William Blake

“ 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. ”

“ What makes the genius of William Blake so salutary a revolutionary influence is the fact that while contending so savagely against puritanical stupidity, he himself preserves to the end, his guilelessness and purity of heart.
There are admirable writers and philosophers, whose work on behalf of the liberation of humanity is rendered less disinterested by the fact that they are fighting for their personal inclinations rather than for the happiness of the world at large. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love-verses; but they have been mine long. Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he is still living. He is the Robert [William] Blake whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the "Night Thoughts," which you may have seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass of human form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac-simile to itself) left behind on the dying bed. ”

“ The dampness of a house placed upon the earth without cellarage, on a low shore too, between the Downs and the sea, seriously affected Blake's health for a time, and caused his Kate severe ague and rheumatism, which lasted even after her return to the dryness of London.
And no less baneful to the inner life was constant intercourse with the well-meaning literary squire. It was not possible for the ardent and exalted nature of Blake, to whom poetry and design were the highest expression of religion, to breathe freely in an atmosphere of elegant trivialities and shallow sentiment. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 is the only poet who sees all temporal things under the form of eternity. To him reality is merely a symbol, and he catches at its terms, hastily and faultily, as he catches at the lines of the drawing-master, to represent, as in a faint image, the clear and shining outlines of what he sees with the imagination ”

“ 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. ”

“ The designs are highly finished: Blake had worked upon them so much, and illuminated them so richly, that even the letterpress seems as if done by hand. The ever-fluctuating colour, 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 if you had been handling something sentient. A picture has been said to be midway between a thing and a thought ”

“ Tenderness, the constant unison of wonder and familiarity so mysteriously allied in nature, the sense of fulness and abundance such as we feel in a field, not because we pry into it all, but because it is all there: these are the inestimable prizes to be secured only by such study in the painter's every picture. And all this Blake, as thoroughly as any painter, was gifted to have attained, as we may see especially in his works of that smallest size where memory and genius may really almost stand in lieu of immediate consultation of nature. ”

“ Blake's rude work,' adds the critic, 'utterly without pretension, too, as an engraving, the merest attempt of a fresh apprentice, is a work of genius; whilst the latter—the doctored cut—'is but a piece of smooth, tame mechanism.'
The more these remarkable designs are seen, the more power do they exert over the mind. With few lines, and the simplest, rudest hints of natural objects, they appeal to the imagination direct, not the memory; setting before us condensed, typical ideas. Strange to think of Blake, shut up in dingy, gardenless South Molton Street, designing such pastorals! ”

“ One associates the poetry of William Blake, not with the mountain peaks and gorgeous foliage and rushing torrents of a landscape that clamours to be admired and would fain overpower us with its picturesque appeal, but with the quietest, gentlest, softest, least assuming background to that "going forth" to our work, "and our labour until the evening," which is the normal destiny of man. ”

“ 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." ”

“ In Blake's colouring of landscape, a subtle and exquisite reality forms quite as strong an element as does ideal grandeur; whether we find him dealing with the pastoral sweetness of drinking cattle at a stream, their hides and fleeces all glorified by sunset with magic rainbow hues; or revealing to us, in a flash of creative genius, some parted sky and beaten sea full of portentous expectation. ”

“ We look in vain through the Silver Drops of William Blake for any record of an existing institution, such as he would have his "noble ladies" rear at Highgate. Among the many incentives he uses to prompt the charitable, we do not find him holding up for their example any model (unless it be "Old Sutton's brave hospital") ; in all his amusing "Charity-school Sticks," his tone is that of a man trying to persuade people that the thing he proposes is feasible. "Some of them," says the sanguine Blake, "have scarce faith enough to believe in the success of this great and good design. ”

“ In Blake's work a great fundamental conception is rarely lacking, and the conception is not, as it has often been asserted, a literary, but always a pictorial, one. At times imagination and execution are wholly untired, as in the splendid water-colour of 'Death on the Pale Horse,' in which not only every line and colour is alive with passionate idea, the implacable and eternal joy of destruction, but also with a realised beauty, a fully grasped invention. ”

“ For it needs to be read in Blake, to have familiarized oneself with his unsophisticated, archaic, yet spiritual 'manner,'—a style sui generis as no other artist's ever was,—to be able to sympathize with, or even understand, the equally individual strain of thought, of which it is the vehicle. And one must almost be born with a sympathy for it. He neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for work'y-day men at all, rather for children and angels ”

“ Throwing aside the sketch of God measuring the universe, he began industriously to draw a portrait of his wife, a portrait which is unfortunately lost, but which must have substantially resembled the remarkable sketch which a friend drew some months afterwards; the portrait of a woman at once plain and distinguished, with a face that is supremely humorous and at once harsh and kind. Long before that portrait was drawn, long before those months had elapsed, William Blake was dead. ”

“ He projects himself into shapeless dreams, instead of into fair definite forms, as already in the Songs of Innocence he had shown that he could do; and hereafter will again in the tasks so happily prescribed by others:—the illustrations to Young, to Blair's Grave, to Job, to Dante. In these amorphous Prophecies are profusely scattered the unhewn materials of poetry and design: sublime hints are sown broad-cast. But alas! whether Blake were definite or indefinite in his conceptions, he was alike ignored. ”

“ Having spoken so far of Blake's influence as a painter, I should be glad if I could point out that the simplicity and purity of his style as a lyrical poet had also exercised some sway. But, indeed, he is so far removed from ordinary apprehensions in most of his poems, or more or less in all, and they have been so little spread abroad, that it will be impossible to attribute to them any decided place among the impulses which have directed the extraordinary mass of poetry displaying power of one or another kind, which has been brought before us, from his day to our own. ”

“ Blake truly described him, either reading, writing, or designing. For it was a tenet of his, that the inner world is the all-important; that each man has a world within, greater than the external. Even while he engraved, he read,—as the plate-marks on his books testify. He never took walks for mere walking's sake, or for pleasure ”

“ Fuseli, indignant, almost hid himself. I am hid.'
Always excepting the favoured portrait-painters, these were, indeed, cold days for the unhappy British artist—the historical or poetic artist above all. Times have strangely altered within living memory. The case is now reversed. One can but sympathise with the above touching outburst; and Blake rarely complained aloud of the world's ill usage, extreme as it was: one can but sympathise, I say, even while cherishing the warmest love and admiration for Sir Joshua's and Gainsborough's delightful art. ”

“ Now it is in this sense that we may truly say that Blake (upon one side of his mind) was something worse than a maniac—he was a faddist. He did permit aspirations or prejudices which are accidental or one-sided to capture and control him at the expense of things really more human and enduring: things which he shared with all the children of men. I do not allude to his supernaturalism; for on that he is in no sense alone, nor even specially eccentric. I do not refer to his love of the gorgeous, the terrible or even the secretive of temples, initiations, and hieroglyphic religion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Even his old friend Mr, Butts, a friend of more than thirty years' standing, the possessor of his best temperas and watercolour drawings, and of copies of all his engraved books, grew cool. The patron had often found it a hard matter not to offend the independent, wilful painter, ever the prouder for his poverty and neglect, always impracticable and extreme when ruffled or stroked the wrong way. The patron had himself begun to take offence at Blake's quick resentment of well-meant, if blunt, advice and at the unmeasured violence of his speech, when provoked by opposition. ”

“ And, as it happens, both these non-rational (or non-Roman) strains in the eighteenth century are particularly important in considering the mental make-up of William Blake. For the first alien strain in this century practically represents all that is effective and fine in this great genius, the second strain represents without question all that is doubtful, all that is irritating, and all that is ineffective in him. ”