syllables, but written with a faint and lovely monotony of
cadence, strangely fluid and flexible in that age of strong caesuras,
as in:


'Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive
queen.'


The sentiment is akin to that of the _Songs of Innocence_,
and hardly more than a shadow of the mythology remains. It
sings or teaches the holiness and eternity of life in all things, the
equality of life in the flower, the cloud, the worm, and the
maternal clay of the grave; and it ends with the unanswered
question of death to life: why? why? In 1790 Blake engraved
in two forms, on six and ten infinitesimal plates, a tractate which
he called, _There is no Natural Religion._ They contain, the
one commenting on the other, a clear and concise statement of
many of Blake's fundamental beliefs; such as: 'That the poetic
Genius is the true Man, and that the Body or outward form of Man
is derived from the Poetic Genius.' 'As all men are alike in
outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike
in the Poetic Genius.' 'Man's perceptions are not bounded by
organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (though ever
so acute) can discover.' Yet, since 'Man's desires are limited by his
perceptions, none can desire what he has not perceived.' 'Therefore
God becomes as we are, that we may become as he is.'

In the same year, probably, was engraved _The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell_, a prose fantasy full of splendid masculine
thought, and of a diabolical or infernal humour, in which Blake,
with extraordinary boldness, glorifies, parodies, and renounces at
once the gospel of his first master in mysticism, 'Swedenborg,
strongest of men, the Samson shorn by the Churches,' as he was
to call him long afterwards, in _Milton._ Blake's attitude
towards Christianity might be roughly defined by calling him a
heretic of the heresy of Swedenborg. _The Marriage  of Heaven
and Hell_ begins: 'As a new heaven is begun, and it is now
thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And
lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting on the tomb: his writings are the
linen clothes folded up.' Swedenborg himself, in a prophecy that
Blake must have heard in his childhood, had named 1757, the year
of Blake's birth, as the first of a new dispensation, the dispensation
of the spirit, and Blake's acceptance of the prophecy marks the date
of his escape from the too close influence of one of whom he said,
as late as 1825, 'Swedenborg was a divine teacher. Yet he was wrong
in endeavoring to explain to the rational faculty what reason cannot
comprehend.' And so we are warned, in _The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell_, against the 'confident insolence sprouting from
systematic reasoning. Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is
new, though it is only the contents or index of already published
books.' And again: 'Any man of mechanical talents may from the
writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand
volumes of equal value with Swedenborg's, and from those of
Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number. But when he has done
this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he
only holds a candle in sunshine.' With Paracelsus it is doubtful if
Blake was ever more than slightly acquainted;  the influence of
Behmen, whom he had certainly read in William Law's translation,
is difficult to define, and seems to have been of the most accidental or
partial kind, but Swedenborg had been a sort of second Bible to him
from childhood, and the influence even of his 'systematic reasoning'
remained with him as at least a sort of groundwork, or despised model;
'foundations for grand things,' as he says in the _Descriptive
Catalogue._ When Swedenborg says, 'Hell is divided into societies
in the same manner as heaven, and also into as many societies as
heaven; for every society in heaven has a society opposite to it in
hell, and this for the sake of equilibrium,' we see in this spirit of
meek order a matter-of-fact suggestion for Blake's 'enormous
wonders of the abysses,' in which heavens and hells change names
and alternate through mutual annihilations.

The last note which Blake wrote on the margins of Swedenborg's
_Wisdom of Angels_ is this: 'Heaven and Hell are born together.'
The edition which he annotated is that of 1788, and the marginalia,
which are printed in Mr. Ellis's _Real Blake_, will show how
attentive, as late as two years before the writing of the book which
that note seems to anticipate, Blake had been to every shade of
meaning in one whom he was to deny with such bitter mockery.
But, even in these notes, Blake is attentive to one thing only, he
is reaching after a confirmation of his own sense of a spiritual
language in which man can converse with paradise and render the
thoughts of angels. He comments on nothing else, he seems to read
only to confirm his conviction; he is equally indifferent to
Swedenborg's theology and to his concern with material things;
his hells and heavens, 'uses,' and 'spiritual suns,' concern him only
in so far as they help to make clearer and more precise his notion of
the powers and activities of the spirit in man. To Blake, as he shows
us in _Milton_, Swedenborg's worst error was not even that
of 'systematic reasoning,' but that of:


'Showing the Transgressors in Hell: the proud
Warriors in Heaven:
Heaven as a Punisher and Hell as one under
Punishment.'


It is for this more than for any other error that Swedenborgs
'memorable relations' are tossed back to him as 'memorable fancies,'
in a solemn parody of his own manner; that his mill and vault and
cave are taken from him and used against him; and that one once
conversant with his heaven, and now weary of it, 'walks among the
fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to
Angels look like torments and insanity.' Blake shows us the energy of
virtue breaking the Ten Commandments, and declares: 'Jesus was
all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.' Speaking through
'the voice of the Devil,' he proclaims that 'Energy is eternal delight,'
and that 'Everything that lives is holy.' And, in a last flaming paradox,
still mocking the manner of the analyst of heaven and hell, he bids us:
'Note. This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend:
we often read the Bible together, in its infernal or diabolical sense,
which the world shall have if they behave well. I have also the Bible of
Hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no.' The Bible
of Hell is no doubt the Bible of Blake's new gospel, in which contraries
are equally true. We may piece it together out of many fragments, of
which the first perhaps is the sentence standing by itself at the bottom
of the page: 'One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.'

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is loud with 'the clangor
of the Arrows of Intellect,' each of the 'Proverbs of Hell' is a jewel of
concentrated wisdom, the whole book is Blake's clearest and most
vital statement of his new, his reawakened belief; it contains, as I
have intimated, all Nietzsche; yet something restless, disturbed,
uncouth, has come violently into this mind and art, wrenching it
beyond all known limits, or setting alight in it an illuminating,
devouring, and unquenchable flame. In common with Swedenborg,
Blake is a mystic who enters into no tradition, such as that tradition
of the Catholic Church which has a liturgy awaiting dreams. For
Saint John of the Cross and for Saint Teresa the words of the vision
are already there, perfectly translating ecstasy into familiar speech;
they have but to look and to speak. But to Blake, as to Swedenborg,
no tradition is sufficiently a matter of literal belief to be at hand with
its forms; new forms have to be made, and something of the crudity of
Swedenborg comes over him in his rejection of the compromise of
mortal imagery.

_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ may be called or not
called a Prophetic Book, in the strict sense; with _The Visions of the
Daughters of Albion_, engraved at Lambeth in 1793, the series
perhaps more literally begins. Here the fine masculine prose of _The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ has given place to a metre vaguer
than the metre of _The Book of Thel_, and to a substance from
which the savor has not yet gone of the _Songs of Innocence_,
in such lines as:


'The new washed lamb tinged with the village smoke,
and the bright swan
By the red earth of our immortal river.'


It is Blake's book of love, and it defends the honesty of the natural
passions with unslackenning ardor. There is no mythology in it, beyond
a name or two, easily explicable. Oothoon, the virgin joy, oppressed by
laws and cruelties of restraint and jealousy, vindicates her right to the
freedom of innocence and to the instincts of infancy.


'And trees and birds and beasts and men behold their
eternal joy.
Arise, you little glancing wings, and sing your infant
joy:
Arise, and drink your bliss, for everything that lives
is holy!'


It is the gospel of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_,
and, as that proclaimed liberty for the mind, so this, with abundant
rhetoric, but with vehement conviction, proclaims liberty for the
body. In form it is still clear, its eloquence and imagery are partly
biblical, and have little suggestion of the manner of the later
Prophetic Books.

_America_, written in the same year, in the same measure
as the _Visions of the Daughters of Albion_, is the most
vehement, wild, and whirling of all Blake's prophecies. It is a
prophecy of revolution, and it takes the revolt of America against
England both literally and symbolically, with names of 'Washington,
Franklin, Paine and Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green,' side by side with
Orc and the Angel of Albion; it preaches every form of bodily and
spiritual liberty in the terms of contemporary events, Boston's
Angel, London's Guardian, and the like, in the midst of cataclysms
of all nature, fires and thunders temporal and eternal. The world
for a time is given into the power of Orc, unrestrained desire,
which is to bring freedom through revolution and the destroying
of the bonds of good and evil. He is called 'Antichrist, Hater of
Dignities, lover of wild rebellion, and transgressor of God's Law.'
He is the Satan of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_, and
he also proclaims:


'For everything that lives is holy, life delights in
life;
Because the soul of sweet delight can never be
defil'd.'


As, in that book, Blake had seen 'the fiery limbs, the flaming
hair' of the son of fire 'spurning the clouds written with curses,
stamping the stony law to dust'; so, here, he hears the voice of
Orc proclaiming:


'The fierce joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands,
What night he led the starry hosts through the wild
wilderness;
That stony law I stamp to dust: and scatter religion
abroad
To the four winds as a torn book, and none shall
gather the leaves.'


Liberty comes in like a flood bursting all barriers:


'The doors of marriage are open, and the Priests in
rustling scales
Rush into reptile coverts, hiding from the fires of
Orc,
That play around the golden roofs in wreaths of fierce
desire,
Leaving the females naked and glowing with the lusts
of youth.
For the female spirits of the dead pining in bonds of
religion
Run from their fetters reddening, and in long-drawn
arches sitting,
They feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of
ancient times,
Over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape
appears.'


The world, in this regeneration through revolution (which seemed to
Blake, no doubt, a thing close at hand, in those days when France and
America seemed to be breaking down the old tyrannies), is to be no longer
a world laid out by convention for the untrustworthy;  and he asks:


'Who commanded this? what God? what Angel?
To keep the generous from experience till the
ungenerous
Are unrestrained performers of the energies of
nature,
Till pity is become a trade, and generosity a science
That men get rich by.'


For twelve years, from the American to the French revolution,
'Angels and weak men' are to govern the strong, and then Europe
is to be overwhelmed by the fire that had broken out in the West,
though the ancient guardians of the five senses 'slow advance
to shut the five gates of their law-built houses.'


'But the gates were consumed, and their bolts and
hinges melted,
And the fierce flames burnt round the heavens, and
round the abode of men.'


Here the myth, though it is present throughout, is an undercurrent,
and the crying of the message is what is chiefly heard. In _Europe_
(1794), which is written in lines broken up into frequent but not
very significant irregularities, short lines alternating with long ones,
in the manner of an irregular ode, the mythology is like a net or spiders
web over the whole text. Names not used elsewhere, or not in the
same form, are found: Manatha-Varcyon, Thiralatha, who in _Europe_
is Diralada. The whole poem is an allegory of the sleep of Nature during
the eighteen hundred years of the Christian era, under bonds of narrow
religions and barren moralities and tyrannous laws, and of the awakening
to forgotten joy, when 'Nature felt through all her pores the enormous
revelry,' and the fiery spirit of Ore, beholding the morning in the east,
shot to the earth:


'And in the vineyards of red France appear'd the light
of his fury.'


It is another hymn of revolution, but this time an awakening
more wholly mental, with only occasional contemporary allusions
like that of the judge in Westminster whose wig grows to his scalp,
and who is seen 'groveling along Great George Street through the
Park gate.' 'Howlings and hissings, shrieks and groans, and voices of
despair,' are heard throughout; we see thought change the infinite
to a serpent:


'Then was the serpent temple formed, image of infinite
Shut up in finite revolutions, and man become an
angel;
Heaven a mighty circle turning; God a tyrant crown'd.'


The serpent temple shadows the whole island:


'Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see (O woman's
triumph)
Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows
are filled
With spectres, and the windows wove over with curses
of iron:
Over the doors Thou shalt not: and over the chimneys
Fear is written:
With bands of iron round their necks fasten'd into the
walls
The citizens: in leaden gyves the inhabitants of
suburbs
Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers.'


The whole book is a lament and protest, and it ends with
a call to spiritual battle. In a gay and naïve prologue, written
by Blake in a copy of _Europe_ in the possession of Mr.
Linnell, and quoted by Ellis and Yeats, Blake tells us that he
caught a fairy on a streaked tulip, and brought him home:


'As we went along
Wild flowers I gathered, and he show'd me each eternal
flower.
He laughed aloud to see them whimper because they
were pluck'd,
Then hover'd round me like a cloud of incense. When
I came
Into my parlour and sat down and took my pen to
write,
My fairy sat upon the table and dictated _Europe._


_The First Book of Urizen_ (1794) is a myth, shadowed in
dark symbols, of the creation of mortal life and its severing from
eternity; the birth of Time out of the void and self-contemplating
shadow' of unimaginative Reason; the creation of the senses, each
a limiting of eternity, and the closing of the tent of heavenly knowledge,
so that Time and the creatures of Time behold eternity no more.
We see the birth of Pity and of Desire, woman the shadow and
desire the child of man. Reason despairs as it realizes that life
lives upon death, and the cold pity of its despair forms into a
chill shadow, which follows it like a spider's web, and freezes into
the net of religion, or the restraint of the activities. Under this
net the senses shrink inwards, and that creation which is 'the
body of our death' and our stationing in time and space is finished:


'Six days they shrank up from existence,
And on the seventh they rested
And they bless'd the seventh day, in sick hope,
And forgot their eternal life.'


Then the children of reason, now 'sons and daughters of sorrow,'


'Wept and built
Tombs in the desolate places,
And form'd laws of prudence and call'd them
The eternal laws of God.'


But Fuzon, the spirit of fire, forsook the 'pendulous earth' with
those children of Urizen who would still follow him.

Here, crystallized in the form of a myth, we see many of Blake's
fundamental ideas. Some of them we have seen under other forms,
as statement rather than as image, in _The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell_ and _There is no Natural Religion._ We shall see
them again, developed, elaborated, branching out into infinite
side-issues, multiplying upon themselves, in the later Prophetic
Books, partly as myth, partly as statement; we shall see them in
many of the lyrical poems, transformed into song, but still never
varying in their message; and we shall see them, in the polemical
prose of all the remaining fragments, and in the private letters,
and in the annotations of Swedenborg, and in Crabb Robinson's
records of conversations. The _Book of Urizen_ is a sort of
nucleus, the germ of a system.

Next to the _Book of Urizen_, if we may judge from the
manner of its engraving, came _The Song of Los_ (1795),
written in a manner of vivid declamation, the lines now lengthening,
now shrinking, without fixed beat or measure. It is the song of Time,
'the Eternal Prophet,' and tells the course of inspiration as it passes
from east to west, 'abstract philosophy' in Brahma, 'forms of dark
delusion' to Moses on Mount Sinai, the mount of law; 'a gospel from
wretched Theotormon' (distressed human love and pity) to Jesus,
'a man of sorrows'; the 'loose Bible' of Mahomet, setting free the
senses,'Odin's 'code of war.'


'These were the Churches, Hospitals, Castles, Palaces,
Like nets and gins and traps to catch the joys of
Eternity,
And all the rest a desart:
Till like a dream Eternity was obliterated and erased.'


'The vast of Nature' shrinks up before the 'shrunken eyes'
of men, till it is finally enclosed in the 'philosophy of the five
senses,' the philosophy of Newton and Locke. 'The Kings of Asia,'
the cruelties of the heathen, the ancient powers of evil, call on
'famine from the heath, pestilence from the fen:'


'To turn man from his path,
To restrain the child from the womb,
To cut off the bread from the city,
That the remnant may learn to obey,
That the pride of the heart may fail,
That the lust of the eyes may be quench'd,
That the delicate ear in its infancy
May be dull'd, and the nostrils clos'd up:
To teach mortal worms the path
That leads from the gates of the grave.'


But, in the darkness of their 'ancient woven dens,' they are startled
by 'the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc'; and at their cry
Urizen comes forth to meet and challenge the liberating spirit; he
thunders against the pillar of fire that rises out of the darkness of
Europe; and at the clash of their mutual onset 'the Grave shrieks
aloud.' But 'Urizen wept,' the cold pity of reason which, as we have
seen in the book named after him, freezes into nets of religion,
'twisted like to the human brain.'

_The Book of Los_ (also dated 1795) is written in the short
lines of _Urizen_ and _Ahania_, a metre following a fixed, insistent
beat, as of Los's hammer on his anvil. It begins with the lament of
'Eno, aged Mother,' over the liberty of old times:


'O Times remote!
When Love and Joy were adoration,
And none impure were deem'd.
Not Eyeless Covet,
Nor Thin-lip'd Envy,
Nor Bristled Wrath,
Nor Curled Wantonness;'


None of these, that is, yet turned to evil, but still unfallen
energies. At this, flames of desire break out, 'living, intelligent,' and
Los, the spirit of Inspiration, divides the flames, freezes them into
solid darkness, and is imprisoned by them, and escapes, only in
terror, and falls through ages into the void ('Truth has bounds,
Error none'), until he has organized the void and brought into it
a light which makes visible the form of the void. He sees it as the
backbone of Urizen, the bony outlines of reason, and then begins,
for the first time in the Prophetic Books, that building of furnaces,
and wielding of hammer and anvil of which we are to hear so much
in _Jerusalem._ He forges the sun, and chains cold intellect
to vital heat, from whose torments:


'A twin
Was completed, a Human Illusion
In darkness and deep clouds involved.'


In _The Book of Los_ almost all relationship to poetry has
vanished; the myth is cloudier and more abstract. Scarcely less so is
_The Book of Ahania_ (1795), written in the same short lines,
hut in a manner occasionally more concrete and realizable. Like
_Urizen_, it is almost all myth. It follows Fuzon, 'son of
Urizen's silent burnings,' in his fiery revolt against:


'This cloudy God seated on waters,
Now seen, now obscured, king of Sorrows.'


From the stricken and divided Urizen is born Ahania ('so name
his parted soul'), who is 'his invisible lust,' whom he loves, hides,
and calls Sin.


'She fell down, a faint shadow wandering,
In chaos, and circling dark Urizen,
As the moon anguished circles the earth,
Hopeless, abhorred, a death shadow,
Unseen, unbodied, unknown,
The mother of Pestilence.'


But Urizen, recovering his strength, seizes the bright son of fire, his
energy or passion, and nails him to the dark 'religious' 'Tree
of Mystery,' from under whose shade comes the voice of Ahania,
'weeping upon the void,' lamenting her lost joys of love, and
the days when:


'Swelled with ripeness and fat with fatness,
Bursting on winds my odours,
My ripe figs and rich pomegranates,
In infant joy at my feet,
O Urizen, sported and sang.'


In _The Four Zoas_ Ahania is called 'the feminine indolent
bliss, the indulgent self of weariness.' 'One final glimpse,' says Mr.
Swinburne, 'we may take of Ahania after her division--the love
of God, as it were, parted from God, impotent therefore and a shadow,
if not rather a plague and blight; mercy severed from justice, and thus
made a worse thing than useless.' And her lament ends in this despair:


'But now alone over rocks, mountains,
Cast out from thy lovely bosom
Cruel jealousy, selfish fear,
Self-destroying; how can delight
Renew in these chains of darkness
Where bones of beasts are strown
On the bleak and snowy mountains,
Where bones from the birth are buried
Before they see the light.'


The mythology, of which parts are developed in each of these
books, is thrown together, in something more approaching a whole,
hut without apparent cohesion or consistency, in _The Four Zoas_,
which probably dates from 1797 and which exists in seventy sheets of
manuscript, of uncertain order, almost certainly in an unfinished
state, perhaps never intended for publication, but rather as a storehouse
of ideas. This manuscript, much altered, arranged in a conjectural order,
and printed with extreme incorrectness, was published by Messrs. Ellis
and Yeats in the third volume of their book on Blake, under the first,
rejected, title of _Vala._[3] They describe it as being in itself a
sort of compound of all Blake's other books, except _Milton_ and
_Jerusalem_, which are enriched by scraps taken from _Vala_, but
are not summarized in it. In the uncertain state in which we have
it, it is impossible to take it as a wholly authentic text; but it
is both full of incidental beauty and of considerable assistance
in unravelling many of the mysteries in _Milton_ and _Jerusalem_,
the books written at Felpham, both dated 1804, in which we find
the final development of the myth, or as much of that final
development as has come to us in the absence of the manuscripts
destroyed or disposed of by Tatham. Those two books indeed seem
to presuppose in their readers an acquaintance with many matters
told or explained in this, from which passages are taken bodily,
but with little apparent method. As it stands, _Vala_ is much more
of a poem than either _Milton_ or _Jerusalem_; the cipher
comes in at times, but between there are broad spaces of cloudy but not
wholly unlighted imagery. Blake still remembers that he is writing a poem,
earthly beauty is still divine beauty to him, and the message is not yet
so stringent as to forbid all lingering by the way.

In some parts of the poem the manner is frankly biblical, and suggests
the book of Proverbs, as thus:


'What is the price of experience? Do men buy it for
a song,
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought
with the price
Of all that a man hath--his wife, his house, his
children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none
comes to buy,
And in the withered fields where the farmer ploughs
for bread in vain.'


Nature is still an image accepted as an adequate symbol, and we
get reminiscences here and there of the simpler, early work of
_Thel_, for instance, in such lines as:


'And as the little seed waits eagerly watching for its
flower and fruit,
Anxious its little soul looks out into the clear
expanse
To see if hungry winds are abroad with their invisible
array;
So man looks out in tree and herb, and fish and bird
and beast,
Collecting up the scattered portions of his immortal
body
Into the elemental forms of everything that grows.'


There are descriptions of feasts, of flames, of last judgments, of
the new Eden, which are full of color and splendor, passing without
warning into the 'material sublime' of Fuseli, as in the picture of Urizen
'stonied upon his throne' in the eighth 'Night.' In the passages which we
possess in the earlier and later version we see the myth of Blake
gradually crystallizing, the transposition of every intelligible symbol
into the secret cipher. Thus we find 'Mount Gilead' changed into
'Mount Snowdon,' 'Beth Peor' into 'Cosway Vale,' and a plain image
such as this:


'The Mountain called out to the Mountain, Awake,
oh brother Mountain,'


Is translated backwards into:


'Ephraim called out to Tiriel, Awake, oh brother
Mountain.'


Images everywhere are seen freezing into types; they stop half-way,
and have not yet abandoned the obscure poetry of the earlier Prophetic
Books for the harder algebra of _Milton_ and _Jerusalem._



VI


The first statement by Blake of his aims and principles in art is
to be found in some letters to George Cumberland and to Dr. Trusler,
contained in the Cumberland Papers in the British Museum. These
letters were first printed by Dr. Garnett in the _Hampstead
Annual_ of 1903, but with many mistakes and omissions.[4] I have
recopied from the originals the text of such letters as I quote.
It appears that in the year 1799 Blake undertook, at the suggestion
of Cumberland, to do some drawings for a book by Dr. Trusler,
a sort of quack writer and publisher, who may be perhaps sufficiently
defined by the quotation of the title of one of his books, which
is _The Way to be Rich and Respectable._ On August 16, Blake
writes to say: 'I find more and more that my Style of Designing
is a Species by itself, and in this which I send you have been
compelled by my Genius or Angel to follow where he led; if I
were to act otherwise it would not fulfill the purpose for which
alone I live, which is in conjunction with such men as my friend
Cumberland to renew the lost Art of the Greeks.' He tells him that he
has attempted to 'follow his Dictate' every morning for a fortnight, but
'it was out of my power!' He then describes what he has done, and says:
'If you approve of my manner, and it is agreeable to you, I would rather
Paint Pictures in oil of the same dimensions than make Drawings, and
on the same terms. By this means you will have a number of Cabinet
pictures, which I flatter myself will not be unworthy of a Scholar of
Rembrandt and Teniers, whom I have Studied no less than Rafael and
Michaelangelo.' The next letter, which I will give in full, for it is a
document of great importance, is dated a week later, and the nature
of the reply which it answers can be gathered from Blake's comment
on the matter to Cumberland, three days later still. 'I have made him,'
he says, 'a Drawing in my best manner: he has sent it back with a Letter
full of Criticisms, in which he says It accords not with his Intentions,
which are, to Reject all Fancy from his Work. How far he expects to
please, I cannot tell. But as I cannot paint Dirty rags and old Shoes
where I ought to place Naked Beauty or simple ornament, I despair of
ever pleasing one Class of Men.' 'I could not help smiling,' he says
later, 'at the difference between the doctrines of Dr. Trusler and those
of Christ.' Here, then, is the letter in which Blake accounts for himself
to the quack doctor (who has docketed it: 'Blake, Dimd with
superstition'), as if to posterity:--


REVD. SIR,

I really am sorry that you are fallen out with the Spiritual World,
Especially if I should have to answer for it. I feel very sorry that your
Ideas and Mine on Moral Painting differ so much as to have made you
angry with my method of study. If I am wrong I am wrong in good
company. I had hoped your plan comprehended All Species of this Art,
and Especially that you would not regret that Species which gives
Existence to Every other, namely, Visions of Eternity. You say that I
want somebody to Elucidate my Ideas. But you ought to know that
what is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men. That which can be
made Explicit to the Ideot is not worth my care. The wisest of the
Ancients considered what is not too Explicit as the fittest for
Instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses,
Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato.

But as you have favored me with your remarks on my Design,
permit me in return to defend it against a mistaken one, which is,
That I have supposed Malevolence without a Cause. Is not Merit in
one a Cause of Envy in another, and Serenity and Happiness and
Beauty a Cause of Malevolence? But Want of Money and the Distress
of a Thief can never be alleged as the Cause of his Thievery, for many
honest people endure greater hardships with Fortitude. We must therefore
seek the Cause elsewhere than in the want of Money, for that is the
Miser's passion, not the Thief's.

I have therefore proved your Reasonings I'll proportioned,  which
you can never prove my figures to be. They are those of Michael Angelo,
Rafael and the Antique, and of the best living Models. I perceive that
your Eye is perverted by Caricature Prints, which ought not to abound
so much as they do. Fun I love, but too much Fun is of all things the
most loathsome. Mirth is better than Fun, and Happiness is better than
Mirth. I feel that a Man may be happy in This World, and I know that
This World is a World of Imagination and Vision. I see Everything I paint
In This World: but Every body does not see alike. To the Eyes of a
Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with
the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled
with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes
of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature
all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my
proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of
the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a Man is,
so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers. You certainly
Mistake when you say that the Visions of Fancy are not to be found
in This World. To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy
or Imagination, and I feel Flattered when I am told so. What is it sets
Homer, Virgil, and Milton in so high a rank of Art? Why is the Bible
more Entertaining and Instructive than any other book? Is it not
because they are addressed to the Imagination, which is Spiritual
Sensation, and but mediately to the Understanding or Reason?
Such is True Painting, and such was alone valued by the Greeks and
the best modern Artists. Consider what Lord Bacon says--'Sense
sends over to Imagination before Reason have judged, and Reason
sends over to Imagination before the Decree can be acted.' See
_Advancement of Learning_,  Part 2, P. 47, of first Edition.

But I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who
can Elucidate My Visions, and Particularly they have been Elucidated
by Children, who have taken a greater delight in contemplating
my Pictures than I even hoped. Neither Youth nor Childhood is Folly
or Incapacity. Some Children are Fools, and so are some old Men. But
There is a vast Majority on the side of Imagination or Spiritual
Sensation.

To Engrave after another Painter is infinitely more laborious
than to Engrave one's own Inventions. And of the size you require
my price has been Thirty Guineas, and I cannot afford to do it
for less. I had Twelve for the Head I sent you as a Specimen; but
after my own designs I could do at least Six times the quantity
of labour in the same time, which will account for the difference in
price, as also that Chalk Engraving is at least Six times as laborious
as Aqua tinta. I have no objection to Engraving after another Artist.
Engraving is the profession I was apprenticed to, and I should never
have attempted to live by any thing else If orders had not come in
for my Designs and Paintings, which I have the pleasure to tell you are
Increasing Every Day. Thus If I am a Painter it is not to be attributed
to Seeking after. But I am contented whether I live by Painting or
Engraving.

I am, Revd. Sir, your very obedient Servant,

WILLIAM BLAKE.

13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth,

_August_ 23, 1799.


Blake tells Cumberland the whole story quite cheerfully, and
ends with these significant words, full of patience, courtesy, and
sad humour: 'As to Myself, about whom you are so kindly Interested,
I live by Miracle. I am Painting small Pictures from the Bible. For as
to Engraving, in which art I cannot reproach myself with any neglect,
yet I am laid by in a corner as if I did not exist, and since my Youngs
Night Thoughts have been published, even Johnson and Fuseli have
discarded my Graver. But as I know that He who works and has his
health cannot starve, I laugh at Fortune and Go on and on. I think
I foresee better Things than I have ever seen. My Work pleases my
employer, and I have an order for Fifty small Pictures at One Guinea
each, which is something better than mere copying after another
artist. But above all I feel myself happy and contented, let what
will come. Having passed now near twenty years in ups and downs,
I am used to them, and perhaps a little practice in them may turn
out to benefit. It is now exactly Twenty years since I was upon the
ocean of business, and tho I laugh at Fortune, I am persuaded that
She Alone is the Governor of Worldly Riches, and when it is Fit She
will call on me. Till then I wait with Patience, in hopes that She is
busied among my Friends.'

The employer is, no doubt, Mr. Butts, for whom Blake had
already begun to work: we know some of the 'frescoes' and color-prints
which belong to this time; among them, or only just after, the
incomparable 'Crucifixion,' in which the soldiers cast lots in the
foreground and the crosses are seen from the back, against a
stormy sky and lances like Tintoretto's. But it was also the time
of all but the latest Prophetic Books (or of all but the latest of those
left to us), and we may pause here for a moment to consider some
of the qualities that Blake was by this time fully displaying in his
linear and colored inventions and 'Visions of Eternity.'

It is by his energy and nobility of creation that Blake takes
rank among great artists, in a place apart from those who have
been content to study, to observe, and to copy. His invention of
living form is like nature's, unintermittent, but without the
measure and order of nature, and without complete command over
the material out of which it creates. In his youth he had sought after
prints of such inventive work as especially appealed to him, Michelangelo,
Raphael, Dürer; it is possible that, having had 'very early in life the
ordinary opportunities,' as Dr. Malkin puts it, 'of seeing pictures in
the houses of noblemen and gentlemen, and in the king's palaces,'
he had seen either pictures, or prints after pictures, of the Italian
Primitives, whose attitudes and composition he at times suggests;
and, to the end, he worked with Dürer's 'Melancholia' on his work-table
and Michelangelo's designs on his walls. It not infrequently happened
that a memory of form created by one of these great draughtsmen
presented itself as a sort of short cut to the statement of the form
which he was seeing or creating in his own imagination. A Devil's
Advocate has pointed out 'plagiarisms' in Blake's design, and would
dismiss in consequence his reputation for originality. Blake had not
sufficient mastery of technique to be always wholly original in design;
and it is to his dependence on a technique not as flexible as his
imagination was intense that we must attribute what is unsatisfying
in such remarkable inventions as 'The House of Death' (Milton's
lazar-house) in the Print Doom of the British Museum. Its appeal
to the imagination is partly in spite of what is 'organized and minutely
articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can
produce.' Death is a version of the Ancient of Days and of Urizen,
only his eyes are turned to blind terror and his beard to forked
flame; Despair, a statue of greenish bronze, is the Scofield of
_Jerusalem_;  the limbs and faces rigid with agony are types
of strength and symbols of pain. Yet even here there is creation,
there is the energy of life, there is a spiritual awe. And wherever
Blake works freely, as in the regions of the Prophetic Books, wholly
outside time and space, appropriate form multiplies under his
creating hand, as it weaves a new creation of worlds and of spirits,
monstrous and angelical.

Blake distinguished, as all great imaginative artists have
distinguished, between allegory, which is but realism's excuse for
existence, and symbol, which is none of the 'daughters of Memory,'
but itself vision or inspiration. He wrote in the MS. book: 'Vision or
imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and
unchangeably. Fable or allegory is formed by the daughters of
Memory.' And thus in the designs which accompany the text of his
Prophetic Books there is rarely the mere illustration of those pages.
He does not copy in line what he has said in words, or explain in
words what he has rendered in line; a creation probably contemporary
is going on, and words and lines render between them, the one to
the eyes, the other to the mind, the same image of spiritual things,
apprehended by different organs of perception.

And so in his pictures, what he gives us is not a picture after
a mental idea; it is the literal delineation of an imaginative
vision, of a conception of the imagination. He wrote: 'If you have
not nature before you for every touch, you cannot paint portrait;
and if you have nature before you at all, you cannot paint history.'
There is a water-color of Christ in the carpenter's shop: Christ, a
child, sets to the floor that compass which Blake saw more often
in the hands of God the Father, stooping out of heaven; his mother
and Joseph stand on each side of him, leaning towards him with
the stiff elegance of guardian angels on a tomb. That is how Blake
sees it, and not with the minute detail and the aim at local color with
which the Pre-Raphaelites have seen it; it is not Holman Hunt's
'Bethlehem' nor the little Italian town of Giotto; it is rendered
carefully after the visual imagination which the verses of the Bible
awakened in his brain. In one of those variations which he did on
the 'Flight into Egypt' (the 'Riposo,' as he called it), we have a
lovely and surprising invention of landscape, minute and impossible,
with a tree built up like a huge vegetable, and flowers growing out
of the bare rock, and a red and flattened sun going down behind
the hills; Joseph stands under the tree, nearly of the same
height, but grave and kindly, and the Mother and Child are mild
eighteenth-century types of innocence; the browsing donkey has
an engaging rough homeliness of hide and aspect. It is all as
unreal as you like, made up of elements not combined into any
faultless pattern; art has gone back further than Giotto, and is
careless of human individuality; but it is seen as it were with
faith, and it conveys to you precisely what the painter meant
to convey. So, in a lovely water-color of the creation of Eve, this
blue-haired doll of obviously rounded flesh has in her something
which is more as well as less than the appeal of bodily beauty,
some suggestion to the imagination which the actual technical
skill of Blake has put there. With less delicacy of color, and with
drawing in parts actually misleading, there is a strange intensity
of appeal, of realization not so much to the eyes as through them
to the imagination, in another water-color of the raising of Lazarus,
where the corpse swathed in grave-clothes floats sidelong upward
from the grave, the weight of mortality as if taken off, and an unearthly
lightness in its disimprisoned limbs, that have forgotten the laws
of mortal gravity.

Yet, even in these renderings of what is certainly not meant
for reality, how abundantly nature comes into the design: mere
bright parrot-like birds in the branches of the tree of knowledge
of good and evil, the donkey of the 'Riposo,' the sheep's heads
woven into the almost decorative border. Blake was constantly
on his guard against the deceits of nature, the temptation of a
'facsimile representation of merely mortal and perishing substances.'
His dread of nature was partly the recoil of his love; he feared to be
entangled in the 'veils of Vala,' the seductive sights of the world
of the senses; and his love of natural things is evident on every
page of even the latest of the Prophetic Books. It is the natural
world, the idols of Satan, that creep in at every corner and border,
setting flowers to grow, and birds to fly, and snakes to glide
harmlessly around the edges of these hard and impenetrable pages.
The minute life of this 'vegetable world' is awake and in subtle
motion in the midst of these cold abstractions. 'The Vegetable
World opens like a flower from the Earth's centre, in which
is Eternity,' and it is this outward flowering of eternity in the
delicate living forms of time that goes on incessantly, as if by the
mere accident of the creative impulse, as Blake or Los builds
Golgonooza or the City of God out of the 'abstract void' and the
'indefiniteness of unimaginative existence.' It is, on every page,
the visible outer part of what, in the words, can hut speak a
language not even meant to be the language of the 'natural man.'

In these symbolic notations of nature, or double language
of words and signs, these little figures of men and beasts that so
strangely and incalculably decorate so many of Blake's pages,
there is something Egyptian, which reminds me of those lovely
riddles on papyri and funeral tablets, where the images of real
things are used so decoratively, in the midst of a language itself all
pictures, with colours never seen in the things themselves, but given
to them for ornament. _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is
filled with what seem like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian tomb
or obelisk, little images which might well mean things as definite
as the images of Egyptian writing. They are still visible, sometimes
mere curves or twines, in the latest of the engraved work, and might
exist equally for some symbolic life which they contain, or for that
decorative life of design which makes them as expressive mosaics
of pattern as the hieroglyphics. I cannot hut think that it was partly
from what he had seen, in actual basalt, or in engravings after
ancient monuments which must have been about him at Basire the
engraver's, that Blake found the suggestion of his picture-writing
in the Prophetic Books. He believed that all Greek art was but a pale
copy of a lost art of Egypt, 'the greater works of the Asiatic
Patriarchs,' Apotheoses of Persian, Hindu, and Egyptian antiquity.'
In such pictures as 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt guiding Behemoth,'
he professed to be but 'applying to modern heroes, on a smaller
scale,' what he had seen in vision of these 'stupendous originals now
lost, or perhaps buried till some happier age.' Is it not likely therefore
that in his attempt to create the religious books of a new religion,
'the Everlasting Gospel' of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' he
should have turned to the then unintelligible forms in which the
oldest of the religions had written itself down in a visible pictorial
message?

But, whatever suggestions may have come to him from elsewhere,
Blake's genius was essentially Gothic, and took form, I doubt
not, during those six years of youth when he drew the monuments
in Westminster Abbey, and in the old churches about London.
He might have learned much from the tombs in the Abbey, and
from the brasses, and from the carved angels in the chapels,
and from the naïve groups on the screen in the chapel of Edward
the Confessor, and from the draped figures round the sarcophagus
of Aymer de Valence. There is often, in Blake's figures, something of the
monumental stiffness of Gothic stone, as there is in the minute yet
formal characterization of the faces. His rendering of terrible and evil
things, the animal beings who typify the passions and fierce distortions
of the soul, have the same childlike detail, content to be ludicrous if
it can only be faithful to a distinct conception, of the carvers of
gargoyles and of Last Judgments. Blake has, too, the same love of
pattern for its own sake, the same exuberance of ornament, always
living and organic, growing out of the structure of the design or out of
the form of the page, not added to it from without. Gothic art taught
him his hatred of vacant space, his love of twining and trailing foliage
and flame and water; and his invention of ornament is as unlimited as
theirs. A page of one of his illuminated books is like the carving on a
Gothic capital. Lines uncoil from a hidden centre and spread like
branches or burst into vast vegetation, emanating from leaf to limb,
and growing upward into images of human and celestial existence.
The snake is in all his designs; whether, in _Jerusalem_, rolled
into chariot-wheels and into the harness of a chariot drawn by hoofed
lions, and into the curled horns of the lions, and into the pointing
fingers of the horns; or, in _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_,
a leviathan of the sea with open jaws, eyed and scaled with poisonous
jewels of purple and blood-red and corroded gold, swelling visibly
out of a dark sea that foams aside from its passage; or, curved above
the limbs and wound about the head of a falling figure in lovely
diminishing coils like a corkscrew which is a note of interrogation;
or, in mere unterrifying beauty, trailed like a branch of a bending
tree across the tops of pages; or, bitted and bridled and a thing of
blithe gaiety, ridden by little, naked, long-legged girls and boys in
the new paradise of an America of the future. The Gothic carvers
loved snakes, but hardly with the strange passion of Blake. They carved
the flames of hell and of earthly punishment with delight in the beauty
of their soaring and twisting lines; but no one has ever made of fire
such a plaything and ecstasy as Blake has made of it. In his paintings he
invents new colors to show forth the very soul of fire, a soul angrier
and more variable than opals; and in his drawings he shows us lines
and nooses of fire rushing upward out of the ground, and fire drifting
across the air like vapor, and fire consuming the world in the last chaos.
And everywhere there are gentle and caressing tongues and trails of fire,
hardly to be distinguished from branches of trees and blades of grass and
stems and petals of flowers. Water, which the Gothic carvers represented
in curving lines, as the Japanese do, is in Blake a not less frequent
method of decoration; wrapping frail human figures in wet caverns
under the depths of the sea, and destroying and creating worlds.

Blake's color is unearthly, and is used for the most part rather
as a symbol of emotion than as a representation of fact. It is at
one time prismatic, and radiates in broad bands of pure color; at
another, and more often, is as inextricable as the veins in mineral,
and seems more like a natural growth of the earth than the creation of a
painter. In the smaller Book of Designs in the Print Room of the British
Museum the colors have moldered away, and blotted themselves
together in a sort of putrefaction which seems to carry the suggestions
of poisonous decay further than Blake carried them. This will be seen
by a comparison of the minutely drawn leviathan of _The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell_, with the colored print in the Book of Designs, in
which the outline of the folds melts and crumbles into a mere chaos
of horror. Color in Blake is never shaded, or, as he would have said,
blotted and blurred; it is always pure energy. In the faint coloring of
the _Book of Thel_ there is the very essence of gentleness; the
color is a faultless interpretation of the faint and lovely monotony of
the verse, and of its exquisite detail. Several of the plates recur
in the Book of Designs, colored at a different and, no doubt, much
later time; and while every line is the same the whole atmosphere
and mood of the designs is changed. Bright rich color is built up in
all the vacant spaces; and with the color there comes a new intensity;
each design is seen over again, in a new way. Here, the mood is a
wholly different mood, and this seeing by contraries is easier to
understand than when, as in the splendid design on the fourth
page of _The Book of Urizen_, repeated in the Book of Designs,
we see a parallel, yet different, vision, a new, yet not contrary,
aspect. In the one, the colors of the open book are like corroded
iron or rusty minerals; in the other, sharp blues, like the wings
of strange butterflies, glitter stormily under the red flashes
of a sunset. The vision is the same, but every color of the thing
seen is different.

To Blake, color is the soul rather than the body of his figures,
and seems to clothe them like an emanation. What Behmen says
of the world itself might be said of Blake's rendering of the aspects
of the world and men. 'The whole outward visible World,' he tells
us, 'with all its Being is a Signature, or Figure of the inward spiritual
World; whatever is internally, and however its Operation is, so
likewise it has its Character externally; like as the Spirit of each
Creature sets forth and manifests the internal Form of its Birth,
by its Body, so does the Eternal Being also.' Just as he gives us a
naked Apollo for the 'spiritual form of Pitt' in the picture in the
National Gallery, where Pitt is seen guiding Behemoth, or the hosts
of evil, in a hell of glowing and obscure tumult, so he sees the
soul of a thing or being with no relation to its normal earthly color.
The colors of fire and of blood, an extra-lunar gold, putrescent
vegetable colors, and the stains in rocks and sunsets, he sees
everywhere, and renders with an ecstasy that no painter to whom
color was valuable for its own sake has ever attained. It is difficult not
to believe that he does not often use color with a definitely
musical sense of its harmonies, and that colour did not literally
sing to him, as it seems, at least in a permissible figure, to sing
to us out of his pages.



VII


At the end of September 1800 Blake left Lambeth, and took
a cottage at Felpham, near Bognor, at the suggestion of William
Hayley, the feeblest poet of his period, who imagined, with foolish
kindness, that he could become the patron of one whom he called
'my gentle visionary Blake.' Hayley was a rich man, and, as the author
of _The Triumphs of Temper_, was looked upon as a person of
literary importance. He did his best to give Blake opportunities of making
money, by doing engraving and by painting miniatures of the neighbors.
He read Greek with him and Klopstock. 'Blake is just become a Grecian,
and literally learning the language,' he says in one letter, and in
another: 'Read Klopstock into English to Blake.' The effect of Klopstock
on Blake is to be seen in a poem of ribald magnificence, which no one
has yet ventured to print in full. The effect of Blake on Hayley, and of
Hayley on Blake, can be realized from a few passages in the letters.
At first we read: 'Mr. Hayley acts like a prince.' Then: 'I find on all
hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery
of business, and intimations that, if I do not confine myself to this,
I shall not live.' Last: 'Mr. H. is as much averse to my poetry as he is
to a chapter in the Bible. He knows that I have writ it, for I have shown
it to him' (this is apparently the _Milton_ or the _Jerusalem_),
and he has read part by his own desire, and has looked with
sufficient contempt to enhance my opinion of it.... But Mr. H. approves
of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced
to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; for I am
determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance
and polite disapprobation. I know myself both poet and painter,
and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything
but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness
I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to
think that I have some genius: as if genius and assurance were the
same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve
laughter.' What laughter they produced, while Blake was still suffering
under them, can be seen by any one who turns to the epigrams on
H. in the note-book. But the letter goes on, with indignant seriousness:
'But I was commanded by my spiritual friends to bear all and be silent,
and to go through all without murmuring, and, in fine, hope till my
three years shall be accomplished;  at which time I was set at liberty
to remonstrate against former conduct, and to demand justice and
truth; which I have done in so effectual a manner that my antagonist
is silenced completely, and I have compelled what should have been
of freedom--my  just right as an artist and as a man.'

In Blake's behavior towards Hayley, which has been criticized,
we can test his sincerity to himself under all circumstances: his
impeccable outward courtesy, his concessions, 'bearing insulting
benevolence' meekly, his careful kindness towards Hayley and hard
labour on his behalf, until the conviction was forced upon him from
within that 'corporeal friends were spiritual enemies,' and that Hayley
must be given up.


'Remembering the verses that Hayley sung
When my heart knocked against the roof of my tongue.'


Blake wrote down bitter epigrams, which were written down
for mere relief of mind, and certainly never intended for publication;
and I can see no contradiction between these inner revolts and an
outer politeness which had in it its due measure of gratitude. Both
were strictly true, and only in a weak and foolish nature can the
consciousness of kindness received distract or blot out the consciousness
of the intellectual imbecility which may lurk behind it. Blake said:


'I never made friends but by spiritual gifts,
By severe contentions of friendship and the burning
fire of thought.'


What least 'contention of friendship' would not have been too
much for the 'triumphs of temper' of 'Felpham's eldest son'? what
'fire of thought' could ever have enlightened his comfortable
darkness? And is it surprising that Blake should have written in
final desperation:


'Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache:
Do be my enemy--for friendship's sake'?


He quarreled with many of his friends, with those whom he had
cared for most, like Stothard and Flaxman; but the cause was
always some moral indignation, which, just or unjust, was believed,
and which, being believed, could not have been acted upon. With Blake
belief and action were simultaneous. 'Thought is Act,' as he wrote on
the margin of Bacon's essays.

I am inclined to attribute to this period the writing down of a
mysterious manuscript in the possession of Mr. Buxton Forman,
which has never been printed, but which, by his kind permission,
I have been allowed to read. This manuscript is headed in large
lettering: 'The Seven Days of the Created World,' above which is
written, as if by an afterthought, in smaller lettering: 'Genesis.'
It is written at the beginning of a blue-covered copy-book, of
which the paper is water-marked 1797. It consists of some two
hundred lines of blank verse, numbered by tens in the margin
up to one hundred and fifty, then follow over fifty more lines
without numberings, ending without a full stop or any apparent
reason for coming to an end. The handwriting is unmistakably
Blake's; on the first page or two it is large and careful; gradually
it gets smaller and seems more hurried or fatigued, as if it had
all been written at a single sitting. The earlier part goes on without
a break, but in the later part there are corrections; single words are
altered, sometimes as much as a line and a half is crossed out and
rewritten, the lines are sometimes corrected in the course of writing.
If it were not for these signs of correction I should find it difficult to
believe that Blake had actually composed anything so tamely regular
in metre or so destitute of imagination or symbol. It is an argument
or statement, written in the formal eighteenth-century manner, with
pious invocations, God being addressed as 'Sire,' and 'Wisdom
Supreme' as his daughter, epithets are inverted that they may fit the
better into a line, and geographical names heaped up in a scarcely
Miltonic manner, while Ixion strangely neighbors the 'press'd
African.' Nowhere is there any characteristic felicity, or any
recognizable sign of Blake.

When I saw first the manuscript it occurred to me that it might
have been a fragment of translation from Klopstock, done at Felpham
under the immediate dictation of Hayley. 'Read Klopstock into English
to Blake' we have seen Hayley noting down. But I can find no original
for it in Klopstock. That Blake could have written it out of his own
head at any date after 1797 is incredible, even as an experiment in that
'monotonous cadence like that used by Milton and Shakespeare and
all writers of English blank verse, derived from the modern bondage
of rhyming,' which he tells us in the preface to _Jerusalem_
he considered 'to be a necessary and indispensable part of verse,'
at the time 'when this verse was first dictated to me.' The only
resemblance which we find to it in Blake's published work is in an
occasional early fragment like that known as 'The Passions,' and
where it is so different from this or any of the early attempts at
blank verse is in the absolute regularity of the metre. All I can suggest
is that Blake may have written it at a very early age, and preserved
a rough draft, which Hayley may have induced him to make a clean
copy of, and that in the process of copying he may have touched up
the metre without altering the main substance. If this is so, I think
he stopped so abruptly because he would not, even to oblige Hayley,
go on any longer with so uncongenial a task.

Blake's three years at Felpham (September 1800 to September
1803) were described by him as 'my three years' slumber on the
banks of ocean,' and there is no doubt that, in spite of the neighborhood
and kindly antagonism of Hayley, that 'slumber' was, for Blake, in a
sense an awakening. It was the only period of his life lived out of
London, and with Felpham, as he said in a letter to Flaxman, 'begins
a new life, because another covering of earth is shaken off.' The cottage
at Felpham is only a little way in from a seashore which is one of the
loveliest and most changing shores of the English coast. Whistler has
painted it, and it is always as full of faint and wandering color as a
Whistler. It was on this coast that Rossetti first learned to care for the
sea. To Blake it must have been the realization of much that he had
already divined in his imagination. There, as he wrote to Flaxman,
'heaven opens on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not
obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly
heard and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a
shadow of their houses.' He drew the cottage on one of the pages of
_Milton_, with a naked image of himself walking in the garden,
and the image of an angel about to alight on a tree. The cottage is
still, as he found it, 'a perfect model for cottages, and I think for
palaces of magnificence, only enlarging, not altering its proportions,
and adding ornaments and not principles'; and no man of imagination
could live there, under that thatched roof and with that marvelous sea
before him, and not find himself spiritually naked and within arm's
reach of the angels.

The sea has the properties of sleep and of awakening, and
there can be no doubt that the sea had both those influences on Blake,
surrounding him for once with an atmosphere like that of his own
dreams. 'O lovely Felpham,' he writes, after he had left it, 'to thee
I am eternally indebted for my three years' rest from perturbation
and the strength I now enjoy.' Felpham represents a vivid pause,
in which he had leisure to return upon himself; and in one of his
letters he says: 'One thing of real consequence I have accomplished
by coming into the country, which is to me consolation enough,
namely, I have recollected all my scattered thoughts on art, and
resumed my primitive and original ways of execution in both
painting and engraving, which in the confusion of London I had
very much obliterated from my mind.' It is to this period, no doubt
(a period mentally overcome in the quiet of Felpham, but awaiting,
as we shall see, the electric spark of that visit to the Truchsessian
Gallery in London), that Blake refers in the _Descriptive Catalogue_,
when he speaks of the 'experiment pictures' which 'were the result
of temptations and perturbations, laboring to destroy imaginative
power, by means of that infernal machine, called Chiaro Oscuro,
in the hands of Venetian and Flemish demons,' such as the 'outrageous
demon,' Rubens, the 'soft and effeminate and cruel demon,' Correggio,
and, above all, Titian. 'The spirit of Titian,' we are told, in what is
really a confession of Blake's consciousness of the power of those
painters whose influence  he dreaded, 'was particularly active
in raising doubts concerning the possibility of executing without
a model; and, when once he had raised the doubt, it became easy
for him to snatch away the vision time after time; for when the
artist took his pencil, to execute his ideas, his power of imagination
weakened so much, and darkened, that memory of nature and of
pictures of the various schools possessed his mind, instead of
appropriate execution, resulting from the inventions.' It was thus
at Felpham that he returned to himself in art, and it was at Felpham
also that he had what seems to have been the culminating outburst of
'prophetic' inspiration, writing from immediate dictation, he said, 'and
even against my will.' Visions came readily to him out of the sea, and
he saw them walk on the shore, 'majestic shadows, grey but luminous,
and superior to the common height of men.'

It was at Felpham that Blake wrote the two last of the Prophetic
Books which remain to us, _Milton_ and _Jerusalem._ Both
bear the date of 1804 on the title-page, and this, no doubt, indicates
that the engraving was begun in that year. Yet it is not certain that the
engraved text of _Jerusalem_, at any rate, was formally published
till after 1809. Pages were certainly inserted between those two dates.
On p. 38 Blake says:


'I heard in Lambeth's shades:
In Felpham I heard and saw the Visions of Albion:
I write in South Molton Street, what I both see and
hear,
In regions of Humanity, in London's opening streets.'


That the main part was written in Felpham is evident from
more than one letter to Butts. In a letter dated April 25, 1803,
Blake says: 'But none can know the spiritual acts of my three
years' slumber on the banks of ocean, unless he has seen them
in the spirit, or unless he should read my long poem descriptive
of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense
number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's _Iliad_
or Milton's _Paradise Lost_; the persons and machinery entirely
new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have
written the poems from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes
twenty or thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even
against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered
non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the
labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study. I mention
this to show you what I think the grand reason of my being brought
down here.' The poem is evidently _Jerusalem_, for the address
'To the Public' on the first page begins: 'After my three years' slumber
on the banks of the Ocean, I again display my Giant forms to the Public.'
In the next letter, dated July 6, Blake again refers to the poem: 'Thus I
hope that all our three years' trouble ends in good-luck at last, and
shall be forgot by my affections, and only remembered by my
understanding, to be a memento in time to come, and to speak
to future generations by a sublime allegory, which is now perfectly
completed into a grand poem. I may praise it, since I dare not pretend
to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity. I
consider it as the grandest poem that this world contains. Allegory
addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden
from the corporeal understanding, is my definition of the most
sublime poetry. It is somewhat in the same manner defined by Plato.
This poem shall, by divine assistance, be progressively printed and
ornamented with prints, and given to the public.'

This I take to mean that before Blake's return to London in
1803 the letterpress of _Jerusalem_ was, as he imagined,
completely finished, but that the printing and illustration were not
yet begun. The fact of this delay, and the fact that pages written after
1803 were inserted here and there, must not lead us to think, as many
writers on Blake have thought, that there could be any allusion in
_Jerusalem_ to the attacks of the _Examiner_ of 1808 and
1809, or that 'Hand,' one of the wicked sons of Albion, could possibly
be, as Rossetti desperately conjectured, 'a hieroglyph for Leigh Hunt.'
The sons of Albion are referred to on quite a third of the pages of
_Jerusalem_, from the earliest to the latest, and must have been
part of the whole texture of the poem from the beginning. In a passage
of the 'Public Address,' contained in the Rossetti MS., Blake says: 'The
manner in which my character has been blasted these thirty years,
both as an artist and as a man, may be seen particularly in a Sunday paper
called the _Examiner_, published in Beaufort's Buildings; the
manner in which I have rooted out the nest of villains will be seen
in a poem concerning my three years' Herculean labours at Felpham,
which I shall soon publish.' Even if this is meant for _Jerusalem_,
as it may well be, Blake is far from saying that he has referred in the
poem to these particular attacks: 'the nest of villains' has undoubtedly
a much broader meaning, and groups together all the attacks of thirty
years, public or private, of which the _Examiner_ is but quoted
as a recent example.

The chief reason for supposing that _Jerusalem_ may not
have been published till after the exhibition of 1809, is to be found in a
passage in the _Descriptive Catalogue_ which seems to summarize
the main subject of the poem, though it is quite possible that it may
refer to some MS. now lost. The picture of the Ancient Britons, says
Blake, represents three men who 'were originally one man who was
fourfold. He was self-divided, and his real humanity slain on the
stems of generation, and the form of the fourth was like the Son of
God. How he became divided is a subject of great sublimity and pathos.
The Artist has written it, under inspiration, and will, if God please,
publish it. It is voluminous, and contains the ancient history of Britain,
and the world of Satan and Adam.' 'All these things,' he has just said,
'are written in Eden.' And he says further: 'The British Antiquities are
now in the Artist's hands; all his visionary contemplations relating
to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was, as it again
shall be, the source of learning and inspiration.' 'Adam was a
Druid, and Noah.' In the description of his picture of the 'Last
Judgment' Blake indicates 'Albion, our ancestor, patriarch of
the Atlantic Continent, whose history preceded that of the Hebrews,
and in whose sleep, or chaos, creation began. The good woman is
Britannia, the wife of Albion. Jerusalem is their daughter.'

We see here the symbols, partly Jewish and partly British,
into which Blake had gradually resolved his mythology. 'The
persons and machinery,' he said, were 'entirely new to the inhabitants
of earth (some of the persons excepted).' This has been usually,
but needlessly, supposed to mean that real people are introduced
under disguises. Does it not rather mean, what would be strictly
true, that the 'machinery' is here of a kind wholly new to the Prophetic
Books, while of the 'persons' some have already been met with, others
are now seen for the first time? It is all, in his own words, 'allegory
addressed to the intellectual powers, while it is altogether hidden
from the corporeal understanding,' and the allegory becomes harder
to read as it becomes more and more naked, concentrated, and
unexplained. _Milton_ seems to have arisen out of a symbol
which came visibly before Blake's eyes on his first waking in the
cottage at Felpham. 'Work will go on here with Godspeed,' he writes
to Butts. 'A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a
plough on my first going out at my gate the first morning after
my arrival, and the ploughboy said to the ploughman, "Father,
the gate is open."' At the beginning of his poem Blake writes:


'The Plow goes forth in tempests and lightnings and
the Harrow cruel
In blights of the east; the heavy Roller follows in
howlings;'


And the imagery returns at intervals, in the vision of 'the Last
Vintage,' the 'Great Harvest and Vintage of the Nations.' The personal
element comes in the continual references to the cottage at Felpham;


'He set me down in Felpham's Vale and prepared a
beautiful
Cottage for me that in three years I might write all
these Visions
To display Nature's cruel holiness: the deceits of
Natural Religion;'


And it is in the cottage near the sea that he sees the vision of
Milton, when he:


'Descended down a Paved work of all kinds of precious
stones
Out from the eastern sky; descending down into my
Cottage
Garden; clothed in black, severe and silent he
descended.'


He awakes from the vision to find his wife by his side:


'My bones trembled. I fell outstretched upon the
path
A moment, and my Soul returned into its mortal state
To Resurrection and Judgment in the Vegetable Body,
And my sweet Shadow of delight stood trembling by
my side.'


In the prayer to be saved from his friends ('Corporeal Friends
are Spiritual Enemies'), in the defense of wrath ('Go to thy labours
at the Mills and leave me to my wrath'), in the outburst:


'The idiot Reasoner laughs at the Man of Imagination
And from laughter proceeds to murder by undervaluing
calumny,'


It is difficult not to see some trace or transposition of the kind,
evil counsellor Hayley, a 'Satan' of mild falsehood in the sight of Blake.
But the main aim of the book is the assertion of the supremacy of the
imagination:


'The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human
Existence itself,'


And the putting off of the 'filthy garments,' of 'Rational
Demonstration,' of 'Memory,' of 'Bacon, Locke, and Newton,' the
clothing of oneself in imagination,


'To cast aside from Poetry, all that is not
Inspiration,
That it shall no longer dare to mock with the aspersion
of Madness.
Cast on the Inspired by the tame high finisher of
paltry Blots,
Indefinite or paltry Rhymes; or paltry harmonies.'


It is because 'Everything in Eternity shines by its own Internal
light,' and that jealousy and cruelty and hypocrisy are all darkenings
of that light, that Blake declares his purpose of:


'Opening to every eye
These wonders of Satan's holiness showing to the
Earth
The Idol Virtues of the Natural Heart, and Satan's
Seat
Explore in all its Selfish Natural Virtue, and put off
In Self-annihilation all that is not of God alone.'


Such meanings as these flare out from time to time with individual
splendors of phrase, like 'Time is the mercy of Eternity,' and the great
poetic epigram, 'O Swedenborg! strongest of men, the Samson shorn
by the Churches' (where, for a moment, a line falls into the regular
rhythm of poetry), and around them are deserts and jungles, fragments
of myth broken off and flung before us after this fashion:


'But Bahab and Tirzah pervert
Their mild influences, therefore the Seven Eyes of
God walk round
The Three Heavens of Ulro, where Tirzah and her
Sisters
Weave the black Woof of Death upon Entuthon
Benython
In the Vale of Surrey where Horeb terminates in
Rephaim.'


In _Jerusalem_, which was to have been 'the grandest poem
which the world contains,' there is less of the exquisite lyrical work
which still decorates many corners of _Milton_, but it is
Blake's most serious attempt to set his myth in order, and it contains
much of his deepest wisdom, with astonishing flashes of beauty. In
_Milton_ there was still a certain approximation to verse, most
of the lines had at least a beginning and an end, but in _Jerusalem_,
although he tells us that 'every word and every letter is studied and put
into its place,' I am by no means sure that Blake ever intended the
lines, as he wrote them, to be taken as metrical lines, or read very
differently from the prose of the English Bible, with its pause in the
sense at the end of each verse. A vague line, hesitating between six
and seven beats, does indeed seem from time to time to emerge from
chaos, and inversions are brought in at times to accentuate a cadence
certainly intended, as here:


'Why should Punishment Weave the Veil with Iron
Wheels of War,
When Forgiveness might it Weave with Wings of
Cherubim?'


But read the whole book as if it were prose, following the sense
for its own sake, and you will find that the prose, when it is not
a mere catalogue, has generally a fine biblical roll and swing in it,
a rhythm of fine oratory; while if you read each line as if it were meant
to be a metrical unit you will come upon such difficulties as this:


'Such is the Forgiveness of the Gods, the Moral Virtues
of the'


That is one line, and the next adds 'Heathen.' There may seem
to be small reason for such an arrangement of the lines if we read
_Jerusalem_ in the useful printed text of Mr. Russell and Mr.
Maclagan; but the reason will be seen if we turn to the original
engraved page, where we shall see that Blake had set down in the
margin a lovely little bird with outstretched wings, and that the tip
of the bird's wing almost touches the last letter of the 'the' and leaves
no room for another word. That such a line was meant to be metrical
is unthinkable, as unthinkable as that:


'Los stood and stamped the earth, then he threw down
his hammer in rage &
In fury'


Has any reason for existing in this form beyond the mere chance
of a hand that writes until all the space of a given line is filled.
Working as he did within those limits of his hand's space, he
would accustom himself to write for the most part, and and especially
when his imagination was most vitally awake, in lines that came
roughly within those limits. Thus it will often happen that the most
beautiful passages will have the nearest resemblance to a regular
metrical scheme, as in such lines as these:


In vain: he is hurried afar into an unknown Night.
He bleeds in torrents of blood, as he rolls thro'
heaven above,
He chokes up the paths of the sky: the Moon is
leprous as snow:
Trembling and descending down, seeking to rest on
high Mona:
Scattering her leprous snow in flakes of disease over
Albion.
The Stars flee remote: the heaven is iron, the earth
is sulphur,
And all the mountains and hills shrink up like a
withering gourd.'


Here the prophet is no longer speaking with the voice of the
orator, but with the old, almost forgotten voice of the poet, and with
something of the despised 'Monotonous Cadence.'

Blake lived for twenty-three years after the date on the
title-page of _Jerusalem_, but, with the exception of the
two plates called _The Ghost of Abel_, engraved in 1822,
this vast and obscure encyclopaedia of unknown regions remains
his last gospel. He thought it his most direct message. Throughout
the Prophetic Books Blake has to be translated out of the unfamiliar
language into which he has tried to translate spiritual realities,
literally, as he apprehended them. Just as, in the designs which his
hand drew as best it could, according to its limited and partly false
knowledge, from the visions which his imagination saw with perfect
clearness, he was often unable to translate that vision into its real
equivalent in design, so in his attempts to put these other mental
visions into words he was hampered by an equally false method,
and often by reminiscences of what passed for 'picturesque' writing in
the work of his contemporaries. He was, after all, of his time, though
he was above it, and just as he only knew Michelangelo through bad
reproductions, and could never get his own design wholly free, malleable,
and virgin to his 'shaping spirit of imagination,' so, in spite of all his
marvelous lyrical discoveries, made when his mind was less burdened
by the weight of a controlling message, he found himself, when he
attempted to make an intelligible system out of the 'improvisations
of the spirit,' and to express that system with literal accuracy, the
half-helpless captive of formal words, conventional rhythms, a
language not drawn direct from its source. Thus we find, in the
Prophetic Books, neither achieved poems nor an achieved philosophy.
The philosophy has reached us only in splendid fragments (the
glimmering of stars out of separate corners of a dark sky), and we
shall never know to what extent these fragments were once parts
of a whole. Had they been ever really fused, this would have been the
only system of philosophy made entirely out of the raw material of
poetry. As it has come to us unachieved, the world has still to wait
for a philosophy untouched by the materialism of the prose
intelligence.

In the Prophetic Books Blake labours at the creation of a myth,
which may be figured as the representation in space of a vast
spiritual tragedy. It is the tragedy of Man, a tragedy in which the first
act is creation. Milton was content to begin with 'Man's first
disobedience,' but Blake would track the human soul back into chaos,
and beyond. He knows, like Krishna, in the _Bhagavad Gita_,
that 'above this visible nature there exists another, unseen and
eternal, which, when all created things perish, does not perish';
and he sees the soul's birth in that 'inward spiritual world,' from
which it falls to mortal life and the body, as into a death. He sees
its new, temporal life, hung round with fears and ambushes, out
of which, by a new death, the death of that mortal self which
separates it from eternity, it may reawaken, even in this life,
into the eternal life of imagination. The persons of the drama
are the powers and passions of Man, and the spiritual forces
which surround him, and are the 'states' through which he
passes. Man is seen, as Blake saw all things, fourfold: Man's
Humanity, his Spectre, who is Reason, his Emanation, who is
Imagination, his Shadow, who is Desire. And the states through
which Man passes, friendly or hostile, energies of good or of
evil, are also four: the Four Zoas, who are the Four Living
Creatures of Ezekiel, and are called Urizen, Luvah, Tharmas,
and Urthona (or, to mortals, Los). Each Zoa has his Emanation:
Ahania, who is the emanation of Intellect, and is named 'eternal
delight'; Vala, the emanation of Emotion, who is lovely deceit,
and the visible beauty of Nature; Enion, who is the emanation
of the Senses, and typifies the maternal instinct; Enitharmon,
who is the emanation of Intuition, and personifies spiritual beauty.
The drama is the division, death, and resurrection, in an eternal circle,
of the powers of man and of the powers in whose midst he fights
and struggles. Of this incommensurable action we are told only in
broken hints, as of a chorus crying outside doors where deeds are
being done in darkness. Images pass before us, make their gesture,
and are gone; the words spoken are ambiguous, and seem to have
an under meaning which it is essential for us to apprehend. We see
motions of building and of destruction, higher than the topmost
towers of the world, and deeper than the abyss of the sea; souls pass
through furnaces, and are remade by Time's hammer on the anvil of
space; there are obscure crucifixions, and Last Judgments return and
are re-enacted.

To Blake, the Prophetic Books were to be the new religious books
of a religion which was not indeed new, for it was the Everlasting
Gospel' of Jesus, but, because it had been seen anew by Swedenborg
and by Wesley and by 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press
of Love,' among whom was Teresa, seemed to require a new interpretation
to the imagination. Blake wrote when the eighteenth century was
coming to an end; he announced the new dispensation which was to
come, Swedenborg had said, with the year (which was the year of Blake's
birth) 1757. He looked forward steadfastly to the time when 'Sexes must
vanish and cease to be,' when 'all their crimes, their punishments, their
accusations of sin, all their jealousies, revenges, murders, hidings
of cruelty in deceit, appear only on the outward spheres of visionary
Space and Time, in the shadows of possibility by mutual forgiveness
for evermore, and in the vision and the prophecy, that we may foresee
and avoid the terrors of Creation and Redemption and Judgment.' He
spoke to literalists, rationalists, materialists; to an age whose very
infidels doubted only facts, and whose deists affirmed no more than
that man was naturally religious. The rationalist's denial of everything
beyond the evidence of his senses seemed to him a criminal blindness;
and he has engraved a separate sheet with images and statements of
the affirmation: 'There is no Natural Religion.' To Blake the literal
meaning of things seemed to be of less than no importance. To
worship the 'Goddess Nature' was to worship the 'God of this World,'
and so to be an atheist, as even Wordsworth seemed to him to be.
Religion was asleep, with Art and Literature in its arms: Blake's was
the voice of the awakening angel. What he cried was that only eternal
and invisible things were true, and that visible temporal things were
a veil and a delusion. In this he knew himself to be on the side of
Wesley and Whitefield, and that Voltaire and Rousseau, the voices of
the passing age, were against him. He called them 'frozen sons of the
feminine Tabernacle of Bacon, Newton, and Locke.' Wesley and
Whitefield he calls the 'two servants' of God, his 'two witnesses.'

But it seemed to him that he could go deeper into the Bible
than they, in their practical eagerness, had gone. 'What are
the treasures of Heaven,' he asked, 'that we are to lay up for
ourselves--are they any other than Mental Studies and Performances?'
'Is the Holy Ghost,' he asked, 'any other than an intellectual Fountain?'
It seemed to him that he could harmonise many things once held
to be discordant, and adjust the many varying interpretations of the
Bible and the other books of ancient religions by a universal
application of what had been taken in too personal a way. Hence
many of the puzzling 'correspondences' of English cities and the
tribe of Judah, of 'the Poetic Genius, which is the Lord.'

There is an outcry in _Jerusalem_:


'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._]



PART II: RECORDS FROM CONTEMPORARY SOURCES



(I.) EXTRACTS FROM THE DIARY, LETTERS, AND REMINISCENCES OF HENRY CRABB
ROBINSON, TRANSCRIBED FROM THE ORIGINAL MSS. IN DR. WILLIAMS'S LIBRARY,
1810-1852


'Of all the records of these his latter years,' says Mr. Swinburne in
his book on Blake, 'the most valuable, perhaps, are those furnished by
Mr. Crabb Robinson, whose cautious and vivid transcription of Blake's
actual speech is worth more than much vague remark, or than any
commentary now possible to give.' Through the kind permission of the
Librarian of Dr. Williams's Library, where the Crabb Robinson MSS. are
preserved, I am able to give, for the first time, an accurate and complete
text of every reference to Blake in the _Diary, Letters_, and
_Reminiscences_, which have hitherto been printed only in
part, and with changes as well as omissions. In an entry in his Diary
for May 13, 1848, Crabb Robinson says: 'It is strange that I, who have
no imagination, nor any power beyond that of a logical understanding,
should yet have great respect for the mystics.' This respect for the
mystics, to which we owe the notes on Blake, was part of an inexhaustible
curiosity in human things, and in things of the mind, which made of
Crabb Robinson the most searching and significant reporter of the
nineteenth century. Others may have understood Blake better than
he did, but no one else was so attentive to his speech, and thus so
faithful an interpreter of his meaning.

In copying from the MS. I have followed the spelling, not however
preserving abbreviations such as 'Bl:' for 'Blake,' due merely to haste,
and I have modified the punctuation and added commas of quotation
only when the writer's carelessness in these matters was likely to be
confusing. Otherwise the transcript is literal and verbatim, and I have
added in footnotes any readings of possible interest which have been
crossed out in the manuscript.



(1) FROM CRABB ROBINSON'S DIARY


1825


_December_


10 ... Dined with Aders. A very remarkable and interesting evening.
The party _Blake_ the painter and Linnell--also a painter
and engraver--to dinner. In the evening came Miss Denman
and Miss Flaxman.



10_th December_ 1825


BLAKE


I will put down as they occur to me without method all I can
recollect of the conversation of this remarkable man. Shall I call
him Artist or Genius--or Mystic--or Madman? Probably he
is all. He has a most interesting appearance. He is now old--pale
with a Socratic countenance, and an expression of great sweetness, but
bordering on weakness--except when his features are animated
by[1] expression, and then he has an air of inspiration about
him. The conversation was on art, and on poetry, and on religion;
but it was my object, and I was successful, in drawing him out,
and in so getting from him an avowal of his _peculiar_ sentiments.
I was aware before of the nature of his impressions, or I should
at times have been at a loss to understand him. He was shewn
soon after he entered the room some compositions of Mrs. Aders
which he cordially praised. And he brought with him an engraving
of his Canterbury Pilgrims for Aders. One of the figures resembled
one in one of Aders's pictures. 'They say I stole it from this
picture, but I did it 20 years before I knew of the picture--however,
in my youth I was always studying this kind of paintings. No
wonder there is a resemblance.' In this he seemed to explain
_humanly_ what he had done, but he at another time spoke of
his paintings as being what he had seen in his visions. And
when he said _my visions_ it was in the ordinary unemphatic
tone in which we speak of trivial matters that every one understands
and cares nothing about. In the same tone he said repeatedly,
the 'Spirit told me.' I took occasion to say--You use the same
word as Socrates used. What resemblance do you suppose is there
between your spirit and the spirit of Socrates? 'The same as
between our countenance.' He paused and added--'I was Socrates.'
And then, as if correcting himself, 'A sort of brother. I must
have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ.
I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.'

It was before this, that I had suggested on very  obvious philosophical
grounds the _impossibility_ of supposing an immortal being
created--an eternity _a parte post_ without an eternity
_a parte ante._ This is an obvious truth I have been many (perhaps
30) years fully aware of. His eye brightened on my saying this,
and he eagerly concurred--'To be sure it is impossible. We are
all co-existent with God--members of the Divine body. We are
all partakers of the Divine nature.' In this, by the bye, Blake has but
adopted an ancient Greek idea--query of Plato? As connected
with this idea I will mention here (though it formed part of our talk,
walking homeward) that on my asking in what light he viewed
the great question concerning the Divinity of Jesus Christ, he
said_--'He is the only God_.' But then he added--'And so am I
and so are you.' Now he had just before (and this occasioned
my question) been speaking of the errors of Jesus Christ--He
was wrong in suffering Himself to be crucified. He should not have
attacked the Government. He had no business with such matters.
On my inquiring how he reconciled this with the sanctity and divine
qualities of Jesus, he said He was not then become the Father.
Connecting as well as one can these fragmentary sentiments, it
would be hard to give Blake's station between Christianity, Platonism,
and Spinosism. Yet he professes to be very hostile to Plato, and
reproaches Wordsworth with being not a Christian but a Platonist.

It is one of the subtle remarks of Hume on certain religious
speculations that the tendency of them is to make men indifferent
to whatever takes place by destroying all ideas of good and evil. I
took occasion to apply this remark to something Blake said. If so,
I said, there is no use in discipline or education, no difference
between good and evil. He hastily broke in on me--'There is
no use in education. I hold it wrong. It is the great sin.[2]
It is eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That was
the fault of Plato--he knew of nothing but of the virtues and vices
and good and evil There is nothing in all that. Every thing is good
in God's eyes.' On my putting the obvious question--Is there
nothing absolutely evil in what men do? 'I am no judge of that.
Perhaps not in God's Eyes.' Though on this and other occasions he
spoke as if he denied altogether the existence of evil, and as if we
had nothing to do with right and wrong. It being sufficient to consider
all things as alike the work of God. [I interposed with the German
word objectively, which he approved of.] Yet at other times he spoke
of error as being in heaven. I asked about the _moral_ character
of Dante in writing his Vision: was he pure? '_Pure_' said Blake.
'Do you think there is any purity in God's eyes? The angels in heaven
are no more so than we--"he chargeth his angels with folly."'
He afterwards extended this to the Supreme Being--he is
liable to error too. Did he not repent him that he had made Nineveh?

It is easier to repeat the personal remarks of Blake than these
metaphysical speculations so nearly allied to the most opposite
systems. He spoke with seeming complacency of himself--said
he acted by command. The spirit said to him, 'Blake, be an artist
and nothing else.' In this there is felicity. His eye glistened while
he spoke of the joy of devoting himself solely to divine art. 'Art is
inspiration. When Michael Angelo or Raphael or Mr. Flaxman does
any of his fine things, he does them in the spirit.' Blake said, 'I
should be sorry if I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural
glory a man has is so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I
wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art. I want nothing
whatever. I am quite happy.'

Among the[3] unintelligible sentiments which he
was continually expressing is his distinction between the natural
and the spiritual world. The natural world must be consumed. Incidentally
_Swedenborg_ was spoken of. He was a divine teacher--he
has done much good, and will do much good--he has corrected
many errors of Popery, and also of Luther and Calvin. Yet he
also said that _Swedenborg_ was wrong in endeavoring to explain
to the _rational_ faculty what the reason cannot comprehend: he
should have left that. As Blake mentioned _Swedenborg_ and
_Dante_ together I wished to know whether he considered their
visions of the same kind. As far as I could collect, he does. _Dante_
he said was the greater _poet._ He had _political_ objects.
Yet this, though wrong, does not appear in Blake's mind to affect the
truth of the vision. Strangely inconsistent with this was the language
of Blake about Wordsworth. Wordsworth he thinks is no Christian but a
Platonist. He asked me, 'Does he believe in the Scriptures?' On my
answering in the affirmative he said he had been much pained by
reading the introduction to the Excursion. It brought on a fit of illness.
The passage was produced and read:


'Jehovah--with his thunder, and the choir
Of shouting Angels, and the empyreal thrones,
I _pass_ them unalarmed.'


This _pass them unalarmed_ greatly offended Blake. 'Does
Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can _surpass_ Jehovah?' I tried
to twist this passage into a sense corresponding with Blake's own
theories, but filled [_sic_= failed], and Wordsworth was finally
set down as a pagan. But still with great praise as the greatest poet
of the age.

Jacob Boehmen was spoken of as a divinely inspired man. Blake
praised, too, the figures in Law's translation as being very beautiful.
Michael Angelo could not have done better. Though he spoke of his
happiness, he spoke of past sufferings, and of sufferings as necessary.
'There is suffering in heaven, for where there is the capacity of
enjoyment, there is the capacity of pain.'

I have been interrupted by a call from Talfourd in writing this
account--and I can not now recollect any distinct remarks--but
as Blake has invited me to go and see him I shall possibly have an
opportunity again of noting what he says, and I may be able hereafter
to throw connection, if not system, into what I have written above.

I feel great admiration and respect for him--he is certainly
a most amiable man--a good creature--and  of his poetical
and pictorial genius there is no doubt, I believe, in the minds of judges.
Wordsworth and Lamb like his poems, and the Aders his paintings.


A few other detached thoughts occur to me. _Bacon_, _Locke_,
and _Newton_ are the three great teachers of Atheism or of Satan's
doctrine. Every thing is _Atheism_ which assumes the reality of the
natural and unspiritual world. _Irving._ He is a highly gifted
man--he is a sent man--but they who are sent sometimes[4]
go further than they ought.

_Dante_ saw Devils where I see none. I see only good. I saw
nothing but good in _Calvin's_ house--better than in Luther's;
he had harlots.

_Swedenborg._ Parts of his scheme are dangerous. His sexual
religion is dangerous.

I do not believe that the world is round. I believe it is quite flat.
I objected the circumnavigation. We were called to dinner at the
moment, and I lost the reply.

The _Sun._ 'I have conversed with the Spiritual Sun--I saw
him on Primrose-hill. He said, "Do you take me for the Greek Apollo?"
"No," I said, "that," [and Blake pointed to the sky] "that is the Greek
Apollo. He is Satan."'

'I know what is true by internal conviction. A doctrine is told
me--my heart says it must be true.' I corroborated this by
remarking on the impossibility of the unlearned man judging of
what are called the _external_ evidences of religion, in
which he heartily concurred.

I regret that I have been unable to do more than set down these
seeming idle and rambling sentences. The tone and manner are
incommunicable. There is a natural sweetness and gentility about
Blake which are delightful. And when he is not referring to his
Visions he talks sensibly and acutely.

His friend Linnel seems a great admirer.

Perhaps the best thing he said was his comparison of moral
with natural evil. 'Who shall say what God thinks evil? That is a wise
tale of the Mahometans--of the Angel of the Lord that murdered
the infant' [alluding to the Hermit of Parnel, I suppose]. 'Is not every
infant that dies of disease in effect murdered by an angel?'


17_th December._ For the sake of connection I will here
insert a minute of a short call I this morning made on Blake. He
dwells in Fountain Court in the Strand. I found him in a small
room, which seems to be both a working-room and a bedroom. Nothing
could exceed the squalid air both of the apartment and his dress,
but in spite of dirt--I might say filth--an air of natural
gentility is diffused over him. And his wife, notwithstanding the same
offensive character of her dress and appearance, has a good expression
of countenance, so that I shall have a pleasure in calling on and
conversing with these worthy people.

But I fear I shall not make any progress in ascertaining his opinions
and feelings--that there being really no system or connection in
his mind, all his future conversation will be but varieties of wildness
and incongruity.

I found [_sic_] at work on Dante. The book (Cary) and his
sketches both before him. He shewed me his designs, of which I
have nothing to say but that they evince a power of grouping and
of throwing grace and interest over conceptions most monstrous and
disgusting, which I should not have anticipated.

Our conversation began about Dante. 'He was an "Atheist," a
mere politician busied about this world as Milton was, till in his old
age he returned back to God whom he had had in his childhood.'

I tried to get out from Blake that he meant this charge only in
a higher sense, and not using the word Atheism in its popular
meaning. But he would not allow this. Though when he in like
manner charged Locke with Atheism and I remarked that Locke
wrote on the evidences of piety and lived a virtuous life, he had
nothing to reply to me nor reiterated the charge of willful deception.
I admitted that Locke's doctrine leads to Atheism, and this seemed
to satisfy him. From this subject we passed over to that of good
and evil, in which he repeated his former assertions more decidedly.
He allowed, indeed, that there is error, mistake, etc., and if these
be evil--then there is evil, but these are only negations.
Nor would he admit that any education should be attempted except
that of cultivation of the imagination and fine arts. 'What are called
the vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the
spiritual world.' When I asked whether if he had been a father he
would not have grieved if his child had become vicious or a great
criminal, he answered, 'I must not regard when I am endeavoring
to think rightly my own any more than other people's weaknesses.'
And when I again remarked that this doctrine puts an end to all
exertion or even wish to change anything, he had no reply. We
spoke of the Devil, and I observed that when a child I thought the
Manichaean doctrine or that of the two principles a rational one.
He assented to this, and in confirmation asserted that he did
not believe in the _omnipotence_ of God. 'The language of
the Bible on that subject is only poetical or allegorical.' Yet soon
after he denied that the natural world is anything. 'It is all nothing,
and Satan's empire is the empire of nothing.'

He reverted soon to his favorite expression, my Visions. 'I
saw Milton in imagination, and he told me to beware of being
misled by his Paradise Lost. In particular he wished me to show
the falsehood of his doctrine that the pleasures of _sex_
arose from the fall. The fall could not produce any pleasure.' I
answered, the fall produced a state of _evil_ in which there
was a mixture of good or pleasure. And in that sense the fall
may be said to produce the pleasure. But he replied that the
fall produced only generation and death. And then he went off
upon a rambling state of a union of sexes in man as in Ovid,
an androgynous state, in which I could not follow him.

As he spoke of Miltons appearing to him, I asked whether he
resembled the prints of him. He answered, 'All.' Of what age did
he appear to be? 'Various ages--sometimes a very old man.'
He spoke of Milton as being at one time a sort of classical Atheist,
and of Dante as being now with God.

Of the faculty of Vision, he spoke as one he has had from early
infancy. He thinks all men partake of it, but it is lost by not being
cultivated. And he eagerly assented to a remark I made, that all men
have all faculties to a greater or less degree. I am to renew my visits,
and to read Wordsworth to him, of whom he seems to entertain a high idea.

[Here B. has added _vide_ p. 174, _i.e._ Dec. 24,
below.]


_Sunday_ 11_th._ The greater part of the forenoon
was spent in writing the preceding account of my interview with Blake
in which I was interrupted by a call from Talfourd....


17_th._ Made a visit to Blake of which I have written fully
in a preceding page.


20_th_... Hundleby took coffee with me _tête à tête._
We talked of his personal concerns, of Wordsworth, whom I can't make
him properly enjoy; of Blake, whose peculiarities he can as little
relish....


_Saturday_ 24_th._ A call on _Blake._ My third
interview. I read him Wordsworth's incomparable ode, which he heartily
enjoyed. The same half crazy crotchets about the two worlds--the
eternal repetition of what must in time become tiresome. Again he
repeated to day, 'I fear Wordsworth loves Nature--and Nature
is the work of the Devil. The Devil is in us, as far as we are Nature.'
On my enquiring whether the Devil would not be destroyed by God
as being of less power, he denied that God has any power--asserted
that the Devil is eternally created not by God, but by God's permission.
And when I objected that permission implies power to prevent, he did
not seem to understand me. It was remarked that the parts of Wordworth's
ode which he most enjoyed were the most obscure and those I the least
like and comprehend....



_January_ 1826


6_th._ A call on Blake. I hardly feel it worth while to write
down his conversation, it is so much a repetition of his former talk.
He was very cordial to-day. I had procured him two subscriptions
for his Job from Geo. Procter and Bas. Montague. I paid £1 on each.
This, probably, put him in spirits, more than he was aware of--he
spoke of his being richer than ever on having learned to know me,
and he told Mrs. A. he and I were nearly of an opinion. Yet I have
practized no deception intentionally, unless silence be so. He
renewed his complaints, blended with his admiration of Wordsworth.
The oddest thing he said was that he had been commanded to do certain
things, that is, to write about Milton, and that he was applauded for
refusing--he struggled with the Angels and was victor. His
wife joined in the conversation....


8_th._ ... Then took tea with Basil Montague, Mrs. M.
there. A short chat about Coleridge, Irving, etc. She admires
Blake_--Encore une excellence là de plus._...


_February_


18_th._ Jos. Wedd breakfasted with me. Then called on
_Blake._ An amusing chat with him, but still no novelty.
The same round of extravagant and mad doctrines, which I shall
not now repeat, but merely notice their application.

He gave me, copied out by himself, Wordsworth's preface to
his Excursion. At the end he has added this note:--

'Solomon, when he married Pharaoh's daughter, became a convert
to the Heathen Mythology, talked exactly in this way of Jehovah
as a very inferior object of man's contemplations; he also passed him
by unalarmed, and was permitted. Jehovah dropped a tear and followed
him by his Spirit into the abstract void. It is called the divine Mercy.
Satan dwells in it, but mercy does not dwell in him.'

Of Wordsworth he talked as before. Some of his writings proceed
from the Holy Ghost, but then others are the work of the Devil.
However, I found on this subject Blake's language more in conformity
with Orthodox Christianity than before. He talked of the being under
the direction of _Self_; and of _Reason_ as the creature
of man and opposed to God's grace. And warmly declared that all he
knew was in the Bible, but then he understands by the Bible the spiritual
sense. For as to the natural sense, that Voltaire was commissioned by
God to expose. 'I have had much intercourse with Voltaire, and he
said to me I blasphemed the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven
me. But they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost
in me, and it shall not be forgiven them.' I asked in what language
Voltaire spoke--he gave an ingenious answer. 'To my sensation
it was English. It was like the touch of a musical key. He touched it
probably French, but to my ear it became English.' I spoke again of
the _form_ of the persons who appear to him. Asked why he did
not _draw_ them, 'It is not worth while. There are so many, the
labour would be too great. Besides there would be no use. As to
Shakespeare, he is exactly like the _old_ engraving--which
is called a bad one. I think it very good.'

I enquired about his writings. 'I have written more than Voltaire
or Rousseau--six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and
20 tragedies as long as Macbeth.' He showed me his Vision (for so it
may be called) of Genesis--'as understood by a Christian
Visionary,' in which in a style resembling the Bible the spirit is given.
He read a passage at random. It was striking. He will not print any
more.[5] 'I write,' he says, 'when commanded by the spirits,
and the moment I have written I see the words fly about the
room in all directions. It is then published, and the spirits
can read. My MSS. of no further use. I have been tempted to
burn my MSS., but my wife won't let me.' She is right, said
I--and you have written these, not from yourself, but by a higher
order. The MSS. are theirs and your property. You cannot tell
what purpose they may answer--unforeseen to you. He liked this,
and said he would not destroy them. His philosophy he repeated--denying
causation, asserting everything to be the work of God or the
Devil--that there is a constant falling off from God--angels
becoming devils. Every man has a devil in him, and the conflict
is eternal between a man's self and God, etc. etc. etc. He told
me my copy of his songs would be 5 guineas, and was pleased
by my manner of receiving this information. He spoke of his
horror of money--of his turning pale when money had been
offered him, etc. etc. etc.


_May_


_Thursday_ 11_th._ Calls this morning on Blake, on
Thornton [etc.] ...

12_th._ ... Tea and supper at home. The Flaxmans, Masqueriers
(a Miss Forbes), Blake, and Sutton Sharpe.

On the whole the evening went off tolerably. Masquerier not
precisely the man to enjoy Blake, who was, however, not in an
_exalted_ state. Allusions only to his particular notions
while Masquerier commented on his opinions as if they were those
of a man of ordinary notions. Blake asserted that the oldest painter
poets were the best. Do you deny all progression? says Masquerier. 'Oh
yes!' I doubt whether Flaxman sufficiently tolerates Blake. But Blake
appreciates Flaxman as he ought. Blake relished my Stone drawings.
They staid till eleven.

Blake is more and more convinced that Wordsworth worships
_nature_ and is not a Bible Christian. I have sent him the
Sketches. We shall see whether they convert him.


_June_


13_th._ Another idle day. Called early on Blake. He was
as wild as ever, with no great novelty, except that he confessed
a _practical_ notion which would do him more injury than any
other I have heard from him. He says that from the Bible he
has learned that _eine Gemeinschaft der Frauen statt finden
sollte._ When I objected that _Ehestand_ seems to be a divine
institution, he referred to the Bible--'that from the beginning
it was not so.' He talked as usual of the spirits, asserted
that he had committed many murders, that reason is the only evil
or sin, and that careless, gay people are better than those who
think, etc. etc. etc.


_December_


_Thursday_ 7_th._ I sent Britt, to enquire after Mr.
Flaxman's health, etc., and was engaged looking over the Term
Reports while he was gone. On his return, he brought the melancholy
intelligence of his death early in the morning!!! The country has lost
one of its greatest and best of men. As an artist he has spread the
fame of the country beyond any others of his age. As a man he exhibited
a rare specimen of Christian and moral excellence.

I walked out and called at Mr. Soane's. He was from home. I then
called on Blake, desirous to see how, with his peculiar feelings
and opinions, he would receive the intelligence. It was much
as I expected--he had himself been very ill during the summer,
and his first observation was with a smile--'I thought I
should have gone first.' He then said, 'I cannot consider death
as anything but[6] a removing from one room to another.' One
thing led to another, and he fell into his wild rambling way
of talk. 'Men are born with a devil and an angel,' but this
he himself interpreted body and soul. Of the Old Testament he
seemed to think not favorably. 'Christ,' said he, 'took much
after his mother (the law), and in that respect was one of the
worst of men.' On my requiring an explanation, he said, 'There
was his turning the money changers out of the Temple. He had
no right to do that.' Blake then declared against those who
sat in judgement on others. 'I have never known a very bad man
who had not something very good about him.' He spoke of the
Atonement. Said, 'It is a horrible doctrine. If another man pay your
debt, I do not forgive it,' etc. etc. etc. He produced _Sintram_
by Fouqué--'This is better than my things.'



1827


_February_


_Friday_, 2_nd._ Götzenberger, the young painter from
Germany, called on me, and I accompanied him to Blake. We looked
over Blake's Dante. Götzenberger seemed highly gratified by the designs,
and Mrs. Aders says Götzenberger considers Blake, as the first
and Flaxman as the second man he had seen in England. The conversation
was slight--I  was interpreter between them. And nothing
remarkable was said by Blake--he was interested apparently by
Götzenberger....



1828


_January_


8_th._ Breakfasted with Shott--Talfourd and B. Field
there. Walked with Field to Mrs. Blake. The poor old lady was more
affected than I expected, yet she spoke of her husband as dying
like an angel. She is the housekeeper of Linnell the painter and
engraver, and at present her services might well pay for her hoard.
A few of her husband's works are all her property. We found that
the Job is Linnell's property, and the print of Chaucer's pilgrimage
hers. Therefore Field bought a proof and I two prints at 2 1/2 guineas
each. I mean one for Lamb. Mrs. Blake is to look out some engravings
for me hereafter....



[Footnote 1: 'Any' crossed out.]

[Footnote 2: 'By which evil' crossed out.]

[Footnote 3: 'More remarkable' crossed out.]

[Footnote 4: 'Exceed their commission' crossed out.]

[Footnote 5: 'For the writer' crossed out.]

[Footnote 6: 'A passage from' crossed out.]



(2) FROM A LETTER OF CRABB ROBINSON TO DOROTHY WORDSWORTH


In a letter to Dorothy Wordsworth, not dated, but bearing the
postmark of February 20, 1826, there is the following reference to
Blake. No earlier reference to him occurs in the letter, in spite of
the sentence which follows:--

'I have above mentioned _Blake._ I forget whether I ever
mentioned to you this very interesting man, with whom I am now
become acquainted. Were the "Memorials" at my hand, I should quote
a fine passage in the Sonnet on the Cologne Cathedral as applicable
to the contemplation of this singular being.'

'I gave your brother some poems in MS. by him, and they interested
him--as well they might, for there is an affinity between them,
as there is between the regulated imagination of a wise poet and the
incoherent dreams of a poet. Blake is an engraver by trade, a
painter and a poet also, whose works have been subject of derision
to men in general; but he has a few admirers, and some of eminence
have eulogized his designs. He has lived in obscurity and poverty,
to which the constant hallucinations in which he lives have doomed
him. I do not mean to give you a detailed account of him. A few
words will suffice to inform you of what class he is. He is not so
much a disciple of Jacob Böhmen and Swedenborg as a fellow Visionary.
He lives, as they did, in a world of his own, enjoying constant
intercourse with the world of spirits. He receives visits from
Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Voltaire, etc. etc. etc., and has given
me repeatedly their very words in their conversations. His paintings
are copies of what he saw in his Visions. His books (and his MSS.
are immense in quantity) are dictations from the spirits. He told
me yesterday that when he writes it is for the spirits only; he sees
the words fly about the room the moment he has put them on paper,
and his book is then published. A man so favoured, of course, has
sources of wisdom and truth peculiar to himself. I will not pretend to
give you an account of his religious and philosophical opinions.
They are a strange compound of Christianity, Spinozism, and
Platonism. I must confine myself to what he has said about your
brother's works, and[1] I fear this may lead me far enough to
fatigue you in following me. After what I have said, Mr. W.
will not be flattered by knowing that Blake deems him the _only
poet_ of the age, nor much alarmed by hearing that, like Muley
Moloch, Blake thinks that he is often in his works an _Atheist._
Now, according to Blake, Atheism consists in worshipping the
natural world, which same natural world, properly speaking, is
nothing real, but a mere illusion produced by Satan. Milton
was for a great part of his life an Atheist, and therefore has
fatal errors in his Paradise Lost, which he has often begged
Blake to confute. Dante (though now with God) lived and died
an Atheist. He was the slave of the world and time. But Dante
and Wordsworth, in spite of their Atheism, were inspired by the
Holy Ghost. Indeed, all real poetry is the work of the Holy Ghost,
and Wordsworth's poems (a large proportion, at least) are the
work of divine inspiration. Unhappily he is left by God to his own
illusions, and then the Atheism is apparent. I had the pleasure of
reading to Blake in my best style (and you know I am vain on
that point, and think I read W.'s poems particularly well) the Ode
on Immortality. I never witnessed greater delight in any listener;
and in general Blake loves the poems. What appears to have disturbed
his mind, on the other hand, is the Preface to the Excursion.
He told me six months ago that it caused him a bowel complaint
which nearly killed him. I have in his hand a copy of the extract
[with the][2] following note at the end: "Solomon, when he
married Pharaoh's daughter and became a convert to the Heathen
Mythology, talked exactly in this way of Jehovah as a very inferior
object of man's contemplation; he also passed him by unalarmed,
and was permitted. Jehovah dropped a tear, and followed him by
his Spirit into the abstract void. It is called the divine mercy. Satan
dwells in it, but Mercy does not dwell in him, he knows not to forgive."
When I first saw Blake at Mrs. Aders's he very earnestly asked me,
"Is Mr. W. a sincere real Christian?" In reply to my answer he said,
"If so, what does he mean by 'the worlds to which the heaven of
heavens is but a veil,' and who is he that shall 'pass Jehovah
unalarmed'?" It is since then that I have lent Blake all the works
which he but imperfectly knew. I doubt whether what I have written
will excite your and Mr. W.'s curiosity; but there is something
so delightful about the man--though in great poverty, he
is so perfect a gentleman, with such genuine dignity and independence,
scorning presents, and of such native delicacy in words, etc.
etc. etc., that I have not scrupled promising introducing him
and Mr. W. together. He expressed his thanks strongly, saying,
"You do me honor, Mr. W. is a great man. Besides, he may convince
me I am wrong about him. I have been wrong before now," etc.
Coleridge has visited Blake, and, I am told, talks finely about
him. That I might not encroach on a third sheet I have compressed
what I had to say about Blake. You must _see_ him one of
these days and he will interest you at all events, whatever
character you give to his mind.'

The main part of the letter is concerned with Wordsworth's
arrangement of his poems, which Crabb Robinson says that he
agrees with Lamb in disliking. He then says: 'It is a sort of intellectual
suicide in your brother not to have continued his admirable series
of poems "dedicated to liberty," he might add, "and public virtue." I
assure you it gives me real pain when I think that some future
commentator may possibly hereafter write, "This great poet survived
to the fifth decenary of the nineteenth century, but he appears to
have dyed in the year 1814 as far as life consisted  in an active
sympathy with the temporary welfare of his fellow-creatures...."

[More follows, and then] 'I had no intention, I assure you, to
make so long a parenthesis or indeed to advert to such a subject.
And I wish you not to read any part of this letter which might
be thought impertinent.... In favor of my affectionate attachment
to your brother's fame, do forgive me this digression, and, as I
said above, keep it to yourself.'

[At the end he says] 'My best remembrances to Mr. W. And
recollect again that you are not to read _all_ this letter to
any one if it will offend, and you are yourself to forgive it as coming
from one who is affly your friend,


H. C. R.'


On April 6, Wordsworth answers the letter from Rydal Mount,
saying: 'My sister had taken flight for Herefordshire when your
letter, for such we guessed it to be, arrived--it was broken
open--(pray  forgive the offense) and your charges of concealment
and reserve frustrated. We are all, at all times, so glad to hear
from you that we could not resist the temptation to purchase
the pleasure at the expense of the peccadillo, for which we beg
pardon with united voices. You are kind enough to mention my
poems.'

[All the rest of the letter is taken up with them, and it ends,
with no mention of Blake] 'I can write no more. T. Clarkson is
going. Your supposed  Biography entertained me much. I could
give you the other side. Farewell.'

[There is no signature.]



[Footnote 1: 'And as I am requested to copy what he has written for
the purpose' crossed out.]

[Footnote 2: The MS. is here torn.]



(3) FROM CRABB ROBINSON'S REMINISCENCES


1810


I was amusing myself this spring by writing an account of the
insane poet, painter, and engraver, _Blake._ Perthes of Hamburg
had written to me asking me to send him an article for a new German
magazine, entitled Vaterländische Annalen, which he was about to
set up, and Dr. _Malkin_ having in his Memoirs of his son
given an account of this extraordinary genius with specimens of
his poems, I resolved out of these to compile a paper. And this I did,[1]
and the paper was translated by Dr. Julius, who, many years
afterwards, introduced himself to me as my translator. It appears
in the single number of the second volume of the Vaterländische
Annalen. For it was at this time that Buonaparte united Hamburg to
the French Empire, on which Perthes manfully gave up the magazine,
saying, as he had no longer a Vaterland, there could be no Vaterländische
Annalen. But before I drew up the paper, I went to see a gallery of
Blake's paintings, which were exhibited by his brother, a hosier in
Carnaby Market. The entrance was 2s. 6d., catalogue included. I was
deeply interested by the catalogue as well as the pictures. I took
4--telling the brother I hoped he would let me come in again.
He said, 'Oh! as often as you please.' I dare say such a thing had never
happened before or did afterwards. I afterwards became acquainted
with Blake, and will postpone till hereafter what I have to say of this
extraordinary character, whose life has since been written very
inadequately by Allan Cunningham in his _Lives of the English
Artists._

[At the side is written]--_N. B_. What I have written
about Blake will appear at the end of the year 1825.



1825


WILLIAM BLAKE


19/02/52


It was at the latter end of the year 1825 that I put in writing
my recollections of this most remarkable man. The larger portions
are under the date of the 18th of December. He died in the year
1827. I have therefore now revised what I wrote on the 10th of
December and afterwards, and without any attempt to reduce to
order, or make consistent the wild and strange rhapsodies uttered
by this insane man of genius, thinking it better to put down what
I find as it occurs, though I am aware of the objection that may
justly be made to the recording the ravings of insanity in which it
may be said there can be found no principle, as there is no
ascertainable law of mental association which is obeyed; and from
which therefore nothing can be learned.

This would be perfectly true of _mere_ madness--but does not
apply to that form of insanity ordinarily called monomania,
and may be disregarded in a case like the present in which the
subject of the remark was unquestionably what a German would
call a _Verunglückter Genie_, whose theosophic dreams bear a
close resemblance to those of _Swedenborg_--whose genius as
an artist was praised by no less men than _Flaxman_ and _Fuseli_--and
whose poems were thought worthy republication by the biographer
of _Swedenborg_ (_Wilkinson_), and of which Wordsworth said
after reading a number--they were the 'Songs of Innocence and
Experience showing the two opposite sides of the human soul'--'There
is no doubt this poor man was mad, but there is something in
the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity
of Lord Byron and Walter Scott!' The German painter _Götzenberger_
(a man indeed who ought not to be named _after the others_ as
an authority for my writing about Blake) said, on his returning
to Germany about the time at which I am now arrived, 'I saw in
England many men of talents, but only three men of genius, Coleridge,
Flaxman, and Blake, and of these Blake was the greatest.' I do
not mean to intimate my assent to this opinion, nor to do more
than supply such materials as my intercourse with him furnish
to an uncritical narrative to which I shall confine myself. I
have written a few sentences in these reminiscences already,
those of the year 1810. I had not then begun the regular journal
which I afterwards kept. I will therefore go over the ground
again and introduce these recollections of 1825 by a reference to
the slight knowledge I had of him before, and what occasioned my
taking an interest in him, not caring to repeat what Cunningham has
recorded of him in the volume of his _Lives of the British Painters_,
etc. etc., except thus much. It appears that he was born...

[The page ends here.]

_Dr. Malkin_, our Bury Grammar School Headmaster, published
in the year 1806 a Memoir of a very precocious child who died... years
old, and he prefixed to the Memoir an account of Blake, and in the
volume he gave an account of Blake as a painter and poet, and printed
some specimens of his poems, viz. 'The Tyger,' and ballads and mystical
lyrical poems, all of a wild character, and M. gave an account of Visions
which Blake related to his acquaintance. I knew that Flaxman thought
highly of him, and though he did not venture to extol him as a genuine
seer, yet he did not join in the ordinary derision of him as a madman.
Without having seen him, yet I had already conceived a high opinion
of him, and thought he would furnish matter for a paper interesting
to Germans, and therefore when _Fred. Perthes_, the patriotic
publisher at Hamburg, wrote to me in 1810 requesting me to give him an
article for his Patriotische Annalen, I thought I could do no better than
send him a paper on Blake, which was translated into German by _Dr.
Julius_, filling, with a few small poems copied and translated, 24
pages. These appeared in the first and last No. of volume 2 of the
Annals. The high-minded editor boldly declared that as the Emperor
of France had annexed Hamburg to France he had no longer a country,
and there could no longer be any patriotical Annals!!! Perthes' Life has
been written since, which I have riot seen. I am told there is in it a
civil mention of me. This _Dr. Julius_ introduced himself to
me as such translator a few years ago. He travelled as an Inspector of
Prisons for the Prussian Government into the United States of America.
In order to enable me to write this paper, which, by the bye, has nothing
in it of the least value, I went to see an exhibition of Blake's original
paintings in Carnaby Market, at a hosier's, Blake's brother. These
paintings filled several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house, and
for the sight a half-crown was demanded of the visitor, for which he
had a catalogue. This catalogue I possess, and it is a very curious
exposure of the state of the artist's mind. I wished to send it to
Germany and to give a copy to Lamb and others, so I took four,
and giving 10s., bargained that I should be at liberty to go again.
'Free! as long as you live,'[2] said the brother, astonished
at such a liberality, which he had never experienced  before,
nor I dare say did afterwards. _Lamb_ was delighted with the
catalogue, especially with the description of a painting afterwards
engraved, and connected with which is an anecdote that, unexplained,
would reflect discredit on a most amiable and excellent man, but
which Flaxman considered to have been not the willful act of
_Stodart_. It was after the friends of Blake had circulated
a subscription paper for an engraving of his _Canterbury Pilgrims_,
that _Stodart_ was made a party to an engraving of a painting
of the same subject by himself. Stodart's work is well known,
Blake's is known by very few. Lamb preferred it greatly to Stodart's,
and declared that Blake's description was the finest criticism he
had ever read of Chaucer's poem.

In this catalogue Blake writes of himself in the most outrageous
language--says, 'This artist defies all competition in colouring'--that
none can beat him, for none can beat the Holy Ghost--that he
and Raphael and Michael Angelo were under divine influence--while
Corregio and Titian worshipped a lascivious and therefore cruel
deity--Reubens a proud devil, etc. etc. He declared, speaking
of color, Titian's men to be of leather and his women of chalk,
and ascribed his own perfection in coloring to the advantage
he enjoyed in seeing daily the primitive men walking in their
native nakedness in the mountains of Wales. There were about
thirty oil-paintings, the coloring excessively dark and high,
the veins black, and the color of the primitive men very like that
of the Red Indians. In his estimation they would probably be the
primitive men. Many of his designs were unconscious imitations.
This appears also in his published works--the designs of _Blair's
Grave_, which Fuseli and Schiavonetti highly extolled--and in
his designs to illustrate _Job_, published after his death for
the benefit of his widow.



23/2/52.


To this catalogue and in the printed poems, the small pamphlet
which appeared in 1783, the edition put forth by Wilkinson of
The Songs of Innocence,' and other works already mentioned, to
which I have to add the first four books of Young's Night Thoughts,
and Allan Cunningham's Life of him, I now refer, and will confine
myself to the memorandums I took of his conversation. I had
heard of him from Flaxman, and for the first time dined in his
company at the Aders'. _Linnell_ the painter also was there--an
artist of considerable talent, and who professed to take[3]
a deep interest in Blake and his work, whether of a perfectly
disinterested character may be doubtful, as will appear hereafter.
This was on the 10th of December.

I was aware of his idiosyncrasies and therefore to a great
degree prepared for the sort of conversation which took place
at and after dinner, an altogether unmethodical rhapsody on art,
poetry, and religion--he saying the most strange things in the
most unemphatic manner, speaking of his _Visions_ as any
man would of the most ordinary occurrence. He was then 68 years
of age. He had a broad, pale face, a large full eye with a benignant
expression--at the same time a look of languor,[4] except when
excited, and then he had an air of inspiration. But not such
as without a previous acquaintance with him, or attending to
_what_ he said, would suggest the notion that he was insane.
There was nothing _wild_ about his look, and though very ready
to be drawn out to the assertion of his favorite ideas, yet with
no warmth as if he wanted to make proselytes. Indeed one of the
peculiar features of his scheme, as far as it was consistent, was
indifference and a very extraordinary degree of tolerance and
satisfaction with what had taken place.[5] A sort of pious and humble
optimism, not the scornful optimism of Candide. But at the same
time that he was very ready to praise he seemed incapable of envy,
as he was of discontent. He warmly praised some composition
of Mrs. Aders, and having brought for Aders an engraving of his
Canterbury Pilgrims, he remarked that one of the figures resembled
a figure in one of the works then in Aders's room, so that he had been
accused of having stolen from it. But he added that he had drawn the
figure in question 20 years before he had seen the _original_
picture. However, there is 'no wonder in the resemblance, as in my
youth I was always studying that class of painting.' I have forgotten
what it was, but his taste was in close conformity with the old German
school.

This was somewhat at variance with what he said both this day
and afterwards--implying that he copies his Visions. And it was
on this first day that, in answer to a question from me, he said, '_The
Spirits told me._' This lead me to say: Socrates used pretty much
the same language. He spoke of his Genius. Now, what affinity or
resemblance do you suppose was there between the _Genius_
which inspired Socrates and your _Spirits?_ He smiled, and for
once it seemed to me as if he had a feeling of vanity gratified.[6]
'The same as in our countenances.' He paused and said, 'I was
Socrates'--and then as if he had gone too far in that--'or
a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him. So I had
with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with
both of them.' As I had for many years been familiar with the idea
that an eternity _a parte post_ was inconceivable without an
eternity _a parte ante_, I was naturally led to express that
thought on this occasion. His eye brightened on my saying this.
He eagerly assented: 'To be sure. We are all coexistent with God;
members of the Divine body, and partakers of the Divine nature.'
Blake's having adopted this Platonic idea led me on our _tête-à-tête_
walk home at night to put the popular question to him, concerning
the imputed Divinity of Jesus Christ. He answered: 'He is the
only God'--but then he added--'And so am I and so are you.'
He had before said--and that led me to put the question--that
Christ ought not to have suffered himself to be crucified.' 'He should
not have attacked the Government. He had no business with such
matters.' On my representing this to be inconsistent with the sanctity
of divine qualities, he said Christ was not yet become the Father. It
is hard on bringing together these fragmentary recollections[7]
to fix Blake's position in relation to Christianity, Platonism, and
Spinozism.

It is one of the subtle remarks of _Hume_ on the tendency
of certain religious notions to reconcile us to whatever occurs, as
God's will. And apply--this to something Blake said, and drawing
the inference that there is no use in education, he hastily rejoined:
'There _is_ no use in education. I hold it wrong. It is the great
Sin. It is eating of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. That was
the fault of Plato: he knew of nothing but the Virtues and Vices.
There is nothing in all that. Everything is good in God's eyes.' On
my asking whether there is nothing absolutely evil in what man does,
he answered: 'I am no judge of that--perhaps  not in God's
eyes.' Notwithstanding this, he, however, at the same time spoke
of error as being in heaven; for on my asking whether Dante was
pure in writing his _Vision_, 'Pure,' said Blake. 'Is there any
purity in God's eyes? No. "He chargeth his angels with folly.'" He even
extended this liability to error to the Supreme Being. 'Did he
not repent him that he had made Nineveh?' My journal here has
the remark that it is easier to retail his personal remarks than to
reconcile those which seemed to be in conformity with the most
opposed abstract systems. He spoke with seeming complacency
of his own life in connection with Art. In becoming an artist he
'acted by command.' The Spirits said to him, 'Blake, be an artist.'
His eye glistened while he spoke of the joy of devoting himself to
_divine art_ alone. 'Art is inspiration. When Michael Angelo
or Raphael, in their day, or Mr. Flaxman, does any of his fine things,
he does them in the Spirit.' Of fame he said: 'I should be sorry if
I had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is so
much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do nothing for
profit. I want nothing--I am quite happy.' This was confirmed
to me on my subsequent interviews with him. His distinction between
the Natural and Spiritual worlds was very confused. Incidentally,
Swedenborg was mentioned--he declared him to be a Divine
Teacher. He had done, and would do, much good. Yet he did wrong
in endeavoring to explain to the _reason_ what it could not
comprehend. He seemed to consider, but that was not clear, the
visions of Swedenborg and Dante as of the same kind. Dante was
the greater poet. He too was wrong in occupying his mind about
political objects. Yet this did not appear to affect his estimation of
Dante's genius, or his opinion of the truth of Dante's visions. Indeed,
when he even declared Dante to be an Atheist, it was accompanied
by expression of the highest admiration; though, said he, Dante
saw Devils where I saw none.[8]

I put down in my journal the following insulated remarks. _Jacob
Böhmen_ was placed among the divinely inspired men. He praised
also the designs to Law's translation of Böhmen. Michael Angelo could
not have surpassed them.

'_Bacon, Locke_, and _Newton_ are the three great
teachers of Atheism, or Satan's Doctrine,' he asserted.

'_Irving_ is a highly gifted man--he is a _sent_ man;
but they who are sent sometimes go further than they ought.'[9]

_Calvin_. I saw nothing but good in _Calvin's_ house.
In _Luther's_ there were _Harlots._ He declared his
opinion that the earth is flat, not round, and just as I had objected
the circumnavigation dinner was announced. But objections were
seldom of any use. The wildest of his assertions was made with the
veriest indifference of tone,[10] as if altogether insignificant.
It respected the natural and spiritual worlds. By way of example
of the difference between them, he said, '_You_ never saw the
spiritual Sun. I have. I saw him on Primrose Hill.' He said,
'Do you take me for the Greek Apollo?' 'No!' I said. '_That_
(pointing to the sky) that is the Greek Apollo. He is Satan.'

Not everything was thus absurd. There were glimpses and flashes
of truth and beauty: as when he compared moral with physical
evil. 'Who shall say what God thinks evil? That is a wise tale
of the Mahometans--of the Angel of the Lord who murdered
the Infant.'--The Hermit of Parnell, I suppose.--'Is not
every infant that dies of a natural death in reality slain by an Angel?'

And when he joined to the assurance of his happiness, that of
his having suffered, and that it was necessary, he added, 'There is
suffering in Heaven; for where there is the capacity of enjoyment,
there is the capacity of pain.[11]

I include among the glimpses of truth this assertion, 'I know
what is true by internal conviction. A doctrine is stated. My heart
tells me It _must_ be true.' I remarked, in confirmation of
it, that, to an unlearned man, what are called the _external_
evidences of religion can carry no conviction with them; and this
he assented to.

After my first evening with him at Aders's, I made the remark
in my journal, that his observations, apart from his Visions and
references to the spiritual world, were sensible and acute. In the
sweetness of his countenance and gentility of his manner he added
an indescribable grace to his conversation. I added my regret,
which I must now repeat, at my inability to give more than incoherent
thoughts. Not altogether my fault perhaps.



25/2/52.


On the 17th I called on him in his house in Fountain's Court
in the Strand. The interview was a short one, and what I saw was
more remarkable than what I heard. He was at work engraving in
a small bedroom, light, and looking out on a mean yard. Everything
in the room squalid and indicating poverty, except himself. And
there was a natural gentility about him, and an insensibility to the
seeming poverty, which quite removed the impression. Besides,
his linen was clean, his hand white, and his air quite unembarrassed
when he begged me to sit down as if he were in a palace. There was
but one chair in the room besides that on which he sat. On my
putting my hand to it, I found that it would have fallen to pieces
if I had lifted it, so, as if I had been a Sybarite, I said with a smile,
'Will you let me indulge myself?' and I sat on the bed, and near him,[12]
and during my short stay there was nothing in him that betrayed
that he was aware of what to other persons might have been even
offensive, not in his person, but in all about him.

His wife I saw at this time, and she seemed to be the very
woman to make him happy. She had been formed by him. Indeed,
otherwise, she could not have lived with him. Notwithstanding her
dress, which was poor and dirty, she had a good expression in her
countenance, and, with a dark eye, had remains[13] of beauty
in her youth. She had that virtue of virtues in a wife, an implicit
reverence of her husband. It is quite certain that she believed
in all his visions. And on one occasion, not this day, speaking
of his Visions, she said, 'You know, dear, the first time you
saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head
to the window and set you a-screaming.' In a word, she was formed
on the Miltonic model, and like the first Wife Eve worshipped
God in her husband. He being to her what God was to him. Vide
Milton's Paradise Lost--_passim_.



26/2/52.


He was making designs or engravings, I forget which. Carey's
Dante was before [_sic._] He showed me some of his designs
from Dante, of which I do not presume to speak. They were too
much above me. But Götzenberger, whom I afterwards took to see
them, expressed the highest admiration of them. They are in the
hands of _Linnell_ the painter, and, it has been suggested, are
reserved by him for publication when Blake may have become[14] an
object of interest to a greater number than he could be at this age.
_Dante_ was again the subject of our conversation. And Blake
declared him a mere politician and atheist, busied about this world's
affairs; as Milton was till, in his (M.'s) old age, he returned back
to the God he had abandoned in childhood.[15] I in vain endeavoured
to obtain from him a qualification of the term atheist, so as not to
include him in the ordinary reproach. And yet he afterwards spoke
of Dante's being _then_ with God. I was more successful when
he also called Locke an atheist, and imputed to him willful deception,
and seemed satisfied with my admission, that Locke's philosophy
led to the Atheism of the French school. He reiterated his former
strange notions on morals--would allow of no other education
than what lies in the cultivation of the fine arts and the imagination.
'What are called the Vices in the natural world, are the highest
sublimities in the spiritual world.' And when I supposed the case
of his being the father of a vicious son and asked him how he would
feel, he evaded the question by saying that in trying to think correctly
he must not regard his own weaknesses any more than other people's.
And he was silent to the observation that his doctrine denied evil.
He seemed not unwilling to admit the Manichaean doctrine of two
principles, as far as it is found in the idea of the Devil. And said
expressly said [_sic_] he did not believe in the omnipotence
of God. The language of the Bible is only poetical or allegorical on the
subject, yet he at the same time denied the _reality_ of the
natural world. Satan's empire is the empire of nothing.

As he spoke of frequently seeing Milton, I ventured to ask,
half ashamed at the time, which of the three or four portraits
in _Hollis's_ Memoirs (vols. in 4to) is the most like. He
answered, 'They are all like, at different ages. I have seen him as
a youth and as an old man with a long flowing beard. He came
lately as an old man--he said he came to ask a favor of
me. He said he had committed an error in his Paradise Lost,
which he wanted me to correct, in a poem or picture; but I declined.
I said I had my own duties to perform.' It is a presumptuous
question, I replied--might I venture to ask--what that could be.
'He wished me to expose the falsehood of his doctrine, taught
in the Paradise Lost, that[16] sexual intercourse arose out
of the Fall. How that cannot be, for no good can spring out
of evil.' But, I replied, if the consequence were evil, mixed with
good, then the good might be ascribed to the common cause. To
this he answered by a reference to the _androgynous_ state,
in which I could not possibly follow him. At the time that he
asserted his own possession of this gift of Vision, he did not boast
of it as peculiar to himself; all men might have it if they would.



1826


27/2/52.


On the 24th I called a second time on him. And on this occasion
it was that I read to him _Wordsworth's Ode_ on the supposed
pre-existent State, and the subject of Wordsworth's religious
character was discussed when we met on the 18th of Feb., and the
12th of May. I will here bring together Blake's declarations concerning
Wordsworth, and set down his marginalia in the 8vo. edit. A.D. 1815,
vol. I. I had been in the habit, when reading this marvelous Ode
to friends, to omit one or two passages, especially that beginning:


'But there's a Tree, of many one,'


Lest I should be rendered ridiculous, being unable to explain
precisely _what_ I admired. Not that I acknowledged this to
be a fair test. But with Blake I could fear nothing of the kind. And it
was this very stanza which threw him almost into a hysterical rapture.
His delight in Wordsworth's poetry was intense.[17] Nor did it seem less,
notwithstanding the reproaches he continually cast on Wordsworth
for his imputed worship of nature;[18] which in the mind
of Blake constituted Atheism [see "Introduction."].



28/2/52.


The combination of the wannest praise with imputations which
from another would assume the most serious character, and the
liberty he took to interpret as he pleased, rendered it as difficult to
be offended as to reason with him. The eloquent descriptions of
Nature in Wordsworth's poems were conclusive proofs of atheism,
for whoever believes in Nature, said Blake, disbelieves in God. For
Nature is the work of the Devil. On my obtaining from him the
declaration that the Bible was the Word of God, I referred to the
commencement of Genesis--In the beginning God created the
Heavens and the Earth. But I gained nothing by this, for I was
triumphantly told that this God was not Jehovah, but the Elohim;
and the doctrine of the Gnostics repeated with sufficient consistency
to silence one so unlearned as myself.

The Preface to the Excursion, especially the verses quoted
from book i. of the Recluse, so troubled him as to bring on a fit
of illness. These lines he singled out:


Jehovah with his thunder, and the Choir
Of shouting Angels, and the Empyreal throne,
I pass them unalarmed.'


Does Mr. Wordsworth think he can surpass Jehovah? There was
a copy of the whole passage in his own hand,[19] in the volume of
Wordsworth's poems sent to my chambers after his death. There
was this note at the end: 'Solomon, when he married Pharaoh's
daughter, and became a convert to the Heathen Mythology, talked
exactly in this way of Jehovah, as a very inferior object of Man's
contemplations; he also passed him unharmed, and was permitted.
Jehovah dropped a tear and followed him by his Spirit into the
abstract void. It is called the Divine Mercy. Sarah dwells in it, but
Mercy does not dwell in Him.'

Some of Wordsworth's poems he maintained were from the Holy
Ghost, others from the Devil. I lent him the 8vo edition, two vols.,
of Wordsworth's poems, which he had in his possession at the time
of his death. They were sent me then. I did not recognize the pencil
notes he made in them to be his for some time, and was on the point
of rubbing them out under that impression, when I made the discovery.

The following are found in the 3rd vol., in the fly-leaf under
the words: Poems referring to the Period of Childhood.



29/2/52.


'I see in Wordsworth the Natural man rising up against the
Spiritual man continually, and then he is no poet, but a Heathen
Philosopher at Enmity against all true poetry or inspiration.'

Under the first poem:


'And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety,'


He had written, 'There is no such thing as natural piety, because
the natural man is at enmity with God.' P. 43, under the Verses 'To
H. C., six years old'--'This is all in the highest degree
imaginative and equal to any poet, but not superior. I cannot
think that real poets have any competition.  None are greatest
in the kingdom of heaven. It is so in poetry.' P. 44, 'On the
Influence of Natural Objects,' at the bottom of the page. 'Natural
objects always did and now do weaken, deaden, and obliterate
imagination in me. Wordsworth must know that what he writes
valuable is not to be found in Nature. Bead Michael Angelo's
sonnet, vol. iv. p. 179.' That is, the one beginning:


'No mortal object did these eyes behold
When first they met the placid light of thine.'[20]


It is remarkable that Blake, whose judgements were on most
points so very singular, on one subject closely connected with
Wordsworth's poetical reputation should have taken a very commonplace
view. Over the heading of the 'Essay Supplementary to the Preface'
at the end of the vol. he wrote, 'I do not know who wrote these
Prefaces; they are very mischievous, and direct contrary to
Wordsworth's own practice' (see "III. From Lady Charlotte Bury's Diary.")
This is not the defense of his own style in opposition to what is
called Poetic Diction, but a sort of historic vindication of the
_unpopular_ poets. On Macpherson, p. 364, Wordsworth wrote
with the severity with which all great writers have written of him.
Blake's comment below was, 'I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton,
that what they say is ancient is so.' And in the following page, 'I own
myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other poet whatever.
Rowley and Chatterton also.' And at the end of this Essay he wrote,
'It appears to me as if the last paragraph beginning "Is it the spirit
of the whole," etc., was written by another hand and mind from
the rest of these Prefaces; they are the opinions of [   ]
landscape-painter. Imagination is the divine vision not of the world,
nor of man, nor from man as he is a natural man, but only as he
is a spiritual man. Imagination has nothing to do with memory.'



1826


1/3/52.


_19th Feb._ It was this day in connection with the assertion
that[21] the Bible is the Word of God and all truth is to be
found in it, he using language concerning man's reason being
opposed to grace very like that used by the Orthodox Christian,
that he qualified, and as the same Orthodox would say utterly
nullified all he said by declaring that he understood the Bible
in a Spiritual sense. As to the natural sense, he said _Voltaire_
was commissioned by God to expose that. 'I have had,' he said,
'much intercourse with Voltaire, and he said to me, "I blasphemed
the Son of Man, and it shall be forgiven me, but they (the enemies
of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me, and it shall not
be forgiven to them." 'I ask him in what language Voltaire spoke.
His answer was ingenious and gave no encouragement to cross-questioning:
'To my sensations it was English. It was like the touch of a
musical key; he touched it probably French, but to my ear it
became English.' I also enquired as I had before about the form
of the persons[22] who appeared to him, and asked why he did
not _draw_ them. 'It is not worth while,' he said. 'Besides
there are so many that the labour would be too great. And there would
be no use in it.' In answer to an enquiry about Shakespeare, 'he is
exactly like the old engraving--which is said to be a bad one.
I think it very good.' I enquired about his own writings. 'I have
written,' he answered, 'more than Rousseau or Voltaire--six
or seven Epic poems as long as Homer and 20 Tragedies as long
as Macbeth.' He shewed me his 'Version of Genesis,'[23] for so it may
be called, as understood by a Christian Visionary. He read a
wild passage in a sort of Bible style. 'I shall print[24] no more,'
he said. 'When I am commanded by the Spirits, then I write, and
the moment I have written, I see the words fly about the room
in all directions. It is then published. The Spirits can read, and
my MS. is of no further use. I have been tempted to burn my MS.,
but my wife won't let me.' She is right, I answered; you write not
from yourself but from higher order. The MSS. are their property,
not yours. You cannot tell what purpose they may answer. This
was addressed _ad hominem._ And it indeed amounted only to
a deduction from his own principles. He incidentally denied
_causation_, every thing being the work of God or Devil.
Every man has a Devil in himself, and the conflict between his
_Self_ and God is perpetually going on. I ordered of him
to-day a copy of his songs for 5 guineas. My[25] manner of
receiving his mention of price pleased him. He spoke of his horror
of money and of turning pale when it was offered him, and this
was certainly unfeigned.

In the No. of the _Gents. Magazine_ for last Jan. there is
a letter by _Gromek_ to Blake printed in order to convict
Blake of selfishness. It cannot possibly be substantially true. I
may elsewhere notice it.

13_th June._ I saw him again in June. He was as wild as
ever, says my journal, but he was led today to make assertions more
palpably mischievous, if capable of influencing other minds, and
immoral, supposing them to express the will[26] of a responsible
agent, than anything he had said before. As, for instance, that he
had learned from the Bible that Wives should be in common. And
when I objected that marriage was a Divine institution, he referred
to the Bible--'that from the beginning it was not so.' He
affirmed that he had committed many murders, and repeated his
doctrine, that reason is the only sin, and that careless, gay people
are better than those who think, etc. etc.

It was, I believe, on the 7th of December that I saw him last.
I had just heard of the death of Flaxman, a man whom he professed
to admire, and was curious to know how he would receive the
intelligence. It was as I expected.[27] He had been ill during
the summer, and he said with a smile, 'I thought I should have
gone first.' He then said, 'I cannot think of death as more than
the going out of one room into another.' And Flaxman was no longer
thought of. He relapsed into his ordinary train of thinking. Indeed I
had by this time learned that there was nothing to be gained by
frequent intercourse. And therefore it was that after this interview
I was not anxious to be frequent in my visits. This day he said, 'Men
are born with an Angel and, a Devil.' This he himself interpreted as
Soul and Body, and as I have long since said of the strange sayings
of a man who enjoys a high reputation, 'it is more in the language
than the thought that this singularity is to be looked for.' And this
day he spoke of the Old Testament as if [_sic_] were the evil
element. Christ, he said, took much after his mother, and in so far
was one of the worst of men. On my asking him for an instance, he
referred to his turning the moneychangers out of the Temple--he
had no right to do that. He digressed into a condemnation of those
who sit in judgement on others. 'I have never known a very bad man
who had not something very good about him.'

Speaking of the Atonement in the ordinary Calvinistic sense,
he said, 'It is a horrible doctrine; if another pay your debt, I do not
forgive it.'

I have no account of any other call--but there is probably
an omission. I took Götzenberger to see him, and he met the
Masqueriers in my chambers. Masquerier was not the man to meet
him. He could not humour Blake nor understand the peculiar sense
in which he was to be received.[28]



1827


My journal of this year contains nothing about Blake. But in
January 1828 Barron Field and myself called on Mrs. Blake. The
poor old lady was more affected than I expected she would be at
the sight of me. She spoke of her husband as dying like an angel.
She informed me that she was going to live with Linnell as his
housekeeper. And we understood that she would live with him,
and he, as it were, to farm her services and take all she had. The
engravings of Job were his already. Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims
were hers. I took two copies--one I gave to C. Lamb. Barron
Field took a proof.

Mrs. Blake died within a few years, and since Blake's death
Linnell has not found the market I took for granted he would seek
for Blake's works. Wilkinson printed a small edition of his poems,
including the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience,'[29] a few years
ago, and Monkton Mylne talks of printing an edition. I have a few
colored engravings--but Blake is still an object of interest
exclusively to men of imaginative taste and psychological curiosity.
I doubt much whether these mems will be of any use to this small
class. I have been reading since the Life of Blake by Allan Cunningham,
vol. II. p. 143 of his Lives of the Painters. It recognizes more perhaps
of Blake's merit than might be expected of a _Scotch_ realist.


22/3/52.



[Footnote 1: The article appeared under the title: 'William Blake,
Künstler, Dichter und religiöser Schwärmer' (aus dem Englischen) on
pp. 107-131 of the _Vaterländisches Museum_, Zweiter Band,
Erstes Heft. Hamburg, bey Friedrich Perthes.  1811.' It has the motto:


'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.'


SHAKESPEARE.

Five of Blake's poems, 'To the Muse?, Piping down the valleys wild,
Holy Thursday, The Tyger, The Garden of Love,' together with ten
lines from the Prophetic Books, are quoted, with German versions in
the metres of the original by Dr. Julius, the translator of the article.
On p. 101 there is an article, 'Von der neuesten englischen Poesie,'
containing notices of 'Poems by W. Cowper' (1803), 'Works of R.
Burns,'and 'Southey's Poems' (1801) and 'Metrical Tales' (1803).]

[Footnote 2: 'Like' is first written, and replaced by 'live.']

[Footnote 3: 'Took' crossed out.]

[Footnote 4: 'With an air of feebleness' crossed out.]

[Footnote 5: After 'indifference and' 'the entire absence of anything
like blame ['reproach' crossed out], and I do not think that I ever heard
him blame anything, then or afterwards crossed out.]

[Footnote 6: 'Pretty much' crossed out.]

[Footnote 7: 'Comparing these fragmentary memoranda' crossed out.]

[Footnote 8: Crossed out:

'Yet this did not appear to affect the truth of his Visions.
I could not reconcile this with his blaming Wordsworth for being a
Platonist--not a Christian. He asked whether Wordsworth
acknowledged the Scriptures as Divine, and declared on my answering
in the affirmative that the Introduction to the Excursion had troubled
him so as to bring on a fit of illness. The passage that offended Blake
was:

'Jehovah with his thunder and the choir
Of shouting Angels and the empyreal throne,
I pass them unalarmed.

"Does Mr. Wordsworth," said Blake, "think his mind can _surpass_
Jehovah's." I tried in vain to rescue Wordsworth from the imputation
of being a Pagan or perhaps an Atheist, but this did not rob him of the
character of being the great poet. Indeed Atheism meant but little
in Blake's mind as will hereafter appear. Therefore when he declared
Dante to be an Atheist, etc.'

In the margin: See of Wordsworth as Blake judged of him,
p. 46 _et seq_. (i.e. "1826, 27/2/52" below.)]

[Footnote 9: 'Dante saw Devils where I saw none' crossed out.]

[Footnote 10: 'Most unconscious simplicity' crossed out.]

[Footnote 11: 'It was after my first interview with him that I expressed
what I must repeat now--my regret' crossed out.]

[Footnote 12: 'He smiled' omitted.]

[Footnote 13: 'Marks' crossed out.]

[Footnote 14: 'More' crossed out.]

[Footnote 15: 'And yet he afterwards said that he was _then_ with God'
crossed out.]

[Footnote 16: 'The plea' crossed out.]

[Footnote 17: 'And seemingly undisturbed by the' crossed out.]

[Footnote 18: 'Which I have anticipated, and which he characterised as
Atheism, that is, in worshipping Nature. See page' crossed out.]

[Footnote 19: 'He gave me a copy of these lines in his hand, with this
note at the end' crossed out.]

[Footnote 20: 'An admirable assertion of the ideal' crossed out.]

[Footnote 21: 'Some of Wordsworth's' crossed out.]

[Footnote 22: 'Spirits' crossed out.]

[Footnote 23: 'Vision of Genesis' crossed out.]

[Footnote 24: 'Write' crossed out.]

[Footnote 25: 'Immediate 'crossed out.]

[Footnote 26: 'Character' crossed out.]

[Footnote 27: 'As might have been expected' crossed out.]

[Footnote 28: 'Understood' crossed out.]

[Footnote 29: 'And some other poems' crossed out.]



(II.) FROM 'A FATHER'S MEMOIRS OF HIS CHILD,' BY BENJAMIN HEATH
MALKIN (1806)


[This, the first printed account of Blake, is taken from the
dedicatory epistle of 'A Father's Memoirs of his Child,' by Benj.
Heath Malkin, Esq., M.A., F.A.S. (London: Printed for Longmans,
Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster Row, by T. Bensley, Bolt
Court, Fleet Street, 1806), to Thomas Johnes, the translator of
Froissart. I have given everything that relates to Blake, with enough
of the remainder to explain the purpose of the dedication. Malkin
was himself, perhaps, already engaged on the translation of
_Gil Blas_, which he brought out in 1809. The frontispiece
to the Memoirs, designed by Blake, and engraved by Cromek, consists
of a portrait of little Malkin, from a miniature, surrounded by a
design of the child saying good-bye to his mother, and floating
up to heaven, hand in hand with an ample and benign angel.]



TO THOMAS JOHNES, OF HAFOD, ESQ., M.P., LORD LIEUTENANT OF
THE COUNTY OF CARDIGAN, ETC. ETC. ETC.


MY DEAR FRIEND,


I have been influenced by several motives, in prefixing your
name to the following pages. My pen seems destined to owe its
employment, in some shape or other, to Hafod....

You may perhaps recollect, that while I was staying with you
last summer, our conversations were nearly as rambling and as
various, as our rides over your new mountain-farms, or as the
subject matter of these preliminary remarks seems likely to be....
It would have been unnatural, to have concealed the mark of an
afflicting dispensation, in society so capable of consoling the
survivor, and appreciating the merit of the departed. In the
interchange of our thoughts on this subject, the task of furnishing
the public with the following facts was urged upon me, at once as
a tribute to the latter, and a relief to the feelings of the former....
On mentioning my design to some of my friends, they expressed
their regret, that I had not determined on it sooner.... In every
other respect, but that of catching attention while the object is
still before the eye, the interval must be considered as an
advantage.... I have been asked, 'How could you get over such
a loss?' I need not say, that this was not your question, for you
could never have found it on the list of possible interrogatories:
and to you, for that very reason, will I answer it.

I got over this great loss, by considering at once what I had
left; how unavailing the lengthened and excessive indulgence of
grief would have been to myself, and how useless it would have
rendered me to others....

Besides this comparison of my own, with the probable or actual
circumstances of others, I bore my disappointment the better
for the recollection, that personal regards are selfish. If my
thoughts were disposed to dwell on the mortifying idea, that
society might have lost an ornament derived to it through me,
they were soon checked, and ashamed of their presumption. Topics
of private bewailing or condolence, of whatever magnitude they
may appear to the individual, can never be modestly transferred
to general interest. But it was my principal consolation, that the
change to him must have been for the better. Supposing the opinion
to have been rational and probable, that the promise of this child
would have ripened into something more than fair capacity and
marketable talent, the prolongation of life was to himself perhaps
the less desirable on that very account. It rarely happens, that the
world affords even the ordinary allowance of happiness to men
of transcendent faculties. Their merits are too frequently denied
the protection and encouragement, to which they feel themselves
entitled, from the private intimations of their own scrutinizing spirit.
When they are most successful, the composure of their minds does
not always keep pace with the prosperity of their fortunes. They
necessarily have but few companions; few, who are capable of
appreciating their high endowments, and entering into the grandeur
of their conceptions. Of these few, those who come the nearest
to their own rank and standard, those who might be the associates
of their inmost thoughts, and the partners of their dearest interests,
are too often envious of their fame. It is a common remark, that
great men are not gregarious. This is but too just; and so much
of man's happiness depends upon society, that the comparative
solitude, to which a commanding genius condemns its possessor,
detracts considerably from the sum of his personal enjoyment.

While I am on this subject, I cannot forbear enlarging somewhat
on an instance the more apposite, as being casually connected with
the subsequent pages. Hitherto, it has confirmed the observation
just hazarded, on the probable fate of stubborn originality in human
life. There seems now indeed some prospect, that the current will
turn: and I shall be eager, on the evidence of the very first
deponent, to disencumber myself of an opinion, which pays so ill
a compliment to our nature. In the meantime, I am confident that
you, and my other readers of taste and feeling, will readily forgive
my travelling a little out of the record, for the purpose of
descanting on merit, which ought to be more conspicuous, and
which must have become so long since, but for opinions and habits
of an eccentric kind.

It is, I hope, unnecessary to call your attention to the ornamental
device, round the portrait in this book; but I cannot so easily refrain
from introducing to you the designer.

Mr. William Blake, very early in life, had the ordinary opportunities
of seeing pictures in the houses of noblemen and gentlemen,
and in the king's palaces. He soon improved such casual occasions
of study, by attending sales at Langford's, Christie's, and other
auction-rooms. At ten years of age he was put to Mr. Pars's
drawing-school in the Strand, where he soon attained the art of
drawing from casts in plaster of the various antiques. His father
bought for him the Gladiator, the Hercules, the Venus of Medicis,
and various heads, hands and feet. The same indulgent parent
soon supplied him with money to buy prints; when he immediately
began his collection, frequenting the shops of the print-dealers,
and the sales of the auctioneers. Langford called him his little
connoisseur; and often knocked down to him a cheap lot, with
friendly precipitation. He copied Raphael and Michael Angelo,
Martin Hemskerck and Albert Dürer, Julio Romano, and the rest
of the historic class, neglecting to buy any other prints, however
celebrated. His choice was for the most part contemned by his
youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at what they
called his mechanical taste. At the age of fourteen, he fixed on
the engraver of Stuart's Athens and West's Pylades and Orestes
for his master, to whom he served seven years' apprenticeship.
Basire, whose taste was like his own, approved of what he did.
Two years passed over smoothly enough, till two other apprentices
were added to the establishment, who completely destroyed its
harmony. Blake, not choosing to take part with his master against
his fellow apprentices, was sent out to make drawings. This
circumstance he always mentions with gratitude to Basire, who
said that he was too simple and they too cunning.

He was employed in making drawings from old buildings and
monuments, and occasionally, especially in winter, in engraving
from those drawings. This occupation led him to an acquaintance
with those neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments.
There he found a treasure, which he knew how to value. He saw
the simple and plain road to the style of art at which he aimed,
unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice. The
monuments of Kings and Queens in Westminster Abbey, which surround
the chapel of Edward the Confessor, particularly that of King
Henry the Third, the beautiful monument and figure of Queen Elinor,
Queen Philippa, King Edward the Third, King Richard the Second
and his Queen, were among his first studies. All these he drew
in every point he could catch, frequently standing on the monument,
and viewing the figures from the top. The heads he considered
as portraits; and all the ornaments appeared as miracles of art,
to his Gothicised imagination. He then drew Aymer de Valence's
monument, with his fine figure on the top. Those exquisite little
figures which surround it, though dreadfully mutilated, are still
models for the study of drapery. But I do not mean to enumerate
all his drawings, since they would lead me over all the old
monuments in Westminster Abbey, as well as over other churches
in and about London.

Such was his employment at Basire's. As soon as he was out
of his time, he began to engrave two designs from the History of
England, after drawings which he had made in the holiday hours
of his apprenticeship. They were selected from a great number of
historical compositions, the fruits of his fancy. He continued making
designs for his own amusement, whenever he could steal a moment
from the routine of business; and began a course of study at the
Royal Academy, under the eye of Mr. Moser. Here he drew with
great care, perhaps all, or certainly nearly all the noble antique
figures in various views. But now his peculiar notions began to
intercept him in his career. He professes drawing from life always
to have been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more
like death, or smelling of mortality. Yet still he drew a good deal
from life, both at the academy and at home. In this manner has
he managed his talents, till he is himself almost become a Gothic
monument. On a view of his whole life, he still thinks himself
authorized to pronounce, that practice and opportunity very
soon teach the language of art: but its spirit and poetry, which
are seated in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and
these make an artist.

Mr. Blake has long been known to the order of men among whom
he ranks; and is highly esteemed by those, who can distinguish
excellence under the disguise of singularity. Enthusiastic and
high-flown notions on the subject of religion have hitherto, as
they usually do, prevented his general reception, as a son of
taste and of the muses. The sceptic and the rational believer,
uniting their forces against the visionary, pursue and scare a
warm and brilliant imagination, with the hue and cry of madness.
Not contented with bringing down the reasonings of the mystical
philosopher, as they well may, to this degraded level, they apply
the test of cold calculation and mathematical proof to departments
of the mind, which are privileged to appeal from so narrow and
rigorous a tribunal. They criticize the representations of corporeal
beauty, and the allegoric emblems of mental perfections; the
image of the visible world, which appeals to the senses for a
testimony to its truth, or the type of futurity and the immortal
soul, which identifies itself with our hopes and with our hearts,
as if they were syllogisms or theorems, demonstrable propositions
or consecutive corollaries. By them have the higher powers of
this artist been kept from public notice, and his genius tied down,
as far as possible, to the mechanical department of his profession. By
them, in short, has he been stigmatized as an engraver, who might
do tolerably well, if he was not mad. But men, whose names will
bear them out, in what they affirm, have now taken up his cause.
On occasion of Mr. Blake engaging to illustrate the poem of The
Grave, some of the first artists in this country have stept forward,
and liberally given the sanction of ardent and encomiastic applause.
Mr. Fuseli, with a mind far superior to that jealousy above described,
has written some introductory remarks in the Prospectus of the
work. To these he has lent all the penetration of his understanding,
with all the energy and descriptive power characteristic of his style.
Mr. Hope and Mr. Locke have pledged their character as connoisseurs,
by approving and patronizing these designs. Had I been furnished
with an opportunity of showing them to you, I should, on Mr. Blake's
behalf, have requested your concurring testimony, which you would
not have refused me, had you viewed them in the same light.

Neither is the capacity of this untutored proficient limited to
his professional occupation. He has made several irregular and
unfinished attempts at poetry. He has dared to venture on the
ancient simplicity; and feeling it in his own character and manners,
has succeeded better than those, who have only seen it through
a glass. His genius in this line assimilates more with the bold
and careless freedom, peculiar to our writers at the latter end
of the sixteenth, and former part of the seventeenth century,
than with the polished phraseology, and just, but subdued thought
of the eighteenth. As the public have hitherto had no opportunity
of passing sentence on his poetical powers, I shall trespass on
your patience, while I introduce a few specimens from a collection,
circulated only among the author's friends, and richly embellished
by his pencil.


LAUGHING SONG


When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by,
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it,

When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in this merry scene,
When Mary and Susan and Emily,
With their sweet round mouths, sing Ha, ha, he!

When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread,
Come live and be merry and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of Ha, ha, he!


The Fairy Glee of Oberon, which Stevens's exquisite music
has familiarized to modern ears, will immediately occur to the
reader of these laughing stanzas. We may also trace another less
obvious resemblance to Jonson, in an ode gratulatory to the
Right Honourable Hierome, Lord Weston, for his return from his
embassy, in the year 1632. The accord is to be found, not in the
words nor in the subject; for either would betray imitation: but
in the style of thought, and, if I may so term it, the date of the
expression.


Such pleasure as the teeming earth
Doth take in easy nature's birth,
When she puts forth the life of every thing:
And in a dew of sweetest rain,
She lies delivered without pain,
Of the prime beauty of the year, the spring.

The rivers in their shores do run,
The clouds rack clear before the sun,
The rudest winds obey the calmest air:
Rare plants from every bank do rise,
And every plant the sense surprise,
Because the order of the whole is fair!

The very verdure of her nest,
Wherein she sits so richly drest,
As all the wealth of season there was spread;
Doth show the graces and the hours
Have multiplied their arts and powers,
In making soft her aromatic bed.

Such joys, such sweets, doth your return
Bring all your friends, fair lord, that burn
With love, to hear your modesty relate
The bus'ness of your blooming wit,
With all the fruit shall follow it,
Both to the honor of the king and state.


The following poem of Blake is in a different character. It
expresses with majesty and pathos the feelings of a benevolent
mind, on being present at a sublime display of national munificence
and charity.


HOLY THURSDAY


'Twas on a Holy Thursday, their innocent faces clean,
The children walking two and two, in red and blue and
green;
Grey-headed beadles walked before, with wands as white
as snow;
Till into the high dome of Paul's, they, like Thames'
waters, flow.

Oh! What a multitude they seemed, these flowers of
London town!
Seated in companies they sit, with radiance all their own!
The hum of multitudes was there, but multitudes of lambs;
Thousands of little boys and girls, raising their innocent
hands.

Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice
of song,
Or like harmonious thunderings, the seats of heaven
among!
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the
poor:
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.


The book of Revelation, which may well be supposed to engross
much of Mr. Blake's study, seems to have directed him, in common
with Milton, to some of the foregoing images. 'And I heard as it were
the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and
as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord
God omnipotent reigneth.' Milton comprises the mighty thunderings
in the epithet 'loud,' and adopts the comparison of many waters, which
image our poet, having in the first stanza appropriated differently, to
their flow rather than to their sound, exchanges in the last for that
of a mighty wind.


He ended; and the heav'nly audience loud
Sung hallelujah, as the sound of sees,
Through multitude that sung.


_Paradise Lost_, Book X. 641.


It may be worth a moment's consideration, whether Dr. Johnson's
remarks on devotional poetry, though strictly just where he applies
them, to the artificial compositions of Waller and Watts, are universally
and necessarily true. Watts seldom rose above the level of a mere
versifier. Waller, though entitled to the higher appellation of poet,
had formed himself rather to elegance and delicacy, than to passionate
emotions or a lofty and dignified deportment. The devotional pieces
of the Hebrew bards are clothed in that simple language, to which
Johnson with justice ascribes the character of sublimity. There is no
reason therefore why the poets of other nations should not be equally
successful, if they think with the same purity, and express themselves
in the same unaffected terms. He says indeed with truth, that 'Repentance
trembling in the presence of the judge, is not at leisure for cadences
and epithets.' But though we should exclude the severer topics from our
catalogue, mercy and benevolence may be treated poetically, because
they are in unison with the mild spirit of poetry. They are seldom
treated successfully; but the fault is not in the subject. The mind of
the poet is too often at leisure for the mechanical prettinesses of
cadence and epithet, when it ought to be engrossed by higher thoughts.
Words and numbers present themselves unbidden, when the soul is
inspired by sentiment, elevated by enthusiasm, or ravished by devotion.
I leave it to the reader to determine, whether the following stanzas
have any tendency to vindicate this species of poetry; and whether
their simplicity and sentiment at all make amends for their unartificial
and unassuming construction.


THE DIVINE IMAGE


To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
All pray in their distress,
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God our Father dear:
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love,
Is man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart;
Pity, a human face;
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form.
In Heathen, Turk, or Jew!
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.


Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and his Sonnets,
occasioned it to be said by a contemporary, that, 'As the soul of
Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty
soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous honey-tongued Shakespeare.' These
poems, now little read, were favorite studies of Mr. Blake's early
days. So were Jonson's Underwoods and Miscellanies, and he seems
to me to have caught his manner, more than that of Shakespeare
in his trifles. The following song is a good deal in the spirit of the
Hue and Cry after Cupid, in the Masque on Lord Haddington's marriage.
It was written before the age of fourteen, in the heat of youthful fancy,
unchastized by judgment. The poet, as such, takes the very strong
liberty of equipping himself with wings, and thus appropriates his
metaphorical costume to his corporeal fashion and seeming. The
conceit is not unclassical; but Pindar and the ancient lyrics arrogated
to themselves the bodies of swans for their august residence. Our
Gothic songster is content to be encaged by Cupid; and submits,
like a young lady's favorite, to all the vagaries of giddy curiosity
and tormenting fondness.


How sweet I roamed from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the prince of love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

He showed me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.


The playful character ascribed to the prince of love, especially his
wanton and fantastic action while sporting with his captive, in the
two last stanzas, render it probable that the author had read the
Hue and Cry after Cupid. If so, it had made its impression; but the
lines could scarcely have been remembered at the time of writing, or
the resemblance would have been closer. The stanzas to which I
especially allude, are these.


Wings he hath, which though ye clip,
He will leap from lip to lip,
Over liver, lights, and heart,
But not stay in any part;
And, if chance his arrow misses,
He will shoot himself, in kisses.

Idle minutes are his reign;
Then the straggler makes his gain,
By presenting maids with toys,
And would have ye think'em joys:
'Tis th' ambition of the elf,
To have all childish as himself.


The two following little pieces are added, as well by way of
contrast, as for the sake of their respective merits. In the first,
there is a simple and pastoral gaiety, which the poets of a refined
age have generally found much more difficult of attainment, than
the glitter of wit, or the affectation of antithesis. The second rises
with the subject. It wears that garb of grandeur, which the idea of
creation communicates to a mind of the higher order. Our bard,
having brought the topic he descants on from warmer latitudes
than his own, is justified in adopting an imagery, of almost oriental
feature and complexion.


SONG


I love the jocund dance,
The softly breathing song,
Where innocent eyes do glance,
And where lisps the maiden's tongue.

I love the laughing gale,
I love the echoing hill,
Where mirth does never fail,
And the jolly swain laughs his fill.

I love the pleasant cot,
I love the innocent bower,
Where white and brown is our lot,
Or fruit in the midday hour.

I love the oaken seat,
Beneath the oaken tree,
Where all the old villagers meet,
And laugh our sports to see.

I love our neighbors all,
But, Kitty, I better love thee;
And love them I ever shall;
But thou art all to me.


THE TIGER


Tiger, Tiger, burning bright,
In the forest of the right!
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand forged thy dread feet?

What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dared its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he, who made the lamb, make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright,
In the forest of the night;
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?


Besides these lyric compositions, Mr. Blake has given several
specimens of blank verse. Here, as might be expected, his personifications
are bold, his thoughts original, and his style of writing altogether epic
in its structure. The unrestrained measure, however, which should
warn the poet to restrain himself, has not infrequently betrayed
him into so wild a pursuit of fancy, as to leave harmony unregarded,
and to pass the line prescribed by criticism to the career of
imagination.

But I have been leading you beside our subject, into a labyrinth
of poetical comment, with as little method or ceremony, as if we were
to have no witness of our correspondence. It is time we should return
from the masking regions of poetry, to the business with which
we set out. Donne, in his Anatomy of the World, remarks the
Egyptians to have acted wisely, in bestowing more cost upon
their tombs than on their houses. This example he adduces, to
justify his own Funeral Elegies: and I may perhaps be allowed
to adopt it, as an additional plea, should my former be of no avail,
for coming forward with this piece of almost infantine biography....

I regret, my dear friend, that it was not in my power to furnish
you and my readers with a portrait of a later date. We had often
talked of allowing ourselves that indulgence; but we were not privy
to the event, which was to have communicated to it an incalculable
value. The engraving here given, though it might well be taken to
represent a much older child, is from a very beautiful miniature,
painted by Paye, when Thomas was not quite two years old. He then
was only beginning to speak; but there was even at that early period
an intelligence in his eye, and an expression about his mouth, which
are, I hope, sufficiently characterized in the delineation to afford
no inadequate idea of his physiognomy....

At all events, this work, though it should escape censure, can
rank no higher than a trifle. What apology must I make for addressing
it to a fellow-laborer, who has accomplished the serious and
difficult task of giving an English dress to Froissart?  I think it was
Gray who denominated your venerable original the Herodotus of
a barbarous age; But surely that age is entitled to a more respectful
epithet, when France could boast its Froissart, Italy its Petrarch,
England its Wickliffe, the father of our reformation, and Chaucer, the
father of our poetry. If I might slightly alter the designation of so
complete a critic, I would prefer calling this simple and genuine
historian, the Herodotus of chivalry. But by whatever title
we are to greet him, the interesting minuteness of his recital,
affording a strong pledge of its fidelity, the lively delineation of
manners, and the charm of unadulterated language, all conspire
to place him in the first rank of early writers. The public began
to revolt from that spirit of philosophizing on the most common
occasions, in consequence of which our modern historians seem
to be more ingenious in assigning causes and motives, than assiduous
to ascertain facts. We are returning home to plain tales and first-hand
authorities; and you will share the honor of pointing out the way.
Froissart, hitherto inaccessible to English readers in general,
from the obsolete garb both of the French and of Lord Berners's
translation, may now be read in such a form, as to unite a peculiar
thought and turn of the ancient with the intelligible phraseology
of modern times. With my best congratulations on your success,
and my earnest request to be forgiven for thus intruding on your
leisure, believe me to be, my dear friend, faithfully yours,


B. H. MALKIN.


HACKNEY, _January_ 4, 1806.



(III.) FROM LADY CHARLOTTE BURY'S DIARY (1820)


[This extract from the _Diary illustrative of the Times of George
the Fourth_, by Lady Charlotte Bury, afterwards Lady Charlotte
Campbell, published anonymously, and edited by John Galt, in four
volumes, in 1839, was first noticed by Mr. W. M. Rossetti, who printed
it in the _Athenaeum._ It is from vol. iii. pp. 345-318.]



FROM LADY CHARLOTTE BURY'S DIARY (1820)


_Tuesday_, _the_ 20_th of January_ [1820].--I
dined at Lady C. L----'s. She had collected a strange
party of artists and literati and one or two fine folks, who were very
ill assorted with the rest of the company, and appeared neither to give
nor receive pleasure from the society among whom they were mingled.
Sir T. Lawrence, next whom I sat at dinner, is as courtly as ever. His
conversation is agreeable, but I never feel as if he was saying what
he really thought....

Besides Sir T., there was also present of this profession Mrs. M.,
the miniature painter, a modest, pleasing person; like the pictures she
executes, soft and sweet. Then there was another eccentric little
artist, by name Blake; not a regular professional painter, but one
of those persons who follow the art for its own sweet sake, and
derive their happiness from its pursuit. He appeared to me to be
full of beautiful imaginations and genius; but how far the execution
of his designs is equal to the conceptions of his mental vision, I
know not, never having seen them. _Main-d'oeuvre_ is frequently
wanting where the mind is most powerful Mr. Blake appears unlearned
in all that concerns this world, and, from what he said, I should fear
he is one of those whose feelings are far superior to his situation
in life. He looks care-worn and subdued; but his countenance
radiated as he spoke of his favorite pursuit, and he appeared
gratified by talking to a person who comprehended his feelings.
I can easily imagine that he seldom meets with any one who enters
into his views; for they are peculiar, and exalted above the common
level of received opinions. I could not help contrasting this humble
artist with the great and powerful Sir Thomas Lawrence, and thinking
that the one was fully if not more worthy of the distinction and the
fame to which the other has attained, but from which _he_ is
far removed. Mr. Blake, however, though he may have as much right,
from talent and merit, to the advantages of which Sir Thomas is
possessed, evidently lacks that worldly wisdom and that grace of
manner which make a man gain an eminence in his profession,
and succeed in society. Every word he uttered spoke the perfect
simplicity of his mind, and his total ignorance of all worldly
matters. He told me that Lady C---- L---- had been very kind
to him. 'Ah!' said he, 'there is a deal of kindness in that lady.' I
agreed with him, and though it was impossible not to laugh at the
strange manner in which she had arranged this party, I could not
help admiring the goodness of heart and discrimination of talent
which had made her patronize this unknown artist. Sir T. Lawrence
looked at me several times whilst I was talking with Mr. B., and I
saw his lips curl with a sneer, as if he despised me for conversing
with so insignificant a person.[1] It was very evident Sir Thomas
did not like the company he found himself in, though he was too
well-bred and too prudent to hazard a remark upon the subject.

The literati were also of various degrees of eminence, beginning
with Lord B----, and ending with----. The grandees were Lord
L----, who appreciates talent, and therefore not so ill assorted
with the party as was Mrs. G----and Lady C----, who did nothing
but yawn the whole evening, and Mrs A----, who all looked with
evident contempt upon the surrounding company.


[Footnote 1: There is surely some mistake in this supposition, for Sir
T. Lawrence was, afterwards at least, one of Mr. Blake's great
patrons and admirers.]



(IV.) BLAKE'S HOROSCOPE (1825)


[Blake's horoscope was cast during his lifetime in _Urania_,
or, the Astrologer's Chronicle, and Mystical Magazine; edited by Merlinus
Anglicanus, jun., the Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century, assisted by
the Metropolitan Society of Occult Philosophers (No. I, London, 1825),
the first and only number of an astrological magazine, published under
the pseudonym of Merlinus Anglicanus by R. C. Smith, an astrologer
of the period, and it is highly probable, as Dr. Garnett suggests, that
the date (confirmed by the birth register at St. James's, Westminster)
was derived from Varley, who would have had it from Blake himself.
I give the map, not as it is printed in the book, but in the clearer and
simpler form in which it was copied and given to me by Dr. Garnett.
I am told that the most striking thing in the map, from an astrological
point of view, is the position and aspect of Uranus, the occult planet,
which indicate in the highest degree 'an inborn and supreme instinct
for things occult,' without showing the least tendency towards madness.
The 'Nativity of Mr. Blake' is the last entry, Footnote [2] in
"William Blake, chapter II."]


[Illustration 02]



NATIVITY OF MR. BLAKE,

THE MYSTICAL ARTIST


[Illustration 03]


The above horoscope is calculated for the _estimate_ time
of birth, and Mr. Blake, the subject thereof, is well known amongst
scientific characters, as having a most peculiar and extraordinary
turn of genius and vivid imagination. His illustrations of the Book
of Job have met with much and deserved praise; indeed, in the line
which this artist has adopted, he is perhaps equalled by none of the
present day. Mr. Blake is no less peculiar and _outré_ in his
ideas, as he seems to have some curious intercourse with the invisible
world; and, according to his own account (in which he is certainly,
to all appearance, perfectly sincere), he is continually surrounded
by the spirits of the deceased of all ages, nations, and countries.
He has, so he affirms, held actual conversations with Michael Angelo,
Raphael, Milton, Dryden, and the worthies of antiquity. He has now
by him a long poem nearly finished, which he affirms was recited to
him by the spirit of Milton; and the mystical drawings of this
gentleman are no less curious and worthy of notice, by all those
whose minds soar above the cloggings of this terrestrial element,
to which we are most of us too fastly chained to comprehend the
nature and operations of the world of spirits.

Mr. Blake's pictures of the last judgment, his profiles of Wallace,
Edward the Sixth, Harold, Cleopatra, and numerous others which
we have seen, are really wonderful for the spirit in which they are
delineated. We have been in company with this gentleman several
times, and have frequently been not only delighted with his conversation,
but also filled with feelings of wonder at his extraordinary faculties;
which, whatever some may say to the contrary, are by no means
tinctured with superstition, as he certainly believes what he
promulgates. Our limits will not permit us to enlarge upon this
geniture, which we merely give as an example worthy to be noticed
by the astrological student in his list of remarkable nativities. But it
is probable that the extraordinary faculties and eccentricities of
idea which this gentleman possesses, are the effects of the Moon
in Cancer in the twelfth house (both sign and house being mystical),
in trine to Herschell from the mystical sign Pisces, from the house
of science, and from the mundane trine to Saturn in the scientific
sign Aquarius, which latter planet is in square to Mercury in Scorpio,
and in quintile to the Sun and Jupiter, in the mystical sign Sagittarius.
The square of Mars and Mercury, from fixed signs, also, has a
remarkable tendency to sharpen the intellects, and lay the foundation
of extraordinary ideas. There are also many other reasons for the
strange peculiarities above noticed, but these the student will no
doubt readily discover.



(V.) OBITUARY NOTICES IN THE LITERARY GAZETTE' AND 'GENTLEMAN'S
MAGAZINE,' 1827.


[Obituary Notices of Blake appeared in the _Literary Gazette_
of August 18, 1827 (pp. 540-41), the _Gentleman's Magazine_ of
October 1827 (pp. 377-8), and the _Annual Register_ of 1827, in its
Appendix of Deaths (pp. 253-4). The notice in the _Gentleman's
Magazine_ is largely condensed from that in the _Literary
Gazette_, but with a different opening, which I have given after
the notice in the _Literary Gazette._ The notice in the
_Annual Register_ is merely condensed from the _Gentleman's
Magazine._]



I


WILLIAM BLAKE


_The Illustrator of the Grave, etc._


To those few who have sympathies for the ideal and (comparatively
speaking) the intellectual in art, the following notice is addressed.
Few persons of taste are unacquainted with the designs by Blake,
appended as illustrations to a 4to edition of Blair's Grave. It was
borne forth into the world on the warmest praises of all our prominent
artists, Hoppner, Phillips, Stothard, Flaxman, Opie, Tresham,
Westmacott, Beechey, Lawrence, West, Nollekins, Shee, Owen, Rossi,
Thomson, Cosway, and Soane; and doubly assured with a preface
by the learned and severe Fuseli, the latter part of which we
transcribe--'The  author of the moral series before us has
endeavored to wake sensibility by touching our sympathies with
nearer, less ambiguous, and less ludicrous imagery, than what
mythology, Gothic superstition, or symbols as far-fetched as
inadequate could supply. His invention has been chiefly employed
to spread a familiar and domestic atmosphere round the most
important of all subjects--to  connect the visible and the
invisible world, without provoking probability--and to lead
the eye from the milder light of time to the radiations of eternity.
Such is the plan and the moral part of the author's invention; the
technic part, and the execution of the artist, though to be examined
by other principles, and addressed to a narrower circle, equally claim
approbation, sometimes excite our wonder, and not seldom our fears,
when we see him play on the very verge of legitimate invention;
but wildness so picturesque in itself, so often redeemed by taste,
simplicity, and elegance--what child of fancy, what artist,
would wish to discharge? The groups and single figures, on their
own basis, abstracted from the general composition, and considered
without attention to the plan, frequently exhibit those genuine
and unaffected attitudes, those simple graces, which nature and
the heart alone can dictate, and only an eye inspired by both
discover. Every class of artists, in every stage of their progress
and attainments, from the student to the finished master, and
from the contriver of ornament to the painter of history, will here
find materials of art, and hints of improvement!'

When it is stated, that the pure-minded Flaxman pointed out
to an eminent literary man the obscurity of Blake as a melancholy
proof of English apathy towards the grand, the philosophic, or
the enthusiastically devotional painter; and that he (Blake) has
been several times employed for that truly admirable judge of
art, Sir T. Lawrence, any further testimony to his extraordinary
powers is unnecessary. Yet has Blake been allowed to exist in
a penury which most artists[1]--beings necessarily of a sensitive
temperament--would deem intolerable. Pent, with his affectionate
wife, in a close back-room in one of the Strand courts, his
bed in one corner, his meagre dinner in another, a rickety table
holding his copper-plates in progress, his colors, books (among
which his Bible, a Sessi Velutello's Dante, and Mr. Carey's
translation, were at the top), his large drawings, sketches,
and MSS.;--his ankles frightfully swelled, his chest disordered,
old age striding on, his wants increased, but not his miserable
means and appliances: even yet was his eye undimmed, the fire
of his imagination unquenched, and the preternatural, never-resting
activity of his mind unflagging. He had not merely a calmly
resigned, but a cheerful and mirthful countenance; in short,
he was a living commentary on Jeremy Taylor's beautiful chapter
on Contentedness. He took no thought for his life, what he should
eat, or what he should drink; nor yet for his body, what he
should put on; but had a fearless confidence in that Providence
which had given him the vast range of the world for his recreation
and delight.

_Blake died last Monday!_ Died as he lived! piously cheerful,
talking calmly, and finally resigning himself to his eternal rest,
like an infant to its sleep. He has left _nothing_ except some
pictures, copper-plates, and his principal work of a series of a hundred
large designs from Dante.

William Blake was brought up under Basire, the eminent engraver.
He was active in mind and body, passing from one occupation to
another, without an intervening minute of repose. Of an ardent,
affectionate, and grateful temper, he was simple in manner and
address, and displayed an inbred courteousness, of the most
agreeable character. Next November he would have been _sixty-nine._
At the age of sixty-six he commenced the study of Italian, for
the sake of reading Dante in the original, which he accomplished!

His widow is left (we fear, from the accounts which have reached
us) in a very forlorn condition, Mr. Blake having latterly been much
indebted for succor and consolation to his friend Mr. Linnell, the
painter. We have no doubt but her cause will be taken up by the
distributors of those funds which are raised for the relief of distressed
artists, and also by the benevolence of private individuals.

When further time has been allowed us for inquiry, we shall
probably resume this matter; at present (owing the above information
to the kindness of a correspondent) we can only record the death
of a singular and very able man.



II


MR. WILLIAM BLAKE


Aug. 13, aged 68, Mr. William Blake, an excellent, but eccentric,
artist.

He was a pupil of the engraver Basire; and among his earliest
productions were eight beautiful plates in the Novelist's Magazine.
In 1793 he published in 12mo, 'The Gates of Paradise,' a very small
book for children, containing fifteen plates of emblems; and 'published
by W. B., 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth'; also about the same time,
'Songs of Experience, with plates'; 'America; a Prophecy,' folio, and
'Europe, a Prophecy,' 1794, folio. These are now become very scarce.
In 1797 he commenced, in large folio, an edition of Young's Night
Thoughts, of which every page was a design, but only one number
was published. In 1805 were produced in 8vo numbers, containing
five engravings by Blake, some ballads by Mr. Hayley, but which
also were abruptly discontinued. Few persons of taste are unacquainted
with the designs by Blake, engraved by Schiavonetti, as illustrations
to a 4to edition of Blair's Grave. They are twelve in number, and an
excellent portrait of Blake, from a picture by T. Phillips, R.A., is
prefixed. It was borne forth ... [Here follows the third sentence,
p. 345 above, to the end of the paragraph.]

In 1809 was published in 12mo, 'A Descriptive Catalogue of
[sixteen] pictures, poetical and historical inventions, painted by
William Blake in watercolors, being the ancient method of fresco
painting restored, and drawings, for public inspection, and for
sale by private contract.' Among these was a design of Chaucer's
Pilgrimage to Canterbury, from which an etching has been published.
Mr. Blake's last publication is a set of engravings to illustrate the
Book of Job. To Fuseli's testimony of his merit above quoted, it
is sufficient to add, that he has been employed by that truly
admirable judge of art, Sir Thomas Lawrence; and that the pure-minded
Flaxman....

[The remainder is condensed from the _Literary Gazette_,
in "The Illustrator of the Grave," above, with the occasional change
of a word, or the order of a sentence.]



[Footnote 1: The term is employed in its generic and comprehensive
sense.]



(VI.) EXTRACT FROM VARLEY'S ZODIACAL PHYSIOGNOMY (1828)


[John Varley, astrologer and water-color painter, was introduced to
Blake by Linnell, and it was for him that Blake did the 'visionary heads'
described by Allan Cunningham. (see "VIII Life of Blake by Allan
Cunningham.") 'The Ghost of a Flea' exists in both forms described
by Varley, in a sketch of the head (which he reproduces, engraved by
Linnell, in a plate at the end of his book, together with two other
heads in outline), and in a full-length picture in tempera. The passage
which follows is taken from pp. 54, 55 of 'A Treatise on Zodiacal
Physiognomy; illustrated with engravings of heads and features:
accompanied by tables of the times of rising of the twelve signs of
the Zodiac; and containing also new and astrological explanation
of some remarkable portions of Ancient Mythological History.' By John
Varley. London: Printed for the Author, 1828.]



EXTRACT FROM VARLEY'S ZODIACAL PHYSIOGNOMY


With respect to the vision of the Ghost of the Flea, seen by
Blake, it agrees in countenance with one class of people under
Gemini, which sign is the significator of the Flea; whose brown color
is appropriate to the color of the eyes in some full-toned Gemini
persons. And the neatness, elasticity, and tenseness of the Flea
are significant of the elegant dancing and fencing sign Gemini.
This spirit visited his imagination in such a figure as he never
anticipated in an insect. As I was anxious to make the most correct
investigation in my power, of the truth of these visions, on hearing
of this spiritual apparition of a Flea, I asked him if he could draw
for me the resemblance of what he saw: he instantly said, 'I see him
now before me.' I therefore gave him paper and a pencil, with which
he drew the portrait, of which a facsimile is given in this number. I
felt convinced by his mode of proceeding that he had a real image
before him, for he left off, and began on another part of the paper
to make a separate drawing of the mouth of the Flea, which the
spirit having opened, he was prevented from proceeding with the
first sketch, till he had closed it. During the time occupied in
completing the drawing, the Flea told him that all fleas were
inhabited by the souls of such men as were by nature blood-thirsty
to excess, and were therefore providentially confined to the size
and form of insects; otherwise, were he himself, for instance, the
size of a horse, he would depopulate a great portion of the country.
He added, that if in attempting to leap from one island to another,
he should fall into the sea, he could swim, and should not be lost.
This spirit afterwards appeared to Blake, and afforded him a view
of his whole figure; an engraving of which I shall give in this work.



(VII.) BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF BLAKE BY J. T. SMITH (1828)


[The Memoir of Blake by John Thomas Smith, Keeper of the Prints
and Drawings in the British Museum, is the last of the 'Biographical
Sketches and Anecdotes of several Artists and others contemporary
with Nollekens,' contained in the second volume of 'Nollekens and
his Times: comprehending a Life of that celebrated Sculptor; and
Memoirs of several contemporary Artists, from the' time of Roubiliac,
Hogarth, and Reynolds, to that of Fuseli, Flaxman, and Blake.' (London:
Henry Colburn, New Burlington Street, 1828.) It contains more facts
at first hand than any other account of Blake, and is really the
foundation of all subsequent biographies. I have added a page,
which is not without its significance, from a later book by Smith,
'A Book for a Rainy Day; or, Recollections of the Events of the last
Sixty-five Years' (1845), where it occurs under date 1784, on
pp. 81, 82.]



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF BLAKE


I believe it has been invariably the custom of every age, whenever
a man has been found to depart from the usual mode of thinking, to
consider him of deranged intellect, and not infrequently stark
staring mad; which judgment his calumniators would pronounce
with as little hesitation, as some of the uncharitable part of mankind
would pass sentence of death upon a poor half-drowned cur
who had lost his master, or one who had escaped hanging with a
rope about his neck. Cowper, in a letter to Lady Hesketh, dated
June 3, 1788, speaking of a dancing-master's advertisement, says,
'The author of it had the good hap to be crazed, or he had never
produced anything half so clever; for you will ever observe, that
they who are said to have lost their wits, have more than other
people.'

Bearing this stigma of eccentricity, William Blake, with most
extraordinary zeal, commenced his efforts in Art under the roof
of No. 28 Broad Street, Carnaby Market; in which house he was
born, and where his father carried on the business of a hosier.
William, the subject of the following pages, who was his second
son, showing an early stretch of mind, and a strong talent for
drawing, being totally destitute of the dexterity of a London
shopman, so well described by Dr. Johnson, was sent away from
the counter as a booby, and placed under the late Mr. James
Basire, an artist well known for many years as engraver to the
Society of Antiquaries. From him he learned the mechanical
part of his art, and as he drew carefully, and copied faithfully,
his master frequently and confidently employed him to make drawings
from monuments to be engraved.

After leaving his instructor, in whose house he had conducted
himself with the strictest propriety, he became acquainted with
Flaxman, the sculptor, through his friend Stothard, and was also
honored by an introduction to the accomplished Mrs. Mathew,
whose house, No. 27, in Rathbone Place, was then frequented by
most of the literary and talented people of the day. This lady--to
whom I also had the honor of being known, and whose door and
purse were constantly open and ready to cherish persons of genius
who stood in need of assistance in their learned and arduous
pursuits, worldly concerns, or inconveniences--was so extremely
zealous in promoting the celebrity of Blake, that upon hearing
him read some of his early efforts in poetry, she thought so well
of them, as to request the Bev. Henry Mathew, her husband, to
join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense
of printing them; in which he not only acquiesced, but, with his
usual urbanity, wrote the following advertisement, which precedes
the poems:


'The following sketches were the production of an untutored
youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the
author till his twentieth year; since which time, his talents having
been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession,
he has been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of
these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the
public eye.

'Conscious of the irregularities and defects to be found in almost
every page, his friends have still believed that they possessed a
poetical originality, which merited some respite from oblivion. These,
their opinions, remain, however, to be now reproved or confirmed by
a less partial public.'


The annexed Song is a specimen of the juvenile playfulness of
Blake's muse, copied from page 10 of these Poems.[1]


SONG


'How sweet I roam'd from field to field,
And tasted all the Summer's pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!

'He show'd me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.

'With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fired my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.

'He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
Then stretches out my golden wing,
And mocks my loss of liberty.'


But it happened, unfortunately, soon after this period, that in
consequence of his unbending deportment, or what his adherents
are pleased to call his manly firmness of opinion, which certainly
was not at all times considered pleasing by every one, his visits
were not so frequent. He, however, continued to benefit by Mrs.
Mathew's liberality, and was enabled to continue in partnership,
as a print-seller, with his fellow-pupil, Parker, in a shop, No. 27,
next door to his father's, in Broad Street; and being extremely partial
to Robert, his youngest brother, considered him as his pupil. Bob,
as he was familiarly called, was one of my playfellows, and much
beloved by all his companions.

Much about this time, Blake wrote many other songs, to which
he also composed tunes. These he would occasionally sing to his
friends; and though, according to his confession, he was entirely
unacquainted with the science of music, his ear was so good, that
his tunes were sometimes most singularly beautiful, and were noted
down by musical professors. As for his later poetry, if it may be so
called, attached to his plates, though it was certainly in some parts
enigmatically curious as to its application, yet it was not always wholly
uninteresting; and I have unspeakable pleasure in being able to state,
that though I admit he did not for the last forty years attend any place
of Divine worship, yet he was not a Freethinker, as some invidious
detractors have thought proper to assert, nor was he ever in any
degree irreligious. Through life, his Bible was everything with him;
and as a convincing proof how highly he reverenced the Almighty, I
shall introduce the following lines with which he concludes his address
to the Deists:


'For a tear is an intellectual thing;
And a sigh is the sword of an Angel-King;
And the bitter groan of a Martyr's woe
Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow.'


Again, at page 77, in his address to the Christians:


'I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven's gate,
Built in Jerusalem's wall.'


In his choice of subjects, and in his designs in Art, perhaps no
man had higher claim to originality, nor ever drew with a closer
adherence to his own conception; and from what I knew of him,
and have heard related by his friends, I most firmly believe few
artists have been guilty of less plagiarisms than he. It is true,
I have seen him admire and heard him expatiate upon the beauties
of Marc Antonio and of Albert Dürer; but I verily believe not with
any view of borrowing an idea; neither do I consider him at any
time dependent in his mode of working, which was generally with
the graver only; and as to printing, he mostly took off his own
impressions.

After his marriage, which took place at Battersea, and which
proved a mutually happy one, he instructed his _beloved_, for
so he most frequently called his Kate,[2] and allowed her, till the last
moment of his practice, to take off his proof impressions and print
his works, which she did most carefully, and ever delighted in the
task: nay, she became a draughts-woman; and as a convincing proof
that she and her husband were born for each others comfort, she
not only entered cheerfully into his views, but, what is curious,
possessed a similar power of imbibing ideas, and has produced
drawings equally original and, in some respects, interesting.

Blake's peace of mind, as well as that of his Catherine, was much
broken by the death of their brother Robert, who was a most amicable
link in their happiness; and, as a proof how much Blake respected him,
whenever he beheld him in his visions, he implicitly attended to his
opinion and advice as to his future projected works. I should have
stated, that Blake was supereminently endowed with the power of
disuniting all other thoughts from his mind, whenever he wished to
indulge in thinking of any particular subject; and so firmly did he
believe, by this abstracting power, that the objects of his compositions
were before him in his mind's eye, that he frequently believed them
to be speaking to him. This I shall now illustrate by the following
narrative.

Blake, after deeply perplexing himself as to the mode of accomplishing
the publication of his illustrated songs, without their being subject
to the expense of letterpress, his brother Robert stood before him
in one of his visionary imaginations, and so decidedly directed him
in the way in which he ought to proceed, that he immediately followed
his advice, by writing his poetry, and drawing his marginal subjects of
embellishments in outline upon the copper-plate with an impervious
liquid, and then eating the plain parts or lights away with aqua-fortis
considerably below them, so that the outlines were left as a stereotype.
The plates in this state were then printed in any tint that he wished,
to enable him or Mrs. Blake to color the marginal figures up by hand
in imitation of drawings.

The following are some of his works produced in this manner, viz.;
'Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, The Book of Jerusalem,'
consisting of an hundred plates, 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,'
'Europe and America'; and another work, which is now very uncommon,
a pretty little series of plates, entitled 'Gate of Paradise.'

Blake, like those artists absorbed in a beloved study, cared not
for money beyond its use for the ensuing day; and indeed he and
his 'beloved' were so reciprocally frugal in their expenses, that, never
sighing for either gilded vessels, silver-laced attendants, or turtle's
livers, they were contented with the simplest repast, and a little
answered their purpose. Yet, notwithstanding all their economy,
Dame Fortune being, as it is pretty well known to the world, sometimes
a fickle jade, they, as well as thousands more, have had their
intercepting clouds.

As it is not my intention to follow them through their lives, I
shall confine myself to a relation of a few other anecdotes of this
happy pair; and as they are connected with the Arts, in my opinion
they ought not to be lost, as they may be considered worthy the
attention of future biographers.

For his marginal illustrations of 'Young's Night Thoughts,' which
possess a great power of imagination, he received so despicably
low a price, that Flaxman, whose heart was ever warm, was determined
to serve him whenever an opportunity offered itself; and with his usual
voice of sympathy, introduced him to his friend Hayley, with whom it
was no new thing to give pleasure, capricious as he was. This
gentleman immediately engaged him to engrave the plates for his
quarto edition of 'The Life of Cowper,' published in 1803-4;
and for this purpose he went down to Felpham, in order to be near
that highly respected _Hermit._

Here he took a cottage, for which he paid twenty pounds a year,
and was not, as has been reported, entertained in a house belonging
to Mr. Hayley rent-free. During his stay he drew several portraits,
and could have had full employment in that department of the Art;
but he was born to follow his own inclinations, and was willing
to rely upon a reward for the labours of the day.

Mr. Flaxman, knowing me to be a collector of autographs, among
many others, gave me the following letter, which he received from
Blake immediately after his arrival at Felpham, in which he styles him.


'DEAR SCULPTOR OF ETERNITY,

'We are safe arrived at our cottage, which is more beautiful than
I thought it, and more convenient. It is a perfect model for cottages,
and, I think, for palaces of magnificence; only enlarging, not altering,
its proportions, and adding ornaments and not principals. Nothing can
be more grand than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple without
intricacy, it seems to be the spontaneous effusion of humanity, congenial
to the wants of man. No other-formed  house can ever please me so
well; nor shall I ever be persuaded, I believe, that it can be improved
either in beauty or use.

'Mr. Hayley received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have
begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more
spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden
gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial
inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly
seen, and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and
sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace.

'Our journey was very pleasant; and though we had a great deal
of luggage, no grumbling. All was cheerfulness and good-humour
on the road, and yet we could not arrive at our cottage before half-past
eleven at night, owing to the necessary shifting of our luggage from
one chaise to another; for we had seven different chaises, and
as many different drivers. We set out between six and seven in the
morning of Thursday, with sixteen heavy boxes, and portfolios full
of prints.

'And now begins a new life, because another covering of earth
is shaken off. I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I could
well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books
and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity,
before my mortal life; and those works are the delight and study
of archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the riches or fame
of mortality? The Lord, our father, will do for us and with us according
to his Divine will for our good.

'You, O dear Flaxman! are a sublime Archangel, my friend and
companion from eternity. In the Divine bosom is our dwelling-place.
I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient
days before this earth appeared in its vegetated mortality to my
mortal-vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity which can
never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the
remotest corners of Heaven from each other.

'Farewell, my best friend! Remember me and my wife in love
and friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire
to entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold; and believe
me for ever to remain,

'Your grateful and affectionate,

'WILLIAM BLAKE.

'Felpham, _Sept._ 21, 1800.

'Sunday morning.'


In a copy of Hayley's 'Triumphs of Temper,' illustrated by Stothard,
which had been the one belonging to the Author's son, and which
he gave after his death to Blake, are these verses in MS. by the
hand of the donor:


'Accept, my gentle visionary, Blake,
Whose thoughts are fanciful and kindly mild;
Accept, and fondly keep for friendship's sake,
This favor'd vision, my poetic child.

'Rich in more grace than fancy ever won,
To thy most tender mind this book will be,
For it belong'd to my departed son;
So from an angel it descends to thee.

W. H.

_July_, 1800.'[3]


Upon his return from Felpham, he addressed the public,
in page 3 of his Book of Jerusalem, in these words, 'After my
three years' slumber on the banks of the ocean, I again display
my giant-forms to the public,' etc.

Some of the 'giant-forms,' as he calls them, are mighty and
grand, and if I were to compare them to the style of any preceding
artist, Michel Angelo, Sir Joshua's favorite, would be the one; and
were I to select a specimen as a corroboration of this opinion, I
should instance the figure personifying the 'Ancient of Days,' the
frontispiece to his 'Europe, a Prophecy.' In my mind, his knowledge
of drawing, as well as design, displayed in this figure, must at once
convince the informed reader of his extraordinary abilities.

I am now under the painful necessity of relating an event promulgated
in two different ways by two different parties; and as I entertain a high
respect for the talents of both persons concerned, I shall, in order to
steer clear of giving umbrage to the supporters of either, leave the
reader to draw his own conclusions, unbiassed by any insinuation
whatever of mine.

An engraver of the name of Cromek, a man who endeavored to
live by speculating upon the talents of others, purchased a series
of drawings of Blake, illustrative of Blair's 'Grave,' which he had
begun with a view of engraving and publishing. These were sold
to Mr. Cromek for the insignificant sum of one guinea each, with
the promise, and indeed under the express agreement, that Blake
should be employed to engrave them; a task to which he looked
forward with anxious delight. Instead of this negotiation being
carried into effect, the drawings, to his great mortification, were put
into the hands of Schiavonetti. During the time this artist was thus
employed, Cromek had asked Blake--what work he had in mind
to execute next. The unsuspecting artist not only told him, but without
the least reserve showed him the designs sketched out for a fresco
picture; the subject Chaucer's 'Pilgrimage to Canterbury'; with which
Mr. Cromek appeared highly delighted. Shortly after this, Blake
discovered that Stothard, a brother-artist to whom he had been
extremely kind in early days, had been employed to paint a picture,
not only of the same subject, but in some instances similar to the
fresco sketch which he had shown to Mr. Cromek. The picture painted
by Stothard became the property of Mr. Cromek, who published
proposals for an engraving from it, naming Bromley as the engraver
to be employed. However, in a short time, that artist's name was
withdrawn, and Schiavonetti's substituted, who lived only to complete
the etching; the plate being finished afterwards by at least three
different hands. Blake, highly indignant at this treatment, immediately
set to work, and proposed an engraving from his fresco picture, which
he publicly exhibited in his brother James's shop-window, at the
corner of Broad Street, accompanied with an address to the public,
stating what he considered to be improper conduct.

So much on the side of Blake.[4] On the part of
Stothard, the story runs thus. Mr. Cromek had agreed with that artist to
employ him upon a picture of the Procession of Chaucer's Pilgrimage
to Canterbury, for which he first agreed to pay him sixty guineas, but
in order to enable him to finish it in a more exquisite manner, promised
him forty more, with an intention of engaging Bromley to engrave it; but
in consequence of some occurrence, his name was withdrawn, and
Schiavonetti was employed. During the time Stothard was painting the
picture, Blake called to see it, and appeared so delighted with it, that
Stothard, sincerely wishing to please an old friend with whom he had
lived so cordially for many years, and from whose works he always most
liberally declared he had received much pleasure and edification,
expressed a wish to introduce his portrait as one of the party, as a
mark of esteem.

Mr. Hoppner, in a letter to a friend, dated May 30, 1807, says
of it:


'This intelligent group is rendered still more interesting by the
charm of coloring, which though simple is strong, and most harmoniously
distributed throughout the picture. The landscape has a deep-toned
brightness that accords most admirably with the figures; and the
painter has ingeniously contrived to give a value to a common scene
and very ordinary forms, that would hardly be found, by unlearned eyes,
in the natural objects. He has expressed too, with great vivacity and
truth, the freshness of morning, at that season when Nature herself
is most fresh and blooming--the Spring; and it requires no
great stretch of fancy to imagine we perceive the influence of it
on the cheeks of the Fair Wife of Bath, and her rosy companions,
the Monk and Friar.

'In respect of the execution of the various parts of this pleasing
design, it is not too much praise to say, that it is wholly free from
that vice which painters term _manner_; and it has this
peculiarity beside, which I do not remember to have seen in any
picture, ancient or modern, namely, that it bears no mark of the
period in which it was painted, but might very well pass for the
work of some able artist of the time of Chaucer. This effect is not,
I believe, the result of any association of ideas connected with the
costume, but appears in primitive simplicity, and the total absence
of all affectation, either of coloring or pencilling.

'Having attempted to describe a few of the beauties of this
captivating performance, it remains only for me to mention one
great defect. The picture is, notwithstanding appearances, _a
modern one._ But if you can divest yourself of the general
prejudice that exists against contemporary talents, you will see
a work that would have done honor to any school, at any period.'[5]


In 1810, Stothard, to his great surprise, found that Blake had
engraved and published a plate of the same size, in some respects
bearing a similarity to his own.[6] Such are the outlines of this
controversy.

Blake's ideas were often truly entertaining, and after he had
conveyed them to paper, his whimsical and novel descriptions
frequently surpassed his delineations; for instance, that of his
picture of the Transformation of the Flea to the form of a Man,
is extremely curious. This personification, which he denominated
a Cupper, or Blood-sucker, is covered with coat of armor, similar
to the case of the flea, and is represented slowly pacing in the night,
with a thorn attached to his right hand, and a cup in the other, as
if ready to puncture the first person whose blood he might fancy, like
Satan prowling about to seek whom he could devour. Blake said of
the flea, that were that lively little fellow the size of an elephant,
he was quite sure, from the calculations he had made of his wonderful
strength, that he could bound from Dover to Calais in one leap.[7]
Whatever may be the public opinion hereafter of Blake's talents,
when his enemies are dead, I will not presume to predict;[8]
but this I am certain of, that on the score of industry at least,
many artists must strike to him. Application was a faculty so
engendered in him that he took little bodily exercise to keep up
his health: he had few evening walks and little rest from labour,
for his mind was ever fixed upon his art, nor did he at any time
indulge in a game of chess, draughts, or backgammon; such
amusements, considered as relaxations by artists in general,
being to him distractions. His greatest pleasure was derived
from the Bible--a work ever at his hand, and which he often
assiduously consulted in several languages. Had he fortunately
lived till the next year's exhibition at Somerset House, the public
would then have been astonished at his exquisite finishing of a
Fresco picture of the Last Judgment, containing upwards of one
thousand figures, many of them wonderfully conceived and grandly
drawn. The lights of this extraordinary performance have the
appearance of silver and gold; but upon Mrs. Blake's assuring me
that there was no silver used, I found, upon a closer examination,
that a blue wash had been passed over those parts of the gilding
which receded, and the lights of the forward objects, which were
also of gold, were heightened with a warm color, to give the
appearance of the two metals.

It is most certain, that the uninitiated eye was incapable of
selecting the beauties of Blake; his effusions were not generally
felt; and in this opinion I am borne out in the frequent assertions
of Fuseli and Flaxman. It would, therefore, be unreasonable to
expect the booksellers to embark in publications, not likely to
meet remuneration. Circumstanced, then, as Blake was, approaching
to threescore years and ten, in what way was he to persevere in his
labours? Alas, he knew not! until the liberality of Mr. Linnell, a
brother-artist of eminence, whose discernment could well appreciate
those parts of his designs which deserved perpetuity, enabled him
to proceed and execute in comfort a series of twenty-one plates,
illustrative of the Book of Job. This was the last work he completed,
upon the merits of which he received the highest congratulations
from the following Royal Academicians: Sir Thomas Lawrence, Mr.
Baily, Mr. Philips, Mr. Chantrey, Mr. James Ward, Mr. Arnald, Mr.
Collins, Mr. Westmacott, and many other artists of eminence.

As to Blake's system of coloring, which I have not hitherto
noticed, it was in many instances most beautifully prismatic. In
this branch of the art he often acknowledged Apelles to have been
his tutor, who was, he said, so much pleased with his style, that
once when he appeared before him, among many of his observations,
he delivered the following:--'You certainly possess my system of
coloring; and I now wish you to draw my person, which has hitherto
been untruly delineated.'

I must own that until I was favoured by Mr. Upcott with a sight
of some of Blake's works, several of which I had never seen, I was
not so fully aware of his great depth of knowledge in coloring. Of
these most interesting specimens of his art, which are now extremely
rare, and rendered invaluable by his death, as it is impossible for any
one to color them with his mind, should the plates remain, Mr. Richard
Thomson, another truly kind friend, has favoured me with the following
descriptive lists.


SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. The author and printer, W. Blake. Small
octavo; seventeen plates, including the title-page. Frontispiece, a
winged infant mounted on the shoulders of a youth. On the title-page,
two figures weeping over two crosses.

_Introduction._ Four Stanzas on a cloud, with a night-sky
behind, and beneath, a figure of Earth stretched on a mantle.

_Earths Answer._ Five Stanzas; a serpent on the ground
beneath.

_The Clod, and the Pebble._ Three Stanzas; above, a
headpiece of four sheep and two oxen; beneath, a duck and reptiles.

_A Poison Tree._ Four Stanzas: The tree stretches up the right
side of the page; and beneath, a dead body killed by its influence.

_The Fly._ Five Stanzas. Beneath, a female figure with two
children.

_Holy Thursday._ Four Stanzas. Head-piece, a female figure
discovering a dead child. On the right-hand margin a mother and two
children lamenting the loss of an infant which lies beneath. Perhaps this
is one of the most tasteful of the set.

_The Chimney-Sweeper._ Three Stanzas. Beneath, a figure of
one walking in snow towards an open door.

_London._ Four Stanzas. Above, a child leading an old man
through the street; on the right hand, a figure warming itself at a fire.
If in any instance Mr. Blake has copied himself, it is in the figure of
the old man upon this plate, whose position appears to have been a
favorite one with him.

_The Tiger._ Six Stanzas. On the right-hand margin, the
trunk of a tree; and beneath, a tiger walking.

_A Little Boy Lost._ Six Stanzas. Ivy-leaves on the right hand,
and beneath, weeping figure before a fire, in which the verses state that
the child had been burned by a Saint.

_The Human Abstract._ Six Stanzas. The trunk of a tree on
the right-hand margin, and beneath, an old man in white drawing a veil
over his head.

_The Angel._ Four Stanzas. Head-piece, a female figure lying
beneath a tree, and pushing from her a winged boy.

_My Pretty Rose-Tree._ Two Stanzas: succeeded by a small
vignette, of a figure weeping, and another lying reclined at the foot of
a tree. Beneath, are two verses more, entitled, _Ah! Sun-Flower_;
and a single stanza, headed _The Lily._

_Nurse's Song._ Two Stanzas. Beneath, a girl with a youth
and a female child at a door surrounded by vine-leaves.

_A Little Girl Lost._ Seven Stanzas; interspersed with birds
and leaves, the trunk of a tree on the right-hand margin.

The whole of these plates are colored in imitation of fresco. The
poetry of these songs is wild, irregular, and highly mystical, but of no
great degree of elegance or excellence, and their prevailing feature is
a tone of complaint of the misery of mankind.

AMERICA: _a Prophecy._ Lambeth: Printed by William Blake,
in the year 1793; folio; eighteen plates or twenty pages, including the
frontispiece and title-page. After a Preludium of thirty-seven lines
commences the Prophecy of 226, which are interspersed with numerous
headpieces, vignettes, and tail-pieces, usually stretching along the
left-hand margin and enclosing the text; which sometimes appears
written on a cloud, and at others environed by flames and water. Of
the latter subject a very fine specimen is shown upon page 13, where
the tail-piece represents the bottom of the sea, with various fishes
coming together to prey upon a dead body. The head-piece is another
dead body lying on the surface of the waters, with an eagle feeding
upon it with outstretched wings. Another instance of Mr. Blake's
favorite figure of the old man entering at Death's door, is contained
on page 12 of this poem. The subject of the text is a conversation
between the Angel of Albion, the Angels of the Thirteen States,
Washington, and some others of the American generals, and 'Red
Ore,' the spirit of war and evil. The verses are without rhyme, and most
resemble hexameters, though they are by no means exact; and the
expressions are mystical in a very high degree.

EUROPE: _a Prophecy._ Lambeth: Printed by William Blake,
1794; folio; seventeen plates on the leaves, inclusive of the frontispiece
and title-page. Colored to imitate the ancient fresco painting. The
Preludium consists of thirty-three lines, in stanzas without rhyme, and
the Prophecy of two hundred and tight; the decorations to which are
larger than most of those in the former book, and approach nearest
to the character of paintings, since, in several instances, they occupy
the whole page. The frontispiece is an uncommonly fine specimen of
art, and approaches almost to the sublimity of Raffaelle or Michel
Angelo. It represents 'The Ancient of Days,' in an orb of light surrounded
by dark clouds, as referred to in Proverbs VIII. 27, stooping down with
an enormous pair of compasses to describe the destined orb of the
world,[9] 'when he set a compass upon the face of the earth.'


'In His hand
He took the golden compasses, prepar'd
In God's eternal store, to circumscribe
This universe, and all created things:
One foot he centred, and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profundity obscure;
And said, "Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just circumference, O World!"'

Paradise Lost, book VII. line 236.


Another splendid composition in this work are the two angels pouring
out the black-spotted plague upon England, on page 9; in which the
fore-shortening of the legs, the grandeur of their positions, and the
harmony with which they are adapted to each other and to their curved
trumpets, are perfectly admirable. The subject-matter of the work is
written in the same wild and singular measures as the preceding, and
describes, in mystical language, the terrors of plague and anarchy which
overspread England during the slumbers of Enitharmon for eighteen
hundred years; upon whose awaking, the ferocious spirit Ore burst into
flames 'in the vineyards of red France.' At the end of this poem are seven
separate engravings on folio pages, without letterpress, which are
colored like the former part of the work, with a degree of splendor and
force, as almost to resemble sketches in oil-colors. The finest of these
are a figure of an angel standing in the sun, a group of three furies
surrounded by clouds and fire, and a figure of a man sitting beneath
a tree in the deepest dejection; all of which are peculiarly remarkable
for their strength and splendor of coloring. Another publication by Mr.
Blake consisted only of a small quarto volume of twenty-three engravings
of various shapes and sizes, colored as before, some of which are
of extraordinary effect and beauty. The best plates in this series
are--the first of an aged man, with a white heard sweeping the
ground, and writing in a book with each hand, naked; a human figure
pressing out his brain through his ears; and the great sea-serpent; but
perhaps the best is a figure sinking in a stormy sea at sunset, the
splendid light of which, and the foam upon the black waves, are
almost magical effects of coloring. Beneath the first design is engraved
'_Lambeth, printed by W. Blake_, 1794.'


Blake's modes of preparing his ground, and laying them over
his panels for painting, mixing his colors, and manner of working,
were those which he considered to have been practized by the
earliest fresco painters, whose productions still remain, in numerous
instances, vivid and permanently fresh. His ground was a mixture
of whiting and carpenter's glue, which he passed over several times
in thin coatings: his colors he ground himself, and also united them
with the same sort of glue, but in a much weaker state. He would, in
the course of painting a picture, pass a very thin transparent wash
of glue-water over the whole of the parts he had worked upon, and
then proceed with his finishing.[10]

This process I have tried, and find, by using my mixture warm,
that I can produce the same texture as possessed in Blake's pictures
of the Last Judgment, and others of his productions, particularly
in Varley's curious picture of the personified Flea. Blake preferred
mixing his colors with carpenter's glue, to gum, on account of the
latter cracking in the sun, and becoming humid in moist weather.
The glue-mixture stands the sun, and change of atmosphere has no
effect upon it. Every carpenter knows that if a broken piece of stick
be joined with good glue, the stick will seldom break again in the
glued parts.

That Blake had many secret modes of working, both as a colorist
and an engraver, I have no doubt. His method of eating away the plain
copper, and leaving his drawn lines of his subjects and his words as
stereotype, is, in my mind, perfectly original. Mrs. Blake is in
possession of the secret, and she ought to receive something
considerable for its communication, as I am quite certain it may be
used to the greatest advantage both to artists and literary characters
in general.

That Blake's colored plates have more effect than others where
gum has been used, is, in my opinion, the fact, and I shall rest my
assertion upon those beautiful specimens in the possession of Mr.
Upcott, colored purposely for that gentleman's godfather, Ozias
Humphrey, Esq., to whom Blake wrote the following interesting letter.


TO OZIAS HUMPHREY, ESQ.


'The design of The Last Judgment, which I have completed by
your recommendation for the Countess of Egremont, it is necessary
to give some account of; and its various parts ought to be described,
for the accommodation of those who give it the honor of their
attention.

'Christ seated on the Throne of Judgment: the Heavens in clouds
rolling before him and around him, like a scroll ready to be consumed
in the fires of the Angels; who descend before his feet, with their four
trumpets sounding to the four winds.

'Beneath, the Earth is convulsed with the labours of the Resurrection.
In the caverns of the earth is the Dragon with seven heads and ten
horns, chained by two Angels; and above his cavern, on the earth's
surface, is the Harlot, also seized and bound by two Angels with
chains, while her palaces are falling into ruins, and her counsellors and
warriors are descending into the abyss, in wailing and despair.

'Hell opens beneath the harlot's seat on the left hand, into which
the wicked are descending.

'The right hand of the design is appropriated to the Resurrection
of the Just: the left hand of the design is appropriated to the
Resurrection and Fall of the Wicked.

'Immediately before the Throne of Christ are Adam and Eve,
kneeling in humiliation, as representatives of the whole human
race; Abraham and Moses kneel on each side beneath them; from
the cloud on which Eve kneels, and beneath Moses, and from the
tables of stone which utter lightning, is seen Satan wound round
by the Serpent, and falling headlong; the Pharisees appear on
the left hand pleading their own righteousness before the Throne
of Christ: The Book of Death is opened on clouds by two Angels;
many groups of figures are falling from before the throne, and
from the sea of fire, which flows before the steps of the throne;
on which are seen the seven Lamps of the Almighty, burning before
the throne. Many figures chained and bound together fall through the
air, and some are scourged by Spirits with flames of fire into the
abyss of Hell, which opens to receive them beneath, on the left hand
of the harlot's seat; where others are howling and descending into
the flames, and in the act of dragging each other into Hell, and of
contending in fighting with each other on the brink of perdition.

'Before the Throne of Christ on the right hand, the Just, in
humiliation and in exultation, rise through the air, with their
Children and Families; some of whom are bowing before the Book
of Life, which is opened by two Angels on clouds: many groups
arise with exultation; among them is a figure crowned with stars,
and the moon beneath her feet, with six infants around her, she
represents the Christian Church. The green hills appear beneath;
with the graves of the blessed, which are seen bursting with their
births of immortality; parents and children embrace and arise
together, and in exulting attitudes tell each other that the New
Jerusalem is ready to descend upon earth; they arise upon the air
rejoicing; others newly awaked from the graves, stand upon the
earth embracing and shouting to the Lamb, who cometh in the
clouds with power and great glory.

'The whole upper part of the design is a view of Heaven opened;
around the Throne of Christ, four living creatures filled with eyes,
attended by seven angels with seven vials of the wrath of God, and
above these seven Angels with the seven trumpets compose the
cloud, which by its rolling away displays the opening seats of the
Blessed, on the right and the left of which are seen the four-and-twenty
Elders seated on thrones to judge the dead.

'Behind the seat and Throne of Christ appears the Tabernacle
with its veil opened, the Candlestick on the right, the Table with
Show-bread on the left, and in the midst, the Cross in place of the
Ark, with the two Cherubim bowing over it.

'On the right hand of the Throne of Christ is Baptism, on his left
is the Lord's Supper--the two introducers into Eternal Life.
Women with infants approach the figure of an aged Apostle, which
represents Baptism; and on the left hand the Lord's Supper is
administered by Angels, from the hands of another aged Apostle;
these kneel on each side of the Throne, which is surrounded by
a glory: in the glory many infants appear, representing Eternal
Creation flowing from the Divine Humanity in Jesus; who opens
the Scroll of Judgment upon his knees before the living and the
dead.

'Such is the design which you, my dear Sir, have been the cause
of my producing, and which, but for you, might have slept till the
Last Judgment.

'WILLIAM BLAKE.

'_January_ 18, 1808.'


Blake and his wife were known to have lived so happily together,
that they might unquestionably have been registered at Dunmow.
'Their hopes and fears were to each other known,' and their days
and nights were passed in each other's company, for he always
painted, drew, engraved, and studied, in the same room where
they grilled, boiled, stewed, and slept; and so steadfastly attentive
was he to his beloved tasks, that for the space of two years he had
never once been out of his house; and his application was often so
incessant, that in the middle of the night, he would, after thinking
deeply upon a particular subject, leap from his bed and write for
two hours or more; and for many years he made a constant practice
of lighting the fire, and putting on the kettle for breakfast before
his Kate awoke.

During his last illness, which was occasioned by the gall mixing
with his blood, he was frequently bolstered-up in his bed to
complete his drawings, for his intended illustration of Dante;
an author so great a favorite with him, that though he agreed
with Fuseli and Flaxman, in thinking Carey's translation superior
to all others, yet, at the age of sixty-three years, he learned the
Italian language purposely to enjoy Dante in the highest possible
way. For this intended work, he produced seven engraved plates
of an imperial quarto size, and nearly one hundred finished drawings
of a size considerably larger; which will do equal justice to his
wonderful mind, and the liberal heart of their possessor, who
engaged him upon so delightful a task at a time when few persons
would venture to give him employment, and whose kindness softened,
for the remainder of his life, his lingering bodily sufferings, which
he was seen to support with the most Christian fortitude.

On the day of his death, August 12,[11] 1827, he composed and
uttered songs to his Maker so sweetly to the ear of his Catherine,
that when she stood to hear him, he, looking upon her most affectionately,
said, 'My beloved, they are not mine--no--they are not mine.'
He expired at six in the evening, with the most cheerful serenity.
Some short time before his death, Mrs. Blake asked him where he
should like to be buried, and whether he would have the Dissenting
Minister, or the Clergyman of the Church of England, to read
the service: his answers were, that as far as his own feelings
were concerned, they might bury him where she pleased, adding,
that as his father, mother, aunt, and brother were buried in
Bunhill Bow, perhaps it would be better to lie there, but as
to service, he should wish for that of the Church of England.

His hearse was followed by two mourning-coaches, attended by
private friends: Calvert, Richmond, Tatham, and his brother, promising
young artists, to whom he had given instructions in the Arts, were of
the number. Tatham, ill as he was, travelled ninety miles to attend the
funeral of one for whom, next to his own family, he held the highest
esteem. Blake died in his sixty-ninth year, in the back-room of the
first-floor of No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, and was buried in Bunhill
Fields, on the 17th of August, at the distance of about twenty-five feet
from the north wall, numbered eighty.

Limited as Blake was in his pecuniary circumstances, his beloved
Kate survives him clear of even a sixpenny debt; and in the fullest
belief that the remainder of her days will be rendered tolerable by the
sale of the few copies of her husband's works, which she will dispose
of at the original price of publication; in order to enable the collector
to add to the weight of his bookshelves, without being solicited to
purchase, out of compassion, those specimens of her husband's talents
which they ought to possess.


EXTRACT FROM 'A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY'


[1784].--This year Mr. Flaxman, who then lived in Wardour
Street, introduced me to one of his early patrons, the Rev. Henry
Mathew, of Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, which was built for him;
he was also afternoon preacher at Saint Martin's-in-the-Fields. At that
gentleman's house, in Rathbone Place, I became acquainted with
Mrs. Mathew and her son. At that lady's most agreeable conversaziones
I first met the late William Blake, the artist, to whom she and Mr.
Flaxman had been truly kind. There I have often heard him read
and sing several of his poems. He was listened to by the company with
profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original
and extraordinary merit.'[12]



[Footnote 1: The whole copy of this little work, entitled 'Poetical
Sketches, by W. B.,' containing seventy pages, octavo, bearing
the date of 1783, was given to Blake to sell to friends, or publish,
as he might think proper.]

[Footnote 2: A friend has favoured me with the following anecdotes,
which he received from Blake, respecting his courtship. He states
that 'Our Artist fell in love with a lively little girl, who allowed him
to say everything that was loving, but would not listen to his overtures
on the score of matrimony. He was lamenting this in the house of
a friend, when a generous-hearted lass declared that she pitied him
from her heart. "Do you pity me?" asked Blake. "Yes; I do, most
sincerely."--"Then,"  said he, "I love you for that."--"Well,"
said the honest girl, "and I love you." The consequence was, they
were married, and lived the happiest of lives.']

[Footnote 3: I copied the above from the book now in the possession of
Mrs. Blake.]

[Footnote 4: In 1809, Blake exhibited sixteen poetical and historical
inventions, in his brother's first-floor in Broad Street; eleven
pictures in fresco, professed to be painted according to the
ancient method, and seven drawings, of which an explanatory
catalogue was published, and is perhaps the most curious of its
kind ever written. At page 7, the description of his fresco
painting of Geoffrey Chaucer's Pilgrimage commences. This picture,
which is larger than the print, is now in the possession of Thomas
Butts, Esq., a gentleman friendly to Blake, and who is in possession
of a considerable number of his works.]

[Footnote 5: See the 'Artist,' by Prince Hoare, Esq., No. 13,
vol. I. p. 13.]

[Footnote 6: I must do Mr. Stothard the justice to declare, that the
very first time I saw him after he had read the announcement
of Blake's death, he spoke in the handsomest terms of his talents,
and informed me that Blake made a remarkably correct and fine
drawing of the head of Queen Philippa, from her monumental effigy
in Westminster Abbey, for Gough's Sepulchral Monuments, engraved
by Basire. The collectors of Stothard's numerous and elegant designs
will recollect the name of Blake as the engraver of several plates in
the Novelist's Magazine, the Poetical Magazine, and also others for
a work entitled the Wit's Magazine, from drawings produced by the
same artist. Trotter, the engraver, who received instructions from
Blake, and who was a pattern-draughtsman to the calico-printers,
introduced his friend Stothard to Blake, and their attachment for
each other coutinued most cordially to exist in the opinion of the
public, until they produced their rival pictures of Chaucer's Canterbury
Pilgrimage.]

[Footnote 7: This interesting little picture is painted in fresco. It is
now the property of John Varley, the artist, whose landscapes
will ever be esteemed as some of the finest productions in Art,
and who may fairly be considered as one of the founders of the
Society of Artists in Water-Colors; the annual exhibitions of which
continue to surpass those of the preceding seasons.]

[Footnote 8: Blake's talent is not to be seen in his engravings from the
designs of other artists, though he certainly honestly endeavored
to copy the beauties of Stothard, Flaxman, and those masters set
before him by the few publishers who employed him; but his own
engravings from his own mind are the productions which the man
of true feeling must ever admire, and the predictions of Fuseli and
Flaxman may hereafter be verified 'That a time will come when Blake's
finest works will be as much sought after and treasured up in the
portfolios of men of mind, as those of Michel Angelo are at
present.']

[Footnote 9: He was inspired with the splendid grandeur of this figure,
by the vision which he declared hovered over his head at the
top of his staircase; and he has been frequently heard to say,
that it made a more powerful impression upon his mind than all
he had ever been visited by. This subject was such a favorite with
him, that he always bestowed more time and enjoyed greater pleasure
when coloring the print, than anything he ever produced.

Mr. F. Tatham employed him to tint an impression of it, for
which I have heard he paid him the truly liberal sum of three
guineas and a half. I say liberal, though the specimen is worth
any price, because the sum was so considerably beyond what Blake
generally had been accustomed to receive as a remuneration for
his extraordinary talents. Upon this truly inestimable impression,
which I have now before me, Blake worked when bolstered-up in
his bed only a few days before he died; and my friend F. Tatham
has just informed me, that after Blake had frequently touched
upon it, and had as frequently held it at a distance, he threw it
from him, and with an air of exulting triumph exclaimed, 'There,
that will do! I cannot mend it.' However, this was not his last
production; for immediately after he had made the above declaration
to his beloved Kate, upon whom his eyes were steadfastly fixed,
he vociferated, 'Stay! keep as you are! _you_ have ever been
an _angel_ to me, I will draw you'; and he actually made
a most spirited fineness of her, though within so short a period
of his earthly termination.]

[Footnote 10: Loutherbourgh was also, in _his_ way, very ingenious in his
contrivances. To oblige his friend Garrick, he enriched a drama,
entitled '_The Christmas Tale_,' with scenery painted by himself,
and introduced such novelty and brilliancy of effect, as formed
a new era in that species of art. This he accomplished by means
of differently colored silks placed before the lamps at the front of
the stage, and by the lights behind the side scenes. The same
effects were used for distance and atmosphere. As for instance,
Harlequin in a fog was produced by tiffany hung between the
audience and himself. Mr. Seguire, the father of the Keeper of
the King's Pictures, and those of the National Gallery, purchased
of Mr. Loutherbourgh ten small designs for the scenery of Omiah,
for which scenes the manager paid him one thousand pounds. Mr.
Loutherbourgh never would leave any paper or designs at the
theatre, nor would he ever allow any one to see what he intended
to produce; as he secretly held small cards in his hand, which he
now and then referred to in order to assist him in his recollections
of his small drawings.]

[Footnote 11: Not the 13th, as has been stated by several editors who
have noticed his death.]

[Footnote 12: A time will come when the numerous, though now very
rare works of Blake (in consequence of his taking very few impressions
from the plates before they were rubbed out to enable him to use them
for other subjects), will be sought after with the most intense avidity.
He was considered by Stothard and Flaxman (and will be by those of
congenial minds, if we can reasonably expect such again) with their
highest admiration. These artists allowed him their utmost unqualified
praise, and were ever anxious to recommend him and his productions
to the patrons of the Arts; but, alas! they were not sufficiently
appreciated as to enable Blake, as every one could wish, to provide
an independence for his surviving partner, Kate, who adored his
memory.]



(VIII.) LIFE OF BLAKE
BY ALLAN CUNNINGHAM (1830)


[Allan Cunningham's Life of Blake occupies pp. 142-179 of the second
volume of his _Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors,
and Architects._ (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, MDCCCXXX.)
It is largely indebted to Smith, but contains a few anecdotes not found
elsewhere, and probably derived from Varley and Linnell. In a letter to
Linnell, printed in Mr. Story's Life, Cunningham says that 'much
valuable information' has been received from Varley, and asks
for more, adding, with characteristic impertinence: 'I know Blake's
character, for I knew the man. I shall make a _judicious_ use of
my materials, and be merciful where sympathy is needed.' He reproduces
the Phillips portrait of Blake, which had been engraved by Schiavonetti
for Blair's _Grave_, in a less showy and more lifelike engraving
by W. C. Edwards.]



Painting, like poetry, has followers, the body of whose genius
is light compared to the length of its wings, and who, rising above
the ordinary sympathies of our nature, are, like Napoleon, betrayed
by a star which no eye can see save their own. To this rare class
belonged William Blake.

He was the second son of James Blake and Catherine his wife,
and born on the 28th of November, 1757, in 28 Broad Street,
Carnaby Market, London. His father, a respectable hosier, caused
him to be educated for his own business, but the love of art came
early upon the boy; he neglected the figures of arithmetic for those of
Raphael and Reynolds; and his worthy parents often wondered how
a child of theirs should have conceived a love for such unsubstantial
vanities. The boy, it seems, was privately encouraged by his mother.
The love of designing and sketching grew upon him, and he desired
anxiously to be an artist. His father began to be pleased with the notice
which his son obtained--and to fancy that a painter's study
might after all be a fitter place than a hosier's shop for one who drew
designs on the backs of all the shop bills, and made sketches on the
counter. He consulted an eminent artist, who asked so large a sum
for instruction, that the prudent shopkeeper hesitated, and young
Blake declared he would prefer being an engraver--a profession
which would bring bread at least, and through which he would be
connected with painting. It was indeed time to dispose of him.
In addition to his attachment to art, he had displayed poetic
symptoms--scraps of paper and the blank leaves of books were
found covered with groups and stanzas. When his father saw sketches
at the top of the sheet and verses at the bottom, he took him away
to Basire, the engraver, in Green Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and
bound him apprentice for seven years. He was then fourteen years old.

It is told of Blake that at ten years of age he became an artist,
and at twelve a poet. Of his boyish pencillings I can find no
traces--but of his early intercourse with the Muse the proof
lies before me in seventy pages of verse, written, he says, between
his twelfth and his twentieth year, and published, by the advice of
friends, when he was thirty. There are songs, ballads, and a dramatic
poem; rude sometimes and melodious, but full of fine thought and
deep and peculiar feeling. To those who love poetry for the music
of its bells, these seventy pages will sound harsh and dissonant; but
by others they will be more kindly looked upon. John Flaxman, a judge
in all things of a poetic nature, was so touched with many passages,
that he not only counseled their publication, but joined with a gentleman
of the name of Matthews in the expense, and presented the printed
sheets to the artist to dispose of for his own advantage. One of these
productions is an address to the Muses--a common theme, but
sung in no common manner.


'Whether on Ida's shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the east,
The chambers of the sun, that now
From ancient melody have ceas'd;

Whether in heaven ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,
Beneath the bosom of the sea,
Wandering in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine! forsaking poesie;

How have ye left the ancient love,
That Bards of old enjoyed in you;--
The languid strings now scarcely move,
The sound is forced--the notes are few.'


The little poem called 'The Tiger' has been admired for the
force and vigour of its thoughts by poets of high name. Many
could weave smoother lines--few could stamp such living images.


'Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Framed thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burned the fervour of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire--
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
When thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand formed thy dread feet?

What the hammer! what the chain!
Formed thy strength and forged thy brain?
What the anvil! What dread grasp
Dared thy deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spheres,
And sprinkled heaven with shining tears,
Did he smile, his work to see?
Did he who made the lamb make thee?'


In the dramatic poem of King Edward the Third there are many
nervous lines, and even whole passages of high merit. The structure
of the verse is often defective, and the arrangement inharmonious;
but before the ear is thoroughly offended, it is soothed by some touch
of deep melody and poetic thought. The princes and earls of England
are conferring together on the eve of the battle of Cressy--the
Black Prince takes Chandos aside, and says--


'Now we're alone, John Chandos, I'll unburthen
And breathe my hopes into the burning air--
Where thousand Deaths are posting up and down,
Commissioned to this fatal field of Cressy:
Methinks I see them arm my gallant soldiers,

And gird the sword upon each thigh, and fit
The shining helm, and string each stubborn bow,
And dancing to the neighing of the steeds;--Methinks
the shout begins--the battle burns;--Methinks
I see them perch on English crests,
And breathe the wild flame of fierce war upon
The thronged enemy.'


In the same high poetic spirit Sir Walter Manny converses
with a genuine old English warrior, Sir Thomas Dagworth.


'O, Dagworth!--France is sick!--the very sky,
Though sunshine light, it seems to me as pale
As is the fainting man on his death-bed,
Whose face is shown by light of one weak taper--
It makes me sad and sick unto the heart;
Thousands must fall to-day.'


Sir Thomas answers.

'Thousands of souls must leave this prison-house
To be exalted to those heavenly fields
Where songs of triumph, psalms of victory,
Where peace, and joy, and love, and calm content
Sit singing on the azure clouds, and strew
The flowers of heaven upon the banquet table.
Bind ardent hope upon your feet, like shoes,
And put the robe of preparation on.
The table, it is spread in shining heaven.
Let those who fight, fight in good steadfastness;
And those who fall shall rise in victory.'


I might transcribe from these modest and unnoticed pages many
such passages. It would be unfair not to mention that the same
volume contains some wild and incoherent prose, in which we may
trace more than the dawning of those strange, mystical, and mysterious
fancies on which he subsequently misemployed his pencil. There
is much that is weak, and something that is strong, and a great deal
that is wild and mad, and all so strangely mingled, that no meaning
can be assigned to it; it seems like a lamentation over the disasters
which came on England during the reign of King John.

Though Blake lost himself a little in the enchanted region of
song, he seems not to have neglected to make himself master of
the graver, or to have forgotten his love of designs and sketches.
He was a dutiful servant to Basire, and he studied occasionally under
Flaxman and Fuseli; but it was his chief delight to retire to the solitude
of his chamber, and there make drawings, and illustrate these with
verses, to be hung up together in his mother's chamber. He was
always at work; he called amusement idleness, sight-seeing vanity,
and money-making the ruin of all high aspirations. 'Were I to love
money,' he said, 'I should lose all power of thought! desire of gain
deadens the genius of man. I might roll in wealth and ride in a golden
chariot, were I to listen to the voice of parsimony. My business is
not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes, expressing godlike
sentiments.' The day was given to the graver, by which he earned
enough to maintain himself respectably; and he bestowed his evenings
upon painting and poetry, and intertwined these so closely in his
compositions, that they cannot well be separated.

When he was six-and-twenty years old, he married Katharine
Boutcher, a young woman of humble connections--the dark-eyed
Kate of several of his lyric poems. She lived near his father's house
and was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, the brightness
of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his
own notions of sylphs and naiads. As he was an original in all things,
it would have been out of character to fall in love like an ordinary
mortal; he was describing one evening in company the pains he
had suffered from some capricious lady or another, when Katharine
Boutcher said, 'I pity you from my heart.' 'Do you pity me?' said Blake,
'then I love you for that.' 'And I love you,' said the frank-hearted lass,
and so the courtship began. He tried how well she looked in a drawing,
then how her charms became verse; and finding moreover that she
had good domestic qualities, he married her. They lived together long
and happily.

She seemed to have been created on purpose for Blake:--she
believed him to be the finest genius on earth; she believed in his
verse--she believed in his designs; and to the wildest flights
of his imagination she bowed the knee, and was a worshipper. She set
his house in good order, prepared his frugal meal, learned to think
as he thought, and, indulging him in his harmless absurdities,
became, as it were, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh.
She learned--what a young and handsome woman is seldom apt
to learn--to despise gaudy dresses, costly meals, pleasant
company, and agreeable invitations--she found out the way
of being happy at home, living on the simplest of food, and contented
in the homeliest of clothing. It was no ordinary mind which could
do all this; and she whom Blake emphatically called his beloved,'
was no ordinary woman. She wrought off in the press the impressions
of his plates--she colored them with a light and neat hand--made
drawings much in the spirit of her husband's compositions, and almost
rivaled him in all things save in the power which he possessed of
seeing visions of any individual living or dead, whenever he chose
to see them.

His marriage, I have heard, was not agreeable to his father; and
he then left his roof and resided with his wife in Green Street, Leicester
Fields. He returned to Broad Street, on the death of his father, a
devout man, and an honest shopkeeper, of fifty years' standing, took
a first-floor and a shop, and in company with one Parker, who had
been his fellow-apprentice, commenced print-seller. His wife attended
to the business, and Blake continued to engrave, and took Robert, his
favorite brother, for a pupil. This speculation did not succeed--his
brother too sickened and died; he had a dispute with Parker--the
shop was extinguished, and he removed to 28 Poland Street. Here he
commenced that series of works which give him a right to be numbered
among the men of genius of his country. In sketching designs, engraving
plates, writing songs, and composing music, he employed his time, with
his wife sitting at his side, encouraging him in all his undertakings. As
he drew the figure he meditated the song which was to accompany it,
and the music to which the verse was to be sung, was the offspring
too of the same moment. Of his music there are no specimens--he
wanted the art of noting it down--if it equalled many of his
drawings, and some of his songs, we have lost melodies of real value.

The first fruits were the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience,' a
work original and natural, and of high merit, both in poetry and in
painting. It consists of some sixty-five or seventy scenes, presenting
images of youth and manhood--of domestic sadness, and fireside
joy--of the gaiety and innocence, and happiness of childhood.
Every scene has its poetical accompaniment, curiously interwoven
with the group or the landscape, and forming, from the beauty of the
color and the prettiness of the pencilling, a very fair picture of itself.
Those designs are in general highly poetical; more allied, however, to
heaven than to earth,--a kind of spiritual abstractions, and
indicating a better world and fuller happiness than mortals enjoy.
The picture of Innocence is introduced with the following sweet
verses.


'Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
And he laughing said to me--

Pipe a song about a lamb;
So I piped with merry cheer.
Piper, pipe that song again--
So I piped--he wept to hear.

Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,
Sing thy songs of happy cheer--
So I sung the same again,
While he wept with joy to hear.

Piper, sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read--
So he vanished from my sight:
And I plucked a hollow reed,

And I made a rural pen,
And I stained the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs,
Every child may joy to hear.'


In a higher and better spirit he wrought with his pencil. But
then he imagined himself under spiritual influences; he saw
the forms and listened to the voices of the worthies of other
days; the past and the future were before him, and he heard,
in imagination, even that awful voice which called on Adam amongst
the trees of the garden. In this kind of dreaming abstraction, he
lived much of his life; all his works are stamped with it; and though
they owe much of their mysticism and obscurity to the circumstance,
there can be no doubt that they also owe to it much of their singular
loveliness and beauty. It was wonderful that he could thus, month
after month, and year after year, lay down his graver after it had won
him his daily wages, and retire from the battle for bread, to disport his
fancy amid scenes of more than earthly splendor, and creatures
pure as unfalled dew.

In this lay the weakness and the strength of Blake, and those
who desire to feel the character of his compositions, must be
familiar with his history and the peculiarities of his mind. He was
by nature a poet, a dreamer, and an enthusiast. The eminence
which it had been the first ambition of his youth to climb, was
visible before him, and he saw on its ascent or on its summit
those who had started earlier in the race of fame. He felt conscious
of his own merit, but w as not aware of the thousand obstacles
which were ready to interpose.' He thought that he had but to
sing songs and draw designs, and become great and famous.
The crosses which genius is heir to had been wholly unforeseen--and
they befell him early; he wanted the skill of hand, and fine tact
of fancy and taste, to impress upon the offspring of his thoughts
that popular shape, which gives such productions immediate circulation.
His works were looked coldly on by the world, and were only
esteemed by men of poetic minds, or those who were fond of
things out of the common way. He earned a little fame, but no
money by these speculations, and had to depend for bread on
the labours of the graver.

All this neither crushed his spirit, nor induced him to work
more in the way of the world; but it had a visible influence upon
his mind. He became more seriously thoughtful, avoided the company
of men, and lived in the manner of a hermit, in that vast wilderness,
London. Necessity made him frugal, and honesty and independence
prescribed plain clothes, homely fare, and a cheap habitation. He was
thus compelled more than ever to retire to worlds of his own creating,
and seek solace in visions of paradise for the joys which the earth
denied him. By frequent indulgence in these imaginings, he gradually
began to believe in the reality of what dreaming fancy painted--the
pictured forms which swarmed before his eyes, assumed, in his
apprehension, the stability of positive revelations, and he mistook
the vivid figures, which his professional imagination shaped, for the
poets, and heroes, and princes of old. Amongst his friends, he at
length ventured to intimate that the designs on which he was
engaged were not from his own mind, but copied from grand works
revealed to him in visions; and those who believed that, would
readily lend an ear to the assurance that he was commanded to
execute his performances by a celestial tongue!

Of these imaginary visitations he made good use, when he invented
his truly original and beautiful mode of engraving and tinting his
plates. He had made the sixty-five designs of his Days of Innocence,
and was meditating, he said, on the best means of multiplying their
resemblance in form and in hue; he felt sorely perplexed. At last
he was made aware that the spirit of his favorite brother Robert was
in the room, and to this celestial visitor he applied for counsel.
The spirit advised him at once: 'write,' he said, 'the poetry, and
draw the designs upon the copper with a certain liquid (which
he named, and which Blake ever kept a secret); then cut the
plain parts of the plate down with aqua-fortis, and this will give
the whole, both poetry and figures, in the manner of a stereotype.'
The plan recommended by this gracious spirit was adopted; the
plates were engraved, and the work printed off. The artist then
added a peculiar beauty of his own. He tinted both the figures
and the verse with a variety of colors, amongst which, while
yellow prevails, the whole has a rich and lustrous beauty, to
which I know little that can be compared. The size of these
prints is four inches and a half high by three inches wide. The
original genius of Blake was always confined, through poverty,
to small dimensions. Sixty-five plates of copper were an object
to him who had little money. The Gates of Paradise, a work of
sixteen designs, and those exceedingly small, was his next undertaking.
The meaning of the artist is not a little obscure; it seems to
have been his object to represent the innocence, the happiness,
and the upward aspirations of man. They bespeak one intimately
acquainted with the looks and the feelings of children. Over them
there is shed a kind of mysterious halo which raises feelings of
devotion. The Songs of Innocence, and the Gates of Paradise,
became popular among the collectors of prints. To the sketch
book and the cabinet the works of Blake are unfortunately confined.

If there be mystery in the meaning of the Gates of Paradise, his
succeeding performance, by name Urizen, has the merit or the
fault of surpassing all human comprehension. The spirit which
dictated this strange work was undoubtedly a dark one; nor does
the strange kind of prose which is intermingled with the figures
serve to enlighten us. There are in all twenty-seven designs
representing beings human, demoniac, and divine, in situations
of pain and sorrow and suffering. One character--evidently
an evil spirit--appears in most of the plates; the horrors
of hell, and the terrors of darkness and divine wrath, seem his
sole portion. He swims in gulps of fire--descends in cataracts
of flame--holds combats with scaly serpents, or writhes in
anguish without any visible cause. One of his exploits is to chase
a female soul through 'a narrow gate and hurl her headlong down
into a darksome pit. The wild verses which are scattered here and
there, talk of the sons and the daughters of Urizen. He seems to
have extracted these twenty-seven scenes out of many visions--what
he meant by them even his wife declared she could not tell, though
she was sure they had a meaning and a fine one. Something like
the fall of Lucifer and the creation of Man is dimly visible in this
extravagant work; it is not a little fearful to look upon; a powerful,
dark, terrible though undefined and indescribable impression is
left on the mind--and it is in no haste to be gone. The size
of the designs is four inches by six; they bear date, 'Lambeth,
1794.' He had left Poland Street and was residing in Hercules
Buildings.

The name of Blake began now to be known a little, and Edwards,
the bookseller, employed him to illustrate Young's Night Thoughts.
The reward in money was small, but the temptation in fame was
great: the work was performed something in the manner of old
books with illuminated margins. Along the ample margins which
the poetry left on the page the artist sketched his fanciful creations;
contracting or expanding them according to the space. Some of
those designs were in keeping with the poems, but there were
others which alarmed fastidious people: the serious and the
pious were not prepared to admire shapes trembling in nudity
round the verses of a grave divine. In the exuberance of Young
there are many fine figures; but they are figures of speech only, on
which art should waste none of its skill. This work was so much,
in many parts, to the satisfaction of Flaxman, that he introduced
Blake to Hayley the poet, who, in 1800, persuaded him to remove
to Felpham in Sussex, to make engravings for the Life of Cowper.
To that place he accordingly went with his wife and sister, and was
welcomed by Hayley with much affection. Of his journey and his
feelings he gives the following account to Flaxman, whom he
usually addressed thus, 'Dear Sculptor of Eternity.'

'We are arrived safe at our cottage, which is more beautiful
than I thought it, and more convenient. It is a perfect model for
cottages, and I think for palaces of magnificence, only enlarging
and not altering its proportions, and adding ornaments and not
principals. Nothing can be more grand than its simplicity and
usefulness. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more
spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden,
gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapors; voices of celestial
inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly
seen, and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and
sister are both well, and are courting Neptune for an embrace.'

Thus far had he written in the language and feelings of a
person of upper air; though some of the expressions are tinctured
with the peculiar enthusiasm of the man, they might find shelter
under the licence of figurative speech, and pass muster as the
poetic language of new-found happiness. Blake thus continues:--

'And now begins a new life, because another covering of earth
is shaken off. I am more famed in heaven for my works than I
could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled
with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages
of eternity before my mortal life, and those works are the delight
and study of archangels. Why then should I be anxious about the
riches or fame of mortality? You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime
archangel, my friend and companion from eternity. Farewell, my
dear friend, remember me and my wife in love and friendship to Mrs.
Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to entertain beneath our thatched
roof of russet gold.'

This letter, written in the year 1800, gives the true twofold
image of the author's mind. During the day he was a man of sagacity
and sense, who handled his graver wisely, and conversed in a
wholesome and pleasant manner; in the evening, when he had done
his prescribed task, he gave a loose to his imagination. While
employed on those engravings which accompany the works of Cowper,
he saw such company as the country where he resided afforded, and
talked with Hayley about poetry with a feeling to which the author
of the Triumphs of Temper was an utter stranger; but at the close
of day away went Blake to the seashore to indulge in his own thoughts and:


'High converse with the dead to hold.'


Here he forgot the present moment and lived in the past; he
conceived, verily, that he had lived in other days, and had formed
friendships with Homer and Moses; with Pindar and Virgil; with
Dante and Milton. These great men, he asserted, appeared to him
in visions, and even entered into conversation. Milton, in a moment
of confidence, entrusted him with a whole poem of his, which the
world had never seen; but unfortunately the communication was oral,
and the poetry seemed to have lost much of its brightness in Blake's
recitation. When asked about the looks of those visions, he answered,
'They are all majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the
common height of men.' It was evident that the solitude of the country
gave him a larger swing in imaginary matters. His wife often accompanied
him to these strange interviews; she saw nothing and heard as
little, but she was certain that her husband both heard and saw.

Blake's mind at all times resembled that first page in the magician's
book of gramoury, which made:


'The cobweb on the dungeon wall,
Seem tapestry in lordly hall.'


His mind could convert the most ordinary occurrence into something
mystical and supernatural. He often saw less majestic shapes than
those of the poets of old. 'Did you ever see a fairy's funeral,
madam?' he once said to a lady, who happened to sit by him in
company. 'Never, sir!' was the answer. 'I have,' said Blake, 'but not
before last night. I was walking alone in my garden, there was
great stillness among the branches and flowers and more than
common sweetness in the air; I heard a low and pleasant sound,
and I knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a
flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of
the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a
body laid out on a rose leaf, which they buried with songs, and
then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.' It would, perhaps,
have been better for his fame had he connected it more with the
superstitious beliefs of his country--amongst the elves
and fairies his fancy might have wandered at will--their
popular character would perhaps have kept him within the bounds
of traditionary belief, and the sea of his imagination might have
had a shore.

After a residence of three years in his cottage at Felpham, he
removed to 17 South Molton Street, London, where he lived seventeen
years. He came back to town with a fancy not a little exalted by the
solitude of the country, and in this mood designed and engraved an
extensive and strange work which he entitled '_Jerusalem._' A
production so exclusively  wild was not allowed to make its appearance
in an ordinary way: he thus announced it. 'After my three years'
slumber on the banks of the ocean, I again display my giant forms
to the public.' Of those designs there are no less than an hundred;
what their meaning is the artist has left unexplained. It seems of a
religious, political, and spiritual kind, and wanders from hell to
heaven and from heaven to earth; now glancing into the distractions
of our own days, and then making a transition to the antediluvians.
The crowning defect is obscurity; meaning seems now and then
about to dawn; you turn plate after plate and read motto after
motto, in the hope of escaping from darkness into light. But the
first might as well be looked at last; the whole seems a riddle
which no ingenuity can solve. Yet, if the work be looked at for
form and effect rather than for meaning, many figures may be
pronounced worthy of Michael Angelo. There is wonderful freedom of
attitude and position; men, spirits, gods, and angels, move with
an ease which makes one lament that we know not wherefore they
are put in motion. Well might Hayley call him his 'gentle visionary
Blake.' He considered the Jerusalem to be his greatest work, and
for a set of the tinted engravings he charged twenty-five guineas.
Few joined the artist in his admiration. The Jerusalem, with all
its giant forms, failed to force its way into circulation.

His next work was the Illustrations of Blair's Grave, which
came to the world with the following commendation by Fuseli:
'The author of the moral series before us has endeavored to
awaken sensibility by touching our sympathies with nearer, less
ambiguous and less ludicrous imagery, than what mythology, Gothic
superstition, or symbols as far fetched as inadequate could supply.
His avocation has been chiefly employed to spread a familiar and
domestic atmosphere round the most important of all subjects,
to connect the visible and the invisible world without provoking
probability, and to lead the eye from the milder light of time to
the radiations of eternity.' For these twelve Inventions,' as he
called them, Blake received twenty guineas from Cromeck, the
engraver--a man of skill in art and taste in literature. The
price was little, but nevertheless it was more than what he usually
received for such productions; he also undertook to engrave them.
But Blake's mode of engraving was as peculiar as his style of
designing; it had little of that grace of execution about it, which
attracts customers, and the Inventions, after an experiment or two,
were placed under the fashionable graver of Louis Schiavonetti.
Blake was deeply incensed--he complained that he was deprived
of the profit of engraving his own designs, and, with even less
justice, that Schiavonetti was unfit for the task.

Some of these twelve 'Inventions' are natural and poetic, others
exhibit laborious attempts at the terrific and the sublime. The old
Man at Death's Door is one of the best--in the Last Day
there are fine groups and admirable single figures--the Wise
Ones of the Earth pleading before the inexorable Throne, and
the Descent of the Condemned, are creations of a high order.
The Death of the Strong Wicked Man is fearful and extravagant,
and the flames in which the soul departs from the body have no
warrant in the poem or in belief. The Descent of Christ into the
Grave is formal and tame, and the hoary old Soul in the Death of
the Good Man, travelling heavenward between two orderly Angels,
required little outlay of fancy. The frontispiece--a naked
Angel descending headlong and rousing the Dead with the Sound
of the last Trumpet--alarmed the devout people of the north,
and made maids and matrons retire behind their fans.

If the tranquillity of Blake's life was a little disturbed by the
dispute about the twelve Inventions,' it was completely shaken
by the controversy which now arose between him and Cromeck
respecting his Canterbury Pilgrimage. That two artists at one and
the same time should choose the same subject for the pencil,
seems scarcely credible--especially  when such subject was
not of a temporary interest. The coincidence here was so close,
that Blake accused Stothard of obtaining knowledge of his design
through Cromeck, while Stothard with equal warmth asserted that
Blake had commenced his picture in rivalry of himself. Blake declared
that Cromeck had actually commissioned him to paint the Pilgrimage
before Stothard thought of his; to which Cromeck replied, that the
order had been given in a vision, for he never gave it. Stothard, a
man as little likely to be led aside from truth by love of gain as by
visions, added to Cromeck's denial the startling testimony that Blake
visited him during the early progress of his picture, and expressed
his approbation of it, in such terms, that he proposed to introduce
Blake's portrait in the procession, as a mark of esteem. It is probable
that Blake obeyed some imaginary revelation in this matter, and
mistook it for the order of an earthly employer; but whether
commissioned by a vision or by mortal lips, his Canterbury Pilgrimage
made its appearance in an exhibition of his principal works in the house
of his brother, in Broad Street, during the summer of 1809.

Of original designs, this singular exhibition contained sixteen--they
were announced as chiefly 'of a spiritual and political nature'--but
then the spiritual works and political feelings of Blake were unlike
those of any other man. One piece represented 'The Spiritual Form
of Nelson guiding Leviathan.' Another, 'The Spiritual Form of
Seth guiding Behemoth.' This, probably, confounded both divines
and politicians; there is no doubt that plain men went wondering
away. The chief attraction was the Canterbury Pilgrimage, not
indeed from its excellence, but from the circumstance of its origin,
which was well known about town, and pointedly alluded to in
the catalogue. The picture is a failure. Blake was too great a
visionary for dealing with such literal wantons as the Wife of Bath
and her jolly companions. The natural flesh and blood of Chaucer
prevailed against him. He gives grossness of body for grossness
of mind,--tries to be merry and wicked--and in vain.

Those who missed instruction in his pictures, found entertainment
in his catalogue, a wild performance, overflowing with the oddities
and dreams of the author--which may be considered as a kind
of public declaration of his faith concerning art and artists. His first
anxiety is about his colors. 'Colouring,' says this new lecturer on the
_Chiaroscuro_, 'does not depend on where the colours are
put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on
form or outline. Where that is wrong the coloring never can be right,
and it is always wrong in Titian and Corregio, Rubens and Rembrandt;
till we get rid of them we shall never equal Raphael and Albert Dürer,
Michael Angelo and Julio Romano. Clearness and precision have
been my chief objects in painting these pictures--clear colors
and firm determinate lineaments, unbroken by shadows--which
ought to display and not hide form, as in the practice of the later
schools of Italy and Flanders. The picture of the Spiritual Form of Pitt
is a proof of the power of colors unsullied with oil or with any cloggy
vehicle. Oil has been falsely supposed to give strength to colors, but
a little consideration must show the fallacy of this opinion. Oil will not
drink or absorb color enough to stand the test of any little time and
of the air. Let the works of artists since Rubens' time witness to the
villainy of those who first brought oil-painting into general opinion
and practice, since which we have never had a picture painted that
would show itself by the side of an earlier composition. This is an awful
thing to say to oil-painters; they may call it madness, but it is true.
All the genuine old little pictures are in fresco and not in oil.'

Having settled the true principles and proper materials of color,
he proceeds to open up the mystery of his own productions. Those
who failed to comprehend the pictures on looking at them, had
only to turn to the following account of the Pitt and the Nelson.
'These two pictures,' he says, 'are compositions of a mythological
cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo, and Egyptian
antiquity, which are still preserved in rude monuments, being copies
from some stupendous originals now lost or perhaps buried to some
happier age. The artist having been taken, in vision, to the ancient
republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of Asia, has seen those
wonderful originals, called in the sacred Scriptures the cherubim,
which were painted and sculptured on the walls of temples, towns,
cities, palaces, and erected in the highly-cultivated states of Egypt,
Moab, and Edom, among the rivers of Paradise, being originals
from which the Greeks and Hetrurians copied Hercules, Venus,
Apollo, and all the groundworks of ancient art. They were executed
in a very superior style to those justly admired copies, being with their
accompaniments terrific and grand in the highest degree. The
artist has endeavored to emulate the grandeur of those seen in
his vision, and to apply it to modern times on a smaller scale.
The Greek Muses are daughters of Memory, and not of Inspiration
or Imagination, and therefore not authors of such sublime conceptions;
some of these wonderful originals were one hundred feet in height;
some were painted as pictures, some were carved as bass-relieves,
and some as groups of statues, all containing mythological and
recondite meaning. The artist wishes it was now the fashion to
make such monuments, and then he should not doubt of having
a national commission to execute those pictures of Nelson and
Pitt on a scale suitable to the grandeur of the nation who is the
parent of his heroes, in highly finished fresco, where the colors
would be as permanent as precious stones.'

The man who could not only write down, but deliberately correct
the printer's sheets which recorded,  matter so utterly wild and
mad, was at the same time perfectly sensible to the exquisite
nature of Chaucer's delineations, and felt rightly what sort of skill
his inimitable Pilgrims required at the hand of an artist. He who
saw visions in Coele-Syria and statues an hundred feet high,
wrote thus concerning Chaucer: 'The characters of his pilgrims
are the characters which compose all ages and nations: as one
age falls another rises, different to mortal sight, but to immortals
only the same: for we see the same characters repeated again and
again, in animals, in vegetables, and in men; nothing new occurs
in identical existence. Accident ever varies; substance can never
suffer change nor decay. Of Chaucer's characters, some of the
names or titles are altered by time, but the characters themselves
for ever remain unaltered, and consequently they are the physiognomies
of universal human life, beyond which nature never steps. Names
alter--things never alter; I have known multitudes of those
who would have been monks in the age of monkery, who in this
deistical age are deists. As Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer
numbered the classes of men.'

His own notions and much of his peculiar practice in art are
scattered at random over the pages of this curious production. His
love of a distinct outline made him use close and clinging dresses;
they are frequently very graceful--at other times they are
constrained, and deform the figures which they so scantily cover.
'The great and golden rule of art (says he) is this:--that the
more distinct and sharp and wiry the bounding line, the more
perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp this external
line, the greater is the evidence of weak imitative plagiarism and
bungling: Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by this line.
How do we distinguish the oak from the beech; the horse from the
ox, but by the bounding outline? How do we distinguish one face
or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its
infinite inflexions and movements? Leave out this line and you leave
out life itself: all is chaos again, and the line of the Almighty must
be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.'

These abominations--concealed outline and tricks of colour--now
bring on one of those visionary fits to which Blake was so liable,
and he narrates with the most amusing wildness sundry revelations
made to him concerning them. He informs us that certain painters
were _demons_--let loose on earth to confound the 'sharp wiry
outline,' and fill men's minds with fears and perturbations.
He signifies that he himself was for some time a miserable instrument
in the hands of Chiaro-Scuro demons, who employed him in making
'experiment pictures in oil.' 'These pictures,' says he, 'were
the result of temptations and perturbations laboring to destroy
imaginative power by means of that infernal machine called Chiaro-Scuro,
in the hands of Venetian and Flemish demons, who hate the Roman
and Venetian schools. They cause that everything in art shall
become a machine; they cause that the execution shall be all
blocked up with brown shadows; they put the artist in fear and
doubt of his own original conception. The spirit of Titian was
particularly active in raising doubts concerning the possibility of
executing without a model. Rubens is a most outrageous demon,
and by infusing the remembrances of his pictures, and style of
execution, hinders all power of individual thought. Corregio is a
soft and effeminate, consequently a most cruel demon, whose
whole delight is to cause endless labour to whoever suffers him
to enter his mind.' When all this is translated into the language
of sublunary life, it only means that Blake was haunted with the
excellences of other men's works, and, finding himself unequal
to the task of rivaling the soft and glowing colors and singular
effects of light and shade of certain great masters, betook himself
to the study of others not less eminent, who happened to have
laid out their strength in outline.

To describe the conversations which Blake held in prose with
demons and in verse with angels, would fill volumes, and an
ordinary gallery could not contain all the heads which he drew
of his visionary visitants. That all this was real, he himself most
sincerely believed; nay, so infectious was his enthusiasm, that
some acute and sensible persons who heard him expatiate, shook
their heads, and hinted that he was an extraordinary man, and
that there might be something in the matter. One of his brethren,
an artist of some note, employed him frequently in drawing the
portraits of those who appeared to him in visions. The most
propitious time for those 'angel-visits' was from nine at night
till five in the morning; and so docile were his spiritual sitters,
that they appeared at the wish of his friends. Sometimes, however,
the shape which he desired-to draw was long in appearing, and
he sat with his pencil and paper ready and his eyes idly roaming
in vacancy; all at once the vision came upon him, and he began
to work like one possess.

He was requested to draw the likeness of Sir. William Wallace--the
eye of Blake sparkled, for he admired heroes. 'William Wallace!'
he exclaimed, 'I see him now--there, there, how noble he
looks--reach me my things!' Having drawn for some time,
with the same care of hand and steadiness of eye, as if a living
sitter had been before him, Blake stopped suddenly, and said, 'I
cannot finish him--Edward the First has stept in between
him and me.' 'That's lucky,' said his friend, 'for I want the portrait
of Edward too.' Blake took another sheet of paper, and sketched
the features of Plantagenet; upon which his majesty politely vanished,
and the artist finished the head of Wallace. 'And pray, sir,' said a
gentleman, who heard Blake's friend tell his story--'was
Sir William Wallace an heroic-looking man? And what sort of personage
was Edward?' The answer was: 'There they are, sir, both framed
and hanging on the wall behind you, judge for yourself.' 'I looked
(says my informant) and saw two warlike heads of the size of
common life. That of Wallace was noble and heroic, that of Edward
stern and bloody. The first had the front of a god, the latter the
aspect of a demon.'

The friend who obliged me with these anecdotes, on observing
the interest which I took in the subject, said, 'I know much about
Blake--I was his companion for nine years. I have sat beside
him from ten at night till 'three in the morning, sometimes slumbering
and sometimes waking, but Blake never slept; he sat with a pencil
and paper drawing portraits of those whom I most desired to see.
I will show you, sir, some of these works.' He took out a large book
filled with drawings, opened it, and continued, 'Observe the poetic
fervor of that face--it is Pindar as he stood a conqueror in
the Olympic games. And this lovely creature is Corinna, who
conquered in poetry in the same place. That lady is Lais, the
courtesan--with the impudence which is part of her profession,
she stept in between Blake and Corinna, and he was obliged to paint
her to get her away. There! that is a face of a different stamp--can
you conjecture who he is?' 'Some scoundrel, I should think, sir.'
'There now--that is a strong proof of the accuracy of Blake--he
is a scoundrel indeed! The very individual task-master whom Moses
slew in Egypt. And who is this now--only imagine who this is?'
'Other than a good one, I doubt, sir.' 'You are right, it is the
Devil--he resembles, and this is remarkable, two men who
shall be nameless; one is a great lawyer, and the other--I
wish I durst name him--is a suborner of false witnesses. This
other head now?--this speaks for itself--it is the head
of Herod; how like an eminent officer in the army!'

He closed the book, and taking out a small panel from a private
drawer, said, 'This is the last which I shall show you; but it is the
greatest curiosity of all. Only look at the splendor of the coloring
and the original character of the thing!' 'I see,' said I, 'a naked
figure with a strong body and a short neck--with burning
eyes which long for moisture, and a face worthy of a murderer, holding
a bloody cup in its clawed hands, out of which it seems eager to
drink. I never saw any shape so strange, nor did I ever see any coloring
so curiously splendid--a kind of glistening green and dusky
gold, beautifully varnished. But what in the world is it?' 'It is a ghost,
sir--the ghost of a flea--a spiritualisation of the thing!'
'He saw this in a vision then,' I said. 'I'll tell you all about it, sir.
I called on him one evening, and found Blake more than usually
excited. He told me he had seen a wonderful thing--the ghost
of a flea! And did you make a drawing of him? I inquired. No, indeed,
said he, I wish I had, but I shall, if he appears again! He
looked earnestly into a corner of the room, and then said, here
he is--reach  me my things--I shall keep my eye on him. There he
comes! his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his
hand to hold blood and covered with a scaly skin of gold and
green;--as he described him so he drew him.'

These stories are scarcely credible, yet there can be no doubt
of their accuracy. Another friend, on whose veracity I have the
fullest dependence, called one evening on Blake, and found him
sitting with a pencil and a panel, drawing a portrait with all the
seeming anxiety of a man who is conscious that he has got a
fastidious sitter; he looked and drew, and drew and looked, yet
no living soul was visible. 'Disturb me not,' said he, in a whisper,
'I have one sitting to me.' 'Sitting to you!' exclaimed his astonished
visitor, 'where is he, and what is he?--I see no one.' 'But I
see him, sir,' answered Blake haughtily, 'there he is, his name is
Lot--you may read of him in the Scripture. _He_ is sitting for
his portrait.'

Had he always thought so idly, and wrought on such visionary
matters, this memoir would have been the story of a madman,
instead of the life of a man of genius, some of whose works are
worthy of any age or nation. Even while he was indulging in these
laughable fancies, and seeing visions at the request of his friends,
he conceived, and drew, and engraved, one of the noblest of all
his productions--the Inventions for the Book of Job. He
accomplished this series in a small room, which served him for
kitchen, bedchamber, and study, where he had no other companion
but his faithful Katherine, and no larger income than some seventeen
or eighteen shillings a week. Of these Inventions, as the artist loved
to call them, there are twenty-one, representing the Man of Uz
sustaining his dignity amidst the inflictions of Satan, the reproaches
of his friends, and the insults of his wife. It was in such things that
Blake shone; the Scripture overawed his imagination, and he was
too devout to attempt aught beyond a literal embodying of the
majestic scene. He goes step by step with the narrative; always
simple, and often sublime--never wandering from the subject,
nor overlaying the text with the weight of his own exuberant fancy.

The passages, embodied, will show with what lofty themes he
presumed to grapple. 1. Thus did Job continually. 2. The Almighty
watches the good man's household. 3. Satan receiving power over
Job. 4. The wind from the wilderness destroying Job's children. 5. And
I alone am escaped to tell thee. 6. Satan smiting Job with sore boils.
7. Job's friends comforting him. 8. Let the day perish wherein I was
born. 9. Then a spirit passed before my face. 10. Job laughed to
scorn by his friends. 11. With dreams upon my bed thou scarest
me--thou affrightest me with visions. 12. I am young and
ye are old, wherefore I was afraid. 13. Then the Lord answered Job
out of the whirlwind. 14. When the morning stars sang together,
and the sons of God shouted for joy. 15. Behold now Behemoth,
which I made with thee. 16. Thou hast fulfilled the judgment of
the wicked. 17. I have heard thee with the hearing of my ear, but
now my eye rejoiceth in thee. 18. Also the Lord accepted Job.
19. Every one also gave him a piece of money. 20. There were not
found women fairer than the daughters of Job. 21. So the Lord
blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning.

While employed on these remarkable productions, he was made
sensible that the little approbation which the world had ever bestowed
on him was fast leaving him. The waywardness of his fancy, and the
peculiar execution of his compositions, were alike unadapted for
popularity; the demand for his works lessened yearly from the
time that he exhibited his Canterbury Pilgrimage; and he could
hardly procure sufficient to sustain life, when old age was creeping
upon him. Yet, poverty-stricken as he was, his cheerfulness never
forsook him--he uttered no complaint--he contracted no debt, and
continued to the last manly and independent. It is the fashion
to praise genius when it is gone to the grave--the fashion is
cheap and convenient. Of the existence of Blake few men of taste
could be ignorant--of his great merits multitudes knew, nor was
his extreme poverty any secret. Yet he was reduced--one of the
ornaments of the age--to a miserable garret and a crust of bread,
and would have perished from want, had not some friends, neither
wealthy nor powerful, averted this disgrace from coming upon
our country. One of these gentlemen, Mr. Linnell, employed Blake to
engrave his Inventions of the Book of Job; by this he earned money
enough to keep him living--for the good old man still labored
with all the ardor of the days of his youth, and with skill equal to his
enthusiasm. These engravings are very rare, very beautiful, and
very peculiar. They are in the earlier fashion of workmanship, and
bear no resemblance whatever to the polished and graceful style
which now prevails. I have never seen a tinted copy, nor am I sure
that tinting would accord with the extreme simplicity of the designs,
and the mode in which they are handled. The Songs of Innocence, and
these Inventions for Job, are the happiest of Blake's works, and ought
to be in the portfolios of all who are lovers of nature and
imagination.

Two extensive works, bearing the ominous names of Prophecies,
one concerning America, the other Europe, next made their appearance
from his pencil and graver. The first contains eighteen and the other
seventeen plates, and both are plentifully seasoned with verse, without
the incumbrance of rhyme. It is impossible to give a satisfactory
description of these works; the frontispiece of the latter, representing
the Ancient of Days, in an orb of light, stooping into chaos, to measure
out the world, has been admired less for its meaning than for the grandeur
of its outline. A head and a tailpiece in the other have been much
noticed--one exhibits the bottom of the sea, with enormous
fishes preying on a dead body--the other, the surface, with a dead
body floating, on which an eagle with outstretched wings is feeding.
The two angels pouring out the spotted plague upon Britain--an
angel standing in the sun, attended by three furies--and several
other Inventions in these wild works, exhibit wonderful strength of
drawing and splendor of coloring. Of loose prints--but which
were meant doubtless to form part of some extensive work--one
of the most remarkable is the Great Sea Serpent; and a figure, sinking in
a stormy sea at sunset--the glow of which, with the foam upon
the dark waves, produces a magical effect.

After a residence of seventeen years in South Molton Street, Blake
removed (not in consequence, alas! of any increase of fortune) to No. 3
Fountain Court, Strand. This was in the year 1823. Here he engraved by
day and saw visions by night, and occasionally employed himself in
making Inventions for Dante; and such was his application that he
designed in all one hundred and two, and engraved seven. It was
publicly known that he was in a declining state of health; that old
age had come upon him, and that he was in want. Several friends,
and artists among the number, aided him a little, in a delicate way,
by purchasing his works, of which he had many copies. He sold
many of his Songs of Innocence, and also of Urizen, and he wrought
incessantly upon what he counted his masterpiece, the Jerusalem,
tinting and adorning it, with the hope that his favorite would find a
purchaser. No one, however, was found ready to lay out twenty-five
guineas on a work which no one could have any hope of comprehending,
and this disappointment sank to the old man's heart.

He had now reached his seventy-first year, and the strength of
nature was fast yielding. Yet he was to the last cheerful and contented.
'I glory,' he said, 'in dying, and have no grief but in leaving you,
Katherine; we have lived happy, and we have lived long; we have been
ever together, but we shall be divided soon. Why should I fear death?
nor do I fear it. I have endeavored to live as Christ commands,
and have sought to worship. God truly--in my own house, when
I was not seen of men.' He grew weaker and weaker--he could
no longer sit upright; and was laid in his bed, with no one to watch
over him, save his wife, who, feeble and old herself, required help
in such a touching duty.

The Ancient of Days was such a favorite with Blake, that three
days before his death, he sat bolstered up in bed, and tinted it
with his choicest colors and in his happiest style. He touched and
retouched it--held it at arm's-length, and then threw it from
him, exclaiming, 'There! that will do! I cannot mend it.' He saw
his wife in tears--she  felt this was to be the last of his
works--'Stay,  Kate! (cried Blake) keep just as you are--I
will draw your portrait--for you have ever been an angel to
me'--she obeyed, and the dying artist' made a fine likeness.

The very joyfulness with which this singular man welcomed
the coming of death, made his dying moments intensely mournful.
He lay chanting songs, and the verses and the music were both the
offspring of the moment. He lamented that he could no longer
commit those inspirations, as he called them, to paper. 'Kate,' he
said, 'I am a changing man--I always rose and wrote down
my thoughts, whether it rained, snowed, or shone, and you arose
too and sat beside me--this can' be no longer.' He died on
the 12th of August, 1828, without any visible pain--his wife,
who sat watching him, did not perceive when he ceased breathing.

William Blake was of low stature and slender make, with a high
pallid forehead, and eyes large, dark, and expressive. His temper
was touchy, and when moved, he spoke with an indignant eloquence,
which commanded respect. His voice, in general, was low and musical,
his manners gentle and unassuming, his conversation a singular
mixture of knowledge and enthusiasm. His whole life was one of
labour and privation,--he had never tasted the luxury of that
independence, which comes from professional profit. This untoward
fortune he endured with unshaken equanimity--offering himself,
in imagination, as a martyr in the great cause of poetic art;--_pitying_
some of his more fortunate brethren for their inordinate love
of gain; and not doubting that whatever he might have won in
gold by adopting other methods, would have been a poor compensation
for the ultimate loss of fame. Under this agreeable delusion,
he lived all his life--he was satisfied when his graver gained
him a guinea a week--the greater the present denial, the surer
the glory hereafter.

Though he was the companion of Flaxman and Fuseli, and sometimes
their pupil, he never attained that professional skill, without which
all genius is bestowed in vain. He was his own teacher chiefly; and
self-instruction, the parent occasionally of great beauties, seldom
fails to produce great deformities. He was a most splendid tinter, but
no colorist, and his works were all of small dimensions, and therefore
confined to the cabinet and the portfolio. His happiest flights, as well
as his wildest, are thus likely to remain shut up from the world. If we
look at the man through his best and most intelligible works, we shall
find that he who could produce the Songs of Innocence and Experience,
the Gates of Paradise, and the Inventions for Job, was the possessor
of very lofty faculties, with no common skill in art, and moreover
that, both in thought and mode of treatment, he was a decided original.
But should we, shutting our eyes to the merits of those works,
determine to weigh his worth by his Urizen, his Prophecies of Europe
and America, and his Jerusalem, our conclusion would be very
unfavorable; we would say that, with much freedom of composition
and boldness of posture, he was unmeaning, mystical, and extravagant,
and that his original mode of working out his conceptions was little
better than a brilliant way of animating absurdity. An overflow of
imagination is a failing uncommon in this age, and has generally
received of late little quarter from the critical portion of mankind.
Yet imagination is the life and spirit of all great works of genius
and taste; and, indeed, without it, the head thinks and the hand
labours in vain. Ten thousand authors and artists rise to the
proper, the graceful, and the beautiful, for ten who ascend
into 'the heaven of invention.' A work--whether from poet
or painter--conceived in the fiery ecstasy of imagination,
lives through every limb; while one elaborated out by skill and
taste only will look, in comparison, like a withered and sapless
tree beside one green and flourishing. Blake's misfortune was that
of possessing this precious gift in excess. His fancy overmastered
him--until he at length confounded 'the mind's eye' with
the corporeal organ, and dreamed himself out of the sympathies
of actual life.

His method of coloring was a secret which he kept to himself,
or confided only to his wife; he believed that it was revealed in a
vision, and that he was bound in honor to conceal it from the
world. 'His modes of preparing his grounds,' says Smith, in his
Supplement to the Life of Nollekens, 'and laying them over his
panels for painting, mixing his colors, and manner of working,
were those which he considered to have been practized by the
early fresco painters, whose productions still remain in many
instances vividly and permanently fresh. His ground was a mixture
of whiting and carpenters' glue, which he passed over several
times in the coatings; his colors he ground himself, and also
united with them the same sort of glue, but in a much weaker
state. He would, in the course of painting a picture, pass a very
thin transparent wash of glue-water over the whole of the parts
he had worked upon, and then proceed with his finishing. He
had many secret modes of working, both as a colorist and an
engraver. His method of eating away the plain copper, and leaving
the lines of his subjects and his words as stereotype, is, in my
mind, perfectly original. Mrs.  Blake is in possession of the secret,
and she ought to receive something considerable for its communication,
as I am quite certain it may be used to advantage, both to artists
and literary characters in general. The affection and fortitude
of this woman entitled her to much respect. She shared her husband's
lot without a murmur, set her heart solely upon his fame, and
soothed him in those hours of misgiving and despondency which
are not unknown to the strongest intellects. She still lives
to lament the loss of Blake--and _fell_ it.'





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