Pictor Ignotus

HUMAN nature is impatient of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained to belong, a new rank shall be created to receive it, rather than that it shall be left to roam up and down, baffling, defiant, and alone. Indeed, so great is our abhorrence of outlying, unclassified facts, that we are often ready to accept classification for explanation ; and having given our mystery a niche and a name, we cease any longer to look upon it as mysterious. The village-schoolmaster, who displayed his superior knowledge to the rustics gazing at an eclipse of the sun by assuring them that it was “ only a phenomenon,” was but one of a great host of wiseacres who stand ready with brush and paint-pot to label every new development, and fancy that in so doing they have abundantly answered every reasonable inquiry concerning cause, character, and consequence.

When William Blake flashed across the path of English polite society, society was confounded. It had never had to do with such an apparition before, and was at its wits’ end. But some Daniel was found wise enough to come to judgment, and pronounce the poet-painter mad; whereupon society at once composed itself, and went on its way rejoicing.

There are a few persons, however, who are not disposed to let this verdict stand unchallenged. Mr. Arthur Gilchrist, late a barrister of the Middle Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously and ably opposed the theory of insanity. From this book, chiefly, we propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions of his own or of any age.

One word, in the beginning, regarding the book before us. The death of its author, while as yet but seven chapters of his work had been printed, would preclude severe criticism, even if the spirit and purpose with which he entered upon his undertaking, and which he sustained to its close, did not dispose us to look leniently upon imperfections of detail. Possessing that first requisite of a biographer, thorough sympathy with his subject, he did not fall into the opposite error of indiscriminate panegyric. Looking at life from the standpoint of the “madman,” he saw how fancies could not only appear, but be, facts ; and then, crossing over, he looked at the madman from the world’s standpoint, and saw how these soul-born facts could seem not merely fancies, but the wild vagaries of a crazed brain. For the warmth with which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our gratitude. But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the greater is our regret for superficial defects. The continued oversight of the author would doubtless have removed many infelicities of style; yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so complicated and so obscure. The worst faults of Miss Sheppard’s worst style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had no part nor lot. Not unfrequently a sentence is a conglomerate in which the ideas to he conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at arrangement, unity, or completeness. Surely, it need bo no presumptuous, but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.

To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few sentences, taken at random from the memoir : —

“ Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired.”

“ The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again : seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those least practised now.”

“ In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade’s version of his own inventions — as to motive and composition his own, that is.”

“ And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country.”

Let us now go back a hundred years, to the time when William Blake was a fair-haired, smooth-browed boy, wandering aimlessly, after the manner of boys, about the streets of London. It might seem at first a matter of regret that a soul full of all glowing and glorious fannies should have been consigned to the damp and dismal did ness of that crowded city; but, in truth, nothing could be more fit. To this affluent, creative mind dinginess and dimness were not. Through the grayest gloom golden palaces rose before him, silver pavements shone beneath his feet, jewelled gates unfolded on golden hinges turning, and he wandered forth into a fair country. What need of sunshine and bloom for one who saw in the deepest darkness a “ light that never was on sea or land ” ? Rambling out into the pleasant woods of Dulwich, through the green meadows of Walton, by the breezy heights of Sydenham, bands of angels attended him. They walked between the toiling haymakers, they hovered above him in the apple-boughs, and their bright wings shone like stars. Tor him there was neither awe nor mystery, only delight. Angels were no more unnatural than apples. But the honest hosier, his father, took different views. Never in all his life had that worthy citizen beheld angels perched on tree-tops, and he was only prevented from administering to his son a sound thrashing for the absurd falsehood by the intercession of his mother. Ah, these mothers ! By what fine sense is it that they detect the nascent genius for which man’s coarse perception can find no better name than perverseness, and no wiser treatment than brute force ?

The boy had much reason to thank his mother,for to her intervention it was doubtless largely due that he was left to follow his bent, and haunt such picture-galleries as might be found in noblemen’s houses and public sale-rooms. There he feasted his bodily eyes on earthly beauty, as his mental gaze had been charmed with heavenly visions. From admiration to imitation was but a step, and the little hands soon began to shape such rude, but loving copies as Raffaelle, with tears in his eyes, must have smiled to see. His father, moved by motherly persuasions, as we can easily infer, bought him casts finmodels, that he might continue his drawing-lessons at home ; his own small allowance of pocket-money went for prints; his wistful child-face presently became known to dealers, and many a cheap lot was knocked down to him with amiable haste by friendly auctioneers. Then and there began that life-long love and loyalty to the grand old masters of Germany and Italy, to Albrecht Dürer, to Michel Angelo, to Rafiaelle, which knew no diminution, and which, in its very commencement, revealed the eclecticism of true genius, because the giants were not the gods in those days.

But there came a time when Pegasus must be broken in to drudgery, and travel along trodden ways. By slow, it cannot be said by toilsome ascent, the young student had reached the vestibule of the temple ; but

“ Every door was barred with gold, and opened but to golden keys,”

which, alas! to him were wanting. Nothing daunted, his sincere soul preferred to be a doorkeeper in the house of his worship rather than a dweller in the tents of Mammon. Unable to he an artist, he was content for the time to become an artisan, and chose to learn engraving, — a craft which would keep him within sight and sound of the heaven from which he was shut out. Application was first made to Ryland, then in the zenith of his fame, engraver to the King, friend of authors and artists, himself a graceful, accomplished, and agreeable gentleman. But the marvellous eyes that pierced through mortal gloom to immortal glory saw also the darkness that brooded behind uncanny light. “ I do not like the man’s face,” said young Blake, as he was leaving the shop with his father; “ it looks as if he will live to be hanged.” The negotiation failed; Blake was apprenticed to Basire; and twelve years after, the darkness that had lain so long in ambush came out and hid the day : Ryland was hanged.

His new master, Basire, was one of those workmen who magnify their office and make it honorable. The most distinguished of four generations of Basires, engravers, he is represented as a superior, liberal-minded, upright man, and a kind master. With him Blake served out his seven years of apprenticeship, as faithful, painstaking, and industrious as any blockhead. So great was the confidence which he secured, that, month after month, and year after year, he was sent out alone to Westminster Abbey and the various old churches in the neighborhood, to make drawings from the monuments, with no oversight but that of his own taste and his own conscience. And a inch reward we may well suppose his integrity brought him, in the charming solitudes of those old-time sanctuaries. Wandering up and down the consecrated aisles, — eagerly peering through the dim, religious light for the beautiful forms that had leaped from many a teeming brain now turned to dust,—reproducing, with patient hand, graceful outline and deepening shadow,—his daring, yet reverent heart held high communion with the ages that were gone. The Spirit of the Past overshadowed him. The grandeur of Gothic symbolism rose before him. Voices of dead centuries murmured low music down the fretted vault. Fair ladies and brave gentlemen came up from the solemn chambers where they had lain so long in silent state, and smiled with their olden grace. Shades of nameless poets, who had wrought their souls into a cathedral and died unknown and unhonored, passed before the dreaming boy, and claimed their immortality. Nay, once the Blessed Face shone through the cloistered twilight, and the Twelve stood roundabout. In this strange solitude and stranger companionship many an old problem untwined its Gordian knot, and whispered along its loosened ength, —

To an engraving of “ Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion,” executed at this time, he appends,—“ This is one of the Gothic artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins ; of whom the world was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages.”

Yet, somewhere, through mediæval gloom and modern din, another spirit breathed upon him, — a spirit of green woods and blue waters, the freshness of May mornings, the prattle of tender infancy, the gambols of young lambs on the hill-side. From his childhood, Poetry walked hand in hand with Painting, and beguiled bis loneliness with wild, sweet harmonies. Bred up amid the stately, measured, melodious platitudes of the eighteenth century, that Golden Age of commonplace, he struck down through them all with simple, untaught, unconscious directness, and smote the spring of ever-living waters. Such wood-notes wild as trill in Sbakspeare’s verse sprang from the stricken chords beneath bis hand. The little singing-birds that seem almost to have leaped unbidden into life among the gross creations of those old Afreets who

carolled their clear, pure lays to him, and left a quivering echo. Fine, fleeting fapiasies we have, a tender, heartfelt, heart-reaching pathos, laughter that might at any moment tremble into tears, eternal truths, draped, in the garb of quaint and simple story, solemn fervors, subtile sympathies, and the winsomeness of little children at their play, — sometimes glowing with the deepest color, often just tinged to the pale and changing hues of a dream, but touched with such coy grace, modulated to such free, wild rhythm, suffused with such a delicate, evanishing loveliness, that they seem scarcely to be the songs of our tangible earth, but snatches from fairy-land. Often rude in form, often defective in rhyme, and not unfrequently with even graver faults than these, their ruggedness cannot hide the gleam of the sacred fire. “ The Spirit of the Age,” moulding her pliant poets, was wiser than to meddle with this sterner stuff. From what hidden cave in Rare Ben Jonson’s realm did the boy bring such an opal as this

SONG.

What could the Spirit of the Age hope to do with a boy scarcely yet in his teens, who dared arraign her in such fashion as is set forth in his address

TO THE MUSES.

Whereabouts in its Elegant Extracts would a generation that strung together sonorous couplets, and compiled them into a book to Enforce the Practice of Virtue, place such a ripple of verse as this ? —

A native of the jungle, leaping into the fine drawing-rooms of Cavendish Square, would hardly create more commotion than such a poem as “ The Tiger,” charging in among Epistles to the Earl of Dorset, Elegies describing the Sorrow of an Ingenuous Mind, Odes innumerable to Memory, Melancholy, Music, Independence, and all manner of odious themes.

Mrs. Montagu, by virtue of the “ moral ” in the last line, may possibly have ventured to read the “ Chimney-Sweeper ” at her annual festival to those swart little people ; but we have not space to give the gem a setting here ; nor the “ Little Black Boy,” with its matchless, sweet child - sadness. Indeed, scarcely one of these early poems — all written between the ages of eleven and twenty — is without its peculiar, and often its peerless charm.

Arrived at the age of twenty-one, he finished his apprenticeship to Basire, and began at once the work and worship of his life, — the latter by studying at the Royal Academy, the former by engraving for the booksellers. Introduced by a brother-artist to Flaxman, he joined him in furnishing designs for the famous Wedgwood porcelain, and so one dinnerset gave bread and butter to genius, and nightingales’ tongues to wealth. That he was not a docile, though a very devoted pupil, is indicated by his reply to Moser, the keeper, who came to him, as he was looking over prints from his beloved Raffaelle and Michel Angelo, and said, “You should not study these old, hard, stiff, and dry, unfinished works of Art: stay a little, and I will show you what you should study.” He brought down Le Brun and Rubens. “ How did I secretly rage!” says Blake. “ I also spake my mind ! I said to Moser, ‘These things that you call finished are not even begun; how, then, can they be finished ?’” The reply of the startled teacher is not recorded. In other respects, also, he swerved from Academical usage. Nature, as it appeared in models artificially posed to enact an artificial part, became hateful to him, seemed to him a caricature of Nature, though he delighted in the noble antique figures.

Nature soon appeared to him in another shape, and altogether charming. A lively miss to whom he had paid court showed herself cold to his advances ; which circumstance he was one evening bemoaning to a dark-eyed, handsome girl, —(a dangerous experiment, by the way,) — who assured him that she pitied him from her heart. “ Do you pity me ? ” he eagerly asked. “ Yes, I do, most sincerely.” “ Then I love you for that,” replied the new Othello to his Desdemona; and so well did the wooing go that the dark-eyed Catharine presently became his wife, the Kate of a forty-five years’ marriage. Loving, devoted, docile, she learned to be helpmeet and companion. Never, on the one side, murmuring at the narrow fortunes, nor, on the other, losing faith in the greatness to which she had bound herself, she not only ordered well her small household, but drew herself up within the range of her husband’s highest sympathy. She learned to read and write, and to work off his engravings. Nay, love became for her creative, endowed her with a new power, the vision and the faculty divine, and she presently learned to design with a spirit and a grace hardly to be distinguished from her husband’s. No children came to make or mar their harmony ; and from the summer morning in Battersea that placed her hand in his, to the summer evening in London that loosed it from his dying grasp, she was the true angel-vision, Heaven’s own messenger to the dreaming poet-painter.

Being the head of a family, Blake now, as was proper, went into “society.” And what a society it was to enter ! And what a man was Blake to enter it! The society of President Reynolds, and Mr. Mason the poet, and Mr. Sheridan the play-actor, and pompous Hr. Burney, and abstract Dr. Delap, — all honorable men ; a society that was dictated to by Dr. Johnson, and delighted by Edmund Burke, and sneered at by Horace Walpole, its untiring devotee : a society presided over by Mrs. Montagu, whom Dr. Johnson dubbed Queen of the Blues ; Mrs. Carter, borrowing, by right of years, her matron’s plumes ; Mrs. Chapone, sensible, ugly, and benevolent; the beautiful Mrs. Sheridan; the lively, absurd, incisive Mrs. Chohnondeley; sprightly, witty Mrs. Thrale ; and Hannah More, coiner of guineas, both as saint and sinner : a most piquant, trenchant, and entertaining society it was, and well might be, since the bullion of genius was so largely wrought into the circulating medium of small talk ; but a society which, from sheer lack of vision, must have entertained its angels unawares. Such was the current which caught up this simple-hearted painter, this seer of unutterable things, this “ eternal child,”— caught him up only to drop him, with no creditable, but with very credible haste. As a lion, he was undoubtedly thrice welcome in Rathbdne Place; butwhen it was found that the lion would not roar there gently, nor be bound by their silken strings, but rather shook his mane somewhat contemptuously at his would-be tamers, and kept, in their grand saloons, his freedom of the wilderness, he was straightway suffered to return to his fitting solitudes. One may imagine the consternation that would be caused by this young fellow turning to Mrs. Carter, whose “talk was all instruction,” or to Mrs. Chapone, bent on the “ improvement of the mind,” or to Miss Streatfield, with her “ nose and notions àlaGrecque,” and abruptly inquiring, “ Madam, did you ever see a fairy’s funeral ? ” “ Never, Sir ! ” responds the startled Muse. “ I have,” pursues Blake, as calmly as if he were proposing to relate a bon mot which he heard at Lady Middleton’s rout last night. “ I was walking alone in my garden last night: there was great stillness among the branches and flowers, and more than common sweetness in the air. I heard a low and pleasant sound, and knew not whence it came. At last I saw the broad leaf of a flower move, and underneath I saw a procession of creatures of the size and color of green and gray grasshoppers, bearing a body laid out on a rose-leaf, which they buried with songs, and then disappeared. It was a fairy funeral.” Or they are discussing, somewhat pompously, Herschel’s late discovery of Uranus, and the immense distances of heavenly bodies, when Blake bursts out uproariously, “ ’T is false! I was walking down a lane the other day, and at the end of it I touched the sky with my stick.” Truly, for this wild man, who obstinately refuses to let his mind be regulated, but bawls out his mad visions the louder, the more they are combated, there is nothing for it but to go back to his Kitty, and the little tenement in Green Street.

But real friends Blake found, who, if they could not quite understand him, could love and honor and assist. Flaxman, the “ Sculptor for Eternity,” and Fuseli, the fiery-hearted Swiss painter, stood up for him manfully. His own younger brother, Robert, shared his talents, and became for a time a loved and honored member of his family,—too much honored, if we may credit an anecdote in which the brother appears to much better advantage than the husband. A dispute hawing one day arisen between Robert and Mrs. Blake, Mr. Blake, after a while, deemed her to have gone too far, and bade her kneel down and beg Robert’s pardon, or never see her husband’s face again. Nowise convinced, she nevertheless obeyed the stern command, and acknowledged herself in the wrong. “ Young woman, you lie ! ” retorted Robert ; “I am in the wrong!” This beloved brother died at the age of twenty-five. During his last illness, Blake attended him with the most affectionate devotion, nor ever left the bedside till he beheld the disembodied spirit leave the frail clay and soar heavenward, clapping its hands for joy !

His brother gone, though not so far away that he did not often revisit the old home,—friendly Flaxman in Italy, but more inaccessible there than Robert in the heaven which lay above this man in his perpetual infancy, — the bas-bleus reinclosed in the charmed circle in which Blake had so riotously disported himself, a small attempt at partnership, shopkeeping, and money-making, wellnigh “dead before it was born,”—the poet began to think of publishing. The verses of which we have spoken had been seen but by few people, and the store was constantly increasing. Influence with the publishers, and money to defray expenses, were alike wanting. A copy of Lavater’s “ Aphorisms,” translated by his fellow-countryman, Fuseli, had received upon its margins various annotations which reveal the man in his moods. “ The great art to love your enemy consists in never losing sight of man in him,” says Lavater. “ None can see the man in the enemy,” pencils Blake. “ If he is ignorantly so, he is not truly an enemy ; if maliciously so, not a man. I cannot love my enemy; for my enemy is not a man, but a beast. And if I have any, I can love him as a beast, and wish to beat him.” No equivocation here, surely. On superstition he comments, — “ It has been long a bugbear, by reason of its having been united with hypocrisy. But let them be fairly separated, and then superstition will be honest feeling, and God, who loves all honest men, will lead the poor enthusiast in the path of holiness.” Herein lies the germ of a truth. Again, Lavater says,—“ A great woman not imperious, a fair woman not vain, a woman of common talents not jealous, an accomplished woman who scorns to shine, are four wonders just great enough to be divided among the four corners of the globe.” Whereupon Blake adds, — “ Let the men do their duty, and the women will be such wonders ; the female life lives from the life of the male. See a great many female dependents, and you know the man.” If this be madness, would that the madman might have bitten all mankind before he died ! To the advice, “ Take here the grand secret, if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none: court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion,” he appends, with an evident reminiscence of Rathbone Place, “ And go to hell.”

But this private effervescence was not enough ; and long thinking anxiously as to ways and means, suddenly, in the night, Robert stood before him, and revealed to him a secret by which a facsimile of poetry and design could be produced. On rising in the morning, Mrs. Blake was sent out with a half-crown to buy the necessary materials, and with that he began an experiment which resulted in furnishing his principal means of support through life. It consisted in a species of engraving in relief both of the words and the designs of his poems, by a process peculiar and original. From his plates he printed off in any tint he chose, afterwards coloring up his designs by hand. Joseph, the sacred carpenter, had appeared in a vision, and revealed to him certain secrets of coloring. Mrs. Blake delighted to assist him in taking impressions, which she did with great skill, in tinting the designs, and in doing up the pages in boards; so that everything, except manufacturing the paper, was done by the poet and his wife. Never before, as his biographer justly remarks, was a man so literally the author of his own book. If we may credit the testimony that is given, or even judge from such proofs as Mr. Gilchrist’s book can furnish, these works of his hands were exquisitely beautiful. The effect of the poems imbedded in their designs is, we are told, quite different from their effect set naked upon a blank page. It was as if he had transferred scenery and characters from that spirit-realm where his own mind wandered at will; and from wondrous lips wondrous words came fitly, and with surpassing power. Confirmation of this we find in the few plates of “ Songs of Innocence ” which have been recovered. Shorn of the radiant rainbow hues, the golden sheen, with which the artist, angel-taught, glorified his pictures, they still body for us the beauty of his “ Happy Valley.” Children revel there in unchecked play. Springing vines, in wild exuberance of life, twine around the verse, thrusting their slender coils in among the lines. Weeping willows dip their branches into translucent pools. Heavy-laden trees droop their ripe, rich clusters overhead. Under the shade of broad-spreading oaks little children climb on the tiger’s yielding back and stroke the lion’s tawny mane in a true Millennium.

The first series, “ Songs of Innocence,” was succeeded by “ Songs of Experience,” subsequently bound in one volume, Then came the book of “ Thel,” an allegory, wherein Thel, beautiful daughter of the Seraphim, laments the shortness of her life down by the River of Adona, and is answered by the Lily of the Valley, the Little Cloud, the Lowly Worm, and the Clod of Clay ; the burden of whose song is —

The designs give the beautiful daughter listening to the Lily and the Cloud. The Clod is an infant wrapped in a lily-leaf. The effect of the whole poem and design together is as of an “ angel’s reverie.”

The “ Marriage of Heaven and Hell ” is considered one of the most curious and original of his works. After an opening “Argument” comes a series of “ Proverbs of Hell,” which, however, answer very well for earth : as, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees ” ; “ He whose face gives no light shall never become a star”; “The apple-tree never asks the beech how he shall grow, nor the lion the horse how he shall take his prey.” The remainder of the book consists of “Memorable Fancies,” half dream, half allegory, sublime and grotesque inextricably commingling, but all ornamented with designs most daring and imaginative in conception, and steeped in the richest color. We subjoin a description of one or two, as a curiosity.

“ A strip of azure sky surmounts, and of land divides, the words of the title-page, leaving on each side scant and baleful trees, little else than stem and spray. Drawn on a tiny scale lies a corpse, and one bends over it. Flames burst fbrth below and slant upward across the page, gorgeous with every hue. In their verv core, two spirits rush together and embrace.” In the seventh design is “a little island of the sea, where an infant springs to its mother’s bosom. From the birth-cleft ground a spirit has half emerged. Below, with outstretched arms and hoary beard, an awful, ancient man rushes at you, as it were, out of the page.” The eleventh is “ a surging of mingled fire, water, and blood, wherein roll the volumes of a huge, double-fanged serpent, his crest erect, his jaws wide open.” “The ever-fluctuating color, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters, the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as it you had been handling something sentient.”

We have not space to give a description, scarcely even a catalogue, of Blake’s numerous works. Wild, fragmentary, gorgeous dreams they are, tangled in with strange allegoric words and designs, that throb with their prisoned vitality. The energy, the might, the intensity of his lines and figures it is impossible for words to convey. It is power in the fiercest, most eager action, — fire and passion, the madness and the stupor of despair, the frenzy of desire, the lurid depths of woe, that thrill and rivet you even in the comparatively lifeless rendering of this book. The mere titles of the poems give but a slight clue to their character. Ideas are upheaved in a tossing surge of words. It is a mystic, but lovely Utopia, into which “ The Gates of Paradise ” open. The practical name of “ America ” very faintly foreshadows the Ossianic Titans that glide across its pages, or the tricksy phantoms, the headlong spectres, the tongues of flame, the folds and fangs of symbolic serpents, that writhe and leap and dart and riot there. With a poem named “ Europe,” we should scarcely expect tor a frontispiece the Ancient of Days, in unapproached grandeur, setting his “ compass upon the face of the Earth,” — a vision revealed to the designer at the top of his own staircase.

Small favor and small notice these works secured from the public, which found more edification in the drunken courtship arid brutal squabbles of “ the First Gentleman of Europe” than in Songs of Innocence or Sculptures for Eternity. The poet’s own friends constituted his public, and patronized him to the extent of their power. The volume of Songs he sold for thirty shillings and two guineas. Afterwards, with the delicate and loving design of helping the artist, who would receive help in no other way, five and even ten guineas were paid, for which sum he could hardly do enough, finishing off each picture like a miniature. One solitary patron he had, Mr. Thomas Butts, who, buying his pictures for thirty years, and turning his own house into “ a perfect Blake Gallery, often supplied the painter with his sole means of subsistence.” May he have his reward ! Most pathetic is an anecdote related by Mr. H. C. Robinson, who found himself one morning sole visitor at an Exhibition which Blake had opened, on his own account, at his brother James’s house. In view of the fact that he had bought four copies of the Descriptive Catalogue, Mr. Robinson inquired of James, the custodian, if he might not come again free. “ Oh, yes ! free as long as you lice ! ” was the reply of the humble hosier, overjoyed at having so munificent a visitor, or a visitor at all.

We have a sense of incongruity in seeing this defiant, but sincere pencil employed by publishers to illustrate the turgid sorrow of Young’s “ Night Thoughts.” The work was to have been issued in parts, but got no farther than the first. (It would have been no great calamity, if the poem itself had come to the same premature end !) The sonorous mourner could hardly have recognized himself in the impersonations in which he was presented, nor his progeny in the concrete objects to which they were reduced. The well-known couplet,

is represented by hours “ drawn as aërial and shadowy beings,” some of whom are bringing their scrolls to the inquirer, and others are carrying their records to heaven.

has a lovely figure, holding a lyre, and springing into the air, but confined by a chain to the earth. Death puts off his skeleton, and appears as a solemn, draped figure; but in many cases the clerical poet is “taken at his word,” with a literalness more startling than dignified.

Introduced by Flaxman to Hayley, friend and biographer of Cow per, favorably known to his contemporaries, though now wellnigh forgotten, Blake was invited to Felpham, and began there a new life. It is pleasant to look back upon this period. Itayley, the kindly, generous, vain, imprudent, impulsive country squire, not at all excepting himself in bis love for mankind, pouring forth sonnets on the slightest provocation, — indeed, so given over to the vice of verse, that

His mouth but out there flew a trope,” — floating with the utmost self-complacence down the smooth current of his time ; and Blake, sensitive, unique, protestant, impracticable, aggressive: it was a rare freak of Fate that brought, about such companionship; yet so true courtesy was there that for four years they lived and wrought harmoniously together,—Hayley pouring out his harmless wish-wash, and Blake touching it with his fiery gleam. Their joint efforts were hardly more pecuniarily productive than Blake’s singlehanded struggles; but his life there bad other and better fruits. In the little cottage overlooking the sea, fanned by the pure breeze, and smiled upon by sunshine of the hills, he tasted rare spiritual joy. Throwing off mortal incumbrance, — never, indeed, an overweight to him,— he revelled in his clairvoyance. The lights that shimmered across the sea shone from other worlds. The purple of the gathering darkness was the curtain of God’s tabernacle. Gray shadows of the gloaming assumed mortal shapes, and he talked with Moses and the prophets, and the old heroes of song. The Ladder of Heaven was firmly fixed by his gardengate, and the angels ascended and descended. A letter written to Flaxman, soon after his arrival at Felpham, is so characteristic that we cannot refrain from transcribing it: —

“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 man. 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 vapors ; 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.

“ Our journey was very pleasant; and though we had a great deal of luggage, no grumbling. All was cheerfulness and good-humor on the road, and yet we could not arrive at our cottage before half-past eleven at night, owing to the necessary shifting of our luggage from one chaise to another; for we had seven different chaises, and as many different drivers. We set out between six and seven in the morning of Thursday, with sixteen heavy boxes and portfolios full of prints.

“ And now begins a new life, because another covering of earth is shaken off.

I am more famed in heaven for mv works than I could well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old, which I wrote and painted in ages of Eternity, before my mortal life, and those works are the delight and study of archangels. Why, then, should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality ? The Lord our Father will do for ns and with us according to his Divine will, for our good.

“ You, O dear Flaxman, are a sublime archangel, — my friend and companion from Eternity. In the Divine bosom is our dwelling-place. I look back into the regions of reminiscence, and behold our ancient days, before this earth appeared in its vegetated mortality to my mortal vegetated eyes. I see our houses of eternity, which can never be separated, though our mortal vehicles should stand at the remotest corners of heaven from each other.

“ Farewell, my best friend ! Remember me and my wife in love and friendship to our dear Mrs. Flaxman, whom we ardently desire to entertain beneath our thatched roof of rusted gold. And believe me forever to remain your grateful and affectionate

“WILLIAM BLAKE.”

Other associations than spiritual ones mingle with the Felpham sojourn. A drunken soldier one day broke into his garden, and, being great of stature, despised the fewer inches of the owner. But between spirits of earth and spirits of the skies there is but one issue to the conflict, and Blake “ laid hold of the intrusive blackguard, and turned him out neck and crop, in a kind of inspired frenzy.” The astonished ruffian made good his retreat, but in revenge reported sundry words that exasperation had struck from his conqueror. The result was a trial for high treason at the next Quarter Sessions. Friends gathered about him, testifying to his previous character ; nor was Blake himself at all dismayed. When the soldiers trumped up their false charges in court, he did not scruple to cry out, “False!” with characteristic and convincing vehemence. Had this trial occurred at the present day, it would hardly be necessary to say that he was triumphantly acquitted. But fifty years ago such a matter wore a graver aspect. In his early life he had been an advocate of the French Revolution, an associate of Price, Priestley, Godwin, and Tom Paine, a wearer of white cockade and bonnet rouge. He had even been instrumental in saving Tom Paine’s life, by hurrying him to France, when the Government was on Ins track; but all this was happily unknown to the Chichester lawyers, and Blake, more fortunate than some of his contemporaries, escaped the gallows.

The disturbance caused by this untoward incident, the repeated failures of literary attempts, the completion of Cowper’s Life, which had been the main object of his coming, joined, doubtless, to a surfeit of Hayley, induced a return to London. He feared, too, that his imaginative faculty was failing. “ The visions were angry with me at Felpham,” he used afterwards to say. We regret to see, also, that he seems not always to have been in the kindest of moods towards his patron. Indeed, it was a weakness of bis to fall out occasionally with his best friends; but when a man is waited upon by angels and ministers of grace, it is not surprising that, he should sometimes be impatient with mere mortals. Nor is it difficult to imagine that the bland and trivial Hayley, perpetually kind, patronizing, and obvious, should, without any definite provocation, become presently insufferable to such a man as Blake.

Returned to London, he resumed the production of his oracular works,prophetic books,” he called them. These he illustrated with his own peculiar and beautiful designs, “ all sanded over with a sort of golden mist.” Among much that is incoherent and incomprehensible may be found passages of great force, tenderness, and beauty. The concluding verses of the Preface to “ Milton ” we quote, as shadowing forth his great moral purpose, and as revealing also the luminous heart of the cloud that so often turns to us only its gray and obseure exterior : —

The same lofty aim is elsewhere expressed in the line,—

“ I touch the heavens as an instrument to glorify the Lord! ”

Our rapidly diminishing space warns us to be brief, and we can only glarvce at a few of the remaining incidents of this outwardly calm, yet inwardly eventful life. In an evil hour—though to it we owe the “ Illustrations to Blair’s Grave ” — he fell into the hands of Cromek, the shrewd Yorkshire publisher, and was tenderly entreated, as a dove in the talons of a kite. The famous letter of Cromek to Blake is one of the finest examples on record of long-headed worldliness bearing down upon wrong-headed genius. Though clutching the palm in this case, and in some others, it is satisfactory to know that Cromek’s clever turns led to no other end than poverty ; and nothing worse than poverty had Blake, with all his simplicity, to encounter. But Blake, in his poverty, had meat to eat which the wily publisher knew not of.

In the wake of this failure followed another. Blake had been engaged to make twenty drawings to illustrate Ambrose Philips’s “ Virgil’s Pastorals ” for schoolboys. The publishers saw them, and stood aghast, declaring he must do no more. The engravers received them with derision, and pronounced sentence, “This will never do.” Encouraged, however, by the favorable opinion of a few artists who saw them, the publishers admitted, with an apology, the seventeen which had already been executed, and gave the remaining three into more docile hands. Of the. two hundred and thirty cuts, the numby-pambyism, which was thought to be the only thing adapted to the capacity of children, has sunk to the level of its worthlessness, and the book now is valued only for Blake’s small contribution.

Of an entirely different nature were the “ Inventions from the Book of Job,” which are pronounced the most remarkable series of etchings on a Scriptural theme that have been produced since the days of Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer. Of these drawings we have copies in the second volume of the “ Life,” from which one can gather something of their grandeur, their bold originality, their inexhaustible and often terrible power. His representations of God the Father will hardly accord with modern taste, which generally eschews all attempt to embody the mind’s conceptions of the Supreme Being; but Blake was far more closely allied to the ancient than to the modern world. His portraiture and poetry often remind us of the childlike familiarity — not rude in him, but utterly reverent — which was frequently, and sometimes offensively, displayed in the old miracle and moral plays.

These drawings, during the latter part of bis life, secured him from actual want. A generous friend, Mr. Linnell, himself a struggling young artist, gave him a commission, and paid him a small weekly stipend: it was sufficient to keep the wolf from tlie door, and that was enough: so the wolf was kept away, his lintel was uncrossed ’gainst angels. It was little to this piper that the public had no ear for his piping, — to this painter, that there was no eye for his pictures.

“ His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.” He had but to withdraw to bis inner chamber, and all honor and recognition awaited him. The pangs of poverty or coldness he never experienced, for his life was on a higher plane: —

When a little girl of extraordinary beauty was brought to him, his kindest wish, as he stood stroking her long ringlets, was, “May God make this world to you, my child, as beautiful as it has been to me ! ” His own testimony declares,—

But much help from above came to him. The living lines that sprung beneath his pencil were but reminiscences of his spiritual home. Immortal visitants, unseen by common eyes, hung enraptured over his sketches, lent a loving ear to his songs, and left with him their legacy to Earth. There was no looking back mournfully on the past, nor forward impatiently to the future, but a rapturous, radiant, eternal now. Every morning came heavyfreighted with its own delights ; every evening brought its own exceeding great reward.

So, refusing to the last to work in traces,— flying out against Reynolds, the bland and popular President of the Royal Academy, yet acknowledging with enthusiasm what he deemed to be excellence,— loving Fuseli with a steadfast love through all neglect, and hurling his indignation at a public that refused to see his worth, — flouting at Bacon, the great philosopher, and fighting for Barry, the restorer of the antique, he resolutely pursued his appointed way unmoved. But the day was fast drawing on into darkness. The firm will never quailed, but the sturdy feet faltered. Yet, as the sun went down, soft lights overspread the heavens. Young men came to him with fresh hearts, and drew out all the freshness of his own. Little children learned to watch for his footsteps over the Hampstead hills, and sat on his knee, sunning him with their caresses. Men who towered above their time, reverencing the god within, and bowing not down to the dcemon àla mode, gathered around him, listened to his words, and did obeisance to his genius. They never teased him with unsympathetic questioning, or enraged him with blunt contradiction. They received his visions simply, and discussed them rationally, deeming them worthy of study rather than of ridicule or vulgar incredulity. To their requests the spirits were docile. Sitting by his side at midnight, they watched while he summoned front unknown realms longvanished shades. William Wallace arose from his “ gory bed,” Edward I. turned back from the lilies of France, and, forgetting their ancient hate, stood before him with placid dignity. The man who built the Pyramids lifted his ungainly features from the ingulfing centuries; souls of blood-thirsty men, duly forced into the shape of fleas, lent their hideousness to his night; and the Evil One himself did not disdain to sit for his portrait to this undismayed magician. That these are actual portraits of concrete objects is not to be affirmed. That they are portraits of what Blake saw is as little to be denied. We are assured that his whole manner was that of a man copying, and not inventing, and the simplicity and sincerity of his life forbid any thought of intentional deceit. No criticism affected him. Nothing could shake his faith. “ It must be right: I saw it so,” was the beginning and end of his defence. The testimony of these friends of his is that he was of all artists most spiritual, devoted, and single-minded. One of them says, if asked to point out among the intellectual a happy man, he should at once think of Blake. One, a young artist, finding his invention flag for a whole fortnight, had recourse to Blake.

“ It is just so with us,” he exclaimed, turning to his wife, “ is it not, for weeks together, when the visions forsake us ? What do we do then, Kate ? “

“We kneel down and pray, Mr. Blake.”

To these choice spirits, these enthusiastic and confiding friends, his house was the House of the Interpreter. The little back-room, kitchen, bedroom, studio, and parlor in one, plain and neat, had for them a kind of enchantment. That royal presence lighted up the “ hole ” into a palace. The very walls widened with the greatness of his soul. The windows that opened on the muddy Thames seemed to overlook the river of the water of life. Among the scant furnishings, his high thoughts, set in noble words, gleamed like apples of gold in pictures of silver. Over the gulf that yawns between two worlds he flung a glorious arch, and walked tranquilly back and forth. Heaven was as much a matterof-fact to him as earth. Of sacred things lie spoke with a familiarity which, to those who did not understand him, seemed cither madness or blasphemy; but his friends never misunderstood. With one exception, none who knew him personally ever thought of calling his sanity in question. To them he was a sweet, gentle, lovable man. They felt the truth of ins life. They saw that

Imagination was to him the great reality. The external, that which makes the chief consciousness of most men, was to him only staging, an incumbrance, and uncouth, but to be endured and made the most of. The world of the imagination was the true world. Imagination bodied forth the forms of things unknown in a deeper sense, perhaps, than the great dramatist meant. His poet’s pen, his painter’s pencil turned them to shapes, and gave to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Nay, he denied that, they were nothings. He rather asserted the actual existence of his visions, — an existence as real, though not of the same nature, as those of the bed or the table. Imagination was a kind of sixth sense, and its objects were as real as the objects of the other senses. This sense he believed to exist, though latent, in every one, and to be susceptible of development by cultivation. This is surely a very different thing from madness. Neither is it the low superstition of ghosts. He recounted no miracle, nothing supernatural. It was only that by strenuous effort and untiring devotion he had penetrated beyond the rank and file —but not beyond the possibilities of the rank and file — into the unseen world. Undoubtedly this power finally assumed undue proportions. In his isolation it led him on too unresistingly. His generation knew him not. It neglected where it should have trained, and stared where it should have studied. He was not wily enough to conceal or gloss over his views. Often silent with congenial companions, he would thrust in with boisterous assertion in the company of captious opponents. Set upon by the unfriendly and the conventional, he wilfully hurled out his wild utterances, exaggerating everything, scorning all explanation or modification, goading peculiarities into reckless extravagance, on purpose to puzzle and startle, and so avenging himself by playing off upon those who attempted to play off upon him. To the gentle, the reverent, the receptive, the simple, he, too, was gentle and reverent.

Nearest and dearest of all, the “ beloved Kate ” held him in highest honor. The ripples that disturbed the smooth flow of their early fife had died away and left an unruffled current. To the childless wife, he was child, husband, and lover. No sphere so lofty, but he could come quickly down to perform the lowliest duties. The empty platter, silently placed on the dinner-table, was the signal for his descent from Parnassus to the money - earning graver. No angel-faces kept him from lighting the morning fire and setting on the breakfast-kettle before his Kitty awoke. Their life became one. Her very spirit passed into his. By day and by night her love surrounded him. In his moments of fierce inspiration, when he would arise from his bed to sketch or write the thoughts that tore his brain, she, too, arose and sat by his side, silent, motionless, soothing him only by the tenderness of her presence. Years and wintry fortunes made havoc of her beauty, but love renewed it day by day for the eyes of her lover, and their hands only met in firmer clasp as they neared the Dark River.

It was reached at last. No violent steep, but a gentle and gracious slope led to the cold waters that had no bitterness for him. Shining already in the glory of the celestial city, his eyes rested upon the dear form that had stood by his side through all these years, and with waning strength he cried, “Stay ! Keep as you are ! You have been ever an angel to me: I will draw you.” And, summoning his forces, he sketched his last portrait of the fond and faithful wife. Then, comforting her with the shortness of their separation, assuring her that he should always be about her to take care of her, he set his face steadfastly towards the Beautiful Gate. So joyful was his passage, so triumphant his march, that the very sight was to them that could behold it as if heaven itself were come down to meet him. Even the sorrowing wife could but listen enraptured to the sweet songs he chanted to his Maker’s praise ; but, “ They are not mine, my beloved ! ” he tenderly cried; ”No! they are not mine! ” The strain he heard was of a higher mood; and continually sounding as he went, with melodious noise, in notes on high, he entered in through the gates into the City.