How sweet I roam'd from field to field, And tasted all the summer's pride, He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; With sweet May-dews my wings were wet, He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; And mocks my loss of liberty. The This may surely be reckoned equal precocity to that so much lauded of Pope and Cowley. It is not promise, but fulfilment. grown man in vain might hope to better such sweet playfulness,playfulness as of a 'child-angel's' penning-any more than noon can reproduce the tender streaks of dawn. But criticism is idle. How analyse a violet's perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly's wing? from the artist's own lips. It is a more reliable story than Allan Cunningham's pleasant mannered generalities, easy to read, hard to verify. The singular biography to which I allude, is Dr. Malkin's Father's Memoirs of his Child (1806), illustrated by a frontispiece of Blake's design. The Child in question was one of those hapless 'prodigies of learning' who, to quote a good-natured friend and philosopher's consoling words to the poor Doctor,-' commence their career at three, become expert linguists at four, profound philosophers at five, read the Fathers at six, and die of old age at seven.' 'Langford,' writes Malkin, called Blake 'his little connoisseur, and often knocked down a cheap lot with friendly precipitation.' Amiable Langford! The great Italians,-Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano,-the great Germans,-Albert Dürer, Martin Hemskerk,— with others similar, were the exclusive objects of his choice; a sufficiently remarkable one in days when Guido and the Caracci were the gods of the servile crowd. Such a choice was contemned by his youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at what they called his mechanical taste!' 'I am happy,' wrote Blake himself in later life (MS. notes to Reynolds), 'I cannot 'say that Raffaelle ever was from my earliest childhood hidden 'from me. I saw and I knew immediately the difference between 6 Raffaelle and Rubens.' Between the ages of eleven and twelve, if not before, Blake had begun to write original irregular verse; a rarer precocity than that of sketching, and rarer still in alliance with the latter tendency. Poems composed in his twelfth year, came to be included in a selection privately printed in his twenty-sixth. Could we but know which they were! One, by Malkin's help, we can identify as written before he was fourteen the following ethereal piece of sportive Fancy, 'Song' he calls it : How sweet I roam'd from field to field, He shew'd me lilies for my hair, And blushing roses for my brow; With sweet May-dews my wings were wet, He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; And mocks my loss of liberty. This may surely be reckoned equal precocity to that so much lauded of Pope and Cowley. It is not promise, but fulfilment. The grown man in vain might hope to better such sweet playfulness,— playfulness as of a 'child-angel's' penning-any more than noon can reproduce the tender streaks of dawn. But criticism is idle. How analyse a violet's perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly's wing? CHAPTER III. ENGRAVER'S APPRENTICE. 1771-78. [ÆT. 14-21.] THE preliminary charges of launching Blake in the career of a Painter, were too onerous for the paternal pocket; involving for one thing, a heavy premium to some leading artist for instruction under his own roof, then the only attainable, always the only adequate training. The investment, moreover, would not after all be certain of assuring daily bread for the future. English engravers were then taking that high place they are now doing little to maintain. Apprenticeship to one would secure, with some degree of artistic education, the cunning right hand which can always keep want at arm's length: a thing artist and littérateur have often had cause to envy in the skilled artisan. The consideration was not without weight in the eyes of an honest shopkeeper, to whose understanding the prosaic craft would more practically address itself than the vague abstractions of Art, or those shadowy promises of Fame, on which alone a mere artist had too often to feed. Thus it was decided for the future designer, that he should enter the to him enchanted domain of Art by a back door as it were. He is not to be dandled into a Painter, but painfully to win his way to an outside place. Daily through life, he will have to marry his shining dreams to the humblest, most irksome realities of a virtually artisan life. Already it had been decreed that an inspired Poet should be endowed with barely grammar enough to compose with schoolboy accuracy. |