26 WILLIAM BLAKE. THE life of a most extraordinary man has recently appeared, and should be studied by all who are interested in the curiosities of literature and art. To this generation he is nearly unknown. To his contemporaries he most frequently seemed to be a madman. Yet of this strange being-at once a poet and a painter-Wordsworth said: "There is something in his madness which "interests me more than the sanity of "Lord Byron and Walter Scott." Fuseli and Flaxman declared that the time would come when his designs should be as much sought after and treasured in portfolios as those of Michael Angelo. "Blake is d- good to steal from," said Fuseli. And, ah! sir," said Flaxman, "his poems are as grand as his pictures." Who is the unknown genius that is praised so highly, and what has he done? The answer is given in two goodly volumes, to which three ardent admirers have contributed. The late Mr. Gilchrist, who distinguished himself by the production of a good biography of Etty, has traced the incidents of Blake's life; Mr. Dante Rossetti, one of the leading preRaphaelite painters, has edited Blake's poetry and criticised his style of art; and Mr. W. M. Rossetti has produced a critical catalogue of Blake's designs. The work produced by three such able men is very interesting. Perhaps they overrate Blake's merits, but their opinion, if exaggerated, is worth examining; and they have done really a good work in rescuing from oblivion one of the most extraordinary men of our nation. William Blake was born in 1757, and he died in 1827. He was born, he 1 The Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus," with Selections from his Poems and other Writings: By the late Alexander Gilchrist, author of "The Life of William Etty:" illustrated from Blake's own works in facsimile by W. J. Linton, and in Photolithography; with a few of Blake's original Plates. 2 vols. Macmillan and Co. 1863. "Did lived, and he died in London. His threescore and ten years covered a most important, a most active period in the history of English art and poetry; and what manner of man he was we can see at once in the earliest incident of his childhood which is known. When he had not yet entered his teens he saw a vision. He beheld a tree at Peckham Rye all filled with angels. He told his father of the sight on coming home, and was about to receive a flogging for the supposed lie, when his mother interfered and saved him for that once. All his life he saw such visions. you ever see a fairy's funeral, madam ?" he once said, quite gravely, to a lady; "I have." And then he described how, in the stillness of his garden, he had seen a procession of little creatures of the size and colour of green and grey grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a roseleaf, which they buried with songs. At this time he was an artist, and drew with wonderful truthfulness the sights which he saw in vision. He really saw what he drew; and if the vision changed its appearance he could not go on. He once saw and drew the ghost of a flea! See the portrait of this amazing monster at page 255-a sketch of singular vigour, which any one once seeing will never forget. As he was drawing this ghostly flea, it appeared in vision to move its mouth, and he had to take the portrait over again. Mr. Richmond, the well-known portrait-painter, was one of his admirers, and finding his invention flag during a whole fortnight, went to Blake, as was his wont, for advice. When he told Blake that his power of invention had been failing him, the strange visionary turned suddenly to Mrs. Blake and said, "It is just so with us, is it not, for weeks together when the visions, forsake us ? What do we do then, Kate ?" "We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake,” was the reply. He prayed for vision, and the vision came. He would insist on it, too, that no one could really draw well any imaginary scene who did not see it as a reality in vision. He was surrounded with strange sights and sounds which nobody else saw or heard. "What! when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?" he supposes some one to ask, and he answers, "Oh! no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!' I question not my corporeal eye, any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through, and not with it." of his poems; but we can, in a short example, show what we mean by objecting to the disproportion between his ideas and facts: A robin redbreast in a cage A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons This is rather a wild way of saying that One of the most curious studies in criticism concerns the rise and fall of Although this is the side of his character which first fixes our attention, Blake was, after all, not a mere visionary, but had a sharp, observing eye for external nature, and understood perfectly that no one can draw visions well unless he can first draw real things well. He drew well and easily, and he had a quick and clear insight into character. At the age of fourteen his father proposed Pope's poetical ascendancy in the last to bind him as an apprentice to Ryland, the engraver. "Father," he said, "I do not like the man's face; he will live to be hanged." And twelve years afterwards Ryland actually was hanged. He was bound apprentice to Busire, the engraver, and worked hard under him till he was twenty-one years of age. Then he studied in the newly-formed Royal Academy, and began to make original designs, some like those of his friend Stothard, to illustrate books. At the same time he was cultivating poetry. When he was yet fourteen, indeed, he threw off verses of no mean merit, and thenceforward he wrote what, for the time, we must consider very remarkable poems, though, regarding his poetical works as a whole, we cannot share Mr. Gilchrist's surprise that Blake is little known as an English poet. For the most part his poems are wanting in form, or they are difficult to understand, or the sentiment which they convey is out of all proportion to the world of fact. We cannot without long quotations, which no one would much care to read, show the formlessness and the obscurity century. So much has been written upon this theme that it may seem to be now exhausted; but the truth is, that we are not yet in full possession of the facts that would enable us to trace with perfect accuracy the movement either of flow or of ebb. In the middle of last century we find Pope enthroned in our literature with imperial power. So far as we can trace, the first conscious or critical lapsing from his authority-the first open treason is to be found in a work published in 1787 by a young man of twenty-two. Henry Headley, of Trinity College, Oxford, then gave to the world a book of beauties, which he entitled, "Select Beauties of Ancient English Poets, with Remarks." Among these remarks will be found a most determined protest against the influence of Pope. He tells us that the translation of Homer, timed as it was, operated like an inundation on our literature; that the consequences which have ensued from the sway of Pope have been full of harm; that "in proportion as his "works were read and the dazzle of his "diction admired, proselytes, who would 66 66 "not originally have been scribblers in verse, were gained, and the art of tagging smooth couplets, without any "reference to the character of a poet, "became an almost indispensable requi"site in a fashionable education;" that hence arose "a spurious taste" which reprobated and set at defiance our older masters ;" and that "to cull words, vary pauses, adjust accents, diversify cadence, and by, as it were, "balancing the line, make the first part "of it betray the second," had become the chief accomplishment of an age whose poetical art seemed to consist entirely "of a suite of traditional 66 imagery, hereditary similes, readiness "of rhyme, and volubility of syllables." But the revolt thus openly proclaimed by the daring young critic, in 1787, had for some time been secretly fermenting, and it is common in this connexion to fix upon the publication of Percy's "Reliques," in 1765, as the first distinct sign of a change. Now it is universally allowed that the most remarkable specimens in Percy, of what may be termed ballad-thinking, are of Scottish origin; and Mr. Robert Chambers, in a recent tract which has not received the attention it deserves, attempts to make good the position that these famed Scottish ballads are by no means of such ancient origin as Percy imagined; that, in fact, they were produced in the early part of last century. We have not yet examined into this question so closely as to be able to give a decisive answer to it, and we reserve to ourselves the right of hereafter rejecting Mr. Chambers's theory; but in the meantime we cannot help thinking that he has made out a fair case for inquiry. The great difficulty of the question depends on the nature of the evidence which has to be weighed. It turns almost wholly on the delicacies of style and other points of internal evidence, which no cautious critic will care to decide off-hand. To detect and follow out resemblances is always a very ticklish task. The resemblance which strikes us to-day we cannot see tomorrow, and it is necessary to approach the comparison many fresh times before we can quite make up our minds. In this case we start back with astonishment from the conclusion that "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens" is a veritable product of Pope's own day and generation. Yet Mr. Chambers has made out a strong case in favour of that conclusion. And if in accordance with this theory it should in the end prove that some of the best ballads in Percy-those which secured for his three volumes their chief influencewere produced in Scotland at the very time when Pope was in England elaborating his style and establishing his supremacy, it will then follow that the seeds of the revolt against the English poet were being sown at the very same time when his authority began to be planted in the hearts of the people. Parallel with the movement of poetry in England there began a movement of poetry in Scotland. Nothing could be more splendid or self-asserting than the beginnings of the former; nothing more humble and retiring than the beginnings of the latter. But ere long the influence of the unpretending crept into the domain of pretentious song, grew there into favour, at length overthrew the giant, and great was the downfall. Now Blake asserted his originality at a time when it was an extraordinary merit to do so-when as yet the ballad style which Percy favoured had not thoroughly told upon the public ear. Blake was eight years of age when, in 1765 (Mr. Gilchrist is wrong in the date 1760), Percy published his ballads, and he began to write in his eleventh year. His poems show a remarkable precocity, that does not suffer by comparison with the similar precocity of Chatterton, who was but four years ahead of him in age. By the year 1770 Chatterton had done his work and died at the age of seventeen. His younger compeer had begun to compose two years before, and had produced some strains which, for his age, are quite wonderful. The following piece was written certainly before the boy was fourteen, and shows a rare precocity : How sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, Till I the prince of Love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide ! He shew'd me lilies for my hair, With sweet May-dews my wings were wet, He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty. To our thinking the finest verses penned by Blake are those addressed to a tiger; and whoever will read them, remembering the sort of style which was in vogue at the time of their composition, will have no difficulty in detecting in them the notes of a man of true genius. If this be madness, it is that species of it to which all genius is said to be near akin : Tiger, tiger, burning bright In what distant deeps or skies And what shoulder and what art What the hammer, what the chain, When the stars threw down their spears, Did He who made the lamb make thee? Blake, we say, never surpassed these verses, and it is curious that though here we have the true sublime, and though with his pencil he could at any time reach the sublime, yet the more ambitious efforts of his pen are usually the least successful. Sometimes-we must say it, with all deference to the really subtle criticism of Mr. Dante Rossetti he is quite unintelligible; if he is not unintelligible, then he is either enigmatical, or he says common things with a disproportionate ponderosity, not of words, but of images. We gave some examples from the passage in which Blake tells us that a cock-fight "doth the rising sun affright." Here is more in the same style of disproportionate grandeur : Kill not the moth nor butterfly, For the last judgment draweth nigh: The bleat, the bark, bellow and roar, It is when he turns from the sublime and the difficult to the simple and easy, that he shows to best advantage. Witness the following bit of simplicity: Piping down the valleys wild, And he, laughing, said to me: While he wept with joy to hear. In a book, that all may read.' And I stain'd the water clear, Every child may joy to hear. Blake was peculiar in his mode of publication. He engraved his poems, he surrounded each page with drawings to illustrate the text, and he carefully coloured these drawings by hand. His illustrative designs, whether mixed up with the text or drawn on a separate page, are of various degrees of merit and of interest. In every design there is evident the perfect ease of a master. There is no doubt that he could draw well, but frequently he chose to draw impossibilities-heads and legs in impossible attitudes, muscles developed beyond all possible tension. In this he was supposed to resemble Michael Angelo; but the great Italian, if he strained to the utmost degree the appearance of muscular action, never represented actions which the muscles were incapable of performing. Blake often outdid nature in this way. Sometimes, too, he seemed to have no idea of what composition is. The first glance at many of his designs is so far from exciting expectation of any good thing, that it is bewildering. The details of the picture are tossed about in hopeless confusion, which it takes some little time to understand. Yet, notwithstanding these defects, there is scarcely a drawing of Blake's in which close study does not detect rare beauties and suggestions. He was wonderfully suggestive, and it is not without reason that the authors and editors of the present biography attribute to Blake's influence much that is peculiarly impressive in the style both of Flaxman and Stothard. His angels are among the finest things we have ever seen, and his treatment of angelic forms is famous for originality. sense of colour, too, is most remarkable, and receives high praise from a colourist, Mr. Dante Rossetti, than whom no living painter is better able to judge. The painters who are known among us as pre-Raphaelites are most excellent of all in their sense of colour, and Blake may be regarded as the herald and forerunner of the pre-Raphaelite system of colour, "in which tints laid on side by side, "each in its utmost force, are made by "masterly treatment to produce a start"ling and novel effect of truth." Mr. Rossetti admits, however, that now and then an unaccountable perversity may be apparent in Blake's colour, as when a 66 66 His tiger is painted in fantastic streaks of "red, green, blue, and yellow, while a "tree stem at his side tantalizingly supplies the tint which one might "venture to think his due, and is perfect tiger-colour!" A mistake of this kind in colour is more easily detected than 66 one of form, but it is to impossibilities of drawing not less wonderful than the impossibility of colouring a tiger blue. and green that we ventured to refer when just now speaking of the supposed resemblance of his style to that of Michael Angelo. Neither for colouring nor for drawing, however, should Blake be judged by only a few of his works. Much of his art looks like mere nightmare, and oppresses one sometimes with the oppressive hideousness, sometimes with the oppressive loveliness, of night-mare. To understand the man well he ought to be studied as a whole, and his admirers ought to make some attempt to bring his innumerable works together. Then we should see the enormous energy of the man; his prodigious power of invention; how grand and how graceful he could be in design; how spiritual and poetical were all his thoughts and views of life. He is best known by his illustrations to Blair's Grave; but the volumes of coloured designs are even more interesting. Some of these will be found in the Print-room of the British Museum. But still finer examples belong to the collections of Lord Houghton and Captain Butts. In the possession of Captain Butts are three works which we have never seen; but Mr. William Rossetti is a competent judge, we accept his opinion of them without misgiving, and we shall quote that opinion as a remarkable testimony to the wonderworking faculty of Blake's pencil. Mr. Rossetti has made a descriptive catalogue of every one of Blake's works of which he could find a traceno matter how slight; and the three works to which we refer bear in his catalogue respectively the numbers 18, 44, and 54. Here is what Mr. Rossetti says: : ELOHIM CREATING ADAM. The Creator is an amazingly grand figure, worthy of a primeval imagination or intuition. He is struggling, as it were, above Adam, who lies distended on the ground, a serpent twined around one leg. The colour has a terrible power in it; and the entire design is truly a mighty one-perhaps on the whole the greatest monument extant of Blake's genitas.¡ |