Part 2

The chief movement of Blake either in art or literature was the first publication of the batch of his own allegorical works. “The Gates of Paradise” came first, and was followed by “Urizen” and the “Book of Thel.” With these he introduced his own mode of engraving and began his own style of decorative illustration. That style was steeped in the Blake and Flaxman feeling for the hard line and the harsh and heroic treatment. There were, of course, many other personalities besides that of Flaxman which were destined to influence the art of William Blake. Among others, the personality of William Blake influences it not inconsiderably. But no influence ever disturbed the love of the absolute academic line. If the reader will look at any of the designs of Blake, many of which are reproduced in this book, he will see the main fact which I mention here. Many of them are hideous, some of them are outrageous, but none of them are shapeless; none of them are what would now be called “suggestive”; none of them (in a word) are timid. The figure of man may be a monster, but he is a solid monster. The figure of God may be a mistake, but it is an unmistakable mistake. About this same time Blake began to illustrate books, decorating Blair’s “Grave” and the Book of Job with his dark but very definite designs. In these plates it is quite plain that the artist, when he errs, errs not by vagueness but by hardness of treatment. The beauty of the angel upside down who blows the trumpet in the face of Blair’s skeleton is the beauty of a perfect Greek athlete. And if the beauty is the beauty of an athlete, so the ugliness is the ugliness of an athlete--or perhaps of an acrobat. The contortions and clumsy attitudes of some of Blake’s figures do not arise from his ignorance of the human anatomy. They arise from a sort of wild knowledge of it. He is straining muscles and cracking joints like a sportsman racing for a cup.

These book illustrations by Blake are among the simplest and strongest designs of his pencil, which at its best (to do him justice) tended to the simple and the strong. Nothing (for instance) could well be more comic or more tragic than the fact that Blake should illustrate Blair’s elephantine epic called “The Grave.” It was as well that Blake and Blair should meet over the grave. It was about all they had in common. The poet was full of the most crushing platitudes of eighteenth century rationalism. The artist was full of a poetry that would have seemed frightful to the poet, a poetry inherited from the mystics of all ages and handed on to the mystics of to-day. Blake was the child of the Rosy Cross and the Eleusinian Mysteries; he was the father of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and even of the “Yellow Book.” But of all this the excellent Mr Blair was innocent, and so, indeed, in all probability was the excellent Mr Blake. But the really interesting point is this: that the illustrations were efficient and satisfactory, from the Blair as well as the Blake point of view. The cut, for instance, with the figure of the old man bowing his head to enter the black grotto of the grave is a fine piece of drawing, apart from its meaning, and is all the finer for its simplicity. But wherever he errs it is always in being too hard and harsh, not too faint or fanciful. Blake was a greater man than Flaxman, though a less perfectly poised man. He was harder than his master, because he was madder. The figure upside down blowing the trumpet is as perfect as a Flaxman figure: only it is upside down. Flaxman upside down is almost a definition of Blake.

* * * * *

SUCH an elementary statement of Blake’s idea of art is not out of place at this stage; for his convictions had formed and hardened unusually early, and his career is almost unintelligible apart from his opinions. It is fairly eccentric even with them. Flaxman had introduced him to literary society, especially to the evening parties of a Blue-stocking named Mrs Matthews. Here his force of mind was admitted; but he was not personally very popular. Most of his biographers attribute this to his “unbending deportment,” and a certain almost babyish candour which certainly belonged to him. But I cannot help thinking that the fact that he was in the habit of singing his own poems to tunes invented by himself may perhaps have had something to do with it. His opinions on all subjects were not only positive but aggressive. He was a fierce republican and denouncer of kings. But Mrs Matthews was probably accustomed to fierce republicans who denounced kings. She may have been less accustomed to a gentleman who insisted on wearing a red cap of liberty in ordinary society. It is due to Blake to say that his politics showed nevertheless that eccentric practicality which was mixed up with his unworldliness; it was certainly through his presence of mind that Tom Paine did not perish on the scaffold.

But Blake had none of the marks of the poetical weakling, of the mere moon-calf of mysticism. If he was a madman, one can emphasise the word man as well as the word mad. For instance, in spite of his sedentary trade and his pacific theories, he had extraordinary physical courage. Not that reasonable minimum of physical courage which is guaranteed by certain conventional sports, but intrinsic contempt of danger, a readiness to put himself into unknown perils. He would suddenly attack men much bigger and stronger than himself, and that with such violence that they were often defeated by their own amazement. He attacked a huge drayman who was harsh to some women and beat him in the most excited manner. He leapt upon a Lifeguardsman who came into his front garden, and ran that astonished warrior into the road by the elbows. The vivacity and violence of these physical outbreaks must be remembered and allowed for when we are judging some of his mental outbreaks. The most serious blot (indeed, the only serious blot) on the moral character of Blake was his habit of letting his rage get the better not only of decency but of gratitude and truth. He would abuse his benefactors as virulently as his enemies. He left epigrams lying about in which he called Flaxman a blockhead and Hayley (as far as the words can be understood) a seducer and an assassin. But the curious thing is that he often did justice to the same people both before and after such eruptions. The truth is, I fancy, that such writings were like sudden attitudes or bodily movements. We talk of a word and a blow; with Blake a word had the same momentary character as a blow. It was not a judgment, but a gesture. He had little or no feeling of the idea that “litera scripta manet.” He did not see any particular reason why he should not be fond of a man merely because he had called the man a murderer a few days before. And he was innocently surprised if the man was not fond of him. In this he was perhaps rather feminine than masculine.

He had many friends and acquaintances of distinction besides Flaxman. Among them was the great Priestley, whose speculations were the life of early Unitarianism and whose Jacobin sympathies led to something not far from martyrdom; other friends were the wild optimist Godwin and his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft. But although he gained many new acquaintances he gained only one new helper. This was a Mr Thomas Butts, who lived in Fitzroy Square, and ought to have a statue there, for he is an eternal model and monument for all patrons of art. While in all other respects apparently a sane and rational British merchant, he conceived an affection for Blake’s allegorical designs. But he gave no commissions for pictures; he simply gave Blake money for pictures as fast as Blake chose to paint them. The subject and size and medium were left entirely to the artist. One day Blake might leave at Fitzroy Square a little water-colour of the “Soul of a Porcupine”; the next day a gorgeous and intricate illumination in gold of the obstetrics and birth of Cain; the next day an enormous mural painting of Hector capturing the arms of Patroclus; the following day a simple pen and ink drawing of the prophet Habbakuk taken from life. All these Mr Thomas Butts of Fitzroy Square received with solid benevolence and paid for in solid coin. Many modern writers and painters may think of such a patron somewhat dreamily. He had his reward, though it was unique rather than particularly practical. Blake regarded him with a serene affection which was never ruffled by the flying storms that were too frequent in his friendships. No allusions can be found in his poetry to the effect that Thomas Butts was a Spectre from Satan’s Loins. No epigram was discovered among Blake’s papers accusing Mr Butts of bereaving anybody’s life. If to have kept one’s own temper with Blake was a large achievement (and it was not a small one), it was certainly a truly noble achievement to have kept Blake’s temper for him. And this Mr Butts and Mrs Blake can alone really claim to have done. For Blake was to pass under a patron who showed him how different is kindness from sympathy.

In the year 1800 he effected a change of residence which was in many ways an epoch in his life. He was a Londoner, though doubtless a Londoner of the time when London was small enough to feel itself on every side to be on the edge of the country. Still Blake had never in any true sense been in the heart of the country. In his earliest poems we read of seraphs stirring in the trees; but we have somehow a feeling that they were garden trees. We read of saints and sages walking in the fields, and we almost have the feeling that they were brickfields. The perfect landscape is pastoral to the point of conventionality; it has not in any sense the actual smell of England. The sights of the town are evidently as native (one might say vital) with him as any of the sights of the country. The black chimney-sweep is as obvious as the white lamb. What is worse still, the white lamb of England is no more natural or native than the alien golden lion of Africa. He was, in fact, a Cockney, like Keats; and Cockneys as a class tend to have too poetical and luxuriantly imaginative a view of life. Blake was about as little affected by environment as any man that ever lived in this world. Still he did change his environment, and it did change him.

There lived about this time near the little village of Eartham, in Sussex, a simple, kind-hearted but somewhat consequential squire of the name of Hayley. He was a landlord and an aristocrat; but he was not one of those whose vanity can be wholly fulfilled by such functions. He considered himself a patron of poetry; and indeed he was one; but, alas! he had a yet more alarming idea. He also considered himself a poet. Whether any one agreed with that opinion while he still ruled the estates and hunted the country it is difficult now to discover. It is sufficiently certain that nobody agrees with it now. “The Triumphs of Temper,” the only poem by Hayley that any modern person can remember, is probably only remembered because it was used to round off scornfully one of the ringing sentences in Macaulay’s Essays. Nevertheless in his own time Hayley was a powerful and important man, quite unshaken as yet as a poet, quite unshakeable as a landed proprietor. But like almost all quite indefensible English oligarchs, he had a sort of unreasonable good nature which somehow balanced or protected his obvious unfitness and ineptitude. His heart was in the right place, though he was in the wrong one. To this blameless and beaming lord of creation, too self-satisfied to be arrogant, too solemnly childish to be cynical, too much at his ease to doubt either others or himself, to him Flaxman introduced, at him rather Flaxman threw, the red-hot cannon-ball called Blake. I wonder whether Flaxman laughed. But laughter convulses and crumples up the pure outline of the Greek profile.

Hayley, who was in his way as munificent as Mæcenas (and I suspect that Mæcenas was quite as stupid as Hayley), gave Blake a cottage in Felpham, a few miles from his own house, a cottage with which Blake almost literally fell in love. He writes as if he had never seen an English country cottage before; and perhaps he never had. “Nothing,” he cries in a kind of ecstasy, “can ever be more grand than its simplicity and usefulness. Simple and without intricacy, it seems to be the spontaneous expression of humanity, congenial to the wants of man. No other formed house can ever please me so well.” It is probably true that none ever did. All that was purest and most chivalrous in his poetry and philosophy flowered in the great winds that pass and repass between the noble Sussex hills and the sea. He was always a happy man, since he had a God. But here he was almost a contented man.

By this time had passed over Blake’s head first the beginning and then the growing blackness of the great French terror. Blake was now in a world in which even he could not venture to walk about in a red cap. Moreover, like most of the men of genius of that age and school, like Coleridge and like Shelley, he seems to have been slightly sickened with the full sensational actuality of the French tragedy; and somewhat unreasonably having urged the rebels to fight, complained because they killed people. If sincere revolutionists like Blake and Coleridge were disappointed at the Revolution, the English Government and governing class were against it with a solidity of desperation. People talk about the reign of terror in France; but allowing for the difference of national temperament and national peril, the two things were twin; there was a reign of terror in England. A gentleman was sent to penal servitude (which some gentlemen find worse than the guillotine) if he said that the Prince Regent was fat. Our terror was as cruel as Robespierre’s, but more cowardly, just as our press-gang was as cruel as conscription, only more cowardly. Everywhere that the Government could knock down an enemy as if by accident, could brain a Jacobin with some brutal club of legal coincidence, the thing was done. Many such blows were struck in that time, and one of them was struck at Blake.

On a certain morning in the August of 1803 Blake walked out into his garden and found standing there a trooper of the 1st Dragoons in a scarlet coat, surveying the landscape with a satisfied air of possession. Blake expressed a desire that the dragoon should leave the garden. The dragoon expressed a desire to knock out Blake’s eyes, “with many abominable imprecations.” Blake sprang upon the man with startling activity, and catching him from behind by both elbows ran him out of the garden as if he were a perambulator. The man, who was probably drunk and must certainly have been surprised, went off with many verbal accusations, but none of a political nature. A little while afterwards, however, he turned up with a grave legal statement to the effect that Blake had taken the opportunity to utter these somewhat improbable words: “Damn the king, damn all his subjects, damn his soldiers, they are all slaves: when Bonaparte comes it will be cut-throat for cut-throat. I will help him.” The impartial critic will be inclined to say that few persons would have even the breath to utter such political generalisations while at the same time running one of the Dragoon Guards bodily out of the gate; and it was not alleged that the incident took more than half a minute. Blake may possibly or even probably have said “damn,” but the rest of the sentence originated, I imagine, in the mind of someone else. But although most of Blake’s biography treats the case as a mere clumsy accident, I can hardly think that it was so. It involves too much of a coincidence. Why did not the dragoon wander into some other garden? Why did not some other poet have to deal with the dragoon? It seems odd that the man of the red cap should be the one man to wrestle with the man of the red coat. It was a time of tyranny, and tyranny is always full of small intrigues. It is not at all impossible that the police, as we should now put it, really tried to entrap Blake. But there entered upon the scene something which in England is stronger even than the police. Hayley, not the small Hayley who was the author of the “Triumphs of Temper,” but the colossal Hayley, who was the squire of Eartham and Bognor, entered the court with the extra aristocratic charm of an accident in the hunting-field. He defended Blake with generosity and good sense, such as seldom fail his class on such occasions; and Blake was acquitted. It was said that the evidence was incomplete; but I fancy that if Hayley had not come the evidence would have been complete enough.

It is unfortunate that this excellent attitude of Hayley nevertheless coincides to a great extent with the solution of the bonds that bound him to Blake. “The Visions were angry with me at Felpham,” said the poet, which was his way of stating that he was somewhat bored with the benevolence of the English gentry. “Voices of celestial inhabitants were _not_ more distinctly heard, nor their forms more distinctly seen,” in the neighbourhood of the Squire of Eartham than in that of Mr Butts of Fitzroy Square; and Blake abruptly returned to London, taking lodgings just off Oxford Street. He started at once on a work with the promising title, “Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion.” I say there is a certain pathos in this parting from Hayley, for he was now to fall into the power of a much more unpleasant kind of capitalist. Poor Blake fell indeed from bad to worse in the matter of patrons. Butts was sensible and sympathetic, Hayley was honest and silly. And his last protector seems to have been something very like a swindler.

The name of this benevolent being was Richard Hartley Cromek, a Yorkshireman, and a publisher. He found Blake in bitter poverty after his breach with Hayley (he and his wife lived on 10s. a week), and his method of sweating was of the simplest and most artistic character. He used to go to Blake, tell him that he would give him the engraving of a number of designs; he would easily make Blake talk enthusiastically, show his sketches and so on; then having got the sketches he would go away and give the engraving to somebody else. This annoyed Blake. It is pleasant to reflect that it was about Cromek that the best of his epigrams was written--

“A petty sneaking knave I knew ... Oh, Mr. Cromek, how do you do?”

Blake’s irritation broke out, as was common with him, not over the clearest but over the most confused case of Cromek’s misconduct. The publisher had seen a design by Blake of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Pilgrims,” and commissioned Blake to complete it. A few days afterwards Cromek found himself in the studio of the popular painter Stothard, and suggested the subject to him. Stothard finished his picture first and it appeared before Blake’s. Blake went into one of his worst rages and wrote one of his best pieces of prose.

* * * * *

A BROTHER artist said of Blake, with beautiful simplicity, “He is a good man to steal from.” The remark is as philosophical as it is practical. Blake had the great mark of real intellectual wealth; anything that fell from him might be worth picking up. What he dropped in the street might as easily be half-a-sovereign as a halfpenny. Moreover, he invited theft in this further sense, that his mental wealth existed, so to speak, in the most concentrated form. It is easier to steal half-a-sovereign in gold than in halfpence. He was literally packed with ideas--with ideas which required unpacking. In him and his works they were too compressed to be intelligible; they were too brief to be even witty. And as a thief might steal a diamond and turn it into twenty farms, so the plagiarist of Blake might steal a sentence and turn it into twenty volumes. It was profitable to steal an epigram from Blake for three reasons--first, that the original phrase was small and would not leave a large gap; second, that it was cosmic and synthetic and could be applied to things in general; third, that it was unintelligible and no one would know it again. I could give innumerable instances of what I mean; I will let one instance stand for the rest. In the middle of that long poem which is so disconnected that it may reasonably be doubted whether it is a long poem at all (I mean that commonly bearing the title “The Auguries of Innocence”), he introduces these two lines:

“When gold and gems adorn the plough To peaceful arts shall envy bow.”

A careless and honest man would read these lines and make nothing of them. A careful thief might make out of them a whole entertaining and symbolic romance, like “Gulliver’s Travels” or “Erewhon.” The idea obviously is this;--that we still for some reason admit the tools of destruction to be nobler than the tools of production, because decorative art is expended on the one and not on the other. The sword has a golden hilt; but no plough has golden handles. There is such a thing as a sword of state; there is no such thing as a scythe of state. Men come to court wearing imitation swords; few men come to court wearing imitation flails. It is fascinating to reflect how fantastic a story might be written upon this hint by Blake. But Blake does not write the story; he only gives the hint, and that so hurriedly that even as a hint it may hardly be understood.

Most of Blake’s quarrels were trivial, and some were little short of discreditable. But in his quarrel with Cromek and Stothard he does really stand as the champion of all that is heroic and ideal, as against all that is worldly and insincere. The celebrated Stothard was at this time in the height of his earlier success; he occupied somewhat the same relation to art and society that has been occupied within our own time by Frederic Leighton. He was, like Leighton, an accomplished draughtsman, a man of slight but genuine poetic feeling, an artist who thoroughly realised that the aim of art was to please. Ruskin said of him very truly (I forget the exact words) that there were no thorns to his roses. At the same time, his smoothness was a smoothness of innocence rather than a smoothness of self-indulgence; his work has a girlish timidity rather than any real conventional cowardice; he was a true artist in a somewhat effeminate style of art. Nor is there any reason to doubt that his personal character was as clean and good-natured as his pictures. It may be that he began his _Canterbury Pilgrims_ without any commission from Cromek, or it may be that he took the commission from Cromek without the least idea that the conception had been borrowed from Blake. That Cromek treated Blake badly is beyond dispute; that Stothard treated him badly is unproved; but Blake was not much in the habit of waiting for proof in such cases. Stothard, I say, may not have been morally in the wrong at all. But he was intellectually and critically very much in the wrong; and Blake pointed this out in a pamphlet which, though defaced here and there with his fantastic malice, is a solid and powerful contribution to artistic and literary criticism.