WILLIAM BLAKE

FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”: THE LAST JUDGMENT

Engraved by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s design. 1808

WILLIAM BLAKE

A STUDY OF HIS LIFE AND
ART WORK

BY
IRENE LANGRIDGE

LONDON
GEORGE BELL AND SONS
1904

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

PREFACE

Some years ago, I became deeply interested in William Blake, and made myself familiar with all that our public collections in London contain of his art-work. It seemed to me that this work was still so little known and appreciated by the public, that a short book might well be written to serve as a pointer to our national Blake treasures. The standard works on Blake—Gilchrist’s Life, Mr. A. C. Swinburne’s Critical Essay, Messrs. Ellis and Yeats’ exhaustive volumes, and Mr. W. M. Rossetti’s Aldine Essay—are of great literary excellence and high critical quality, and must ever remain the great authorities on the subject; but, owing to these works being either out of print, very lengthy, very expensive, or unillustrated, a want may be supplied by, and an opportunity of usefulness open to, such a book as the present one. Different in scope as it is from any other book on Blake, and modest in aim, it deals with the poet-artist as he is manifested in those works of his which are accessible to the public.

In seeking to sketch again his artistic personality, I have been guided by the conclusions of his eminent biographers and critics wherever they coincided with my own intuitive convictions. But in the study of a character and work so out of the usual, so exotic and strange as those of Blake, unanimity of opinion and judgement is hardly to be hoped for, and the variety of points of view from which each new student sees him, may assist to the rounding and filling out of the portrait drawn in so masterly a manner in the first instance by Alexander Gilchrist.

My best thanks are due to Mr. A. B. Langridge for reading my proofs and for the photographs which he took expressly to illustrate this volume. Also to Mr. Frederic Shields for numerous acts of kindness and the loan of original Blake drawings, to Sir Charles Dilke, to Messrs. Chatto and Windus, to Mr. Laurence Binyon, Mr. G. K. Fortescue, and to Dr. G. C. Williamson for help given to me in various ways.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

BOOKS ON BLAKE

Binyon, Robert Laurence. “William Blake: being all his woodcuts photographically reproduced in facsimile.” London, 1902. 4^o. [The Unicorn Press: Little Engravings, No. 2.]

Cunningham, Allan. “The Lives of the most eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects.” London, 1829-33. 12^o. [Part of “The Family Library,” 6 vols.] Note: a second edition of this work was published in 1830-37, in 16^o, 6 vols.

Ellis, E. J., and Yeats, W. B. “The works of William Blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical.” Edited with lithographs of the illustrated “Prophetic Books,” and a memoir and interpretation. London, B. Quaritch, 1893. 8^o. 3 vols.

Garnett (Sir) Richard. “William Blake, Painter and Poet.” London, 1895. 80 pp. folio. [“The Portfolio Monographs,” No. 22.]

Gilchrist, Alexander. “The Life of W. Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotus.’” With selections from his poems and other writings. Edited by Anne Gilchrist, with the assistance of D. G. and W. M. Rossetti. London, 1863. 8^o. 2 vols. Note: a second enlarged edition was published in 1880. London, Macmillan & Co. 8^o. 2 vols.

Malkin, Thomas W. “A Father’s Memoirs of his Child.” London, 1806. 8^o.

Rossetti, W. M. “The Poetical Works of William Blake.” Edited with a prefatory memoir. London, 1874. 8^o. [“The Aldine Poets.” George Bell & Sons.]

Scott, William Bell. “Exhibition of the Works of William Blake.” With introductory memoir. London, The Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1876. 4^o.

Scott, William Bell. “William Blake.” Etchings from his works (with descriptive text). London, Chatto and Windus, 1878. Folio.

Smetham, James. “Essay on Blake.” (Reprinted in Gilchrist’s work, q.v., from the “London Quarterly Review”).

Swinburne, A. C. “William Blake.” A critical essay, with illustrations from Blake’s designs in facsimile, coloured and plain. Second edition. London, 1868. 8^o.

WILLIAM BLAKE

CHAPTER I

William Blake was one of those unique beings who live above this actual world, in the high places of imagination. At four years old he saw his first vision, as his wife reminded him in old age, in the presence of Mr. Crabb Robinson: “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and He put His head to the window and set you screaming.” Quaintly, crudely, as the story is told by Mrs. Blake, it bears testimony to the fact that the visionary faculty was developed in Blake from the beginning. Imagination claimed him definitely as her child from that early day when, having rambled far afield into the country (as it was his pastime to do throughout life), he saw, in a meadow near Dulwich, a tree amongst whose branches glistening angels clustered and sang. It may be, as one of Blake’s critics suggests, that Nature was herself the basis of the supernatural beauty he saw, though he was all unwitting of it. Standing beneath a tree laden with delicate pink blossom, and gazing up into the rosy gloom, Blake may well have translated this pulsating beauty into a miracle. Above among the greenery he may have seemed to catch glimpses of aspiring hands and faces among the crowding wings of flame and rose and sun-kissed gold. A little breeze would set angelic wings and garments all a-moving and a-fluttering, and a thrush’s voice suddenly cleaving the silence seem an angel’s song indeed, too exquisite to be endured without tears, to the quivering, spell-bound wanderer. Such may have been the explanation of this early vision, but Blake himself never attributed any natural cause to such spiritual manifestations. Everything was alive to him with a strange inner life: the “vegetable world,” as he called it, was but the shadow of the real world of imagination, whose spiritual population was more clearly discernible to his highly-wrought consciousness, than natural phenomena themselves. Narrowly did he escape a whipping from his father, the worthy hosier, for what that matter-of-fact man could not but consider a most impudent invention on the child’s part. The incident was a foreshadowing of the poet-painter’s life. The mysterious regions in which his spirit wandered so fearlessly, and which his poems and his drawings represented to the world, had but scanty attraction for his time. It would be truer perhaps to say that they were more often regarded with fear and repulsion. The mortal who dares to raise even the corner of the veil that so discreetly hides from our material world the many other existent conditions of consciousness, the great Beyond of Spirit Life, does so at his own risk, and with the certainty of earning his fellow men’s distrust and disapproval. The outlook on that immensity has a tendency, it is true, to endanger the perfect mental equilibrium; but though the age—professing faith in a set of decent religious formulae, but in reality sceptical of all spiritual life and destiny—called Blake mad, he was recognized by a few chosen spirits as a great master and seer. The story of his life contains but few incidents, but through these incidents we see a soul travelling.

William Blake was born in 1757 at 28, Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Soho. The old house still stands, but looks very dirty and depressing, like the street, which, since Blake played in it, has suffered a dingy declension. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have added some biographical details to Gilchrist’s Life, state that William’s father, the hosier, James Blake, was the son of an Irishman, one John O’Neil. John O’Neil married a girl from Rathmines, Dublin, called Ellen Blake, and as he soon afterwards got into debt and trouble of one sort and another, he dropped his name of O’Neil and adopted his wife’s maiden name. This fact, if established beyond doubt, would seem to be of singular importance, as the presence of Irish blood in William Blake would account for several strange characteristics which are not otherwise understandable. The Kelts are always particularly sensitive and open to spiritual experience. Imagination, second sight, and acute psychic consciousness, seem to be the peculiar attributes of the race; and these gifts are seldom to be found in a pure Anglo-Saxon. There were four other children, James, of whom we shall hear again, Robert, our artist’s beloved younger brother, John, a ne’er-do-weel, and a girl of whom not much is known.

Very early William developed a taste for art, and his father, with more sense than usually characterizes the parents of great men, allowed him to follow his bent, and sent him, from the age of ten to fourteen, to the drawing class of one Pars, in the Strand. We read of his attending picture sales and occasionally buying drawings and prints after Raphael, Michael Angelo, Albert Dürer, and other old masters at prices which would make the modern collector green with envy. But we do not hear of Blake’s attending any other school either before or after leaving Pars for the purpose of furthering his general education. All the knowledge that he acquired outside Art was self-chosen and self-taught. A sound general education is the firmest basis on which to build a tower of observation from which the world and life may be surveyed with judgement. Blake’s beautiful and fantastic house of thought, however, was erected on no such foundation. Perhaps instinct guided his choice of mental food: certain it is that the peculiar education he gave himself enabled him to preserve his own personality in all its vital energy. Pars appears to have been the Squarcione of that generation. He had been sent to Greece by the Dilettante Society to study ruined temples and broken statues. On his return to England he set up a school in the Strand to teach drawing from plaster casts after the antique.

When he was fourteen, with a view to getting a trade by which he could earn his daily bread, Blake’s father determined to apprentice him to an engraver. He took him first to Rylands, an eminent engraver with a Court appointment, but the boy said after the interview, “Father, I do not like that man’s face. He looks as if he would live to be hanged.” Strange forecast this proved to be, for in 1783 Rylands was indeed hanged for forgery. Blake was finally apprenticed to Basire, a sound craftsman, but of a somewhat hard and dry manner. Basire’s style as an engraver set its stamp on Blake, there is no doubt. It would have hampered most men severely, rendering their work formal and immobile, but Blake turned it to a strange account, and it became expressive in his hands. When in his later years he found that he had outgrown it, he modified it to suit his new requirements, but it had been a laborious and useful servant, if not a gracious one. During his apprenticeship Basire set him to draw all the mediaeval tombs and monuments in Westminster Abbey and other churches for a certain publication to be brought out by the firm. In doing this Blake imbibed large draughts of the intense and fervent Gothic spirit. Its deep innerness, its passionate aspiration, its whimsicality, and its quaint decorative exuberance, expressed alike in angels and gargoyles, found and touched a vibrating chord in his heart. Gothic art entered into him and became part of him. Its influence was strong, though it took a characteristically Blakeian expression always, and those long mornings spent among the slanting sunbeams and the whispering silence of the chapels around the King Confessor’s tomb, were among the truly eventful incidents of his life.

In many of his designs a Gothic church with spires and buttresses like Westminster,—often a mere symbol sufficient to recall it, occasionally carefully and elaborately drawn in—stands as an embodiment of Blake’s idea of worship.

Strange thoughts must have come to him among those forests of slender pillars and arches! Some hint of them is conveyed by an engraving he did during the period of drawing in the Abbey. It is after a drawing (probably one bought by him cheap at a sale room) by Michael Angelo, and has the imaginative inscription written on it by Blake, “Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion. This is one of the Gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the dark ages, wandering about in sheepskin and goatskin, of whom the world was not worthy.” Joseph of Arimathea, it will be remembered, is supposed to have come to Glastonbury in 63 A.D. and built the first Christian Church.

He did not always work in the Abbey in quiet. There is a story told by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, of how he was plagued by the Westminster boys till he laid his grievance before the Dean, who thereupon deprived the boys of the right to wander about the Abbey at their pleasure, a right denied to them to this day.

At twenty, Blake’s apprenticeship to Basire being ended, he attended the Academy schools and drew from the antique under Keeper Moser, picking out for his chief delight and most ardent study the drawings of Michael Angelo and Raphael—a very barbaric choice it was considered, according to the decadent taste of the period. Moser recommended him to give up poring over “those old hard, stiff, dry, unfinished works of art,” and to turn his attention to Le Brun and Rubens, some of whose drawings he fetched out for Blake’s inspection. Blake, however, who was never able to conceal his thoughts, nor to express them in anything but forcible terms, burst out, “These things that you call finished, are not even begun; how then can they be finished?” and comments on the incident, which he relates in his MS. notes on “Reynolds’ Discourses,” made in his old age, “that the man who does not know the beginning, cannot know the end of art.” By this he meant, that to be preoccupied as were Rubens and Le Brun, with the merely faithful representation of the beauty of the body, to dwell as an end in itself on the wonder of white shoulders, tapering fingers, and too luscious flesh, to linger in the folds and intricacies of silk and velvet robes, and to spend strength and power on these things, was mere foolishness and blundering.

Physical beauty, splendour of colour, only thrilled and arrested him when he recognized in them the symbols of an idea, when they seemed to hint of things rarer and more excellent than any purely natural or intrinsic attribute. If he could discriminate its eternal inner message, and could make it visible to the world, then was physical beauty worthy of reproduction. But he seldom dwelt on beauty for its own sake, but only when it was spiritually significant; so it is easy to see why he was inaccessible to the influence of such artists as Rubens and Le Brun.

At the Academy Schools he had the opportunity of drawing from the living model, and profited by it to a certain limited extent. But he always had an aversion to it, declaring that to his whimsical nature it “smelt of mortality.” However he might and did justify his negligence of this important branch of technique, his art was necessarily weakened by it. Technique is the language of art, and is only to be obtained by frequent and laboriously faithful reference to nature. It is true that Blake’s strong power of generalizing, along with his marvellous gift of recalling at desire things discriminated by him, made the achievement of technique through methods of life study a less urgent necessity to him than to other men who had no such retentive artistic memories. Essential lines Blake never failed to give, but by intention rather than from any inability he seldom gives more than these essential lines in the figures he drew and painted.

After all it is possible that his power of delineating swift movement, and the great range of emotions that correspond to that, might have been injured or lost by too close an application to the artificially posed human figure. We have seen much life lost in the too close study of life, as in the otherwise exquisite work of Lord Leighton.

Blake believed that to draw from the typical forms seen by him in vision was his true purpose and aim, and the study of individual human forms filled his eye with confusion, for, as he was for ever asserting, Nature seemed to him but a faint and garbled version of the grand originals seen in imagination, that is, in truth.

While Blake was educating himself in art, he had to earn his livelihood by engraver’s work, and between 1779 and 1782 one or two booksellers employed him to engrave designs after various artists. Among these artists was Stothard, to whom, in 1782, Blake was introduced. Stothard brought Flaxman and Blake together, and the three became warm friends. It was only after many years, and then through the machinations of an evil man (the publisher Cromek), that Blake became estranged from Stothard, and partially also from Flaxman.

In 1780 Blake exhibited his first picture in the Academy, “The Death of Earl Godwin.” It was only the twelfth exhibition of the institution, and the first to be held at Somerset House. How curiously do its four hundred and eighty-seven exhibits (including wax work and a design for a fan) contrast with our mammoth Academies of to-day! Sir Joshua Reynolds, Mary Moser, Gainsborough, Angelica Kauffman, Cosway and Fuseli, were all contributors in the year of grace 1780. Blake was in sympathy with none of them save Fuseli, who, although a man greatly overrated in his day, had a real sense of the potency of the invisible world, mainly, however, of that portion of it concerned with arch-fiends, witches, demons, and baleful omens.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Bouchier, and set up housekeeping in Green Street. It appears that he had been much in love with a girl called Pollie Wood, who had jilted him. Going to stay at Richmond in a state of deep depression, he made the acquaintance of Catherine Bouchier. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats have added this detail to the first biographer’s story. When she first entered the room where he sat, she was overcome by such intense emotion that she had to withdraw for awhile. She afterwards admitted that at that moment she became suddenly aware that she was in the presence of her future husband.

Small wonder that Blake felt an irresistible affinity for this charming dark-eyed girl whose fervent susceptible spirit responded so mysteriously to his own. No marriage was ever more happy. Catherine was of humble origin, and practically no education, for at the time of her marriage she was unable to read or write, but nevertheless she possessed the rare and delicate qualities necessary for the mate of a man like Blake. She early realized that the man she had married was no ordinary one, and to be of service to her dear “Mr. Blake” (as she always called him with quaint reverence), to enter into his thoughts, to smooth the path of his material life, and to conform her young and unlessoned girlhood to his difficult standard of plain living and high thinking, became her one absorbing object.

There were a few rough passages in the early days of married life, which Gilchrist indicates, but they soon disappeared. It was merely the friction and heat given off, before the two strong natures were fused into a perfect union. Catherine’s nature appears to have been a compound of ardent worship and pregnant sympathy. Never did a woman so forget herself in reverencing, nigh worshipping, the man she had chosen to marry.

During an unusually long, and in many respects a peculiarly isolated life, these two lived together, the one master mind and purpose informing both.

No words could do full justice to the beautiful life of Catherine Blake. It is true that no ordinary man could have drawn such harmony from the vivacious, impulsive, passionate nature of the girl. All the generous love that her nature possessed she lavished on Blake, and her complete absorption in him seems to have satisfied the maternal cravings which were to have no other satisfaction, for William and Catherine had no children. The work of caring for the few rooms which were all that Blake’s means allowed, and his ambition desired, for the housing of their bodies, this Catherine did with the thoroughness of the true aesthete. She cooked, sewed, swept, dusted, and washed, and yet found time to learn from her husband how to read and write, the use of the graver, and even to colour with neat and precise hand some of the prints he made. Added to this she was soon able to read with intelligence the books he praised, and listened wondering to the songs he made, finding them of a heavenly significance and beauty; and when his tense nerves and superabundant physical energy drove Blake forth to stretch his limbs and cool his brain in long country walks of thirty, and occasionally forty miles at a stretch, Catherine went with him, and cheerfully tramped along beside him, silent or responsive as he set the mood.

Again, when in the night time visions appeared to his teeming ever-inventive brain, and he must needs get up and write or draw while the divine “mania” was upon him, then Catherine arose softly and sat beside that wondrous husband in her white nightgown, her whole consciousness hanging upon his least movement or utterance, and her whole being thrilling sympathetically to those invisible presences which moved his spirit. Like Mary, “she kept all these things in her heart and pondered them.”

Speaking of his wife, one cannot but recall that in Blake’s mysterious and unorthodox creed the doctrine of free love was a very favourite one, on which in his poetry he was never tired of insisting. Yet he seems to have desired freedom, only, as Mr. Swinburne finely shows, “for the soul’s sake.” If love is bound, he argued, what merit is there in faithfulness? Love, to be what love in perfect development should be,—to be what Love in its very essence predicates,—must be free. Such a creed, proclaimed by the lips of the most austere of men in matters sensual, seems to shadow forth one dimly apprehended aspect of a truth, which may be realized perhaps, in a future and more perfect state of society.

“In a myrtle shade,” and “William Bond,” are two among the poems in Blake’s MS. book, which have their origin in thoughts about free love.

The year after his marriage, 1782-83, Blake had to turn to engraving in real earnest to pay for the necessities of the modest ménage in Green Street. We find him engaged mainly in engraving plates after Stothard’s refined and graceful designs. In after years, when he was estranged from Stothard, Blake used to say that many of these same designs contained ideas stolen from himself. There can be small doubt that Stothard did owe something to Blake’s influence. Fuseli frankly declared that “Blake is damned good to steal from,” and accordingly adopted his ideas, and in one instance, at least, a complete design.

A kind and appreciative couple, the Rev. Henry and Mrs. Mathew, received Blake in their drawing-room about this time, and gave him an honoured place among their guests. It was they who paid in part for the production of his “Poetical Sketches,” and Flaxman, who had always a strong admiration of Blake’s poetical genius, helped,—an act of beautiful generosity in a young artist with his own way to make.

The “Poetical Sketches” are among the tenderest lyric notes uttered by Blake, and their bird-like spontaneity and lilt recall, says Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “the best period of English song-writing, whose rarest treasures lie scattered among the plays of our Elizabethan dramatists.” These wild wood-notes gushing unselfconscious from a heart glad with youth and fair visions are in strange contrast to the artificial, trifling, and unsatisfying poetry of the age. Blake himself writes in the “Poem to the Muses”:

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

What can be said of that perfect lyric, written when Blake was but fourteen, “My silks and fine array,” and that other which I shall surely be forgiven for quoting as it stands:

How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer’s pride,
Till I the Prince of Love beheld
Who in the sunny beams did glide.

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

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

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