PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF EXPERIENCE,” 1794
To a poetically sensitive mind, verses like these remain like a beautiful echo in the memory, having a musical charm apart from the sense of the words. Although in this little book it is my purpose to dwell mainly on Blake’s manifestation of himself as a designer and painter, I cannot avoid lingering sometimes on his poetical expression. For the creative impulse that clothed its thought in a garment of words is the same as that which is embodied in plastic forms and symbolic colouring. Blake’s invention had two outlets, but was itself one stream of energy only.
The lines to the Evening Star are incomparably sweet and haunting:
Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening,
Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light
Thy brilliant torch of love; thy radiant crown
Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!
Smile on our loves, and whilst thou drawest round
The curtains of the sky, scatter thy dew
On every flower that closes its sweet eyes
In timely sleep. Let thy west wind sleep on
The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes,
And wash the dusk with silver. Soon, full soon,
Dost thou withdraw; then the wolf rages wide,
And then the lion glares through the dim forest,
The fleeces of our flocks are covered with
Thy sacred dew; protect them with thine influence.
The lingering subtle and most musical sweetness of such lines as those quoted above, “Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, and wash the dusk with silver,” can be surpassed by none of the great masters of melody. So unaccustomed were the ears of the time to such perfectly natural bursts of song, that the Rev. Henry Mathew considered it necessary to apologize to the refined and fastidious for calling attention to them, “hoping their poetic originality merits some respite from oblivion.” Blake might well seem strange to these borné people, for he was no other than the herald and forerunner of the poetic renaissance of the beginning of the nineteenth century.
In the Mathew’s drawing-room, surrounded by a wondering group of dilettanti, above whom he towered head and shoulders intellectually, he was encouraged to sing his “Songs of Innocence,” which he had already written, though not produced, to his own music. Blake had then a mode of musical expression as well as an artistic and a literary one, though no record of it has been preserved. With these three keys he unlocked the doors of materialism outwards, on to the vistas of God-thrilled Eternity.
In 1784 Blake exhibited two drawings in the Royal Academy, “War, unchained by an Angel—Fire, Pestilence and Famine following,” and “A Breach in the City—the Morning after a Battle.” It is obvious from these that his style was already formed in all its strength and almost terrifying individuality.
During this year Blake’s father died, and William and Catherine returned to Broad Street and took up their abode next to the paternal dwelling now occupied by the elder brother James. James, though a Swedenborgian and accounting himself a godly person, was also a busy seeker after this world’s good things, and seems to have had little in common with William, though for some years friendly relations were maintained between them. Blake set up a shop as printseller and engraver in Broad Street in company with a man named Parker, whose acquaintance he had made in the old Basire days, but it was a short-lived affair, and soon came to an end.
It was in this year that William’s younger brother Robert became his pupil. Nothing much can be discovered about the personality of Robert, but from Blake’s own writings and designs we are able to see how close a tie of affection existed between these two brothers.
Robert only lived three years after becoming William’s house-mate and pupil. In his final illness it was not Catherine but William who nursed him day and night untiringly, with passionate love and care; and when at last the end came, Blake saw his brother’s soul fare forth, clapping its hands for joy, from the mortal tenement—a vision to bear fruit afterwards in his designs for Blair’s “Grave.” Then he was beset with sheer physical exhaustion, and going to bed, slept for three days and three nights. Many years after we find him going back into this period of personal sorrow, to extract therefrom comfort for Hayley, who had lost his son.
“I know,” he writes to him, “that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in remembrance in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice and even now write from his dictate. Forgive me for expressing to you my enthusiasm, which I wish all to partake of, since it is to me a source of immortal joy, even in this world. May you continue to be so more and more, and to be more and more persuaded that every mortal loss is an immortal gain. The ruins of time build mansions in Eternity”:—from all of which it is easy to see that Robert’s influence on the soul of William augmented after his death.
In 1788 Blake removed from Broad Street to No. 28, Poland Street, which lies in its immediate neighbourhood. A coolness may have sprung up between James and William, for the brothers saw little of each other now.
The following characteristic story, taken from Mr. Tatham’s MS., and retold by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, helps to draw in Blake’s psychological portrait.
In Poland Street Blake’s windows looked over Astley’s Yard,—Astley of circus fame. One day on looking out he saw a boy limping up and down, dragging a heavy block chained to his foot. It was a hobble used for horses, and Blake, with his brain on fire and pity and rage tearing at his heart, was soon down in the yard among the circus company. He gave them a passionate speech on liberty, appealed to them as true men and Britons not to punish a fellow-countryman in a manner that would degrade a slave, and finally saw the crowd yield to his eloquence, and his point was gained. The boy was loosed, and Blake returned to his own world of work and vision.
Some hours after, Mr. Astley, who had been out during the incident related, called on Blake, and stormed and raved at what he called his interference. At first Blake was as angry as Astley, his blood was up, and there seemed every prospect of a very violent quarrel. But suddenly, in the midst of his anger, Blake remembered that the amelioration of the boy’s condition was his first object, and, quickly changing his tactics, he so worked on the higher moral nature which Astley evidently possessed, that he completely won him over to his views, and the two men parted—friends. Ever after, however, as Messrs. Ellis and Yeats point out, the chain remained with Blake as the symbol of cruel oppression and slavery, and we shall see him using it in his designs again and again as such.
PRINTED AND COLOURED PLATE FROM
“SONGS OF INNOCENCE,” 1789
In 1790 he produced the “Songs of Innocence,” printed and published, as well as designed, engraved, and composed by himself. In the long and romantic history of art, nothing is more strange than the story of how this little book came into being. Blake was unknown to the world and had no credit with publishers, nor had he the wherewithal to publish at his own expense the poems which he had written and called “Songs of Innocence.” Yet he greatly desired to see them set forth in a book with appropriate and significant designs. But how was this to be accomplished? He pondered the matter long, till at last light and leading came. In the silence of one midnight his dead brother Robert appeared to him and instructed him as to the method—an entirely original one—which he should use. The very next day, Blake being urgent to begin his work, his wife went out early with half-a-crown (all the money they had in the world), and laid out one and tenpence on the necessary material. And in faith and gladness, relying on that mystical power in himself which took and used his hand and eye and brain almost without his will, he began to make the first of his lovely engraved and painted books. This is the alpha of a long series of engraved books which issued from his hand at intervals for some years. While in Poland Street he wrote, but did not publish till long after, the “Ghost of Abel,” in 1789 the “Book of Thel,” in 1790 the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” and in 1791 a poem, the first of a projected series of seven books, called “The French Revolution.”
This so-called poem owed its birth to the fact that about this period Blake became one of a literary, artistic, and political set who met at the house of Johnson the publisher. At these gatherings Mary Wollstonecraft arrayed her charms to storm the citadel of Fuseli’s cynical heart, unavailingly. Among other guests were Tom Paine, author of “The Rights of Man,” whom eventually Blake was the means of saving, by a timely word of warning, from arrest in England. He judiciously advised his flight to France, at the right moment for his safety. Godwin and Holcroft and several revolutionary dreamers were members of this coterie. Blake’s enthusiasm was set all aglow by a philosophy which saw in the French Revolution a great renovating process,—the fire to burn up the ignorance and superstition and class boundaries of the ancient order, the introduction of a new reign of righteousness and peace.
In effect, this new philosophy which fired the imagination of Blake had a basis of materialism and violence which would have found no answering response in his soul, had he sought to investigate it. His sympathy with the group was intellectual, and with the higher manifestations of its creed alone. It led to no political action. He had far other work to do than that of a political agitator, but all expansive doctrines which made for liberty and individuality fired the imagination and fed the intellect of Blake. Democracy was his ideal, and democratic virtues won his admiration; indeed, he dared to flaunt the “bonnet rouge” of liberty in London streets in this agitated period, but after the Days of Terror in ’92 he tore off the white cockade and never again donned the Cap of Liberty. But if his work was not to be in the political arena, he was in his own way hastening the coming of that better and more immaterial kingdom which these young liberators only half conceived.
In 1792 died the great leader of English art, Sir Joshua Reynolds. His work, concerned as it was with the exquisite graces of this passing world, had nothing to say to Blake, who regarded it in the light of his own artistic standpoint, with positive aversion. It often happens that a man who feels it his burning mission to work out and reveal some hitherto neglected or unseen aspect of truth, does so at the cost of a one-sidedness which is a necessary defect of his quality. Blake could no more appreciate Sir Joshua—at least at this stage of his being—than Sir Joshua could appreciate Blake. The veteran Reynolds once told him, when a young man, “to work with less extravagance and more simplicity, and to correct his drawing.” Blake never got over that. We can imagine the suppressed heat with which he listened choking to the advice of the popular artist who was so utterly ignorant of his aims and ideals. To us, who may enter into the soul of each, it is given to realize that they, and all the company of the world’s great artists, have furthered the true work of art; have all helped, and are helping, according to their gifts and in their degree, to rear the walls and set with windows and crown with battlements and towers, the palace of beauty for the soul of man to dwell in with delight and worship. That the workers have not always recognized each other is matter for regret, though it is scarcely perhaps to be wondered at, seeing that each is set on emphasizing and relieving against its background the one point which seems to him necessary and valuable.
The characteristic notes which Blake appended to Reynolds’ “Discourses” many years later, express much of his dislike. Truly, it is easy to conceive of a mind offering nothing but delight and admiration to Reynolds’ practice, yet excited to a grave disapproval by much of his theory, or what he states as his theory. For Reynolds actually taught that genius—such as his own, for instance—was a state to be inducted into by precept, and evolved through study, instead of being a thing of fire, a tongue of flame from on high, set on a man as a seal, from which he cannot escape. I am reminded of Rossetti here, who quite sincerely told Mr. Hall Caine, “I paint by a set of unwritten but clearly-defined rules, which I could teach to any man as systematically as you could teach arithmetic.” Ah! that such genius might thus be taught!
However, Reynolds, his practice and theory alike, were by Blake swept into a limbo of unconditional condemnation, though occasionally, in spite of the prejudice he nursed against Sir Joshua, he flashed out notes of emphatic approval, on certain utterances in the great man’s “Discourses.”
PAGE FROM “AMERICA, A PROPHECY,” 1793
Printed in blue, from the Print Room copy
CHAPTER II
LIFE AT FELPHAM
In 1793 Blake removed across the river to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, where he lived for seven years of great mental and spiritual vitality, seeing visions and dreaming dreams and embodying them in beautiful designs. He was a tireless worker, never resting, and sleeping much less than other men. These Lambeth days were days of comparative prosperity with the Blakes, whose wants were so simple and few. The little house in which they lived possessed rustic charms—a garden with a summer-house, and a vine climbing over the back of the house, whose leaves made a pleasant rustling in summer. A view of the river, too, could not have failed to add a significant charm to the place. On its shining surface might be descried ships like souls faring to the world’s great market-place, to barter and to receive merchandise; while others, with white sails set, slipped quietly down the river and out to the wide mysterious sea. Blake had a few pupils, too, and at this period he made the acquaintance of Mr. Butts, who was a staunch friend and true appreciator for thirty years. During all that time he was a constant buyer of our artist’s work, and bought sometimes at the rate of one drawing a week. In time Mr. Butts’ spacious house in Fitzroy Square became a regular Blake Gallery. The average price he paid was £1 to 30s. a design or picture. To Mr. Butts’ great honour be it said that he never assumed the airs of a patron, never tried to bind or hamper Blake’s genius, or to dictate or direct his choice of subjects or treatment of them. He seems to have realized that this man was “a prince in Israel,” and the lordship of his ideas not to be questioned, but accepted humbly and with gratitude.
In a future chapter I hope to deal with the Blake drawings and easel pictures done for Mr. Butts, which were available to the public in the Exhibition at Messrs. Carfax’s Rooms in Ryder Street, held in 1904.
Blake seems to have enjoyed a little wave of recognition at Lambeth—popularity it can hardly be called—but it was not long-lived. At one time he was even suggested as drawing-master to the Royal Family, but declined the position, not from modesty, but from devotion to his true métier—the preservation and expression of spiritual ideas—with which such a post would probably have interfered.
Two acts of secret and most munificent generosity are recorded by Tatham, and quoted by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, concerning Blake while at Lambeth.
He gave £40 (he seldom after had half as much money beside him) to a friend in distress, and his deep sympathetic heart being moved by the sight of a sick young man, an artist, who daily passed their door, he and his Kate made the young man’s acquaintance, and for the love of Christ and in memory of brother Robert, finally took him into their house and tended him till his death some months later.
While at Lambeth he made three large and important drawings—“Nebuchadnezzar,” an enlarged edition of the bearded figure on hands and knees which occurs in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; “The Lazar House” and “The Elohim creating Adam.” He also made designs for Young’s “Night Thoughts.” There were 537 designs made, and Blake only took a year to do them. A selected few were engraved. While at Lambeth he printed also his “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” “America,” “Europe,” “Urizen,” “The Gates of Paradise,” “The Book of Los,” “The Song of Los,” and “Ahania.” The list implies steady application, and untiring intellectual and spiritual energy.
THE LAZAR HOUSE, FROM MILTON
Water-colour, 1795
The introduction of our painter, in 1800, by his old friend Flaxman, to Hayley, poetaster and dilettante, marks the beginning of a new epoch in his life.
Hayley, the friend of Gibbon and, later, of Cowper (whose biography he wrote), was a characteristic product of the last quarter of the eighteenth century,—that age of complaisant preoccupation with trifles.
This poetically barren interval before the birth of the wonderful new school of poetry had, since the best days of Cowper, but one star above its horizon—or was it a will-o’-the-wisp?—the soi-disant poet Hayley. Complaisantly he twinkled on his admiring world, and, striking the lyre with gracious hand, sang with modest satisfaction “The Triumphs of Temper.” This now forgotten work earned him the position of “greatest of living poets,” and he assumed his high seat in the literary world with bustling alacrity. Above all things he aspired to culture, not at the expense of a very continuous effort or strain, it is true, but he loved to collect around him artists and men of letters to whom he could play the part of a somewhat undersized Lorenzo de’ Medici. That they would respond gracefully, and take their parts becomingly in this garden-comedy, was all that he required of his court.
It will be remembered that Romney was one of his artist friends, and that the connection proved in a way economically disastrous to the painter, for Hayley was an extravagant man, though he professed simple tastes, and encouraged poor Romney in his mania for building and other lavish expenditure.
His influence, such as it was, was stimulating to none of his friends, though he meant well and kindly enough. He affected the part of the country gentleman, as well as that of the high priest of culture, and delighted in patronage.
Soon after his acquaintance with Blake began, his old friend Cowper died under tragic conditions, and a week later Hayley’s only child (an illegitimate son) died also. The boy was a youth of promise, and had been a pupil of Flaxman. So he had gratified as well as filled the poor father’s heart. Hayley’s trouble called forth a letter from Blake, which I quoted when writing on the death of Robert, and it seems to have touched, perhaps comforted, Hayley, who even in his deep affliction assumed a pose not natural or spontaneous.
Blake was recommended by Flaxman as an engraver and designer (if the latter should be required), and Hayley proposed that the Blakes should come and live at Felpham, near his own place of Eartham in Sussex, in order that his new protégé might engrave the illustrations to the life of Cowper which he was now about to write, under Hayley’s own eye.
The idea pleased Blake, while Mrs. Blake, he wrote, “is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels, whenever she hears it named.” As a matter of fact, Hayley did not live at Eartham now, as the place was an expensive one to keep up, but had built himself a wonderful turretted marine “cottage,” with a library and covered court for equestrian exercise at Felpham.
PLATE FROM “EUROPE,” PRINTED 1794
Coloured by hand
In the September of 1800, Blake being then forty-three years old, the husband and wife took up their abode in a pretty little cottage by the sea at Felpham, and began a new manner of life. If Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, had afforded Blake hints and types of spiritual life and light, how much larger a vista must have opened to him at Felpham. He used to wander musing along the seashore, and more than once saw the yellow sands peopled by a host of souls long since departed from this earth—Moses and the Prophets, Homer, Dante, Milton: “all,” Blake said, “majestic shadows, gray but luminous, and superior to the common height of men.” Many visions came to him at first. It is not wonderful that this should have been so, for there was nothing that did not teem with suggestions to his subjective mind, and when he received a new influx of spiritual light, as he seemed to have had at Felpham, then, indeed, were blossoms, stars and stones, nay, the very air he breathed, alive with a strange, sentient, crowding population, to whose spiritual utterances he listened, whose forms he strained his mental sight to realize.
In a letter to Flaxman, beginning, “Dear Sculptor of Eternity,” Blake writes in the first effervescence of delight: “Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen.”
For a while all went very well indeed, and the first part of his sojourn at Felpham was a sort of charmed circle in his life. “Mr. Hayley acts like a prince,” “Felpham is the sweetest spot on earth,” “work will go on here with God-speed,” “Find that I can work with greater pleasure than ever,” are phrases which occur in the enthusiastic letters of the period. But gradually Hayley’s constant companionship, his amiable but fatuous and gushing friendship, acted like the hated chain of slavery on Blake’s electric and expansive temperament. Hayley’s mind was set on little things, trivial business and futile undertakings, and his vanity and self-satisfaction about all his doings came at last to be exasperating to Blake. In spite of his generosity, his lavish but undiscerning praise, and the commissions for engraving and designs with which he supplied our artist, Blake little by little found himself goaded to madness by the ever-flowing stream of Hayley’s conventionality and watery enthusiasms. Hayley attempted to enlarge Blake’s education by reading to him Klopstock and translating as he went along—a proceeding that must have bored our fiery genius to tears. He also, with the kindest intentions in the world, obtained commissions for Blake to paint miniatures—hardly, one would think, a congenial form of art to him, but one which at the beginning appears to have interested him nevertheless.
A couplet he wrote in the Note-book at the time evidences the irritated nerves that Hayley’s unspiritual contact set on edge:
Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache.
Do be my enemy for friendship’s sake.
The letters, too, to Mr. Butts give direct insight into his state of mind, and the points of sharp disagreement and intellectual misunderstanding between the two men are easily traced.
It appears that “Hayley was as much averse to a page of Blake’s poetry as to a chapter in the Bible.”
Blake the creator and artist was unintelligible and foreign to Hayley, who, always satisfied with his own judgement, sought to turn Blake from designing and to chain him to the hack work of engraving.
LOS, ENITHARMON AND ORC
Colour-print from “Urizen,” 1794
By degrees the visions that had so often and radiantly appeared to Blake on his first coming to Felpham seemed to forsake him. As he became involved in Hayley’s pursuits, and sought to work out Hayley’s plans for him, the visions even appeared to be angry with him. Then, indeed, it seemed that he was in danger of “bartering his birthright for a mess of pottage.” He writes to Mr. Butts:
“My unhappiness has arisen from a source which, if explored too narrowly, might hurt my pecuniary circumstances, as my dependence is on engraving at present, and particularly the engravings I have in hand for Mr. H., and I find on all hands great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business, and intimations that if I do not confine myself to this, I shall not live. This has always pursued me.... This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. H. will bring me back again. For that I cannot live without doing my duty to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined, and to this I have long made up my mind.... But,” he goes on to say, “if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us; if we refuse to do spiritual acts because of natural fears and natural desires, who can describe the dismal torments of such a state? I too well remember the threats I heard” (i.e., in vision). “If you, who are organized by Divine Providence for spiritual commission, refuse and bury your talents in the earth, even though you should want natural bread—sorrow and desperation pursue you through life, and after death shame and confusion of face to eternity. Everyone in eternity will leave you, aghast at the man who was crowned with glory and honour by his brethren and betrayed their cause to their enemies. You will be called the base Judas who betrayed his friend.”
Blake was the apostle and martyr of this devotion to the high spiritual mission of Art. He would make no compromise with the world.
In a letter to Mr. Butts dated April 25th, 1803, he writes:
“I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoyed, and that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy and speak parables, unobserved, and at liberty from the doubts of other mortals, perhaps doubts proceeding from kindness, but doubts are always pernicious, especially when we doubt our friends. Christ is very decided on this point: ‘He who is not with me is against me;’ there is no medium or middle state; and if a man is the enemy of my spiritual life, while he pretends to be the friend of my corporeal, he is a real enemy; but the man may be the friend of my spiritual life while he seems the enemy of my corporeal, though not vice versâ.”
This enemy to Blake’s spiritual life is certainly Hayley.
He writes with unmistakable frankness of the Hermit of Eartham in a later letter:
“Mr. H. approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems, and I have been forced to insist on his leaving me, in both, to my own self-will; I am determined to be no longer pestered with his genteel ignorance and polite disapprobation. I know myself both Poet and Painter, and it is not his affected contempt that can move to anything but a more assiduous pursuit of both arts. Indeed, by my late firmness I have brought down his affected loftiness, and he begins to think I have some genius, as if genius and assurance were the same thing! But his imbecile attempts to depress me only deserve laughter.” He goes on to say that he will relinquish all engagements to design for Hayley, “unless altogether left to my own judgement, as you, my dear friend, have always left me; for which I shall never cease to honour and respect you.” And for which, we may add, posterity also has good reason to laud and acclaim Mr. Butts.
Blake was not the man to be the creature of any patron, spending his time and all his magnificent powers as the servant of another man’s brain—especially when that brain was Hayley’s.
If the engravings and designs done for his patron had earned him thousands instead of a mere competence, such work could not have tempted him from his chosen path of spiritual art. Finally, in 1803, he threw off the yoke decisively, turned his back on patronage, and returned with his faithful Kate to the liberty and poverty of rooms in South Molton Street, London, after a three years’ rural seclusion. Just before leaving Felpham Blake became involved in a very disagreeable affair with a drunken soldier named Schofield, which resulted in a trial for sedition. The soldier, who was forcibly removed by Blake from his cottage garden, where he was trespassing, trumped up in revenge a set of ridiculous charges against him, saying he had used seditious language against the king and government. In the practical difficulties that all this gave rise to, Hayley came forward to Blake’s assistance, and putting all the weight of his local position and popularity on the artist’s side, materially helped him before and at the time of the trial. Although he had been thrown from his horse and hurt a few days previously, he insisted on being present to give evidence in his protégé’s favour, who was of course acquitted. Warm-hearted Blake felt a generous inrush of the old affection for his friend, and a deep sense of gratitude helped to re-establish the old cordial relations between the two men. It must not be inferred from this, however, that Blake had altered his opinion that Hayley was his spiritual enemy. That, he held, Hayley had proved himself to be. But he now recognized that it was not malignity, but deficiency of spiritual knowledge and insight that had made him act as he did. It was the law of his being, and Blake, having learned this through experience of his three years’ stay at Felpham, expected no more from him than his capacity warranted, and gave him his dues, dwelling with gratitude on the fact that Hayley was at least a true “corporeal friend.”
The stress and strain connected with the trial had a bad effect on Blake’s highly-sensitive nerves, and is painfully apparent in the writing of the time. The time at Felpham, and the period that succeeded on his return to London, have much light shed on them by the Note-book. The MS. book to which reference has been made was a sort of safety valve, which Blake kept ever at his elbow, and in which he wrote long dissertations on Art and Religion—the “Public Address,” the “Vision of the Last Judgment,” and many of the poems published under the title (which heads the Note-book itself) of “Ideas of Good and Evil.” Along with, and interspersed with these connected and finished utterances, are splenetic epigrams, rude rather than humorous caricature couplets, little scraps of unconsidered verse written to illustrate some incident of the day, and drawings here, there, and everywhere. The MS. Note-book is a very intimate part of Blake. On its first page Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote the inscription written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who possessed it till his death:
“I purchased this original MS. of Palmer, an attendant at the Antique Gallery of the British Museum, on the 30th April, 1849. Palmer knew Blake personally, and it was from the artist’s wife that he had the present MS., which he sold me for 10s. Among the sketches are one or two profiles of Blake himself.” Unfortunately it has now passed by purchase into the possession of a collector at Boston, U.S.A. I say unfortunately, because our own National Museum should have secured such a treasure, but its present owner courteously lent it for a prolonged period to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, who have embodied the main part of it in their exhaustive and most interesting work. The Note-book was deeply studied by Gilchrist, and was one of Rossetti’s dearest treasures, leaving its impress on his mind and work.
The work Blake did during the Felpham period included the designs and engraving of animals to Hayley’s “Ballads,” some of the engravings for “The Life of Cowper,” and, above all, the writing of two long prophetic books, the “Milton” and the “Jerusalem,” which, however, he did not finish till he had returned to London.
CHAPTER III
THE PROCESSION OF THE PILGRIMS
Blake’s course was now definitely chosen. He had turned his back on patronage and voluntarily married poverty, like St. Francis, in order that he might be free to work out his own poetic and artistic ideas without reference to popularity, patronage, or pecuniary advantage. His wants and Catherine’s were simple indeed, and to pay for them, from week to week, was all he desired. South Molton Street, in which they now took up their abode, was closely shut in by streets and houses. There was no garden, no summer-house or vine with pattering green leaves against the window as at Lambeth,—no trees even to recall the natural beauties of Felpham. But Blake seems to have been almost glad to be delivered from the agitating beauty of the natural or “vegetative world,” as he called it, which was to him error and not truth—the visible shadow that darkened and hid invisible and eternal ideas. Now indeed, with nothing to distract him, he could open his eyes inward into the “World of Thought,” into “Eternity,” which is imagination. Gilchrist’s Life enables us to realize how he could live in this imaginative world, and yet, at the same time, fulfil with great practical ability such a work, for instance, as collecting material for Hayley for the “Life of Romney,” which the latter was now beginning. The letters he wrote to Hayley at the time, which are all given in the Life, are the letters of a kindly business-like man, intent on giving only such information as will be useful. The good sense, the sanity, the mediocrity (I had almost said) of these letters are a pledge of Blake’s ability to act and express himself as other men when he wished so to do.
FROM BLAIR’S “GRAVE”: THE RE-UNION OF
THE SOUL AND THE BODY
Engraving by L. Schiavonetti after Blake’s design. Published 1808
Hayley was his good “corporeal friend,” to whom he was grateful for “corporeal acts” of kindness, and as such he treated him.
In one of the letters alone there bursts forth a great full-throated shout of joy, as it were, because he has suddenly achieved a great advance in his art. As the passage gives valuable insight into his mind at the time, I shall take liberty to quote it:
“O glory! O delight! I have entirely reduced that spectrous Fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. He is the enemy of conjugal love, and is the Jupiter of the Greeks, an iron-hearted tyrant, the ruiner of ancient Greece. I speak with perfect confidence and certainty of the fact which has passed upon me. Nebuchadnezzar had seven times passed over him, I have had twenty; thank God, I was not altogether a beast as he was; but I was a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils; these beasts and these devils are now, together with myself, become children of light and liberty, and my feet and my wife’s feet are free from fetters....
“Suddenly on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of Pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window shutters. Consequently I can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates I am engraving after Romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of Art. O, the distress I have undergone, and my poor wife with me; incessantly labouring and incessantly spoiling what I had done well. Every one of my friends was astonished at my faults, and could not assign a reason; they knew my industry and abstinence from every pleasure for the sake of study, and yet—and yet—and yet there wanted proofs of industry in my works. I thank God with entire confidence that it shall be so no longer: he is become my servant who domineered over me, he is even as a brother who was my enemy. Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm, or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark but very profitable years. I thank God that I courageously pursued my course through darkness.”
All of which tense and highly-figurative language means that Blake had suddenly received enlightenment on various technical methods from the silent witness of Raphael’s and Michael Angelo’s and other masters’ achievement. He could never learn by verbal advice, precept or criticism, but when shown great work, the artist in him dwelt on every line, absorbing and assimilating its principles. The spectrous fiend to whom he refers is, according to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, his own “selfhood.” He held that every man contained in himself a devil and an angel, the devil being the natural man, the angel the God in man. Of this idea of his more hereafter.
Blake’s work, when done in the heat of his spirit, is always noble, characteristic, and largely, often wholly, right (I am speaking of the execution, not the ideas expressed), but when “incessant labour” was expended without the incessant reference to nature which an elaborate technique demands, it is not wonderful that “incessant spoiling” should have been the result.
Now, indeed, he seems to have seen how it was with himself, and to have gained a new mastery of material through studying the manner of other men’s work.
In 1804 Blake brought out his “Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” a poem which he told Mr. Butts was descriptive of the “spiritual acts of his three years’ slumber on the banks of Ocean.”
“Milton” was also produced in the same year.
In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek, whilom engraver, but now publisher and printseller, “discovered” Blake in his self-chosen retirement, and proposed giving him employment. The story of his treacherous dealings is an evil one.
Cromek, who had learnt engraving in the studio of Bartolozzi, found it laborious and slow work, so exchanged its drudgery for the calling of a publisher, but, having good taste but no capital, he was hard pressed indeed to make both ends meet.
One day a piece of luck came in his way. He paid a visit to Blake’s working and living room in South Molton Street. Many beautiful things were to come into being in that room, but none more so than the drawings for Blair’s “Grave” which Blake had designed, intending to print and publish them in the usual way. Cromek found them, and seized upon them, gloating. He persuaded Blake to relinquish the idea of publishing them himself, and to surrender the undertaking to Cromek as one more fitted to push them and bring them before the notice of the public.
Blake was very poor at the time. In an insulting letter written by Cromek to Blake some two years later, he refers with contemptible want of feeling and taste to this fact. “Your best work, the illustrations to the ‘Grave,’” he says, “was produced when you and Mrs. Blake were reduced so low as to be obliged to live on half a guinea a week!”
Blake sold the twelve drawings to him for £1 10s. each, with the assured verbal agreement that he was himself to engrave them for the projected edition—a promise which of course entailed considerable further payment for the work of engraving later on.
Cromek in possession of the copyright conveniently forgot his promise. Impregnated as he was with the fluent and graceful style of Bartolozzi’s school, Blake’s manner of engraving seemed to him grim, austere and archaic. He thought that the noble drawings translated by the hand of the popular and graceful engraver, Lewis Schiavonetti, would insure the success of the designs with the public as Blake could never have done were he to have engraved them himself.
It may be that there was truth in it. Some critics hold that the illustrations to Blair’s “Grave” have a suavity, a felicity superimposed by the engraver on the stern and original work of Blake which was just what was needed to render his work attractive to the public. To Blake’s true lovers, however, his own graver is the rightful interpreter of his own drawings, and, whether Cromek were right or not in this critical matter of taste, he was dishonest and mean to break the engagement on the basis of which alone he had obtained the drawings.
While Blake was looking forward with “anxious delight” to the engraving of his designs, Cromek had other schemes afoot. He called often at South Molton Street, hoping to pounce on some other work of genius which he could turn into money for himself. He was arrested one day before a pencil sketch of a new and hitherto untreated subject—the Procession of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims. He tried to get Blake to make a finished drawing of it, with a view of course to getting it out of the artist’s hands, and then having it engraved by someone else. Negotiations on this basis failing, he gave Blake a commission (verbal again) to execute the design in a finished picture and an engraving from it. On the strength of this, Blake’s friends circulated a subscription paper for the engraving, and he himself set to work on the picture. Cromek, however, had not done. He was in love with the subject. Sure of Blake’s conception being thoughtful and strong, but probably wishful that it might be invested with a more earthly grace and interest than he would put upon it, he went to Stothard and suggested the subject to him, suppressing all mention of Blake. Probably he assisted the suggestion by hints as to its treatment derived from what he had actually appreciated in Blake’s conception. He commissioned him to paint the picture for sixty guineas, an engraving from which was to be done by Bromley, though Schiavonetti was eventually substituted for him.