The book contains the names of more than five hundred subscribers, but only one contemporary notice has been found, a notice of two columns, mere drivel and mere raving, signed by the happily undiscovered initials R. H., in the thirty-second number of Leigh Hunt's paper,The Examiner(August 7, 1808, pp. 509, 510). It is under the heading 'Fine Arts,' and is called 'Blake's edition of Blair'sGrave.' The notice is rendered specially grotesque by its serious air of arguing with what it takes to be absurdity coupled with 'an appearance of libidinousness' which 'intrudes itself upon the holiness of our thoughts and counteracts their impression.' Like most moralists of the press, this critic's meaning is hard to get at. Here, however, is a specimen: 'But a more serious censure attaches to two of these most heterogeneous and serio-fantastic designs. At the awful day of judgment, before the throne of God himself, a male and female figure are described in most indecent attitudes. It is the same with the salutation of a man and his wife meeting in the pure mansions of Heaven.' Thus sanctified a voice was it that first croaked at Blake out of the 'nest of villains' which he imagined that he was afterwards to 'root out' ofThe Examiner.
A quite different view of him is to be found in a book which was published before theGraveactually came out, though it contains a reference to the designs and to the 'ardent and encomiastic applause' of 'some of the first artists in the country.' The book, which contained an emblematic frontispiece designed by Blake and engraved by Cromek, wasA Father's Memoirs of his Child, written by Benjamin Heath Malkin, then headmaster of Bury Grammar School, in which the father gives a minute and ingenuous account of his child, a prodigy of precocious intellect, who died at the age of nearly seven years. The child was accustomed to do little drawings, some of which are reproduced in the book in facsimile, and the father, after giving his own opinion of them, adds: 'Yet, as my panegyric on such a subject can carry with it no recommendation, I subjoin the testimony of Mr. Blake to this instance of peculiar ingenuity, who has given me his opinion of these various performances in the following terms:—
'"They are all firm, determinate outlines, or identical form. Had the hand which executed these little ideas been that of a plagiary, who works only from the memory, we should have seen blots, called masses; blots without form, and therefore without meaning. These blots of light and dark, as being the result of labour, are always clumsy and indefinite; the effect of rubbing out and putting in, like the progress of a blind man, or of one in the dark, who feels his way, but does not see it. These are not so. Even the copy of Raphael's cartoon of St. Paul preaching is a firm, determinate outline, struck at once, as Protogenes struck his line, when he meant to make himself known to Apelles. The map of Allestone has the same character of the firm and determinate. All his efforts prove this little boy to have had that greatest of all blessings, a strong imagination, a clear idea, and a determinate vision of things in his own mind.'" It is in the lengthy dedication of the book to Thomas Johnes, the translator of Froissart, that Dr. Malkin gives the very interesting personal account of Blake which is reprinted on p. 307 below.
It is not certain whether Blake had ever known little Thomas Malkin, and it would be interesting to know whether it was through any actual influence of his that the child had come to his curious invention of an imaginary country. He drew the map of this country, peopled with names (Nobblede and Bobblobb, Punchpeach and Closetha) scarcely more preposterous than the names which Blake was just then discovering for his own spiritual regions, wrote its chronicles, and even made music for it. The child was born in 1795 and died in 1802, and Blake had been at Felpham since September 1800; but, if they had met before that date, there was quite time for Blake's influence to have shown itself. In 1799 the astonishing child 'could read, without hesitation, any English book. He could spell any words.... He knew the Greek alphabet'; and on his fourth birthday, in that year, he writes to his mother saying that he has got a Latin grammar and English prints. In October 1800 he says: 'I know a deal of Latin,' and in December he is reading Burns's poems, 'which I am very fond of.' Influence or accident, the coincidence is singular, and at least shows us something in Blake's brain working like the brain of a precocious child.
In 1806 Blake wrote a generous and vigorous letter to the editor of theMonthly Review(July 1, 1806) in reply to a criticism which had appeared inBell's Weekly Messengeron Fuseli's picture of Count Ugolino in the Royal Academy. In 1808 he had himself, and for the fifth and last time, two pictures in the Academy, and in that year he wrote the letter to Ozias Humphrey, describing one of his many 'Last Judgments,' which is given, with a few verbal errors, by J. T. Smith. In December he wrote to George Cumberland, who had written to order for a friend 'a complete set of all you have published in the way of books colored as mine are,' that 'new varieties, or rather new pleasures, occupy my thoughts; new profits seem to arise before me so tempting that I have already involved myself in engagements that preclude all possibility of promising anything.' Does this refer to the success of Blair'sGrave, which had just been published? He goes on: 'I have, however, the satisfaction to inform you that I have myself begun to print an account of my various inventions in Art, for which I have procured a publisher, and am determined to pursue the plan of publishing, that I may get printed without disarranging my time, which in future must alone be designing and painting.' To this project, which was never carried out, he refers again in the prospectus printed in anticipation of his exhibition, a copy of which, given to Ozias Humphreys, exists with the date May 15, 1809. A second prospectus is given by Gilchrist as follows:—
'Blake's Chaucer, the Canterbury Pilgrims. This Fresco Picture, representing Chaucer's Characters, painted by William Blake, as it is now submitted to the public.
'The designer proposes to engrave in a correct and finished line manner of engraving, similar to those original copper-plates of Albert Dürer, Lucas Van Leyden, Aldegrave, and the old original engravers, who were great masters in painting and designing; whose methods alone can delineate Character as it is in this Picture, where all the lineaments are distinct.
'It is hoped that the Painter will be allowed by the public (notwithstanding artfully disseminated insinuations to the contrary) to be better able than any other to keep his own characters and expressions; having had sufficient evidence in the works of our own Hogarth, that no other artist can reach the original spirit so well as the Painter himself, especially as Mr. B. is an old, well-known, and acknowledged graver.
'The size of the engraving will be three feet one inch long by one foot high. The artist engages to deliver it, finished, in one year from September next. No work of art can take longer than a year: it may be worked backwards and forwards without end, and last a man's whole life; but he will, at length, only be forced to bring it back to what it was, and it will be worse than it was at the end of the first twelve months. The value of this artist's year is the criterion of Society; and as it is valued, so does Society flourish or decay.
'The price to Subscribers, Four Guineas; two to be paid at the time of subscribing, the other two, on delivery of the print.
'Subscriptions received at No. 28, corner of Broad Street, Golden Square, where the Picture is now exhibiting, among other works, by the same artist.
'The price will be considerably raised to non-subscribers.'
The exhibition thus announced was held at the house of James Blake, and contained sixteen pictures, of which the first nine are described as 'Frescoes' or 'experiment pictures,' and the remaining seven as drawings,' that is, drawings in water-color. The Catalogue (which was included in the entrance fee of half a crown) is Blake's most coherent work in prose, and can be read in Gilchrist, ii. 139-163. It is called 'A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, Poetical and Historical Inventions, painted by William Blake, in Water-Colors, being the ancient Method of Fresco Painting Restored; and Drawings, for Public Inspection, and for Sale by Private Contract.' Crabb Robinson, from whom we have the only detailed account of the exhibition, says that the pictures filled 'several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house' (see p. "From Crabb Robinson's Reminiscences," below.) He mentions Lamb's delight in the Catalogue,[5]and his declaring 'that Blake's description was the finest criticism he had ever read of Chaucer's poem.' In that letter to Bernard Barton (May 15, 1824), which is full of vivid admiration for Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age'), Lamb speaks of the criticism as 'most spirited, but mystical and full of vision,' and says: 'His pictures—one in particular, the "Canterbury Pilgrims," (far above Stothard's)—have great merit, but hard, dry, yet with grace.' Southey, we know from a sneer inThe Doctorat 'that painter of great but insane genius, William Blake,' also went to the exhibition, and found, he tells us, the picture of 'The Ancient Britons,' 'one of the worst pictures, which is saying much.' A note to Mr. Swinburne'sWilliam Blaketells us that in the competent opinion of Mr. Seymour Kirkup this picture was 'the very noblest of all Blake's works.' It is now lost; it was probably Blake's largest work, the figures, Blake asserts, being 'full as large as life.' Of the other pictures the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and sixteenth are lost; the ninth exists in a replica in 'fresco,' and the sixteenth in what is probably a first sketch.
Blake's reason for giving this exhibition was undoubtedly indignation at what he took to be Stothard's treachery in the matter of the 'Canterbury Pilgrims.' This picture (now in the National Gallery, No. 1163) had been exhibited by Cromek throughout the kingdom, and he had announced effusively, in a seven page advertisement at the end of Blair'sGrave, the issue of 'a print executed in the line manner of engraving, and in the same excellent style as the portrait of Mr. William Blake, prefixed to this work, by Louis Schiavonetti, Esq., V. A., the gentleman who has etched the prints that at once illustrate and embellish the present volume.' TheDescriptive Catalogueis full of angry scorn of 'my rival,' as Blake calls Stothard, and of the 'dumb dollies' whom he has 'jumbled together' in his design, and of Hoppner for praising them in the letter quoted in the advertisement. 'If Mr. B.'s "Canterbury Pilgrims" had been done by any other power than that of the poetic visionary, it would have been as dull as his adversary's,' Blake assures us, and, no doubt, justly. The general feeling of Blake's friends, I doubt not, is summed up in an ill-spelled letter from young George Cumberland to his father, written from the Pay Office, Whitehall, October 14, 1809, which I copy in all its literal slovenliness from the letter preserved in the Cumberland Papers: 'Blakes has published a Catalogue of Pictures being the ancient method of Frescoe Painting Restored you should tell Mr. Barry to get it, it may be the means of serving your friend. It sells for 2/6 and may be had of J. Blake, 28 Broad St., Golden Square, at his Brothers—the Book is a great curiosity. He as given Stothard a complete set down.'
The Catalogue is badly printed on poor paper in the form of a small octavo hook of 66 pages. It is full of fierce, exuberant wisdom, which plunges from time to time into a bright, demonstrative folly; it is a confession, a criticism, and a kind of gospel of sanctity and honesty and imagination in art. The whole thing is a thinking aloud. One hears an impetuous voice as if saying: 'I have been scorned long enough by these fellows, who owe to me all that they possess; it shall be so no longer.' As he thinks, his pen follows; he argues with foes actually visible to him; never does he realize the indifferent public that may glance at what he has written, and how best to interest or convince it if it does. He throws down a challenge, and awaits an answer.
What answer came is rememberable among the infamies of journalism. Only one newspaper noticed the exhibition, and this was againThe Examiner.The notice appeared under the title 'Mr. Blake's Exhibition' in No. 90, September 17, 1809, pp. 605-6, where it fills two columns. It is unsigned, but there can be no doubt that it was written by the R. H. of the former article. The main part of it is taken up by extracts from theDescriptive Catalogue, italicized and put into small capitals 'to amuse the reader, and satisfy him of the truth of the foregoing remarks.' This is all that need be quoted of the foregoing remarks:
'But when the ebullitions of a distempered brain are mistaken for the sallies of genius by those whose works have exhibited the soundest thinking in art, the malady has indeed attained a pernicious height, and it becomes a duty to endeavor to arrest its progress. Such is the case with the productions and admirers of William Blake, an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and, consequently, of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not forced on the notice and animadversion ofThe Examiner, in having been held up to public admiration by many esteemed amateurs and professors as a genius in some respect original and legitimate. The praises which these gentlemen bestowed last year on this unfortunate man's illustrations to Blair'sGravehave, in feeding his vanity, stimulated him to publish his madness more largely, and thus again exposed him, if not to the derision, at least to the pity of the public.
...Thus encouraged, the poor man fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are unintelligible allegory, others an attempt at sober character by caricature representation, and the whole "blotted and blurred," and very badly drawn. These he calls an Exhibition, of which he has published a Catalogue, or rather a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain. One of the pictures represents Chaucer's Pilgrims, and is in every respect a striking contrast to the admirable picture of the same subject by Mr. Stothard, from which an exquisite print is forthcoming from the hand of Schiavonetti.'
The last great words of the Catalogue, 'If a man is master of his profession, he cannot be ignorant that he is so; and, if he is not employed by those who pretend to encourage art, he will employ himself, and laugh in secret at the pretenses of the ignorant, while he has every night dropped into his shoe, as soon as he puts it off, and puts out the candle, and gets into bed, a reward for the labours of the day such as the world cannot give, and patience and time await to give him all that the world can give': those noble, lovely, pathetic and prophetic words, are quoted at the end of the article without comment, as if to quote them was enough. It was.
In 1803 William Blake sold to Thomas Butts eleven drawings for fourteen guineas. In 1903 twelve water-color drawings in illustration of L'AllegroandIl Penserosowere sold for £1960, and the twenty-one water-color drawings forJobfor £5600. These figures have their significance, but the significance must not be taken to mean any improvement in individual taste. When a selection from the pictures in the Butts collection was on view at Sotheby's I heard a vulgar person with a loud voice, a dealer or a dealer's assistant, say with a guffaw: 'It would make me sick to have these things round my room.' That vulgar person represents the eternal taste of the multitude; only, in the course of a hundred years, a few men of genius have repeated after one another that Blake was a man of genius, and their united voices have carried further than the guffaws of vulgar persons, repeated generation after generation. And so in due course, when Blake has been properly dead long enough, there is a little public which, bidding against itself, gambles cheerfully for the possession of the scraps of paper on which he sent in his account, against the taste of his age and the taste of all the ages.
Blake himself had never any doubt of his own greatness as an artist, and some of the proud or petulant things which he occasionally wrote (the only outbreaks of impatience in a life wholly given up to unceasing and apparently unrewarded labour) have been quoted against him as petty or unworthy, partly because they are so incalculated and so childlike. Blake 'bore witness,' as he might have said, that he had done his duty: 'for that I cannot live without doing my duty, to lay up treasures in heaven, is certain and determined,' he writes from Felpham. And he asserted the truth of his own genius, its truth in the spiritual sense, its divine origin, as directly and as emphatically as he asserted everything which he had apprehended as truth. He is merely stating what seems to him an obvious but overlooked fact when he says: 'In Mr. B.'s Britons the blood is seen to circulate in their limbs: he defies competition in coloring'; and again: 'I am, like other men, just equal in invention and execution of my work,' All art, he had realized, which is true art, is equal, as every diamond is a diamond. There is only true and false art. Thus when he says in his prospectus of 1793 that he has been 'enabled to bring before the Public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country,' he means neither more nor less than when he says in theDescriptive Catalogueof 1809: 'He knows that what he does is not inferior to the grandest antiques. Superior it cannot be, for human power cannot go beyond either what he does or what they have done; it is the gift of God, it is inspiration and vision.
...The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost.' It is in humility rather than in pride that he equals himself with those who seemed to him the genuine artists, the humility of a belief that all art is only a portion of that 'Poetic Genius, which is the Lord,' offered up in homage by man, and returning, in mere gratitude, to its origin. When he says, 'I do not pretend to paint better than Rafael or Michael Angelo, or Julio Romano, or Albert Dürer, but I do pretend to paint finer than Rubens, or Rembrandt, or Titian, or Correggio,' he merely means, in that odd coupling and contrasting of names, to assert his belief in the supremacy of strong, clear, masculine execution over what seemed to him (to his limited knowledge, not false instinct) the heresy and deceit of 'soft and effeminate' execution, the 'broken lines, broken masses, and broken colors' of the art which 'loses form.' In standing up for his ideal of art, he stands up himself, like a champion. 'I am hid,' he writes on the flyleaf of Reynolds'sDiscourses, and, in the last sentence of that 'Public Address' which was never printed, he declares: 'Resentment for personal injuries has had some share in this public address, but love to my art, and zeal for my country, a much greater.' And in the last sentence of theDescriptive Catalogue, he sums up the whole matter, so far as it concerned him, finally, and with a 'sure and certain hope' which, now that it has been realized, so long afterwards, comes to us like a reproach.
'Shall Painting,' asks Blake in hisDescriptive Catalogue, 'be confined to the sordid drudgery of facsimile representations of merely mortal and perishing substances, and not be, as poetry and music are, elevated into its own proper sphere of invention and visionary conception? No, it shall not be so! Painting, as well as poetry and music, exists and exults in immortal thoughts.' It was to restore this conception of art to England that Blake devoted his life. 'The Enquiry in England,' he said, in his marginalia to Reynolds, 'is not whether a Man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass.' He says there: 'Ages are all Equal, but Genius is always above the Age.' He looks on Bacon and Locke and Burke and Reynolds as men who 'mock Inspiration and Vision.' 'Inspiration and Vision,' he says, 'was then, and now is, and I hope will always Remain, my Element, my Eternal Dwelling-place.' 'The Ancients did not mean to Impose when they affirmed their belief in Vision and Revelation. Plato was in Earnest. Milton was in Earnest. They believed that God did visit Man Really and Truly.' Further, 'Knowledge of Ideal Beauty is not to be Acquired. It is born with us.... Man is Born Like a Garden ready Planted and Sown. This World is too poor to produce one Seed.'
What Blake meant by vision, how significantly yet cautiously he interchanged the words 'seen' and 'imagined,' has been already noted in that passage of theDescriptive Catalogue, where he answers his objectors: 'The connoisseurs and artists who have made objections to Mr. B.'s mode of representing spirits with real bodies would do well to consider that the Venus, the Minerva, the Jupiter, the Apollo, which they admire in Greek statues are, all of them, representations of spiritual existences, of Gods immortal, to the ordinary perishing organ of sight; and yet they are embodied and organized in solid marble. Mr. B. requires the same latitude, and all is well.' Then comes the great definition, which I will not repeat: 'He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments.'
'The world of imagination,' he says elsewhere, 'is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation or vegetation is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the eternal realities of everything which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature.' What is said here, transmuted by an instinct wholly an artist's into a great defense of the reality of imagination in art, is a form of the central doctrine of the mystics, formulated by Swedenborg in something very like Blake's language, though with errors or hesitations which is what Blake sets himself to point out in his marginalia to Swedenborg. As, in those marginalia, we see Blake altering every allusion to God into an allusion to 'the Poetic Genius,' so, always, we shall find him understanding every promise of Christ, or Old Testament prophecy, as equally translatable into terms of the imaginative life, into terms of painting, poetry, or music. In the rendering of vision he required above all things that fidelity which can only be obtained through 'minutely particular' execution. 'Invention depends Altogether upon Execution or Organisation; as that is right or wrong, so is the Invention perfect or imperfect. Whoever is set to Undermine the Execution of Art is set to destroy Art. Michael Angelo's Art depends on Michael Angelo's Execution Altogether.... He who admires Rafael Must admire Rafael's Execution. He who does not admire Rafael's Execution can not admire Rafael.' Finally, 'the great and golden rule of art as well as of life,' he says in theDescriptive Catalogue, 'is this: that the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imagination, plagiarism, and bungling.... What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wiry line of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions? Leave out this line, and you leave out life itself. All is chance again, and the line of the Almighty must be drawn out upon it again, before man or beast can exist.'
In Blake's work a great fundamental conception is rarely lacking, and the conception is not, as it has often been asserted, a literary, but always a pictorial, one. At times imagination and execution are wholly untired, as in the splendid water-color of 'Death on the Pale Horse,' in which not only every line and color is alive with passionate idea, the implacable and eternal joy of destruction, but also with a realized beauty, a fully grasped invention. No detail has been slurred in vision, or in the setting down of the vision: the crowned old man with the sword, the galloping horse, the pestilential figure of putrid scales and flames below, and the wide-armed angel with the scroll-above. In the vision of 'Fire' there is grandeur and, along with it, something inadequately seen, inadequately rendered. Flame and smoke embrace, coil, spire, swell in bellying clouds, divide into lacerating tongues, tangle and whirl ecstatically upward and onward, like a venomous joy in action, painting the air with all the color of all the flowers of evil. But the figures in the foreground are partly academic studies, partly archaic dolls, in which only the intention is admirable. In 'Job Confessing his Presumption to God' one sees all that is great and all that is childish in Blake's genius. I have never seen so sufficing a suggestion of disembodied divine forces as in this whirling cloud of angels, cast out and swept round by the wind of God's speed, like a cascade of veined and tapering wings, out of which ecstatic and astonished heads leap forward. But in the midst of the wheel a fierce old man, with outstretched arms (who is an image of God certainly not corrected out of any authentic vision), and, below, the extinguished figure of Job's friends, and Job, himself one of Blake's gnome-like old men with a face of rigid awe and pointing fingers of inarticulate terror, remain no more than statements, literal statements, of the facts of the imagination. They are summarized remembrances of vision, not anything 'imagined in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than the perishing mortal eye can see.'
Or, might it not be said that it is precisely through this minute accuracy to the detail of imagination that this visionary reality comes to seem to us unreal? In Blake every detail is seen with intensity, and with equal intensity. No one detail is subordinated to another, every inch of his surface is equally important to him; and from this unslackening emphasis come alike his arresting power and the defect which leaves us, though arrested, often unconvinced. In his most splendid things, as in 'Satan exulting over Job' and 'Cain fleeing from the Grave of Abel,' which are painted on wood, as if carved or graved, with a tumult of decorative color, detail literally overpowers the sense of sight, like strong sunlight, and every outline seizes and enters into you simultaneously. At times, as in 'The Bard of Gray,' and 'The Spiritual Form of Pitt' in the National Gallery, he is mysteriously lyrical in his paint, and creates a vague emotion out of a kind of musical color, which is content to suggest. Still more rarely, as in the ripe and admirable 'Canterbury Pilgrims,' which is a picture in narrative, as like Chaucer as Chaucer himself, but unlike any other picture, he gives us a vision of worldly reality; but it was of this picture that he said: 'If Mr. B.'s "Canterbury Pilgrims" had been done by any other power than that of the poetic visionary, it would have been as dull as his adversary's.' Pure beauty and pure terror creep and flicker in and out of all his pictures, with a child's innocence; and he is unconscious of how far he is helped or hindered, as an artist, by that burden of a divine message which is continually upon him. He is unconscious that with one artist the imagination may overpower the technique, as awe overpowers the senses, while to another artist the imagination gives new life to the technique. Blake did not understand Rembrandt, and imagined that he hated him; but there are a few of his pictures in which Rembrandt is strangely suggested. In 'The Adoration of the Three Kings' and in 'The Angel appearing to Zacharias' there is a lovely depth of color, bright in dimness, which has something of the warmth and mystery of Rembrandt, and there are details in the design of 'The Three Kings' (the door open on the pointing star in the sky and on the shadowy multitude below) which are as fine in conception as anything in the Munich 'Adoration of the Shepherds.' But in these, or in the almost finer 'Christ in the Garden, sustained by an Angel' (fire flames about the descending angel, and the garden is a forest of the night), how fatal to our enjoyment is the thought of Rembrandt! To Rembrandt, too, all things were visions, but they were visions that he saw with unflinching eyes; he saw them with his hands; he saw them with the faces and forms of men, and with the lines of earthly habitations.
And, above all, Rembrandt, all the greatest painters, saw a picture as a whole, composed every picture consciously, giving it unity by his way of arranging what he saw. Blake was too humble towards vision to allow himself to compose or arrange what he saw, and he saw in detail, with an unparalleled fixity and clearness. Every picture of Blake, quite apart from its meaning to the intelligence, is built up in detail like a piece of decoration; and, widely remote as are both intention and result, I am inclined to think he composed as Japanese artists compose, bit by bit, as he saw his picture come piece by piece before him. In every picture there is a mental idea, and there is also a pictorial conception, working visually and apart from the mental idea. In the greatest pictures (in the tremendous invention, for instance, of the soldiers on Calvary casting lots for the garments of Christ), the two are fused, with overwhelming effect; but it happens frequently that the two fail to unite, and we see the picture, and also the idea, but not the idea embodied in the picture.
Blake's passion for detail, and his refusal to subordinate any detail for any purpose, is to be seen in all his figures, of which the bodies seem to be copied from living statues, and in which the faces are wrung into masks of moods which they are too urgent to interpret. A world of conventional patterns, in which all natural things are artificial and yet expressive, is peopled by giants and dolls, muscular and foolish, in whom strength becomes an insane gesture and beauty a formal prettiness. Not a flower or beast has reality, as our eyes see it, yet every flower and beast is informed by an almost human soul, not the mere vitality of animal or vegetable, but a consciousness of its own lovely or evil shape. His snakes are not only wonderful in their coils and colors, but each has his individual soul, visible in his eyes, and interpreting those coils and colors. And every leaf, unnatural yet alive, and always a piece of decoration, peers with some meaning of its own out of every corner, not content to be forgotten, and so uneasily alive that it draws the eye to follow it. 'As poetry,' he said, 'admits not a letter that is insignificant, so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass insignificant—much less an insignificant blur or mark.' The stones with which Achan has been martyred live each with a separate and evil life of its own, not less vivid and violent than the clenched hands raised to hurl other stones; there is menacing gesture in the cloud of dust that rises behind them. And these human beings and these angels, and God (sometimes an old bowed Jew, fitted into a square or lozenge of winged heads) are full of the energy of a life which is betrayed by their bodies. Sometimes they are mere child's toys, like a Lucifer of bright baubles, painted chromatically, with pink hair and blushing wings, hung with bursting stars that spill out animalculæ. Sometimes the whole man is a gesture and convulses the sky; or he runs, and the earth vanishes under him. But the gesture devours the man also; his force as a cipher annihilates his very being.
In greatness of conception Blake must be compared with the greatest among artists, but the difference between Blake and Michelangelo is the difference between the artist in whom imagination overpowers technique, as awe overpowers the senses, and the artist in whom imagination gives new life to technique. No one, as we have seen, was more conscious of the identity which exists in the work of the greatest artists between conception and execution. But in speaking of invention and execution as equal, he is assuming, as he came to do, the identity of art and inspiration, the sufficiency of first thoughts in art. 'Be assured,' he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham, 'that there is not one touch in those drawings and pictures but what came from my head and heart in unison.... If I were to do them over again, they would lose as much as they gained, because they were done in the heat of my spirit.' He was an inexhaustible fountain of first thoughts, and to him first thoughts only were of importance. The one draughtsman of the soul, he drew, no doubt, what he saw as he saw it; but he lacked the patience which is a part of all supreme genius. Having seen his vision, he is in haste to record what he has seen hastily; and he leaves the first rough draft as it stands, not correcting it by a deliberate seeing over again from the beginning, and a scrupulous translation of the terms of eternity into the terms of time. I was once showing Rodin some facsimiles of Blake's drawings, and telling him about Blake, I said: 'He used to literally see these figures; they are not mere inventions.' 'Yes,' said Rodin, 'he saw them once; he should have seen them three or four times.' There, it seems to me, is the fundamental truth about the art of Blake: it is a record of vision which has not been thoroughly mastered even as vision. 'No man,' said Blake, 'can improve an original invention; nor can an original invention exist without execution organized, delineated, and articulated, either by God or man.' And he said also: 'He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.' But Blake's imagination is in rebellion, not only against the limits of reality, but against the only means by which he can make vision visible to others. And thus he allows himself to be mastered by that against which he rebels: that power of the hand by which art begins where vision leaves off.
Nothing is known of Blake's life between 1809, the date of his exhibition, and 1818, when he met the chief friend and helper of his later years, John Linnell. Everything leads us to believe that those nine years were years of poverty and neglect. Between 1815 and 1817 we find him doing engraver's task-work for Flaxman'sHesiod, and for articles, probably written by Flaxman, on Armour and Sculpture in Bees'sEncyclopoedia.Gilchrist tells a story, on the authority of Tatham, of Blake copying the cast of the Laocoon among the students at the Royal Academy, and of Fuseli, then the keeper, coming up with the just and pleasant remark that it was they who should learn of him, not he of them. TheMiltonand theJerusalem, both dated 1804, were printed at some time during this period. Gilchrist suggests that the reason why Blake issued no more engraved books from his press was probably his inability to pay for the copper required in engraving; and his suggestion is confirmed in a letter to Dawson Turner, a Norfolk antiquary, dated June 9, 1818, a few days before the meeting with Linnell. Blake writes: 'I send you a list of the different works you have done me the honor to inquire after. They are unprofitable enough to me, though expensive to the buyer. Those I printed for Mr. Humphry are a selection from the different books of such as could be printed without the writing, though to the loss of some of the best things; for they, when printed perfect, accompany poetical personifications and acts, without which poems they never could have been executed:—
£s.d.America, 18 prints folio,5 5 0Europe, 17 do. do.,5 5 0Visions, 8 do. do.,3 3 0Thel, 6 do. quarto,2 2 0Songs of Innocence, 28 prints octavo,3 3 0Songs of Experience, 26 do. octavo,3 3 0Urizen, 28 prints quarto,5 5 0Milton, 50 do. do.,10 10 012 large prints, size of each about 2 ft.by 1 1/2 ft., historical and poetical,printed in colours, each5 5 0
The last twelve prints are unaccompanied by any writing. The few I have printed and sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an artist, which was the chief thing intended. But I have never been able to produce a sufficient number for general sale by means of a regular publisher. It is therefore necessary to me that any person wishing to have any or all of them should send me their order to print them on the above terms, and I will take care that they shall be done at least as well as any I have yet produced.'
If we compare this list with the printed list of twenty-five years back (see above "William Blake, chapter III.") we shall see that the prices are now half as many guineas as they were once shillings; in a letter to Cumberland, nine years later, they have gone up by one, two, or three guineas apiece, and Blake tells Cumberland that 'having none remaining of all that I had printed, I cannot print more except at a great loss. For at the time I printed these things I had a little house to range in. Now I am shut up in a corner, therefore I am forced to ask a price for them that I can scarce expect to get from a stranger. I am now printing a set of theSongs of Innocence and Experiencefor a friend at ten guineas, which I cannot do under six months consistent with my other work, so that I have little hope of doing any more of such things. The last work is a poem entitledJerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, but find that to print it will cost my time to the value of twenty guineas. One I have finished. It contains 100 plates, but it is not likely that I shall get a customer for it.'[6]
Gilchrist tells us, by an error which was pointed out in the life of Palmer by his son, in 1892, that Blake met Linn ell in 1813. It was in 1818, and the first entry relating to Blake in Linnell's journal is dated June 24. In a letter communicated to me by Mr. Sampson, Mr. John Linnell, junior, states that his father took in October or November 1817 the greater part of a house at 38 Rathbone Place, where he lived till the end of 1818; he then took a house at Cirencester Place, Fitzroy Square. Mr. Linnell gives the following extract from his father's autobiographical notes: 'At Rathbone Place, 1818... here I first became acquainted with William Blake, to whom I paid a visit in company with the younger Mr. Cumberland. Blake lived then in South Molton Street, Oxford Street, second floor. We soon became intimate, and I employed him to help me with an engraving of my portrait of Mr. Upton, a Baptist preacher, which he was glad to do, having scarcely enough employment to live by at the prices he could obtain; everything in Art was at a low ebb then.... I soon encountered Blake's peculiarities, and somewhat taken aback by the boldness of some of his assertions, I never saw anything the least like madness, for I never opposed him spitefully, as many did, but being really anxious to fathom, if possible, the amount of truth which might be in his most startling assertions, generally met with a sufficiently rational explanation in the most really friendly and conciliatory tone.'
From 1818 Linnell became, in his own independent way, the chief friend and disciple of Blake. Himself a man of narrow but strong individuality, he realized and accepted Blake for what he was, worked with him and for him, introduced him to rich and appreciative buyers like Sir Thomas Lawrence, and gave him, out of his own carefully controlled purse, a steady price for his work, which was at least enough for Blake to live on. There are notes in his journal of visits to picture-galleries together; to the Academy, the British Gallery, the Water-Color Exhibition, the Spring Gardens Exhibition; 'went with Mr. Blake to see Harlow's copy of the Transfiguration' (August 20, 1819), 'went with Mr. Blake to British Museum to see prints' (April 4 and 24, 1823). In 1820 there are notes of two visits to Drury Lane Theatre. It was probably early in 1819 that Linnell introduced Blake to his friend John Varley, the water-color painter and astrologer, for whom Blake did the famous 'visionary heads.' A vivid sketch of the two arguing, drawn by Linnell, is given in Mr. Story's Life of Linnell. Varley, though an astrologer on the mathematical side, was no visionary. He persuaded Blake to do a series of drawings, naming historical or legendary people to him, and carefully writing down name and date of the imaginary portraits which Blake willingly drew, and believing, it has been said, in the reality of Blake's visions more than Blake himself. Cunningham, in his farcical way, tells the story as he may have got it from Varley (see "(VIII.) Life of Blake by Allan Cunningham." below), for he claims in a letter to Linnell to have 'received much valuable information from him.' But the process has been described, more simply, by Varley himself in hisTreatise of Zodiacal Physiognomy(1828), where the 'Ghost of a Flea' and the 'Constellation Cancer' are reproduced in engraving. Some of the heads are finely symbolical, and I should have thought the ghost of a flea, in the sketch, an invention more wholly outside nature if I had not seen, in Rome and in London, a man in whom it is impossible not to recognize the type, modified to humanity, but scarcely by a longer distance than the men from the animals in Giovanni della Porta's 'Fisonomia dell' Huomo.'
It was in 1820, the year in which Blake began his vast picture of the 'Last Judgment,' only finished in the year of his death, that he did the seventeen woodcuts to Thornton'sVirgil, certainly one of his greatest, his most wholly successful achievements. The book was for boys' schools, and we find Blake returning without an effort to the childlike mood of theSongs of Innocence and Experience.The woodcuts have all the natural joy of those early designs, an equal simplicity, but with what added depth, what richness, what passionate strength! Blake was now engraving on wood for the first time, and he had to invent his own way of working. Just what he did has never been better defined than in an article which appeared in theAthenaeumof January 21, 1843, one of the very few intelligent references to Blake which can be found in print between the time of his death and the date of Gilchrist'sLife.'We hold it impossible,' says the writer, 'to get a genuine work of art, unless it come pure and unadulterated from the mind that conceived it.... Still more strongly is the author's meaning marked in the few wood-engravings which that wonderful man Blake cut himself for an edition of Thornton'sPastorals of Virgil.In token of our faith in the principle here announced, we have obtained the loan of one of Blake's original blocks, from Mr. Linnell, who possesses the whole series, to print, as an illustration of our argument, that, amid all drawbacks, there exists a power in the work of the man of genius, which no one but himself can utter fully. Side by side we have printed a copy of an engraver's improved version of the same subject. When Blake had produced his cuts, which were, however, printed with an apology, a shout of derision was raised by the wood-engravers. "This will never do!" said they; "we will show what it ought to be,"—that is, what the public taste would like—and they produced the above amendment! The engravers were quite right in their estimate of public taste; and we dare say many will agree with them even now: yet, to our minds, Blake's rude work, utterly without pretension, too, as an engraving—the merest attempt of a fresh apprentice—is a work of genius; whilst the latter is but a piece of smooth, tame mechanism.'
Blake lived at South Molton Street for seventeen years. In 1821, 'on his landlord's leaving off business, and retiring to France,' says Linnell, he removed to Fountain Court, in the Strand, where he took the first floor of 'a private house kept by Mr. Banes, whose wife was a sister of Mrs. Blake.' Linnell tells us that he was at this time 'in want of employment,' and, he says, 'before I knew his distress he had sold all his collection of old prints to Messrs. Colnaghi and Co.' Through Linnell's efforts, a donation of £25 was about the same time sent to him from the Royal Academy.
Fountain Court (the name is still perpetuated on a metal slab) was called so until 1883, when the name was changed to Southampton Buildings. It has all been pulled down and rebuilt, but I remember it fifteen years ago, when there were lodging-houses in it, by the side of the stage-door of Terry's Theatre. It was a narrow slit between the Strand and the river, and, when I knew it, was dark and comfortless, a blind alley. Gilchrist describes the two rooms on the first floor, front and back, the front room used as a reception-room; a smaller room opened out of it at the back, which was workroom, bedroom, and kitchen in one. The side window looked down through an opening between the houses, showing the river and the hills beyond; and Blake worked at a table facing the window. There seems to be no doubt, from the testimony of many friends, that Crabb Robinson's description, which will be seen below, with fuller detail than has yet been printed, conveys the prejudiced view of a fastidious person, and Palmer, roused by the word 'squalor,' wrote to Gilchrist, asserting 'himself, his wife, and his rooms, were clean and orderly; everything was in its place.' Tatham says that 'he fixed upon these lodgings as being more congenial to his habits, as he was very much accustomed to get out of his bed in the night to write for hours, and return to bed for the rest of the night.' He rarely left the house, except to fetch his pint of porter from the public-house at the corner of the Strand. It was on one of these occasions that he is said to have been cut by a Royal Academician whom he had recently met in society. Had not the Royal Academy been founded (J. T. Smith tells us in hisBook for a Rainy Day, under date 1768) by 'members who had agreed to withdraw themselves from various clubs, not only in order to be more select as to talent, but perfectly correct as to gentlemanly conduct'?
It was about this time that Blake was discovered, admired, and helped by one who has been described as 'not merely a poet and a painter, an art-critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things, and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.' This was Lamb's 'kind, lighthearted Wainewright,' who in the intervals of his strange crimes found time to buy a fine copy of theSongs of Innocenceand to give a jaunty word of encouragement or advertisement toJerusalem.Palmer remembers Blake stopping before one of Wainewright's pictures in the Academy and saying, 'Very fine.'
In 1820 Blake had carried out his last commission from Butts in a series of twenty-one drawings in illustration of the Book of Job. In the following year Linnell commissioned from him a duplicate set, and in September 1821 traced them himself from Butts's copies; they were finished, and in parts altered, by Blake. By an agreement dated March 25, 1823, Blake undertook to engrave the designs, which were to be published by Linnell, who gave £100 for the designs and copyright, with the promise of another £100 out of the profits on the sale. There were no profits, but Linnell gave another £50, paying the whole sum of £150 in weekly sums of £2 or £3. The plates are dated March 8, 1825, but they were not published until the date given on the cover, March 1826. Gilchrist intimates that 'much must be lost by the way' in the engraving of the water-color drawings; but Mr. Russell, a better authority, says that 'marvelous as the original water-color drawings unquestionably were, they are in every case inferior to the final version in the engraving.' It is on these engravings that the fame of Blake as an artist rests most solidly; invention and execution are here, as he declared that they must always be in great art, equal; imagination at its highest here finds adequate expression, without even the lovely strangeness of a defect. They have been finally praised and defined by Rossetti, in the pages contributed to Gilchrist's life (i. 330-335), of which Mr. Swinburne has said, with little exaggeration, that 'Blake himself, had he undertaken to write notes on his designs, must have done them less justice than this.'
Before Blake had finished engraving the designs to 'Job' he had already begun a new series of illustrations to Dante, also a commission from Linnell; and, with that passionate conscientiousness which was part of the foundation of his genius, he set to work to learn enough Italian to be able to follow the original with the help of Cary's translation. Linnell not only let Blake do the work he wanted to do, paying him for it as he did it, but he took him to see people whom it might be useful for him to know, such as the Aders, who had a house full of books and pictures, and who entertained artists and men of letters. Mrs. Aders had a small amateur talent of her own for painting, and from a letter of Carlyle's, which is preserved among the Crabb Robinson papers, seems to have had literary knowledge as well. 'Has not Mrs. Aders (the lady who lent meWilhelm Meister) great skill in, such things?' he asks in a letter full of minute inquiries into German novels. Lamb and Coleridge went to the house, and it was there that Crabb Robinson met Blake in December 1825. Mr. Story, in his Life of Linnell, tells us that one of Linnell's 'most vivid recollections of those days was of hearing Crabb Robinson recite Blake's poem, "The Tiger," before a distinguished company gathered at Mrs. Aders's table. It was a most impressive performance.' We find Blake afterwards at a supper-party at Crabb Robinson's, with Linnell, who notes in his journal going with Blake to Lady Ford's, to see her pictures; in 1820 we find him at Lady Caroline Lamb's.
Along with this general society Blake now gathered about him a certain number of friends and disciples, Linnell being the steadiest friend, and Samuel Palmer, Edward Calvert, and George Richmond the chief disciples. To these must be added, in 1826, Frederick Tatham, a young sculptor, who was to be the betrayer among the disciples. They called Blake's house 'the House of the Interpreter,' and in speaking of it afterwards speak of it always as of holy ground. Thus we hear of Richmond, finding his invention flag, going to seek counsel, and how Blake, who was sitting at tea with his wife, turned to her and said: 'What do we do, Kate, when the visions forsake us?' 'We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.' It is Richmond who records a profoundly significant saying of Blake: 'I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it.' Palmer tells us that Blake and his wife would look into the fire together and draw the figures they saw there, hers quite unlike his, his often terrible. On Palmer's first meeting that Blake, on October 9, 1824, he tells us how Blake fixed his eyes upon him and said: 'Do you work with fear and trembling?' 'Yes, indeed,' was the reply. 'Then,' said Blake, 'you'll do.'
The friends often met at Hampstead, where Linnell had, in 1824, taken Collins's Farm, at North End, now again known by its old name of 'Wyldes.' Blake disliked the air of Hampstead, which he said always made him ill; but he often went there to see Linnell, and loved the aspect from his cottage, and to sit and hear Mrs. Linnell sing Scotch songs, and would sometimes himself sing his own songs to tunes of his own making. The children loved him, and would watch for him as he came, generally on foot, and one of them says that she remembers 'the cold winter nights when Blake was wrapped up in an old shawl by Mrs. Linnell, and sent on his homeward way, with the servant, lantern in hand, lighting him across the heath to the main road.' It is Palmers son who reports it, and he adds: 'It is a matter of regret that the record of these meetings and walks and conversations is so imperfect, for in the words of one of Blake's disciples, to walk with him was like "walking with the Prophet Isaiah."' Once when the Palmers were staying at Shoreham, the whole party went down into the country in a carrier's van drawn by eight horses: Calvert tells the story, with picturesque details of Blake's second-sight, and of the hunt with lanterns in Shoreham Castle after a ghost, who turned out to be a snail tapping on the broken glass of the window.
From the end of 1825 Blake's health began to fail, and most of his letters to Linnell contain apologies for not coming to Hampstead, as he is in bed, or is suffering from a cold in the stomach. It was the beginning of that sickness which killed him, described as the mixing of the gall with the blood. He worked persistently, whether he was well or ill, at the Dante drawings, which he made in a folio book given him by Linnell. There were a hundred pages in the book, and he did a drawing on every page, some completely finished, some a mere outline; of these he had only engraved seven at the time of his death. He sat propped up in bed, at work on his drawings, saying, 'Dante goes on the better, which is all I care about.' In a letter to George Cumberland, on April 12, 1827, he writes: 'I have been very near the gates of death, and have returned very weak and an old man, feeble and tottering, but not in the spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever.' And indeed there is no sign of age or weakness in these last great inventions of a dying man. 'Flaxman is gone,' he adds, 'and we must soon follow, every one to his own eternal house, leaving the delusive Goddess Nature to her laws, to get into freedom from all law of the numbers, into the mind, in which every one is king and priest in his own house. God send it so on earth, as it is in heaven.'
Blake died on August 12, 1827, and the ecstasy of his death has been recorded by many witnesses. Tatham tells us how, as he put the finishing touches to a design of 'The Ancient of Days' which he had been coloring for him, he 'threw it down suddenly and said: "Kate, you have been a good wife; I will draw your portrait." She sat near his bed, and he made a drawing which, though not a likeness, is finely touched and expressed. He then threw that down, after having drawn for an hour, and began to sing Hallelujahs and songs of joy and triumph which Mrs. Blake described as being truly sublime in music and in verse.' Smith tells us that he said to his wife, as she stood to hear him, 'My beloved, they are not mine, no, they are not mine.' And a friend quoted by Gilchrist says: 'He died on Sunday night, at six o'clock, in a most glorious manner. He said he was going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died his countenance became fair, his eyes brightened, and he burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven.' 'Perhaps,' he had written not long before, 'and I verily believe it, every death is an improvement of the state of the departed.'
Blake was buried in Bunhill Fields, where all his family had been buried before him, but with the rites of the Church of England, and on August 17 his body was followed to the grave by Calvert, Richmond, Tatham, and Tatham's brother, a clergyman. The burial register reads: 'Aug. 17, 1827. William Blake. Age, 69 years. Brought from Fountain Court, Strand. Grave, 9 feet; E.&W. 77: N.&S. 32. 19/' The grave, being a 'common grave,' was used again, and the bones scattered; and this was the world's last indignity against William Blake.
Tatham tells us that, during a marriage of forty-five years, Mrs. Blake had never been separated from her husband 'save for a period that would make altogether about five weeks.' He does not remind us, as Mr. Swinburne, on the authority of Seymour Kirkup, reminds us, of Mrs. Blake's one complaint, that her husband was incessantly away 'in Paradise.' Tatham adds: 'After the death of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this, whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her, until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere affection and regard.' Before going to Tatham's she had spent nine months at Linnell's house in Cirencester Place, only leaving it in the summer of 1828, when Linnell let the house. After leaving Tatham she took lodgings in 17 Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, where she died at half-past seven on the morning of October 18, 1831, four years after the death of her husband, and within three months of his age. Tatham says: 'Her death not being known but by calculation, sixty-five years were placed upon her coffin,' and in the burial register at Bunhill Fields we read: 'Oct. 23, 1831. Catherine Sophia Blake. Age, 65 yrs. Brought from Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Grave, 12 feet; E.&W. 7: N.&S. 31, 32. £1, 5s.' She was born April 24, 1762, and was thus aged sixty-nine years and six months.
Mr. Swinburne tells us, on the authority of Seymour Kirkup, that, after Blake's death, a gift of £100 was sent to his widow by the Princess Sophia, which she gratefully returned, as not being in actual need of it. Many friends bought copies of Blake's engraved books, some of which Mrs. Blake colored, with the help of Tatham. After her death all the plates and manuscripts passed into Tatham's hands. In his memoir Tatham says that Blake on his death-bed 'spoke of the writer of this as a likely person to become the manager' of Mrs. Blake's affairs, and he says that Mrs. Blake bequeathed to him 'all of his works that remained unsold at his death, being writings, paintings, and a very great number of copperplates, of whom impressions may be obtained.' Linnell says that Tatham never showed anything in proof of his assertion that they had been left to him. Tatham had passed through various religious phases, and from being a Baptist, had become an 'angel' of the Irvingite Church. He is supposed to have destroyed the whole of the manuscripts and drawings in his possession on account of religious scruples; and in the life of Calvert by his son we read: 'Edward Calvert, fearing some fataldénouement, went to Tatham and implored him to reconsider the matter and spare the good man's precious work; notwithstanding which, blocks, plates, drawings, and MSS., I understand, were destroyed.'
Such is the received story, but is it strictly true? Did Tatham really destroy these manuscripts for religious reasons, or did he keep them and surreptitiously sell them for reasons of quite another kind? In theRossetti Papersthere is a letter from Tatham to Mr. W. M. Rossetti, dated Nov. 6, 1862, in which he says: 'I have sold Mr. Blake's works for thirty years'; and a footnote to Dr. Garnett's monograph on Blake in theThe Portfolioof 1895 relates a visit from Tatham which took place about 1860. Dr. Garnett told me that Tatham had said, without giving any explanation, that he had destroyed some of Blake's manuscripts and kept others by him, which he had sold from time to time. Is there not therefore a possibility that some of these lost manuscripts may still exist? whether or not they may turn out to be, as Crabb Robinson tells us that Blake told him, 'six or seven epic poems as long as Homer, and twenty tragedies as long asMacbeth.'
There are people who still ask seriously if Blake was mad. If the mind of Lord Macaulay is the one and only type of sanity, then Blake was mad. If imagination, and ecstasy, and disregard of worldly things, and absorption in the inner world of the mind, and a literal belief in those things which the whole 'Christian community' professes from the tip of its tongue; if these are signs and suspicions of madness, then Blake was certainly mad. His place is where he saw Teresa, among 'the gentle souls who guide the great wine-press of Love'; and, like her, he was 'drunk with intellectual vision.' That drunkenness illuminated him during his whole life, yet without incapacitating him from any needful attention to things by the way. He lived in poverty because he did not need riches; but he died without leaving a debt. He was a steady, not a fitful worker, and his wife said of him that she never saw his hands still unless he was reading or asleep. He was gentle and sudden; his whole nature was in a steady heat which could blaze at any moment into a flame. 'A saint amongst the infidels and a heretic with the orthodox,' he has been described by one who knew him best in his later years, John Linnell; and Palmer has said of him: 'His love of art was so great that he would see nothing but art in anything he loved; and so, as he loved the Apostles and their divine Head (for so I believe he did), he must needs say that they were all artists.' 'When opposed by the superstitious, the crafty, or the proud,' says Linnell again, 'he outraged all common-sense and rationality by the opinions he advanced'; and Palmer gives an instance of it: 'Being irritated by the exclusively scientific talk at a friend's house, which talk had turned on the vastness of space, he cried out, "It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the heath, and touched the sky with my finger."'
It was of the essence of Blake's sanity that he could always touch the sky with his finger. 'To justify the soul's frequent joy in what cannot be defined to the intellectual part, or to calculation': that, which is Walt Whitman's definition of his own aim, defines Blake's. Where others doubted he knew; and he saw where others looked vaguely into the darkness. He saw so much further than others into what we call reality, that others doubted his report, not being able to check it for themselves; and when he saw truth naked he did not turn aside his eyes. Nor had he the common notion of what truth is, or why it is to be regarded. He said: 'When I tell a truth it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those who do.' And his criterion of truth was the inward certainty of instinct or intuition, not the outward certainty of fact. 'God forbid,' he said, 'that Truth should be confined to mathematical demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is unworthy of her notice.' And he said: 'Error is created, truth is eternal. Error or creation will be burned up, and then, not till then, truth or eternity will appear. It is burned up the moment men cease to behold it.'
It was this private certainty in regard to truth and all things that Blake shared with the greatest minds of the world, and men doubted him partly because he was content to possess that certainty and had no desire to use it for any practical purpose, least of all to convince others. He asked to be believed when he spoke, told the truth, and was not concerned with argument or experiment, which seemed to him ways of evasion. He said:
'It is easy to acknowledge a man to be great and good,while weDerogate from him in the trifles and small articles ofthat goodness,Those alone are his friends who admire his minutestpowers.'
He spoke naturally in terms of wisdom, and made no explanations, bridged none of the gulfs which it seemed to him so easy to fly over. Thus when he said that Ossian and Rowley were authentic, and that what Macpherson and Chatterton said was ancient was so, he did not mean it in a strictly literal sense, but in the sense in which ancient meant authentic: true to ancient truth. Is a thing true as poetry? then it is true in the minutest because the most essential sense. On the other hand, in saying that part of Wordsworth's Preface was written by another hand, he was merely expressing in a bold figure a sane critical opinion. Is a thing false among many true things? then it is not the true man who is writing it, but some false section of his brain. It may be dangerous practically to judge all things at an inner tribunal; but it is only by such judgments that truth moves.
And truth has moved, or we have. AfterZarathustra, Jerusalemno longer seems a wild heresy. People were frightened because they were told that Blake was mad, or a blasphemer. Nietzsche, who has cleared away so many obstructions from thought, has shamed us from hiding behind these treacherous and unavailing defenses. We have come to realize, what Rossetti pointed out long ago, that, as a poet, Blake's characteristic is above all things that of 'pure perfection inwriting verse.' We no longer praise his painting for its qualities as literature, or forget that his design has greatness as design. And of that unique creation of an art out of the mingling of many arts which we see in the 'illuminated printing' of the engraved books, we have come to realize what Palmer meant when he said long ago: 'As a picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought, so, in some of these type books over which Blake had long brooded with his brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it—not with a mortal life, but an indestructible life.' And we have come to realize what Blake meant by the humble and arrogant things which he said about himself. 'I doubt not yet,' he writes in one of those gaieties of speech which illuminate his letters, 'to make a figure in the great dance of life that shall amuse the spectators in the sky.' If there are indeed spectators there, amused by our motions, what dancer among us are they more likely to have approved than this joyous, untired, and undistracted dancer to the eternal rhythm?