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

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 bonâ fide market for even mediocre verse, publishers and editors actually handing over hard cash for it, just as if it were prose, Blake’s friends would have done better to have gone to the Trade with his poems. The thin octavo did not even get so far as the Monthly Review; at all events, it does not appear in the copious and explicit Index of’books noticed’ in that periodical, now quite a manual of extinct literature.

The poems J.T. Smith, in 1784, heard Blake sing, can hardly have been those known to his hearers by the printed volume of 1783, but fresh ones, to the composition of which the printing of that volume had stimulated him: some doubtless of the memorable and musical Songs of Innocence, as they were 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 [ÆT. 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, (quære, our friend Nollekens Smith?) executes the engravings; and after him a nameless one. The engraving caricatures, of the earth earthy, for this ‘Library of Momus’ was truly a singular task for a spiritual poet!

Some slight clue to the original Design of this period in a somewhat different key is given by the Exhibition-Catalogues, which report Blake as making a second appearance at the Academy in 1784. In that year, – the year of Reynolds’ 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 naïf and archaic-looking; rude, faltering, often puerile or absurd in drawing; but are characterized by Blake-like feeling and intention, having in short a strong family likeness to his brother’s work. The subjects are from Homer and the poets. Of one or two compositions there are successive and each time enlarged versions. True imaginative animus is often made manifest by very imperfect means; in the composition of the groups, and the expressive disposition of the individual figure, or of an individual limb: as, e.g. (in one drawing) that solitary upraised arm stretched heaven-ward from out the midst of the panic-struck crowd of figures, who, embracing, huddle together with bowed heads averted from a Divine Presence. In another, a group of ancient men stand silent on the verge of a sea-girt precipice, beyond which they gaze towards awe-inspiring shapes and sights unseen by us. This last motive seems to have pleased Blake himself. One of his earliest attempts, if not 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 [ÆT. 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 [ÆT. 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