Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist

Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist Richard Holmes Alexander Gilchrist LIVES THAT NEVER GROW OLDPart of a radical series – edited by Richard Holmes – that recovers the great classical tradition of English biography. Gilchrist’s ‘The Life of William Blake’ is a biographical masterpiece, still thrilling to read and vividly alive.This was the first biography of William Blake ever written, at a time when the great visionary poet and painter was generally forgotten, ridiculed or dismissed as insane. Wonderfully vivid and outspoken (one chapter is entitled ‘Mad or Not Mad’), it was based on revealing interviews with many of Blake’s surviving friends.Blake conversed with spirits, saw angels in trees, and sunbathed naked with his wife ‘like Adam and Eve’. Gilchrist adds detailed descriptions of Blake’s beliefs and working methods, an account of his trial for high treason and fascinating evocations of the places in London, Kent and Sussex where he lived. The book ultimately transformed and enhanced Blake’s reputation. Gilchrist on Blake Life of William Blake Pictor Ignotus by Alexander Gilchrist EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD HOLMES 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 a 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. Table of Contents Cover Page (#ufee786f4-6bcc-51a2-9836-c8fda7124d7b) Title Page (#uedacb238-da87-5a30-8a1a-11d77728e3f2) Epigraph (#u9c50f3cb-eb24-5ecf-bce2-ff4f678fe6fd) Introduction (#u94ff4f35-0b1d-5ab6-a2c2-a1b758cf7f10) Select Chronology (#uf057f409-42ce-5d34-9d89-acba7578adc6) One Preliminary (#ufaf4a954-437d-52ac-ad7f-24fc7c087bf5) Two Childhood, 1757-71 (#u06ee3a8b-f7f9-58f3-91ed-d67ba289985f) Three Engraver’s Apprentice 1771-78 [?T. 14-21] (#ua164b5b9-d73c-5673-bccc-acccafbd3fd4) Four A Boy’s Poems 1768-77 [?T. 11-20] (#uc3c94762-4789-5e5b-92b0-458198579990) Five Student and Lover 1778-82 [?T. 21-25] (#u8321c81f-ccb1-5277-98e3-d34219e3fc9a) Six Introduction to the Polite World 1782-84 [?T. 24-27] (#ubb895fb9-70cc-5fd7-bb09-bdf8dbd23cb1) Seven Struggle and Sorrow 1782-87 [?T. 25-30] (#uee550e13-2067-5955-af35-250882b7f769) Eight Meditation: Notes on Lavater 1788 [?T. 30-31] (#u4df8f545-a5da-5a36-b7c6-517de5e6e903) Nine Poems of Manhood 1788-89 [?T. 31-32] (#u3ed1eae3-52b2-5293-8862-c1bbeb2c16c6) Ten Books of Prophecy 1789-90 [?T. 32-33] (#litres_trial_promo) Eleven Bookseller Johnson’s 1791-92 [?T. 34-35] (#litres_trial_promo) Twelve The Gates of Paradise, America, ETC. 1793 [?T. 36] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirteen The Songs of Experience 1794 [?T. 37] (#litres_trial_promo) Fourteen Productive Years 1794-95 [?T. 37-38] (#litres_trial_promo) Fifteen At Work for the Publishers 1795-99 [?T. 38-42] (#litres_trial_promo) Sixteen A New Life 1799-1800 [?T. 42-43] (#litres_trial_promo) Seventeen Poet Hayley and Felpham 1800-1801 [?T. 43-44] (#litres_trial_promo) Eighteen Working Hours 1801-3 [?T. 44-46] (#litres_trial_promo) Nineteen Trial for High Treason 1803-4 [?T. 46-47] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty Adieu to Felpham 1804 [?T. 47] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-One South Molton Street 1804 [?T. 47] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Two A Keen Employer 1805-7 [?T. 48-50] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Three Gleams of Patronage 1806-1808 [?T. 49-51] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Four The Designs to Blair 1804-8 [?T. 47-51] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Five Appeal to the Public 1808-10 [?T. 51-53] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Six Engraver Cromek 1807-1812 [?T. 50-55] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Seven Years of Deepening Neglect 1810-17 [?T. 53-60] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Eight John Varley and the Visionary Heads, 1818-20 [?T. 61-63.] (#litres_trial_promo) Twenty-Nine Opinions: Notes on Reynolds 1820 [?T. 63] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty Designs to Phillips’ Pastorals 1820-21 [AElig;T. 63-64] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-One Fountain Court, 1821-25 [?T. 64-68] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Two Inventions to the Book of Job 1823-25 [?T. 66-68] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Three Hampstead; and Youthful Disciples, 1825-27 [?T. 68-70] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Four Personal Details (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Five Mad or Not Mad (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Six Declining Health: Designs to Dante 1824-1827 [?T 67-70] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Seven Last Days, 1827 [?T. 69-70] (#litres_trial_promo) Thirty-Eight Posthumous 1827-31 (#litres_trial_promo) Appendix (#litres_trial_promo) Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Classic Biographies By (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) INTRODUCTION (#ulink_084eb1ca-f826-5246-8f2b-558cba7772c0) 1 When William Blake died in London in 1827, he was already a forgotten man. He had been living in two-room lodgings in Fountain Court, in the Middle Temple, off Fleet Street. His engraved and hand-painted Songs of Innocence and of Experience, had sold less than twenty copies in thirty years. His Prophetic Books had disappeared almost without trace. A single mysterious poem – The Tyger’ – had reached the anthologies. As a poet – once read in manuscript by Coleridge, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb – he was virtually unknown outside a small circle of disciples, a group of young men who pointedly called themselves The Ancients’. Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, magnanimously dismissed him ‘a man of great, but undoubtedly insane genius’. As an artist, his reputation was little better. He was chiefly remembered as a one-time commercial engraver of grimly improving texts: Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, Robert Blair’s The Grave, the dark Biblical drama of the Book of Job, and Dante’s Inferno still unfinished at the time of his death. In 1830 Blake was given a short and gently patronizing entry in Alan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters. The illuminations to The Songs of Innocence, and the Book of Job, were mildly admired. The Tyger’ was re-printed as an example of fascinating eccentricity. But Cunningham damned him with faint praise. Blake was a lovable, minor eccentric: unworldly, self-taught and self-deluded. He produced work that was ‘unmeaning, mystical and extravagant’. He was a man ‘overmastered’ by his own imagination. He confused ‘the spiritual for the corporeal vision’. But for the stabilizing influence of his faithful – but ‘illiterate’ – wife Kate, William Blake would be remembered simply as ‘a madman’. Three years later, in March 1833, the Monthly Magazine wittily celebrated Blake’s lunacies. ‘Blake was an embodied sublimity. He held converse with Michael Angelo, yea with Moses; not in dreams, but in the placid still hour of the night – alone, awake – with such powers as he possessed in their full vigour…He chatted with Cleopatra, and the Black Prince sat to him for a portrait. He reveled in the past; the gates of the spiritual world were unbarred at his behest, and the great ones of bygone ages, clothed in the flesh they wore on earth, visited his studio.’ Blake was diagnosed as a sufferer of extreme and persistent visual hallucinations, a man who ‘painted from spectres’, and had lost his grasp on reality. ‘His may be deemed the most extraordinary case of spectral illusion that has hitherto occurred. Is it possible that neither Sir Walter Scott, nor Sir David Brewster – the authors of Demonology and Witchcraft and Natural Magic – ever heard of Blake?’ This article had great success, and was copied by the smart Parisian magazine, La Revue Britannique, the following year. The translation was a little hurried, and opened with the assertion that not only was the ‘spectral’ William Blake still alive, but he was actually incarcerated in a London madhouse. The two most celebrated inmates of the madhouse of Bedlam in London are the arsonist Martin, estranged elder brother of the painter John Martin, and William Blake – nicknamed “The Seer”.’ Twenty years after his death, ‘mad’ Blake’s reputation was barely taken seriously at all. A large manuscript collection of his work was offered for private sale by a keeper at the British Museum in 1847. It consisted of a foolscap quarto sketchbook of 58 leaves, packed with Blake’s unpublished poems and drawings. It would now be considered priceless, but then it was sold for a mere ten shillings and sixpence. The purchaser was Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Vague plans to publish it by the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood were mooted, and Dante’s brother the critic William Rossetti, expressed an interest. But on examination it was put quietly aside as too difficult and obscure to interest the public. A whole generation had now elapsed, the surviving ‘Ancients’ were indeed growing old, and the memory of ‘mad’ Blake was dwindling to nothing. It is possible that the author of The Tyger’ might have been entirely lost. Then, thirteen years later, on 1 November 1860, Rossetti wrote to his friend the poet William Allingham with surprising news. ‘A man (one Gilchrist, who lives next door to Carlyle) wrote to me the other day, saying he was writing a Life of Blake, and wanted to see my manuscript by that genius. Was there not some talk of your doing something by way of publishing its contents? I know William thought of doing so, but fancy it might wait long for his efforts…I have not engaged myself in any way to the said Gilchrist on the subject, though I have told him he can see it here if he will give me a day’s notice.’ When the ‘said Gilchrist’ finally visited in March 1861, Rossetti was surprised to encounter a long-haired, dreamy, moon-faced young man who looked rather as if he had stepped out of one of his own Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Alexander Gilchrist was thirty-two, a young writer and art critic, who announced quietly that he had been working on a Life of Blake for the last six years. Indeed, he had already signed a contract with the publisher Macmillan. He did not think William Blake was mad; in fact he thought he was a genius. He was going to transform his reputation, however long it took him, and whatever it cost him. 2 Who was Blake’s unexpected champion? Born in the year after Blake’s death in 1828, Alexander Gilchrist had trained as a barrister in the Middle Temple. Restless in his profession, bookish and not physically strong, but with great determination and independence of mind, Gilchrist sought freedom in magazine journalism and freelance art criticism. From 1849, when he was just twenty-one, he began to write regularly for the Eclectic Review, and quickly made his name as critic and reviewer. He was known for his fresh eye, his jaunty prose style, his meticulous background research, and his highly unorthodox views. He was also a young critic in search of a cause. In 1850, he produced an outstanding article on the forgotten and unfashionable painter, William Etty. Etty had once been renouned as an exuberant painter of Romantic nudes, both male and female, and erotic scenes from classical history and mythology, such as his Vision of Gyges. Once admired by Regency critics, Victorian taste and propriety had turned against him, and his paintings were scoffingly referred to in Academy circles as ‘Etty’s bumboats’. Gilchrist accepted a speculative commission from a provincial publisher, David Bogue, to write a full-length biography. He undertook to re-establish Etty’s reputation, and turn back the tide of priggish mockery and misunderstanding. On the strength of the ?100 commission, Alexander married his twenty-three year old sweetheart, Anne Burrows, in February 1851. They spent part of their honeymoon researching Etty’s life in York, where the painter had lived and worked. They interviewed his friends, and examined his nude studies and historical pictures, now mostly housed in private collections. This unorthodox nuptial expedition greatly appealed to Anne, who was freethinking in her views, and impatient with the conventions of her respectable Highgate upbringing. She too hoped one day to write. Their first child was born in December 1851, and the large Etty biography was published in 1855, when Gilchrist was still only twenty-seven. The book, which was studiously written and safely deprived of all illustrations (apparently Bogue lost his nerve at the last moment), caused only a mild scandal in York. But in London it drew wholly unexpected praised from the sixty year-old doyen of biographical writing, Thomas Carlyle. It was written, the Sage announced, ‘in a vigorous, sympathetic, vivacious spirit’, and gave the ‘delineation, actual and intelligible, of a man extremely well-worth knowing’. This rare mark of approval from the author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), confirmed Gilchrist in his new vocation as biographer. After several visits to Chelsea, Gilchrist established himself as Carlyle’s confidante and to some extent his biographical protege. The Sage had recently published his influential Life of John Sterling (1851), which by sympathetically recounting the career of an apparent failure, indeed a kind of anti-Hero, gave the whole genre a new impulse. It was a time when biography was about to enter a new literary golden age, with John Forster’s Oliver Goldsmith (1854), Mrs Gaskell’s Charlotte Bronte (1857), Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), G. H. Lewes’s Goethe (1855) and Frederick Martin’s John Clare (1866). Carlyle noticed that Gilchrist’s dreamy appearance was deceptive: the young lawyer had a capacity for relentless archival research, an almost forensic gift for tracking down rare books and documents. Carlyle was working, with many groans, on his multi-volume Life of Frederick the Great, and soon found Gilchrist bringing him numerous rare bibliographic finds. ‘Beyond doubt you are one of the successfullest hunters up of Old Books now living,’ beamed Carlyle, ‘and one of the politest of obliging men!’ The bookish Gilchrist also took great delight in pursing his open-air researches. With Anne he took long walks in Kent, Dorset, and the Lake District. With Carlyle he wandered after midnight about the backstreets of Westminster, Soho, Lambeth or the City. He had an eye (not unlike the young Dickens) for old houses, forgotten buildings, crooked corners, and disappearing communities. Faced with some old church, said Anne, he would ‘scan every stone’ until it yielded up its ‘quota of history’. Over long evenings of black tea and tobacco, Carlyle encouraged him to talk, speculate, and seek a daring new subject for his pen. A warm, if slightly wary, friendship also grew up between Anne and the older Jane Carlyle. The subject of William Blake had probably been in Gilchrist’s mind for more than a decade. As a young law student of the Middle Temple, Gilchrist had heard rumours of Blake as the eccentric erstwhile occupant of Fountain Court, which he passed through every day on the way to his legal chambers. He wrote a highly characteristic evocation of this place, its sacred Blakean associations overlaid by mid-Victorian seediness, that eventually appeared in Chapter 31 of his biography. Fountain Court, unknown by name, perhaps, to many who yet often pass it on their way through a great London artery, is a court lying a little out of the Strand, between it and the river, and approached by a dark narrow opening, or inclined plane, at the corner of Simpson’s Tavern, and nearly opposite Exeter Hall. At one corner of the court, nearest the Strand, stands the Coal Hole Tavern, once the haunt of Edmund Kean and his ‘Wolf Club’ of claquers, still in Blake’s time a resort of the Thespian race; not then promoted to the less admirable notoriety it has, in our days, enjoyed. Now the shrill tinkle of a dilapidate piano, accompaniment to a series of tawdry poses plastiques, wakes the nocturnal echoes, making night hideous in the quiet court where the poet and visionary once lived and designed the Inventions of Job. Initially Gilchrist knew little of the poetry. As an art critic it was a copy of Blake’s Illustrations to the Book of Job, found at the back of a London printshop, which first caught his eye. He never lost his sense of their astonishing power, and it was Blake’s visual imagination which always remained for Gilchrist the key to his genius. Accordingly, in summer 1855 he decided to write to one of the surviving Ancients, the painter Samuel Palmer, by then aged sixty. On 23 August 1855 Gilchrist received a long and engaging reply, which he later reprinted entire in Chapter 33 of his biography. While praising Blake’s artistic integrity, Palmer carefully dispelled the notion of Blake’s madness, and replaced it with the figure of a gentle, almost Christ-like sage. ‘He was a man without a mask; his aim was single, his path straight-forwards, and his wants few…His voice and manner were quiet, yet all awake with intellect…He was gentle and affectionate, loving to be with little children, and to talk about them. That is heaven,’ he said to a friend, leading him to a window, and pointing to a group of them at play.’ At the same time Palmer hinted at a prophet from the Old Testament, rather than the New: a formidable Blake who could be highly ‘expressive’ and emotional, ‘quivering with feeling’, capable of deep anger, and with a flashing glance that could be ‘terrible’ towards his enemies. ‘Cunning and falsehood quailed under it.’ He summed up these contradictions with a painterly example from the Italian Renaissance. ‘His ideal home was with Fra Angelico: a little later he might have been a reformer, but after the fashion of Savonarola.’ Gilchrist was captivated, and he and Palmer became fast friends. A year later in 1856, the Gilchrist family moved in next to the Carlyles at No. 6 Cheyne Row. The pursuit of Blake’s trail through London galleries, local museums, antique bookshops, and private collections now began in earnest. Gilchrist purchased Blake prints, and borrowed what he could not buy. Anne started her own collection of Blake’s watercolours. Together they tracked down Blake’s various lodgings and workshops north and south of the river, in Soho and Lambeth, and meticulously researched his three year sojourn at Felpham, by the sea in Sussex. Having established friendly contact with the affable Samuel Palmer, Gilchrist moved on to the other surviving Ancients. They were not all so easy to deal with. The painter John Linnell, was helpful but bossy, suggesting the possibilities of a collaboration. He had eleven precious letters from Blake, written at the very end of his life. The sculptor Frederick Tatham, having written his own private Memoir, and taken to religion, was strange and touchy. The artist George Richmond (only fifteen when he met Blake) was now a well-meaning but gushing middle-aged raconteur. Gilchrist engaged them in correspondence and interviewed them where he could, minutely compiling anecdotes and stories, trying to sift the true from the apocryphal. He talked to Francis Oliver Finch and Flaxman’s younger sister Maria Denman. He was particularly interested in the relations between Blake and his wife Catherine. Original letters from Blake were the one thing Gilchrist found it almost impossible to discover, apart from Linnell’s. Gilchrist’s greatest diplomatic triumph was to pierce the peppery reserve of the retired journalist, Henry Crabb Robinson, then in his eighties. Robinson – once the intimate friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Lamb – had kept extensive diary accounts of the whole Romantic circle during his time. They were admiring, but sceptical and extremely shrewd. In 1811 he had published a rare appreciation of Blake’s work in a German magazine published in Hamburg: ‘William Blake: Artist, Poet, and Religious Dreamer’. Moreover, his unpublished Journals for 1825-7 contained a unique series of interviews with the older Blake. Robinson paid particular attention to the question of Blake’s visions, the logic (or otherwise) of his explanations, and the significance of his eccentricities. Gilchrist managed to obtain all this material, and use it with brilliant effect in Chapter 36. In the winter of 1859, Gilchrist submitted an outline draft of his Life of Blake to the publisher Macmillan. He was offered an ?150 contract, and an advance on research expenses of ?20. Compared with the Etty commission, these terms marked a small but not very generous increase. After all, this was a time when popular biographies by Mrs Gaskell and John Forster were being commissioned for well over ?1,000. But of course Blake’s name was still worth nothing. Undeterred, Gilchrist worked on through 1860, continuing to support his family with freelance journalism. But it must have seemed an increasingly quixotic venture. In March 1861, he finally met Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and the pace of research increased still further. The Blake manuscript notebook, purchased over fourteen years before, was at last revealed. Over several later meetings at the Cheshire Cheese tavern, in Fleet Street, the new poems and drawings were discussed. Gilchrist quickly passed muster with the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, all of whom were suddenly excited by the prospect of the forthcoming book Rossetti’s friendship also brought him into contact with Swinburne, who now discovered a passion for Blake. Most enthusiastic of all was Dante Gabriel’s brother, the art critic William Michael Rossetti, who encouraged Gilchrist to think in terms of an even more ambitious project. After the biography perhaps he could edit a companion volume of Blake’s poems and a catalogue of his art work? Spurred on by these late supporters, Gilchrist promised Macmillan to deliver the completed biography by spring 1862. But after six years, the work was now close to exhausting him. Money was short, and by now the Gilchrists had four children. Gilchrist’s constitution, never strong, began to fail. He was frequently ill and depressed, harassed by his weekly art reviews. Sometimes he collapsed, unable to work on Blake for days on end. It was in this growing professional crisis that Anne Gilchrist began quietly to assert herself. Anne had probably been working as Alexander’s part-time research assistant ever since the Etty days. But now she became his full-time amanuensis. She took dictation, copied Blake’s manuscripts, checked facts and dates at the British Museum, and prepared an index. She admired Gilchrist’s perfectionism, always pursuing one more source or reference. But sometimes she felt he would never complete the book at all. Nonetheless, by late summer 1861, Gilchrist told Macmillan that he had a draft of the whole biography. Although he was continually slipping in extra materials and anecdotes, the basic structure of the book was secure. It was lucidly organized in thirty-eight short chapters, and he was ready to start sending it in batches to the printer, for setting up in proof. This was the usual procedure for a large book. Macmillan was delighted and urged him to begin. Accordingly, Gilchrist sent the first eight chapters to the printers in September 1861, taking Blake’s Life up to the Poetic Sketches and the ‘Notes on Lavater’ made when Blake had just turned thirty. He promised to send in the next batch by November, with the aim of having the complete work in proof by the following spring. He was under great pressure, but believed that with Anne’s help he could just about fulfil his deadlines. On 20 November 1861, Gilchrist wrote to his publisher that he had been unable to send the next ‘big mass of copy, consisting of the next dozen or so chapters (taking Blake up to forty and his most productive years). He explained that ‘domestic troubles have during the last month stood in the way’. For six weeks his eldest daughter, seven year old Beatrice, had been lying dangerously ill at Cheyne Row with scarlet fever. His wife Anne had insisted on a ‘rigid quarantine’, remaining alone in the child’s sickroom to carry out all the nursing herself. There was great fear of infection. Gilchrist was only allowed in once an evening, to make up the fire, while Anne stood back by the window. Meanwhile, he tried to look after the other three young children with the help of one (frequently drunk) domestic. At the end of his letter, Gilchrist unburdened himself to his publisher. We have been in great misery at times, aggravated by our having a doctor in whom we had not implicit confidence…My wife has during all this time been confined to the sickroom, without help!…Of hired nurses we have a horror, our friends have mostly children and others regard for whom makes them dread crossing the threshold of a scarlatina infected house. Forgive this closing matter. Yours faithfully, Alexander Gilchrist. A week later, just as his little daughter Beatrice began to pull through, Gilchrist was himself struck down. Jane Carlyle sent notes offering help to Anne, and Thomas Carlyle brought a fashionable physician, who looked at Gilchrist from the distance of the sickroom door and hastily departed. After that, events unfolded quickly. Ten days after he had sent his desperate, apologetic letter to his publisher Macmillan, Alexander Gilchrist slipped into a coma. Anne later wrote: The brain was tired with stress of work; the fever burned and devastated like a flaming fire: to four days of delirium succeeded one of exhaustion, of stupor; and then the end; without a word, but not widiout a look of loving recognition. It was on a wild and stormy night, 30 November 1861, that his spirit took flight.’ Alexander Gilchrist died at the age of thirty-three. His great biography of Blake, his labour of love, had been wonderfully researched and written in draft. But it was unfinished. 3 With her peculiar force and independence, Anne Gilchrist immediately determined to finish the biography for him. Less than a week after Alexander’s death, she wrote to Macmillan on 6 December 1861, ‘I try to fix my thoughts on the one thing that remains for me to do for my dear Husband. I do not think that anyone but myself can do what has to be done to the Book. I was his amanuensis…’ She packed up his papers, returned a mass of borrowed pictures and manuscripts, refused Jane’s invitation to move in with the Carlyles, and took the children and the unfinished book down to a clapboard cottage in tiny village of Shottermill, a mile from Haslemere in Sussex. To understand what happened next, we have to turn to Anne Gilchrist’s own story. She had always been an independent spirit. She was born Annie Burrows in February 1828 in Gower Street, London, but was partly brought up in the country at Colne in Essex. Here, when she was nine years old, her beloved elder brother Johnnie saved her life. The incident, as re-told, has a curious fairy-tale-like quality. While exploring a secret part of the garden, little Annie fell backwards into a deep well, and would have certainly drowned, had not Johnnie reached down and just managed to hold her up by the hair, until help finally came. Over thirty years later she put this strangely symbolic tale of survival into a children’s story, Lost in the Woods (1861). Anne’s father was a London lawyer, strict and demanding, who died aged fifty-one in 1839, when she was only eleven. From then on, the family were on their own, and Anne was in some sense a liberated spirit. They moved to Highgate, where Anne went to school, a handsome tomboy, clever and rebellious. She was musical, well-read, and free-thinking. At seventeen she was surprised by the local vicar, when reading Rousseau’s sexually explicit Confessions on a tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. Embarrassment was avoided (according to Anne) when the vicar misheard the title as St Augustine’s Confessions. At nineteen she became fascinated by scientific ideas, a further unladylike development. She announced to a friend that the intellectual world was divided between Emerson and Comte, between the spiritual and the materialist, and she was tending towards the latter. In 1847 (the year Rossetti bought the Blake manuscript), she was devastated by the death of her ‘angel brother’, Johnnie. A year later, aged twenty, she announced her engagement to one of Johnnie’s friends, a handsome young law student, Alexander Gilchrist, ‘great, noble and beautiful’. In a way, he was probably a substitute brother. She deeply admired him, but from what she said later, she was never truly in love. What Alexander offered was the chance of freedom and independence. Their unorthodox Etty honeymoon was a promise of things to come. After the birth of their four children – Percy, Beatrice, Herbert, and Grace – she set herself to earn additional household money by writing small pieces for the monthly magazines, and Chambers Encyclopaedia. The first of these, ‘A Glance at the Vegetable Kingdom’, was published in Chambers in spring 1857, shortly after they moved into Cheyne Row. Unexpectedly, Anne made a specialty of popular science subjects. Moreover, she was remarkably successful. In 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, she wrote a controversial article on the newly discovered gorilla, ‘Our Nearest Relation’, comparing its skills and habits to homo sapiens. It was published in Charles Dickens’ magazine, All the Year Round. Next she wrote on Whales and Whaling’, and in the following years she produced several further young person’s guides to scientific topics: What is Electricity?’, ‘What is a Sunbeam?’, and The Indestructibility of Force’. Her ability to research, organize and explain technical subjects for the general reader was highly unusual. Her role as Gilchrist’s amanuensis was therefore more that it might superficially appear. She seems to have become a genuine literary partner. Anne claimed the subsequent work on the biography came to her as a kind of posthumous collaboration. ‘Alex’s spirit is with me ever – presides in my home; speaks to me in every sweet scene; broods over the peaceful valleys; haunts the grand wild hill tops; shines gloriously forth in setting sun, and moon and stars.’ This may have been true, but she was also driven by other, though no less powerful emotions. Essentially, she seems to have felt guilty about Gilchrist’s death. She felt that she had never been his true wife. Nearly a decade later, in September 1871, she wrote a remarkable confession of her own. ‘I think…my sorrow was far more bitter, though not so deep, as that of a loving tender wife. As I stood by him in the coffin, I felt such remorse I had not, could not have, been more tender to him – such a conviction that if I had loved him as he deserved to be loved he would not have been taken from us. To the last my soul dwelt apart and unmated, and his soul dwelt apart and unmated.’ Her drive to complete his biography of Blake was, therefore, far more than a show of pious sentiment, a widow’s tender offering. It was more like an uneasy debt of honour, the recognition of a difficult but sacred trust. Anne already knew much of Alexander’s method of working, and his perfectionism. What she did not know was whether she could match it. She wrote to Macmillan: ‘Many things were to have been inserted – anecdotes etc. collected during the last year, which he used to say would be the best things in the book. Whether I shall be able to rightly use the rough notes of these and insert them in the fittest places I cannot yet tell. He altered chapter by chapter as he sent it to the printers…’ Three months later, in March 1862 she again wrote Macmillan that, to her surprise, she had completed sorting and arranging all of Alexander’s remaining material for the book. It would be faithfully completed. ‘You shall not find me dilatory or unreliable; least of all in this sacred trust.’ Fiercely defensive of every word of Alexander’s existing text, she carefully began to pull together the drafts of the outstanding chapters. She made regular visits to the British Museum, catching the London train up from Haslemere station. She checked his facts and polished his style. She defended him against Macmillan’s charges of sometimes writing too flamboyantly, like Carlyle. Most crucially, she turned for help to the Rossettis. She did not want them to touch the text of Alex’s biography, but she wanted help with the companion volume: the catalogue of Blake’s pictures and an anthology of his poetry. She proposed to Macmillan that he commission a second volume, to consist of an annotated catalogue of Blake’s visual work compiled by Michael Rossetti, and a selection of Blake’s poetry edited by Dante Gabriel. This was agreed, and the whole project now advanced rapidly on its new footing. The sudden death of Dante Gabriel’s own wife, Lizzie Siddal, that same spring of 1862, added a peculiar intensity to the work of selection. (‘I feel forcibly’, he wrote to Anne, ‘the bond of misery that exists between us.’) He moved back into bachelor lodgings, which he shared with Meredith and the young Swinburne, and they too acted as unofficial Blake readers and selectors. Even Christina Rossetti came to stay at the Shottermill cottage. So not only had the whole Rossetti family now rallied round Anne’s ‘Herculean labour’, but the two volume work had almost become a group enterprise, a Pre-Raphaelite project to restore Blake, and to do honour to his young idealistic biographer. As Dante Gabriel wrote to Anne, ‘I would gladly have done it for Blake’s or gladly for your husband’s or gladly for your own sake, and moreover, had always had a great wish of my own to do something in this direction…’ The twin volumes were to be delivered twelve months later, in spring 1863. 4 Who, then, finally wrote Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake? It is clear from their correspondence, that the Rossettis almost entirely confined themselves to the editorial work on the second volume alone. Dante Gabriel was asked to write a ‘Supplementary’ summary (Chapter 39, no longer included); and to fill in a missing description of Blake’s Book of Job (Chapter 32), ironically the very work that had first drawn Gilchrist to Blake. Apart from that, they touched virtually nothing in the first volume, because they were not permitted to. Anne regarded the text of the biography as a sacred to Gilchrist’s memory. She was its sole guardian. ‘I think you will not find it hard to forgive me a little reluctance,’ she wrote to William Rossetti, ‘that any living tones should blend with that voice which here speaks for the last time on earth.’ But how far she herself added new materials from Alexander’s notes, or made stylistic changes, must remain more problematic. In April 1862 she was speaking of ‘incorporating all the additional matter contained in the notes’ into a final draft, which sounds quite radical. But by the end of May, the position was almost reversed. ‘I am glad to say I find the Manuscript even more complete than I anticipated, and that a large mass of Notes which I had thought contained new matter, were merely for reference and verification.’ To the end of her days Anne insisted that she was nothing more than her husband’s ‘editor’. But since Gilchrist’s original manuscript has not survived, there is no way of knowing precisely how she understood this role. However, it is difficult to find evidence of any large editorial additions or interventions. For example, Alexander had frequently lamented his failure to develop any proper critical commentary on the poetry (as opposed to the illuminations) of Blake’s ‘Prophetic Books’. Anne was clearly tempted to remedy this. ‘I found the only grave omission in the book – the only place where dear Alec had left an absolute blank that must be filled in – was for some account of Blake’s mystic writings, or ‘Prophetic Books’, as he called them.’ But although she consulted with Rossetti, she did not in the end attempt to add any significant commentary, writing ruefully: ‘I could heartily wish the difficult problem presented by these strange Books had been successfully grappled with, or indeed grappled with at all. Hardly anything has now been attempted beyond bringing together a few readable extracts…They are at least psychologically curious and important.’ The omission is very clear, for example in the desultory remarks on Jerusalem in Chapter 21, despite the fact that Anne had meticulously copied out the entire text by hand, from a rare copy loaned with great reluctance (‘only for a week’) by Monckton Milnes. In fact, she seems to have conceived her main role as protecting what Alexander had written and quoted. There was some need for this. The genial Palmer was desperate to avoid anything that hinted at ‘blasphemy, while Macmillan was acutely nervous of Blake’s erotic writing; he anxiously read every line of the proofs, and questioned even single lines from the poems, especially those from The Daughters of Albion’. William Rossetti wrote: The pervading idea of “The Daughters of Albion” is one which was continually seethling in Blake’s mind, and flustering Propriety in his writings…It is the idea of the unnatural and terrible result in which, in modern society, ascetic doctrines in theology and morals have involved the relations of the sexes…in [this] cause he is never tired of uprearing the banner of heresy and non-conformity.’ Anne replied on 3 October 1862: ‘I am afraid you will be vexed with me…But it was no use to put in what I was perfectly certain Macmillan (who reads all the proofs) would take out again…It might be well to mention to Mr Swinburne that it would be perfectly useless to attempt to handle this side of Blake’s writings – that Mr Macmillan in far more inexorable against any shade of heterodoxy in morals, than in religion…in fact poor “flustered Propriety” has to be most tenderly and indulgently dealt with.’ She was beset by other diplomatic problems. One of the original Ancients, the painter John Linnell, offered to oversee all the proofs, but made it clear that he would alter the text where he did not approve of it. Anne knew that Alexander had already rejected this idea long before: ‘the bare notion of it filled him with horror: I do not think he ever showed proof or manuscript to the most congenial friend even.’ This was a policy that Anne clearly intended to continue. Alexander had made the ‘most minute notes’ of all Linnell told him, but believed there was ‘considerable divergency’ in their view of the facts. ‘Besides,’ concluded Anne, ‘a biographer’s duty often is to balance the evidence of conflicting witnesses.’ To have acceded to Linnell would, she felt sure, have been ‘a most imprudent, and indeed treacherous thing on my part.’ There were other difficulties among the survivors, and keepers of the flame. Frederick Tatham had quarreled with Linnell over the ownership of some of Blake’s Dante drawings, and Anne believed that Tatham had also imposed on Blake’s widow by silently selling off many of his engraved books over ‘thirty years’. Such post-mortem disputes between the Ancients were peculiarly confusing to Anne. Yet she retained absolute confidence in Alexander’s view of the situation. ‘My husband, who had sifted the matter, and knew both parties, thought Linnell an upright and truthful, if somewhat hard man, and that towards Blake his conduct had been throughout admirable. He also inclined to think, that Mrs Blake retained one trait of an uneducated mind – an unreasonable suspiciousness…’ Here, she was in fact quoting Gilchrist’s own words from the biography. She was however dismayed to discover that Tatham, in a fit of religious zeal, had much later destroyed many of Blake’s manuscripts. For a biographer this was itself the ultimate sin, and would have appalled Alexander. She wrote angrily to Rossetti, saying that Tatham had come to believe that Blake was indeed inspired, ‘but quite from a wrong quarter – by Satan himself – and was to be cast out as an “unclean spirit”.’ This was a ghastly parody of Gilchrist’s subtle, secular, psychological appreciation of Blake’s profound eccentricity and originality. She would have nothing to do with it. The most challenging editorial problem arrived last. In January 1863, when the biography was already printing, Anne was sent ten precious letters of Blake’s to his young publisher and patron, Thomas Butts. At a stroke, this doubled the number of surviving letters. They all dated from the crucial – and little known – period of creative renewal, when Blake retired to a tiny cottage in Felpham, Sussex, between 1800 and 1804. These gave a wholly new insight into Blake’s character, his views of his art and patronage, and some wonderful examples of his most limpid but visionary prose. The villagers of Felpham are not mere rustics; they are polite and modest. Meat is cheaper than in London; but the sweet air and the voices of winds, trees, and birds, and the odours of the happy ground, make it a dwelling for immortals. Work will go on here with God-speed. A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a plough on my first going out at my gate the first morning of my arrival, and the ploughboy said to the Ploughman, ‘Father, the gate is open.’ One letter even gave a long and detailed account, from Blake’s point of view, of the fracas with a soldier in the garden at Felpham which lead to his trial for ‘seditious and treasonable utterance’ in 1804. This was one of the most dramatic events in Blake’s life, and perhaps a turning point in his professional career. Gilchrist had already given up a whole chapter to describing the incident. His account was based on Catherine’s memories, Hayley’s letters, and a local Sussex newspaper report of the trial. While defending Blake as certainly not guilty of real treason, Gilchrist allowed it to be tacitly understood that Blake did treat the soldier with some violence, ‘in a kind of inspired frenzy’, and probably did shout some ill-advised political things at him:’ “Damn the King, and you too,” said Blake with pardonable emphasis.’ Blake’s own account was far more exculpatory, and intriguingly different. How should Anne handle this unexpected biographical windfall? Macmillan claimed he was too far advanced with the printing to allow Anne to insert these letters at such a late stage. However, since they were discovered nine months before the book was finally published, it seems that Anne herself was loath to disrupt Alexander’s narrative. Yet the letters were extremely revealing, and Anne could not bear to omit them. ‘I have all but finished copying Blake’s letters; a task of real enjoyment, for they are indeed supremely interesting, admitting one as far as anything he ever wrote into the “inner precincts” of his mind…’ In the end, the solution she chose was to print the ‘LETTERS TO THOMAS BUTTS’ separately, as an appendix to the Life (where they can now be found). This perhaps gives the clearest indication of the subsidiary way she saw her own editorial function. This solution (although clearly not ideal) allowed her carefully to retain Alexander’s perceptive narrative of the Sussex period without interruption (Chapters 16 to 19). But it also allowed her to appear modestly in her own role of Editor, remarking on the light that the letters now threw on ‘the undercurrents of Blake’s life’, and wishing only that Alexander had seen them before he died. By autumn 1863, Anne had surmounted all these difficulties. Far from finding the work burdensome, she later said characteristically, that it had proved a support and a consolation to her in the time of mourning. That beloved task (the Blake) kept my head above water in the deep sea of affliction, and now that it is ended I sometimes feel like to sink – to sink, that is, into pining discontent – and a relaxing of the hold upon all high aims…’ The Life was finally published in two volumes in October 1863. 5 Two thousand copies were printed, and reviews appeared rapidly. There were some initial doubts whether the biography would, as Anne put it, ‘shock devout minds’. One reviewer observed evenly: ‘a more timid biographer might have hesitated about making so open an exhibition of his hero’s singularities.’ But it was soon clear that the book would be a triumph. It was widely admired by the entire Pre-Raphaelite circle, Robert Browning wrote a fan letter, and Samuel Palmer spoke for the Ancients when he described it as ‘a treasure’. He added thoughtfully, ‘I do hope it may provoke a lively art-controversy in the periodicals, unless people have gone quite to sleep’. He had ‘read wildly everywhere’, and concluded tenderly, ‘already it is certain to be an imperishable monument of the dear Biographer.’ It was loyally hailed by Carlyle: ‘thankfulness is one clear feeling; not only to you from myself, but to you for the sake of another who is not here now.’ He considered it ‘right well done – minute knowledge well-arranged, lively utterance, brevity, cheerful lucidity’. Later he told Anne, with a tact surely designed to please the editor, that the whole biography was remarkable for ‘the acuteness and thoroughness with which the slightest clues had been followed out in gathering the materials, and with all this toil and minute accuracy on the writer’s part, nothing but pleasure for the reader – no tediousness.’ The great strengths of the work, which Anne had so faithfully preserved, were quickly apparent. Gilchrist’s approach is lively, personal, enthusiastic and often humourous – quite unlike much over-earnest mid-Victorian biography. The quick, informal, darting style of his prose lends a sense of continual discovery and excitement to the narrative, and yet allows for virtuoso passages of description and summary. It is extraordinarily well-researched, especially in the use made of the previous memoirs by Malkin, Tatham, Linnell, Palmer, Crabb Robinson, and others. Although he had lacked the Butts Letters, Gilchrist draws effectively on some original correspondance with Flaxman in the early years, and the expressive series of short notes to John Linnell at Hampstead in the last years. He also quotes brilliantly throughout from Blake’s own works, both prose and poetry, much of it quite unknown to contemporary readers, such as the early ‘Notes on Lavater’ and the ‘Proverbs of Hell’. He was, too, the first Victorian writer to pick out and reprint in full Blake’s great ‘Jerusalem’ hymn from the preface to Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient times’, in Chapter 21. There are two qualities in Gilchrist’s writing, which make him such an exceptionally vivid biographer. The first is his sense of physical place. Gilchrist had a gift for evoking particular London streets, characteristic clusters of buildings or courtyards, and beyond them certain rural landscapes and secluded villages, where Blake had lived and worked. He captured their appearance, mood and atmosphere, and gave hints of their visionary meanings, or auras, for Blake. Gilchrist had spent endless days researching and identifying them, following meticulously in Blake’s footsteps. He could also add fascinating observations of how these sacred places had changed in the subsequent fifty or so years, giving a sense of historical continuity. In this way, the biography first gave Blake’s extraordinary imaginative life ‘a local habitation and a name’. The descriptions of the gothic interior of Westminster Abbey, or of Hercules Building (and its garden) in Lambeth, or of the cottage and seashore at Felpham, and the last, hidden lodgings at Fountain Court are especially evocative in this respect. The second quality is his power to conjure up Blake’s pictures and designs for the reader. Only few of these were actually illustrated in black and white engravings, so a great deal depended on Gilchrist’s verbal descriptions. He found a remarkable way of bringing these to life in virtuoso passages of exquisite prose ‘dramatization’, the energy of his syntax matching the energy of Blake’s line, which became a major feature of his biography. Here the young art critic comes into his own. This, for example, is how he brilliantly evoked the life and movement of the thirteen designs for ‘A Memorable Fancy’, in Chapter 10. 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 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 brooded, with the 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. Gilchrist made the defense of Blake’s eccentricity, and the rejection of his supposed insanity, a commanding theme from the beginning of the biography. 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 angel 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…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. Gilchrist reverts continually to these visions: calmly asking what exactly they were, how Blake described them, and how they should be accounted for. Much apparently outlandish behaviour, such as the ‘scandalous’ Adam and Eve nude sunbathing incident at Lambeth, is given a reasonable and detailed explanation, in this case with a amusing reminder about the poet Shelley’s enthusiasm for the early naturist movement. It is interesting that clearly Anne had been able to prevent Macmillan from censoring this particular account. Later, Blake’s poverty, social isolation and professional difficulties are shrewdly shown to have exacerbated the oddities of his temperament. Of the quarrel with the commercial publisher Cromek in 1815, a frankly ‘discordant episode’, Gilchrist writes, ‘In Blake’s own mind, where all should have been, and for the most part was, peace, the sordid conflict left a scar. It left him more tetchy than ever; more disposed to willful exaggeration of individualities already too prominent, more prone to unmeasured violence of expression. The extremes he gave way to in his designs and writings – mere ravings to such as had no key to them – did him no good with that portion of the public the illustrated Blair had introduced him to…Now, too, was established for him the damaging reputation “Mad”.’ All this is summarised in the decisive Chapter 35, boldly entitled: ‘Mad or Not Mad’. In many way this chapter is the psychological key to the entire biography. Here Gilchrist carefully defines the ‘special faculty’ of Blake’s imagination, and vindicates the profound spiritual sanity of the ‘gentle yet fiery-hearted mystic’. One after another, he calls to witness all Blake’s circle of friends, from Flaxman and Fuseli to Palmer and Linnell. In a robust passage Gilchrist rejects any modish Victorian interpretation of Blake’s visions. ‘No man, by the way, would have been more indifferent or averse than he (wide and tolerant as was his faith in supernatural revelations) towards the table-turning, wainscot-knocking, bosh-propounding “Spiritualism” of the present hour.’ Instead Gilchrist finally champions Blake in terms that Carlyle would have recognised: ‘Does not prophet or hero always seem “mad” to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world…?’ Gilchrist’s remaining narrative problem lay in the dearth of material during Blake’s ‘dark years’ in London in the decade between 1808 and 1818, when he met his great patron and supporter, the young painter John Linnell, the first of the Ancients. Broadly his solution is to introduce the engaging stories of some of the more colourful characters who knew Blake during this time: the rapacious art dealer Cromek; the exuberant astrologer John Varley (for whom Blake painted the visionary portrait of the Flea); and the dandy art critic and poisoner (later championed by Oscar Wilde), Thomas Wainewright. The last chapters are structured round the unpublished Reminiscences of Crabb Robinson from 1825, and the interviews with Palmer, Richmond and Tatham who knew Blake in the last years at Fountain Court. Here, from Chapter 34 onwards (‘Personal Details’), the biography is at its most intimate and moving. The final picture of Blake ‘chaunting Songs’ to Catherine, as he lay on his deathbed in the little upper room above the Thames, is unforgettable. 6 Gilchrist’s biography was immediately taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle. William Rossetti established himself as the leading nineteenth-century Blake scholar, and edited the first collection of Blake’s Poetical Works, published in the Aldine series in 1874. Algernon Swinburne, inspired by Gilchrist, wrote the first detailed assessment of Blake as a poet, which appeared as a long monograph, William Blake: A Critical Essay in 1868. In his Preface Swinburne spoke with admiration of Gilchrist’s ‘trained skill’ and ‘sense of selection’ as a biographer, and his ‘almost incomparable capacity of research and care in putting to use the results of such long and refined labour’. Like Palmer, he felt the biography would endure, despite the tragic circumstances of its composition. This good that he did is likely to live after him; no part of it is likely to be interred in his grave.’ In saying this, Swinburne also gently re-opened the question of the posthumous collaboration between Anne and Alexander. ‘For the book, unfinished, was not yet incomplete, when the writer’s work was broken short off. All or nearly all the biographical part had been carried through to a good end. It remained for other hands to do the editing; to piece together the loose notes left, and to supply all that was requisite or graceful in the way of remark or explanation.’ Anne however remained strenuous in her denial of having contributed anything more than ‘editorial’ work. Interest in Blake steadily revived, and within fifteen years Macmillan was ready to undertake a new edition. Anne Gilchrist had spent the previous four years in America with her children, writing about the work of Walt Whitman and forming an intense personal friendship with the poet. But on her return to England in June 1879, almost her first act was undertake the revision of the Blake biography for Macmillan. She had remained in close touch with the Rossettis, and with their advice began to correct minor errors of fact and dates. By March 1880 the work was being ‘pushed energetically through’. Her son Herbert remarked: ‘Anne Gilchrist’s task of editing the second edition was not an easy one. It was a tradition in the family to avoid notes; to recast the text rather than to use them. Thus, too, as a consequence, her work as editor is not apparent.’ This is curious, as her editorial hand is much more evident in the 1880 edition, and its impact much more marked. Her main task was to find a place for another major cache of correspondence, some forty newly discovered letters from Blake to his patron William Hayley. Thirty-four of them had been auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1878, and bought by the Rossettis. Dante Gabriel regarded them as ‘rather disappointing’, and largely concerned with mundane business matters. But together with the twelve letters to Thomas Butts, they filled in the picture of Blake’s middle years between 1800 and 1805. Clearly these could no longer be left in an Appendix. Anne determined that they should be fully integrated into the narrative of the text. She inserted them with extraordinary skill between Chapter 16 and Chapter 20, adding short linking sentences, but largely allowing them to speak for themselves. By comparing the two editions, one can see how ingenuously she kept to Alexander’s original wording (often by the device of altering the order of his paragraphs), and how little she added of her own. She was, however, forced to delete a large part of Alexander’s account of the ‘soldier’ incident at Felpham, allowing it to be replaced by Blake’s own self-justifying letter to Butts. This was the one major cut she made in the entire biography, and it was not a happy one. It produced a smoother but more anodyne account. Indeed overall, the changes in the second edition had a curiously muffling effect. The dramatic story of Blake’s Sussex period nearly doubled in length, but also halved in biographical impact. The picture of Blake’s strange inner life, was swamped and blurred by the mundane superfluity of Hayley materials. The fifty extra pages slowed the pace of the entire narrative. This loss of pace was further increased by newly extended citations from the Prophetic Books. Though she still regarded any attempt to interpret Blake’s mythology as ‘a reckless adventure’, Anne hopefully read and re-read Jerusalem, finding ‘several more coherent and indeed beautiful passages’, and relating the poetry to the ‘sublime influence of the sea’ on Blake at Felpham. Finally she added half-a-dozen new extracts from both Jerusalem and Milton to Chapter 21, with a brief commentary on Blake’s use of names. She also referred the reader to Swinburne’s critical essay, as a possible guide ‘through the dark mazes of these labyrinthine, spectre-haunted books’. Further expansions included more quotations from the ‘Proverbs of Hell’, and further brief reflections on Blake’s mysticism. But she also made cuts at certain points of controversy. She slightly shortened the Adam and Eve’ incident in Chapter 12, in deference to its supposed immorality. She also removed some of Alexander’s reflection on the sexual symbolism of The Daughters of Albion’, the old point of disagreement with Macmillan and ‘flustered Propriety’. Finally she censored a few of his more vivid but risqu? phrases, such as the memorable reference to the music hall nude shows near Fountain Court. Altogether the addition of the new letters, together with Anne’s expanded quotations from the Prophetic Books, and her prudential cuts, gave the second edition of 1880 greater authority as a work of reference. But it also damaged much of its original charm and energy as a biography. The second edition was longer, slower and more ponderous. The elegant, lively narrative structure with its short concentrated chapters, as Alexander had originally devised it, was weakened and made more conventional. It lost something of the passionate excitement and directness of its original youthful conception. Ironically for all Anne’s sense of holding a sacred trust to her husband’s work, Alexander’s own voice is muted and dissipated. The second edition became more like a standard high Victorian volume of Life and Letters. Nonetheless, the edition of 1880 continued the task of reestablishing Blake’s reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. Praise for Gilchrist’s heroic work was now universal, and Walt Whitman for one, saluted the rise of a new informal English style of biography, comparing it to the work of J.A. Froude. The Blake book is charming for the same reason that we find Froude’s Carlyle fascinating – it is minute, it presents the man as he was, it gathers together little things ordinarily forgotten; portrays the man as he walked, talked, worked, in his simple capacity as a human being. It is just in such touches – such significant details – that the profounder, conclusive, art of biographical narrative lies.’ Anne would still make no claims other than that of being ‘editor’ of Alexander’s work. Instead she added a long and passionate Memoir, praising his supreme dedication as a biographer. In it she made this thoughtful observation: ‘If I could briefly sketch a faithful portrait of Blake’s biographer, the attempt would need no apology, for if the work be of interest, so is the worker. A biographer necessarily offers himself as the mirror in which his hero is reflected; and we judge all the better of the truth and adequacy of the image by a closer acquaintance with the medium through which it comes to us.’ In the use of that one word ‘medium’, she might, at least unconsciously, have been calling attention to herself. 7 Anne Gilchrist later wrote the Blake entry for Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, and also a well-judged Life of Mary Lamb for the new and influential Eminent Women of Letters series, published by Allen Lane in 1883. She had other literary plans, including Lives of Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle. But her heart was broken by the sudden and tragic death of her favourite daughter Beatrice. This was the child they had nursed through scarlet fever at Cheyne Row, while Alexander was struggling to complete the biography. She was always closely associated in Anne’s mind with the early shared work on Blake. True to her mother’s early leanings towards science, Beatrice had been training in Edinburgh to qualify as one of Britain’s first women doctors. Possibly as the result of an unhappy love affair, she committed suicide at the age of twenty-five by taking cyanide in July 1881. Anne Gilchrist never really recovered from the death of Beatrice, so shortly after the publication of the second edition of Blake. She contracted cancer and died at Hampstead four years later in November 1885, aged only fifty-three, all her other literary plans unfulfilled. Gilchrist’s original Life of William Blake, with its combative subtitle Pictor Ignotus (The Unknown Painter’), is one of the most influential of all the great mid-Victorian biographies. It rescued its subject from almost total obscurity, challenged the notion of Blake’s madness, and first defined his genius as both an artist and visionary poet combined. It set the agenda for modern Blake studies, and remains the prime source for all modern Blake biographies. It remains wonderfully readable today, and salvaged from death, it still vibrates with extraordinary life. Yet like so many works of art, it was produced at great cost, and under mysterious conditions. In the absence of an original manuscript of the 1863 biography, the mystery will always remain just how much of this first, ground-breaking text we really owe to Alexander Gilchrist or to Anne; or to some indefinable Blakean collaboration between the two. The text printed here is that of the first edition of 1863, together with the letters to Thomas Butts in an Appendix. SELECT CHRONOLOGY (#ulink_770e7f4a-1281-5c94-9aff-e934239cb22f) ONE Preliminary (#ulink_9b1cfece-4531-51ac-becc-9dc36a88eb56) 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. Encyclopaedias 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 this 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 awhile, 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 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 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 medi?val sense, 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 intrinsic 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 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 D?rer, often, 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 this 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 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. TWO Childhood, 1757-71 (#ulink_95a31f60-3892-5361-9e3c-41798f5cf39f) 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 nth 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 four. 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 (only shorter) much such as Wigmore Street is now. 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 portion stands a large, dingy brewery. The street is a shabby miscellany of oddly assorted occupations, – lapidaries, picklemakers, 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 nineteenth century bad eminence in the bills of choleramortality, and then, unsophisticate green field and hedgerow opened on the 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 life-long reminiscence with Blake, and stored his mind with life-long 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 hay-makers 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 pavements 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 of 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 clear 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 corner of Castle Court: a house and court demolished when Agar Street and King William Street were made. The school was founded and brought 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 Chamber’s, 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-dealers’ 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 author – 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 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 D?rer, 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 Phoebus 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? THREE Engraver’s Apprentice 1771-78 [?T. 14-21] (#ulink_f342b17e-3537-5d87-bf33-98be419d0a6f) 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 litt?rateur have often had cause to envy in the skilled artisan. 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 artisan 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: 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 200/. 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 (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’ 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 Arch?ologia 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 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 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, and a genius singularly german to Blake’s own order of mind, the ‘singular boy of fourteen,’ during the commencement of his apprenticeship, may ‘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, 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, the latter 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 role 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 excellencies, 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 five centuries had lain in mute majesty, – 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 mediaeval tombs. He pored over all with a reverent good faith, which, in the age of Stuart and Revert, 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 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-enclosed in its cerecloths – of his very visage: a recognizable 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 singlehanded. 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 Arch?ologia, in some of the engravings of coins, &c., to the Memoirs of Hollis (1780), and in Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments, not published till 1786 and 1796. The Antiquaries were alive and stirring then; and enthusiastic John Carter was laying the foundations in English Arch?ology on which better-known men have since built. In the Sepulchral Monuments, vol. 1, 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 ascendancy, 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) to his own Canterbury Pilgrimage (the engraving not the picture), 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. 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 Act?on, and, in short, all that are called Woollen’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 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 dormar 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. FOUR A Boy’s Poems 1768-77 [?T. 11-20] (#ulink_f359bceb-a074-5ea9-b671-3e4f416d1e05) 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, and which purports to be a collection (expressly compiled ‘to enforce the practice of Virtue’) of ‘Such poems as have been universally esteemed the first 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,’ 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 Thompson, is nowhere in the volume discernible; but involuntary emulation of higher ones partially known to him: 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 na?ve sweetness of the two concluding stanzas; which, in practised hands, might have been wrought into more artful melody, with little increase of real effect. Again, how many reams 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 Song extracted 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 recognized 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-coloured 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 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, impalpable personifications, as dim and monotonous as a moor in a mist. To the close of his life, Blake retained his allegiance 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, is so.’ And again, when the Lake Poet speaks contemptuously of Macpherson, ‘I own 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 omitted 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. 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; those 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 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 eighteenth 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 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: seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those least practised now. FIVE Student and Lover 1778-82 [?T. 21-25] (#ulink_869ef31b-c58a-550e-9c66-73b30dd4d596) Apprenticeship to Basire having ended, Blake, now (1778) twenty-one, studied for awhile in the newly formed Royal Academy: just then in an uncomfortable chrysalis condition, having had to quit its cramped lodgings in Old 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 Martin’s 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 ample 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 a 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 Palace,’ 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 of whom voluntarily testified their regard around his grave in the burialground 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 seventythree, 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 Rubens’ 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 to be 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 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 in 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 imaginative 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. ‘Its 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 contemporaries for fancy and correct drawing of the human 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 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’ 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 nightmoth 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’ 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, who 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, and 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 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 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 Goodwin, a drawing probably, being 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 eclat, netting double the average amount realized by its predecessors: viz. as much as 3,000/. 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, 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 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 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 bookplates for the publications already named. These voluminous, well-illustrated serials are 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 humble 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 fruidess 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 na?vely to relate. One evening at a friend’s house he was bemoaning in a corner his love-crosses. His 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 mis-spelt 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 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 familyseat, 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. 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’d maid Doth drop a tear beneath the silent shade, I turn my eyes; and pensive as I go, Curse 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, – decidedly 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, So when we walk, nothing impure comes near, Each field seems Eden and each calm retreat; Each village seems the haunt of holy feet. But that sweet village where my black-ey’d maid Closes her eyes in sleep beneath 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 architectural 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, perspectiveless 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 sidewindows, 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? SIX Introduction to the Polite World 1782-84 [?T. 24-27] (#ulink_a7fd94a9-c400-5049-aced-c97bf10168ab) 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, 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 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-mache, Artist’s colours, toy-shops, and fancytrades, 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 numbered. Of the Mathews’ house, by the 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:’ quaere 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 prot?g?. 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. Reunions were held in it such as Mrs Montagu and Mrs Vesey had first set going, unconsciously contributing the word bluestocking 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, 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 Bas-bleu, 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 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 virtu, 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 castshop, 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 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.’ Phoenix 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 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 leisure is pleaded, ‘requisite to such a revisal of these sheets as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye.’ 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.’ Semicolons 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 bon? 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 subsequentle auditory – ‘thay named. Blake’s course of soirees in Rathbone Place was not long a 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. SEVEN Struggle and Sorrow 1782-87 [?T. 25-30] (#ulink_383980a9-addb-5ee9-88b3-7844bfe54ba8) 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, 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 life-long 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 pub-Ushers 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 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 sugarplum 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 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 Son’s Revenge, The Discomfited Duellists, The Blind Beggar’s Hats, and May Day in London. After which, an engraver of lower grade, one Smith, (qu?re, 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’ Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse, and Fortune-Teller, – 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. Companionsubjects, 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 recognized North American States. I have not seen 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. 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 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 eldest 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 gendeman 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, 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 Hon 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 a 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 to the Academy-Exhibition, one, by the way, at which our old friend Parson Gardnor is still exhibiting – some seven Views of Lake Scenery. One of Blake’s drawings is from Gray, The 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. 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, Serre, 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 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 legacy, but not at all unproductive, he had to bequeath 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 na?f 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 his very earliest, in that peculiar stereotype process he soon afterwards invented, as a version of this very composition: marvellously improved in the treatment – in the disposition 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 faults – 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 mutual self-sacrifice. Of which the following anecdote will supply a hint, as well as 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 nth 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’a-day experiences. In the same year, disagreements with Parker put an end to the partnership and to print-selling. This Parker subsequently 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, and 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. EIGHT Meditation: Notes on Lavater 1788 [?T. 30-31] (#ulink_5a251bbb-2cb1-5e1e-ac4f-ba3bab2ece6f) 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 haphazard 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, cut 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 exorcizing evil spirits, who, in fact, had a bona fide if convulsive hold of the super-sensual, there was much that was germane 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 tide-page occurs a naive 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 Gold! ‘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 is 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 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 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,’ 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 position, 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 he 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 47th speaks of the “heterogeneous” in works of Art and Literature, which all extravagance is; but exuberance is not. But,’ adds 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. 2d 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 gleaming 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 on more than half your acquirance 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 chanter must sneak. NINE Poems of Manhood 1788-89 [?T. 31-32] (#ulink_ec0e26cd-c743-52c2-98db-caf176392757) 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 original and significant series of Poems, by which of themselves, Blake established a claim, however unrecognized, 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 patronizing 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 Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/alexander-gilchrist/gilchrist-on-blake-the-life-of-william-blake-by-alexan/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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