William Blake A Critical Essay

The "Autumn," too, should hardly have been rejected: Blake had probably never seen the praiseworthy but somewhat verbose historical drama on the same subject, generously bestowed upon Shakespeare by critics of that German acuteness which can accept as poetry the most- meritorious powers of rhetoric. His own disjointed and stumbling fragment, deficient as it is in shape or plan or local colour, has far more of the sound and savour of Shakespeare's style in detached lines: In dramatic passion, in dramatic character, and in dramatic language, Mr.

Wells' great play is no doubt far ahead, not of Blake's work only, but of most other men's: One other thing we may observe of these " Sketches ;" that they contain, though only in the pieces rejected from our present collection, sad indications of the inexplicable influence which an early reading of the detestable pseudo- Ossian seems to have exercised on Blake.

How or why such lank and lamentable counterfeits of the poetical style did ever gain this luckless influence one, too, which in after years was to do far worse harm than it has done here it is not easy to guess. Similar puzzles will, however, recur to the student of Blake's art ; but will not, if he be in any way worthy of the study, be permitted for a minute to impair his sense of its incomparable merits. Incomparable, we say advisedly: In Blake married, it seems after a year or two of engaged life. His wife Catherine Boucher deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife on record.

In all things but affection, her husband must have been as hard to live with as the most erratic artist or poet who ever mistook his way into marriage. Over the stormy or slippery passages in their earlier life Mr. Gil- christ has passed perhaps too lightly. No doubt Blake's aberrations were mainly matters of speech or writing ; it is however said, truly or falsely, that once in a patriarchal mood he did propose to add a second wife to their small and shifting household, and was much per- plexed at meeting on one hand with tears and on all hands with remonstrances.

As to the rest, Mrs. Blake's belief in him was full and profound enough to endure some amount of trial. Practically he was always, as far as we know, regular, laborious, immaculate to an exception ; and in their old age she worked after him and for him, revered and helped and obeyed him, with an exquisite goodness. For the next eighteen years we have no continuous or available record under Blake's own hand of his manner of life ; and of course must not expect as yet any help from those who can still, or could lately, remember the man himself in later days.

He laboured with passionate steadiness of energy, at work sometimes valueless and sometimes invaluable ; made, retained, and lost friends of a varying quality. Even to the lamentable taskwork of bad comic engravings for dead and putrescent "Wit's Magazines" his biographer has tracked him and taken note of his doings.

The one thing he did get published his poem, or apology for a poem, called " The French Ke volution" the first of seven projected books is, as far as I know, the only original work of its author worth little or even nothing ; consisting mainly of mere wind and splutter. The six other books, if extant, ought nevertheless to be looked up, as they can hardly be with- out some personal interest or empirical value, even if no better in workmanship than. During these years however he produced much of his greatest work ; among other things, the " Songs of Innocence and Expe- rience," and the prophetic books from " Thel " to "Ahania;" of all which we shall have to speak in due time and order.

Their vivid and vigorous style is often a model in its kind ; and the matter, how- ever violent and eccentric at times, always clear, noble, and thoughtful ; remarkable especially for the eagerness of approbation lavished on the meanest of impulsive or fanciful men, and the fervour of scorn excited by the best works and the best intentions of others. The watery wisdom and the bland absurdity of Lavater's axioms meet with singular tolerance from the future author of the " Proverbs of Hell ; " the considerate regu- lations and suggestions of Beynolds' " Discourses " meet with no tolerance at all from the future illustrator of Job and Dante.

In all these rough notes, even we may say in those on Bacon's Essays, there is always a bushel of good grain to an ounce of chaff. What is erroneous or what seems perverse lies for the most part only on the surface ; what is falsely applied is often truly said ; what is unjustly worded is often justly con- ceived. A man insensible to the perfect manner and noble matter of Bacon, while tolerant of the lisping and slavering imbecilities of Lavater, seems at first sight past hope or help ; but subtract the names or alter the symbols given, and much of Blake's commentary will seem, as it is, partially true and memorable even in its actual form, wholly true and memorable in its implied meaning.

Again, partly through ingrained humour, partly through the rough shifts of his imperfect and tentative education, Blake was much given to a certain perverse and defiant habit of expression, meant rather to scare and offend than to allure and attract the common WILLIAM BLAKE. In his old age we hear that he would at times try the ironic method upon objectionable reasoners ; not, we should imagine, with much dexterity or subtlety. The small accidents and obscure fluctuations of luck during these eighteen years of laborious town life, the changes of residence and acquaintance, the method and result of the day's work done, have been traced with much care and exhibited in a direct distinct manner by the biographer.

His alliance with Paine and the ultra-democrats then working or talking in London is the most curious episode of these years. His republican passion was like Shelley's, a matter of fierce dogmatic faith and rapid assumption. Looking at any sketch of his head and face one may see the truth of his assertion that he was born a democrat of the ima- ginative type.

The faith which accepts and the passion which pursues an idea of justice not wholly attainable looks out of the tender and restless eyes, moulds the eager mobile-seeming lips.

1. Die Hintermänner: die stille Macht (German Edition).
2. William Blake, a critical essay | Great Writers Inspire;
3. Shoot em ta Hell (THE GUNS OF INFINITY Book 1)!

We need no evidence to bid us believe with what fervour of spirit and singleness of emotion he loved the name and fol- lowed the likeness of freedom, whatever new name or changed likeness men might put upon her. Liberty and religion, taken in a large and subtle sense of the words, were alike credible and adorable to him ; and in nothing else could he find matter for belief or worship.

His forehead, largest as he said just over the eyes, shows an eager steadiness of passionate expression. Shut off any single feature, and it will seem singular how little the face changes or loses by the exclusion. With all this, it is curious to read how the author of " Urizen " and "Ahania" saved from probable hanging the author of the " Eights of Man " and " Age of Keason.

The swift quiet resolution and fear- less instant sense of the right thing to do which he showed at all times of need are worth notice in a man of such fine and nervous habit of mind and body. In the year after Paine's escape from England, his deliverer published a book which would probably have been something of a chokepear for the conventionnel.

This set of seventeen drawings was Blake's first series of original designs, not meant to serve as merely illustrative work. The book is itself not unavailable as a key to much of Blake's fitful and tempestuous philosophy; and it would have been better to re-engrave the series in full than to give random selections twisted out of their places and made less intelligible than they were at first by the headlong process of inversion and convulsion to which they have here been subjected. The frontispiece gives a symbol of man's birth into the fleshly and mutable house of life, powerless and painless as yet, but encircled by the likeness and oppressed by the mystery of material existence.

The pre-existent spirit here well-nigh disappears under stifling folds of vegetable leaf and animal incrustation ,of overgrowing husk It lies dumb and dull, almost as a thing itself begotten of the perishable body, conceived in bondage and brought forth with grief. The curled and clinging caterpillar, emblem of motherhood, adheres and impends over it, as the lapping leaves of flesh unclose and release the human fruit of corporeal generation.

With mysterious travail and anguish of mysterious division, the child is born as a thing out of sleep ; the original perfect manhood being cast in effect into a heavy slumber, and the female or reflective element called into creation. This tenet recurs constantly in the turbulent and fluctuating evangel of Blake ; that the feminine element exists by itself for a time only, and as the shadow of the male ; thus Space is the wife of Time, and was created of him in the beginning that the things of lower life might have air to breathe and a place to hide their heads ; her moral aspect is Pity.

At sight of her so brought forth, a wonder in heaven, all the most ancient gods or daemons of pre-material life were terrified and amazed, touched with awe and softened with passion ; yet endured not to look upon her, a thing alien from the things of their eternal life ; for as space is impredicable of the divine world, so is pity impredicable of the daemonic nature.

See the "First Book of Urizen. Only through his help and through her pity can flesh or spirit endure life for a little, under the iron law of the maker and the oppressor of man. Alone among the other co-equal and co-eternal daemons of his race, the Creator is brought into contact and collision with Space and Time ; against him alone they struggle in Promethean agony of conflict to deliver the children of men ; and against them is the Creator compelled to fight, that he may reach and oppress those whose weak- ness is defended by all the warring hands of Time, shel- tered by all the gracious wings of Space.

In the first plate of the " Gates of Paradise," the woman finds the child under a tree, sprung of the earth like a mandrake, which he who plucks up and hears groan must go mad or die ; grown under the tree of physical life, which is rooted in death, and the leaf of it is poisonous, WILLIAM BLAKE. Out of earth is rent violently forth the child of dust and clay, naked, wide-eyed, shrieking ; the woman bends down to gather him as a flower, half blind with fierce sur- prise and eagerness, half smiling with foolish love and piti- ful pleasure ; with one hand she holds other children, small and new-blown also as flowers, huddled in the lap of her garment ; with the other she plucks him up by the hair, regardless of his deadly shriek and convulsed arms, heedless that this uprooting of the mandrake is the seal of her own death also.

Then follow symbols of the four created elements from which the corporeal man is made ; the water, blind and mutable as doting age, emblem of ignorant doubt and moral jealousy ; the heavy melancholy earth, grievous to life, oppressive of the spirit, type of all sorrows and tyrannies that are brought forth upon it, saddest of all the elements, tightest as a curb and painfullest as a load upon the soul: Bound the new-created man revolves the flaming sword of Law, burning and dividing in the hand of the angel, servant of the cruelty of God, who drives into exile and debars from paradise the fallen spiritual man upon earth.

Eound the woman a double type perhaps at once of the female nature and the "rational truth " or law of good and evil roar and freeze the winds and snows of prohibition, blinding, congealing, confusing ; and in that tempest of things spiritual the shell of mate- rial things hardens and thickens, excluding all divine vision and obscuring all final truth with solid-seeming walls of separation. But death in the end shall enlighten all the deluded, shall deliver all the imprisoned ; there, though the worm weaves, the Saviour also watches ; the new garments of male and female to be there assumed by the spirit are so woven that they shall no longer be as shrouds or swaddling-clothes to hamper the newly born or consume the newly dead, but free raiment and fair symbol of the spirit.

For the power of the creative daemon, which began with birth, must end with death ; upon the perfect and eternal man he had not power till he had created the earthly life to bring man into subjection; and shall not have power upon him again any more when he is once resumed by death.

Where the Creator's power ends, there begins the Saviour's power; where oppression loses strength to divide, mercy gains strength to reunite. In these first six plates is the kernel of the book ; round these the subsequent symbols revolve, and toward these converge. The seventh we may assume to be an emblem of desire as it is upon earth, blind and wild, glad and sad, destroying the pleasures it catches hold of, losing those it lets go. One Love, a moth-like spirit, lies crushed at the feet of the boy who pursues another, flinging his cap towards it as though to trap a butterfly; startled with the laugh of triumphant capture even at his lips, as the wingless flying thing eludes him and soars beyond the enclosure of summer leaves and stems toward upper air and cloud.

To the original sketch was appended this quotation from Spenser, Book 2, Canto 2, v. In the ninth plate, men strive to set a ladder against the moon and climb by it through the deepest dark- ness of night ; a white segment of narrow light just shows the sharp tongue of precipitous land upon which 24 WILLIAM BLAKE. This was originally a satirical sketch of " amateurs and connoisseurs," emblematic merely of their way of study- ing art, analyzing all great things done with ready rule and line, and scaling with ladders of logic the heaven of invention; here it reappears enlarged and exalted into a general type of blind belief and presumptuous reason, indicative also of the helpless hunger after spiritual things ingrained in those made subject to things mate- rial ; the effusion and eluctation of spirits sitting in prison towards the truth which should make them free.

In the tenth plate, the half-submerged face and out- stretched arm of a man drowning in a trough of tum- bling sea show just above the foam, against the glaring and windy clouds whose blown drift excludes the sky. Perhaps the noble study of sea registered in the Cata- logue as No. Of the two this sketch is the finer ; a greater effect of tempest was never given by the work of any hand than in this weltering and savage space of sea, with the aimless clash of its breakers and blind turbulence of water veined and wrinkled with storm, enridged and cloven into drifting array of battle, with no lesser life visible upon it of man or vessel, fish or gull: This drawing, which has been reproduced by photography, might have found a place here or later in the book.

In the eleventh plate, emble- matic of religious restraint and the severities of artificial holiness, an old man, spectacled and strait-mouthed, clips with his shears the plumes of a winged boy, who writhes WILLIAM BLAKE. The twelfth plate continues this allegory under the type of father and sons, the vital energy and its desires or passions, thrust down into prison-houses of ice and snow. Next, man as he is upon earth attains for once to the vision of that which he was and shall be ; his eyes open upon the sight of life beyond the mundane and mortal elements, and the chains of reason and religion relax.

In the evening he travels towards the grave ; a figure stepping out swiftly and steadily, staff in hand, over rough country ground and beside low thick bushes and underwood, dressed as a man of Blake's day ; a touch of realism curious in the midst of such mystical work. Next in extreme age he passes through the door of death to find the worm at her work ; and in the last plate of the series, she is seen sitting, a worm- like woman, with hooded head and knees drawn up, the adder-like husk or shell of death at her feet, and behind her head the huge rotting roots and serpentine nether fibres of the tree of life and death: It may however be taken as being in a certain sense one of the prophetic or evangelic series which was afterwards to stretch to such strange lengths.

In this engraved symbolic poem of life and death, most of Blake's chief articles of faith are advanced or im- plied ; noticeably, for example, that tenet regarding the creative deity and his relations to time and to the sons of men. Thus far he can see and no farther ; for so long and no longer he has power upon the actions and passions of created and transient life. Him let no Christians worship, nor the law of his covenant ; the written law which its writer wept at and hid beneath his mercy-seat ; but instead let them write above the altars of their faith a law of infinite forgive- ness, annihilating in the measureless embrace of its mercy the separate existences of good and evil.

So speaks Blake in his prologue ; and in his epilogue thus: To the Accuser, who is the God of this World. Truly, my Satan, thou art but a dunce, And dost not know the garment from the man ; Every harlot was a virgin once, Nor canst thou ever change Kate into Nan. Upon the life which is but as a vesture, and as a ves- ture shall be changed, he who created it has power till the end ; appearances and relations he can alter, and turn a virgin to a harlot ; but not change one individual life to another, reverse or rescind the laws of personality.

Virtue and vice, chastity and unchastity, are changeable and perishable ; " they all shall wax old as doth a gar- ment: All qualities proper to human nature are inventions of the Accuser ; not so the immor- tal prenatal nature, which is the essence of every man severally from eternity. That lies beyond the dominion of the God of this world ; he is but the Son of Morning, that having once risen, will set again ; shining only in the darkness of spiritual night ; his light is but a light seen in dreams before the dawn by men belated and misled, which shall pass away and be known no more at the advent of the perfect day.

All these mystical heresies may seem turbid and chaotic ; but the legend or subject-matter of the present book is transparent as water, lucid as flame, compared to much of Blake's subsequent work. The designs, even if taken apart from their significance, are among his most inventive and interesting. Interpreted according to Blake's intention, the book was a small leaf or chapter of the inspired gospel of deliverance which he was charged to preach through the organs of his art ; a gospel not easily to be made acceptable or comprehensible.

Of the prophetic books produced about this time we shall not as yet speak ; nor have we much to say of the next set of designs, those illustrative of " Young's Night Thoughts," which were done, as will be surmised, on commission. Power, invention, and a certain share of beauty, these designs of course have ; but less, as it seems to me, of Blake's great qualities and more of his faults or errors than usual.

That the text which serves as a peg to hang them on, or a finger-post to point them out, is itself a thing dead and rotten, does not suffice to explain this ; for Blake could do admirable work by way of illustration to the verse of Hayley. This name brings us to a new and singular division of our present task. During the four important years of Blake's residence at Felpham we can trace his doings and feelings with some fulness and with some confi- dence. They were probably no busier than other years of his life ; but by a happy accident we hear more con- cerning the sort of labour done.

In August Blake moved out of London for the first time; he returned "early in The first act or two were played out with sufficient liking on either side. It must be remarked and remembered that throughout this curious and incongruous intercourse there is no question what- ever of obligation on Blake's part for any kindness shown beyond the equal offices of friend to friend. It is for " Mr. Hayley's usual brotherly affection" that he expresses such ready gratitude.

That the poor man's goodwill was genuine we need not hesitate to allow; but the fates never indulged in a freak of stranger humour than when it seemed good to their supreme caprice to couple in the same traces for even the shortest stage a man like Hay ley with a man like Blake, and bracket the " Triumphs of Temper" with the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell. It requires a certain strength of imagination to realise the assured fact that he was once a " greatest living poet ; " retrospection collapses in the effort, and credulity loses heart to believe. Such, however, was in effect his pro- fession ; he had the witness of his age under hand and seal to the fact, that on the death of his friend Cowper the supreme laurels of the age or day had fallen by inherit- ance to that poet's accomplished and ingenious biographer.

There is something pathetic and almost piteous in his perfect complacency and his perfect futility. A moral country should not have forgotten that to Mr. Hayley was ready enough to cage and exhibit among the flock of tame geese which composed his troop of swans this bird of foreign feather; and until the eagle's beak and claws came into play under sharp provocation, the Felpham coop and farmyard were duly dignified by his presence and behaviour as a " tame villatic fowl.

But of such alliances nothing could come in the end but that which did come. Butts, his one purchaser on the scale of a guinea per picture , " approves of my designs as little as he does of my poems. Things, however, took some time in reaching the tragic pitch of these shrill discords.

For months or years they appear to have run through various scales of very tolerable harmony. Blake, in the intervals of incessant engraving and occasional designing, was led by his good Hayley into the greenest pastures of literature and beside the stillest waters of verse ; he was solicited to help in softening and arranging for public inspection the horrible and pitiful narrative of Cowper's life ; he was prevailed upon to listen while Hayley "read Klopstock into English to Blake," with what result one may trust he never knew.

For it was probably under the sting of this infliction that Blake scratched down in pencil a brief lyrical satire on the German Milton, which modern humanity would refuse to read in public if transcribed ; although or because it might be, for grotesque ease and ringing breadth of melodious extravagance, a scrap saved from some tattered chorus of Aristophanes, or caught up by Eabelais as the fragment of a litany at the shrine of the Dive Bouteille. Let any man judge, from the ragged shred we can afford to show by way of sample, how a sight or handling of the stuff would have affected Hayley ; The moon at that sight blushed scarlet red, The stars threw down their cups and fled, And all the devils that were in hell Answered with a ninefold yell.

For the rest, when out of the shadow of Klopstock or Cowper, Blake had enough serious work on hand. His designs for various ballads of Hayley's, strays of sick verse long since decomposed, were admirable enough to warrant a hope of general admiration. This they failed of ; but Blake's head and hands were full of other work. Butts, "is become a goddess in my eyes.

He speaks of orders multiplying upon him, of especial praise received for proficiency in this style of work ; not, we may sup- pose, from any who had much authority to praise or dis- praise. In miniature and such things he must probably have worked with half his heart and less than half his native skill or strength of eye and hand. There is a certain pathos in the changes of tone which come one by one over Blake's correspondence at this time. All at first is sunlit and rose-coloured.

Meat is cheaper than in London ; but the sweet air and the voices of winds, trees, and birds, and the odours of the happy ground, make it a dwelling for immortals. A roller and two harrows lie before my window. In his quietest moods of mind, in his soberest tempers of fancy, he was always at some such work. At this time, too, he was living at a higher strain of the senses than usual.

So sudden a change of air and change of world as had come upon him filled his nerves and brain at every entrance with keen influences of childlike and sensitive satisfaction. Witness too the simple and complete pleasure with which he writes invitations and descriptions, transcribes visions and expe- riences. Probably too in some measure, could we trace the perfect relation of flesh with spirit and blood with brain, we should find that this first daily communion with the sea wrought upon him at once within and without ; that the sharp sweetness of the salted air was not without swift and pungent effect ; that the hourly physical delight lavished upon every sense by all tunes and odours and changes and colours of the sea the delight of every breath or sound or shadow or whisper passing upon it may have served at first to satiate as well as to stimulate, before the pressure of enjoyment grew too intense and the sting of enjoyment too keen.

Upon Blake, of all men, one may conjecture that these influences of spirit and sense would act with exquisite force. It is observable that now, and not before, we hear of visions making mani- fest to him the spiritual likeness of dead men: Through the marvellous last book of the Contemplations the breath and sound of the sea is blown upon every verse ; when he heard as it were the thunder and saw as it were the splendour of revelation, it was amid the murmur and above the motion of the Channel ; pres du dolmen qui domine Rozel, A 1'endroit oil le cap se prolonge en presqu'ile.

It is of small moment how the work thus done may strike the heavy ear of vulgarity or affect the torpid palate of prurience ; against mere indo- lence or mere misconstruction it is waste of time to con- trive precautions or rear defences ; but the laws and the dues of art it is never permissible to forget. It is in fact only by innate and irrational perception that we can apprehend and enjoy the supreme works of verse and colour ; these, as Blake indicates with a noble accuracy, are not things of the understanding ; otherwise, we may add, the whole human world would appreciate them alike or nearly alike, and the high and subtle luxuries of excep- tional temperaments would be made the daily bread of the poor and hungry ; the vinum dcemonum which now D 2 36 WILLIAM BLAKE.

All the more, meantime, because this " bread of sweet thought and wine of delight" is not broken or shed for all, but for a few only because the sacramental elements of art and poetry are in no wise given for the sustenance or the salvation of men in general, but reserved mainly for the sublime profit and intense pleasure of an elect body or church all the more on that account should the minis- tering official be careful that the paten and chalice be found wanting in no one possible grace of work or per- fection of material.

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That too much of Blake's written work while at Felp- ham is wanting in executive quality, and even in decent coherence of verbal dress, is undeniable. The Pythoness who delivers these stormy and sonorous oracles is at once exposed and hampered as it were by her loose and heavy raiment ; the prophetic robe here slips or gapes, there muffles and impedes ; is now a tatter that hardly hides the contorted limbs, and now an encumbrance that catches or trips up the reeling feet. Everything now written in the fitful impatient intervals of the day's work bears the stamp of an overheated brain and of nerves too intensely strung.

Everything may well appear to confirm the suggestion that, as high latitudes and climates of rarefied air affect the physical structure of inhabitants or travellers, so in this case did the sudden country life, the taste and savour of the sea, touch sharply WILLIAM BLAKE. How far such passive capacity of excitement differs from insanity ; how in effect a temperament so sensuous, so receptive, and so passionate, is further off from any risk of turning unsound than hardier natures carrying heavier weight and tougher in the nerves ; need scarcely be indicated.

For the rest, our concern at present shall still be mainly with the letters of this date ; and by their light we may be enabled to see light shed upon many things hitherto hopelessly dark. As no other samples of Blake's correspondence worth mention have been allowed us by the jealousy of fate and divine parsimony, we must be duly grateful and careful in dealing with all we have ; gathering the fragments into commodious baskets, and piecing the shreds into available patchwork. These letters bear upon them the common stamp of all Blake's doings and writings ; the fiery and lyrical tone of mind and speech, the passionate singleness of aim, the heat and flame of faith in himself, the violence of mere words, the lust of paradox, the loud and angry habits of expression which abound in his critical or didactic work, are not here missing ; neither are clear indications wanting of his noblest qualities ; the great love of great things, the great scorn of small men, the strong tenderness of heart, the tender strength of spirit, which won for him honour from all that were honourable.

Catalog Record: William Blake; a critical essay | Hathi Trust Digital Library

Ready even in a too fervent manner to accept, to praise, to believe in worth and return thanks for it, he will have no man or thing impede or divert him, either for love's sake or hate's. Upon Hayley, as we may see by collation of Blake's note- book with his letters, the lash fell at last, after long toler- ation of things intolerable, after " great objections to my doing anything but the mere drudgery of business," as for instance engraving illustrations to Hayley 's poems designed by Flaxman's sister not by his wife, as stated at p.

This," adds Blake, " has always pursued me. You will understand by this the source of all my uneasiness.

Catalog Record: William Blake; a critical essay | Hathi Trust Digital Library

This from Johnson and Fuseli brought me down here, and this from Mr. Hayley one of the best burlesque epigrams in the language: His mother on his father him begot. What is most to be regretted in these letters is the wonderful tone of assertion respecting the writer's own pictures and those of the great Italian schools. This it would be difficult enough to explain, dishonest to over- look, easy to ridicule, and unprofitable to rebuke. Higher authority than the writer's of that note no man can have or can require. And as Blake's artistic heresies are in fact mere accidents the illegitimate growth of chance and circumstance we may be content to leave them wholly to the practical judgment and the wise charity of such artists as are qualified to pass sentence upon the achievements and the shortcomings of this great artist.

Their praise can alone be thoroughly worth having ; their blame can alone be of any significance: Other points and shades of character not less singular it is essential here to take notice of. These are not mat- ters of accident, like the errors of opinion or perversities of expression which may distort or disfigure the notes and studies on purely artistic matters ; they compose the vital element and working condition of Blake's talent.

From the fifth to the tenth letter especially, it becomes evident that the writer was passing through strange struggles of spirit and passionate stages of faith. As early as the fourth letter, dated almost exactly a year later than the first written on his arrival at Felpham, Blake refers in a tone of regret and perplexity to the "abstract folly" which makes him incapable of direct practical work, though not of earnest and continuous labour. This action of the nerves or of the mind he was plainly unable to regulate or modify.

But this medicine the strange and strong faculty of faith innate in the man precludes him from taking. Physical distress "is his mock and scorn ; mental no man can give ; and if Heaven inflicts it, all such distress is a mercy. Above all gods or daemons of creation and division, he beheld by faith in a perfect man a supreme God. I am again emerged into the light of day ; I still and shall to eternity embrace Christianity, and adore Him who is the express image of God.

He walked and laboured under other heavens, on another earth, than the earth and the heaven of material life: It was, as we said, his element of life, inhaled at every breath with the common air, mixed into his veins with their natural blood. It was an element almost painfully tangible and actual ; an absolute medium or state of existence, inevit- able, inexplicable, insuperable. To him the veil of outer things seemed always to tremble with some breath behind it: All the void of earth and air seemed to quiver with the passage of sentient wings and palpitate under the pressure of conscious feet.

Flowers and weeds, stars and stones, spoke with articulate lips and gazed with living eyes. Hands were stretched towards him from beyond the darkness of material nature, to tempt or to support, to guide or to restrain. His hardest facts were the vaguest allegories of other men. To him all symbolic things were literal, all literal things symbolic. About his path and about his bed, around his ears and under his eyes, an infinite play of spiritual life seethed and swarmed or shone and sang.

Spirits impri- soned in the husk and shell of earth consoled or menaced him. Every leaf bore a growth of angels ; the pulse of every minute sounded as the falling foot of God ; under the rank raiment of weeds, in the drifting down of thistles, strange faces frowned and white hair fluttered ; tempters and allies, wraiths of the living and phantoms of the dead, crowded and made populous the winds that blew about him, the fields and hills over which he gazed. It was fourfold in the intervals of keenest inspiration and subtlest rapture ; threefold in the paradise of dreams lying between earth and heaven, lulled by lighter airs and lit by fainter stars ; a land of night and moonlight, spectral and serene.

These strange divisions of spirit and world according to some dim and mythologic hierarchy were with Blake matters at once serious and commonplace.

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The worlds of Beulah and Jerusalem, the existence of Los god of Time and Enitharmon goddess of Space, the fallen manhood of Theotormon, the impri- soned womanhood of Oothoon, were more to him even than significant names ; to the reader they must needs seem less. This monstrous nomenclature, this jargon of miscreated things in chaos, rose as by nature to his lips, flowed from them as by instinct. Time, an incarnate spirit clothed with fire, stands before him in the sun's likeness ; he is threatened with poverty, tempted to make himself friends of this world ; and makes answer as though to a human tempter: Strangely severed from other men, he was, or he con- ceived himself, more strangely interwoven with them.

The light of his spiritual weapons, the sound of his spiritual warfare, was seen, he believed, and was heard in faint resonance and far reverberation among men who knew not what such sights and sounds might mean. Heaven was full of the dead, coming to witness against him with blood-shedding and with shedding of tears: Nothing to him was neutral ; nothing without significance. Such struggles of spirit in poets or artists have been too often made the subject of public study ; nay, too often the theme of chaotic versifiers.

A theme more utterly improper it is of course impossible to devise. It is just that a workman should see all sides of his work, and labour with all his might of mind and dexterity of hand to make it great and perfect ; but to use up the details of the process as crude material for cruder verse to invite spectators as to the opening of a temple, and show them the unbaked bricks and untem- pered mortar to expose with immodest violence and impotent satisfaction the long revolting labours of mental abortion this no artist will ever attempt, no craftsman ever so perform as to escape ridicule.

It is useless for those who can carve no statue worth the chiselling to exhibit instead six feet or nine feet of shapeless plaster or fragmentary stucco, and bid us see what sculptors work with ; no man will accept that in lieu of the statue. Not less futile and not less indecent is it for those who can give expression to no great poem to dis- gorge masses of raw incoherent verse on the subject of verse-making: To Blake the whole thing was too grave for any such exposure of spiritual nudity.

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In these letters he records the result of his " sore travail ;" in these verses he com- memorates the manner of his work " under the direction of messengers from heaven daily and nightly, not without trouble or care ;" but he writes in private and by pure WILLIAM BLAKE. For such heavy play with gossamer and straws his nature was too earnest and his genius too exalted.

This is the mood in which he looks over what work he has done or has to do ; and in his lips the strange scriptural language used has the sincerity of pure fire. Why should I be troubled? I will go on in the strength of the Lord ; through hell "will I sing forth His praises ; that the dragons of the deep may praise Him, and that those who dwell in dark- ness and in the sea-coasts may be gathered into His kingdom.

How it may fare with artisans be they never so pretentious is a matter of sufficiently small moment. One blessing there assuredly was upon all Blake's work ; the infinite blessing of life ; the fervour of vital blood. In spite however of all inspiration and of all support, sickness and uncongenial company impeded his hours of labour and corroded his hours of repose. A trial on the infamous charges of sedition and assault, brought by a private soldier whose name of Scholfield was thus made shamefully memorable, succeeded finally in making the country unendurable to him. Blake's honourable acquittal does not make it less disgraceful that the charge should at all have been entertained.

His own courage, readiness of wit, and sincerity of spirit are fully shown in the letter relating this short and sharp episode in his quiet life. Some months later he returned to London once for all, and once for all broke off rela- tions with Felpham: Having read these letters, we are not lightly to judge of Blake as of another man. Thoughts and creeds pecu- liar to his mind found expression in ways and words peculiar to his lips. It was no vain or empty claim that he put forward to especial insight and individual means of labour.

If he spoke strangely, he had great things to speak. If he acted strangely, he had great things to do. If the man who wrote thus had nothing to do or to say worth the saying or the doing, it may fairly be said that he was mad or foolish. The involving smoke, here again, implied the latent fire. Where the particles of dust are mere hardened mud, where the cloud is mere condensing fog hatched from the stagnation of a swamp, one may justly complain of the obstruction and the obscurity.

This man had never lived in the low places of thought. To a poet who has given us so much, to an artist who has done great things to such great purpose, we may give at least some allowance and some toleration. The distance is great which divides a fireside taper from the eclipsed moon on Etna.

Eules which are useful or necessary for household versifiers may well be permitted to relax or even to dissolve when applied to one who has attained to see with unblinded eyes and to speak with adequate words of matters so far above them. The next point noticeable by us in the story of Blake's life is his single-handed duel with Cromek and Stothard ; and of this we need not wish to speak at much length. The few and great words cited above occur, it will be observed, in a poem affording throughout no inapt allegory of Blake's life and works. More accurate and more admirable expression was never given to a theme so pregnant and so great.

The whole " fable " may be well applied by students of the matter in hand to the history of Blake's relations with minor men of more turn for success ; which, as Victor Hugo has noted in his royal manner, is so often " a rather hideous thing. What has been written in the text is of course based upon the assumption that Mr. Gilchrist has given an account of the matter as full and as fair as it was assuredly his desire to make it. As junior counsel so to speak on behalf of Blake, I have followed the lead of his biographer ; for me in fact nothing remained but to revise and restate, with such clearness and brevity as I could, the case as laid down by him.

This, finding on the face of it nothing incoherent or incredible, I have done ; whether any man can disprove it remains to be seen. Meantime we are not left to our own choice in the matter of epithets. There is but one kind of phrase that will express such things and the doers of such things. Against Stothard no grave charge has been brought ; none therefore can be re- futed. Any reference to subsequent doings or sufferings of his must be unspeakably irrelevant to the matter in hand. Against Cromek a sufficiently heavy indict- ment has been laid ; one which cannot be in the least degree lightened by counter- charges of rash violence on Blake's part or blind hastiness on Mr.

One thing alone can avail him in the way of whitewash. He is charged with theft ; prove that he did not steal. He is charged with breach of contract ; prove that his contract was never broken. He is charged with denying a commission given by him ; prove that he did not deny it. For no man, it is to be feared, will now believe that Blake, sleeping or waking, forged the story of the com- mission or trumped up the story of the contract. That point of the defence the counsel for Cromek had best give up with all convenient speed ; had better indeed not dream at all of entering upon it.

Prove that he did not write the letter published by Mr. It is undoubtedly deplorable that any one now living should in any way have to suffer for the misdoings of a man, whom, were it just or even possible, one would be willing to overlook and to forget. But time is logical and equable; and this is but one among many inevitable penalties which time is certain to bring upon such wrong-doers in the end ; penalties, or rather simple results of the thing done. Had this man either dealt honestly or while dealing dishonestly been but at the pains to keep clear of Walter Scott and William Blake, no writer would have had to disturb his memory.

But now, however strong or sincere may be our just sense of pity for all to whom it may give pain, truth must be spoken ; and the truth is that, unless the authorities cited can be utterly upset and broken down by some palpable proof in his favour, Cromek was what has been stated. Gilchrist also, in the course of his fair and lucid narrative, speaks once of "pity.

William Blake: A Critical Essay by Algernon Charles Swinburne

And even for the exercise of these special talents he is perhaps not to be blamed ; the man did but work with such qualities as he had ; did. But that he should have done this at Blake's expense is and must remain unpardonable: A best that can be done for Cromek is to let well alone. Less could not have been said of him than equitable biography has here been compelled to say ; no more need be said now and for ever, if counsel will have the wisdom to let sleeping dogs lie.

The waters are muddy enough without that. Vague and vain clamour of deprecation or appeal may be plain- tive but is not conclusive. As to any talk of cruelty or indelicacy shown in digging up the dead misdeeds of dead men, it is simply pitiable. Were not reason wasted on such reasoners it might be profitable which too evidently it is not to reply that such an argument cuts right and left at once. Suppress a truth, and you suggest a lie ; and a lie so suggested is the most " indelicate " of cruelties possible to inflict on the dead If, for pity's sake or contempt's or for any other reason, the biographer had explained away the charges against Cromek which lay ready to his hand, he must have left upon the memory of Scott and upon the memory of Blake the stain of a charge as grave as this: To one or two the good name of a private man may be valuable ; to all men the good name of a great man must be precious.

This difference of value must not be allowed to weigh with us while considering the evidence ; but the fact seems to be that no evidence in disproof of the main charges has been put forward which can be seriously thought worth sifting for a moment. This then being the sad case, to inveigh against Blake's biographer is utterly idle and hardly honest. If the stories are not true, any man's com- mentary which assumes their truth must be infinitely unimportant. If the stories are true, no remark annexed to the narrative can now blacken the accused further.

Those alone who are responsible for the accusation brought can be convicted of unfairness in bringing it ; Mr. Gilchrist, it must be repeated, found every one of the charges which we now find in his book, given under the hand and seal of honourable men. These he found it, as I do now, necessary to transcribe in a concise form ; adding, as I have done, any brief remarks he saw fit to make in the interest of justice and for the sake of explanation. Let there be no more heard of appeal against this exercise of a patent right, of invective against this discharge of an evident duty.

Disproof is the one thing that will now avail ; and to anything short of that no one should again for an instant listen. It may be worth while to condense the evidence as to his dealings with Blake and Stothard. One alone of these three comes out clear from the involved network of suspicious double-dealing. In the matter of the engravings to Blair, Cromek had en- trapped and cheated Blake from the first.

In the matter of the drawing from Chaucer, he had gone a step further down the steep slope of peculation. After the proposal to employ Schiavonetti, Blake might at once have thrown him over as a self-detected knave. He did not ; and was accordingly plundered again in a less dexterous and a more direct manner.

It is fortunate that the shameful little history has at last been tracked through all its scandalous windings by so keen an eye and so sure a hand as Mr. Two questions arise at first sight ; did Cromek give Blake a commission for his design of the " Pilgrims "? Both these questions Blake would have answered in the affirmative ; and in his dialect the affirmative mood was distinct and strong. Further evi- dence on the first head can be wanted by no one of decent insight or of decent candour.

That Cromek, with more than professional impudence, denied the charge, is an incident in the affair neither strange nor important. With the vul- garities and audacities, the shifts and the doubles of this shuffling man of prey, no one need again be troubled. That a visitor caught with the spoons in his pocket should bluster, stammer, and grin as he pleads innocence or affects amazement, is natural and desirable; for every word and gesture, humble or shameless, incoherent or intrepid, serves to convict him twice over.

Undoubtedly he saw Blake's sketch, tried to conjure it into his pocket, and failed ; undoubtedly, finding that the artist would not again give up his work to be engraved by other hands, he made such approach to an honest offer as was compatible with his character ; undoubtedly also he then made money in his uncleanly way out of the failure by tossing the subject to another painter as a bait.

No man has a right to express wonder that Blake refused to hold Stothard blameless. It is nothing whatever to the purpose that, while Cromek's somewhat villainous share in the speculation was as yet under cover, Blake may have bestowed on Stothard's unfinished design his friendly counsel and his frank applause. After the dealer's perfidy had been again bared and exposed by his own act, it was, and it is yet, a stretch of charity to suppose that his associate was not likewise his accomplice. And the manner of Stothard's retort upon Blake, when taxed by him with unfair dealing, was not of a sort qualified to disperse or to allay suspicion.

He charged, and he permitted Cromek to charge, the plundered man with the act of plunder. The fellowship of such an one as Cromek leaves upon all who take his part at least the suspicion of a stain. All should hope that Stothard on coming out of the matter could have shown clean hands ; none can doubt that Blake did. That on Stothard's part irritation should have succeeded to surprise, and rancour to irritation, is not wonderful. If he was indeed injured by the fault of Cromek and the misfortune of Blake, it would doubt- less have been admirably generous to have controlled the irritation and overcome the rancour ; but in that case the worst that should be said of him is that he did not adopt the noblest course of action possible to him.

Ad- mitting this, he is not blameable for choosing to throw in his lot with Cromek ; but we must then suppose not merely that Cromek had abstained from any avowal of his original treachery, but that Stothard was unhappily able to accept in good faith the bare assertion of Cromek in preference to the bare assertion of Blake.

If we believe this, we are bound to admit no harsher feeling than regret that Cromek should so have duped and blinded his betters ; but in common fairness we are also bound to restrict the question within these limits. For Stothard a door of honourable escape stands open ; and all must desire rather to widen than to narrow the opening.

No one can wish to straiten his chance of acquittal, or to inquire too curiously whether there be not a pretext for closing the door that now stands ajar. It is possible that Blake was not wronged by Stothard ; it is undeniable that he was wronged through him. It is probable that Stothard believed himself to be not in the wrong ; it is certain that Blake was in the right. In one of his rough epigrams, formless and pointless for the most part, but not without value for the sudden broken gleams of light they cast upon Blake's character and history, he reproaches both sculptor and painter with benefits conferred by him- self and disowned by them: I taught them how to see ; And now they know neither themselves nor me.

If so, we must say he managed to scratch his own fingers with the pin, to miss his shot with the bolt, and to spill the liquor extracted from the essence of knavery. The following dialogue has equal virulence and somewhat more sureness of aim. Why should you prove ungrateful to your friends, Sneaking, and backbiting, and odds-and-ends?

Turn back, turn back ; you travel all in vain ; Turn through the iron gate down Sneaking Lane. About the close of this quarrel, and before the publica- tion of Blake's designs to Blair as engraved for Cromek by Schiavonetti, a book came out which would have deserved more notice and repaid more interest than has yet been shown it.

The graceful design by Blake on its frontispiece is not the only or even the chief attraction of Dr. Malkin's "Memoirs of his Child. Even supreme genius, which usually has a mind now and then to try, has never given us the complete and vivid likeness which a child has for once given of himself. Matthew Bartlett rated it really liked it Dec 10, Jeremy rated it really liked it Nov 26, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog rated it it was ok Jun 27, Karl Rossmann rated it really liked it Jan 05, Ven rated it did not like it Jan 31, Robert added it Jan 30, Inna marked it as to-read Aug 17, Yasiru reviews will soon be removed and linked to blog marked it as to-read Dec 25, Jean Fausto marked it as to-read Jul 08, Alexandra marked it as to-read Jul 30, Tristan marked it as to-read Sep 29, Theo Logos marked it as to-read Mar 23, Paul Davis marked it as to-read Nov 15, Chris Mills marked it as to-read Nov 15, Janos Fisterra marked it as to-read Dec 14, Hermgirl marked it as to-read Jun 19, Linda marked it as to-read Jul 05, Dan marked it as to-read Oct 21, Msrobot0 marked it as to-read Jan 13, Valentine Frenett marked it as to-read Jan 29, Soraya marked it as to-read Jun 26, Kyle marked it as to-read Jul 26, Marta marked it as to-read Aug 26, Brandon marked it as to-read Sep 06, Laura marked it as to-read Jan 03, Kevin added it May 28, LE Francis marked it as to-read Jun 03, Alex Galton marked it as to-read Jun 29, Brandon Longstreth marked it as to-read Jul 12, Joey Woolfardis marked it as to-read Sep 15, Isrrael is currently reading it Nov 22, Oliver marked it as to-read Jan 03, Chihiro marked it as to-read Jan 16, There are no discussion topics on this book yet.

About Algernon Charles Swinburne. Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, controversial in his own day. He invented the roundel form, wrote some novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.