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Document Title: Life of William Blake, “Pictor Ignotus”, vol. 1
Author: Alexander Gilchrist
Author: Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Date of Composition: 1880

The full Rossetti Archive record for this transcribed document is available.

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Sig. Vol. I.
LIFE

Of

WILLIAM BLAKE



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I assert for myself that I do not behold the outward creation, and that to me it is hindrance and not action. “What!” it will be questioned, “when the sun rises, do you not see the round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” Oh ! no, no ! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!” I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it and not with it.—Blake, A Vision of the Last Judgment.
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Portrait of Blake

Fac-simile of a Portrait on Ivory

Painted from life by John Linnell, 1827

Engraved by C.H. Jeens.

Figure: Bust portrait of Blake, in profile



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LIFE

of

WILLIAM BLAKE

WITH SELECTIONS FROM HIS POEMS AND OTHER WRITINGS



BY

ALEXANDER GILCHRIST

A NEW AND ENLARGED EDITION

ILLUSTRATED FROM BLAKE'S OWN WORKS

WITH ADDITIONAL LETTERS AND A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I

Editorial Note (page ornament): Phaeton Press’ printer's mark, capital "P" drawing manned chariot
PHAETON PRESS

NEW YORK

1969

The Right of Translation is Reserved

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Originally Published 1880

Reprinted 1969
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-90368

Published by PHAETON PRESS, INC.
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Preface To The Second Edition.
In 1878 thirty-four autograph letters from William Blake to Hayley were sold by Messrs. Sotheby and Wilkinson. Thanks to the courtesy of the gentlemen into whose possession a large proportion of the letters ultimately passed,— Mr. Frederick Locker and Mr. Alexander Macmillan,—these, and a few more obtained from the same source (one by the British Museum and the others by Mr. Kirby), are now incorporated in the Biography, and carry on the narrative of Blake's life during the two years immediately succeeding his return from Felpham. In the same way the letters to Mr. Butts, generously placed in my hands by his grandson, Captain Butts, just before the appearance of the first edition, and there printed in Vol. II., are now put in there place, making the Felpham chapters mainly autobiographical.
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The two friends whose labour of love wrought so largely to give completeness to the first issue of this book have revised and, especially in the case of the Annotated Catalogue, brought up to date their work; whilst another friend, Mr. Frederic J. Shields, out of the same warmth of admiration for Blake's genius and character, has freely rendered precious service with pen and pencil further to enrich the new edition. He has supplied a vigorous translation into words of the more pregnant among the large and important series of Designs by Blake to Young's Night Thoughts, which has lately come to light, and is now in the possession of Mr. Bain, of the Haymarket—the series of which a very small portion only was engraved by Blake for Edwards's edition of 1797. Mr. Shields has also drawn, from original pencil sketches by Blake, two new portraits of Mrs. Blake and the head of Blake by himself, which was somewhat roughly given in the first edition. Lastly, he has adapted a fairy design of Blake's own to the cover.
From America has come help in the shape of some admirable examples of engraver's work, four of which are from designs by Blake never before reproduced, and two are from the Grave. These were executed to illustrate an article on Blake, by Mr. Horace Scudder, in Scribner's Magazine, June, 1880; and to the courtesy of Messrs. Scribner & Co., of
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New York, we are indebted for the use of the blocks.
Of additional illustrations there remain to be specified a newly discovered design to Hamlet (from a copy of the Second Folio Shakespeare containing also several other designs by Blake, and now in possession of Mr. Macmillan); another plate from the Jerusalem; the Phillips portrait of Blake, which Schiavonetti engraved for Blair's Grave; a view of Blake's Cottage at Felpham and of his Work Room and Death Room in Fountain Court, both drawn by Herbert H. Gilchrist; and, last not least, the Inventions to the Book of Job executed anew by the recently discovered photo-intaglio process.
In Vol. II will also now be found an Essay on Blake, by James Smetham, republished (by permission) from the London Quarterly Review. Its fine qualities and its inaccessibility will, I feel assured, make it welcome here as an important accession to a work which aims to gather to a focus all the light that can be shed on Blake and on the creations of his genius.
Anne Gilchrist



Keats Corner, Well Road, Hampstead,

Oct. 10, 1880
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Preface To The First Edition
One short word of sorrowful significance which has had to be inserted in the title-page, while it acquaints the reader with the peculiar circumstances under which this Biography comes before him, seems also to require a few words about its final preparation for the press; the more so as the time which has elapsed since the Life of Blake was first announced might otherwise lead to a wrong inference respecting the state in which it was left by the beloved author when he was seized, in the full tide of health and work and happy life, with the fever which, in five days, carried him hence. The Life was then substantially complete; and the first eight chapters were already printed. The main services, therefore, which the Work has received from other hands— and great they are—appear in the Second Part and in the Appendix: in the choice and arrangement of a large collection of Blake's unpublished and hitherto almost equally inaccessible published Writings, together with
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introductory remarks to each Section; and in a thorough and probably exhaustive Annotated Catalogue of his Pictorial Works. The first of these services—the editorship, in a word, of the Selections—has been performed by Mr. Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the second by his brother, Mr. William Rossetti. To both of these friends, admiration of Blake's genius and regard for the memory of his biographer have made their labour so truly a labour of love that they do not suffer me to dwell on the rare quality or extent of the obligation.
To the Life itself one addition has been made,—that of a Supplementary Chapter, in fulfilment of the Author's plan. He left a memorandum to the effect that he intended writing such a chapter, and a list of the topics to be handled there, but nothing more. This also Mr. D. G. Rossetti has carried into execution; and that the same hand has filled in some blank pages in the Chapter on the Inventions to the Book of Job the discerning reader will scarcely need to be told.
The only other insertions remaining to be particularized are the accounts of such of Blake's Writings as it was decided not to reprint in the Second Part; chiefly of the class he called Prophecies. I could heartily wish the difficult problem presented by these
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strange Books had been more successfully grappled with, or indeed grappled with at all. Hardly anything has been now attempted beyond bringing together a few readable extracts. But however small may be the literary value of the Europe, America, Jerusalem, &c., they are at least psychologically curious and important; and should the opportunity arise, I hope to see these gaps filled in with workmanship which shall better correspond with that of the rest of the fabric. In speaking of the Designs which accompany the Poems in question, I was not left wholly without valued aid.
To Mr. Samuel Palmer and Mr. William Haines, to Mr. Linnell and other of Blake's surviving friends, and to the possessors of his works, grateful acknowledgments of the services rendered are due, in various ways, by each and all to enhance the completeness of the following record of the fruitful life and labours of William Blake. In my dear husband's name, therefore, I sincerely thank these gentlemen.
Anne Gilchrist.

May 15th, 1863,

Brookbank, near Haslemere.
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Contents Of Volume I.



Biography
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME I.
Note: The list of illustrations is printed in four columns. The headers of the three right-hand columns are "Drawn by", "Engraved by", and "Page".
  • Portrait of Blake, from a miniature painted in 1827 . .   John Linnell    C.H. Jeens    Frontispiece
  • From America. . .  Blake    W. J. Linton    Title-page to Biography
  • From Illustrations of the Book of Job . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    1
  • Glad Day. Block lent by Messrs. Scribner and Co. . .   Blake          29
  • Plague. From a Water-colour Drawing . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    54
  • Infant Joy. From Songs of Innocence. Block lent by Messrs. Scribner and Co. . .   Blake    J. F. Jungling    68
  • Nebuchadnezzar. From Pencil-Drawing in Rossetti's MS. Note-book. . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    88
  • Illustration for Wollstonecraft's Tales for Children. From the original Drawing . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    90
  • From Visions of the Daughters of Albion . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    97, 103
  • Gates of Paradise. Eight plates. Facsimilies. . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    98, 100, 102
  • From America. . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    108, 110
  • From Europe. . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    124, 126
  • Elijah in the Chariot of Fire. From a Colour-printed Design. (See Vol. II., p. 209. No. 23.) Block lent by Messrs. Scribner and Co. . .   Blake          128
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  • Young burying Narcissa (?) India-ink Drawing. Block lent by Messrs. Scribner and Co. . .   Blake    J. Hellawell    134
  • "Are glad when they can find the Grave." From the MS. Note-book. (See Vol. II., p. 259. No. 27 F) . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    141
  • From Visions of the Daughters of Albion . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    155
  • Blake's Cottage at Felpham. Photo-Intaglio . .   Herbert H. Gilchrist.    Typographic Etching Co.    150
  • From the MS. Note-book . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    225
  • Vala Hyle, Skofeld. From Jerusalem . .   Blake    Typographic Etching Co.    230
  • Border from Jerusalem   Blake    W. J. Linton    232, 233, 234
  • Full-page "   " . . Blake W. J. Linton 226
  • "   "   " . . Blake W. J. Linton 236
  • "   "   " . . Blake W. J. Linton 238
  • "   "   " . . Blake W. J. Linton 240
  • Tail and Head-pieces from Jerusalem . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    27, 50, 51, 115, 264,
  • Portions of Pages from the same . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    239, 240
  • From Milton.—Blake's Cottage at Felpham . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    245
  • Death's Door. From Blair's Grave. Block lent by Messrs. Scribner and Co. . .   Blake          269
  • Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother and Child in the Tomb. From the same. Block lent by Messrs. Scribner and Co.   Blake          270
  • Design from Hamlet. From Watercolour Drawing.   Blake    J. D. Cooper    272
  • Visionary Heads. From Pencil Drawings . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    299
  • From the same.—The Man who built the Pyramids, Edward I, William Wallace, Edward III. . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    300.
  • Ghost of a Flea . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    303.
  • The Accusers of Theft, Adultery, Murder . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    304
  • Designs to Phillips's Pastorals. Blake's own Wood-blocks. . .   Blake    Blake    320
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  • Plan of Blake's Room in Fountain Court . .   F. J. Shields          322
  • Behemoth and Leviathan. From the Illustrations to Job. .   Blake    W. J. Linton    336
  • Blake's Work-room and Death-room . .   Herbert H. Gilchrist    Typographic Etching Co.    348
  • Catherine Blake. From a Pencil-Drawing by her Husband. (Photo-Intaglio) . .   F. J. Shields    Typographic Etching Co.    361
  • Catherine and William Blake. From the Pencil-outline in MS. Note-book. (Photo-Intaglio). .   F. J. Shields    Typographic Etching Co.    374
  • The Circle of Traitors. From Dante . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    377
  • Mr. Cumberland's Card-plate . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    399
  • From Design for Blair's Grave . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    406
  • Mrs. Blake in Age . .   Tatham    W. J. Linton    412
VOLUME II.
  • Portrait of Blake. By T. Phillips, R.A., Etched by Schiavonetti for Blair's Grave. Photo-Intaglio. . .     Typographic Etching Co.    Frontispiece
  • Design from Visions of the Daughters of Albion . .   Blake       W. J. Linton    Title-page to Selections
  • Canterbury Pilgrimage (reduced). The Heads under it are Facsimilies . .   Blake    W. J. Linton    144
  • Illustrations of the Book of Job. Twenty-one Photo-Intaglios. .      Typographic Etching Co.    204
  • Songs of Innocence. Seven of the Original Plates . .    204
  • Songs of Experience. Nine of the Original Plates . .    204
  • Tail-piece. From Vision of the Daughters of Albion . . 376

  • The design on the cover is adapted, by Mr. Frederic J. Shields, from a rough sketch in Blake's MS. Note-book, for a picture which was exhibited some years ago at Manchester, but did not find its way to the Burlington Fine Art Club Exhibition of Blake's works. The angelic figure on the back of the volume is from one of the designs to Young's Night Thoughts.

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more about this work
William Blake

 

from America





Biography
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Note: This title is illustrated
LIFE OF



WILLIAM BLAKE



CHAPTER I.



PRELIMINARY.
From nearly all collections or beauties of ‘The English Poets,’ catholic to demerit as these are, tender of the expired and expiring reputations, one name has been hitherto perseveringly exiled. Encyclopædias ignore it. The Biographical Dictionaries furtively pass it on with inaccurate despatch, as having had some connexion with the Arts. With critics it has had but little better fortune. The Edinburgh Review, twenty-seven years ago, specified as a characteristic sin of ‘partiality’ in Allan Cunningham's pleasant Lives of British Artists, that he should have ventured to include his name, since its possessor could (it seems) ‘scarcely be considered a painter’ at all. And later, Mr. Leslie, in his Handbook for Young Painters , dwells on it with imperfect sympathy for a while, to dismiss it with scanty recognition.
Yet no less a contemporary than Wordsworth, a man little prone to lavish eulogy or attention on brother poets, spake in private of the Songs of Innocence and Experience of William
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Blake, as ‘undoubtedly the production of insane genius,’ (which adjective we shall, I hope, see cause to qualify,) but as to him more significant than the works of many a famous poet. ‘There is something in the madness of this man,’ declared he (to Mr. Crabb Robinson), ‘which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott.’
Of his Designs, Fuseli and Flaxman, men not to be imposed on in such matters, but themselves sensitive— as Original Genius must always be—to Original Genius in others, were in the habit of declaring with unwonted emphasis, that ‘the time would come’ when the finest ‘would be as much sought after and treasured in the portfolios’ of men discerning in art, ‘as those of Michael Angelo now.’ ‘And ah! Sir,’ Flaxman would sometimes add, to an admirer of the designs, ‘his poems are as grand as his pictures.’
Of the books and designs of Blake, the world may well be ignorant. For in an age rigorous in its requirement of publicity, these were in the most literal sense of the words, never published at all: not published even in the mediæval sense, when when writings were confided to learned keeping, and works of art not unseldom restricted to cloister-wall or coffer-lid. Blake's poems were, with one exception, not even printed in his life-time; simply engraved by his own laborious hand. His drawings, when they issued further than his own desk, were bought as a kind of charity, to be stowed away again in rarely opened portfolios. The very copper-plates on which he engraved, were often used again after a few impressions had been struck off; one design making way for another, to save the cost of new copper. At the present moment, Blake drawings, Blake prints, fetch prices which would have solaced a life of penury, had their producer received them. They are thus collected, chiefly because they are (naturally enough) already ‘ RARE,’ and ‘ VERY RARE.’ Still hiding in private portfolios, his drawings are there prized or known by perhaps a score of individuals, enthusiastic appreciators,—some of their singularity and rarity, a few of their instrinsic quality.
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At the Manchester Art-Treasures Exhibition of 1857, among the select thousand water-colour drawings, hung two modestly tinted designs by Blake, of few inches in size: one the Dream of Queen Catherine, another Oberon and Titania. Both are remarkable displays of imaginative power, and finished examples in the artist's peculiar manner. Both were unnoticed in the crowd, attracting few gazers, fewer admirers. For it needs to be read in Blake, to have familiarized oneself with his unsophisticated, archaic, yet spiritual ‘manner,'—a style sui generis as no other artist's ever was,—to be able to sympathize with, or even understand, the equally individual strain of thought, of which it is the vehicle. And one must almost be born with a sympathy for it. He neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself ‘a divine child,’ whose playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.
In an era of academies, associations, and combined efforts, we have in him a solitary, self-taught, and as an artist, semi-taught Dreamer, ‘delivering the burning messages of prophecy by the stammering lips of infancy,’ as Mr. Ruskin has said of Cimabue and Giotto. For each artist and writer has, in the course of his training, to approve in his own person the immaturity of expression Art has at recurrent periods to pass through as a whole. And Blake in some aspects of his art never emerged from infancy. His Drawing, often correct, almost always powerful, the pose and grouping of his figures often expressive and sublime as the sketches of Raffaelle or Albert Dürer, on the other hand, range under the category of the ‘impossible;’ are crude, contorted, forced, monstrous, though none the less efficient in conveying the visions fetched by the guileless man from Heaven, from Hell itself, or from the intermediate limbo tenanted by hybrid nightmares. His prismatic colour, abounding in the purest, sweetest melodies to the eye, and always expressing a sentiment, yet looks to the casual observer slight, inartificial, arbitrary.
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Many a cultivated spectator will turn away from all this as from mere ineffectualness,—Art in its second childhood. But see that sitting figure of Job in his Affliction, surrounded by the bowed figures of wife and friend, grand as Michael Angelo, nay, rather as the still, colossal figures fashioned by the genius of old Egypt or Assyria! Look on that simple composition of Angels Singing aloud for Joy , pure and tender as Fra Angelico, and with an austerer sweetness.
It is not the least of Blake's peculiarities that, instead of expressing himself, as most men have been content to do, by help of the prevailing style of his day, he, in this, as in every other matter, preferred to be independent of his fellows; partly by choice, partly from the necessities of imperfect education as a painter. His Design has conventions of its own; in part, its own, I should say, in part, a return to those of earlier and simpler times.
Of Blake as an Artist, we will defer further talk. His Design can ill be translated into words, and very inadequately by any engraver's copy. Of his Poems, tinged with the very same ineffable qualities, obstructed by the same technical flaws and impediments—a semi-utterance as it were, snatched from the depths of the vague and unspeakable— of these remarkable Poems, never once yet fairly placed before the reading public, specimens shall by-and-bye speak more intelligibly for themselves. Both form part in a Life and Character as new, romantic, pious—in the deepest natural sense—as they : romantic, though incident be slight; animated by the same unbroken simplicity, the same high unity of sentiment.
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CHAPTER II.



CHILDHOOD. 1757-71.
William Blake, the most spiritual of artists, a mystic poet and painter, who lived to be a contemporary of Cobbett and Sir Walter Scott, was born 28th November, 1757, the year of Canova's birth, two years after Stothard and Flaxman ; while Chatterton, a boy of five, was still sauntering about the winding streets of antique Bristol. Born amid the gloom of a London November, at 28, Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Golden Square (market now extinct), he was christened on the 11th December—one in a batch of six—from Grinling Gibbons’ ornate font in Wren's noble Palladian church of St. James's. He was the son of James and Catherine Blake, the second child in a family of five.
His father was a moderately prosperous hosier of some twenty years’ standing, in a then not unfashionable quarter. Broad Street, half private houses, half respectable shops, was a street much such as Wigmore Street is now, only shorter. Dashing Regent Street as yet was not, and had more than half a century to wait for birth ; narrow Swallow Street in part filling its place. All that Golden Square neighbourhood,—Wardour Street, Poland Street, Brewer Street,—held then a similar status to the Cavendish Square district say, now: an ex-fashionable, highly respectable condition, not yet sunk into the seedy category. The Broad Street of present date is a dirty, forlorn-looking thoroughfare ; one half of it twice as wide as the other. In the wider
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portion stands a large, dingy brewery. The street is a shabby miscellany of oddly assorted occupations,—lapidaries, pickle-makers, manufacturing trades of many kinds, furniture-brokers, and nondescript shops. ‘Artistes’ and artizans live in the upper stories. Almost every house is adorned by its triple or quadruple row of brass bells, bright with the polish of frequent hands, and yearly multiplying themselves. The houses, though often disguised by stucco, and some of them refaced, date mostly from Queen Anne's time; 28, now a ‘trimming shop,’ is a corner house at the narrower end, a large and substantial old edifice.
The mental training which followed the physical one of swaddling-clothes, go-carts, and head-puddings, was, in our Poet's case, a scanty one, as we have cause to know from Blake's writings. All knowledge beyond that of reading and writing was evidently self-acquired. A ‘new kind’ of boy was soon sauntering about the quiet neighbouring streets— a boy of strangely more romantic habit of mind than that neighbourhood had ever known in its days of gentility, has ever known in its dingy decadence. Already he passed half his time in dream and imaginative reverie. As he grew older the lad became fond of roving out into the country, a fondness in keeping with the romantic turn. For what written romance can vie with the substantial one of rural sights and sounds to a town-bred boy? Country was not, at that day, beyond reach of a Golden Square lad of nine or ten. On his own legs he could find a green field without the exhaustion of body and mind which now separates such a boy from the alluring haven as rigorously as prison bars. After Westminster Bridge—the ‘superb and magnificent structure' now defunct, then a new and admired one— came St. George's Fields, open fields and scene of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ riots in Blake's boyhood; next, the pretty village of Newington Butts, undreaming its 19th century bad eminence in the bills of cholera-mortality ; and then, unsophisticated green field and hedgerow opened on the
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child's delighted eyes. A mile or two further through the ‘large and pleasant village’ of Camberwell with its grove (or avenue) and famed prospect, arose the sweet hill and vale and ‘sylvan wilds' of rural Dulwich, a ‘village’ even now retaining some semblance of its former self. Beyond, stretched, to allure the young pedestrian on, yet fairer amenities: southward, hilly Sydenham ; eastward, in the purple distance, Blackheath. A favourite day's ramble of later date was to Blackheath, or south-west, over Dulwich and Norwood hills, through the antique rustic town of Croydon, type once of the compact, clean, cheerful Surrey towns of old days, to the fertile verdant meads of Walton- upon-Thames; much of the way by lane and footpath. The beauty of those scenes in his youth was a lifelong reminiscence with Blake, and stored his mind with lifelong pastoral images.
On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his ‘first vision.’ Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. Returned home he relates the incident, and only through his mother's intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie. Another time, one summer morn, he sees the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking. If these traits of childish years be remembered, they will help to elucidate the visits from the spiritual world of later years, in which the grown man believed as unaffectedly as ever had the boy of ten.
One day, a traveller was telling bright wonders of some foreign city. ‘Do you call that splendid ?’ broke in young Blake; ‘I should call a city splendid in which the houses were of gold, the pavement of silver, the gates ornamented with precious stones.’ At which outburst, hearers were already disposed to shake the head and pronounce the speaker crazed : a speech natural enough in a child, but not unlikely to have been uttered in maturer years by Blake.
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To say that Blake was born an artist, is to say of course that as soon as the child's hand could hold a pencil it began to scrawl rough likeness of man or beast, and make timid copies of all the prints he came near. He early began to seek opportunities of educating hand and eye. In default of National Gallery or Museum, for the newly founded British Museum contained as yet little or no sculpture, occasional access might freely be had to the Royal Palaces. Pictures were to be seen also in noblemen's and gentlemen's houses, in the sale-rooms of the elder Langford in Covent Garden, and of the elder Christie: sales exclusively filled as yet with the pictures of the ‘old and dark’ masters, sometimes genuine, oftener spurious, demand for the same exceeding supply. Of all these chances of gratuitous instruction the boy is said to have sedulously profited: a dear proof other schooling was irregular.
The fact that such attendances were permitted, implies that neither parent was disposed, as so often happens, to thwart the incipient artist's inclination ; bad, even for a small tradesman's son, as at that time were an artist's outlooks, unless he were a portrait-painter. In 1767 (three years after Hogarth's death), Blake being then ten years old, was ‘put to Mr. Pars drawing-school in the Strand.’ This was the preparatory school for juvenile artists then in vogue: preparatory to the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in St. Martin's Lane, of the ‘Incorporated Society of Artists,’ the Society Hogarth had helped to found. The Royal Academy of intriguing Chambers’ and Moser's founding, for which George the Third legislated, came a year later. ‘Mr. Pars’ drawing-school in the Strand’ was located in ‘the great room,’ subsequently a show-room of the Messrs. Ackermann's— name once familiar to all buyers of prints—in their original house, on the left-hand side of the Strand, as you go citywards, just at the eastern comer of Castle Court: a house and court demolished when Agar Street and King William Street were made. The school was founded and brought
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into celebrity by William Shipley, painter, brother to a bishop, and virtual founder also, in 1754, of the still-extant Society of Arts,—in that same house, where the Society lodged until migrating to its stately home over the way, in the Adelphi.
Who was Pars? Pars, the Leigh or Cary of his day, was originally a chaser and son of a chaser, the art to which Hogarth was apprenticed, one then going out of demand, unhappily,—for the fact implied the loss of a decorative art. Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired. He had a younger brother, William, a portrait-painter, and one of the earliest Associates or inchoate R. A.'s, who was extensively patronized by the Dilettanti Society, and by the dilettante Lord Palmerston of that time. The former sent him to Greece, there for three years to study ruined temple and mutilated statue, and to return with portfolios, a mine of wealth to cribbing ‘classic’ architects,—contemporary Chambers’ and future Soanes.
At Pars’ school as much drawing was taught as is to be learned by copying plaster-casts after the Antique, but no drawing from the living figure. Blake's father bought a few casts, from which the boy could continue his drawing-lessons at home: the Gladiator, the Hercules, the Venus de Medici, various heads, and the usual models of hand, arm, and foot. After a time, small sums of money were indulgently supplied wherewith to make a collection of Prints for study. To secure these, the youth became a frequenter of the print-dealer's shops and the sales of the auctioneers, who then took threepenny biddings, and would often knock down a print for as many shillings as pounds are now given, thanks to ever-multiplying Lancashire fortunes.
In a scarce, probably almost unread book, affecting—despite the unattractive literary peculiarities of its pedagogue authors— from its subject and very minuteness of detail, occurs an account, from which I have begun to borrow, of Blake's early education in art, derived from the artist's own lips. It is a more reliable story than Allan Cunningham's pleasant
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mannered generalities, easy to read, hard to verify. The singular biography to which I allude, is Dr. Malkin's Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), illustrated by a frontispiece of Blake's design. The Child in question was one of those hapless ‘prodigies of learning’ who,—to quote a good-natured friend and philosopher's consoling words to the poor Doctor,—'commence their career at three, become expert linguists at four, profound philosophers at five, read the Fathers at six, and die of old age at seven.’
‘Langford,’ writes Malkin, called Blake ‘his little connoisseur, and often knocked down a cheap lot with friendly precipitation.’ Amiable Langford! The great Italians,— Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano,—the great Germans,— Albert Dürer, Martin Hemskerk,—with others similar, were the exclusive objects of his choice ; a sufficiently remarkable one in days when Guido and the Caracci were the gods of the servile crowd. Such a choice was ‘contemned by his youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at what they called his mechanical taste!’ ‘I am happy,’ wrote Blake himself in later life ( MS. notes to Reynolds), ‘I cannot say that Raffaelle ever was from my earliest childhood hidden from me. I saw and I knew immediately the difference between Raffaelle and Rubens.’
Between the ages of eleven and twelve, if not before, Blake had begun to write original irregular verse ; a rarer precocity than that of sketching, and rarer still in alliance with the latter tendency. Poems composed in his twelfth year, came to be included in a selection privately printed in his twenty-sixth. Could we but know which they were! One, by Malkin's help, we can identify as written before he was fourteen: the following ethereal piece of sportive Fancy, ‘Song’ he calls it:—
  • 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!
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  • He shew'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,
  • 10And Phœbus fir'd my vocal rage;
  • He caught me in his silken net,
  • And shut me in his golden cage.
  • He loves to sit and hear me sing,
  • Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;
  • Then stretches out my golden wing,
  • And mocks my loss of liberty.
This may surely be reckoned equal precocity to that so much lauded of Pope and Cowley. It is not promise, but fulfilment. The grown man in vain might hope to better such sweet playfulness,—playfulness as of a ‘child-angel's’ penning— any more than noon can reproduce the tender streaks of dawn. But criticism is idle. How analyse a violet's perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly's wing ?
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CHAPTER III.



ENGRAVER'S APPRENTICE. 1771-78. [ÆT. 14-21]
The preliminary charges of launching Blake in the career of a Painter, were too onerous for the paternal pocket ; involving for one thing, a heavy premium to some leading artist for instruction under his own roof, then the only attainable, always the only adequate training. The investment, moreover, would not after all be certain of assuring daily bread for the future. English engravers were then taking that high place they are now doing little to maintain. Apprenticeship to one would secure, with some degree of artistic education, the cunning right hand which can always keep want at arm's length : a thing artist and littérateur have often had cause to envy in the skilled artizan. The consideration was not without weight in the eyes of an honest shopkeeper, to whose understanding the prosaic craft would more practically address itself than the vague abstractions of Art, or those shadowy promises of Fame, on which alone a mere artist had too often to feed. Thus it was decided for the future designer, that he should enter the, to him, enchanted domain of Art by a back door, as it were He is not to be dandled into a Painter, but painfully to win his way to an outside place. Daily through life, he will have to marry his shining dreams to the humblest, most irksome realities of a virtually artizan life. Already it had been decreed that an inspired Poet should be endowed with barely grammar enough to compose with schoolboy accuracy.
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At the age of fourteen, the drawing-school of Mr. Pars in the Strand, was exchanged for the shop of engraver Basire, in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. There had been an intention of apprenticing Blake to Ryland, a more famous man than Basire; an artist of genuine talent and even genius, who had been well educated in his craft; had been a pupil of Ravenet, and after that (among others) of Boucher, whose stipple manner he was the first to introduce into England. With the view of securing the teaching and example of so skilled a hand, Blake was taken by his father to Ryland; but the negotiation failed. The boy himself raised an unexpected scruple. The sequel shows it to have been a singular instance—if not of absolute prophetic gift or second sight— at all events of natural intuition into character and power of forecasting the future from it, such as is often the endowment of temperaments like his. In after life this involuntary faculty of reading hidden writing continued to be a characteristic. ‘Father,’ said the strange boy, after the two had left Ryland's studio, ‘I do not like the man's face : it looks as if he will live to be hanged! ‘ Appearances were at that time utterly against the probability of such an event. Ryland was then at the zenith of his reputation. He was engraver to the king, whose portrait (after Ramsay) he had engraved, receiving for his work an annual pension of 2OOl. An accomplished and agreeable man, he was the friend of poet Churchill and others of distinguished rank in letters and society. His manners and personal appearance were peculiarly prepossessing, winning the spontaneous confidence of those who knew or even casually saw him. But twelve years after this interview, the unfortunate artist will have got into embarrassments, will commit a forgery on the East India Company:—and the prophecy will be fulfilled.
The Basire with whom ultimately Blake was placed, was James Basire, the second chronologically and in merit first of four Basires ; all engravers, and the three last in date
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(all bearing one Christian name) engravers to the Society of Antiquaries. This Basire, born in London, 1730, now therefore forty-one, and son of Isaac Basire, had studied design at Rome. He was the engraver of Stuart and Revett's Athens (1762), of Reynolds's Earl Camden (1766), of West's Pylades and Orestes (1770). He had also executed two or three plates after some of the minor and later designs of Hogarth :—the frontispiece to Garrick's Farmer's Return (1761), the noted political caricature of The Times , and the portrait sketch of Fielding (1762), which Hogarth himself much commended, declaring ‘he did not know his own drawing from a proof of the plate.’ The subjects of his graver were principally antiquities and portraits of men of note,—especially portraits of antiquaries: hereditary subjects since with the Basire family. He was official engraver to the Royal as well as the Antiquarian Society. Hereafter he will become still more favourably known in his generation as the engraver of the illustrations to the slow-revolving Archæologia and Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of Antiquaries,— then in a comparatively brisk condition,—and to the works of Gough and other antiquarian big-wigs of the old, full-bottomed sort. He was an engraver well grounded in drawing, of dry, hard, monotonous, but painstaking, conscientious style; the lingering representative of a school already getting old-fashioned, but not without staunch admirers, for its ‘firm and correct outline,’ among antiquaries; whose confidence and and esteem,—Gough's in particular,—Basire throughout possessed.
In the days of Strange, Woollett, Vivares, Bartolozzi, better models, if more expensive in their demands, might have been found ; though also worse. Basire was a superior, liberal-minded man, ingenuous and upright; and a kind master. The lineaments of his honest countenance (set off by a bob-wig) may be studied in the portrait by his son, engraved as frontispiece to the ninth volume of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes. As a Designer, Blake was, in essentials, influenced by no contemporary ; as engraver alone influenced
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by Basire, and that strongly—little as his master's style had in common with his own genius. Even as engraver, he was thus influenced, little to his future advantage in winning custom from the public. That public, in Blake's youth fast outgrowing the flat and formal manner inherited by Basire, in common with Vertue (engraver to the Society of Antiquaries before him) and the rest, from the Vanderguchts, Vanderbanks and other naturalized Dutchmen and Germans of the bob-wig and clipped-yew era, will now readily learn to enjoy the softer, more agreeable one of M'Ardell, Bartolozzi, Sherwin.
His seven years apprenticeship commenced in 1771, year of the Academy's first partial lodgement in Old Somerset Palace— and thus (eventually) in the National Pocket. As he was constitutionally painstaking and industrious, he soon learned to draw carefully and copy faithfully whatever was set before him, altogether to the Basire taste, and to win, as a good apprentice should, the approval and favour of his master. One day, by the way (as Blake ever remembered), Goldsmith walked into Basire's. It must have been during the very last years of the poet's life : he died in 1774. The boy— as afterwards the artist was fond of telling—mightily admired the great author's finely marked head as he gazed up at it, and thought to himself how much he should like to have such a head when he grew to be a man. Another still more memorable figure, a genius singularly german to Blake's own order of mind, the ‘singular boy of fourteen,’ may during the commencement of his apprenticeship, ‘any day have met unwittingly in London streets, or walked beside,—a placid, venerable, thin man of eighty-four, of erect figure and abstracted air, wearing a full-bottomed wig, a pair of long ruffles, and a curious-hilted sword, and carrying a goldheaded cane,—no Vision, still flesh and blood, but himself the greatest of modern Vision Seers,—Emanuel Swedenborg by name; who came from Amsterdam to London, in August 1771, and died at No. 26, Great Bath Street,
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Coldbath Fields, on the 29th of March, 1772.' This Mr. Allingham pleasantly suggests, in a note to his delightful collection of lyrical poems, Nightingale Valley (1860), in which (at last) occur a specimen or two of Blake's verse. The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men the engraver's apprentice was to grow up the likest to Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional temperament and endowment was so, in faculty for theosophic dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and in matter of fact hold of spiritual things. To savant and to artist alike, while yet on earth, the Heavens were opened. By Swedenborg's theologic writings, the first English editions of some of which appeared during Blake's manhood, he was considerably influenced ; but in no slavish spirit. These writings, in common with those of Jacob Boehmen and of the other select mystics of the world, had natural affinities to Blake's mind and were eagerly assimilated. But he hardly became a proselyte or ‘Swedenborgian’ proper; though his friend Flaxman did. In another twenty years we shall find him freely and—as true believers may think—heretically criticising the Swedish seer from the spiritualist, not the rationalist point of view : as being a Divine Teacher, whose truths however were ‘not new,’ and whose falsehoods were ‘all old.’
Among the leading engravings turned out by Basire, during the early part of Blake's apprenticeship, may be instanced in 1772, one after B. Wilson ( not Richard), Lady Stanhope as the Fair Penitent, (her rôle in certain amateur theatricals by the Quality); and in 1774, The Field of the Cloth of Gold and Interview of the two Kings , after a copy for the Society of Antiquaries by ‘little Edwards’ of Anecdote fame, from the celebrated picture at Windsor. The latter print was celebrated for one thing, if no other, as the largest ever engraved up to that time on one plate—copper, let us remember,—being some 47 inches by 27; and paper had to be made on purpose for it.
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Sig. Vol. I. C
‘Two years passed over smoothly enough,’ writes Malkin, ‘till two other apprentices were added to the establishment, who completely destroyed its harmony.’ Basire said of Blake, ‘ he was too simple and they too cunning.’ He, lending, I suppose, a too credulous ear to their tales, ‘declined to take part with his master against his fellow-apprentices;’ and was therefore sent out of harm's way into Westminster Abbey and the various old churches in and near London, to make drawings from the monuments and buildings Basire was employed by Gough the antiquary to engrave : ‘a circumstance he always mentioned with gratitude to Basire.’ The solitary study of authentic English history in stone was far more to the studious lad's mind than the disorderly wrangling of mutinous comrades. It is significant of his character, even at this early date, for zeal, industry, and moral correctness, that he could be trusted month after month, year after year, unwatched, to do his duty by his master in so independent an employment.
The task was singularly adapted to foster the romantic turn of his imagination, and to strengthen his natural affinities for the spiritual in art. It kindled a fervent love of Gothic,—itself an originality then,—which lasted his life, and exerted enduring influences on his habits of feeling and study; forbidding once for all, if such a thing had ever been possible to Blake, the pursuit of fashionable models, modern excellences, technic and superficial, or of any but the antiquated essentials and symbolic language of imaginative art.
From this time forward, from 1773 that is, the then ‘neglected works of art called Gothic monuments,’ were for years his daily companions. The warmer months were devoted to zealous sketching, from every point of view, of the Tombs in the Abbey; the enthusiastic artist ‘frequently standing on the monument and viewing the figures from the top.’ Careful drawings were made of the regal forms which for four or five centuries had lain in mute majesty,—
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once amid the daily presence of reverent priest and muttered mass, since in awful solitude,—around the lovely Chapel of the Confessor: the austere sweetness of Queen Eleanor, the dignity of Philippa, the noble grandeur of Edward the Third, the gracious stateliness of Richard the Second and his Queen. Then came drawings of the glorious effigy of Aymer de Valence, and of the beautiful though mutilated figures which surround his altar-tomb; drawings, in fact, of all the mediæval tombs. He pored over all with a reverent good faith, which in the age of Stuart and Revett, taught the simple student things our Pugins and Scotts had to learn near a century later. ‘The heads he considered as portraits,'—not unnaturally, their sculptors showing no overt sign of idiocy;—'and all the ornaments appeared as miracles of art to his gothicized imagination,’ as they have appeared to other imaginations since. He discovered for himself then or later, the important part once subserved by Colour in the sculptured building, the living help it had rendered to the once radiant Temple of God,—now a bleached dishonoured skeleton.
Shut up alone with these solemn memorials of far off centuries,—for, during service and in the intervals of visits from strangers, the vergers turned the key on him,—the Spirit of the past became his familiar companion. Sometimes his dreaming eye saw more palpable shapes from the phantom past: once a vision of ‘Christ and the Apostles,’ as he used to tell; and I doubt not others. For, as we have seen, the visionary tendency, or faculty, as Blake more truly called it, had early shown itself.
During the progress of Blake's lonely labours in the Abbey, on a bright day in May, 1774, the Society for which, through Basire, he was working, perpetrated by royal permission, on the very scene of those rapt studies, a highly interesting bit of antiquarian sacrilege : on a more reasonable pretext, and with greater decency, than sometimes distinguish such questionable proceedings. A select
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Sig. C 2
company formally and in strict privacy opened the tomb of Edward the First, and found the embalmed body ‘in perfect preservation and sumptuously attired,’ in ‘robes of royalty, his crown on his head, and two sceptres in his hands.’ The antiquaries saw face to face the ‘dead conqueror of Scotland ;’ had even a fleeting glimpse—for it was straightway re-inclosed in its cere-cloths—of his very visage: a recognisable likeness of what it must have been in life. I cannot help hoping that Blake may (unseen) have assisted at the ceremony.
In winter the youth helped to engrave selections from these Abbey Studies, in some cases executing the engraving single-handed. During the evenings and at over hours, he made drawings from his already teeming Fancy, and from English History. ‘A great number,’ it is said, were thrown off in such spare hours. There is a scarce engraving of his, dated so early as 1773, the second year of his apprenticeship, remarkable as already to some extent evincing in style—as yet, however, heavy rather than majestic—still more in choice of subject, the characteristics of later years. In one corner at top we have the inscription (which sufficiently describes the design), ‘Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion;’ and at bottom, ‘engraved by W. Blake, 1773, from an old Italian drawing;’ ‘Michael Angelo, Pinxit.’ Between these two lines, according to a custom frequent with Blake, is engraved the following characteristic effusion, which reads like an addition of later years:—'This’ (he is venturing a wild theory as to Joseph) ‘is One of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins; of whom the World was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages.’
The ‘prentice work as assistant to Basire of these years ( 1773-78) may be traced under Basire's name in the Archæologia in some of the engravings of coins, &c., to the Memoirs of Hollis (1780), and in Gough's Sepulchral Monuments , not
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published till 1786 and 1796. The Antiquaries were alive and stirring then; and enthusiastic John Carter was laying the foundations in English Archæology on which better-known men have since built. In the Sepulchral Monuments, vol. I, pt. 2 (1796), occurs a capital engraving as to drawing and feeling, ‘Portrait of Queen Philippa from her Monument,’ with the inscription Basire delineavit et sculpsit; for which, as in many other cases, we may safely read ‘W. Blake.’ In fact, Stothard often used to mention this drawing as Blake's, and with praise. The engraving is in Blake's forcible manner of decisively contrasted light and shade, but simple and monotonous manipulation. It is to a large scale, and gives the head and shoulders merely. Another plate, with a perspective view of the whole monument and a separate one of the effigy, accompanies it. In Part I. (1786), are similar ‘Portraits’ of Queen Philippa, of Edward III. &c.
From Basire, Blake could only acquire the mechanical part of Art, even of the engraver's art ; for Basire had little more to communicate. But that part he learned thoroughly and well. Basire's acquirements as an engraver were of a solid though not a fascinating kind. The scholar always retained a loyal feeling towards his old master; and would stoutly defend him and his style against that of more attractive and famous hands,—Strange, Woollett, Bartolozzi. Their ascendency, indeed, led to no little public injustice being done throughout, to Blake's own sterling style of engraving: a circumstance which intensified the artist's aversion to the men. In a MS. descriptive Advertisement (1810) printed in VOL. II. with the title Public Address, relating to the engraving of his own Canterbury Pilgrimage , Blake expresses his contempt for them very candidly—and intemperately perhaps. There too, he records the impression made on him personally, when as a boy he used to see some of them in Basire's studio. ‘Woollett,’ he writes, ‘I knew very intimately by his intimacy with Basire, and knew him to be one of the most ignorant fellows I ever met.
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A machine is not a man, nor a work of art : it is destructive of humanity and of art. Woollett, I know, did not know how to grind his graver. I know this. He has often proved his ignorance before me at Basire's by laughing at Basire's knife-tools, and ridiculing the forms of Basire's other gravers, till Basire was quite dashed and out of conceit with what he himself knew. But his impudence had a contrary effect on me.'—West, for whose reputation Woollett's graver did so much, ‘asserted’ continues Blake, ‘that Woollett's prints ‘ were superior to Basire's, because they had more labour and care. Now this is contrary to the truth. Woollett did not know how to put so much labour into a hand or a foot as Basire did ; he did not know how to draw the leaf of a tree. All his study was clean strokes and mossy tints. . . . Woollett's best works were etched by Jack Brown; Woollett etched very ill himself. The Cottagers, and Jocund Peasants, the Views in Kew Gardens, Foot's Cray, and Diana and Actæon, and, in short, all that are called Woollett's were etched by Jack Brown. And in Woollett's works the etching is all; though even in these a single leaf of a tree is never correct. Strange's prints were, when I knew him, all done by Aliamet and his French journeymen, whose names I forget. I also knew something of John Cooke, who engraved after Hogarth. Cooke wished to give Hogarth what he could take from Raffaelle; that is, outline, and mass, and colour; but he could not.’ Again, in the same one-sided, trenchant strain:—'What is called the English style of engraving, such as proceeded from the toilettes of Woollett and Strange (for theirs were Fribble's toilettes) can never produce character and expression. Drawing—'firm, determinate outline ‘—is in Blake's eyes, all in all:—'Engraving is drawing on copper and nothing else. But, as Gravelot once said to my master, Basire " De English may be very clever in deir own opinions, but day do not draw ." ‘
Before taking leave of Basire we will have a look at the
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house in Great Queen Street, in which Blake passed seven years of his youth; whither Gough, Tyson, and many another enthusiastic dignified antiquary, in knee-breeches and powdered wig, so often bent their steps to have a chat with their favourite engraver. Its door has opened to good company in its time, to engravers, painters, men of letters, celebrated men of all kinds. Just now we saw Goldsmith enter. When Blake was an apprentice, the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields, though already antique, was a stately and decorous one, through which the tide of fashionable life still swayed on daily errands of pleasure or business. The house can yet be identified as No. 31, one of two occupied by Messrs. Corben and Son, the coach-builders, which firm, or rather their predecessors, in Basire's time occupied only No. 30. It stands on the northern side of the street, opposite—to the west or Drury Lane-ward of—Freemasons’ Tavern ; almost exactly opposite New Yard and the noticeable ancient house at one side of that yard, with the stately Corinthian pilasters in well wrought brick. Basire's is itself a seventeenth century house refaced early in the Georgian era, the parapet then put up half hiding the old dormer windows of the third story. Originally, it must either have been part of a larger mansion, or one of a uniformly-built series, having continuous horizontal brick mouldings ; as remnants of the same on its neighbours testify. Outside, it remains pretty much as it must have looked in Blake's time ; old-fashioned people having (Heaven be praised!) tenanted it ever since the first James Basire and after him his widow ended their days there. With its green paint, old casements quiet old-fashioned shop-window, and freedom from the abomination of desolation (stucco), it retains an old-world genuine aspect, rare in London's oldest neighbourhoods, and not at war with the memories which cling around the place.
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CHAPTER IV.



A BOY'S POEMS. 1768-77. [ÆT. 11-20.]
The poetical essays of the years of youth and apprenticeship are preserved in the thin octavo, Poetical Sketches by W. B. , printed by help of friends in 1783, and now so rare, that after some years’ vain attempt, I am forced to abandon the idea of myself owning the book. I have had to use a copy borrowed from one of Blake's surviving friends. In such hands alone, linger, I fancy, the dozen copies or so still extant. There is (of course) none where, at any rate, there should be one—in the British Museum.
‘Tis hard to believe these poems were written in the author's teens, harder still to realize how some of them, in their unforced simplicity, their bold and careless freedom of sentiment and expression, came to be written at all in the third quarter of the eighteenth century : the age ‘of polished phraseology and subdued thought,'—subdued with a vengeance. It was the generation of Shenstone, Langhorne, Mason, Whitehead, the Wartons ; of obscurer Cunningham, Lloyd, Carter. Volumes of concentrated Beauties of English Poetry, volumes as fugitive often as those of original verse, are literary straws which indicate the set of the popular taste. If we glance into one of this date,—say into that compiled towards the close of the century, by one Mr. Thomas Tompkins, which purports to be a collection (expressly compiled ‘to enforce the practice of Virtue') of ‘Such poems as have been universally esteemed the first
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ornaments of our language,'—who are the elect? We have in great force the names just enumerated, and among older poets then read and honoured, to the exclusion of Chaucer and the Elizabethans, so imposing a muster-roll as— Parnell, Mallett, Blacklock, Addison, Gay; and, ascending to the highest heaven of the century's Walhalla, Goldsmith, Thomson, Gray, Pope; with a little of Milton and Shakspere thrown in as make-weight.
Where, beyond the confines of his own most individual mind, did the hosier's son find his model for that lovely web of rainbow fancy already quoted? I know of none in English literature. For the Song commencing
‘My silks and fine array,’
(see Vol. II), with its shy evanescent tints and aroma as of pressed rose-leaves, parallels may be found among the lyrics of the Elizabethan age, an alien though it be in its own. The influence of contemporary models, unless it be sometimes Collins or Thomson, is nowhere in the volume discernible; but involuntary emulation of higher ones partially known to him, there is;—of the Reliques given to the world by Percy in 1760; of Shakspere, Spenser, and other Elizabethans. For the youth's choice of masters was as unfashionable in Poetry as in Design. Among the few students or readers in that day of Shakspere's Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and Sonnets, of Ben Jonson's Underwoods and Miscellanies, the boy Blake was, according to Malkin, an assiduous one. The form of such a poem as
‘Love and harmony combine,’
is inartificial and negligent; but incloses the like intangible spirit of delicate fancy; a lovely blush of life as it were, suffusing the enigmatic form. Even schoolboy blunders against grammar, and schoolboy complexities of expression, fail to break the musical echo, or mar the naive sweetness of the two concluding stanzas; which, in practised hands, might
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have been wrought into more artful melody with little increase of real effect. Again, how many realms of scholastic Pastoral have missed the simple gaiety of one which does not affect to be a ‘pastoral’ at all:—
‘I love the jocund dance.’
Of the remarkable Mad Songextracted by Southey in his Doctor, who probably valued the thin octavo, as became a great Collector, for its rarity and singularity, that poet has said nothing to show he recognised its dramatic power, the daring expression of things otherwise inarticulate, the unity of sentiment, the singular truth with which the key-note is struck and sustained, or the eloquent, broken music of its rhythm.
The ‘marvellous Boy’ that ‘perished in his pride,’ (1770) while certain of these very poems were being written, amid all his luxuriant promise, and memorable displays of Talent produced few so really original as some of them. There are not many more to be instanced of quite such rare quality. But all abound in lavish if sometimes unknit strength. Their faults are such alone as flow from youth, as are inevitable in one whose intellectual activity is not sufficiently logical to reduce his imaginings into sufficiently clear and definite shape. As examples of poetic power and freshness quickening the imperfect, immature form, take his verses To the Evening Star in which the concluding lines subside into a reminiscence, but not a slavish one, of Puck's Night Song in Midsummer Night's Dream; or the lament To the Muses, —not inapposite surely, when it was written; or again, the full-colored invocation To Summer.
In a few of the poems, the influence of Blake's contemporary, Chatterton,—of the Poems of Rowley, i.e., is visible. In the Prologue to King John, Couch of Death, Samson, &c., all written in measured prose, the influence is still more conspicuous of Macpherson's Ossian, which had taken the world
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by storm in Blake's boyhood, and in his manhood was a ruling power in the poetic world. In the ‘Prophetic’ and too often incoherent rhapsodies of later years this influence increases unhappily, leading the prophet to indulge in vague inpalpable personifications, as dim and monotonous as a moor in a mist. To the close of his life, Blake retained his allegians to Ossian and Rowley. ‘I believe,’ writes he, in a MS. note (1826) on Wordsworth's Supplementary Essay,‘I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton; that what they say is ancient, and it is so.’ And again, when the Lake Poet speaks contemptuously of Macpherson, ‘I own to myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other poet whatever; of Rowley and Chatterton also.’
The longest piece in this volume, the most daring and perhaps, considering a self-taught boy wrote it, the most remarkable, is the Fragment or single act, of a Play on the high historic subject of King Edward III.: one of the few in old English history accidentally ommitted from Shakspere's cycle. In his steps it is, not in those of Addison or Home, the ambitious lad strives as a dramatist to tread; and, despite halting verse, confined knowledge, and the anachronism of a modern tone of thought,—not unworthily, though of course with youthful unsteady stride. The manner and something of the spirit of the Historical Plays is caught, far more nearly than by straining Ireland in his forgeries. Of this performance as of the other contents of this volume, specimens must be deferred till Vol. II; not to interrupt the thread of our narrative too much.
Fully to appreciate such poetry as the lad Blake composed in the years 1768-77, let us call to mind the dates at which first peeped above the horizon the cardinal lights which people our modern poetic Heavens, once more wakening into life the dull corpse of English song. Five years later than the last of these dates was published a small volume of Poems, ‘By William Cowper, of the Middle Temple.’ Nine years later (1786) Poems in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert
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Burns, appealed to a Kilmarnock public. Sixteen years later (1793) came the poems Wordsworth afterwards named Juvenile, written between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two; The Evening Walk, and the Descriptive Sketches, with their modest pellucid merit, still in the fettered 18th century manner. Not till twenty-one years later (1798), followed the more memorable Lyrical Ballads, including for one thing, the Tintern Abbey of Wordsworth, for another, The Ancient Mariner of Coleridge.
All these Poems had their influence, prompt or tardy, widening eventually into the universal. All were at any rate published. Some—those of Burns,—appealed to the feelings of the people, and of all classes; those of Cowper to the most numerous and influential section of an English community. The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to one class and that a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again, since the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground are those least practised now.  



Figure: An image of a reclining female figure.



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Morning, or Glad Day

MORNING, OR GLAD DAY

Figure: Engraving. Nude figure personifying Morning, just touching one foot to earth, arms outstretched, rising sun behind head. Creeping caterpillar slides past his planted foot, while night moth flies away into background.



CHAPTER V.



STUDENT AND LOVER. 1778-82. [ÆT. 21-25]
Apprenticeship to Basire having ended, Blake, now (1778) twenty-one, studied for a while in the newly formed Royal Academy : just then in an uncomfortable chrysalis condition, having had to quit its cramped lodgings in Old
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Somerset Palace (pulled down in 1775) and awaiting completion of the new building in which more elbow-room was to be provided. He commenced his course of study at the Academy (in the Antique School) ‘under the eye of Mr. Moser,’ its first Keeper, who had conducted the parent Schools in St. Martins Lane. Moser, like Kauffman and Fuseli, was Swiss by birth : a sixth of our leading artists were still foreigners, as lists of the Original Forty testify. By profession he was a chaser unrivalled in his generation, medallist—he modelled and chased a great seal of England, afterwards stolen—and enamel-painter, in days when costly watch-cases continued to furnish employment for the enamel-painter. He was, in short, a skilled decorative artist during the closing years of Decorative Art's existence as a substantive fact in England, or Europe. The thing itself—the very notion that such art was wanted—was about to expire ; and be succeeded, for a dreary generation or two, by mere blank negation. Miss Moser, afterwards Mrs. Lloyd ‘the celebrated flower painter,’ another of the original members of the Academy, was George Michael Moser's daughter. Edwards, in his Anecdotes of Painters, obscurely declares of the honest Switzer that he was ‘well skilled in the construction of the human figure and, as an instructor in the Academy, his manners, as well as his abilities, rendered him a most respectable master to the students.’ A man of plausible address, as well as an ingenious, the quondam chaser and enameller was, evidently: a favourite with the President (Reynolds), a favourite with royalty. On the occasion of one royal visit to the Academy, after 1780 and its instalment in adequate rooms in the recently completed portion of Chambers’ ‘Somerset Place,’ Queen Charlotte penetrated to the old man's apartment, and made him sit down and have an hour's quiet chat in German with her. To express his exultation at such ‘amiable condescension,’ the proud Keeper could ever after hardly find broken English and abrupt gestures sufficiently startling and whimsical. He was a favourite, too, with the students ; many
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of whom voluntarily testified their regard around his grave in the burial-ground of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, when the time came to be carried thither in January, 1783.
The specific value of the guidance to be had by an ingenuous art-student from the venerable Moser, now a man of seventy-three, is suggestively indicated by a reminiscence afterwards noted down in Blake's MS. commentary on Reynolds’ Discourses.‘I was once,’ he there relates, ‘looking over the prints from Raffaelle 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 and Ruben's Galleries. How did I secretly rage! I also spake my mind! I said to Moser,— “These things that you call finished are not even begun : how then can they be finished?” The man who does not know the beginning cannot know the end of art.’ Which observations ‘tis feared Keeper Moser accounted hardly dutiful. For a well-conducted Student ought, in strict duty, to spend (and in such a case lose) his evening in looking through what his teacher sets before him. It has happened to other Academy students under subsequent Keepers and Librarians, I am told, to find themselves in a similarly awkward dilemma to this of Blake's.
With the Antique, Blake got on well enough, drawing with ‘great care all or certainly nearly all the noble antique figures in various views.’ From the living figure he also drew a good deal : but early conceived a distaste for the study as pursued in the Academies of Art. Already ‘life,’ in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a Model artificially posed to enact an artificial part—to maintain a painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature's —became, as it continued, ‘hateful’ looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, ‘more like death’ than life ; nay, (singular to say), ‘smelling of mortality'—to an imagin-
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ative mind ! ‘Practice and opportunity,’ he used afterwards to declare, ‘very soon teach the language of art:’ as much, that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect quantum. ‘It's spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught ; and these make the artist:’ a truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively in view. Even at their best—as the vision-seer and instinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of his life ( MS. notes to Wordsworth)—mere ‘Natural Objects always did and do weaken, deaden and obliterate imagination in me!’
The student still continued to throw off drawings and verses for his own delight ; out of his numerous store of the former, engraving two designs from English history. One of these engravings, King Edward and Queen Eleanor, ‘published’ by him at a later date (from Lambeth), I have seen. It is a meritorious but heavy piece of business, in the old-fashioned plodding style of line-engraving, wherein the hand monotonously hatched line after line, now struck off by machine. The design itself and the other water-colour drawings of this date, all on historical subjects, which now lie scattered among various hands, have little of the quality or of the mannerism we are accustomed to associate with Blake's name. they remind one rather of Mortimer, the historical painter (now obsolete) of that era, who died, high in reputation with his figure, but neglected by patrons, about this very time, viz. in 1779, at the early age of forty. Of Mortimer, Blake always continued to entertain a very high estimate. The designs of this epoch in his life are correctly drawn, prettily composed, and carefully coloured, in a clear uniform style of equally distributed positive tints. But the costumes are vague and mythical, without being graceful and credible ; what mannerism there is is a timid one, such as reappears in Hamilton always, in Stothard often ; the general effect is heavy and uninteresting,—and the net result a yawn. One drawing
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dating from these years (1778-9), The Penance of Jane Shore in St. Paul's Church, thirty years later was included in Blake's Exhibition of his own Works (1809). In the Descriptive Catalogue he speaks of it with some complacency as ‘proving to the author, and he thinks to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential points.’ To me, on inspecting the same, it proves nothing of the kind ; though it be a very exemplary performance in the manner just indicated. The central figure of Jane Shore has however much grace and sweetness; and the intention of the whole composition is clear and decisive. One extrinsic circumstance materially detracts from the appearance of this and other water-colour drawings from his hand of the period: viz. that, as a substitute for glass, they were all eventually, in prosecution of a hobby of Blake's, varnished—of which process, applied to a water-colour drawing, nothing can exceed the disenchanting, not to say destructive effect.
There is a scarce engraving inscribed ‘W. B. inv. 1780’ (reproduced at the head of this chapter,) which, within certain limitations, has much more of the peculiar Blake quality and intensity about it. The subject is evidently a personification of Morning, or Glad Day: a nude male figure, with one foot on earth, just alighted from above; a flood of radiance still encircling his head; his arms outspread,—as exultingly bringing joy and solace to this lower world,—not with classic Apollo-like indifference, but with the divine chastened fervour of an angelic minister. Below crawls a caterpillar, and a hybrid kind of night-moth takes wing.
Meanwhile, the Poet and Designer, living under his father the hosier's roof, 28, Broad Street, had not only to educate himself in high art, but to earn his livelihood by humbler art—engraver's journey-work. During the years 1779 to 1782 and onwards, one or two booksellers gave him employment in engraving from afterwards better known fellow designers. Harrison of Paternoster Row employed him for his Novelists’
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Magazine, or collection of approved novels ; for his Ladies’ Magazine, and perhaps other serials; J. Johnson, a constant employer during a long series of years, for various books ; and occasionally other booksellers,—Macklin, Buckland, and (later) Dodsley, Stockdale, the Cadells. Among the first in date of such prints, was a well-engraved frontispiece after Stothard, bold and telling in light and shade ('The Four Quarters of the Globe'), to a System of Geography (1779); and another after Stothard ('Clarence's Dream ‘) to Enfield's Speaker, published by Johnson in 1780. Then came with sundry miscellaneous, eight plates after some of Stothard's earliest and most beautiful designs, for the Novelists’ Magazine. The designs brought in young Stothard, hitherto an apprentice to a Pattern-draftsman in Spitalfields, a guinea a-piece,—and established his reputation : their intrinsic grace, feeling, and freshness being (for one thing) advantageously set off by very excellent engraving, of an infinitely more robust and honest kind than the smooth style of Heath and his School which succeeded to it and eventually brought about the ruin of line-engraving for book illustrations. Of Blake's eight engravings, all thorough and sterling pieces of workmanship, two were illustrations of Don Quixote, one of the Sentimental Journey (1782), one of Miss Fielding's David Simple, another of Launcelot Greaves, three of Grandison (1782-3).
One Trotter, a fellow-engraver who received instructions from Blake, engraved a print or two after Stothard, and was also draftsman to the calico-printers, had introduced Blake to Stothard, the former's senior by nearly two years, then lodging in company with Shelly, the miniature painter, in the Strand. Stothard introduced Blake to Flaxman, who after seeing some of the early graceful plates in the Novelists’ Magazine, had of his own accord made their designer's acquaintance. Flaxman, of the same age and standing as Stothard, was as yet subsisting by his designs for the first Wedgwood, and also living in the Strand with his father who
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there kept a well-known plaster-cast shop when plaster-cast shops were rare. A wistful remembrance of the superiority of ‘old Flaxman's’ casts still survives among artists. In 1781 the sculptor married, taking house and studio of his own at 27, Wardour Street, and becoming Blake's near neighbour. He proved—despite some passing clouds which for a time obscured their friendship at a later era—one of the best and firmest friends Blake ever had, as great artists often prove to one another in youth. The imaginative man needed friends ; for his gifts were not of the bread-winning sort. He was one of those whose genius is in a far higher ratio than their talents : and it is Talent which commands worldly success. Amidst the miscellaneous journey-work which about this period kept Blake's graver going, if not his mind, may be mentioned the illustrations to a show-list of Wedgwood's productions, specimens of his latest novelties in earthenware and porcelain—tea and dinner services, &c. Seldom have such very humble essays in Decorative Art— good enough in form, but not otherwise remarkable—tasked the combined energies of a Flaxman and a Blake! To the list of the engraver's friends was afterwards added Fuseli, of maturer age and acquirements, man of letters as well as Art, a multifarious and learned author. From intercourse with minds like these, much was learned by Blake, in his art and out of it. In 1780, Fuseli, then thirty-nine, just returned from eight years’ sojourn in Italy, became a neighbour, lodging in Broad Street, where he remained until 1782. In the latter year, his original and characteristic picture of The Nightmare made ‘a sensation’ at the Exhibition: the first of his to do so. The subsequent engraving gave him a European reputation. Artists’ homes as well as studios abounded then in Broad Street and its neighbourhood. Bacon the sculptor lived in Wardour Street, Paul Sandby in Poland Street, the fair R.A., Angelica Kauffman in Golden Square, Bartolozzi with his apprentice Sherwin in Broad Street itself and, at a later date, John Varley, ‘father of
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modern Water Colours,’ in the same street (No. 15). Literary celebrities were not wanting: in Wardour Street, Mrs. Chapone; in Poland Street, pushing, pompous Dr. Burney, of Musical History notoriety.
In the catalogue of the now fairly established Royal Academy's Exhibition for 1780, its twelfth, and first at Somerset House— all previous had been held in its ‘Old Room’ (originally built for an auction room), on the south side of Pall Mall East—appears for the first time a work by ‘W. Blake.’ It was an Exhibition of only 489 ‘articles’ in all, waxwork and ‘designs for a fan' inclusive ; among its leading exhibitors, boasting Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mary Moser, R.A., Gainsborough and Angelica Kauffman, R.A. Cosway, and Loutherbourg, Paul Sandby and Zoffany, Copley (Lyndhurst's father), and Fuseli, not yet Associate. Blake's contribution is the Death of Earl Godwin exhibited in ‘The Ante-room’ devoted to flower-pieces, crayons, miniatures, and water-colour landscapes—some by Gainsborough. This first Exhibition in official quarters went off with much éclat, netting double the average amount realized by its predecessors: viz. as much as 3,000 l.
In the sultry, early days of June, 1780, the Lord George Gordon No-Popery Riots rolled through Town. Half London was sacked, and its citizens for six days laid under forced contributions by a mob some forty thousand strong of boys, pickpockets, and ‘roughs.’ In this outburst of anarchy, Blake long remembered an involuntary participation of his own. On the third day, Tuesday, 6th of June, ‘the Mass-houses’ having already been demolished—one, in Blake's near neighbourhood, Warwick Street, Golden Square—and various private houses also ; the rioters, flushed with gin and victory, were turning their attention to grander schemes of devastation. That evening, the artist happened to be walking in a route chosen by one of the mobs at large, whose course lay from Justice Hyde's house near Leicester Fields, for the destruction of which less than an hour had sufficed, through Long Acre,
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past the quiet house of Blake's old master, engraver Basire in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, and down Holborn, bound for Newgate. Suddenly, he encountered the advancing wave of triumphant Blackguardism, and was forced (for from such a great surging mob there is no disentanglement) to go along in the very front rank, and witness the storm and burning of the fortress-like prison, and release of its three hundred inmates. This was a peculiar experience for a spiritual poet ; not without peril, had a drunken soldier chanced to have identified him during the after weeks of indiscriminate vengeance: those black weeks when strings of boys under fourteen were hung up in a row to vindicate the offended majesty of the Law. ‘I never saw boys cry so!’ observed Selwyn, connoisseur in hanging, in his Diary.
It was the same Tuesday night, one may add, that among the obnoxious mansions of magistrate and judge gutted of furniture, and consigned to the flames, Lord Mansfield's in Bloomsbury Square was numbered. That night, too—every householder having previously chalked the talisman, ‘No Popery,’ on his door, (the very Jews inscribing ‘This House True Protestant!’) every house showing a blue flag, every wayfarer having donned the blue cockade—that night the Londoners with equal unanimity illuminated their windows. Still wider stupor of fear followed next day : and to it, a still longer sleepless night of prison-burning, drunken infatuation, and onsets from the military, let slip at last from civil leash. Six-and-thirty fires are to be seen simultaneously blazing in one new neighbourhood (Bloomsbury), not far from Blake's and still nearer to Basire's ; whence are heard the terrible shouts of excited crowds, mingling with the fiercer roar of the flames, and with the reports of scattered musket-shots at distant points from the soldiery. Some inhabitants catch up their household effects and aimlessly run up and down the streets with them; others cheerfully pay their guinea a mile for a vehicle to carry them beyond the
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tumult. These were not favourable days for designing, or even quiet engraving.
Since his twentieth year, Blake's energies had been ‘wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession’ as artist: too much so to admit of leisure or perhaps inclination for poetry. Engrossing enough was the indispensable effort to master the difficulties of Design, with pencil or in water-colours. With the still tougher mechanical difficulties of oil-painting he never fairly grappled; but confined himself to water-colours and tempera (on canvas), with, in after years a curious modification of the latter—which he daringly christened ‘fresco.' Original invention now claimed more than all his leisure. His working-hours during the years 1780 to 1782 were occupied by various book-plates for the publications already named. These voluminous, well-illustrated serials are not infrequently stumbled on by the Collector at the second-hand booksellers. Very few are to be found in our Museum Library, professedly miscellaneous as that collection is. In the Print Room exists a fine series of engravings after Stothard ; which, however, being undated, affords little help to those wishing to learn something about the engravers of them.
These were days of Courtship, too. And the course of Blake's love did not open smoothly. ‘A lively little girl’ in his own, or perhaps a humbler station, the object of his first sighs readily allowed him, as girls in a humbler class will, meaning neither marriage nor harm, to ‘keep company’ with her; to pay his court, take mutual walks, and be as lovesick as he chose; but nowise encouraged the idea of a wedding. In addition to the pangs of fruitless love, attacks of jealousy had stoically to be borne. When he complained that the favour of her company in a stroll had been extended to another admirer, ‘Are you a fool ?’ was the brusque reply— with a scornful glance. ‘That cured me of jealousy,’ Blake used naïvely to relate. One evening at a friend's house he was bemoaning in a corner his love-crosses. His
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listener, a dark-eyed generous-hearted girl, frankly declared ‘She pitied him from her heart.’ ‘Do you pity me ?’ Yes ! I do, most sincerely.’ ‘Then I love you for that!’ he replied with enthusiasm:—such soothing pity is irresistible. And a second more prosperous courtship began. At this, or perhaps a later meeting, followed the confession, I dare say in lower tones, ’ Well! and I love you!‘—always, doubtless, a pretty one to hear.
The unsophisticated maiden was named Catherine Sophia Boucher—plebeian corruption, probably, of the grand historic name, Bourchier;—daughter of William and Mary Boucher of Battersea. So at least the Register gives the name: where, within less than ten years, no fewer than seven births to the same parents, including two sets of twins in succession, immediately precede hers. Her position and connexions in life were humble, humbler than Blake's own ; her education— as to book-lore—neglected, not to say omitted. For even the (at first) paltry makeshift of National Schools had not yet been invented; and Sunday Schools were first set going a little after this very time, namely in 1784. When, by and by, Catherine's turn came, as bride, to sign the Parish Register, she, as the same yet mutely testifies, could do no more than most young ladies of her class then, or than the Bourchiers, Stanleys, and magnates of the land four centuries before could do—viz. make a X as ‘her mark:’ her surname on the same occasion being misspelt for her and vulgarized into Butcher, and her second baptismal name omitted. A bright-eyed, dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim graceful form, can make a young artist and poet overlook such trifles as defective scholarship. Nor were a fair outside and a frank accessible heart deceptive lures in this instance. Catherine—Christian namesake, by the way, of Blake's mother—was endowed with a loving loyal nature, an adaptive open mind, capable of profiting by good teaching, and of enabling her, under constant high influence, to become a meet companion to her imaginative husband in his solitary
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and wayward course. Uncomplainingly and helpfully, she shared the low and rugged fortunes which over-originality insured as his unvarying lot in life. She had mind and the ambition which follows. Not only did she prove a good housewife on straitened means, but in after-years, under his tuition and hourly companionship, she acquired, besides the useful arts of reading and writing, that which very few uneducated women with the honestest effort ever succeed in attaining—some footing of equality with her husband, She, in time, came to work off his engravings as though she had been bred to the trade; nay, imbibed enough of his very spirit to reflect it in Design which might almost have been his own.
Allan Cunningham says she was a neighbour. But the marriage took place at Battersea, where I trace relatives of Blake's father to have been then living. During the course of the courtship, many a happy Surrey ramble must have been taken towards and around the pleasant village of the St. Johns. The old family-seat, spacious and venerable, still stood, in which Lord Bolingbroke had been born and died, which Pope had often visited. The village was ‘four miles from London’ then, and had just begun to shake hands with Chelsea by a timber bridge over the Thames; the river bright and clear there at low tide as at Richmond now, with many a placid angler dotting its new bridge. Green meadow and bright cornfield lay between the old-fashioned winding High Street and the purple heights of Wimbledon and Richmond. In the volume of 1783, among the poems which have least freshness of feeling, being a little alloyed by false notes as of the poetic Mocking Bird, are one or two love-poems anticipating emotions as yet unfelt. And Love, it is said, must be felt ere it can be persuasively sung. One or two stanzas, if we did not know they had been written long before, might well have been allusive to the ‘black-eyed maid’ of present choice and the ‘sweet village’ where he wooed her.
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  • When early morn walks forth in sober grey,
  • Then to my black-ey'd maid I haste away;
  • When evening sits beneath her dusky bow'r
  • And gently sighs away the silent hour,
  • The village-bell alarms, away I go,
  • And the vale darkens at my pensive woe.
  • To that sweet village, where my black-ey’ maid
  • Doth drop a tear beneath the silent shade,
  • I turn my eyes; and pensive as I go,
  • 10Curse my black stars, and bless my pleasing woe.
  • Oft when the summer sleeps among the trees,
  • Whisp'ring faint murmurs to the scanty breeze,
  • I walk the village round; if at her side
  • A youth doth walk in stolen joy and pride,
  • I curse my stars in bitter grief and woe,
  • That made my love so high and me so low.
The last is an inapplicable line to the present case,—decidely unprophetic. In a better, more Blake-like manner is the other poem, apposite to how many thousand lovers, in how many climes, since man first came into the planet.
  • My feet are wing'd while o'er the dewy lawn
  • I meet my maiden risen with the morn:
  • Oh, bless those holy feet, like angel's feet!
  • Oh, bless those limbs beaming with heavenly light!
  • As when an angel glitt'ring in the sky
  • In times of innocence and holy joy,
  • The joyful shepherd stops his grateful song
  • To hear the music of that angel's tongue:
  • So when she speaks, the voice of Heav'n I hear;
  • 10So when we walk, nothing impure comes near;
  • Each field seems Eden and each calm retreat;
  • Each village seems the haunt of holy feet.
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  • But that sweet village where my black-ey'd maid
  • Closes her eyes in sleep beneath the Night's shade,
  • Whene'er I enter, more than mortal fire
  • Burns in my soul, and does my song inspire.
The occasional hackneyed rhyme, awkward construction, and verbal repetition, entailed by the requirements of very inartificial verse, are technical blemishes any poetical reader may by ten minutes’ manipulation mend, but such as clung to Blake's verse in later and maturer years.
The lovers were married, Blake being in his twenty-fifth year, his bride in her twenty-first, on a Sunday in August (the 18th), 1782, in the then newly rebuilt church of Battersea : a ‘handsome edifice,’ say contemporary topographers. Which, in the present case, means a whitey-brown brick building in the church-warden style, relying for architectual effect externally, on a nondescript steeple, a low slate roof, double rows of circular-headed windows, and an elevated western portico in a strikingly picturesque and unique position, almost upon the river as it were, which here takes a sudden bend to the south-west, the body of the church stretching alongside it. The interior, with its galleries (in which are interesting seventeenth and eighteenth century mural tablets from the old church, one by Roubiliac), and elaborately decorated apsidal dwarf-chancel, has an imposing effect and a strongly marked characteristic accent (of its Day), already historical and interesting. There, standing above the vault wherein lies the coronetted coffin of Pope's Bolingbroke, the two plighted troth. The vicar who joined their hands, Joseph Gardnor, was himself an amateur artist of note in his day, copious ‘honorary contributor’ (not above customers) to the Exhibitions ; sending ‘ Views from the Lakes,’ from Wales, and other much-libelled Home Beauties, and even Landscape Compositions ‘in the style of the Lakes,’ whatever that may mean. Specimens of this master—pasteboard-like model of misty mountain, old manorial houses as of cards, perspective-
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less diagram of lovely vale—may be inspected in Williams’ plodding History of Monmouthshire, and in other books of topography. Engravers had actually to copy and laboriously bite in these young-lady-like Indian ink drawings. Conspicuous mementoes of the vicar's Taste and munificence still survive, parochially, in the ‘handsome crimson curtains’ trimmed with amber, and held up by gold cord with heavy gold tassels, festooned about the painted eastern window of the church : or rather in deceptively perfect imitations of such upholstery, painted ('tis said) by the clergyman's own skilled hand on the light-grained wall of the circular chancel. The window is an eighteenth century remnant piously preserved from the old church : a window literally painted not stained— the colours not burnt in, that is ; so that a deluded cleaner on one occasion rubbed out a portion. The subjects are armorial bearings of the St. Johns, and (at bottom) portraits of three august collateral connexions of the Family: Margaret Beauchamp, Henry VII, and Queen Elizabeth. The general effect is good in colour, not without a tinge of ancient harmony, yellow being the predominating hue. From the vicar's hand, again, are the two small ‘paintings on glass,'— The Lamb bearing the sacred monogram, and The Dove (descending),— which fill the two circular side-windows, of an eminently domestic type, in the curvilinear chancel-wall: paintings so ‘natural’ and familiarly ‘like,’ an innocent spectator forgets perhaps their sacred symbolism—as possibly did the artist too! Did the future designer of The Gates of Paradise, the Jerusalem, and the Job, kneel beneath these trophies of religious art?
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CHAPTER VI.



INTRODUCTION TO THE POLITE WORLD . 1782-84. [ÆT. 25-27.]
To his father, Blake's early and humble marriage is said to have been unacceptable ; and the young couple did not return to the hosier's roof. They commenced housekeeping on their own account in lodgings at 23, Green Street, Leicester Fields; in which Fields or Square, on the north side, the junior branches of Royalty had lately abode, and on the east (near Green Street) great Hogarth. On the west side of it Sir Joshua, in these very years, had his handsome house and noble gallery. Green Street, then the abode of quiet private citizens, is now a nondescript street, given up to curiosity-shops, shabby lodging-houses and busy feet hastening to and from the Strand. No. 23, on the right-hand side going citywards, next to the house at the corner of the Square, is one—from the turn the narrow Street here takes—at right angles with and looking down the rest of it. At present, part tenanted by a shoemaker, the house is in an abject plight of stucco, dirt, and dingy desolation. In the previous year, as we have seen, friendly Flaxman had married and taken a house.
About this time, or a little earlier, Blake was introduced by the admiring, sympathetic sculptor to the accomplished Mrs. Mathew, his own warm friend. The ‘celebrated Mrs. Mathew?’ Alas! for tenure of mortal Fame! This
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lady ranked among the distinguished blue-stockings of her day; was once known to half the Town, the polite and lettered part thereof, as the agreeable, fascinating, spirituelle Mrs. Mathew, as, in brief, one of the most ‘gifted and elegant’ of women. As she does not, like her fair comrades, still flutter about the bookstalls among the half-remembered all-unread, and as no lettered contemporary has handed down her portrait, she has disappeared from us. Yet the lady, with her husband, the Rev. Henry Mathew, merit remembrance from the lovers of Art, as the first discoverers and fosterers of the genius of Flaxman, when a boy not yet in teens, and his introducer to more opulent patrons. Their son, afterwards Dr. Mathew, was John Hunter's favourite pupil. Learned as well as elegant, she would read Homer in Greek to the future sculptor, interpreting as she went, while the child sat by her side sketching a passage here and there; and thus she stimulated him to acquire hereafter some knowledge of the language for himself. She was an encourager of musicians, a kind friend to young artists. To all of promising genius the doors of her house, 27, Rathbone Place, were open. Rathbone Place, not then made over to papier-maché, Artist's colours, toy-shops, and fancy-trades, was a street of private houses, stiffly genteel and highly respectable, nay, in a sedate way, quasi fashionable ; the Westbourne Street of that day, when the adjacent district of Bloomsbury with its Square, in which (on the countryward side) was the Duke of Bedford's grand House, was absolutely fashionable and comparatively new, lying on the northern skirts of London; when Great Ormond Street, Queen's Square, Southampton Row, were accounted ‘places of pleasure, ‘being’ in one of the most charming situations about town, ‘next the open fields, and commanding a ‘beautiful landscape formed by the hills of Highgate and Hampstead and adjacent country.’ Among the residents of Rathbone Place, the rebel Lords Lovat, Kilmarnock, Balmarino had at one time been numbered. Of the Mathews’ house, by the
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way, now divided into two, both of them shops, the library or back parlour, garrulous Smith (Nollekens's biographer) in his Book for a Rainy Day tells us, was decorated by grateful Flaxman ‘with models in putty and sand, of figures in niches in the Gothic manner :’ quære if still extant? The window was painted ‘in imitation of stained glass'—just as that in Battersea church, those at Strawberry Hill, and elsewhere were, the practice being one of the valued arts or artifices of the day—by Loutherbourg's assistant, young Oram, another protégé. The furniture, again, ‘bookcases, tables, and chairs,’ were also ornamented to accord with the appearance of those ‘of antiquity.’
Mrs. Mathew's drawing-room was frequented by most of the literary and known people of the last quarter of the century, was a centre of all then esteemed enlightened and delightful in society. Réunions were held in it such as Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Vesey had first set going, unconsciously contributing the word blue-stocking to our language. There, in the list of her intimate friends and companions, would assemble those esteemed ornaments of their sex,—unreadable Chapone, of well improved mind ; sensible Barbauld; versatile, agreeable Mrs. Brooke, novelist and dramatist; learned and awful Mrs. Carter, a female Great Cham of literature, and protectress of ‘Religion and Morality.’ Thither came sprightly, fashionable Mrs. Montagu herself, Conyers Middleton's pupil, champion of Shakspere in his urgent need against rude Voltaire, and a letter-writer almost as vivacious and piquante in the modish style as her namesake Lady Wortley; her printed correspondence remaining still readable and entertaining. This is the lady whose powers of mind and conversation Dr. Johnson estimated so highly, and whose good opinion he so highly valued, though at last to his sorrow falling out of favour with her. It was she who gave the annual May-Day dinner to the chimney sweeps, in commemoration of a well-known family incident. As illustrative of their status with the public, let us add, on Smith's authority,
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that the four last-named beaux-esprits figured as Muses in the Frontispiece to a Lady's Pocket Book for 1778—a flattering apotheosis of nine contemporary female wits, including Angelica Kauffman and Mrs. Sheridan. Perhaps pious, busy Hannah More, as yet of the world, as yet young and kittenish, though not without claws, also in her youth a good letter-writer in the woman-of-the-world style; perhaps, being of the Montagu circle, she also would make one at Mrs. Mathew's, on her visits to town to see her publishers, the Cadells, about some ambling poetic 4to. Florio and the Basbleu, modest Sacred Drama, heavy 8vo. Strictures on Female Education, or other fascinating lucubration on
"Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate :"
dissertations, which, after having brought their author in some thirty thousand pounds sterling, a capricious public consumes with less avidity than it did. Good heavens! what a frowsy, drowsy ‘party sitting in a parlour,’ now ‘all silent and all damned’ (in a literary sense), these venerable ladies and great literary luminaries of their day, ladies once lively and chatty enough, seem to an irreverent generation, at their present distance from us. The spiritual interval is an infinitely wider one than the temporal; so foreign have mere eighteenth-century habits of thought and prim conventions become. Let us charitably believe the conversation of the fair was not so dull as their books; that there was the due enlivenment of scandal and small talk; and that Mrs. Mathew—by far the most pleasant to think of, because she did not commit herself to a book—that she, with perhaps Mrs. Brooke and Mrs. Montagu, took the leading parts.
The disadvantages of a neglected education, such as Blake's, are considerable. But, one is here reminded, the disadvantages of a false one are greater: when the acquisition of a second nature of conventionality, misconception of
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high models and worship of low ones, is the kind in vogue. An inestimable advantage for an original mind to have retained its freedom, the healthy play of native powers, of virgin faculties yet unsophisticate!
Mrs. Mathew's husband was a known man, too, man of taste and virtù, incumbent of the neighbouring Proprietary Chapel, Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, built for him by admiring lay friends ; an edifice known to a later generation as the theatre of Satan Montgomery's displays. Mr. Mathew filled also a post of more prestige as afternoon preacher at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; and ‘read the church-service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,’ a lady who had heard him informs me—and as others too used to think, Flaxman for one. With which meagre biographic trait, the inquisitive reader must be satisfied. The most diligent search yields nothing further. That he was an amiable, kindly man we gather from the circumstances of his first notice of the child Flaxman in the father's cast-shop, coughing over his Latin behind the counter, and of his continued notice of the weakly child during the years which elapsed before he was strong enough to walk from the Strand to Rathbone Place, and be received into the sunshine of Mrs. Mathew's smiles.
To that lady's agreeable and brilliant conversazioni Blake was made welcome. At one of them, a little later (in 1784), Nollekens Smith, most literal, most useful of gossips, then a youth of eighteen, first saw the poet-painter, and ‘heard him read and sing several of his poems'—'often heard him.’ Yes! sing them; for Blake had composed airs to his verses. Wholly ignorant of the art of music, he was unable to note down these spontaneous melodies, and repeated them by ear. Smith reports that his tunes were sometimes ‘most singularly beautiful,’ and ‘were noted down by musical professors;’ Mrs. Mathew's being a musical house. I wish one of these musical professors or his executors would produce a sample. Airs simple and ethereal to match the designs and poems of
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William Blake would be a novelty in music. One would fain hear the melody invented for
How sweet I roam'd from field to field—
or for some of the Songs of Innocence. ‘He was listened to by the company,’ adds Smith, ‘with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit.’ Phœnix amid an admiring circle of cocks and hens is alone a spectacle to compare mentally with this!
The accomplished hostess for a time took up Blake with much fervour. His poetic recitals kindled so much enthusiasm in her feminine bosom that she urged her husband to join his young friend Flaxman, in placing the poems—those of which we gave an account at the date of composition—in the clear light of print and to assume half the cost. Which, accordingly, was done, in 1783 : the year in which happened the execution for forgery of the gifted fellow-engraver—in whose face the boy Blake, twelve years before, had so strangely deciphered omens of his fate—Ryland. This unfortunate man's prepossessing appearance and manners inspired, on the other hand, so much confidence in the governor of the prison in which he awaited trial, that on one occasion the former took him out for a walk, implicitly trusting to his good faith that he would not avail himself of the opportunity to run away. Ryland's was the last execution at Tyburn, then still on the outside of London. This was the year, too, in which Barry published his Account of the Pictures in the Adelphi. On one copy I have seen a characteristic pencil recollection, from Blake's hand, of the strange Irishman's ill-favoured face : that of an idealized bulldog, with villainously low forehead, turn-up nose, and squalid tout-ensemble. It is strong evidence of the modest Flaxman's generous enthusiasm for his friend that, himself a struggling artist, little patronized, he should have made the first offer of printing these poems, and at his
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Sig. Vol. I. E
own charge; and that he now bore a moiety of the cost. The book only runs to 74 pages, 8vo., and its unpretending title-page stands thus: Poetical Sketches; by W. B., London: Printed in the Year 1783. The clergyman ‘with his usual urbanity’ penned a preface stating the youthful authorship of the volume, apologizing for ‘irregularities and defects’ in the poems, and ‘hoping their poetic originality merits some respite from oblivion.’
The author's absence of the leisure, ‘requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye, is pleaded.’ Little revisal certainly they had, not even correction of the press, apparently. The pamphlet, which has no printer's name to be discredited by it, is as carelessly printed as an old English play, evidently at an establishment which did not boast a ‘reader.' Semi-colons and fullstops where commas should be, misprints, such as ‘beds of dawn’ for ‘birds,’ by no means help out the meaning. The whole impression was presented to Blake to sell to friends or publish, as he should think best. Unfortunately, it never got published and, for all purposes except that of preservation, might as well have continued MS. As in those days there still survived, singular to say, a bonâ fide market for even mediocre verse, publishers and editors actually handing over hard cash for it, just as if it were prose, Blake's friends would have done better to have gone to the Trade with his poems. The thin octavo did not even get so far as the Monthly Review; at all events, it does not appear in the copious and explicit Index of ‘books noticed’ in that periodical, now quite a manual of extinct literature.
The poems J. T. Smith, in 1784, heard Blake sing, can hardly have been those known to his hearers by the printed volume of 1783, but fresh ones, to the composition of which the printing of that volume had stimulated him : some, doubtless, of the memorable and musical Songs of Innocence, as they were subsequently named.
Blake's course of soirées in Rathbone Place was not long a
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smooth one. ‘It happened unfortunately,’ writes enigmatic Smith, whose forte is not grammar, ‘soon after this period'— soon after 1784, that is, the year during which Smith heard him ‘read and sing his poems’ to an attentive auditory— ‘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’:—and after a time ceased altogether, ‘tis to be feared. One's knowledge of Blake's various originalities of thought on all subjects, his stiffness, when roused, in maintaining them, also his high, though at ordinary moments inobtrusive notions of his calling, of the dignity of it, and its superiority to all mere worldly distinctions, help to elucidate gossiping John Thomas. One readily understands that on more intimate acquaintance, when it was discovered by well-regulated minds that the erratic Bard perversely came to teach, not to be taught, nor to be gently schooled into imitative proprieties and condescendingly patted on the back, he became less acceptable to the polite world at No. 27, than when first started as a prodigy in that elegant arena.  



Figure: A figure standing under a tree.



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Sig. E 2
CHAPTER VII.



STRUGGLE AND SORROW. 1782-87. [ÆT. 25-30.]
 



Figure: Print of skeleton lying supine, just below chapter title.



Returning to 1782-3, among the engravings executed by Blake in those years, I have noticed after Stothard, four illustrations—two vignettes and two oval plates—to Scott of Amwell's Poems, published by Buckland (1782) ; two frontispieces to Dodsley's Lady's Pocket Book—'The morning amusements of H.R.H. the Princess Royal and her four sisters’ (1782), and ‘A Lady in full-dress’ with another ‘in the most fashionable undress now worn’ (1783);—and The Fall of Rosamond, a circular plate in a book published by Macklin (1783). To the latter year also, the first after Blake's marriage, belong about eight or nine of the vignettes after the purest and most lovely of the early and best designs of the same artist—full of sweetness, refinement, and graceful fancy—which illustrate Ritson's Collection of English Songs (3 vols. 8vo.); others being engraved by Grignon, Heath, &c. In the first volume occur the best designs, and—what is remarkable—designs very Blake-like in feeling and conception ; having the air of graceful translation of his inventions. Most in this volume are engraved by Blake, and very finely,
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with delicacy, as well as force. I may instance in particular one at the head of the Love Songs, a Lady singing, Cupids fluttering before her, a singularly refined composition; another, a vignette to Jemmy Dawson, which is, in fact, Hero awaiting Leander ; another to When Lovely Woman, a sitting figure of much dignity and beauty.
In after-years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions—as to motive and composition his own, that is. The strict justice of this complaint I can hardly measure, because I know not how much of the Design he afterwards engraved was actually being produced at this period—doubtless much. We shall hereafter have to point out that a good deal in Flaxman and Stothard may be traced to Blake, is indeed only Blake in the Vernacular, classicized and (perhaps half-unconsciously) adapted. His own compositions bear the authentic first-hand impress ; those unmistakable traces, which no hand can feign, of genuineness, freshness, and spontaneity ; the look as of coming straight from another world—that in which Blake's spirit lived. He, in his cherished visionary faculty, his native power and lifelong habit of vivid Invention, was placed above all need or inclination to borrow from others. If, as happens to all, there occur occasional passages of unconscious reminiscence from the Old Masters, there is no cooking or disguise. His friend Fuseli, with characteristic candour, used to declare, ‘Blake is d——d good to steal from!'
Certainly, Stothard, though even he could by utmost diligence only earn a moderate income—for if in request with the publishers he was neglected by picture-buyers—was throughout life, compared with Blake, a prosperous, affluent man. He had, throughout, the advantage of Blake with the public. Hence, early, some feeling of soreness in his uncompliant companion's bosom. Stothard had the advantage
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in the marketable quality of his genius, in his versatile talents, his superior technic attainments—or, rather, superior consistency of attainment ; above all, in his inborn grace and elegance. He could make the refined Domestic groups he so readily conceived, whether all his own or in part borrowed, far more palatable to the many, the cultivated many—cultivated Rogers for example, his life-long patron— than Blake could ever make his Dantesque sublimity, wild Titanic play of fancy, and spiritually imaginative dreams. I think the latter, as we shall see when we come to the Songs of Innocence and Experience, was at this period of his life influenced to his advantage as a designer by contact with Stothard's graceful mind ; but that any capability of grander qualities occasionally shown by Stothard was derived, and perhaps as unconsciously, from Blake. And Stothard's earlier style is far purer and more ‘matterful,’ to use an expression of Charles Lamb's, than the sugar-plum manner of his latter years. In Stothard as in Blake, however nominally various the subject, there is the tyrannous predominance of certain ruling ideas of the designer's. Stothard's tether was always shorter than Blake's; but within the prescribed limits, his performance was the more (superficially) perfect, as well as soft, and rounded.
In 1784 I find Blake engraving after Stothard and others in the Wit's Magazine. The Wit's Magazine was a ‘Monthly Repository for the Parlour Window':— not designed (as the title in those free-speaking days might warrant a suspicion) to raise a blush on Lady's cheek :—a miscellany of innocently entertaining rather than strictly witty gleanings, and original contributions, mostly amateur. A periodical curious to look back upon in days of a weekly Punch! It would be difficult now to find a literary parallel to Mr. Harrison's plan of ‘creating a spirit of emulation, and rewarding genius : ‘by awarding ‘one silver medal’ per month to the ‘best witty tale, essay, or poem,’ another to ‘the best answer’ to the munificent proprietor's ‘prize enigmas.’ A full list of the names and addresses
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of successful candidates for Fame is appended to each of the two octavo volumes to which the Magazine ran. A graceful grotesque, the Temple of Mirth, of Stothard's design, is the frontispiece to the first number: a folding sheet forcibly engraved by Blake in his characteristic manner of distributing strongly contrasted light and shade and tone. To it succeeded, month by month, four similar engravings by him after a noted caricaturist of the day now forgotten, S. Collings: on broad-grin themes, such as The Tithe in Kind, or the Sow's Revenge, The Discomfited Duellists , The Blind Beggar's Hats, and May Day in London. After which, an engraver of lower grade, one Smith, ( quære, our friend Nollekens Smith?) executes the engravings; and after him a nameless one. The engraving caricatures of the earth earthy for this ‘Library of Momus’ was truly a singular task for a spiritual poet!
Some slight clue to the original Design of this period in a somewhat different key is given by the Exhibition-Catalogues, which report Blake as making a second appearance at the Academy in 1784. In that year,—the year of Reynolds's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Fortune-Teller,—there hung in the ‘Drawing and Sculpture Room,’ two designs of Blake's: one,— War unchained by an Angel—Fire, Pestilence and Famine following ; the other, a Breach in a City— The Morning after a Battle. Companion-subjects, their tacit moral— the supreme despicableness of War—was one of which the artist, in all his tenets thorough-going, was a fervent propagandist in days when War was tyrannously in the ascendant. This, by the way, was the year of Peace with the tardily recognised North American States. I have not seen the former of those two drawings. The same theme gave birth about twenty years later to four very fine water-colour drawings,—for Dantesque intensity, imaginative directness, and power of the terrible : illustrations of the doings of the Destroying Angels that War lets loose— Fire, Plague, Pestilence, and Famine. Of the second-named we give here a reduced
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Plague

Plague.

Figure: Watercolor drawing depicting Plague, one of Blake's four Destroying Angels loosed by War. Figures in the foreground, dressed in classical costume, care for and mourn over those who have succumbed. A conflagration and looming black cloud occupies a corner of the background. A study of a female mourner hovers over the drawing and that of the dead in their shared grave appears below, just above the title.



page: [54b]
Note: blank page
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version. A vivid expositor of Blake ( London Quarterly Review, January 1869) says of this design :—‘An inexorable severe grandeur pervades the general lines; an inexplicable woe—as of Samaria in the deadly siege, when Joram, wandering on the walls, was obliged to listen to the appeal of the cannibal mother—hangs over it. A sense of tragic culmination, the stroke of doom irreversible comes through the windows of the eyes, as they take in the straight black lines of the pall and bier; the mother falling from her husband's embrace with her dying child; one fair corpse scarcely earthed over in the foreground, and the black funereal reek of a distant fire which consumes we know not what difficult horror. It is enough to fire the imagination of the greatest historical painter.’ Another very grand and awe-inspiring illustration of still later date, of the same suggestive theme, is Let loose the Dogs of War—a demon or savage cheering on blood-hounds who seize a man by the throat; of which Mr. Ruskin possesses the original pencil sketch, Mr. Linnell the water-colour drawing.
During the summer of 1784, died Blake's father, an honest shopkeeper of the old school, and a devout man—a dissenter. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, on the fourth of July (a Sunday) says the Register. The second son, James,—a year and a half William's senior,—continued to live with the widow Catherine, and succeeded to the hosier's business in Broad Street, still a highly respectable street, and a good one for trade, as it and the whole neighbourhood continued until the era of Nash and the ‘first gentleman in Europe.’ Golden Square was still the ‘town residence’ of some half-dozen M.P.'s—for county or rotten borough ; Poland Street and Great Marlborough Street of others. Between this brother and the artist no strong sympathy existed, little community of sentiment or common ground (mentally) of any kind; although indeed, James—for the most part an humble matter-of-fact man—had his spiritual and visionary side too; would at times talk Swedenborg, talk of seeing Abraham and Moses,
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and to outsiders seem, like his gifted brother, ‘a bit mad'—a mild madman instead of a wild and stormy.
On his father's death, Blake, who found Design yield no income, Engraving but a scanty one, returned from Green Street, Leicester Fields, to familiar Broad Street. At No. 27, next door to his brother's, he set up shop as printseller and engraver, in partnership with a former fellow-apprentice at Basire's : James Parker, a man some six or seven years his senior. An engraving by Blake after Stothard, Zephyrus and Flora (a long oval), was published by the firm "Parker and Blake" this same year (1784). Mrs. Mathew, still friendly and patronizing, though one day to be less eager for the poet's services as Lion in Rathbone Place, countenanced, nay perhaps first set the scheme going—in an ill-advised philanthropic hour; favouring it, if Smith's hints may be trusted, with solid pecuniary help. It will prove an ill-starred speculation ; Pegasus proverbially turning out an indifferent draught-horse. Mrs. Blake helped in the shop; the poet busied himself with his graver and pencil still. William Blake behind the counter would have been a curious sight to see! His younger and favourite brother, Robert, made one in the family; William taking him as a gratis pupil in engraving. It must have been a singularly conducted commercial enterprise. No. 27 bears at present small trace—with its two quiet parlour-windows, apparently the same casements that have been there from the beginning—of having once been even temporarily a shop. The house is of the same character as No. 28: a good-sized three-storied one, with panelled rooms ; its original aspect (like that of No. 28) wholly disguised, externally, by all-levelling stucco. It is still a private mansion ; but let out (now) in floors and rooms to many families, instead of one.
From 27, Broad Street, Blake in 1785 sent four water-colour drawings or frescos, in his peculiar acceptation of the term, to the Academy-Exhibition, one by the way, at which our old friend Parson Gardner is still exhibiting—some seven Views of Lake Scenery. One of Blake's drawings is from Gray, The
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Bard. The others are subjects from the Story of Joseph: Joseph's Brethren bowing before him; Joseph making himself known to them ; Joseph ordering Simeon to be bound. The latter series I have seen. The drawings are interesting for their imaginative merit, and as specimens, full of soft tranquil beauty, of Blake's earlier style : a very different one from that of his later and better-known works. Conceived in a dramatic spirit, they are executed in a subdued key, of which extravagance is the last defect to suggest itself. The design is correct and blameless, not to say tame (for Blake), the colour full, harmonious and sober. At the head of the Academy-Catalogues of those days, stands the stereotype notification, ‘The pictures &c. marked (*) are to be disposed of.’ Blake's are not so marked : let us hope they were disposed of! The three Joseph drawings turned up within the last ten years in their original close rose-wood frames (a far from advantageous setting), at a broker's in Wardour Street, who had purchased them at a furniture-sale in the neighbourhood. They were sent to the International Exhibition of 1862. Among Blake's fellow-exhibitors, it is now curious to note the small galaxy of still remembered names—Reynolds, Nollekens, Morland, Cosway, Fuseli, Flaxman, Stothard (the last three yet juniors)— sprinkling the mob of forgotten ones : among which such as West, Hamilton, Rigaud, Loutherbourg, Copley, Serres, Mary Moser, Russell, Dance, Farington, Edwards, Garvey, Tomkins, are positive points of light. This year, by the way, Blake's friend Trotter exhibits a Portrait of the late Dr. Johnson , ‘a drawing in chalk from the life, about eighteen months before his death,’ which should be worth something.
Blake's brother Robert, his junior by nearly five years, had been a playfellow of Smith's, whose father lived near (in Great Portland Street) ; and from him we hear that ‘Bob, as he was familiarly called,’ had ever been ‘much beloved by all his companions.’ By William he was in these years not only taught to draw and engrave, but encouraged to exert his imagination in original sketches. I have come across some of
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these tentative essays, carefully preserved by Blake during life, and afterwards forming part of the large accumulation of artistic treasure remaining in his widow's hands : the sole, but not at all unproductive, legacy, he had to bequeath to her. Some are in pencil, some in pen and ink outline thrown up by a uniform dark ground washed in with Indian ink. They unmistakably show the beginner— not to say the child—in art ; are naïf and archaic-looking ; rude, faltering, often puerile or absurd in drawing ; but are characterized by Blake-like feeling and intention, having in short a strong family likeness to his brother's work. The subjects are from Homer and the poets. Of one or two compositions there are successive and each time enlarged versions. True imaginative animus is often made manifest by very imperfect means ; in the composition of the groups, and the expressive disposition of the individual figure, or of an individual limb : as e.g. (in one drawing) that solitary upraised arm stretched heaven-ward from out the midst of the panic-struck crowd of figures, who, embracing, huddle together with bowed heads averted from a Divine Presence. In another, a group of ancient men stand silent on the verge of a sea-girt precipice, beyond which they gaze towards awe-inspiring shapes and sights unseen by us. This last motive seems to have pleased Blake himself. One of his earliest attempts, if not quite his earliest, in that peculiar stereotype process he soon afterwards invented, is a version of this very composition ; marvellously improved in the treatment—in the dispositon and conception of the figures (at once fewer and better contrasted), as well, of course, as in drawing ; which was what Blake's drawing always was— whatever its wilful—not only full of grand effect, but firm and decisive, that of a Master.
With Blake and with his wife, at the print-shop in Broad Street, Robert for two happy years and a half lived in seldom disturbed accord. Such domestications, however, always bring their own trials, their own demands for self-sacrifice. Of which the following anecdote will supply a hint, as well as
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testify to much amiable magnanimity on the part of both the younger members of the household. One day, a dispute arose between Robert and Mrs. Blake. She, in the heat of discussion, used words to him, his brother (though a husband too) thought unwarrantable. A silent witness thus far, he could now bear it no longer, but with characteristic impetuosity— when stirred—rose and said to her: ‘Kneel down and beg Robert's pardon directly, or you never see my face again!’ A heavy threat, uttered in tones which, from Blake, unmistakably showed it was meant. She, poor thing! ‘thought it very hard,’ as she would afterwards tell, to beg her brother-in-law's pardon when she was not in fault! But being a duteous, devoted wife, though by nature nowise tame or dull of spirit, she did kneel down and meekly murmur, ‘Robert, I beg your pardon, I am in the wrong! ‘Young woman, you lie!' abruptly retorted he: ‘ I am in the wrong!’
At the commencement of 1787, the artist's peaceful happiness was gravely disturbed by the premature death, in his twenty-fifth year, of this beloved brother : buried in Bunhill Fields the 11th of February. Blake affectionately tended him in his illness, and during the last fortnight of it watched continuously day and night by his bedside, without sleep. When all claim had ceased with that brother's last breath, his own exhaustion showed itself in an unbroken sleep of three days’ and nights’ duration. The mean room of sickness had been to the spiritual man, as to him most scenes were, a place of vision and of revelation; for Heaven lay about him still, in manhood, as in infancy it ‘lies about us’ all. At the last solemn moment, the visionary eyes beheld the released spirit ascend heavenward through the matter-of-fact ceiling, ‘clapping its hands for joy'—a truly Blake-like detail. No wonder he could paint such scenes! With him they were work'y-day experiences.
In the same year, disagreements with Parker put an end to the partnership and to print-selling. This Parker subsequently
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engraved a good deal after Stothard, in a style which evinces a common Master with Blake as well as companionship with him: in particular, the very fine designs, among Stothard's most masterly, to the Vicar of Wakefield (1792), which are very admirably engraved ; also most of those of Falconer's Shipwreck (1795). After Flaxman, he executed several of the plates to Homer's Iliad; after Smirke, The Commemoration of 1797 ; after Northcote, The Revolution of 1688, and others ; and for Boydell's Shakspeare, eleven plates. He died ‘about 1805,’ according to the Dictionaries.
Blake quitted Broad Street for neighbouring Poland Street: the long street which connects Broad Street with Oxford Street, and into which Great Marlborough Street runs at right angles. He lodged at No. 28 (now a cheesemonger's shop, boasting three brass bells), not many doors from Oxford Street on the right-hand side, going towards that thoroughfare; the houses at which end of the street are smaller and of later date than those between Great Marlborough and Broad Street. Henceforward Mrs. Blake, whom he carefully instructed, remained his sole pupil—sole assistant and companion too ; for the gap left by his brother was never filled up by children. In the same year—that of Etty's birth (March, 1787) amid the narrow streets of distant antique York—his friend Flaxman exchanged Wardour Street for Rome, and a seven years’ sojourn in Italy. Already educating eye and mind in his own way, Turner, a boy of twelve, was hovering about Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, in which the barber's son was born : some half mile—of (then) staid and busy streets—distant from Blake's Broad Street; Long Acre, in which Stothard first saw the light, lying between the two.
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CHAPTER VIII.



MEDITATION : NOTES ON LAVATER. 1788. [ÆT. 31]
One of Blake's engravings of the present period is a frontispiece after Fuseli to the latter's translation of the Aphorisms of his fellow-countryman, Lavater. The translation, which was from the original MS., was published by Johnson in 1788, the year of Gainsborough's death. If any deny merit to Blake as an engraver, let them turn from this boldly executed print of Fuseli's mannered but effective sitting figure, ostentatiously meditative, of Philosophic Contemplation, or whatever it may be, to the weak shadow of the same in the subsequent Dublin editions of this little book. For the Swiss enthusiast had then a European reputation. And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country. Now it, as a whole, reads unequal and monotonous ; does not impress one as an elixir of inspired truth ; induces rather, like most books of maxims, the ever recurring query, cui bono? And one readily believes what the English edition states, that the whole epitome of moral wisdom was the rapid ‘effusion’ of one autumn.
In the ardent, pious, but illogical Lavater's character, full of amiability, candour, and high aspiration, a man who in the eighteenth century believed in the continuation of miracles, of witchcraft, and of the power of exorcising evil spirits, who,
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in fact, had a bonâ fide if convulsive hold of the super-sensual, there was much that was german to William Blake, much that still remains noble and interesting.
In the painter's small library the Aphorisms became one of his most favourite volumes. This well-worn copy contains a series of marginal notes, neatly written in pen and ink—it being his habit to make such in the books he read—which speak to the interest it excited in him. On the title-page occurs a naïve token of affection : below the name Lavater is inscribed ‘Will. Blake,’ and around the two names, the outline of a heart.
Lavater's final Aphorism tells the reader, ‘If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you, and then show your copy to whom you please.’ Blake showed his notes to Fuseli ; who said one assuredly could read their writer's character in them.
‘All old!’ ‘This should be written in letters of gold on our temples,’ are the endorsements accorded such an announcement as ‘The object of your love is your God ;’ or again, ‘Joy and grief decide character. What exalts prosperity? What embitters grief? What leaves us indifferent? What interests us ? As the interest of man, so his God, as his God so is he.’
But the annotator sometimes dissents ; as from this : ‘You enjoy with wisdom or with folly, as the gratification of your appetites capacitates or unnerves your powers.’ ‘ False!’ is the emphatic denial, ‘for weak is the joy which is never wearied.’ On one Aphorism, in which ‘frequent laughing,’ and ‘the scarcer smile of harmless quiet,’ are enumerated as signs respectively ‘of a little mind,’ or ‘of a noble heart;’ while the abstaining from laughter merely not to offend, &c. is praised as ‘a power unknown to many a vigorous mind ;’ Blake exclaims, ‘I hate scarce smiles ; I love laughing !’ ‘A sneer is often the sign of heartless malignity,’ says Lavater. ‘ Damn sneerers!‘ echoes Blake. To Lavater's censure
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of the ‘pietist who crawls, groans, blubbers, and secretly says to gold, Thou art my hope! and to his belly, Thou art my god,’ follows a cordial assent. ‘Everything,' Lavater rashly declares, ‘may be mimicked by hypocrisy but humility and love united.’ To which, Blake : ‘All this may be mimicked very well. This Aphorism certainly was an oversight; for what are all crawlers but mimickers of humility and love?’ ‘Dread more the blunderer's friendship than the calumniator's envy,’ exhorts Lavater. ‘ I doubt this! ‘ says the margin.
At the maxim, ‘You may depend upon it that he is a good man, whose intimate friends are all good, and whose enemies are characters decidedly bad,’ the artist (obeying his author's injunctions) reports himself ‘ Uneasy,’ fears he ‘has not many enemies !’ Uneasy, too, he feels at the declaration, ‘Calmness of will is a sign of grandeur : the vulgar, far from hiding their will, blab their wishes—a single spark of occasion discharges the child of passion into a thousand crackers of desire.’ Again: ‘Who seeks those that are greater than himself, their greatness enjoys, and forgets his greatest qualities in their greater ones, is already truly great.’ To this, Mr. Blake : ‘I hope I do not flatter myself that this is pleasant to me.’
Some of Blake's remarks are not without a brisk candour: as when the Zurich philanthropist tells one, ‘The great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of man in him,’ &c.; and he boldly replies, ‘None can see the man in the enemy. If he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy : if maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy, for my enemy is not a man but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him.’ And again, to the dictum, ‘Between passion and lie there is not a finger's breadth,’ he retorts, ‘Lie is contrary to passion.’ Upon the aphorism, ‘Superstition always inspires littleness; religion grandeur of mind ; the superstitious raises beings inferior to himself to deities,’ Blake remarks at some length : ‘I do not allow there is such a thing as superstition, taken in the
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true sense of the word. A man must first deceive himself before he is thus superstitious, and so he is a hypocrite. No man was ever truly superstitious who was not as truly religious as far as he knew. True superstition is ignorant honesty, and this is beloved of God and man. Hypocrisy is as different from superstition as the wolf from the lamb.’ And similarly when Lavater, with a shudder, alludes to ‘the gloomy rock, on either side of which superstition and incredulity their dark abysses spread,’ Blake says, ‘Superstition has been long a bug-bear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness.’ This was a cardinal thought with Blake, and almost a unique one in his century.
The two are generally of better accord. The since often-quoted warning, ‘Keep him at least three paces distant who hates bread, music, and the laugh of a child!’ is endorsed as the ‘Best in the book.’ Another, ‘Avoid like a serpent him who speaks politely, yet writes impertinently,’ elicits the ejaculation, ‘ A dog! get a stick to him!‘ And the reiteration, ‘Avoid him who speaks softly and writes sharply,’ is enforced with, ‘Ah, rogue, I would be thy hangman!’ The assertion that ‘A woman, whose ruling passion is not vanity, is superior to any man of equal faculties,’ begets the enthusiastic comment, ‘ Such a woman I adore!’ At the foot of another, on woman, ‘A great woman not imperious, a fair woman not vain, a woman of common talents not jealous, an accomplished woman who scorns to shine, are four wonders just great enough to be divided among the four corners of the globe,’ Blake appends, ‘Let the men do their duty and the women will be such wonders: the female life lives from the life of the male. See a great many female dependents and you know the man.’
In a higher key, when Lavater justly affirms that ‘He only who has enjoyed immortal moments can reproduce them,
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Sig. Vol. I F
Blake exclaims, ‘Oh that men would seek immortal moments !— that men would converse with God!’ as he, it may be added, was ever seeking, ever conversing, in one sense. In another place Lavater declares, that ‘He who adores an impersonal God, has none; and without guide or rudder launches on an immense abyss, that first absorbs his powers and next himself.’ To which, warm assent from the fervently religious Blake: ‘Most superlatively beautiful, and most affectionately holy and pure. Would to God all men would consider it!’ Religious, I say, but far from orthodox ; for in one place he would show sin to be ‘ negative not positive evil:’ lying, theft, &c., ‘mere privation of good ;’ a favourite idea with him, which, whatever its merit as an abstract proposition, practical people would not like written in letters of gold on their temples, for fear of consequences.
One of the most prolix of these aphorisms runs,‘Take from Luther his roughness and fiery courage, from this man one quality, from another that, from Raffaelle his dryness and nearly hard precision, and from Rubens his supernatural luxury of colours; detach his oppressive exuberance from each, and you will have something very correct and flat instead,’ as it required no conjuror to tell us. Whereon Blake, whom I here condense : ‘Deduct from a rose its red, from a lily its whiteness, from a diamond hardness, from an oak-tree height, from a daisy lowliness, rectify everything in nature, as the philosophers do, and then we shall return to chaos, and God will be compelled to be eccentric in His creation. Oh ! happy philosophers ! Variety does not necessarily suppose deformity. Beauty is exuberant, but if ugliness is adjoined, it is not the exuberance of beauty. So if Raffaelle is hard and dry, it is not from genius, but an accident acquired. How can substance and accident be predicated of the same essence? Aphorism 47 speaks of the "heterogeneous" in works of Art and Literature, which all extravagance is; but exuberance is not. ‘But,' adds
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Blake, ‘the substance gives tincture to the accident, and makes it physiognomic.’
In the course of another lengthy aphorism, the ‘knave’ is said to be ‘only an enthusiast, or momentary fool.‘ Upon which Mr. Blake breaks out still more characteristically: ‘Man is the ark of God: the mercy-seat is above upon the ark; cherubim guard it on either side, and in the midst is the holy law. Man is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and water. If thou seekest by human policy to guide this ark, remember Uzzah— 2 Sam. 6th ch. Knaveries are not human nature; knaveries are knaveries. This aphorism seems to lack discrimination.’ In a similar tone, on Aphorism 630, commencing, ‘A God, an animal, a plant, are not companions of man ; nor is the faultless,—then judge with lenity of all,’ Blake writes, ‘It is the God in all that is our companion and friend. For our God Himself says, "You are my brother, my sister, and my mother;" and St. John, "Whoso dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him." Such an one cannot judge of any but in love, and his feelings will be attractions or repulsions. God is in the lowest effects as well as in the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak. For let it be remembered that creation is God descending according to the weakness of man : our Lord is the Word of God, and everything on earth is the Word of God, and in its essence is God.’
Surely gold-dust may be descried in these notes; and when we remember it is a painter, not a metaphysician, who is writing, we can afford to judge them less critically. Another characteristic gleaning or two, ere we conclude. An ironical maxim, such as ‘Take here the grand secret, if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none : court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion,’ meets with the hearty response from an unfashionable painter, ‘And go to hell.’ When the Swiss tells him that ‘Men carry their character not seldom in their pockets : you might decide
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Sig. F 2
on more than half your acquaintance had you will or right to turn their pockets inside out;’ the artist candidly acknowledges that he ‘seldom carries money in his pockets, they are generally full of paper,’ which we readily believe. Towards the close, Lavater drops a doubt that he may have ‘perhaps already offended his readers;’ which elicits from Blake a final note of sympathy. ‘Those who are offended with anything in this book, would be offended with the innocence of a child, and for the same reason, because it reproaches him with the errors of acquired folly.’
Enough of the Annotations on Lavater, which, in fulfilment of biographic duty, I have thus copiously quoted ; too copiously, the reader may think, for their intrinsic merit. To me they seem mentally physiognomic, giving a near view of Blake in his ordinary moments at this period. We, as through a casually open window, glance into the artist's room, and see him meditating at his work, graver in hand.
Lavater's Aphorisms not only elicited these comments from Blake, but set him composing aphorisms on his own account, of a far more original and startling character. In Lavater's book I trace the external accident to which the form is attributable of a remarkable portion—certain ‘Proverbs of Hell,’ as they were waywardly styled—of an altogether remarkable book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, engraved two years later; the most curious and significant book, perhaps, out of many, which ever issued from the unique man's press.
Turning from the Annotations on Lavater to higher, less approachable phases of this original Mind, the indubitably INSPIRED aspects of it, it is time to note that the practice of verse had, as we saw in 1784, been once more resumed, in a higher key and clearer tones than he had yet sounded. Design more original and more mature than any he had before realized, at once grand, lovely, comprehensible, was in course of production. It must have been during the years 1784—88, the Songs and Designs sprang from his creative brain, of which another chapter must speak.
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Infant Joy

J.F. JUNGLING-SC

INFANT JOY.

Figure: Infant Joy. From Songs of Innocence.



CHAPTER IX.



POEMS OF MANHOOD. 1788-89. [ÆT. 31-32.]
Though Blake's brother Robert had ceased to be with him in the body, he was seldom far absent from the faithful visionary in spirit. Down to late age the survivor talked much and often of that dear brother; and in hours of solitude and inspiration his form would appear and speak to the poet in consolatory dream, in warning or helpful vision. By the end of 1788, the first portion of that singularly originial and significant series of Poems, by which of themselves, Blake
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established a claim, however unrecognised, on the attention of his own and after generations, had been written; and the illustrative designs in colour, to which he wedded them in inseparable loveliness, had been executed. The Songs of Innocence form the first section of the series he afterwards, when grouping the two together, suggestively named Songs of Innocence and of Experience. But how publish? for standing with the public, or credit with the trade, he had none. Friendly Flaxman was in Italy; the good offices of patronising blue-stockings were exhausted. He had not the wherewithal to publish on his own account; and though he could be his own engraver, he could scarcely be his own compositor. Long and deeply he meditated. How solve this difficulty with his own industrious hands? How be his own printer and publisher?
The subject of anxious daily thought passed—as anxious meditation does with us all—into the domain of dreams and (in his case) of visions. In one of these a happy inspiration befell, not, of course, without supernatural agency. After intently thinking by day and dreaming by night, during long weeks and months, of his cherished object, the image of the vanished pupil and brother at last blended with it. In a vision of the night, the form of Robert stood before him, and revealed the wished-for secret, directing him to the technical mode by which could be produced a fac-simile of song and design. On his rising in the morning, Mrs. Blake went out with half-a-crown, all the money they had in the world, and of that laid out 1 s. 10 d. on the simple materials necessary for setting in practice the new revelation. Upon that investment of 1 s. 10 d. he started what was to prove a principal means of support through his future life,—the series of poems and writings illustrated by coloured plates, often highly finished afterwards by hand,—which became the most efficient and durable means of revealing Blake's genius to the world. This method, to which Blake henceforth consistently adhered for multiplying his works, was quite an original one. It
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consisted in a species of engraving in relief both words and designs. The verse was written and the designs and marginal embellishments outlined on the copper with an impervious liquid, probably the ordinary stopping-out varnish of engravers. Then all the white parts or lights, the remainder of the plate that is, were eaten away with aquafortis or other acid, so that the outline of letter and design was left prominent, as in stereotype. From these plates he printed off in any tint, yellow, brown, blue, required to be the prevailing or ground colour in his fac-similes; red he used for the letter-press. The page was then coloured up by hand in imitation of the original drawing, with more or less variety of detail in the local hues.
He ground and mixed his water-colours himself on a piece of statuary marble, after a method of his own, with common carpenter's glue diluted, which he had found out, as the early Italians had done before him, to be a good binder. Joseph, the sacred carpenter, had appeared in vision and revealed that secret to him. The colours he used were few and simple : indigo, cobalt, gamboge, vermilion, Frankfort-black freely, ultramarine rarely, chrome not at all. These he applied with a camel's-hair brush, not with a sable, which he disliked.
He taught Mrs. Blake to take off the impressions with care and delicacy, which such plates signally needed; and also to help in tinting them from his drawings with right artistic feeling; in all which tasks she, to her honour, much delighted. The size of the plates was small, for the sake of economising copper; something under five inches by three. The number of engraved pages in the Songs of Innocence alone was twenty-seven. They were done up in boards by Mrs. Blake's hand, forming a small octavo; so that the poet and his wife did everything in making the book,—writing, designing, printing, engraving,—everything except manufacturing the paper : the very ink, or colour rather, they did make. Never before surely was a man so literally the author
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of his own book. ‘Songs of Innocence, the author and printer W. Blake, 1789,’ is the title. Copies still occur occasionally; though the two series bound together in one volume, each with its own title-page, and a general one added, is the more usual state.
First of the Poems let me speak, harsh as seems their divorce from the Design which blends with them, forming warp and woof in one texture. It is like pulling up a daisy by the roots from the greensward out of which it springs. To me many years ago, first reading these weird Songs in their appropriate environment of equally spiritual form and hue, the effect was as that of an angelic voice singing to oaten pipe, such as Arcadians tell of; or, as if a spiritual magician were summoning before human eyes, and through a human medium, images and scenes of divine loveliness; and in the pauses of the strain we seem to catch the rustling of angelic wings. The Golden Age independent of Space or Time, object of vague sighs and dreams from many generations of struggling humanity—an Eden such as childhood sees, is brought nearer than ever poet brought it before. For this poet was in assured possession of the Golden Age within the chambers of his own mind. As we read, fugitive glimpses open, clear as brief, of our buried childhood, of an unseen world present, past, to come; we are endowed with new spiritual sight, with unwonted intuitions, bright visitants from finer realms of thought, which ever elude us, ever hover near. We encounter familiar objects, in unfamiliar, transfigured aspects, simple expression and deep meanings, type and antitype. True, there are palpable irregularities, metrical licence, lapse of grammar, and even of orthography; but often the sweetest melody, most daring eloquence of rhythm, and what is more, appropriate rhythm. They are unfinished poems: yet would finish have bettered their bold and careless freedom? Would it not have brushed away the delicate bloom? that visible spontaneity, so rare and great a charm, the eloquent attribute of our old English ballads and of the
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early Songs of all nations. The most deceptively perfect wax-model is no substitute for the living flower. The form is, in these Songs, a transparent medium of the spiritual thought, not an opaque body. ‘He has dared to venture,’ writes Malkin, not irrelevantly, ‘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.
There is the same divine afflatus as in the Poetical Sketches, but fuller: a maturity of expression, despite surviving negligences, and of thought and motive. The ‘Child Angel,’ as we ventured to call the Poet in earlier years, no longer merely sportive and innocently wanton, wears a brow of thought; a glance of insight has passed into
  • ‘A sense sublime
  • Of something far more deeply interfused’
in Nature, a feeling of ‘the burthen of the mystery of things’; though still possessed by widest sympathies with all that is simple and innocent, with echoing laughter, little lamb, a flower's blossom, with ‘emmet wildered and forlorn.’
These poems have a unity and mutual relationship, the influence of which is much impaired if they be read otherwise than as a whole. They are given entire in the Second Volume, to which I refer my reader, if not of decisively unpoetic turn.
Who but Blake, with his pure heart, his simple exalted character, could have transfigured a commonplace meeting of Charity Children at St. Paul's, as he has done in the Holy Thursday? A picture at once tender and grand. The bold images, by a wise instinct resorted to at the close of the first and second stanzas and opening of the third, are in the highest degree imaginative; they are true as only Poetry can be.
How vocal is the poem Spring, despite imperfect rhymes. From addressing the child, the poet, by a transition not
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infrequent with him, passes out of himself into the child's person, showing a chameleon sympathy with childlike feelings. Can we not see the little three-year-old prattler stroking the white lamb, her feelings made articulate for her?—Even more remarkable is the poem entitled The Lamb, sweet hymn of tender infantine sentiment appropriate to that perennial image of meekness ; to which the fierce eloquence of The Tiger, in the Songs of Experience , is an antitype. In The Lamb the poet again changes person to that of a child. Of lyrical beauty, take as a sample The Laughing Song, with its happy ring of merry innocent voices. This and The Nurse's Song are more in the style of his early poems, but, as we said, of far maturer execution. I scarcely need call attention to the delicate simplicity of the little pastoral, entitled The Shepherd : to the picturesqueness in a warmer hue, the delightful domesticity, the expressive melody of The Echoing Green : or to the lovely sympathy and piety which irradiate the touching Cradle Song. More enchanting still is the stir of fancy and sympathy which animates The Dream, that
  • Did weave a shade o'er my angel-guarded bed ;
  • of an emmet that had
  • Lost her way,
  • Where on grass methought I lay.
Few are the readers, I should think, who can fail to appreciate the symbolic grandeur of The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, or the enigmatic tenderness of the Blossom and the Divine Image ; and the verses On Another's Sorrow, express some of Blake's favourite religious ideas, his abiding notions on the subject of the Godhead, which surely suggest the kernel of Christian feeling. A similar tinge of the divine colours the lines called Night, with its revelation of angelic guardians, believed in with unquestioning piety by Blake, who makes us in our turn conscious, as we read, of angelic noiseless footsteps. For a nobler depth of religious beauty,
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with accordant grandeur of sentiment and language, I know no parallel nor hint elswhere of such a poem as The Little Black Boy—
  • My mother bore me in the southern wild.
We may read these poems again and again, and they continue fresh as at first. There is something unsating in them, a perfume as of a growing violet, which renews itself as fast as it is inhaled.
One poem, The Chimney Sweeper, still calls for special notice. This and Holy Thursday are remarkable as an anticipation of the daring choice of homely subject, of the yet more daringly familiar manner, nay, of the very metre and trick of style adopted by Wordsworth in a portion of those memorable ‘experiments in poetry,’—the Lyrical Ballads,— in The Reverie of Poor Susan, for instance (not written till 1797), the Star Gazers, and The Power of Music (both 1806). The little Sweep's dream has the spiritual touch peculiar to Blake's hand. This poem, I may add, was extracted thirty-five years later in a curious little volume (1824) of James Montgomery's editing, as friend of the then unprotected Climbing Boys. It was entitled, The Chimney Sweeper's Friend and Climbing Boy's Album ; a miscellany of verse and prose, original and borrowed, with illustrations by Robert Cruikshank. Charles Lamb, one of the living authors applied to by the kind-hearted Sheffield poet, while declining the task of rhyming on such a subject, sent a copy of this poem from the Songs of Innocence, communicating it as "from a very rare and curious little work." At line five, ‘Little Tom Dacre’ is transformed, by a sly blunder of Lamb's, into ‘little Tom Toddy.’ The poem on the same subject in the Songs of Experience, inferior poetically, but in an accordant key of gloom, would have been the more apposite to Montgomery's volume.
The tender loveliness of these poems will hardly reappear in Blake's subsequent writing. Darker phases of feeling,
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more sombre colours, profounder meanings, ruder eloquence, characterise the Songs of Experience of five years later.
In 1789, the year in which Blake's hand engraved the Songs of Innocence, Wordsworth was finishing his versified Evening Walk on the Goldsmith model ; Crabbe (‘Pope in worsted stockings,’ as Hazlitt christened him), famous six years before by his Village, was publishing one of his minor quartos, The Newspaper ; and Mrs. Charlotte Smith, not undeservedly popular, was accorded a fifth edition within five years, of her Elegiac Sonnets, one or two of which still merit the praise of being good sonnets, among the best in a bad time. In these years, Hayley, Mason, Hannnah More, Jago, Downman, Helen Maria Williams, were among the active producers of poetry ; Cumberland, Holcroft, Inchbald, Burgoyne, of the acting drama of the day ; Peter Pindar, and Pasquin Williams, of the satire.
The designs, simultaneous offspring with the poems, which in the most literal sense illuminate the Songs of Innocence, consist of poetized domestic scenes. The drawing and draperies are grand in style as graceful, though covering few inches’ space ; the colour pure, delicate, yet in effect rich and full. The mere tinting of the text and of the free ornamental period are idealized, the landscape given in pastoral and symbolic hints. Sometimes these drawings almost suffer from being looked at as a book and held close, instead of at a distance as pictures, where they become more effective. In composition, colour, pervading feeling, they are lyrical to the eye, as the Songs to the ear.
On the whole, the designs to the Songs of Innocence are finer as well as more pertinent to the poems ; more closely interwoven with them, than those which accompany the Songs of Experience. Of these in their place.
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CHAPTER X.



BOOKS OF PROPHECY. 1789-90. [ÆT. 32-33]
In the same year that the Songs of Innocence were published, Blake profited by his new discovery to engrave another illustrated poem. It is in a very different strain ; one, however, analogous to that running through nearly all his subsequent writings, or ‘Books,’ as he called them. The Book of Thel is a strange mystical allegory, full of tender beauty and enigmatic meaning. Thel, youngest of ‘the Daughters of the Seraphim’ (personification of humanity, I infer), is afflicted with scepticism, with forebodings of life's brevity and nothingness:—
  • She in paleness sought the secret air
  • To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day;
  • Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,
  • And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew.
As the poem is printed entire in our Second Volume , I will now simply give an Argument of it, by way of indicating its tenor, and to serve as a bridge for the reader across the eddying stream of abstractions which make up this piece of poetic mysticism.
Argument.
Thel laments her transient life—The Lily of the Valley answers her—Pleads her weakness, yet Heaven's favour—Thel urges her own
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uselessness—A little cloud descends and taketh shape—Shows how he weds the evening dew and feeds the flowers of earth—Tells of Love and Serviceableness—Thel replies in sorrow still—The Cloud invokes the lowly worm to answer her—Who appears in the form of a helpless child—A clod of clay pities her wailing cry—And shows how in her lowliness she blesses and is blessed—She summons Thel into her house—The grave's gates open—Thel, wandering, listens to the voices of the ground—Hears a sorrowing voice from her own grave-plot—Listens, and flees back.
The fault of the poem is the occasional tendency to vagueness of motive, to an expression of abstract emotions more legitimate for the sister art of music than for poetry, which must be definite, however deep and subtle. The tendency grew in Blake's after writings and overmastered him. But on this occasion the meaning which he is at the pains to define, with the beauty of much of the imagery and of the pervading sentiment, more than counterbalance any excess of the element of the Indefinite, especially when, as in the original, the poem is illumined by its own design, lucidly expository, harmonising with itself and with the verse it illustrates.
The original quarto consists of seven engraved pages, including the title, in size some six inches by four and a quarter. Four are illustrated by vignettes, the other two by ornamental head or tail-piece. The designs—Thel, the virgin sceptic, listening to the lily of the valley in the humble grass ; to the golden cloud ‘reclining on his airy throne ;’ to the worm upon her dewy bed ; or kneeling over the personified clod of clay, an infant wrapped in lily's leaf; or gazing at the embracing clouds—are of the utmost sweetness; simple, expressive, grand; the colour slight, but pure and tender. The mere ornamental part of the title-page, of which the sky forms the framework, is a study for spontaneous easy grace and unobtrusive beauty. The effect of the whole, poem and design together, is as of a wise, wondrous, spiritual dream or angel's reverie. The engraving of the letter-press differs
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from that of the Songs of Innocence, the text (in colour red as before) being relieved by a white ground, which makes the page more legible if less of a picture. I may mention, in corroboration of a previous assertion of Stothard's obligations as a designer to Blake, that the copy of Thel, formerly Stothard's, bears evidence of familiar use on his part, in broken edges, and the marks of a painter's oily fingers. These few and simple designs, while plainly original, show all the feeling and grace of Stothard's early manner, with a tinge of sublimity superadded which was never Stothard's.
In the track of the mystical Book of Thel came in 1790 the still more mystical Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an engraved volume, illustrated in colour, to which I have already alluded as perhaps the most curious and significant, while it is certainly the most daring in conception and gorgeous in illustration of all Blake's works. The title dimly suggests an attempt to sound the depths of the mystery of Evil, to view it in its widest and deepest relations. But further examination shows that to seek any single dominating purpose, save a poetic and artistic one, in the varied and pregnant fragments of which this wonderful book consists, were a mistake. The student of Blake will find in Mr. Swinburne's Critical Essay on Blake all the light that can be thrown by the vivid imagination and subtle insight of a Poet on this as on the later mystic or ‘Prophetic Books.’
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell opens with an ‘Argument’ in irregular unrhymed verse:—
  • Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air;
  • Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
  • Once meek and in a perilous path
  • The just man kept his course along
  • The vale of death.
  • Roses are planted where thorns grow,
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  • And on the barren heath
  • Sing the honey bees.
  • Then the perilous path was planted;
  • 10And a river and a spring
  • On every cliff and tomb ;
  • And on the bleached bones
  • Red clay brought forth.
  • Till the villain left the paths of ease
  • To walk in perilous paths, and drive
  • The just man into barren climes.
  • Now the sneaking serpent walks
  • In mild humility,
  • And the just man rages in the wilds
  • 20Where lions roam.
  • Rintrah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air;
  • Hungry clouds swag on the deep.
The key-note is more clearly sounded in the following detached sentences:—

Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive, that obeys Reason. Evil is the active, springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.

The Voice of the Devil.

All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:—

  • 1. That man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
  • 2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body, and that Heaven, called Good, is alone from the Soul.
  • 3. That God will torment man in Eternity for following his energies.

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But the following contraries to these are true:—

  • 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
  • 2. Energy is the only Life, and is from the Body ; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
  • 3. Energy is Eternal Delight.

To this shortly succeeds a series of Proverbs or Aphorisms, called ‘Proverbs of Hell.’ These we give almost entire.
  • In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.
  • Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
  • The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
  • Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
  • The cut worm forgives the plough.
  • Dip him in the river who loves water.
  • A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
  • He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.
  • Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.
  • The busy bee has no time for sorrow.
  • The hours of Folly are measured by the clock, but of Wisdom no clock can measure.
  • All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap.
  • Bring out number, weight, and measure, in a year of dearth.
  • The most sublime act is to set another before you.
  • If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
  • Shame is Pride's cloak.
  • Excess of sorrow laughs; excess of joy weeps.
  • The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man.
  • The fox condemns the trap, not himself.
  • Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.
  • Let man wear the fell of the lion, woman the fleece of the sheep.
  • The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.
  • The selfish smiling fool and the sullen frowning fool shall be both thought wise, that they may be a rod.
  • What is now proved was once only imagined.
  • The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbit, watch the roots; the lion, the tiger, the horse, the elephant, watch the fruits.
    • page: 81
    Sig. Vol. I G
  • The cistern contains; the fountain overflows.
  • One thought fills immensity.
  • Always be ready to speak your mind, and a base man will avoid you.
  • Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
  • The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
  • The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the lion.
  • He who has suffered you to impose on him, knows you.
  • The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.
  • Expect poison from the standing water.
  • You never know what is enough, unless you know what is more than enough.
  • Listen to the fool's reproach; it is a kingly title!
  • The eyes of fire; the nostrils of air; the mouth of water; the beard of earth.
  • The weak in courage is strong in cunning.
  • The apple-tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse how he shall take his prey.
  • The thankful receiver bears a plentiful harvest.
  • If others had not been foolish, we should be so.
  • The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled.
  • When thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius; lift up thy head !
  • One law for the lion and ox is oppression.
  • To create a little flower is the labour of ages.
  • Damn braces, Bless relaxes.
  • The best wine is the oldest, the best water the newest.
  • Prayers plough not! Praises reap not!
  • Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!
  • As the air to a bird, or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
  • The crow wished everything was black, the owl that everything was white.
  • Exuberance is beauty.
  • Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.
  • Where man is not, Nature is barren.
  • Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed.
  • Enough ! or too much.
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The remainder of the book consists of five distinct, but kindred prose compositions, not all following consecutively, each entitled a ‘Memorable Fancy.’ Half dream, half allegory, these wild and strange fragments defy description or interpretation. It would hardly occur, indeed, that they were allegorical, or that interpretation was a thing to be expected or attempted, but for an occasional sentence like the following:— ‘I, in my hand, brought the skeleton of a body which in the mill was Aristotle's Analytics:’ and we are sometimes tempted to exclaim with the angel who conducts the author to the mill: ‘Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.’ Throughout these ‘Memorable Fancies,’ there is a mingling of the sublime and grotesque better paralleled in art than literature—in that Gothic art with the spirit of which Blake was so deeply penetrated ; where corbels of grinning and distorted faces support solemn overarching grandeurs, and quaint monsters lurk in foliaged capital or nook.
In the second ‘Memorable Fancy,’ of which we give a brief sample or two, he sees Isaiah and Ezekiel in a vision :—
* * * *Then I asked : ‘Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so make it so ?’
He replied, ‘All poets believe that it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.’
Then Ezekiel said: ‘The philosophy of the East taught the first principles of human perception; some nations held one principle for the origin and some another; we of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle, and all the others merely derivative; which was the cause of our despising the priests and philosophers of other countries, and prophesying that all gods would at last be proved to originate in ours, and to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius. It was this that our great poet, King David, desired so fervently and invoked so pathetically, saying, "By this he conquers enemies, and governs kingdoms;" and we so loved our God, that we cursed in His name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled. From these opinions, the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the Jews.’
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Sig. G 2

‘This,’ said he, ‘like all firm persuasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the Jews’ code and worship the Jews’ God ; and what greater subjection can be?’

I heard this with some wonder, and must confess my own conviction.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is—infinite.

For man has closed himself up, till be sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.



A Memorable Fancy.

I was in a printing-house in hell, and saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation.

In the first chamber was a dragon-man, clearing away the rubbish from a cave's mouth; within, a number of dragons were hollowing the cave.

In the second chamber was a viper folding round the rock and the cave, and others adorning it with gold, silver, and precious stones.

In the third chamber was an eagle with wings and feathers of air; he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite. Around, were numbers of eagle-like men, who built palaces in the immense cliffs.

In the fourth chamber were lions of flaming fire raging around and melting the metals into living fluids.

In the fifth chamber were unnamed forms, which cast the metals into the expanse.

There they were received by men who occupied the sixth chamber, and took the forms of books, and were ranged in libraries.

The Giants who formed this world into its sensual existence, and now seem to live in it in chains, are, in truth, the causes of its life and the sources of all activity, but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy; according to the proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.

Thus, one portion of being is the Prolific, the other the Devouring. To the devourer it seems as if the producer was in his chains, but it is not so; he only takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.

But the Prolific would cease to be prolific, unless the devourer, as a sea, received the excess of his delights.

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A Memorable Fancy.



An Angel came to me, and said, ‘O pitiable, foolish young man ! O horrible—O dreadful state ! Consider the hot burning dungeon thou art preparing for thyself to all eternity, to which thou art going in such career.’ I said, ‘Perhaps you will be willing to show me my eternal lot, and we will contemplate together upon it, and see whether your lot or mine is most desirable.’

So he took me through a stable and through a church, and down into the church vault, at the end of which was a mill. Through the mill we went, and came to a cave : down the winding cavern we groped our tedious way till a void, boundless as a nether sky, appeared beneath us, and we held by the roots of trees, and hung over this immensity. But I said, ‘If you please, we will commit ourselves to this void and see whether Providence is here also ; if you will not, I will!' But he answered, ‘Do not presume, O young man; but as we here remain, behold thy lot, which will soon appear when the darkness passes away.’

So I remained with him, sitting in the twisted root of an oak ; he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep.

By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city. Beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining. Round it were fiery tracks, on which revolved vast spiders crawling after their prey, which flew or rather swam in the infinite deep, in the most terrific shapes of animals sprung from corruption; and the air was full of them, and seemed composed of them. These are Devils, and are called Powers of the Air. I now asked my companion which was my eternal lot ? he said, ‘Between the black and the white spiders.’

But now from between the black and white spiders, a cloud and fire burst and rolled through the deep, blackening all beneath; so that the nether deep grew black as a sea, and rolled with a terrible noise. Beneath us was nothing now to be seen but a black tempest; till, looking east between the clouds and the waves, we saw a cataract of blood mixed with fire, and not many stones’ throw from us appeared and sunk again the scaly fold of a monstrous serpent. At last to the east, distant about three degrees, appeared a fiery crest above the waves. Slowly it reared like a ridge of golden rocks, till we discovered two globes of crimson fire, from which the sea fled away in clouds of smoke, and now we saw it was the head of

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Leviathan. His forehead was divided into streaks of green and purple, like those on a tiger's forehead. Soon we saw his mouth and red gills hang just above the raging foam, tinging the black deep with beams of blood, advancing towards us with all the fury of a spiritual existence.

My friend the Angel climbed up from his station into the mill. I remained alone, and then this appearance was no more ; but I found myself sitting on a pleasant bank beside a river by moonlight, hearing a harper who sung to the harp, and his theme was, ‘The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.’

But I arose, and sought for the mill, and there I found my Angel; * * * but I by force suddenly caught him in my arms, and flew westerly through the night, till we were elevated above the earth's shadow. Then I flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun. Here I clothed myself in white, and, taking in my hand Swedenborg's volumes, sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to Saturn. Here I stayed to rest, and then leaped into the void between Saturn and the fixed stars.

Soon we saw seven houses of brick; one we entered; in it were a number of monkeys, baboons, and all of that species, chained by the middle, grinning and snatching at one another, but withheld by the shortness of their chains. However, I saw that they sometimes grew numerous, and then the weak were caught by the strong, and with a grinning aspect devoured, by plucking off first one limb and then another, till the body was left a helpless trunk. This, after grinning and kissing it with seeming fondness, they devoured too; and here and there I saw one savourily picking the flesh off his own tail. As the stench terribly annoyed us both, we went into the mill, and I in my hand brought a skeleton of a body, which in the mill was Aristotle's Analytics. So the Angel said: ‘Thy phantasy has imposed upon me, and thou oughtest to be ashamed.’

I answered, ‘We impose on one another, and it is but lost time to converse with you, whose works are only Analytics.’

Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new ; though it is only the contents or index of already published books.

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.

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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.

The power of these wild utterances is enhanced to the utmost by the rich adornments of design and colour in which they are set—design as imaginative as the text, colour which has the lustre of jewels.
A strip of azure sky surmounts, and of land divides, the words of the title-page, leaving on each side scant and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny scale, lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst forth below and slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their very core two spirits rush together and embrace. These beautiful figures appear to have suggested to Flaxman the delicately executed bas-relief on Collins's monument. In the second design, to the right of the page, there runs up an almost lifeless tree. A man clinging to the thin stem, and holding by a branch, reaches its only cluster to a woman standing below. Distant are three figures reposing on the ground. At the top of the third, a woman with outspread arms is borne away on flames—
  • ‘like a creature native and indued
  • Unto that element;’
beneath, two figures are rushing away from a female lying on the earth.
In the next, the sun sets over the sea in blood. A spirit, grasping a child, walks on the waves. Another, in the midst of fire, would fain rush to her, but an iron link clinches his ankle to the rock.
The fifth resembles the catastrophe of Phaëton, save that there is but one horse. Spires of flame are already kindling below.
Under the text of the sixth, an accusing demon, with bat-like wings, points fiercely to a scroll—a great parchment scroll across his knees. A figure sits on each side recording.
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In the next design we have a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother's bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below, with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page.
At the top of the fourteenth page a spirit, with streaming locks, extends her arms across, pointing hither and thither. She hovers, poised over a corpse, which looks as if ‘laid out,’ the arms straight by the sides; helpless, uncoffined ; flames are rolling onward to consume it.
The ninth design is of an eagle flying and gazing upwards : his talons gripe a long snake trailing and writhing. Both are flecked with gold, and coruscate as from a light within.
The tenth presents a huddled group of solemn figures seated on the ground. The next is a surging of mingled fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge double-fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open.
In the twelfth, the disembodied spirit, luminous and radiant, sits lightly upon its late prison house, gazing upwards whither it is about to soar. It is the same figure as that in Blair's Grave, where you see also the natural body, bent with years, tottering into the dark doorway beneath.
The thirteenth and last design gives Blake's idea of Nebuchadnezzar in the wilderness. Mr. Palmer tells me that he has old German translations of Cicero and Petrarch, in which, among some wild and original designs, almost the very same figure occurs; but that many years had elapsed after making his own design before Blake saw the woodcut.
The designs are highly finished: Blake had worked upon them so much, and illuminated them so richly, that even the letterpress seems as if done by hand. The ever-fluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you
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had been handling something sentient. A picture has been said to be midway between a thing and a thought; so in these 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 with a life indestructible, whether for good or evil.
The volume is an octavo, consisting of twenty-four pages ; all of them illuminated. In some copies the letters are red, in others a golden brown. The engraved page is about six inches by four. Occasionally a deep margin was left so as to form a quarto. Lord Houghton possesses a fine quarto, Mr. Linnell an octavo copy.
The subjoined outline of Nebuchadnezzar is not copied from the design just spoken of in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but is a facsimile of what was probably the original sketch for this, and is taken from a MS. volume by Blake, of rare interest and value, in the possession of Mr. Rossetti. This book contains, besides rough sketches and rough draughts, afterwards elaborated into finished designs and poems, much that exists in no other form. The kindness of the owner enables me freely to draw from this source.

 

Nebuchadnezzar

Figure: facsimile of original pencil drawing of Nebuchadnezzar



page: [89]
CHAPTER XI.



BOOKSELLER JOHNSON'S. 1791-92. [ÆT. 34-35]
These were prolific years with Blake, both in poetry and design. In 1791 he even found a publisher, for the first and last time in his life, in Johnson of St. Paul's Churchyard, to whom Fuseli had originally introduced him, and for whom he had already engraved. Johnson in this year—the same in which he published Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Women— issued, without Blake's name, and unillustrated, a thin quarto, entitled The French Revolution, a Poem in Seven Books. Book the First. One Shilling. Of the Revolution itself, only the first book, ending with the taking of the Bastille, had as yet been enacted. In due time the remainder followed. Those of Blake's epic already written were never printed, events taking a different turn from the anticipated one.
The French Revolution, though ushered into the world by a regular publisher, was no more successful than the privately printed Poetical Sketches, or the privately engraved Songs of Innocence, in reaching the public, or even in getting noticed by the monthly reviewers. It finds no place in their indices, nor in the catalogue of the Museum Library.
In this year Johnson employed Blake to design and engrave six plates to a series of Tales for Children, in the then prevailing Berquin School, by Johnson's favourite and protégée,
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Mary Wollstonecraft; tales new and in demand in the autumn of 1791, now unknown to the bookstalls. ‘Original stories' they are entitled, ‘from real life, with conversations calculated to regulate the affections and form the mind to truth

 

Illustration from Wollstonecraft

Figure: Illustration for Wollstonecraft's Tales for Children . Care-worn mother holds her hands up in despair while a young boy and girl cling to her skirt.



and goodness.’ The designs, naïve and rude, can hardly be pronounced a successful competition with Stothard, though traces of a higher feeling are visible in the graceful female forms—benevolent heroine, or despairing, famishing peasant group. The artist evidently moves in constraint, and the
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accessories of these domestic scenes are as simply generalised as a child's : result of an inobservant eye for such things. They were not calculated to obtain Blake employment in a capacity in which more versatile hands and prettier designers, such as Burney and Corbould (failing Stothard), were far better fitted to succeed. The book itself never went to a second edition. More designs appear to have been made for the little work than were found available, and some of the best were among the rejected. It may interest the reader to have a sample of him in this comparatively humble department. Possessing most of the original drawings, we therefore give a print from one. There is, however, a terrible extremity of voiceless despair in the upturned face of the principal figure which, perhaps, no hand but that of him who conceived it could accurately reproduce. He also re-engraved for Johnson some designs by Chodowiecki to a book of pinafore precepts, called Elements of Morality, translated from the German of Salzmann by Mary Wollstonecraft; 1 and among casual work engraved a plate for Darwin's Botanic Garden—The Fertilization of Egypt—after Fuseli.
Bookseller Johnson was a favourable specimen of a class of booksellers and men now a tradition : an open-hearted tradesman of the eighteenth century, of strict probity, simple habits, liberal in his dealings, living by his shop and in it, not at a suburban mansion. He was, for nearly forty years, Fuseli's fast and intimate friend, his first and best; the kind patron of Mary Wollstonecraft, and of many another. He encouraged Cowper over The Task, after the first volume of Poems had been received with indifference ; and when The Task met its sudden unexpected success, he righteously pressed 1,000 l. on the author, although both this and the previous volume had been assigned to him for nothing—as an equivalent, that is, for the bare cost of publication. To Blake, also, Johnson was friendly, and tried to help him as far as he could help so unmarketable a talent.
Transcribed Footnote (page 91):

1 Notes and Queries, June 19, 1880.

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In Johnson's shop—for booksellers’ shops were places of resort then with the literary—Blake was, at this date, in the habit of meeting a remarkable coterie. The bookseller gave, moreover, plain but hospitable weekly dinners at his house, No. 72, St. Paul's Churchyard, in a little quaintly-shaped upstairs-room, with walls not at right angles, where his guests must have been somewhat straitened for space. Hither came Drs. Price and Priestley, and occasionally Blake; hither friendly, irascible Fuseli ; hither precise doctrinaire Godwin, whose Political Justice Johnson will, in 1793, publish, giving 700 l. for the copyright. Him, the author of the Songs of Innocence got on ill with, and liked worse. Here, too, he met formal stoical Holcroft, playwright, novelist, translator, literary man-of-all-work, who had written verse ‘to order’ for our old friend The Wits’ Magazine. Seven years hence he will be promoted to the Tower, and be tried for high treason with Hardy, Thelwall, and Horne Tooke, and one day will write the best fragment of autobiography in the language : a man of very varied fortunes. Here hard-headed Tom Paine, ‘the rebellious needleman :’ Mary Wollstonecraft also, who at Johnson's table commenced her ineffectual flirtation with already wedded, cynical Fuseli, their first meeting occurring here in the autumn of 1790. These and others of very ‘advanced’ political and religious opinions, theoretic republicans and revolutionists, were of the circle. The First Part of The Rights of Man had been launched on an applauding and indignant world, early in 1791 ; Johnson, whom the MS. had made the author's friend, having prudently declined to publish it though he was Priestley's publisher. A few years hence their host, despite his caution, will, for his liberal sympathies, receive the honour of prosecution from a good old habeas-corpus-suspending Government ; and, in 1798, be fined and imprisoned in the King's Bench for selling a copy of Gilbert Wakefield's Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff's Address,— a pamphlet which every other bookseller in town sold, and continued to sell, with impunity. While in prison he still
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gave his weekly literary dinners—in the Marshal's house instead of his own; Fuseli remaining staunch to his old friend under a cloud.
Blake was himself an ardent member of the New School, a vehement republican and sympathiser with the Revolution, hater and contemner of kings and king-craft. And like most reformers of that era,—when the eighteenth century dry-rot had well-nigh destroyed the substance of the old English Constitution, though the anomalous caput mortuum of it was still extolled as the ‘wisest of systems,'—he may have even gone the length of despising the ‘Constitution.’ Down to his latest days Blake always avowed himself a ‘Liberty Boy,’ a faithful ‘Son of Liberty;’ and would jokingly urge in self-defence that the shape of his forehead made him a republican. ‘I can't help being one,’ he would assure Tory friends, ‘any more than you can help being a Tory : your forehead is larger above ; mine, on the contrary, over the eyes.’ To him, at this date, as to ardent minds everywhere, the French Revolution was the herald of the Millennium, of a new age of light and reason. He courageously donned the famous symbol of liberty and equality—the bonnet-rouge—in open day, and philosophically walked the streets with the same on his head. He is said to have been the only one of the set who had the courage to make that public profession of faith. Brave as a lion at heart was the meek spiritualist. Decorous Godwin, Holcroft, wily Paine, however much they might approve, paused before running the risk of a Church-and-King mob at their heels. All this was while the Revolution, if no longer constitutional, still continued muzzled; before, that is, the Days of Terror, in September ‘92, and subsequent defiance of kings and of humanity. When the painter heard of these September doings he tore off his white cockade, and assuredly never wore the red cap again. Days of humiliation for English sympathisers and republicans were beginning.
Though at one with Paine, Godwin, Fuseli and the others as to politics, he was a rebel to their theological or anti-
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theological tenets. Himself a heretic among the orthodox, here among the infidels he was a saint, and staunchly defended Christianity—the spirit of it—against these strangely assorted disputants.
In 1792 the artist proved, as he was wont to relate, the means of saving Paine from the vindictive clutches of exasperated ‘friends of order.’ Early in that year Paine had published his Second Part of The Rights of Man. A few months later, county and corporation addresses against ‘seditious publications’ were got up. The Government (Pitt's) answered the agreed signal by issuing a proclamation condemnatory of such publications, and commenced an action for libel against the author of The Rights of Man, which was to come off in September; all this helping the book itself into immense circulation. The ‘Friends of Liberty’ held their meetings too, in which strong language was used. In September, a French deputation announced to Paine that the Department of Calais had elected him member of the National Convention. Already as an acknowledged cosmopolitan and friend of man, he had been declared a citizen of France by the deceased Assembly. One day in this same month, Paine was giving at Johnson's an idea of the inflammatory eloquence he had poured fourth at a public meeting of the previous night. Blake, who was present, silently inferred from the tenor of his report that those in power, now eager to lay hold of noxious persons, would certainly not let slip such an opportunity. On Paine's rising to leave, Blake laid his hands on the orator's shoulder, saying, ‘You must not go home, or you are a dead man !’ and hurried him off on his way to France, whither he was now, in any case bound, to take his seat as French legislator. By the time Paine was at Dover, the officers were in his house or, as his biographer Mr. Cheetham designates it, his ‘lurking hole in the purlieus of London ;’ and some twenty minutes after the Custom House officials at Dover had turned over his slender baggage with, as he thought, extra malice, and he had set sail
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for Calais, an order was received from the Home Office to detain him. England never saw Tom Paine again. New perils awaited him : Reign of Terror and near view of the guillotine—an accidentally open door and a chalk mark on the wrong side of it proving his salvation. But a no less serious one had been narrowly escaped from the English Tories. Those were hanging days ! Blake, on this occasion, showed greater sagacity than Paine, whom, indeed, Fuseli affirmed to be more ignorant of the common affairs of life than himself even. Spite of unworldliness and visionary faculty, Blake never wanted for prudence and sagacity in ordinary matters.
Early in this September died Blake's mother, at the age of seventy, and was buried in Bunhill Fields on the 9th. She is a shade to us, alas! in all senses: for of her character, or even her person, no tidings survive. Blake's associates in later years remember to have heard him speak but rarely of either father or mother, amid the frequent allusions to his brother Robert. At the beginning of the year (February 23rd, 1792) had died the recognised leader of English painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whom failing eyesight had for some time debarred from the exercise of his art. He was borne, in funeral pomp, from his house in Leicester Fields to Saint Paul's, amid the regrets of the great world, testified by a mourning train of ninety coaches, and by the laboured panegyric of Burke. Blake used to tell of an interview he had once had with Reynolds, in which our neglected enthusiast found the originator of a sect in art to which his own was so hostile, very pleasant personally, as most found him. ‘Well, Mr. Blake,’ blandly remarked the President, who, doubtless, had heard strange accounts of his interlocutor's sayings and doings ‘I hear you despise our art of oil-painting.’ ‘ No, Sir Joshua, I don't despise it; but I like fresco better.’
Sir Joshua's style, with its fine taste, its merely earthly graces and charms of colour, light, and shade, was an abomination to the poetic visionary—'The Whore of Babylon’
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and ‘Antichrist,’ metaphorically speaking. For, as it has been said, very earnest original artists make ill critics : of feeble sympathy with alien schools of feeling, they can no more be eclectic in criticism than, to any worthy result, in practice. Devout sectaries in art hate and contemn those of opposite artistic faith with truly religious fervour. I have heard of an eminent living painter in the New School, who, on his admiration being challenged for a superlative example of Sir Joshua's graceful, generalizing hand, walked up to it, pronounced an emphatic word of disgust, and turned on his heel: such bigoted mortals are men who paint!
It was hardly in flesh and blood for the unjustly despised author of the Songs of Innocence, who had once, as Allan Cunningham well says, thought, and not perhaps unnaturally, that ‘he had but to sing beautiful songs, and draw grand designs, to become great and famous,’ and in the midst of his obscurity feeling conscious of endowments of imagination and thought, rarer than those fascinating gifts of preception and expression which so readily won the world's plaudits and homage; it was hardly possible not to feel jealous, and as it were injured, by the startling contrast of such fame and success as Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's.
Of this mingled soreness and antipathy we have curious evidence in some MS. notes Blake subsequently made in his copy of Sir Joshua's Discourses. Struck by their singularity, one or two of Blake's admirers in later years transcribed these notes. To Mr. Palmer I am indebted, among many other courtesies, for a copy of the first half of them.
‘This man was here,’ commences the indignant commentator, ‘to depress Art: this is the opinion of William Blake. My proofs of this opinion are given in the following notes. Having spent the vigour of my youth and genius under the oppression of Sir Joshua, and his gang of cunning, hired knaves—without employment and, as much as could possibly be without bread,—the reader must expect to read, in all my remarks on these books, nothing but indignation
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Sig. Vol. I. II
and resentment. While Sir Joshua was rolling in riches, Barry was poor and unemployed, except by his own energy; Mortimer was called a madman, and only portrait-painting was applauded and rewarded by the rich and great. Reynolds and Gainsborough blotted and blurred one against the other, and divided all the English world between them. Fuseli, indignant, almost hid himself. I AM HID.’
Always excepting the favoured portrait-painters, these were, indeed, cold days for the unhappy British artist—the historical or poetic artist above all. Times have strangely altered within living memory. The case is now reversed. One can but sympathise with the above touching outburst; and Blake rarely complained aloud of the world's ill usage, extreme as it was: one can but sympathise, I say, even while cherishing the warmest love and admiration for Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's delightful art. The glow of sunset need not blind us to the pure light of Hesperus. Admiration of a fashionable beauty, with her Watteau-like grace, should not dazzle the eye to exclusion of the nobler grace of Raphael or the Antique.
Of these notes more hereafter.

 

from Visions of the Daughers of Albion

Figure: Illustration from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion . Woman lying prone on a bed of clouds; bird with outstretched wings hovers over her.



page: [98]
CHAPTER XII.



THE GATES OF PARADISE, AMERICA, etc. 1793. [ÆT. 36.]
In 1793, Blake quitted Poland Street, after five years' residence there. The now dingy demirep street, one in which Shelley lodged in 1811, after his expulsion from Oxford, had witnessed the production of the Songs of Innocence and other Poetry and Design of a genus unknown, before or since, to that permanently foggy district. From the neighbourhood of his birth he removed across Westminster Bridge to Lambeth. There he will remain other seven years, and produce no less an amount of strange and original work. Hercules Buildings is the new abode ; a row of houses which had sprung up since his boyish rambles.
Within easy reach of the centre of London on one side, the favourite Dulwich strolls of early years were at hand on the other. Hercules Buildings, stretching diagonally between the Kennington Road and Lambeth Palace, was then a street of modest irregular sized houses, from one to three stories high, with fore-courts or little gardens in front, in the suburban style ; a street indeed only for half its length, the remainder being a single row, or terrace. No. 13, Blake's, was among the humbler, one-storied houses, on the right hand side as you go from the Bridge to the Palace. It had a wainscoted parlour, pleasant low windows, and a narrow strip of real garden behind, wherein grew a fine vine. A lady who, as a girl, used with her elders to call on the artist here, tells me Blake would on no account prune this vine, having a
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Gates of Paradise plates.

4.— AIR.

2.— WATER.

Figure: Facsimiles of two plates from Gates of Paradise. Upper plate depicts "Air": crouching figure with hands in hair, head on knee. Clouds behind and above form a chair for him, stars surround him. Lower plate depicts "Water", a drooping figure sitting under a tree on a river bank, the river itself running at his feet. Rain pours down on him and fills the frame.



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Sig. H 2
theory it was wrong and unnatural to prune vines : and the affranchised tree consequently bore a luxuriant crop of leaves, and plenty of infinitesimal grapes which never ripened. Open garden ground and field, interspersed with a few lines of clean, newly-built houses, lay all about and near ; for brick and mortar was spreading even then. At back, Blake looked out over gardens towards Lambeth Palace and the Thames, seen between gaps of Stangate Walk,—Etty's home a few years later. The city and towers of Westminster closed the prospect beyond the river, on whose surface sailing hoys were then plying once or twice a day. Vauzhall Gardens lay half a mile to the left ; Dulwich and Peckham hills within view to the south-west. The street has since been partly rebuilt, partly re-named ; the whole become now sordid and dirty. At the back of what was Blake's side has arisen a row of ill-drained, one-storied tenements bestriden by the arches of the South Western Railway ; while the adjacent main roads, grimy and hopeless looking, stretch out their long arms towards further mile on mile of suburb,—Newington, Kennington, Brixton.
In Hercules Buildings Blake engraved and ‘published'—May, 1793, adding at the foot of the title-page Johnson's name to his own— The Gates of Paradise; a singularly beautiful and characteristic volume, pre-eminently marked by significance and simplicity. It is a little foolscap octavo, printed according to his usual method, but not coloured ; containing seventeen plates of emblems, accompanied by verse, with a title or motto to each plate. For Children, the title runs, or as some copies have it, For the Sexes. The Gates of Paradise.—‘a sort of devout dream, equally wild and lovely,’ Allan Cunningham happily terms it. There is little in art which speaks to the mind directly and pregnantly as do these few, simple Designs, emblematic of so much which could never be imprisoned in words, yet of a kind more allied to literature than to art. It is plain, on looking at this little volume alone, from whom Flaxman and Stothard borrowed.
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Hints of more than one design of theirs might be found in it. And Blake's designs have, I repeat, the look of originals. A shock as of something wholly fresh and new, these typical compositions give us.
The verses at the commencement elucidate, to a certain extent, the intention of the Series, embodying an ever recurrent canon of Blake's Theology :—
  • Mutual forgiveness of each vice,
  • Such are the Gates of Paradise,
  • Against the Accuser's chief desire,
  • Who walked among the stones of fire.
  • Jehovah's fingers wrote The Law:
  • He wept! then rose in zeal and awe,
  • And in the midst of Sinai's heat,
  • Hid it beneath His Mercy Seat.
  • O Christians ! Christians ! tell me why
  • 10You rear it on your altars high? ‘
‘What is man ?’—the frontispiece significantly inquires.
To the Gates of Paradise their author in some copies added what many another Book of his would have profited by,—the Keys of the Gates, in sundry wild lines of rudest verse, which do not pretend to be poetry, but merely to tag the artist's ideas with rhyme, and are themselves a little obscure, though they do help one to catch the prevailing motives. For which reason they shall here accompany our samples of the ‘emblems.’ The numbers prefixed to the lines refer them to the plates which they are severally intended to explain.
The Keys of the Gates.
  • The Caterpillar on the Leaf
  • Reminds thee of thy Mother's Grief.
  • 1 My Eternal Man set in Repose,
  • The Female from his darkness rose ;
  • And she found me beneath a Tree,
  • A Mandrake, and in her Veil hid me.
  • Serpent reasonings us entice,
  • Of Good and Evil, Virtue, Vice.
  • 2 Doubt self-jealous, Wat'ry folly,
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Gates of Paradise. Plates.

WHAT IS MAN?

9.— I WANT! I WANT!

14.— THE TRAVELLER HASTETH IN THE EVENING.

Figure: Facsimile of three plates from Gates of Paradise. Upper plate ("What Is Man?") is of a rural scene. The central figure is a young man in mid-stride, right arm raised with hat in hand. His left foot is planted at the feet of another human figure lying supine on the grass. The young man's startled gaze follows a tiny human figure spiriting away through the air.

Lower left plate ("I Want! I Want!"): three small, indistinct figures stand on a hill. Two have arms over each other's shoulders, the third climbs upon a luminescent moon beam up to a crescent moon.

Lower right plate ("The Traveller Hasteth In The Evening"): rural path, a young man dressed as a traveller and carrying a walking stick strides toward right side of frame.



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  • 103 Struggling through Earth's Melancholy.
  • 4 Naked in Air, in Shame and Fear,
  • 5 Blind in Fire, with Shield and Spear,
  • Two Horrid Reasoning Cloven Fictions,
  • In Doubt which is Self Contradiction,
  • A dark Hermaphrodite I stood,—
  • Rational Truth, Root of Evil and Good.
  • Round me, flew the flaming sword;
  • Round her, snowy Whirlwinds roar'd,
  • Freezing her Veil, the mundane shell.
  • 206 I rent the veil where the Dead dwell:
  • When weary Man enters his Cave,
  • He meets his Saviour in the Grave.
  • Some find a Female Garment there,
  • And some a Male, woven with care,
  • Lest the Sexual Garments sweet
  • Should grow a devouring Winding-sheet.
  • 7 One Dies! Alas! the living and dead!
  • One is slain! and one is fled !
  • 8 In vainglory hatch'd and nurs'd
  • 30By double spectres, self accurs'd
  • My Son! my Son ! thou treatest me
  • But as I have instructed thee.
  • 9 On the shadows of the Moon,
  • Climbing thro’ night's highest noon :
  • 10 In Time's Ocean falling, drown'd :
  • 11 In Aged Ignorance profound,
  • Holy and cold, I clipp'd the Wings
  • Of all Sublunary Things :
  • 12 And in depths of icy Dungeons
  • 40Closed the Father and the Sons.
  • 13 But when once I did descry
  • The Immortal man that cannot Die,
  • 14 Thro’ evening shades I haste away
  • To close the labours of my Day.
  • 15 The Door of Death I open found,
  • And the Worm weaving in the Ground ;
  • 16 Thou'rt my Mother, from the Womb ;
  • Wife, Sister, Daughter, to the Tomb:
  • Weaving to Dreams the Sexual Strife,
  • 50And weeping over the Web of Life.
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In one copy which I have seen, under No. 4 are inscribed the words—
  • On cloudy doubts and reasoning cares.
Last follows an epilogue, or postscript, which perhaps explains itself, addressed
  • 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.
In this year, by the way, the first volume of a more famous poet, but a much less original volume than Blake's first,—the Descriptive Sketches of Wordsworth, followed by the Evening Walk,—were published by Johnson, of St. Paul's Churchyard. Neither reached a second edition ; but by 1807, when the Lyrical Ballads had attracted admirers here and there, they had, according to De Quincey, got out of print, and scarce.
Other engraved volumes, more removed from ordinary sympathy and comprehension than the Gates of Paradise, were issued in the same year : dreamy ‘Books of Prophecy' following in the wake of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell. First came Visions of the Daughters of Albion, a folio volume of Designs and rhymless verse, printed in colour.



  • The eye sees more than the heart knows
is the key-note struck in the first page, to which follows the Argument :—
  • I loved Theotormon,
  • And I was not ashamed ;
  • I trembled in my virgin fears,
  • And I hid in Leutha's vale.
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    Gates of Paradise plates

    7.— ALAS!

    10.— HELP! HELP!

    16.— I HAVE SAID TO THE WORM, THOU ART MY MOTHER AND MY SISTER.

    Figure: Three facsimiles from the Gates of Paradise. Upper plate ("Alas!"): worm larva with face of sleeping child and a body mimicking swaddling clothes lays on an outspread leaf. Another leaf arches over it, providing a canopy. Lower left plate ("Help! Help!"): an arm reaches out of a tempestuous sea towards a heaven filled with foreboding clouds. Lower right plate ("I Have Said To The Worm..."): a helpless looking figure shrouded in white crouches under the exposed roots of a tree. An enormous worm snakes in from the background and encircles the figure's feet. His skeletal hand weakly holds a slender stick or wand.



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  • I plucked Leutha's flower,
  • And I rose up from the vale ;
  • But the terrible thunders tore
  • My virgin mantle in twain.
 

from Visions of the Daughers of Albion

Figure: Illustration from the Visions of the Daughters of Albion . Oothoon, partially nude, kneels before the marigold and kisses a smaller figure that issues from it with its arms outstretched. Rain or sunrays in the background.



The poem partakes of the same delicate mystic beauty as Thel, but tends also towards the incoherence of the writings which immediately followed it. Of the former qualities the commencement may be quoted as an instance—
  • Enslaved, the daughters of Albion weep, a trembling lamentation
  • Upon their mountains ; in their valleys, sighs toward America.
  • For the soft soul of America,—Oothoon,—wandered in woe
  • Among the vales of Leutha, seeking flowers to comfort her :
  • And thus she spoke to the bright marigold of Leutha's vale,—
    • page: 104
  • ‘Art thou a flower? Art thou a nymph? I see thee now a flower ;
  • And now a nymph ! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!’
  • The golden nymph replied, ‘Pluck thou my flower, Oothon the mild,
  • Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight
  • 10Can never pass away.'—She ceased and closed her golden shrine.
  • Then Oothoon plucked the flower, saying,—'I pluck thee from thy bed,
  • Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts,
  • And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.’
  • Over the waves she went, in wing'd exulting swift delight,
  • And over Theotormon's reign took her impetuous course.
But she is taken in the ‘thunders,’ or toils of Bromion, who appears the evil spirit of the soil. Theotormon, in jealous fury, chains them—'terror and meekness'—together, back to back, in Bromion's cave, and seats himself sorrowfully by. The lamentations of Oothoon, and her appeals to the incensed divinity, with his replies, form the burthen of the poem. The Daughters of Albion, who are alluded to in the opening lines as enslaved, weeping, and sighing towards America, ‘hear her woes and echo back her cries ;’ a recurring line or refrain, which includes all they have to do.
We subjoin another extract or two:—
  • Oothoon weeps not: she cannot weap ! her tears are locked up !
  • But she can howl incessant, writhing her soft, snowy limbs,
  • And calling Theotormon's eagles to prey upon her flesh!’
  • ‘I call with holy voice ! kings of the sounding air I !
  • ‘Rend away this defiled bosom that I may reflect
  • The image of Theotormon on my pure transparent breast!’
  • The eagles at her call descend and rend their bleeding prey.
  • Theotormon severely smiles; her soul reflects the smile,
  • As the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure and smiles.
  • 10The Daughters of Albion hear her woes and echo back her sighs.
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  • ‘Why does my Theotormon sit weeping upon the threshold?
  • And Oothoon hovers by his side persuading him in vain!
  • I cry, Arise, O Theotormon ! for the village dog
  • Barks at the breaking day; the nightingale has done lamenting;
  • The lark does rustle in the ripe corn; and the Eagle returns
  • From nightly prey, and lifts his golden beak to the pure east,
  • Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions, to awake
  • The sun that sleeps too long ! Arise, my Theotormon ; I am pure !
  • Ask the wild ass why he refuses burdens; and the meek camel
  • Why he loves man. Is it because of eye, ear, mouth, or skin,
  • Or breathing nostrils ? No : for these the wolf and tiger have.
  • Ask the blind worm the secrets of the grave; and why her spires
  • Love to curl round the bones of death : and ask the ravenous snake
  • Where she gets poison ; and the winged eagle, why he loves the sun :
  • And then tell me the thoughts of man that have been hid of old !
  • Silent I hover all the night, and all day could be silent,
  • If Theotormon once would turn his loved eyes upon me;
  • 10How can I be defiled, when I reflect thy image pure ?
  • Sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on ; and the soul prey'd on by woe.
  • The new washed lamb ting'd with the village smoke and the bright swan
  • By the red earth of our immortal river: I bathe my wings,
  • And I am white and pure, to hover round Theotormon's breast.’
Then Theotormon broke his silence, and he answered:—
  • ‘Tell me what is the night or day to one o'erflow'd with woe?
  • Tell me what is a thought ? and of what substance is it made?
  • Tell me what is a joy : and in what gardens do joys grow?
  • And in what rivers swim the sorrows; and upon what mountains
  • Wave shadows of discontent? And in what homes dwell the wretched,
  • Drunken with woe forgotten, and shut up from cold despair?
  • Tell me where dwell the thoughts forgotten till thou call them forth?
  • 10Tell me where dwell the joys of old and where the ancient loves?
  • And when they will renew again, and the night of oblivion pass?
  • That I may traverse times and spaces far remote, and bring
  • Comforts into a present sorrow, and a night of pain.’
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The poem concludes thus :—
  • The sea fowl takes the wintry blast for a covering to her limbs.
  • And the wild snake the pestilence, to adorn him with gems and gold.
  • 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 every thing that lives is holy.
  • Thus every morning wails Oothoon, but Theotormon sits
  • Upon the margined ocean, conversing with shadows dire.
  • The Daughters of Albion hear her woes, and echo back her sighs.
The designs to the Visions of the Daughters of Albion are magnificent in energy and portentousness. They are coloured with flat, even tints, not worked up highly. A frontispiece represents Bromion and Oothoon, chained in a cave that opens on the sea ; Theotormon sitting near. The title-page is of great beauty ; the words are written over rainbow and cloud, from the centre of which emerges an old man in fire, other figures floating round. We give two specimens. One ( page 103) illustrates the Argument we have quoted ; the other ( page 97), an incident in the poem (also quoted), where the eagles of Theotormon rend the flesh of Oothoon.
The other volume of this year's production at Lambeth, entitled America, a Prophecy, is a folio of twenty pages, of still more dithyrambic verse. It is verse hard to fathom; with far too little Nature behind it, or back-bone; a redundance of mere invention,—the fault of all this class of Blake's writings; too much wild tossing about of ideas and words. The very names—Urthona, Enitharmon, Ore, &c. are but Ossian-like shadows, and contrast oddly with those of historic or matter-of-fact personages occasionally mentioned in the poem ; whom, notwithstanding the subject in hand, we no longer expect to meet with, after reading the Preludium:—
page: 107
  • The shadowy Daughter of Urthona stood before red Orc,
  • When fourteen suns had faintly journey'd o'er his dark abode :
  • His food she brought in iron baskets, his drink in cups of iron.
  • Crown'd with a helmet and dark hair, the nameless female stood.
  • A quiver with its burning stores, a bow like that of night
  • When pestilence is shot from heaven,—no other arms she needs,—
  • Invulnerable though naked, save where clouds roll round her loins
  • Their awful folds in the dark air. Silent she stood as night ;
  • For never from her iron tongue could voice or sound arise ;
  • 10But dumb from that dread day when Orc essay'd his fierce embrace.
  • ‘Dark virgin !’ said the hairy youth, ‘thy father stern, abhorr'd,
  • Rivets my tenfold chains, while still on high my spirit soars ;
  • Sometimes an eagle screaming in the sky ; sometimes a lion,
  • Stalking upon the mountains ; and sometimes a whale, I lash
  • the raging, fathomless abyss ; anon, a serpent folding
  • Around the pillars of Urthona, and round thy dark limbs,
  • On the Canadian wilds I fold.’
The poem opens itself thus:—
  • The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent.
  • Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America's shore,
  • Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent night.
  • Washington, Franklin, Paine, Warren, Gates, Hancock and Green,
  • Meet on the coast, glowing with blood, from Albion's fiery prince.
  • Washington spoke : ‘Friends of America, look over the Atlantic sea.
  • ‘A bended bow is lifted in the heaven, and a heavy iron chain
  • Descends link by link from Albion's cliffs across the sea to bind
  • Brothers and sons of America, till our faces pale and yellow,
  • 10Heads deprest, voices weak, eyes downcast, hands work-bruised,
  • Feet bleeding on the sultry sands, and the furrows of the whip,
  • Descend to generations that in future times forget.’
  • The strong voice ceased : for a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea,
  • The eastern cloud rent. On his cliffs stood Albion's wrathful Prince,—
  • A dragon form clashing his scales : at midnight he arose,
  • and flamed red meteors round the land of Albion beneath.
  • His voice, his locks, his awful shoulders and his glowing eyes,
  • Appear to the Americans, upon the cloudy night.
  • Solemn heave the Atlantic waves between gloomy nations.
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One more extract shall suffice :—
  • The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations;
  • The grave is burst, the spices shed, the linen wrapped up.
  • The bones of death, the covering clay, the sinews shrunk and dried,
  • Reviving shake, inspiring move, breathing ! awakening !
  • Spring,—like redeemed captives when their bonds and bars are burst.
  • Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field ;
  • Let him look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air.
  • 10Let the enchained soul, shut up in darkness and in sighing,
  • Whose face has never seen a smile in thirty weary years,
  • Rise, and look out !—his chains are loose ! his dungeon doors are open !
The poem has no distinctly seizable pretensions to a prophetic character, being, like the rest of Blake's ‘Books of Prophecy,’ rather a retrospect, in its mystic way, of events already transpired. The American War of Independence is the theme ; a portion of history here conducted mainly by vast mythic beings, ‘Orc,’ the ‘Angels of Albion,’ the ‘Angels of the thirteen states,’ &c. ; whose movements are throughout accompanied by tremendous elemental commotion—'red clouds and raging fire ;' ‘black smoke, thunder,’ and



  • Plagues creeping on the burning winds driven by flames of Orc,
through which chaos the merely human agents show small and remote, perplexed and busied in an ant-like way. Strange to conceive a somewhile associate of Paine producing these ‘Prophetic’ volumes !
The America now and then occurs coloured, more often plain black, or occasionally blue and white. The designs blend with and surround the verse ; the mere grouping of the text, filled in here and there with ornament, often forming, in itself, a picturesque piece of decorative composition. Of the beauty of most of these designs, in their finished state, it would be quite impossible to obtain any notion, without
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from America

From AMERICA .

  • Albions Angel stood beside the Stone
  • of night and saw
  • The terror like a comet or more like the
  • planet red
  • That once inclosd the terrible wandering comets in its sphere
  • Then Mars thou wast our center & the planets three flew round
  • Thy crimson disk; so e'er the Sun was rent from thy red sphere.
  • The Spectre glowd his horrid length staining the temple long
  • With beams of blood & thus a voice came forth and shook the temple

Figure: Illustrated verse from the America. Above, "Albion's Prince" stands astride a cloud, shouldering a captive male figure. Two angelic figures flank him; the one on his left offers a flaming sword; on his right, a balance of scales tipped heavily in favor of one side. Below, a serpent's coils open to receive a man who is free-falling head first into the abyss. The upper body and head of the serpent perfectly encircle the contorted body as it descends. On the left side of the frame, another figure descends, in anguished fetal position, into flaming hell-fire.



page: 109
the necessary adjunt of colour. The specimens given in this chapter and elsewhere can at best only show form and arrangement—the groundwork of the pages ; the frames as it were in which the verses are set ; Blake never intending any copies to go forth to the world until they had been coloured by hand. Facing pages 109 and 110, however, we give facsimiles both as of two whole pages from the America, exact facsimiles both as regards drawing and writing (though reduced to about half the size of the original), and in a colour as near as possible to that frequently used by Blake for the groundwork, as we said before, of his painted leaves. Similar examples we shall give when we come to other books of the same character,—the Europe, and that yet more remarkable, the Jerusalem.
Whatever may be the literary value of the work, the designs display unquestionable power and beauty. In firmness of outline and refinement of finish, they are exceeded by none from the same hand. We have more especially in view Lord Houghton's superb copy. Turning over the leaves, it is sometimes like an increase of daylight on the retina, so fair and open is the effect of particular pages. The skies of sapphire, or gold, rayed with hues of sunset, against which stand out leaf or blossom, or pendant branch, gay with bright plumaged birds ; the strips of emerabld sward below, gemmed with flower and lizard and enamelled snake, refresh the eye continually. Some of the illustrations are of a more sombre kind. There is one in which a little corpse, white as snow, lies gleaming on the floor of a green overarching cave, which close inspeciton proves to be a field of wheat, whose slender interlacing stalks, bowed by the full ear and by a gentle breeze, bend over and inclose the dead infant. The delicate network of stalks (which is carried up one side of the page, the main picture being at the bottom), and the subdued yet vivid green light shed over the whole, produce a lovely decorative effect. Decorative effect is in fact never lost sight of, even when the motive of the design is ghastly or terrible. As for instance at page 13, which represents the different fate
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of two bodies drowned in the sea—the one, that of a woman, cast up by the purple waves on a rocky shore ; an eagle, with outstretched wings, alighting on her bosom, his beak already tearing her flesh : the other, lying at the bottom of the ocean, where snaky loathsome things are twining round it, and open-mouthed fishes gathering greedily to devour. The effect is as of looking through water down into wondrous depths. One design in the volume was an especial favourite of Blake's : Gates of Paradise (Plate 15); in Blair's Grave, and as a distinct engraving. There are also two other subjects repeated subsequently,—in the Grave and the Job. But one more design (we might expatiate on all) shall tempt us to loiter. It heads the last page of the book and consists of a white-robed, colossal figure, bowed to the earth ; about which, as on a huge, snow-covered mass of rock, dwarf shapes are clustered here and there. Enhancing the weird effect of the whole, stand three lightning scathed oaks, each of which,
  • “As threatening Heaven with vengeance,
  • Holds out a whithered hand.”
An exquisite piece of decorative work occupies the foot of the page.
In all these works the Designer's genius floats loose and rudderless ; a phantom ship on a phantom sea. He projects himself into shapeless dreams, instead of into fair definite forms, as already in the Songs of Innocence he had shown that he could do ; and hereafter will again in the tasks so happily prescribed by others :—the illustrations to Young, to Blair's Grave, to Job, to Dante. In these amorphous Prophecies are profusely scattered the unhewn materials of poetry and design : sublime hints are sown broad-cast. But alas ! whether Blake were definite or indefinite in his conceptions, he was alike ignored. He had not the faculty to make himself popular, even with a far more intelligent public as to Art than any which existed during the reign of George the Third.
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from America

  • Fiery the Angels rose, and as they rose deep thunder roll'd
  • Around their shores : indignant burning with the fires of Orc,
  • And Boston's angel cried aloud as they flew thro’ the dark night.
  • He cried : Why trembles honesty, and, like a murderer,
  • Why seeks he refuge from the frown of his immortal station ?
  • Must the generous tremble and leave his joy to the idle, to the pestilence
  • That mock him ? Who commanded this ? What God, what Angel ?
  • To keep the generous from experience till the ungenerous
  • Are unrestrained performers of the energies of nature,
  • 10Till pity become a trade and generosity a science
  • That men get rich by, and the sandy desert is given to the strong.
  • What God is he writes laws of peace and clothes him in a tempest?
  • What pitying Angel lusts for tears and fans himself with sighs?
  • What crawling villain preaches abstinence and wraps himself
  • In fat of lambs ? No more I follow, no more obedience pay.
From America

Figure: Illustrated verse from the America. Above, a female figure rides through the night sky on the back of a flying swan, reigns in hand. She looks backward over her left shoulder. Below, another female figure rides the back of a serpent, also with reigns in hand. Two children, holding hands, ride behind. A crescent moon shines in the cloudy night sky ; there are birds soaring above.



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In 1794, Flaxman returned from his seven years’ stay in Italy, with well-stored portfolios, with more than ever classicized taste, and having made at Rome for discerning patrons those designs from Homer, Æschylus and Dante which were afterwards to spread his fame through Europe. He returned to be promoted R.A. at once, and to set up house and studio in Buckingham Street, Fitzroy Square,—then a new scantily-peopled region, lying open to the hills of Hampstead and Highgate. In these premises he continued till his death in 1826. Piroli, a Roman artist, had been engaged to engrave the above-mentioned graceful compostions from the poets. His first set of plates,—those to the Odyssey, —were lost in the voyage to England, and Blake was employed to make engravings in their stead, although Piroli's name still remained on the general title-page (dated 1793) ; probably as being liklier credentials with the public. Piroli subsequently engraved the Outlines to Æschylus, to the Iliad, &c. Blake's engravings are much less telling, at the first glance, than Piroli's. Instead of hard, bold, decisive lines, we have softer lighter ones. But on looking into them we find more of the artist in the one,—as in the beautiful Aphrodite, for instance, a very fine and delicate engraving,—more uniform mechanical effect in the other. Blake's work is like a drawing, with traces as of a pen ; Piroli's the orthodox copperplate style. Blake, in fact, at that time, etched a good deal more than do ordinary engravers.
One consistent patron there was, whom it has become time to mention. Without his friendly countenance, even less would have remained to show the world, or a portion of it, what manner of man Blake was. I mean Mr. Thomas Butts, whose long friendship with Blake commenced at this period. For nearly thirty years he continued (with few interruptions) a steady buyer, at moderate prices, of Blake's drawings, temperas and frescoes ; the only large buyer the artist ever had. Occasionally he would take of Blake a drawing a week. He, in this way, often supplied the imaginative man with the bare
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means of subsistence when no others existed—at all events from his art. All honour to the solitary appreciator and to his zealous constancy ! As years rolled by, Mr. Butts' house in Fitzroy Square became a perfect Blake gallery. Fitzroy Square, by the way built in great part by Adelphi Adams, was fashionable in those days. Noblemen were contented to live in its spacious mansions ; among other celebrities, General Miranda, the South American hero, abode there.
Mr. Butts was no believer in Blake's ‘madness.’ Strangers to the man, and they alone, believed in that. Yet he could give piquant account of his protégé‘s extravagances. One story in particular he was fond of telling, which has been since pretty extensively retailed about town ; and though Mr. Linnell, the friend of Blake's later years, regards it with incredulity, Mr. Butts’ authority in all that relates to the early and middle period of Blake's life, must be regarded as unimpeachable. At the end of the little garden in Hercules Buildings there was a summer-house. Mr. Butts calling one day found Mr. and Mrs. Blake sitting in this summer-house, freed from ‘those troublesome disguises’ which have prevailed since the Fall. ‘ Come in !’ cried Blake; ‘it's only Adam and Eve, you know !’ Husband and wife had been reciting pasages from Paradise Lost, in character, and the garden of Hercules Buildings had to represent the Garden of Eden. For my reader here frankly to enter into the full simplicity and naïveté of Blake's character, calls for the exercise of a little imagination on his part. He must go out of himself for a moment, if he would take such eccentricities for what they are worth, and not draw false conclusions. If he or I—close-tethered as we are to the matter-of-fact world—were on a sudden to wander in so bizarre a fashion from the prescriptive proprieties of life, it would be time for our friends to call in a doctor, or apply for a commission de lunatico. But Blake lived in a world of Ideas ; Ideas to him were more real than the actual external world. On this matter, as on all others, he had his own peculiar views. He thought that,
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Sig. Vol. I. I
the Gymnosophists of India, the ancient Britons, and others of whom History tells, who went naked, were, in this, wiser than the rest of mankind,—pure and wise,—and that it would be well if the world could be as they. From the speculative idea to the experimental realization of it in his own person, was, for him, but a step ; though the prejudices of Society would hardly permit the experiment to be more than temporary and private. Another of Blake's favourite fancies was that he could be, for the time, the historical person into whose character he projected himself : Socrates, Moses, or one of the Prophets. ‘I am Socrates,’ or ‘Moses,’ or ‘the prophet Isaiah,’ he would wildly say ; and always his glowing enthusiasm was mirrored in the still depths of his wife's nature. This incident of the garden illustrates forcibly the strength of her husband's influence over her, and the unquestioning manner in which she fell in with all he did or said. When assured by him that she (for the time) was Eve, she would not dream of contradiction—nay, she in a sense believed it. If therefore the anecdote argues madness in one, it argues it in both.
The Blakes do not stand alone, however, in modern history as to eccentric tenets, and even practices, in the article of drapery. Jefferson Hogg, for instance, in his Life of Shelley, tells us of a ‘charming and elegant’ family in the upper ranks of society, whose acquaintance the poet made about 1813, who had embraced the theory of ‘philosophical nakednesss.’ The parents believing in an impending ‘return to nature’ and reason, the pristine state of innocence, prepared their children for the coming millennium, by habituating them to run naked about the house, a few hours every day ; in which condition they would open the door to welcome Shelley. The mother herself, enthusiastic in the cause,—than whom there was ‘never a more innocent or more virtuous lady,’—also rehearsed her part—in private. She would rise betimes, lock herself in her dressing-room, and there for some hours remain, without her clothes, reading and writing,
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naively assuring her friends afterwards that she ‘felt so much the better for it, so innocent during the rest of the day.’ Strange dénoûments have happened to other believers in the high physical, moral, and aesthetic advantages of nudity. Hogg tells another story,—of Dr. Franklin; who wrote, on merely sanitary grounds, in favour of morning ‘air-baths.’ The philosopher, by the daily habit of devoting the early hours to study undressed, had so familiarized himself with the practice of his theory, that the absence of mind natural to philosophers led him into inadvertences. Espying once a friend's maid-servant tripping quickly across the green with a letter in her hand—an important letter he had been eagerly expecting—the philosopher ran out to meet her: at which apparition she fled in terror, screaming. Again, no one ever accused hard-headed, cannie Wilkie even of eccentricity. But he was a curious mixture of simplicity, worldliness, and almost fanatical enthusiasm in the practice of his art. One morning, the raw-boned young Scotchman was discovered by a caller (friend Haydon) drawing from the nude figure before a mirror; a method of study he pronounced ‘verra improving,’ as well as economical! Blake's vagary, then, we may fairly maintain to be not wholly without parallel on the part of sane men, when carried away by an idea, as at first blush it would seem.
At the period of the enactment of the scene from Milton, Mrs. Blake was, in person, still a presentable Eve. A ‘brunette’ and ‘very pretty’ are terms I have picked up as conveying something regarding her appearance in more youthful days. Blake himself would boast what a pretty wife he had She lost her beauty as the seasons sped,— ‘never saw a woman so much altered,’ was the impression of one on meeting her again after a lapse of but seven years ; a life of hard work and privation having told heavily upon her in the interim. In spirit, she was, at all times, a true Eve to her Adam ; and might with the most literal appropriateness have used to him the words of Milton:
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Sig. I 2
  • ‘What thou bid'st
  • Unargued I obey ; so God ordains :
  • God is thy law, thou mine ; to know no more
  • Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise.
  • With thee conversing I forget all time ;
  • All seasons and their change, all please alike.’
To her he never seemed erratic or wild. There had indeed at one time been a struggle of wills, but she had yielded ; and his was a kind, if firm rule. Surely never had visionary man so loyal and affectionate a wife!  



Figure: A human figure walks across the clouds, pulling the moon in crescent phase behind him.



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CHAPTER XIII.



THE SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. 1794. [ÆT. 37.]
In the Songs of Experience , put forth in 1794, as complement to the Songs of Innocence of 1789, we come again on more lucid writing than the Books of Prophecy last noticed,— writing freer from mysticism and abstractions, if partaking of the same colour of thought. Songs of Innocence and Experience, showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul: the author and printer, W. Blake , is the general title now given. The first series, quite in keeping with its name, had been of far the more heavenly temper. The second, produced during an interval of another five years, bears internal evidence of later origin, though in the same rank as to poetic excellence. As the title fitly shadows, it is of grander, sterner calibre, of gloomier wisdom. Strongly contrasted, but harmonious phases of poetic thought are presented by the two series.
One poem in the Songs of Experience happens to have been quoted often enough (first by Allan Cunningham in connection with Blake's name), to have made its strange old Hebrew-like grandeur, its Oriental latitude yet force of eloquence, comparatively familiar:— The Tiger. To it Charles Lamb refers: ‘I have heard of his poems,' writes he, ‘but have never seen them. There is one to a tiger, beginning—
  • Tiger ! tiger! burning bright
  • In the forests of the night,
which is glorious !’
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Of the prevailing difference of sentiment between these poems and the Songs of Innocence, may be singled out as examples The Clod and the Pebble, and even so slight a piece as The Fly ; and in a more sombre mood, The Garden of Love, The Little Boy Lost, Holy Thursday (antitype to the poem of the same title in Songs of Innocence), The Angel, The Human Abstract, The Poison Tree, and above all, London. One poem, The Little Girl Lost, may startle the literal reader, but has an inverse moral truth and beauty of its own. Another, The Little Girl Lost, and Little Girl Found, is a daringly emblematic anticipation of some future age of gold, and has the picturesqueness of Spenserian allegory, lit with the more ethereal spiritualism of Blake. Touched by
  • ‘The light that never was on sea or shore,’
is this story of the carrying off of the sleeping little maid by friendly beasts of prey, who gambol round her as she lies; the kingly lion bowing ‘his mane of gold,’ and on her neck dropping ‘from his eyes of flame, ruby tears ;’ who, when her parents seek the child, brings them to his cave; and
  • They look upon his eyes,
  • Filled with deep surprise ;
  • And wondering behold
  • A spirit armed in gold!
Well might Flaxman exclaim, ‘Sir, his poems are as grand as his pictures,’ Wordsworth read them with delight, and used the words before quoted. Blake himself thought his poems finer than his designs. Hard to say which are the more uncommon in kind. Neither, as I must reiterate, reached his own generation. In Malkin's Memoirs of a Child, specimens from the Poetical Sketches and Songs of Innocence and Experience were given ; for these poems struck the well-meaning scholar, into whose hands by chance they fell, as somewhat astonishing; as indeed they struck most who
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stumbled on them. But Malkin's Memoirs was itself a book not destined to circulate very freely ; and the poems of Blake, even had they been really known to their generation, were not calculated in their higher qualities to win popular favour,—not if they had been free from technical imperfection. For it was an age of polish of trifles ; not like the present age, with its slovenliness and licence. Deficient finish was never a charactistic of the innovator Wordsworth himself, who started from the basis of Pope and Goldsmith ; and whose matter, rather than manner, was obnoxious to critics. Defiant carelessness, though Coleridge in his Juvenile Poems was often guilty of it, did not become a characteristic of English verse, until the advent of Keats and Shelley ; poets of imaginative virtue enough to cover a multitude of their own and other people's sins. The length to which it has since run (despite Tennyson), we all know.
Yet in this very inartificiality lies the secret of Blake's rare and wondrous success. Whether in design or in poetry, he does, in very fact, work as a man already practised in one art, beginning anew in another ; expressing himself with virgin freshness of mind in each, and in each realizing, by turns, the idea flung out of that prodigal cornucopia of thought and image, Pippa Passes:—‘If there should arise a new painter, will it not be in some such way by a poet, now, or a musician (spirits who have conceived and perfected an ideal through some other channel), transferring it to this, and escaping our conventional roads by pure ignorance of them ?’ Even Malkin, with real sense, observes of the poet in general,—his mind ‘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.’ Yes ! ravished by devotion. For in these songs of Blake's occurs devotional poetry, which is real poetry too—a very exceptional thing.
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Witness that simple and beautiful poem entitled The Divine Image, or that On Another's Sorrow. The Songs of Innocence are in truth animated by a uniform sentiment of deep piety, of reverent feeling, and may be said, in their pervading influence, to be one devout aspiration throughout. The Songs of Experience consist rather of earnest, impassioned arguments ; in this differing from the simple affirmations of the earlier Songs of Innocence, —arguments on the loftiest themes of existence.
After the Songs of Experience, Blake never again sang to like angelic tunes ; nor even with the same approach to technical accuracy. His poetry was the blossom of youth and early manhood. Neither in design did he improve on the tender grace of some of these illustrations ; irregularities became as conspicuous in it, as in his verse ; though in age he attained to nobler heights of sublimity, as the Inventions of Job will exemplify.
Let us again take a glance at what was going on contemporaneously in English literature during the years 1789-94. In novels, these were the days of activity of the famous Minerva Press, with Perdita Robinson and melancholy Charlotte Smith as leaders. Truer coin was circulated by Godwin ( St. Leon appeared in 1799), by Zeluco Moore, by Mrs. Radcliffe ( Mysteries of Udolfo, in 1794), by Monk Lewis, the sisters Lee, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Opie. In verse, it was the hour of the sentimental Della Cruscans, Madame Piozzi, Mrs. Robinson again, ‘Mr. Merry,’ and others. On these poor butterflies, Gifford, in this very year, laid his coarse, heavy hand ; himself as empty a versifier, if smarter. Glittering Darwin, whose Loves of the Plants delighted the reading world in 1789, smooth Hayley, Anna Seward, ‘Swan of Lichfield,’ were popular poets. In satire, Dr. Wolcott was punctually receiving from the booksellers his unconscionably long annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds, for copious Peter Pindarisms, fugitive odes, and epistles. In the region of enduring literature Cowper had closed his
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contributions to poetry by the translation of Homer. The third reprint of Burns's Poems, with Tam O’ Shanter for one addition, had appeared at Edinburgh in 1793 ; and the poet himself took leave of this rude world in 1796. Crabbe had achieved his first success. Among rising juniors was Rogers, who had made his début in 1786, the same year as Burns ; and in 1792, the Pleasures of Memory established a lasting reputation for its author,—a thing it would hardly do now. A little later (1799), stripling Campbell's Pleasures of Hope will leap through four editions in a year. Bloomfield is in 1793-4 jotting down The Farmer's Boy; Wordsworth shaping the first example, but a diffuse one, of that new kind of poetry which was hereafter to bring refreshment and happiness to many hearts,— Guilt and Sorrow; still one of his least read poems.
In the newly-opened fruitful domain of poetic antiquarianism,— the eighteenth century's best poetic bequest,— Bishop Percy had found a zealous follower in choleric, trenchant Joseph Ritson who, in 1791, published his Pieces of Ancient Popular Poetry, and in 1795 Robin Hood. In 1790 had appeared Ellis's Specimens of the Early English Poets.
Surely there was room for Blake's pure notes of song— still, in 1860, fresh as when first uttered—to have been heard. But it was fated otherwise. Half a century later, they attracted the attention of a sympathizer with all mystics and spiritualists, Dr. Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg. Under his auspices, the Songs of Innocence and Experience were reprinted, or rather first printed, as a thin octavo, without illustrations, by Pickering, in Chancery Lane, and W. Newberry, in Chenies Street, both extinct publishers now. A very limited impression was taken off, and the reprint soon became almost as scarce as the costly and beautiful original. During the last few years, I have observed only three copies turn up—two at the fancy prices of £i 8 s and £i 7 s 6 d. ; the other, secured by myself at a more moderate outlay. They are once again printed in Vol. II. in the succession, so far as
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can be ascertained, in which their author first issued them. Consisting, as they did, of loose sheets, the Songs have seldom been bound up twice alike, and are generally even numbered wrong. Dr. Wilkinson printed them in an order of his own, and too often with words of his own ; alterations which were by no means improvements always. They are now given in strict fidelity to the original, the correction of some few glaring grammatical blemishes alone excepted, which seemed a pious duty. 1
A few words of bibliographic detail may perhaps be permitted for the collector's sake, considering the extreme beauty, the singularity, and rarity of the original book.
The illustrated Songs of Innocence and Experience was issued to Blake's public, to his own friends that is, at the modest price of thirty shillings or two guineas. Its selling price now, when perfect, varies from ten and twelve guineas upwards. From the circumstance of its having lain on hand in sheets, and from some purchasers having preferred to buy or bind only select portions, the series often occurs short of many plates—generally wants one or two. The right number is fifty-four engraved pages.
Later in Blake's life,—for the sheets always remained in stock,—five guineas were given him, and in some cases, when intended as a delicate means of helping the artist, larger sums. Flaxman recommended more than one friend to take copies, a Mr. Thomas among them, who, wishing to give the artist a present, made the price ten guineas. For such a sum Blake could hardly do enough, finishing the plates like miniatures. In the last years of his life, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Sir Francis Chantrey, and others, paid as much as twelve and twenty guineas ; Blake conscientiously working up the colour and finish, and perhaps over-labouring them, in return ; printing off only on one side of the leaf, and expanding the book by help of margin into a handsome quarto. If without a sixpence in his pocket, he was always too justly
Transcribed Footnote (page 121):

1 See note prefixed to the Songs in Vol. II.

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proud to confess it: so that, whoever desired to give Blake money, had to do it indirectly, to avoid offence, by purchasing copies of his works ; which, too, might have hurt his pride, had he suspected the secret motive, though causelessly ; for he really gave, as he well knew, far more than an intrinsic equivalent.
The early, low-priced copies,—Flaxman's for instance,— though slighter in colour, possess a delicacy of feeling, a freshness of execution, often lost in the richer, more laboured examples, especially in those finished after the artist's death by his widow. One of the latter I have noticed, very full and heavy in colour, the tints laid on with a strong and indiscriminating touch.
Other considerable varieties of detail in the final touches by hand exist. There are copies in which certain minutiæ are finished with unusual care and feeling. The prevailing ground-colour of the writing and illustrations also varies. Sometimes it is yellow, sometimes blue, and so on. In one copy the writing throughout is yellow, not a happy effect. Occasionally the colour is carried further down the page than the ruled space ; a stream say, as in The Lamb, is introduced. Of course, therefore, the degrees of merit vary greatly between one copy and another, both as a whole and in the parts. A few were issued plain, in black and white, or blue and white, which are more legible than the polychrome examples. In these latter, the red or yellow lettering being sometimes unrelieved by a white ground, we have, instead of contrasted hue, gradations of it, as in a picture.
Out of the destruction that has engulfed so large a portion of Blake's copper-plates, partly owing to the poverty which compelled him often to obliterate his own work, that the same metal might serve again, partly to the neglect, and worse than neglect, of some of those into whose hands they fell, we have happily been able to enrich our pages from a remnant,—ten plates, taking off sixteen impressions (a
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few having been engraved on both sides),—of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. The gentleman from whom they were obtained had once the entire series in his possession ; but all save these ten were stolen by an ungrateful black he had befriended, who sold them to a smith as old metal.
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CHAPTER XIV.



PRODUCTIVE YEARS. 1794-95. [ÆT. 37-38]
To the Songs of Experience succeeded from Lambeth the same year (1794) volumes of mystic verse and design, in the track of the Visions of the Daughters of Albion, and the America. One of them is a sequel to the America, and generally occurs bound up with it, sometimes coloured, sometimes plain. It is entitled Europe, a Prophecy: Lambeth, printed by William Blake , 1794 ; and consists of seventeen quarto pages, with designs of a larger size than those of America, occupying the whole page often. The frontispiece represents the ‘Ancient of Days,’ as shadowed forth in Proverbs viii. 27 : ‘when he set a compass upon the face of the earth;’ and again, as described in Paradise Lost, Book vii. line 236 : a grand figure, ‘in an orb of light surrounded by dark clouds, is stooping down, with an enormous pair of compasses, to describe the world's destined orb;’ Blake adopting with childlike fidelity, but in a truly sublime spirit, the image of the Hebrew and English poets. This composition was an especial favourite with its designer. When colouring it by hand, he ‘always bestowed more time,' says Smith, ‘and enjoyed greater pleasure in the task, than from anything else he produced.’ The process of colouring his designs was never to him, however, a mechanical or irksome one. Very different feelings were his from those of a mere copyist. Throughout life, whenever for his few patrons filling in the colour to his
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from Europe

  • Enitharmon slept
  • Eighteen hundred years : Man was a Dream!
  • The night of Nature and their harps unstrung
  • She slept in middle of her nightly song.
  • Eighteen hundred years a female dream
  • Shadows of men in fleeting bands upon the winds :
  • Divide the heavens of Europe :
  • Till Albions Angel smitten with his own plagues fled with his bands
  • The cloud bears hard on Albions shore,
  • 10Fill'd with immortal demons of futurity.
  • In council gather the smitten Angels of Albion
  • The cloud bears hard upon the council house: down rushing
  • On the heads of Albions Angels
  • One hour they lay buried beneath the ruins of that hall
  • But as the stars rise from the salt lake they arise in pain
  • In troubled mists oerclouded by the terrors of strugling times
From EUROPE.

Figure: A plate from Europe A whirlwind of air and snow frame the verse here. Two human figures are caught up in it, hovering at the top of the frame, entwined in the spiralling lines that represent the winds.



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Note: blank page
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engraved books, he lived anew the first fresh, happy experiences of conception, as in the high hour of inspiration.
Smith tells us that Blake ‘was inspired with the splendid grandeur of this figure, “ The Ancient of Days ,” by the vision which he declared hovered over his head at the top of his staircase’ in No. 13, Hercules Buildings, and that ‘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.’ On that same staircase it was Blake, for the only time in his life, saw a ghost. When talking on the subject of ghosts, he was wont to say they did not appear much to imaginative men, but only to common minds, who did not see the finer spirits. A ghost was a thing seen by the gross bodily eye, a vision, by the mental. ‘Did you ever see a ghost ?” asked a friend. ‘Never but once,’ was the reply. And it befel thus. Standing one evening at his garden-door in Lambeth, and chancing to look up, he saw a horrible grim figure, ‘scaly, speckled, very awful,’ stalking down stairs towards him. More frightened than ever before or after, he took to his heels, and ran out of the house.
It is hard to describe poems wherein the dramatis persona are giant shadows, gloomy phantoms; the scene, the realms of space ; the time, of such corresponding vastness, that eighteen hundred years pass as a dream:—
  • Enitharmon slept,
  • She slept in middle of her nightly song
  • Eighteen hundred years.
More apart from humanity even than the America, it is hard to trace out any distinct subject, any plan or purpose in the Europe, or to determine whether it mainly relate to the past, present, or to come. And yet its incoherence has a grandeur about it as of the utterance of a man whose eyes are fixed on strange and awful sights, invisible to bystanders. To use an expression of Blake's own, on a subsequent
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occasion, it is as if the ‘Visions were angry,’ and hurried in stormy disorder before his rapt gaze, no longer to bless and teach, but to bewilder and confound.
The Preludium, and the two accompanying specimen pages, which give a portion of both words and design, will enable the reader to form some idea of the poem. There occurs in one of the latter an allusion to the Courts of Law at Westminster, which is a striking instance of that occasional mingling of the actual with the purely symbolic, before spoken of. Perhaps the broidery of spider's web which so felicitously embellishes the page, was meant to bear a typical reference to the same.
The ‘nameless shadowy female,’ with whose lamentation the poem opens, personifies Europe as it would seem ; her head (the mountains) turbaned with clouds, and round her limbs, the ‘sheety waters’ wrapped; whilst Enitharmon symbolizes great mother Nature:— Preludium.
  • The nameless shadowy female rose from out
  • The breast of Orc,
  • Her snaky hair brandishing in the winds of Enitharmon :
  • And thus her voice arose:—
  • ‘O mother Enitharmon, wilt thou bring forth other sons ?
  • To cause my name to vanish, that my place may not be found ?
  • For I am faint with travel!
  • Like the dark cloud disburdened in the day of dismal thunder.
  • My roots are brandish'd in the heavens; my fruits in earth beneath,
  • 10Surge, foam, and labour into life !—first born, and first consum'd,
  • Consumed and consuming !
  • Then why shouldst thou, accursed mother! bring me into life ?
  • I weep !—my turban of thick clouds around my lab'ring head ;
  • I fold the sheety waters as a mantle round my limbs.
  • Yet the red sun and moon
  • And all the overflowing stars rain down prolific pains.
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Note: blank page
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From Europe

  • And the clouds & fires pale rolld round in the night of Enitharmon
  • Round Albions cliffs & Londons walls: still Enitharmon slept!
  • Rolling volumes of grey mist involve Churches Palaces Towers.
  • For Urizen unclasped his Book: feeding his soul with pity
  • The youth of England hid in gloom curse the paind heavens: compell'd
  • Into the deadly night to see the form of Albions Angel
  • Their parents brought them forth & aged ignorance preaches canting
  • On a vast rock percievd by those senses that are clos'd from thought:
  • Bleak dark abrupt it stands & overshadows London city
  • 10They saw his boney feet on the rock the flesh consumd in flames:
  • They saw the Serpent temple lifted above shadowing the Island white:
  • They heard the voice of Albions Angel howling in flames of Orc
  • Seeking the trump of the last doom
  • Above the rest the howl was heard from Westminster louder & louder:
  • The Guardian of the secret codes forsook his ancient mansion.
  • Driven out by the flames of Orc his furr'd robes & false locks
  • Adhered and grew one with his flesh, and nerves & veins shot thro them
  • With dismal torment sick hanging upon the wind: he fled
  • Goveling along Great George Street thro’ the Park gate all the soldiers
  • 20Fled from his sight he dragd his torments to the wilderness.
  • Thus was the howl thro Europe!
  • For Orc rejoicd to hear the howling shadows
  • But Palamabron shot his lightnings trenching down his wide back
  • And Rintrah hung with all his legions in the nether deep.
  • Enitharmon laugh'd in her sleep to see 10 womans triumph
  • Every house a den, every man bound: the shadows are filld
  • With spectres and the windows wove over with curses of iron:
  • Over the doors Thous shalt not & over the chimneys Fear is written
  • With bands of iron round their necks fastend into the walls.
  • 30the citizens in leaden gyves the inhabitants of suburbs
  • Walk heavy: soft and bent are the bones of villagers
  • Between the clouds of Urizen the flames of Orc roll heavy
  • Around the limbs of Albions Guardian his flesh consuming.
  • Howlings & hissings, shrieks & groans & voices of despair
  • Heavens of Albion, Furious
From Europe.

Figure: Plate from Europe. The verse verges into a background of a large spider web occupied by several spiders, bees, and various bugs. At the bottom of plate, a human figure lies with legs bent, hands folded under chin, face upraised.



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  • Unwilling I look up to heaven : unwilling count the stars,
  • Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine.
  • I seize their burning power,
  • 20And bring forth howling terrors and devouring fiery kings!
  • Devouring and devoured, roaming on dark and desolate mountains,
  • In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees,
  • Ah ! mother Enitharmon !
  • Stamp not with solid form this vig'rous progeny of fire !
  • I bring forth from my teeming bosom, myriads of flames,
  • And thou dost stamp them with a signet. Then they roam abroad,
  • And leave me, void as death.
  • Ah ! I am drown'd in shady woe, and visionary joy.
  • And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?
  • 30To compass it with swaddling bands? And who shall cherish it
  • With milk and honey?
  • I see it smile, and I roll inward, and my voice is past.’
  • She ceas'd ; and rolled her shady clouds
  • Into the secret place.
So rapid was the production of this class of Blake's writings that, notwithstanding their rich and elaborate decoration, and the tedious process by which the whole had to be, with his own hand, engraved and afterwards coloured, the same year witnessed the completion of another, and the succeeding year, of two more ‘prophetic books.’ The Book of Urizen (1794), was the title of the next. The same may be said of it as of its predecessors. Like them, the poem is shapeless, unfathomable ; but in the heaping up of gloomy and terrible images, the America and Europe are even exceeded.
The following striking passage, which describes the appearing of the first woman, will serve as an example of Urizen:—
  • At length, in tears and cries, embodied
  • A female form trembling and pale
  • Waves before his deathly face.
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  • All Eternity shudder'd at the sight
  • Of the first female form, now separate.
  • Pale as a cloud of snow,
  • Waving before the face of Los !
  • Wonder, awe, fear, astonishment,
  • Petrify the eternal myriads
  • 10At the first female form now separate.
  • They call'd her Pity, and fled !
  • ‘Spread a tent with strong curtains around them :
  • Let cords and stakes bind in the Void,
  • That Eternals may no more behold them !’
  • They began to weave curtains of darkness.
  • They erected large pillars round the void ;
  • With golden hooks fastened in the pillars ;
  • With infinite labour, the Eternals
  • A woof wove, and called it Science.
The design, like the text, is characterized by a monotony of horror. Every page may be said as a furnace mouth to



  • ‘Cast forth redounding smoke and ruddy flame,’




in the midst of which are figures howling, weeping, writhing, or chained to rocks, or hurled headlong into they abyss. Of the more striking, I recall a figure that stoops over and seems breathing upon a globe enveloped in flames, the lines of fire flowing into those of his drapery and hair ; an old, amphibious-looking giant, with rueful visage, letting himself sink slowly through the waters like a frog ; a skeleton coiled round, resembling a fossil giant imbedded in the rock, &c. The colouring is rich—a little overcharged perhaps in the copy I have seen,—and gold-leaf has been freely used, to heighten the effect.
Still another volume bears date 1794,—a small quarto, consisting of twenty-three engraved and coloured designs, without letter-press, explanation, or key of any kind. The designs are of various size, all fine in colour, all extraordinary, some beautiful, others monstrous abounding in forced
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Elijah in the Chariot of Fire

ELIJAH IN THE CHARIOT OF FIRE.



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Sig. Vol. I. K
attitudes, and suspicious anatomy. The frontispiece, adopted from Urizen, is inscribed Lambeth printed by Will. Blake, 1794, and has the figure of an aged man, naked, with white beard sweeping the ground, and extended arms, each hand resting on a pile of books, and each holding a pen, wherewith he writes. The volume seems to be a carefully finished selection of favourite compositions from his portfolios and engraved books. Four are recognizable as the principal designs of the Book of Thel, modified in outline, and in colour richer and deeper. One occurs in the Visions of the Daughters of Albion. Another will hereafter re-appear in the illustrations to The Grave :—‘The spirit of the strong wicked man going forth.’
The Song of Los (1795), is in metrical prose, and is divided into two portions, one headed Africa, the other Asia. In it we again, as in the America, seem to catch a thread of connected meaning. It purports to show the rise and influence of different religions and philosophies upon mankind; but, according to Blake's wont, both action and dialogue are carried on, not by human agents, but by shadowy immortals, Orc, Sotha, Palamabron, Rintrah, Los, and many more:—
  • Then Rintrah gave abstract philosophy to Brama in the East;
  • (Night spoke to the cloud—
  • ‘So these human-formed spirits in smiling hypocrisy war
  • Against one another: so let them war on I
  • Slaves to the eternal elements !')
Next, Palamabron gave an ‘abstract law’ to Pythagoras ; then also to Socrates and Plato:—
  • Times roll'd on o'er all the sons of men,
Till Christianity dawns. Monasticism is spoken of:—
  • * * * The healthy built
  • Secluded places : * * *
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Afterwards it becomes a fruitful source of spiritual corruption :—
  • Then were the churches, hospitals, castles, palaces,
  • Like nets and gins and traps to catch the joys of eternity;
  • And all the rest a desert,
  • Till like a dream, eternity was obliterated and erased.
Prior to this, however—
  • Antamon call'd up Leutha from her valleys of delight,
  • And to Mahomet a loose Bible gave.
  • But in the North to Odin, Sotha gave a code of war.
A gradual debasement of the human race goes on—
  • Till a philosophy of five senses was complete !
  • Urizen wept, and gave it into the hands of Newton and Locke.
  • Clouds roll heavy upon the Alps round Rousseau and Voltaire.
  • And on the mountains of Lebanon round the deceased gods of Asia,
  • And on the deserts of Africa round the Fallen Angels.
  • The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent!
Under the symbol of the kings of Asia, the Song describes the misery of the old philosophies and despotisms ; their bitter lament and prayer that by pestilence and fire the race may be saved ; ‘that a remnant may learn to obey’:—
  • The Kings of Asia heard
  • The howl rise up from Europe !
  • And each ran out from his web,
  • From his ancient woven den :
  • For the darkness of Asia was startled
  • At the thick-flaming, thought-creating fires of Orc.
  • And the Kings of Asia stood
  • And cried in bitterness of soul:—
  • ‘Shall not the King call for Famine from the heath ?
  • 10Nor the Priest for Pestilence from the fen ?
  • To restrain ! to dismay ! to thin,
  • The inhabitants of mountain and plain !
  • In the day of full-feeding prosperity,
  • And the night of delicious songs ?’
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Sig. K 2
Urizen heard their cry :—
  • And stretched his clouds over Jerusalem :
  • For Adam, a mouldering skeleton,
  • Lay bleached on the garden of Eden;
  • And Noah, as white as snow,
  • On the mountains of Ararat.
He thunders desolately from the heavens; Orc rises ‘like a pillar of fire above the Alps,’ the earth shrinks, the resurrection of the dry bones is described, and the poem concludes.
Of the illustrations, two are separate pictures occupying the full page; the rest surround and blend with the text in the usual manner; and if they have not all the beauty, they share a full measure of the spirit and force of Blake. The colour is laid on with an impasto which gives an opaque and heavy look to some of them, and the medium being oil, the surface and tints have suffered. Here, as elsewhere, the designs seldom directly embody the subjects of the poem, but are independent though kindred conceptions—the right method perhaps.
As if the artist himself were at length beginning to grow weary, The Book of Ahania (1795), last of this series, is quite unadorned, except by two vignettes, one on the title, the other on the concluding page. The text is neatly engraved in plain black and white, without border or decoration of any kind. There are lines and passages of much force and beauty, but they emerge from surrounding obscurity like lightning out of a cloud :—
  • ‘And ere a man hath power to say—Behold !
  • The jaws of darkness do devour it up.’
The first half of the poem is occupied with the dire warfare between Urizen and his rebellious son, Fuzon. Their weapons are thus describled:—
  • The broad disk of Urizen upheaved.
  • Across the void many a mile.
  • It was forged in mills where the winter
  • Beats incessant: ten winters the disk
  • Unremitting endured the cold hammer.
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But it proves ineffectual against Fuzon's fiery beam:—
  • * * Laughing, it tore through
  • That beaten mass; keeping its direction,
  • The cold loins of Urizen dividing.
Wounded and enraged, Urizen prepares a bow formed of the ribs of a huge serpent—‘a circle of darkness’—and strung with its sinews, by which Fuzon is smitten down into seeming death. In the midst of the conflict, Ahania, who is called ‘the parted soul of Urizen,’ is cast forth :—
  • She fell down a faint shadow wand'ring
  • In chaos and circling dark Urizen,
  • As the moon anguish'd circles the earth ;
  • Hopeless! abhorr'd ! a death-shadow
  • Unseen, unbodied, unknown !
  • The mother of Pestilence!
Her lamentation, from which we draw our final extract, fills the concluding portion of the poem :—
  • Ah, Urizen ! Love !
  • Flower of morning! I weep on the verge
  • Of non-entity: how wide the abyss
  • Between Ahania and thee!
  • I cannot touch his hand,
  • Nor weep on his knees, nor hear
  • His voice and bow; nor see his eyes
  • And joy; nor hear his footsteps and
  • My heart leap at the lovely sound!
  • 10I cannot kiss the place
  • Whereon his bright feet have trod.
  • But I wander on the rocks
  • With hard necessity.
While intent on the composition and execution of these mystic books, Blake did not neglect the humble task-work which secured him a modest independence. He was at this time busy on certain plates for a book of travels, Captain J. G. Stedman's Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam . This work, ‘illustrated
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with eighty elegant engravings from drawings made by the author,’ was published by Johnson the following year (1796). Of these ‘elegant engravings’ Blake executed fourteen ; Holloway and Bartolozzi were among those employed for the remainder. Negroes, Monkeys, ‘Limes, Capiscums, Mummy-apples,’ and other natural productions of the country, were the chief subjects which fell to Blake's share.
Also among the fruit of this period should be particularised two prints in which the figures are on a larger scale than in any other engravings by Blake. They are both from his own designs. Under the first is inscribed :— Ezekiel : ‘Take away from thee the desire of thine eyes.’ Ezek. xxiv. 17. Painted and Engraved by W. Blake. Oct. 27, 1794. 13, Hercules Buildings. Ezekiel kneels with arms crossed and eyes uplifted in stern and tearless grief, according to God's command: beside him is one of those solemn bowed figures, with hidden face, and hair sweeping the ground, Blake often, and with such powerful effect, introduces : and on a couch in the background lies the shrouded corpse of Ezekiel's wife.
The subject of the other, which corresponds in size and style, is from the Book of Job:—‘What is man, that thou shouldst try him every moment?’ It possesses a peculiar interest as being the first embodiment of Blake's ideas upon a theme, thirty years later to be developed in that series of designs,—the Inventions to the Book of Job, which, taken as a grand harmonious whole, is an instance of rare individual genius, of the highest art with whatever compared, that certainly constitutes his masterpiece. The figure of Job himself, in the early design, is the same as that in the Inventions. But the wife is a totally differnt conception, being of a hard and masculine type.
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CHAPTER XV.



AT WORK FOR THE PUBLISHERS. 1795-99. [ÆT. 38-42]
In 1795-6, Miller, the publisher, of Old Bond Street, employed Blake to illustrate a new edition in quarto, of a translation of Bürger's Lenore, by one Mr. J. T. Stanley, F.R.S. The first edition (1786), had preceded by ten years Sir Walter Scott's translation, which came out at the same time as Stanley's new edition. The amateur version amounts to a paraphrase, not to say a new poem ; the original being ‘altered and added to,’ to square it with ‘the cause of religion and morality.’ Blake's illustrations are engraved by a man named Perry, and are three in number. One is a frontispiece,—Lenore clasping her ghostly bridegroom on their earth-scorning charger ; groups of imps and spectres from hell hovering above and dancing below ; a composition full of grace in the principal figures, wild horror and diablerie in the accessories. Another—a vignette—is an idealised procession of Prussian soldiers, escorted by their friends ; Lenore and her mother vainly gazing into the crowd in quest of their missing William. It is a charmingly composed group characterised by more than Stothard's grace and statuesque beauty. The third illustration, also a vignette, is the awakening of Lenore from her terrible dream, William rushing into her arms in the presence of the old St. Anna-like mother,—for such is the turn the catastrophe takes under Mr. Stanley's
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Young Burying Narcissa

YOUNG BURYING NARCISSA.

Figure: India-ink drawing. Three young girls kneel at the edge of a grave that has been newly dug in a cave. A shovel and lantern occupy the left side of the frame. In the center, the oldest girl holds a book in her left hand and gestures with her right hand toward the grave. The two younger girls kneel by her side, praying and weeping. The name of the engraver, "J. Hellawell", appears in the lower left corner.



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hands. This, again, is a composition of much daring and grace; its principal female figure, one of those spiritual, soul-startled forms Blake alone of men could draw. To Stanley's translation the publisher added the original German poem, with two engravings after Chodowiecki, ‘the German Hogarth,’ as he has been called, which, though clever, look as here executed, prosaic compared with Blake.
Edwards, of New Bond Street, at that day a leading bookseller, engaged Blake, in 1796, to illustrate an expensive edition, emulating Boydell's Shakspere and Milton, of Young's Night Thoughts. The Night Thoughts was then, as it had been for more than half a century, a living classic, which rival booksellers delighted to re-publish. Edwards paid his designer and engraver ‘a despicably low sum,’ says Smith, which means, I believe, a guinea a plate. And yet the prefatory Advertisement, dated December 22, 1796, tells us that the enterprise had been undertaken by the publisher ‘not as a speculation of advantage, but as an indulgence of inclination, in which fondness and partiality would not permit him to be curiously accurate in adjusting the estimate of profit and loss ;’ undertaken also from the wish ‘to make the arts in their most honourable agency subservient to the purposes of religion.’ In the same preface, written with Johnsonian swing, by Fuseli probably—the usual literary help of fine-art publishers in those days—and who I suspect had something to do with Edwards’ choice of artist, ‘the merit of Mr. Blake’ is spoken of in terms which show it to have been not wholly ignored then: ‘to the eyes of the discerning it need not be pointed out ; and while a taste for the arts of design shall continue to exist, the original conception, and the bold and masterly execution of this artist cannot be unnoticed or unadmired.’ The edition, which was to have been issued in parts, never got beyond the first ; public encouragement proving inadequate. This part extends to ninety-five pages,—to the end of Night the Fourth, —, and includes forty-three designs. It appeared in the autumn of 1797.
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These forty-three plates occupied Blake a year. A complete set of drawings for the Night Thoughts had been made, which remained in the family of Edwards, the publisher, till quite recently, when it passed into the hands of Mr. Bain, of the Haymarket. ‘Altogether this enormous series reaches the aggregate of five hundred and thirty-seven designs, of which, as has been said, only forty-three were given in the Engraved Selection. In some, every inch of the available margin is quick with multitudinous invention ; and in others the whole interest is gathered to the broadest spaces and the remainder left as great breadths of light or gloom. As might be expected in so vast a task, they are very unequal both in conception and design. In succession they are solemn, tender or playful, broken by frequent bursts of Titanic inspiration under which the pages tremble. Then follow others painfully grotesque, or feebly uninteresting, but these are comparatively few; and the inspection of these unique volumes (which ought to belong to the nation) cannot fail to impress on the mind of every lover of Blake a loftier estimate of his gigantic powers than was before entertained.’ Thus writes Mr. Frederick Shields, from whose hand the reader will find, in Vol. II., complete descriptive notes of all the more important designs in this great series.
Edwards’ edition was as much a book of design as of type ; splendidly printed in folio on thick paper, with an ample margin to each page. Around every alternate leaf Blake engraved wild, allegorical figures; designs little adapted to the apprehension of his public. He so engraved them as to make a picture of the whole page, as in his own illustrated poems; but not with an equally felicitous result, when combined with formal print. To each of the four Nights was prefixed an introductory design or title—The illustrations have one very acceptable aid, and that is, a written ‘explanation of the engravings’ at the end; drawn up or put into shape by another hand than Blake's—the same possibly which had penned the Advertisement. It would be well if
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all his designs had this help. For at once literal in his translation of word into line, daring and unhacknied in his manner of indicating his pregnant allegories, Blake's conceptions do not always explain themselves at a glance, and without their meaning, half their beauty must needs be lost.
Looked at merely as marginal book illustrations, the engravings are not strikingly successful. The space to be filled in these folio pages is of itself too large, and the size of the outlines is æsthetically anything but a gain. For such meanings as Blake's, not helped by the thousand charms of the painter's language, can be advantageously compressed into small space. The oft-repeated colossal limbs of Death and Time sprawling across the page—figures too large for the margin of the book, and necessarily always alike—become somewhat uninteresting. How little Blake was adapted to ingratiate himself with the public, the engraved series exemplifies. The general spectator willl find these designs, all harping on life, death, and immortality, far from attractive ; austere themes, austerely treated, if also sweetly and grandly ; without even relief of so much admixture of worldly topic and image as is introduced in the text of the epigrammatic poet. There is monotony of subject, of treatment, of the expression of ideas pure and simple, ideas similar to those literature is commonly employed to convey, yet transcending words, is at the very opposite pole to that of the great mass of modern painters. There is little or no individuality in his faces, if more in his forms. Typical forms and faces, abstract impersonations, are used to express his meaning. Everything—figures, landscape, costume, accessory—is reduced to its elemental shape, its simplest guise— ‘bare earth, bare sky, and ocean bare.’
The absence of colour, the use of which Blake so well understood, to relieve his simple design and heighten its significance, is a grave loss. I have seen one copy of the Young, originally coloured for Mr. Butts, now in the hands of
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Lord Houghton, much improved by the addition, forming a book of great beauty.
Many of these designs, taken by themselves, are, however, surpassingly imaginative and noble : as the first—‘Death in the character of an old man, having swept away with one hand part of a family, is presenting with the other their spirits to immortality;’ in which, as often happens with Blake, separate parts are even more beautiful compositions than the whole. And again, the literal translation into outline of a passage few other artists would have selected, to render closely:—
  • What though my soul fantastic measures trod
  • O'er fairy fields; or mourn'd along the gloom
  • Of pathless woods; or down the craggy steep
  • Hurl'd headlong; swam with pain the mantled pool
  • Or scaled the cliff, or danced on hollow winds,
  • With antic shapes, wild natives of the brain.’
Again, the illustration to the line—
  • ’ ‘Tis greatly wise to talk with our past hours,’
in which ‘the hours are drawn as aërial and shadowy beings some of whom are bringing their scrolls to the inquirer, while others are carrying their records to heaven.’ Again, ‘the author, encircled by thorns emblematical of grief, laments the loss of his friend to the midnight hours,’ here also represented as aërial, shadowy beings. A grand embodiment is that of the Vale of Death, where ‘the power of darkness broods over his victims as they are borne down to the grave by the torrent of a sinful life ;’ the life stream showing imploring upturned faces, rising to the suface, of infancy, youth, age ; while the pure, lovely figure of Narcissa wanders in the shade beside.
Of a higher order still, are some illustrations in which the designer chooses themes of his own, parallel to, or even independent of the text, not mere translations of it. As to the line—
  • ‘Its favours here are trials, not rewards,’
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where in exemplification of the ‘frailty of the blessings of this life, the happiness of a little family is suddenly destroyed by the accident of the husband's death from the bite of a serpent.’ The father is writhing in the serpent's sudden coil, while beside him his beautiful wife, as yet unconscious of his fate, is bending over, and holding back her infant, who stretches out eager little hands to grasp a bird on the wing. A truly pregnant allegory, nobly designed, and of Raffaellesque grace. On so slight a hint as the line—
  • ‘Oft burst my song beyond the bounds of life,’
a lovely and spiritual ‘figure holding a lyre, and springing into the air, but confined by a chain to the earth,’ typifies ‘the struggling of the soul for immortality.’ The line—
  • ‘We censure nature for a span too short,’
waywardly suggests a naïve but fine composition of ‘a man measuring an infant with his span, in allusion to the shortness of life.’ To the words—
  • ‘Know like the Median, fate is in thy walls,’
we have of course the story of Belshazzar. Illustrative of the axiom, ‘teaching we learn,’ is introduced an unaffected and beautiful group,—an aged father instructing his children.
Some of the designs trench on those afterwards more matured in Blair's Grave : as ‘Angels attending the death-bed of the righteous,’ and ‘Angels conveying the spirit of the good man to heaven,’ both of aërial tenderness and grace. ‘A skeleton discovering the first symptoms of re-animation on the sounding of the archangel's trump,’ is precisely the same composition as one introduced in The Grave, except that in the earlier design the foreshortened figure of the archangel is different and finer.
Throughout, the familiar abstractions Death and Time are originally conceived, as they had need be, recurring so frequently. They are personified by grand, colossal figures. Instead of the hacknied convention of a skeleton, Death appears as a solemn, draped, visionary figure. So, too, the
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conventional wings of angel and spirit are dispensed with. The literalness with which the poet's metaphors are occasionally embodied is a startling and not always felicitous invasion of the province of words. As when Death summons the living ‘from sleep to his kingdom the grave,’ with a handbell; or ‘plucks the sun from his sphere.’ Or again, when a personification of the Sun hides his face at the crucifixion ; or another of Thunder, directs the poet to admiration of God ; all which difficulties are fearlessly handled. Any less daring man would have fared worse. In Blake's conceptions it is hit or miss, and the miss is a wide one : witness the ‘Resurrection of our Saviour,’ and ‘Our Saviour in the furnace of affliction ;’ large, soulless figures, quite destitute of Blake's genius.
Excepting one or two such as I have last named, familiarity does much to help the influence of these, as of all Blake's designs ; to deepen the significance of our artist's high spiritual commentary on the poet; to modify the monotony of the appeal. The first unpleasant effect wears off of the conventional mannikins which here represent humanity, wherewith gigantic Time and Death disport on the page. Art hath her tropes as well as poetry. At this very time was preparing, and in 1802 was published by Vernor and Hood, and the trade, an octavo edition of Young, illustrated by Stothard, which did prove successful. Blake's Young compares advantageously, I may add, with Stothard's, whose designs, with some exceptions, display a very awkward attempt to reconcile the insignia of the matter-of-fact world with those of the spiritual. Better Blake's nude figures (in which great sacrifices are made to preserve decorum), better his favourite, simple draperies of close-fitting garments, and his typical impersonation of ‘the author,’ than Stothard's clerical gentleman, in full canonicals, looking, with round-eyed wonder, at the unusual phenomenon of winged angels fluttering above. Returning to Blake's career, I find him, in 1799, exhibiting a picture at the Academy, The Last Supper. ‘Verily I say
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unto you that one of you shall betray me.’ Among the engravings of the same year are some slight ones after the designs of Flaxman for a projected colossal statue of the allegoric sort for Greenwich Hill, to commemorate Great Britain's naval triumphs. They illustrate the sculptor's Letter or quarto pamphlet, addressed to the committee which had started the scheme of such a monument. It is a curious pamphlet to look at now. Flaxman's design, rigidly classical of course, is not without recommendations, on paper. There is an idea in it, a freshness, purity, grand simplicity we vainly look for in the Argand-lamp style of the Trafalgar Square column, or in any other monument erected of late by the English, so unhappy in their public works.  

Are glad when they can find the Grave

Figure: "Are Glad When They Can Find The Grave" from the MS. Notebook. A man dressed as a traveller and carrying a walking stick reaches his left hand out towards Death, who is depicted here as the Grim Reaper.



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CHAPTER XVI.



A NEW LIFE. 1799-1800. [ÆT. 42-43]
About this time (1800) the ever-friendly Flaxman gave Blake an introduction which had important consequences ; involving a sudden change of residence and mode of life. This was in recommending him to Hayley, ‘poet,’ country gentleman, friend and future biographer of Cowper ; in which last capacity the world alone remembers him. Then, though few went to see his plays, or read his laboured Life of Milton, he retained a traditional reputation on the strength of almost his first poem,—still his magnum opus, after nearly twenty years had passed since its appearence,—the Triumphs of Temper. He held, in fact, an honoured place in contemporary literature ; his society eagerly sought and obtained, by lovers of letters ; to mere ordinary squires and neighbours sparingly accorded ; to the majority point-blank refused. His name continued to be held in esteem among a slow-going portion of the world, long after his literary ware had ceased to be marketable. People of distinction and ‘position in society,’ princesses of the blood, and others, when visiting Bognor, would, even many years later, go out of their way to see him, as if he had been a Wordsworth.
Between Flaxman and the Hermit of Eartham, as the book-loving squire delighted to subscribe himself, friendly relations had, for some twenty years, subsisted. During three of these, Hayley's acknowledged son (he had no legitimate
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children), Thomas Alphonso, had been an articled pupil of the sculptor's. Early in 1798, beginnings of curvature of the spine had necessitated a return from Flaxman's roof into Sussex. There, after two years’ more suffering, he died of the accumulated maladies engendered in a weakly constitution by sedentary habits ; a victim of forcing, I suspect.
In 1799, the author of the Triumphs of Temper was seeing through the press one of his long Poetical Essays, as smooth and tedious as the rest, on Sculpture; in the form of ‘Epistles to Flaxman.’ It was published in 1800, with three trivial illustrations. Two of these are engraved by Blake: The Death of Demosthenes, after a bald outline by Hayley junior, whom the father easily persuaded himself into believing, as well as styling, his ‘youthful Phidias ;’ and a portrait of the ‘young sculptor,’ after a medallion by his master, Flaxman, the drawing of which was furnished Blake by Howard; the combined result being indifferent. This was the occasion of Blake's first coming into direct personal communication with Hayley, to whom he submitted an impression of the plate of The Death of Demosthenes, which ‘has been approved,’ he writes, February 8th, 1800, ‘by Mr. Flaxman ;’ adding his hopes that the young sculptor ‘will soon be well enough to make hundreds of designs both for the engraver and the sculptor.’
On April 25th, 1800, the long intermittent tragedy of Cowper's life came to an end, amid dark and heavy clouds: the last years of suffering having been smoothed by a pension obtained through Hayley's intercession. A week later died Hayley's hapless son. And our poor bard had to solace himself in his own way, by inditing sonnets to his child's memory, ‘on his pillow,’ at four o'clock in the morning; a daily sonnet or two soon swelling into MS. volumes. Blake, to whom death ever seemed but as ‘the going out of one room into another,’ was, of all men, one who could offer consolation as sincere as his sympathy. On hearing the sorrowful news he wrote at once the following characteristic letter:—
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Dear Sir,
I am very sorry for your immense loss, which is a repetition of what all feel in this valley of misery and happiness mixed. I send the shadow of the departed angel, and hope the likeness is improved. The lips I have again lessened as you advise and done a good many other softenings to the whole. I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the regions of my imagination ; I hear his advice and even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm which I wish all to partake of, since it is to me a source of immortal joy, even in this world. By it I am the companion of angels. May you continue to be so more and more; and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of Time build mansions in Eternity.
I have also sent a proof of Pericles for your remarks, thanking you for the kindness with which you express them, and feeling heartily your grief with a brother's sympathy.
I remain,

Dear Sir,

Your hu