Robert Blake

“ 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, shop-keeping, and money-making, wellnigh "dead before it was born,"—the poet began to think of publishing. ”

“ His father died, leaving but an insignificant sum to be divided among his many children, and Robert, with strong Republican views, was returned to Parliament for his native town of Bridgwater. Events were moving rapidly towards Civil War, and in the outbreak of that momentous struggle many men found at last their vocation. Among them was Blake, whose great defence of Taunton town against the Royalist siege in 1645 was one of the most dogged and successful incidents of that time. ”

“ With Blake and with his wife, at the print-shop in Broad Street, Robert for two happy years and a half lived in seldom disturbed accord. Such domestications, however, always bring their own trials, their own demands for self-sacrifice. Of which the following anecdote will supply a hint, as well as testify to much amiable magnanimity on the part of both the younger members of the household. ”

“ In 1804 Blake brought out his “Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion,” a poem which he told Mr. Butts was descriptive of the “spiritual acts of his three years’ slumber on the banks of Ocean.”
“Milton” was also produced in the same year.
In 1805 Robert Hartley Cromek, whilom engraver, but now publisher and printseller, “discovered” Blake in his self-chosen retirement, and proposed giving him employment. The story of his treacherous dealings is an evil one. ”

“ Nearly eighty years after De Soto’s visit, on the borderline between tradition and history, came the ministration of Mother Maria de Jesus de Agreda, “the angel in blue,” teaching the Tejas tribes the Christian religion, in 1620. So great was the influence of this saintly woman that in 1690 the chief of the Tejas told Massanet that they wished to do as she had done, and even wanted to be buried in blue garments.
The first definite description of Nacogdoches and its aboriginal population is in the account of LaSalle’s visit here in 1685. ”

“ He has no other servant, nor nurse, and wants no other. As his eyes rested on the once graceful form, thought of all she had been to him in these years filled the poet-artist's mind. 'Stay!' he cried, 'keep as you are! you have been ever an angel to me: I will draw you!' And a portrait was struck off by a hand which approaching death—few days distant now—had not weakened nor benumbed. This drawing has been described to me by Mr. Tatham, who once possessed it, as 'a phrenzied sketch of some power; highly interesting, but not like.'
Blake still went on designing as of old. ”

“ Fred grinned at them and was—wonderful to relate!—as silent as his chum. They had agreed to say nothing in response to the chaffing.
"And who was the handsomest woman in the world?" scoffed another boy, who was rather better informed than most of his mates. "Cleopatra, maybe! And she was blacker than our Phoebe who washes for my mother. All Egyptians are black."
"I'd just like to know who you think is the prettiest girl, Bobby Blake?" demanded one of the bigger girls who went to school with the chums, her nose tip tilted to show her scorn. "What do you know about pretty girls?" ”

“ His father, James Blake, kept a hosier’s shop in Broad Street, Golden Square; and from the scanty education which the young artist received, it may be judged that the circumstances of the family were not very prosperous. For the facts of William Blake’s early life the world is indebted to a little book, called A Father’s Memoirs on a Child, written by Dr Malkin in 1806. Here we learn that young Blake quickly developed a taste for design, which his father appears to have had sufficient intelligence to recognize and assist by every means in his power. ”

“ Does not prophet or hero always seem 'mad' to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world, the motives of feeling and action being so alien and incomprehensible?
In a letter respecting Blake, addressed by the late James Ward, in June, 1855, to his son, George Raphael, the engraver, the venerable artist gave expression to an interesting view of his own—itself, some may think, tinged by eccentricity. 'There can be no doubt,' he writes, 'of his having been what the world calls a man of genius. ”

“ In his art, in truth, Blake would not barter independence, or the exercise of his imaginative faculty for patronage or money. This residence at Felpham, under poet Hayley's protection, might have proved a turning-point in his life. Had he complied with Hayley's evident wishes, and set himself, as a miniature painter, to please patrons, he might have climbed to fortune and fame. It was a 'choice of Hercules' for him once again. But he had made his choice in boyhood, and adhered to it in age. Few are so perseveringly brave. ”

“ The big dog followed his master. He was part Newfoundland and would have made a fine playmate for any boy, if he had not been trained to be ugly with all strangers. When he got through the fence and saw Bobby standing idly by, he growled at him.
"Look out, Bob!" shouted Fred. "He'll bite you."
"I'm not doing anything," said Bobby Blake. "And you had better not set your dog on me, Plunkit."
"You fellers are too fresh," said the farm boy. "My father says you're not to come around here—"
"Your father doesn't own this land, and your father doesn't own this creek," whipped in Fred, from the branch. ”

“ In such cases, the traces of past beauty do but heighten the melancholy of its utter ruin. Amid so much that was beautiful in her affectionate, wifely spirit, these externals were little noticed. To friends who remember Blake in Fountain Court, those calm, patriarchal figures of Job and his Wife in the artist's own designs, still recall the two, as they used to sit together in that humble room.
All I have met, who at any period of the poet-artist's life knew much of Blake, speak with affection of him. A sweet, gentle, lovable creature, say all; courageous too, yet not bitter. ”

“ Willie, with a pistol as his gavel, at which time General Thomas J. Rusk delivered one of his famous orations, which has been preserved to us in our court records.
Even the transfer of title to the old house from Vicente Cordova brings an element of tragedy and in some respects even comedy. Cordova was the leader in the so-called Cordova Rebellion in 1838, in which Zechariah Fenley was murdered and one of his slaves taken away. Following this, in 1840, Rebecca Fenley filed suit for damages against Cordova, not for the death of her husband, but for the loss of her slave. ”

“ The mingling of sound sagacity with the utmost licence of imagination showed itself at every hour of Blake's life. He would, at any moment, speak as he here writes, and was not a mere sensible mortal in the morning, and a wild visionary in the evening. Visionary glories floated before his eyes even while he stooped over the toilsome copper-plate. There was no pause or hiatus in the life-long wedding of spiritual and earthly things in his daily course; no giving the reins to imagination at one time more than other. ”

“ He is not taught this; it comes to him as blossoms come to the spring, and is the first mark of his vocation. It was this inward thirst and longing that sent out the boy Blake into the fields and lanes, and among the surburban hills. The force of boyish imagination must have been stronger in him than in most, even of the children of genius, for, as early as the age of thirteen or fourteen, the conceptions of his mind began to assume an external form. He saw a tree sparkling in the sun, and discovered that it was filled with angels. ”

“ If I were asked to name a writer whose work conveys to one's mind, free of any admixture of rhetoric or of any alloy of cleverness, the very impact and shock of pure inspired genius, I would unhesitatingly name William Blake. One is strangely conscious in reading him of the presence of some great unuttered power—some vast demiurgic secret—struggling like a buried Titan just below the surface of his mind, and never quite finding vocal expression. ”

“ More apart from humanity even than the America, it is hard to trace out any distinct subject, any plan or purpose in the Europe, or to determine whether it mainly relate to the past, present, or to come. And yet its incoherence has a grandeur about it as of the utterance of a man whose eyes are fixed on strange and awful sights, invisible to bystanders. To use an expression of Blake's own, on a subsequent occasion, it is as if the 'Visions were angry,' and hurried in stormy disorder before his rapt gaze, no longer to bless and teach, but to bewilder and confound. ”

“ Blake let up on the gas a little and the car almost stopped. He went on. "I wish you were a man ... it'd be different then ... I could slap the shit out of you. But you're not. You're too pretty. Too innocent ... too ... too much like Venus. ”

“ The size of these prints is four inches and a half high by three inches wide. The original genius of Blake was always confined, through poverty, to small dimensions. Sixty-five plates of copper were an object to him who had little money. The Gates of Paradise, a work of sixteen designs, and those exceedingly small, was his next undertaking. The meaning of the artist is not a little obscure; it seems to have been his object to represent the innocence, the happiness, and the upward aspirations of man. They bespeak one intimately acquainted with the looks and the feelings of children. ”

“ Blake had no appearance of being a suspicious man, nor do I think at this time, he had the remotest idea that he was either watched or followed; an ignorance of the truth which I took care to preserve by taking my seat in a different car from him and not showing myself again during the whole ride from New York to Putney. ”

“ Never once he despaired of his mission, never he doubted of the heavenly origin of his visions, or of his writings. "I may praise them, since I dare not pretend to be other than the secretary, the authors are in Eternity", Blake writes in a letter to Thomas Butts 1802 about the Prophetic books. And though poverty and want are at his door, he never makes concessions in order to see his books printed and earn a little money. With infinite patience and care he continues writing down his weird fancies and illuminating them with his fantastic drawings. ”

“ The eldest son, James, Tatham tells us, 'having a saving, somniferous mind, lived a yard and a half life, and pestered his brother with timid sentences of bread and cheese advice.' On his father's death in 1784 he carried on the business, and it was at his house that Blake held his one exhibition of pictures in 1809. 'These paintings filled several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house,' says Crabb Robinson in his Reminiscences; and, telling how he had bought four copies of the catalogue, 'giving 10/-, I bargained that I should be at liberty to go again. "Free! as long as you live!" ”

“ September 3, 1801: (Hayley to Johnson again) * * * 'The good Blake is finishing, very happily, the plate of the poet's mother. He salutes you affectionately.' October 1, 1801: 'October, you see, is arrived, and you, my dear Johnny, will arrive, I trust, before half this pleasant month shall pass away; for we want you as a faithful coadjutor in the turret, more than I can express. I say we, for the warm-hearted indefatigable Blake works daily by my side, on the intended decorations of our biography. Engraving, of all human works, appears to require the largest portion of patience ”

“ There can be no doubt that the true ideal is that which unites in equal strength the forming and all-energising imagination, and the solid body of external truth by which it is to manifest itself to the eye and mind. There are moments when the sincere devotee of Blake is disposed to claim for him a place as great as that occupied by Michael Angelo; when, carried away by the ravishment of his fiery wheels, the thought is lost beyond the confines of sense, and he seems "in the spirit to speak mysteries." ”

“ Though Blake lost himself a little in the enchanted region of song, he seems not to have neglected to make himself master of the graver, or to have forgotten his love of designs and sketches. He was a dutiful servant to Basire, and he studied occasionally under Flaxman and Fuseli; but it was his chief delight to retire to the solitude of his chamber, and there make drawings, and illustrate these with verses, to be hung up together in his mother's chamber. He was always at work; he called amusement idleness, sight-seeing vanity, and money-making the ruin of all high aspirations. ”

“ If we wished by a single question to sound the depths of a man's mind and capacity for the judgment of works of pure imagination, we know of none we should be so content to put as this one, "What think you of William Blake?" He is one of those crucial tests which, at once, manifest the whole man of art and criticism. He is a stumbling-block to all pretenders, to all conventional learnedness, to all merely technical excellence. ”

“ With which meagre biographic trait, the inquisitive reader must be satisfied. The most diligent search yields nothing further. That he was an amiable, kindly man we gather from the circumstances of his first notice of the child Flaxman in the father's cast-shop, coughing over his Latin behind the counter, and of his continued notice of the weakly child during the years which elapsed before he was strong enough to walk from the Strand to Rathbone Place, and be received into the sunshine of Mrs. Mathew's smiles.
To that lady's agreeable and brilliant conversazioni Blake was made welcome. ”