William Blake

“ Catherine Blake, the buttress of her husband's hopes, the stay to his thoughts, the admirer of his genius, the companion of his solitude and the solace of his days, was now left without the protecting hand of the most affectionate of husbands. ”

“ The Creator, a grand and terrific figure, ancient and winged, like some monument of an Oriental imagination, clothed about the body with flowing drapery, his hair streaming behind, with all the agony of creation upon his face, is forming Adam, who lies prostrate below him, out of the four elements. ”

“ Blake's opinion of a very gorgeous dress, purchased the day following Blake's compassionate gift: for there is little doubt so great a difficulty as the payment of a debt never was attempted by such careless ones as those. Such people are a prey upon the assiduous, and a heavy drag to the never-failing industry of the active man, whose sagacity is wealth, whose energy is gain, and whose labours are ever blessed with the abundance they deserve. Industry and frugality accompany each other through lands fat with plenty, and meadows fed with the streams of exuberance ”

“ The debate lasted long, but, like all wise men whose anger is unavoidably raised, they ended in mutual forgiveness and mutual respect. Astley saw that his punishment was too degrading, and admired Blake for his humane sensibility, and Blake desisted from wrath when Astley was pacified. As this is an example truly worthy of imitation to all those whose anger is either excited by indignation or called forth by defence, it may not be out of place to say, if all quarrels were thus settled, the time would shortly come when the lion would lie down with the lamb, and the little child would lead them. ”

“ He was a subject often of much internal perturbation and over-anxiety, for he has spoilt as much work (which every artist knows is not only easy, but common) by over-labour as would take some a whole life of ordinary industry to accomplish. Mrs. Blake has been heard to say that she never saw him, except when in conversation or reading, with his hands idle; he scarcely ever mused upon what he had done. Some men muse and call it thinking, but Blake was a hard worker; his thought was only for action, as a man plans a house, or a general consults his map and arranges his forces for a battle. ”

“ Idleness and extravagance prowl through the deserts of want, and where it should happen they find a repast, in unthankfulness and ignorance they gorge and gormandise; they then loiter during the interval of their sloth until their wants have again returned, and their ungrateful entrails are demanding more. Emptiness is indeed their curse, and repletion the utmost paradise of their vacant thoughts.
Another anecdote may be given to shew that Blake could not have suffered much from absolute want. About this time he taught drawing, and was engaged for that purpose by some families of high rank ”

“ God is a husband to the widow and a father to those whose parents are departed to His heavenly bosom. A cry is heard, a voice of joy is sounding in the streets. The bereaved widow has found a husband and the fatherless family a trustworthy friend: touch not their little ones, trample not upon their borders, break not down their hedges, for their friend is a strong foe and their defender a mighty man. ”

“ The eyes of stupid cunning will never be pleased with the work any more than the look of self-devoting genius. The quarrel of the Florentine with the Venetian is not because he does not understand drawing, but because he does not understand colouring. How should he, when he does not know how to draw a hand or foot, know how to colour it? Colouring does not depend on where the colours are put, but on where the lights and darks are put, and all depends on form or outline, on where that is put ”

“ She had in the cellars of her faith an army of courageous defenders, who, had she been ever so encamped against, should, must, and would have prevailed, through Him who is of the widow the protector and to the fatherless a friend. Always, like a true wife, leaning on her husband for advice and for all spiritual strength, her shaft broken and her prop dismembered, she had been forlorn, she had been withered, she had drooped, nay she had fallen, but for the guard of her faithful Saviour and her pitiful Redeemer. ”

“ The whole of the remainder, including many of the artist's noblest productions, has been recently disposed of by the present representative of the Butts family.
In September 1800, Blake left London to work for Hayley at Felpham. The prospect of life in the country filled him with unbounded delight. He had dreams of the beginning of a new life, in which he has to emerge at last from the confusion and unrest of his past existence into a state of freedom and spiritual felicity. With no care but art, he imagined that he would be able, unmolested, to "converse in heaven and walk with angels." ”

“ Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies, when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.... ”

“ Catherine Blake, his wife, and the mother of the artist, has been represented as being possessed of all those endearing sympathies so peculiar to maternal tenderness. The eldest son, John, was the favourite of his father and mother; and, as frequently in life, the object least worthy is most cherished, so he, a dissolute, disreputable youth, carried away the principal of his parent's attachment, leaving the four others, William, James, Catherine, and Robert, to share the interest between them. ”

“ The nude form of Satan, with uplifted arms, stands erect on high, in the midst, against a background of fire. Beelzebub, a crown of gold upon his head, is reclining deep in thought upon a rock below him. Overhead, on either side, is a cluster of rebels pursued headlong from heaven by flaming arrows and hail and many lightnings. All around Satan are the leaders of his host, princes and deities and demons, some of them still stupefied by their fall, many of them bound and wallowing in liquid fire. ”

“ He had again, as about oil painting, Michael Angelo on his side, who, though rich, preferred living as a poor man, the habits of whom, it must be confessed, are the most conducive and congenial to study and application.
His friends ridiculed and blamed him by turns, but Blake found an excuse by resigning all his other pupils, and continued to suffice himself upon his frugality, to find plenty in what others have called want, and wealth in the efforts of his own mind. ”

“ Is God a Spirit, who must be worshipped in Spirit & in Truth, and are not the Gifts of the Spirit Everything to Man?... What is Mortality but the things relating to the Body, which Dies? What is Immortality but the things relating to the Spirit, which Lives eternally?... Answer this to yourselves, & expel from among you those who pretend to despise the labours of Art & Science, which alone are the labours of the Gospel: Is not this plain & manifest to the thought? Can you think at all, & not pronounce heartily: That to Labour in Knowledge is to Build up Jerusalem ”

“ Those who want happiness must stoop to find it: it is a flower that grows in every vale. Vain, foolish man that roams on lofty rocks! where, because his garments are swollen with wind, he fancies he is grown into a giant. ”

“ It is fair, however, to say that what Blake produced from these characters, in delineating them, was often so curiously original, and yet so finely expressed, that it was difficult, if prejudices were cast away, to disbelieve totally this power. It is well known to all inquiring men that Blake was not the only individual who enjoyed this peculiar gift. A great and learned German, Emanuel Swedenborg, whose writings, as well as being so peculiar, are so interesting, saw visions of eternity, a full account of which he gives in his voluminous writings. ”

“ Thou hast given me power to protect myself from my bitterest enemies." At last he could conceal the truth no more. "He is as much averse," he complains of Hayley in a letter to Butts, "to my poetry as he is to a chapter in the Bible," and "approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems." This attitude on the part of his patron soon convinced him that he was in serious danger from an enemy of his soul, who was urging him in the name of worldly wisdom to forsake his allegiance to Imagination, that he might devote himself to the imitation of nature. ”

“ Blake's defence, but he has no doubt that his hatred to oil as a vehicle was produced by some great defect in it, as he has also no doubt, in spite of what cavillers have irritated Blake to say, that he possessed too much sound sense and judgment to be absolutely wrong, although he might in his violence have said more than he could prove. Blake seemed intended for the fifteenth century, when real energy of mind gained the appropriate rapidity of hand, and when the vehicle, if not such as he invented, was in much better command for sublime compositions ”

“ The story of the events at Felpham having reached the dwellers in eternity, the poet Milton receives a heavenly command to return to earth, with the double purpose both of redeeming his own imagination from the state of bondage into which it had fallen during his lifetime owing to the detestable nature of his religion, and of delivering Blake from the tyranny of his oppressors. He comes as "the Awakener," to overthrow "the idiot Reasoner," who "laughs at the Man of Imagination." ”

“ For any account of these illustrations the reader must be referred to Gilchrist's Life of Blake; and it is only necessary to mention here that, magnificent as the original water-colour drawings unquestionably are, they are in every case inferior to the final version in the engraving, and that both they themselves and the many existing studies for them are mainly interesting as showing the evolution of the design in the mind of the artist, and the marvellous certainty of judgment that guided him in every elimination or change. ”

“ A bad cause requires a long book. Generally advocating one in which there is a flaw, the greatest controversialists are the greatest doubters. They are trembling needles between extreme points. Irritated by hypocrisy and the unequivocal yielding of weak and interested men, he said and wrote unwarrantable arguments; but unalloyed and unencumbered by opposition, he was in all essential points orthodox in his belief. But he put forth ramifications of doubt, that by his vigorous and creative mind were watered into the empty enormities of extravagant and rebellious thoughts. ”

“ The history of mysticism provides countless similar instances of the way in which an apparently trivial circumstance may be possessed of the highest spiritual significance: and a reference to the letter to Hayley, of 23rd October 1804, will show that we are justified by Blake himself in regarding this visit as a landmark in his career, when he became able to carry out his new code of art with all the joy and enthusiasm which inspired the productions of his youth. ”

“ Flaxman belonged to them, as have many other as judicious men. Although it would not be irrelevant, it would be tedious to narrate Swedenborg's opinions, or rather Swedenborg's visions, for he asserted that he only gave a detail and history of what he saw and heard. All that is necessary to prove now is, that other men, other sensible men, such as scarcely could be designated as mad or stupid, did see into an immaterial life denied to most. ”

“ On the 12th August 1827, Blake's body died; and we may leave his work with a few beautiful words about the man from a letter written by Linnell to Bernard Barton three years later: "He was more like the ancient patterns of virtue than I ever expected to see in this world; he feared nothing so much as being rich, lest he should lose his spiritual riches. He was at the same time the most sublime in his expressions, with the simplicity and gentleness of a child."
Frederick Tatham, author of the Life which follows, was the son of an architect to whom Blake had been introduced by Linnell ”

“ How many of us have suffered from those who "do unkind things in kindness: with power armed to say the most irritating things in the midst of tears and love!" as Blake afterwards wrote in his Milton, a poem which is almost wholly devoted to describing, under a close disguise, the events, or the "herculean labours," as he calls them, of his life at Felpham ”

“ In this incredulous age it is requisite, before this possibility is admitted, even as a doubt or question, that it should be said that he who inefficiently attempts to defend this power, never has been accustomed to see them, although he has known others besides Blake, on whose veracity and sanity he could equally well rely, who have been thus favoured. The Cock Lane ghost story, the old women's tales, and the young bravo who defies the ghost in the tap-room, that he shudders at in his walk home, are foolishly mixed up with Blake's visions. ”

“ Let every Christian, as much as in him lies, engage himself openly & publicly before all the World in some Mental pursuit for the Building up of Jerusalem." In such words he sums up "the Everlasting Gospel," which he believed himself and all other creative artists in duty bound to deliver to humanity.
The series of letters begins with an extract from a letter from Flaxman to Hayley (now for the first time printed) , which has some importance if only to refute the common idea that Blake's art found no acceptance among the artists of his own day. ”

“ The trammels of this art, which he never till his very last days overcame, he spent money and time to learn, and had it not been for the circumstance of his having frequent quarrels with his fellow apprentices, concerning matters of intellectual argument, he would perhaps never have handled the pencil, and would consequently have been doomed for ever to furrow upon a copper plate monotonous and regular lines, placed at even distances, without genius and without form. These quarrels existing between the three boys, Basire thought he could not do better than to send Blake out drawing ”

“ Because Fuseli coloured a witch like a witch, and Michael Angelo coloured a prophet like a prophet, these men are called no colourists. That the greatest men should colour worst is an enigma perfectly inexplicable ”