Part 44

"Done!"

The plate was finished; it contained many figures; the parties were mutually delighted, and the affair ended with a tipsy bout, at the Gray's Inn Coffee-house, at the employer's expense.

It was not likely that such an original would be content to sit, year after year, over a sheet of copper, perpetuating the renown of others, whilst possessed of a restless and ardent mind, intent on exploring unknown regions of taste, he could open a way through the intricacies of art, and by a short but eccentric cut reach the Temple of Fame. He set to work, and succeeded to the astonishment of the goddess, who, one day, beheld this new votary unceremoniously resting upon the steps of her altar.

See an able paper in Fraser's Magazine, No. 133.

William Blake, Painter and Poet.

The life of this extraordinary man of genius has been written by Mr. Alexander Gilchrist, with much feeling, judgment, and good taste. Wordsworth was more interested with what he terms Blake's "madness" than with the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott. Fuseli and Flaxman predicted a day when the drawings of Blake should be as much sought after and treasured by artists as those of Michael Angelo. Hayley admired and befriended Blake. He was a true poet, though, as Gilchrist says, "he neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for workyday men at all; rather for children and angels--himself a divine child, whose play-things were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens, and the earth."

Blake was born in 1757, at No. 28, Broad Street, Carnaby Market, where his father carried on the business of a hosier. When a boy he began to dream. When eight or ten years of age, he brought home from Peckham Rye a tale of a tree filled with angels, for doing which his father threatened to thrash him.

In 1767 he was sent to the drawing-school of Mr. Pars, in the Strand, and taught to copy plaster casts after the antique, while his father made a collection of prints for him to study. He had already, too, begun to write poetry. At the age of fourteen he was placed with James Basire, the engraver. His father intended to apprentice him to Ryland, a more famous engraver than Basire. The boy Blake, however, raised an unexpected scruple. "The sequel," says Mr. Gilchrist, "shows it to have been a singular instance, if not of absolute prophetic gift or second sight, at all events of natural intuition into character and power of forecasting the future, from such as is often the endowment of temperament like his. In after-life this involuntary faculty of reading hidden writing continued to be a characteristic. 'Father,' said the strange boy, after the two had left Ryland's studio, 'I do not like the man's face; it looks as if he lived to be hanged!' Appearances were at this time utterly against the probability of such an event." But, twelve years after this interview, the unfortunate Ryland got into embarrassment, committed a forgery on the East India Company, and the prophecy was fulfilled.

By 1773 Blake had begun to draw his own dreams, such as one of Joseph of Arimathea, described by him as "one of the Gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins." In 1783 Blake published, by the help of friends, a small volume of Poetical Sketches, of which here is a specimen:--

"Memory, hither come, And tune your merry notes; And, while upon the wind Your music floats, I'll pore upon the stream Where sighing lovers dream, And fish for fancies as they pass Within the watery glass.

"I'll drink of the clear stream, And hear the linnet's song; And there I'll lie and dream The day along: And, when night comes, I'll go To places fit for woe; Walking along the darkened valley With silent Melancholy."

We pass over Blake's progress in his art, but may remark, from his biographer, that although he drew the Antique with great care, he thus early conceived a distaste for the study as pursued in Academies of Art. "Already 'life,'" says Mr. Gilchrist, "in so factitious, monotonous an aspect of it as that presented by a model artificially posed to enact an artificial part--to maintain in painful rigidity some fleeting gesture of spontaneous Nature's--became, as it continued, 'hateful,' looking to him, laden with thick-coming fancies, 'more like death' than life; nay (singular to say), 'smelling of mortality'--to an imaginative mind! 'Practice and opportunity,' he used afterwards to declare, 'very soon teach the language of art;' as much, that is, as Blake ever acquired, not a despicable if imperfect quantum. 'Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist:' a truism, the fervid poet already began to hold too exclusively in view. Even at their best--as the vision-seer and instinctive Platonist tells us in one of the very last years of his life (MS. notes to Wordsworth)--mere 'Natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me!'"

Blake wrote many songs, to which he also composed tunes, sometimes singularly beautiful; these he would occasionally sing to his friends. His later verse, which he attached to his plates, was very enigmatical. Though he did not for forty years attend any place of divine worship, yet he was not a Freethinker nor irreligious, as has been scandalously represented. The Bible was everything with him. How he reverenced the Almighty, the following conclusion of his address to the Deity will show:--

"For a tear is an intellectual thing; And a sigh is the sword of an Angel King; And the bitter groan of a martyr's woe Is an arrow from the Almighty's bow."

And in his Address to the Christians:--

"I give you the end of a golden string, Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven's gate, Built in Jerusalem's wall."

Blake was a diligent and enthusiastic student. The day he devoted to the graver and the night to poetry; he was utterly indifferent to the goods of this life, and used to say: "My business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes expressing god-like sentiments."

When Blake was twenty-six years of age, he married Catherine Boutcher, who lived near his father's house, and was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hands, the brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his own notions of sylphs and naiads. His marriage proved a mutually happy one. She had not learned to write, but Blake instructed his "beloved," as he most frequently called her, and allowed her till the last moments of his practice to take off his proof impressions and print his works, which she did most carefully, and ever delighted in the task; nay, she became a draughtswoman. And as a convincing proof that she and her husband were born for each other's comfort, she not only cheerfully entered into his views, but, what is curious, possessed a similar power of imbibing ideas, and produced drawings equally original, and in some respects, interesting. She almost rivalled him in all things, save in the power of seeing visions of any individual living or dead, whenever he chose to see them. Yet, she joined him in other extravagances. The painter and Mrs. Blake one day received a guest in their arbour in a state of nakedness, to whom they calmly declared that they were Adam and Eve!

In his thirtieth year, Blake annotated the Aphorisms of Lavater, and illustrated his own poems, The Songs of Innocence and of Experience. These, with the illustrations to Blair's Grave, to the Book of Job, and the plate of the Canterbury Pilgrimage--are the works of Blake by which he is best known. He was his own printer and publisher. His deceased brother and pupil, Robert Blake, disclosed to him in a dream by what manner of process his purpose could be brought to pass and the last half-crown he possessed was spent by Mrs. Blake to procure the materials. Their manner of manipulation was revealed to him by "Joseph, the sacred carpenter."

One of the most touching and popular of The Songs of Innocence was "The Chimney Sweeper:"

"When my mother died I was very young And my father sold me while yet my tongue Could scarcely cry--weep! weep! weep! So your chimneys I clean and in soot I sleep.

"There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head That curl'd like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said, Hush, Tom, never mind it, for when your head's bare, You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.

"And so he was quiet--and on that very night, As Tommy was sleeping, he had such a sight; There thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

"And by came an Angel, who had a bright key, He opened the coffins and set them all free; Then down a green vale, leaping, laughing they run, And wash in a river, and shine like the sun.

"Then, naked and white, all their bags left behind, They rise up on pure clouds and sport in the wind: And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy, He'd have God for his father and never want joy.

"And so Tommy awoke and we rose in the dark, And got with our bags and our brushes to work; Though the morning was cold, he was happy and warm, So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm."

In 1800, the Blakes were invited by Hayley to visit him at Felpham, in Sussex, under the idea of providing the artist with occupation and emolument. Upon this occasion Blake wrote thus to Flaxman:--

"Dear Sculptor of Eternity,--We are safe arrived at our cottage, which is more beautiful than I thought it, and more convenient. It is a perfect model for cottages, and I think for palaces of magnificence, only enlarging--not altering its proportions, and adding ornaments and not principles. Nothing can be more grand than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple without intricacy, it seems to be the spontaneous expression of humanity congenial to the wants of men. No other formed house can ever please me so well, nor shall I ever be persuaded, I believe, that it can be improved either in beauty or use. Mr. Hayley received us with his usual brotherly affection. I have begun to work. Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen; and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses. My wife and sister are both well, courting Neptune for an embrace.