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,
Fac-simile of a Portrait on Ivory
Painted from life by John
Linnell, 1827
Engraved by C.H. Jeens.
Originally Published 1880Reprinted 1969
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72-90368
Published by PHAETON PRESS, INC.
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.
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
Of additional illustrations there remain to be specified a newly discovered
design to 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
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 withSelections—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 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.
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
.
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
Yet no less a contemporary than Wordsworth, a man little prone to lavish
eulogy or attention on brother poets, spake in private of the
Of his
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
‘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! 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, And 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 ?
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.
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 :
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 it
looks as if he will live to be hanged!‘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
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
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,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.
‘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,— 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
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 Basire delineavit et sculpsit
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.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
The poetical essays of the years of youth and
apprenticeship are preserved in the thin octavo,
‘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
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
‘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
‘I love the jocund dance.’
Of the remarkable
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
In a few of the poems, the influence of Blake's contemporary, Chatterton,—of the
‘I believe,’writes he, in a MS. note (1826) on Wordsworth's
‘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
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
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