LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

William Blakewould have been the first to understand that the biography of anybody ought really to begin with the words, “In the beginning God created heaven and earth.” If we were telling the story of Mr Jones of Kentish Town, we should need all the centuries to explain it. We cannot comprehend even the name “Jones,” until we have realised that its commonness is not the commonness of vulgar but of divine things; for its very commonness is an echo of the adoration of St John the Divine. The adjective “Kentish” is rather a mystery in that geographical connection; but the word Kentish is not so mysterious as the awful and impenetrable word “town.” We shall have rent up the roots of prehistoric mankind and seen the last revolutions of modern society before we really know the meaning of the word “town.” So every word we use comes to us coloured from all its adventures in history, every phase of which has made at least a faint alteration. Theonly right way of telling a story is to begin at the beginning—at the beginning of the world. Therefore all books have to be begun in the wrong way, for the sake of brevity. If Blake wrote the life of Blake it would not begin with any business about his birth or parentage.

Blake was born in 1757, in Carnaby Market—but Blake’s life of Blake would not have begun like that. It would have begun with a great deal about the giant Albion, about the many disagreements between the spirit and the spectre of that gentleman, about the golden pillars that covered the earth at its beginning and the lions that walked in their golden innocence before God. It would have been full of symbolic wild beasts and naked women, of monstrous clouds and colossal temples; and it would all have been highly incomprehensible, but none of it would have been irrelevant. All the biggest events of Blake’s life would have happened before he was born. But, on consideration, I think it will be better to tell the tale of Blake’s life first and go back to his century afterwards. It is not, indeed, easy to resist temptationhere, for there was much to be said about Blake before he existed. But I will resist the temptation and begin with the facts.

William Blakewas born on the 28th of November 1757 in Broad Street, Carnaby Market. Like so many other great English artists and poets, he was born in London. Like so many other starry philosophers and flaming mystics, he came out of a shop. His father was James Blake, a fairly prosperous hosier; and it is certainly remarkable to note how many imaginative men in our island have arisen in such an environment. Napoleon said that we English were a nation of shopkeepers; if he had pursued the problem a little further he might have discovered why we are a nation of poets. Our recent slackness in poetry and in everything else is due to the fact that we are no longer a nation of shopkeepers, but merely a nation of shop-owners. In any case there seems to be no doubt that William Blake was brought up in the ordinary atmosphere of the smaller English bourgeoisie. His manners and moralswere trained in the old obvious way; nobody ever thought of training his imagination, which perhaps was all the better for the neglect. There are few tales of his actual infancy. Once he lingered too long in the fields and came back to tell his mother that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting under a tree. His mother smacked him. Thus ended the first adventure of William Blake in that wonderland of which he was a citizen.

His father, James Blake, was almost certainly an Irishman; his mother was probably English. Some have found in his Irish origin an explanation of his imaginative energy; the idea may be admitted, but under strong reservations. It is probably true that Ireland, if she were free from oppression, would produce more pure mystics than England. And for the same reason she would still produce fewer poets. A poet may be vague, and a mystic hates vagueness. A poet is a man who mixes up heaven and earth unconsciously. A mystic is a man who separates heaven and earth even if he enjoys them both. Broadly the English type is he who sees the elves entangled in theforests of Arcady, like Shakespeare and Keats: the Irish type is he who sees the fairies quite distinct from the forest, like Blake and Mr W. B. Yeats. If Blake inherited anything from his Irish blood it was his strong Irish logic. The Irish are as logical as the English are illogical. The Irish excel at the trades for which mere logic is wanted, such as law or military strategy. This element of elaborate and severe reason there certainly was in Blake. There was nothing in the least formless or drifting about him. He had a most comprehensive scheme of the universe, only that no one could comprehend it.

If Blake, then, inherited anything from Ireland it was his logic. There was perhaps in his lucid tracing of a tangled scheme of mysticism something of that faculty which enables Mr Tim Healy to understand the rules of the House of Commons. There was perhaps in the prompt pugnacity with which he kicked the impudent dragoon out of his front garden something of the success of the Irish soldier. But all such speculations are futile. For we do not know what James Blake really was, whether an Irishman by accident or by truetradition. We do not know what heredity is; the most recent investigators incline to the view that it is nothing at all. And we do not know what Ireland is; and we shall never know until Ireland is free, like any other Christian nation, to create her own institutions.

Let us pass to more positive and certain things. William Blake grew up slight and small, but with a big and very broad head, and with shoulders more broad than were natural to his stature. There exists a fine portrait of him which gives the impression of a certain squareness in the mere plan of his face and figure. He has something in common, so to speak, with the typically square men of the eighteenth century; he seems a little like Danton, without the height; like Napoleon, without the mask of Roman beauty; or like Mirabeau, without the dissipation and the disease. He had abnormally big dark eyes; but to judge by this plainly sincere portrait, the great eyes were rather bright than dark. If he suddenly entered the room (and he was likely to have entered it suddenly) I think we should have felt first a broad Bonaparte head and broad Bonaparte shoulders, and then afterwardsrealised that the figure under them was frail and slight.

His spiritual structure was somewhat similar, as it slowly built itself up. His character was queer but quite solid. You might call him a solid maniac or a solid liar; but you could not possibly call him a wavering hysteric or a weak dabbler in doubtful things. With his big owlish head and small fantastic figure he must have seemed more like an actual elf than any human traveller in Elfland; he was a sober native of that unnatural plain. There was nothing of the obviously fervid and futile about Blake’s supernaturalism. It was not his frenzy but his coolness that was startling. From his first meeting with Ezekiel under the tree he always talked of such spirits in an everyday intonation. There was plenty of pompous supernaturalism in the eighteenth century; but Blake’s was the only natural supernaturalism. Many reputable persons reported miracles; he only mentioned them. He spoke of having met Isaiah or Queen Elizabeth, not so much even as if the fact were indisputable, but rather as if so simple a thing were not worth disputing. Kings and prophets came from heaven or hellto sit to him, and he complained of them quite casually, as if they were rather troublesome professional models. He was angry because King Edward I. would blunder in between him and Sir William Wallace. There have been other witnesses to the supernatural even more convincing, but I think there was never any other quite so calm. His private life, as he laid its foundations in his youth, had the same indescribable element; it was a sort of abrupt innocence. Everything that he was destined to do, especially in these early years, had a placid and prosaic oddity. He went through the ordinary fights and flirtations of boyhood; and one day he happened to be talking about the unreasonable ways of some girl to another girl. The other girl (her name was Katherine Boucher) listened with apparent patience until Blake used some phrase or mentioned some incident which (she said) she really thought was pathetic or, popularly speaking, “hard on him.” “Do you?” said William Blake with great suddenness. “Then I love you.” After a long pause the girl said in a leisurely manner, “I love you too.” In this brief and extraordinary manner was decided a marriage ofwhich the unbroken tenderness was tried by a long life of wild experiments and wilder opinions, and which was never truly darkened until the day when Blake, dying in an astonishing ecstasy, named her only after God.

To the same primary period of his life, boyish, romantic, and untouched, belongs the publication of his first and most famous books, “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” These poems are the most natural and juvenile things Blake ever wrote. Yet they are startlingly old and unnatural poems for so young and natural a man. They have the quality already described—a matured and massive supernaturalism. If there is anything in the book extraordinary to the reader it is clearly quite ordinary to the writer. It is characteristic of him that he could write quite perfect poetry, a lyric entirely classic. No Elizabethan or Augustan could have moved with a lighter precision than—

“O sunflower, weary of time,That countest the steps of the sun.”

“O sunflower, weary of time,

That countest the steps of the sun.”

But it is also characteristic of him that he could and would put into an otherwise good poem lines like—

“And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,Would not have bandy children, nor fasting nor birch”;

“And modest Dame Lurch, who is always at church,

Would not have bandy children, nor fasting nor birch”;

lines that have no sense at all and no connection with the poem whatever. There is a stronger and simpler case of contrast. There is the quiet and beautiful stanza in which Blake first described the emotions of the nurse, the spiritual mother of many children.

“When the voices of children are heard in the vale,And laughter is heard on the hill,My heart is at rest within my breastAnd everything else is still.”

“When the voices of children are heard in the vale,

And laughter is heard on the hill,

My heart is at rest within my breast

And everything else is still.”

And here is the equally quiet verse which William Blake afterwards wrote down, equally calmly—

“When the laughter of children is heard on the hill,And whisperings are in the dale,The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,My face turns green and pale.”

“When the laughter of children is heard on the hill,

And whisperings are in the dale,

The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,

My face turns green and pale.”

That last monstrous line is typical. He would mention with as easy an emphasis that a woman’s face turned green as that the fields were green when she looked at them. That is the quality of Blake which is most personaland interesting in the fixed psychology of his youth. He came out into the world a mystic in this very practical sense, that he came out to teach rather than to learn. Even as a boy he was bursting with occult information. And all through his life he had the deficiencies of one who is always giving out and has no time to take in. He was deaf with his own cataract of speech. Hence it followed that he was devoid of patience while he was by no means devoid of charity: but impatience produced every evil effect that could practically have come from uncharitableness: impatience tripped him up and sent him sprawling twenty times in his life. The result was the unlucky paradox, that he who was always preaching perfect forgiveness seemed not to forgive even imperfectly the feeblest slights. He himself wrote in a strong epigram—

“To forgive enemies Hayley does pretend,Who never in his life forgave a friend.”

“To forgive enemies Hayley does pretend,

Who never in his life forgave a friend.”

THE LILLY (1789)

But the effect of the epigram is a little lost through its considerable truth if applied to the epigrammatist. The wretched Hayley had himself been a friend to Blake—and Blakecould not forgive him. But this was not really lack of love or pity. It was strictly lack of patience, which in its turn was due to that bursting and almost brutal mass of convictions with which he plunged into the world like a red-hot cannon ball, just as we have already imagined him plunging into a room with his big bullet head. His head was indeed a bullet; it was an explosive bullet.

Of his other early relations we know little. The parents who are often mentioned in his poems, both for praise and blame, are the abstract and eternal father and mother and have no individual touches. It might be inferred, perhaps, that he had a special emotional tie with his elder brother Robert, for Robert constantly appeared to him in visions and even explained to him a new method of engraving. But even this inference is doubtful, for Blake saw the oddest people in his visions, people with whom neither he nor any one else has anything particular to do; and the method of engraving might just as well have been revealed by Bubb Doddington or Prester John or the oldest baker in Brighton. That is one of the facts that makes one fancythat Blake’s visions were genuine. But whoever taught him his own style of engraving, an ordinary mortal engraver taught him the ordinary mortal style, and he seems to have learnt it very well. When apprenticed by his father to a London engraving business he was diligent and capable. All his life he was a good workman, and his failures, which were many, never arose from that common idleness or looseness of life attributed to the artistic temperament. He was of a bitter and intolerant temper, but not otherwise unbusiness-like; and he was prone to insult his patrons, but not, as a rule, to fail them. But with this part of his character we shall probably have to deal afterwards. His technical skill was very great. This and a certain original touch also attracted to the young artist the attention and interest of the sculptor Flaxman.

The influence of this great man on Blake’s life and work has been gravely underrated. The mistake has arisen from causes too complex to be considered, at any rate at this stage; but they resolve themselves into a misunderstanding of the nature of classicism and of the nature of mysticism. But this can be said decisively:Blake remained a Flaxmanite to the day of his death. Flaxman as a sculptor and draughtsman stood, as everybody knows, for classicism at its clearest and coldest. He would admit no line into a modern picture that might not have been on a Greek bas-relief. Even foreshortening and perspective he avoided as if there were something grotesque about them—as, indeed, there is. Nothing can be funnier, properly considered, than the fact that one’s own father is a pigmy if he stands far enough off. Perspective really is the comic element in things. Flaxman vaguely felt this; Flaxman shrank from the almost insolent foreshortenings of Rubens or Veronese as he would have shrank from the gigantic boots in the foreground of an amateur photograph. For him high art was flat art in painting or drawing, everything could be done by pure line upon a single plane. Flaxman is probably best known to the existing public by his illustrations in line to Pope’s “Homer,”—which have certainly copied most exquisitely the austere limitations of Greek vases and reliefs. Anger may be uttered by the lifted arm or sorrow by the sunken head, but the faces of all those godsand heroes are, as you may think them, beautiful or foolish, like the faces of the dead. Above all, the line must never falter and come to nothing; Flaxman would regard a line fading away in such a picture as we should regard a railway line fading away upon a map.

This was the principle of Flaxman; and this remained to the day of his death one of the firmest principles of William Blake. I will not say that Blake took it from the great sculptor, for it formed an integral part of Blake’s individual artistic philosophy; but he must have been encouraged to find it in Flaxman and strengthened in it by the influence of an older and more famous man. No one can understand Blake’s pictures, no one can understand a hundred allusions in his epigrams, satires, and art criticism who does not first of all realise that William Blake was a fanatic on the subject of the firm line. The thing he loved most in art was that lucidity and decision of outline which can be seen best in the cartoons of Raphael, in the Elgin Marbles, and in the simpler designs of Michael Angelo. The thing he hated most in art was the thing which we now call Impressionism—thesubstitution of atmosphere for shape, the sacrifice of form to tint, the cloudland of the mere colourist. With that cyclopean impudence which was the most stunning sign of his sincerity, he treated the greatest names not only as if they were despicable, but as if they were actually despised. He reasons mildly with the artistic authorities, saying—

“You must admit that Rubens was a fool,And yet you make him master in your school,And give more money for his slobberingsThan you will give for Raphael’s finest things.”

“You must admit that Rubens was a fool,

And yet you make him master in your school,

And give more money for his slobberings

Than you will give for Raphael’s finest things.”

And then, with one of those sudden lunges of sense which made him a swordsman after all, he really gets home upon Rubens—

“I understood Christ was a carpenterAnd not a brewer’s drayman, my good sir.”

“I understood Christ was a carpenter

And not a brewer’s drayman, my good sir.”

In another satire he retells the fable of the dog, the bone, and the river, and permits (with admirable humour) the dog to expatiate upon the vast pictorial superiority of the bone’s reflection in the river over the bone itself; the shadow so delicate, suggestive, rich in tone, the real bone so hard and academic in outline. He was the sharpest satirist of the Impressionistswho ever wrote, only he satirised the Impressionists before they were born.

THE DIVINE IMAGE (1789)

The ordinary history of Blake would obviously be that he was a man who began as a good engraver and became a great artist. The inner truth of Blake could hardly be better put than this: that he was a good artist whose idea of greatness was to be a great engraver. For him it was no mere technical accident that the art of reproduction had to cut into wood or bite into stone. He loved to think that even in being a draughtsman he was also a sculptor. When he put his lines on a decorative page he would have much preferred to carve them out of marble or cut them into rock. Like every true romantic, he loved the irrevocable. Like every true artist, he detested india-rubber. Take, for the sake of example, all the designs to the Book of Job. When he gets the thing right he gets it suddenly and perfectly right, as in the picture of all the sons of God shouting for joy. We feel that the sons of God might really shout for joy at the excellence of their own portrait. When he gets it wrong he gets it completely and incurably wrong, as in the preposterous picture of Satan dancingamong paving-stones. But both are equally final and fixed. If one picture is incurably bad, the other picture is incurably good. Courage (which is, with kindness, the only fundamental virtue in man), is present and prodigious in both. No coward could have drawn such pictures.

The chief movement of Blake either in art or literature was the first publication of the batch of his own allegorical works. “The Gates of Paradise” came first, and was followed by “Urizen” and the “Book of Thel.” With these he introduced his own mode of engraving and began his own style of decorative illustration. That style was steeped in the Blake and Flaxman feeling for the hard line and the harsh and heroic treatment. There were, of course, many other personalities besides that of Flaxman which were destined to influence the art of William Blake. Among others, the personality of William Blake influences it not inconsiderably. But no influence ever disturbed the love of the absolute academic line. If the reader will look at any of the designs of Blake, many of which are reproduced in this book, he will see the main fact which I mentionhere. Many of them are hideous, some of them are outrageous, but none of them are shapeless; none of them are what would now be called “suggestive”; none of them (in a word) are timid. The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster. The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake. About this same time Blake began to illustrate books, decorating Blair’s “Grave” and the Book of Job with his dark but very definite designs. In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment. The beauty of the angel upside down who blows the trumpet in the face of Blair’s skeleton is the beauty of a perfect Greek athlete. And if the beauty is the beauty of an athlete, so the ugliness is the ugliness of an athlete—or perhaps of an acrobat. The contortions and clumsy attitudes of some of Blake’s figures do not arise from his ignorance of the human anatomy. They arise from a sort of wild knowledge of it. He is straining muscles and cracking joints like a sportsman racing for a cup.

These book illustrations by Blake are amongthe simplest and strongest designs of his pencil, which at its best (to do him justice) tended to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for instance) could well be more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate Blair’s elephantine epic called “The Grave.” It was as well that Blake and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries; he was the father of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and even of the “Yellow Book.” But of all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting point is this: that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory, from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the black grotto of the graveis a fine piece of drawing, apart from its meaning, and is all the finer for its simplicity. But wherever he errs it is always in being too hard and harsh, not too faint or fanciful. Blake was a greater man than Flaxman, though a less perfectly poised man. He was harder than his master, because he was madder. The figure upside down blowing the trumpet is as perfect as a Flaxman figure: only it is upside down. Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake.

The Little Black BoyTHE LITTLE BLACK BOY (1789)

THE LITTLE BLACK BOY (1789)

Suchan elementary statement of Blake’s idea of art is not out of place at this stage; for his convictions had formed and hardened unusually early, and his career is almost unintelligible apart from his opinions. It is fairly eccentric even with them. Flaxman had introduced him to literary society, especially to the evening parties of a Blue-stocking named Mrs Matthews. Here his force of mind was admitted; but he was not personally very popular. Most of his biographers attribute this to his “unbending deportment,” and acertain almost babyish candour which certainly belonged to him. But I cannot help thinking that the fact that he was in the habit of singing his own poems to tunes invented by himself may perhaps have had something to do with it. His opinions on all subjects were not only positive but aggressive. He was a fierce republican and denouncer of kings. But Mrs Matthews was probably accustomed to fierce republicans who denounced kings. She may have been less accustomed to a gentleman who insisted on wearing a red cap of liberty in ordinary society. It is due to Blake to say that his politics showed nevertheless that eccentric practicality which was mixed up with his unworldliness; it was certainly through his presence of mind that Tom Paine did not perish on the scaffold.

But Blake had none of the marks of the poetical weakling, of the mere moon-calf of mysticism. If he was a madman, one can emphasise the word man as well as the word mad. For instance, in spite of his sedentary trade and his pacific theories, he had extraordinary physical courage. Not that reasonable minimum of physical courage which is guaranteedby certain conventional sports, but intrinsic contempt of danger, a readiness to put himself into unknown perils. He would suddenly attack men much bigger and stronger than himself, and that with such violence that they were often defeated by their own amazement. He attacked a huge drayman who was harsh to some women and beat him in the most excited manner. He leapt upon a Lifeguardsman who came into his front garden, and ran that astonished warrior into the road by the elbows. The vivacity and violence of these physical outbreaks must be remembered and allowed for when we are judging some of his mental outbreaks. The most serious blot (indeed, the only serious blot) on the moral character of Blake was his habit of letting his rage get the better not only of decency but of gratitude and truth. He would abuse his benefactors as virulently as his enemies. He left epigrams lying about in which he called Flaxman a blockhead and Hayley (as far as the words can be understood) a seducer and an assassin. But the curious thing is that he often did justice to the same people both before and after such eruptions. The truthis, I fancy, that such writings were like sudden attitudes or bodily movements. We talk of a word and a blow; with Blake a word had the same momentary character as a blow. It was not a judgment, but a gesture. He had little or no feeling of the idea that “litera scripta manet.” He did not see any particular reason why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than masculine.

He had many friends and acquaintances of distinction besides Flaxman. Among them was the great Priestley, whose speculations were the life of early Unitarianism and whose Jacobin sympathies led to something not far from martyrdom; other friends were the wild optimist Godwin and his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft. But although he gained many new acquaintances he gained only one new helper. This was a Mr Thomas Butts, who lived in Fitzroy Square, and ought to have a statue there, for he is an eternal model and monument for all patrons of art. While in all other respects apparently a sane and rational British merchant,he conceived an affection for Blake’s allegorical designs. But he gave no commissions for pictures; he simply gave Blake money for pictures as fast as Blake chose to paint them. The subject and size and medium were left entirely to the artist. One day Blake might leave at Fitzroy Square a little water-colour of the “Soul of a Porcupine”; the next day a gorgeous and intricate illumination in gold of the obstetrics and birth of Cain; the next day an enormous mural painting of Hector capturing the arms of Patroclus; the following day a simple pen and ink drawing of the prophet Habbakuk taken from life. All these Mr Thomas Butts of Fitzroy Square received with solid benevolence and paid for in solid coin. Many modern writers and painters may think of such a patron somewhat dreamily. He had his reward, though it was unique rather than particularly practical. Blake regarded him with a serene affection which was never ruffled by the flying storms that were too frequent in his friendships. No allusions can be found in his poetry to the effect that Thomas Butts was a Spectre from Satan’s Loins. No epigram was discovered among Blake’s papers accusing MrButts of bereaving anybody’s life. If to have kept one’s own temper with Blake was a large achievement (and it was not a small one), it was certainly a truly noble achievement to have kept Blake’s temper for him. And this Mr Butts and Mrs Blake can alone really claim to have done. For Blake was to pass under a patron who showed him how different is kindness from sympathy.

In the year 1800 he effected a change of residence which was in many ways an epoch in his life. He was a Londoner, though doubtless a Londoner of the time when London was small enough to feel itself on every side to be on the edge of the country. Still Blake had never in any true sense been in the heart of the country. In his earliest poems we read of seraphs stirring in the trees; but we have somehow a feeling that they were garden trees. We read of saints and sages walking in the fields, and we almost have the feeling that they were brickfields. The perfect landscape is pastoral to the point of conventionality; it has not in any sense the actual smell of England. The sights of the town are evidently as native (one mightsay vital) with him as any of the sights of the country. The black chimney-sweep is as obvious as the white lamb. What is worse still, the white lamb of England is no more natural or native than the alien golden lion of Africa. He was, in fact, a Cockney, like Keats; and Cockneys as a class tend to have too poetical and luxuriantly imaginative a view of life. Blake was about as little affected by environment as any man that ever lived in this world. Still he did change his environment, and it did change him.

THE SWAN (1789)

There lived about this time near the little village of Eartham, in Sussex, a simple, kind-hearted but somewhat consequential squire of the name of Hayley. He was a landlord and an aristocrat; but he was not one of those whose vanity can be wholly fulfilled by such functions. He considered himself a patron of poetry; and indeed he was one; but, alas! he had a yet more alarming idea. He also considered himself a poet. Whether any one agreed with that opinion while he still ruled the estates and hunted the country it is difficult now to discover. It is sufficiently certain that nobody agrees with it now. “The Triumphs ofTemper,” the only poem by Hayley that any modern person can remember, is probably only remembered because it was used to round off scornfully one of the ringing sentences in Macaulay’s Essays. Nevertheless in his own time Hayley was a powerful and important man, quite unshaken as yet as a poet, quite unshakeable as a landed proprietor. But like almost all quite indefensible English oligarchs, he had a sort of unreasonable good nature which somehow balanced or protected his obvious unfitness and ineptitude. His heart was in the right place, though he was in the wrong one. To this blameless and beaming lord of creation, too self-satisfied to be arrogant, too solemnly childish to be cynical, too much at his ease to doubt either others or himself, to him Flaxman introduced, at him rather Flaxman threw, the red-hot cannon-ball called Blake. I wonder whether Flaxman laughed. But laughter convulses and crumples up the pure outline of the Greek profile.

Hayley, who was in his way as munificent as Mæcenas (and I suspect that Mæcenas was quite as stupid as Hayley), gave Blake a cottage in Felpham, a few miles from his own house,a cottage with which Blake almost literally fell in love. He writes as if he had never seen an English country cottage before; and perhaps he never had. “Nothing,” he cries in a kind of ecstasy, “can ever be more grand than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple and without intricacy, it seems to be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to the wants of man. No other formed house can ever please me so well.” It is probably true that none ever did. All that was purest and most chivalrous in his poetry and philosophy flowered in the great winds that pass and repass between the noble Sussex hills and the sea. He was always a happy man, since he had a God. But here he was almost a contented man.

By this time had passed over Blake’s head first the beginning and then the growing blackness of the great French terror. Blake was now in a world in which even he could not venture to walk about in a red cap. Moreover, like most of the men of genius of that age and school, like Coleridge and like Shelley, he seems to have been slightly sickened with the full sensational actuality of the Frenchtragedy; and somewhat unreasonably having urged the rebels to fight, complained because they killed people. If sincere revolutionists like Blake and Coleridge were disappointed at the Revolution, the English Government and governing class were against it with a solidity of desperation. People talk about the reign of terror in France; but allowing for the difference of national temperament and national peril, the two things were twin; there was a reign of terror in England. A gentleman was sent to penal servitude (which some gentlemen find worse than the guillotine) if he said that the Prince Regent was fat. Our terror was as cruel as Robespierre’s, but more cowardly, just as our press-gang was as cruel as conscription, only more cowardly. Everywhere that the Government could knock down an enemy as if by accident, could brain a Jacobin with some brutal club of legal coincidence, the thing was done. Many such blows were struck in that time, and one of them was struck at Blake.

On a certain morning in the August of 1803 Blake walked out into his garden and found standing there a trooper of the 1st Dragoonsin a scarlet coat, surveying the landscape with a satisfied air of possession. Blake expressed a desire that the dragoon should leave the garden. The dragoon expressed a desire to knock out Blake’s eyes, “with many abominable imprecations.” Blake sprang upon the man with startling activity, and catching him from behind by both elbows ran him out of the garden as if he were a perambulator. The man, who was probably drunk and must certainly have been surprised, went off with many verbal accusations, but none of a political nature. A little while afterwards, however, he turned up with a grave legal statement to the effect that Blake had taken the opportunity to utter these somewhat improbable words: “Damn the king, damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers, they are all slaves: when Bonaparte comes it will be cut-throat for cut-throat. I will help him.” The impartial critic will be inclined to say that few persons would have even the breath to utter such political generalisations while at the same time running one of the Dragoon Guards bodily out of the gate; and it was not alleged that the incident took more than half a minute.Blake may possibly or even probably have said “damn,” but the rest of the sentence originated, I imagine, in the mind of someone else. But although most of Blake’s biography treats the case as a mere clumsy accident, I can hardly think that it was so. It involves too much of a coincidence. Why did not the dragoon wander into some other garden? Why did not some other poet have to deal with the dragoon? It seems odd that the man of the red cap should be the one man to wrestle with the man of the red coat. It was a time of tyranny, and tyranny is always full of small intrigues. It is not at all impossible that the police, as we should now put it, really tried to entrap Blake. But there entered upon the scene something which in England is stronger even than the police. Hayley, not the small Hayley who was the author of the “Triumphs of Temper,” but the colossal Hayley, who was the squire of Eartham and Bognor, entered the court with the extra aristocratic charm of an accident in the hunting-field. He defended Blake with generosity and good sense, such as seldom fail his class on such occasions; and Blake wasacquitted. It was said that the evidence was incomplete; but I fancy that if Hayley had not come the evidence would have been complete enough.

SPACE (1793)

It is unfortunate that this excellent attitude of Hayley nevertheless coincides to a great extent with the solution of the bonds that bound him to Blake. “The Visions were angry with me at Felpham,” said the poet, which was his way of stating that he was somewhat bored with the benevolence of the English gentry. “Voices of celestial inhabitants werenotmore distinctly heard, nor their forms more distinctly seen,” in the neighbourhood of the Squire of Eartham than in that of Mr Butts of Fitzroy Square; and Blake abruptly returned to London, taking lodgings just off Oxford Street. He started at once on a work with the promising title, “Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion.” I say there is a certain pathos in this parting from Hayley, for he was now to fall into the power of a much more unpleasant kind of capitalist. Poor Blake fell indeed from bad to worse in the matter of patrons. Butts was sensible and sympathetic, Hayleywas honest and silly. And his last protector seems to have been something very like a swindler.

The name of this benevolent being was Richard Hartley Cromek, a Yorkshireman, and a publisher. He found Blake in bitter poverty after his breach with Hayley (he and his wife lived on 10s. a week), and his method of sweating was of the simplest and most artistic character. He used to go to Blake, tell him that he would give him the engraving of a number of designs; he would easily make Blake talk enthusiastically, show his sketches and so on; then having got the sketches he would go away and give the engraving to somebody else. This annoyed Blake. It is pleasant to reflect that it was about Cromek that the best of his epigrams was written—

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