  TO PREFACE PREFACEIt was when Mr. Sampson's edition of Blake came into my hands in the winter of 1905 that the idea of writing a book on Blake first presented itself to me. From a boy he had been one of my favorite poets, and I had heard a great deal about him from Mr. Yeats as long ago as 1893, the year in which he and Mr. Ellis brought out their vast encyclopaedia, The Works of William Blake, Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. From that time to this Blake has never been out of my mind, but I have always hesitated to write down anything on a subject so great in itself, and already handled by great poets. Things have been written about Blake by Rossetti which no one will ever surpass; and in Mr. Swinburne's book Blake himself seems to speak again, as through the mouth of a herald. I read these, I read everything that had been written about him; gradually I got to know all his work, in all its kinds; and when I found, in Mr. Sampson's book, the rarest part of his genius, disentangled at last from the confusions of the commentators, I caught some impulse—was it from the careful enthusiasm of this editor, or perhaps straight from Blake?—and began to write down what now filled and overflowed my mind. Having begun on an impulse, I laid my plans as strictly as I could, and decided to make a book which would be, in its way, complete. There was to be, first, my own narrative, containing, as briefly as possible, every fact of importance, with my own interpretation of what I took to be Blake's achievements and intentions. But this was to be followed by a verbatim reprint of documents. These documents were the material of Gilchrist, but, even after Gilchrist's use of them, they remain of primary and undiminished importance: they are the main evidence in our case. The documents which form the second part of my book contain every personal account of Blake which was printed during his lifetime, and between the time of his death and the publication of Gilchrist's Life in 1863, together with the complete text of every reference to Blake in the Diary, Letters, and Reminiscences of Crabb Robinson, transcribed for the first time from the original manuscripts. All these I have given exactly as they stand, not correcting their errors, for even errors have their value as evidence. The only other document of the period which exists was written by Frederick Tatham, within two years of the appearance of Cunningham's Life, and bound up at the beginning of a colored copy of Blake's Jerusalem, now in the possession of Captain Archibald Stirling. This manuscript was consulted by Mr. Swinburne and afterwards by Mr. Ellis and Mr. Yeats; but though many extracts have been made from it, it was printed for the first time by Mr. Archibald G. B. Russell in his edition of The Letters of William Blake (Methuen, 1906). This very important volume completes the task which I have here undertaken: the reprint of every record of Blake from contemporary sources. The mere contact with Blake seems to awaken the natural generosity of those who have concerned themselves with him. To Mr. John Sampson, the editor of the only accurate edition of Blake's poems, I am indebted for more help and encouragement than I can hope to express in detail; and particularly for prompting me to a search among birth and marriage and death registers, by which I have been enabled to settle several disputed points of some interest. To Mr. A. G. B. Russell I owe constant personal help, and the very generous loan of the proofs of his edition of Blake's Letters, and of Tatham's Life, with free leave to use them in the narrative which I was writing at a time when his book had not yet appeared. Through this favour I have been able to take such facts as Tatham is responsible for directly from Tatham, and not at secondhand. I am also indebted to Mr. Russell for reading my proofs and saving me from some errors of fact. I have to thank Mr. Buxton Forman for allowing me to read and describe the unpublished manuscript in Blake's handwriting in his possession. Finally, my particular thanks are due to the Librarian of Dr. Williams's Library, Mr. Francis H. Jones, for permission to copy and print the full text of all the references to Blake in the Crabb Robinson Manuscripts. LONDON, April 1907. LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED1. Life of William Blake. By ALEXANDER GILCHRIST. Two volumes. Macmillan, 1863. New and enlarged edition, 1880. 2. William Blake: A Critical Essay. By ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. John Camden Hotten, 1868. New edition, Chatto&Windus, 1906. 3. The Poetical Works of William Blake. Edited by W. M. ROSSETTI. Aldine Edition. Bell&Sons, 1874. 4. The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer. By A. H. Palmer. Seeley&Co., 1892. 5. The Life of John Linnell. By ALFRED T. STORY. Two volumes. Bentley, 1892. 6. A Memoir of Edward Calvert. By his third son [SAMUEL CALVERT]. S. LOW&Co., 1893. 7. The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical. Edited, with lithographs of the illustrated Prophetic Books, and a Memoir and Interpretation, by EDWIN JOHN ELLIS and WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS. Three volumes. Quaritch, 1893. 8. The Poems of William Blake. Edited by W. B. YEATS. 'The Muses' Library.' Lawrence&Bullen, 1893. 9. William Blake: his Life, Character, and Genius. By ALFRED T. STORY. Sonnenschein&Co., 1893. 10. William Blake: Painter and Poet. By RICHARD GARNETT. 'Portfolio,' 1895. 11. Ideas of Good and Evil. By W. B. YEATS. (William Blake and the Imagination, William Blake and his Illustrations to the Divine Comedy.) A. H. Bullen, 1903. 12. The Rossetti Papers (1862 to 1870); a Compilation by W. M. ROSSETTI. Sands&Co., 1903. 13. The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem. Edited by E. R. D. MACLAGAN and A. G. B. RUSSELL. Bullen, 1904. 14. The Poetical Works of William Blake. Edited by JOHN SAMPSON. Oxford, 1905. 15. The Letters of William Blake; together with a Life by FREDERICK TATHAM. Edited by ARCHIBALD G. B. RUSSELL. Methuen, 1906. 16. The Poetical Works of William Blake. Edited and annotated by EDWIN J. ELLIS. Two volumes. Chatto&Windus, 1906. (The only edition containing the Prophetic Books.) 17. William Blake. Vol. I. Illustrations of the Book of Job, with a general Introduction by LAURENCE BINYON. Methuen, 1906. 18. The Real Blake. A Portrait Biography. By EDWIN J. ELLIS. Chatto&Windus, 1907. PART IINTRODUCTIONIWhen Blake spoke the first word of the nineteenth century there was no one to hear it, and now that his message, the message of emancipation from reality through the 'shaping spirit of imagination,' has penetrated the world, and is slowly remaking it, few are conscious of the first utterer, in modern times, of the message with which all are familiar. Thought to-day, wherever it is most individual, owes either force or direction to Nietzsche, and thus we see, on our topmost towers, the Philistine armed and winged, and without the love or fear of God or man in his heart, doing battle in Nietzsche's name against the ideas of Nietzsche. No one can think, and escape Nietzsche; but Nietzsche has come after Blake, and will pass before Blake passes. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell anticipates Nietzsche in his most significant paradoxes, and, before his time, exalts energy above reason, and Evil, 'the active springing from energy' above Good, 'the passive that obeys reason.' Did not Blake astonish Crabb Robinson by declaring that 'there was nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices'; that 'vices in the natural world were the highest sublimities in the spiritual world'? 'Man must become better and wickeder,' says Nietzsche in Zarathustra; and, elsewhere; 'Every man must find his own virtue.' Sin, to Blake, is negation, is nothing; 'everything is good in God's eyes'; it is the eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that has brought sin into the world: education, that is, by which we are taught to distinguish between things that do not differ. When Nietzsche says: 'Let us rid the world of the notion of sin, and banish with it the idea of punishment,' he expresses one of Blake's central doctrines, and he realizes the corollary, which, however, he does not add. 'The Christian's soul,' he says, 'which has freed itself from sin is in most cases ruined by the hatred against sin. Look at the faces of great Christians. They are the faces of great haters.' Blake sums up all Christianity as forgiveness of sin: 'Mutual forgiveness of each vice, The doctrine of the Atonement was to him a 'horrible doctrine,' because it seemed to make God a hard creditor, from whom pity could be bought for a price. 'Doth Jehovah forgive a debt only on condition that it shall be paid? ... That debt is not forgiven!' he says in Jerusalem. To Nietzsche, far as he goes on the same road, pity is 'a weakness, which increases the world's suffering'; but to Blake, in the spirit of the French proverb, forgiveness is understanding. 'This forgiveness,' says Mr. Yeats, 'was not the forgiveness of the theologian who has received a commandment from afar off, but of the poet and artist, who believes he has been taught, in a mystical vision, "that the imagination is the man himself," and believes he has discovered in the practice of his art that without a perfect sympathy there is no perfect imagination, and therefore no perfect life.' He trusted the passions, because they were alive; and, like Nietzsche, hated asceticism, because: 'Abstinence sows sand all over 'Put off holiness,' he said, 'and put on intellect,' And 'the fool shall not enter into heaven, let him be ever so holy.' Is not this a heaven after the heart of Nietzsche? Nietzsche is a Spinoza À rebours. The essence of the individual, says Spinoza, 'is the effort by which it endeavors to persevere in its own being.' 'Will and understanding are one and the same.' 'By virtue and power I understand the same thing.' 'The effort to understand is the first and sole basis of virtue.' So far it might be Nietzsche who is speaking. Only, in Spinoza, this affirmation of will, persistent egoism, power, hard understanding, leads to a conclusion which is far enough from the conclusion of Nietzsche. 'The absolute virtue of the mind is to understand; its highest virtue, therefore, to understand or know God.' That, to Nietzsche, is one of 'the beautiful words by which the conscience is lulled to sleep.' 'Virtue is power,' Spinoza leads us to think, because it is virtue; 'power is virtue,' affirms Nietzsche, because it is power. And in Spinoza's profound heroism of the mind, really a great humility, 'he who loves God does not desire that God should love him in return.' Nietzsche would find the material for a kind of desperate heroism, made up wholly of pride and defiance. To Blake, 'God-intoxicated' more than Spinoza, 'God only acts and is, in existing beings and men,' as Spinoza might also have said; to him, as to Spinoza, all moral virtue is identical with understanding, and 'men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.' Yet to Blake Spinoza's mathematical approach to truth would have been a kind of negation. Even an argument from reason seemed to him atheistical: to one who had truth, as he was assured, within him, reason was only 'the bound or outward circumference of energy,' but 'energy is the only life,' and, as to Nietzsche, is 'eternal delight.' Yet, to Nietzsche, with his strange, scientific distrust of the imagination, of those who so 'suspiciously' say 'We see what others do not see,' there comes distrust, hesitation, a kind of despair, precisely at the point where Blake enters into his liberty. 'The habits of our senses,' says Nietzsche, 'have plunged us into the lies and deceptions of feeling.' 'Whoever believes in nature,' says Blake, 'disbelieves in God; for nature is the work of the Devil.' 'These again,' Nietzsche goes on, 'are the foundations of all our judgments and "knowledge," there is no escape whatever, no back-way or by-way into the real world.' But the real world, to Blake, into which he can escape at every moment, is the world of imagination, from which messengers come to him, daily and nightly. Blake said 'The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction,' and it is partly in what they helped to destroy that Blake and Nietzsche are at one; but destruction, with Blake, was the gesture of a hand which brushes aside needless hindrances, while to Nietzsche it was 'an intellectual thing,' the outer militant part of 'the silent, self-sufficient man in the midst of a general enslavement, who practices self-defense against the outside world, and is constantly living in a state of supreme fortitude.' Blake rejoins Nietzsche as he had rejoined Spinoza, by a different road, having fewer devils to cast out, and no difficulty at all in maintaining his spiritual isolation, his mental liberty, under all circumstances. And to Blake, to be 'myself alone, shut up in myself,' was to be in no merely individual but in a universal world, that world of imagination whose gates seemed to him to be open to every human being. No less than Nietzsche he says to every man: Be yourself, nothing else matters or exists; but to be myself, to him, was to enter by the imagination into eternity. The philosophy of Nietzsche was made out of his nerves and was suffering, but to Blake it entered like sunlight into the eyes. Nietzsche's mind is the most sleepless of minds; with him every sensation turns instantly into the stuff of thought; he is terribly alert, the more so because he never stops to systematize; he must be for ever apprehending. He darts out feelers in every direction, relentlessly touching the whole substance of the world. His apprehension is minute rather than broad; he is content to seize one thing at a time, and he is content if each separate thing remains separate; no theory ties together or limits his individual intuitions. What we call his philosophy is really no more than the aggregate of these intuitions coming to us through the medium of a remarkable personality. His personality stands to him in the place of a system. Speaking of Kant and Schopenhauer, he says: 'Their thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of the soul.' His thoughts are the passionate history of his soul. It is for this reason that he is an artist among philosophers rather than a pure philosopher. And remember that he is also not, in the absolute sense, the poet, but the artist. He saw and dreaded the weaknesses of the artist, his side-issues in the pursuit of truth. But in so doing he dreaded one of his own weaknesses. Blake, on the other hand, receives nothing through his sensations, suffers nothing through his nerves. 'I know of no other Christianity,' he says, 'and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the divine arts of Imagination: Imagination, the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies, when these vegetable mortal bodies are no more.' To Nietzsche the sense of a divine haunting became too heavy a burden for his somewhat inhuman solitude, the solitude of Alpine regions, with their steadfast glitter, their thin, high, intoxicating air. 'Is this obtrusiveness of heaven,' he cries, 'this inevitable superhuman neighbor, not enough to drive one mad?' But Blake, when he says, 'I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly,' speaks out of natural joy, which is wholly humility, and it is only 'if we fear to do the dictates of our angels, and tremble at the tasks set before us,' it is only then that he dreads, as the one punishment, that 'every one in eternity will leave him.' II'There are three powers in man of conversing with Paradise,' said Blake, and he defined them as the three sons of Noah who survived the flood, and who are Poetry, Painting, and Music. Through all three powers, and to the last moments of his life on earth, Blake conversed with Paradise. We are told that he used to sing his own songs to his own music, and that, when he was dying, 'he composed and uttered songs to his Maker,' and 'burst out into singing of the things he saw in heaven.' And with almost the last strength of his hands he had made a sketch of his wife before he 'made the rafters ring,' as a bystander records, with the improvisation of is last breath. Throughout life his desire had been, as he said, 'to converse with my friends in eternity, see visions, dream dreams, and prophesy and speak parables unobserved.' He says again: 'I rest not from my great task And, writing to the uncomprehending Hayley (who had called him 'gentle, visionary Blake'), he says again: 'I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.' To the newspapers of his time, on the one or two occasions when they mentioned his name, he was 'an unfortunate lunatic'; even to Lamb, who looked upon him as 'one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' he was a man 'flown, whither I know not—to Hades or a madhouse.' To the first editor of his collected poems there seemed to be 'something in his mind not exactly sane'; and the critics of to-day still discuss his sanity as a man and as a poet. It is true that Blake was abnormal; but what was abnormal in him was his sanity. To one who believed that 'The ruins of Time build mansions in eternity,' that 'imagination is eternity,' and that 'our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part,' there could be none of that confusion at the edge of mystery which makes a man mad because he is unconscious of the gulf. No one was ever more conscious than Blake was of the limits of that region which we call reality and of that other region which we call imagination. It pleased him to reject the one and to dwell in the other, and his choice was not the choice of most men, but of some of those who have been the greatest saints and the greatest artists. And, like the most authentic among them, he walked firmly among those realities to which he cared to give no more than a side-glance from time to time; he lived his own life quietly and rationally, doing always exactly what he wanted to do, and with so fine a sense of the subtlety of mere worldly manners, than when, at his one moment of worldly success, in 1793, he refused the post of drawing-master to the royal family, he gave up all his other pupils at the same time, lest the refusal should seem ungracious on the part of one who had been the friend of revolutionaries. He saw visions, but not as the spiritualists and the magicians have seen them. These desire to quicken mortal sight until the soul limits itself again, takes body, and returns to reality; but Blake, the inner mystic, desired only to quicken that imagination which he knew to be more real than the reality of nature. Why should he call up shadows when he could talk in the spirit with spiritual realities? 'Then I asked,' he says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?' He replied, "All poets believe that it does." In the Descriptive Catalogue to his exhibition of pictures in 1809, Blake defines, more precisely than in any other place, what vision was to him. He is speaking of his pictures, but it is a plea for the raising of painting to the same 'sphere of invention and visionary conception' as that which poetry and music inhabit. 'The Prophets,' he says, 'describe what they saw in vision as real and existing men, whom they saw with their imaginative and immortal organs; the Apostles the same; the clearer the organ, the more distinct the object. A spirit and a vision are not, as the modern philosophy supposes, a cloudy vapor, or a nothing. They are organized and minutely articulated beyond all that the mortal and perishing nature can produce. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all. The painter of this work asserts that all his imaginations appear to him infinitely more perfect and more minutely organized than anything seen by his mortal eye.' 'Inspiration and vision,' he says in one of the marginal notes to Reynolds's Discourses, 'was then, and now is, and I hope will always remain, my element, my eternal dwelling-place.' And 'God forbid,' he says also, 'that Truth should be confined to mathematical demonstration. He who does not know Truth at sight is not worthy of her notice.' The mind of Blake lay open to eternity as a seed-plot lies open to the sower. In 1802 he writes to Mr. Butts from Felpham: 'I am not ashamed, afraid, or averse to tell you what ought to be told—that I am under the direction of messengers from heaven, daily and nightly.' 'I have written this poem,' he says of the Jerusalem, 'from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or— thirty lines at a time, without premeditation, and even against my will.' 'I may praise it,' he says in another letter, 'since I dare not pretend to be any other than the secretary; the authors are in eternity.' In these words, the most precise claim for direct inspiration which Blake ever made, there is nothing different in kind, only in degree, from what must be felt by every really creative artist and by every profoundly and simply religious person. There can hardly be a poet who is not conscious of how little his own highest powers are under his own control. The creation of beauty is the end of art, but the artist should rarely admit to himself that such is his purpose. A poem is not written by the man who says: I will sit down and write a poem; but rather by the man who, captured by rather than capturing an impulse, hears a tune which he does not recognize, or sees a sight which he does not remember, in some 'close corner of his brain,' and exerts the only energy at his disposal in recording it faithfully, in the medium of his particular art. And so in every creation of beauty, some obscure desire stirred in the soul, not realized by the mind for what it was, and, aiming at most other things in the world than pure beauty, produced it. Now, to the critic this is not more important to remember than it is for him to remember that the result, the end, must be judged, not by the impulse which brought it into being, nor by the purpose which it sought to serve, but by its success or failure in one thing: the creation of beauty. To the artist himself this precise consciousness of what he has done is not always given, any more than a precise consciousness of what he is doing. Only in the greatest do we find vision and the correction of vision equally powerful and equally constant. To Blake, as to some artists and to most devout people, there was nothing in vision to correct, nothing even to modify. His language in all his letters and in much of his printed work is identical with the language used by the followers of Wesley and Whitefield at the time in which he was writing. In Wesley's journal you will find the same simple and immediate consciousness of the communion of the soul with the world of spiritual reality: not a vague longing, like Shelley's, for a principle of intellectual beauty, nor an unattained desire after holiness, like that of the conventionally religious person, but a literal 'power of conversing with Paradise,' as Blake called it, and as many Methodists would have been equally content to call it. And in Blake, as in those whom the people of that age called 'enthusiasts' (that word of reproach in the eighteenth century and of honor in all other centuries), there was no confusion (except in brains where 'true superstition,' as Blake said, was 'ignorant honesty, and this is beloved of God and man') between the realities of daylight and these other realities from the other side of day. Messrs. Ellis and Yeats quote a mysterious note written in Blake's handwriting, with a reference to Spurzheim, page 154. I find that this means Spurzheim's Observations on the Deranged Manifestations of the Mind, or Insanity (1817), and the passage in the text is as follows: 'Religion is another fertile cause of insanity. Mr. Haslam, though he declares it sinful to consider religion as a cause of insanity, adds, however, that he would be ungrateful, did he not avow his obligations to Methodism for its supply of numerous cases. Hence the primitive feelings of religion may be misled and produce insanity; that is what I would contend for, and in that sense religion often leads to insanity.' Blake has written: 'Methodism, etc., p. 154. Cowper came to me and said: "Oh! that I were insane, always. I will never rest. Can not you make me truly insane? I will never rest till I am so. Oh! that in the bosom of God I was hid. You retain health and yet are mad as any of us all-over us all—mad as a refuge from unbelief—from Bacon, Newton, and Locke."' What does this mean but that 'madness,' the madness of belief in spiritual things, must be complete if it is to be effectual, and that, once complete, there is no disturbance of bodily or mental health, as in the doubting and distracted Cowper, who was driven mad, not by the wildness of his belief, but by the hesitations of his doubt? Attempts have been made to claim Blake for an adept of magic. But whatever cabbalistical terms he may have added to the somewhat composite and fortuitous naming of his mythology ('all but names of persons and places,' he says, 'is invention, both in poetry and painting'), his whole mental attitude was opposed to that of the practicers of magic. We have no record of his ever having evoked a vision, but only of his accepting or enduring visions. Blake was, above all, spontaneous: the practiser of magic is a deliberate craftsman in the art of the soul. I can no more imagine Blake sitting down to juggle with symbols or to gaze into a pool of ink than I can imagine him searching out words that would make the best effects in his lyrics, or fishing for inspiration, pen in hand, in his own ink-pot. A man does not beg at the gate of dreams when he is the master for whose entrance the gate stands open. Of the definite reality of Blake's visions there can be no question; no question that, as he once wrote, 'nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God, and in the abysses of the accuser.' But imagination is not one, but manifold; and the metaphor, professing to be no more than metaphor, of the poet, may be vision as essential as the thing actually seen by the visionary. The difference between imagination in Blake and in, say, Shakespeare, is that the one (himself a painter) has a visual imagination and sees an image or metaphor as a literal reality, while the other, seeing it not less vividly but in a more purely mental way, adds a 'like' or an 'as,' and the image or metaphor comes to you with its apology or attenuation, and takes you less by surprise. But to Blake it was the universe that was a metaphor. WILLIAM BLAKEIThe origin of the family of William Blake has not yet been found; and I can claim no more for the evidence that I have been able to gather than that it settles us more firmly in our ignorance. But the names of his brothers and sister, their dates and order of birth, and the date of his wife's birth, have never, so far as I know, been correctly given. Even the date of his own birth has been contested by Mr. Swinburne 'on good MS. authority,' which we know to be that of Frederick Tatham, who further asserts, wrongly, that James was younger than William, and that John was 'the eldest son.' Gilchrist makes no reference to John, but says, wrongly, that James was 'a year and a half William's senior,' and that William had a sister 'nearly seven years younger than himself'; of whom, says Mr. Yeats, we hear little, and among that little not even her name.' Most of these problems can be settled by the entries in parish registers, and I have begun with the registers of the church of St. James, Westminster. I find by these entries that James Blake, the son of James and Catherine Blake, was born July 10, and christened July 15, 1753; John Blake ('son of John and Catherine,' says the register, by what is probably a slip of the pen) was horn May 12, and christened June I, 1755; William Blake was born November 28, and christened December 11, 1757; another John Blake was born March 20, and christened March 30, 1760; Richard Blake was born June 19, and christened July 11, 1762; and Catherine Elizabeth Blake was born January 7, and christened January 28, 1764. Here, where we find the daughter's name and the due order of births, we find one perplexity in the name of Richard, whose date of birth fits the date given by Gilchrist and others to Robert, William's favorite brother, whose name he has engraved on a design of his 'spiritual form' in Milton, whom he calls Robert in a letter to Butts, and whom J. T. Smith recalls not only as Robert, but as 'Bob, as he was familiarly called.' In the entry of 'John, son of John and Catherine Blake,' I can easily imagine the clerk repeating by accident the name of the son for the name of the father; and I am inclined to suppose that there was a John who died before the age of five, and that his name was given to the son next born. Precisely the same repetition of name is found in the case of Lamb's two sisters christened Elizabeth, and Shelley's two sisters christened Helen. 'My brother John, the evil one,' would therefore be younger than William; but Tatham, in saying that he was older, may have been misled by there having been two sons christened John. There are two theories as to the origin of Blake's family; but neither of them has yet been confirmed by the slightest documentary evidence. Both of these theories were put forth in the same year, 1893, one by Mr. Alfred T. Story in his William Blake, the other by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats in their Works of William Blake. According to Mr. Story, Blake's family was connected with the Somerset family of the Admiral, through a Wiltshire family of Blakes; but for this theory he gives merely the report of 'two ladies, daughters of William John Blake, of Southampton, who claim to be second cousins of William Blake,' and in a private letter he tells me that he has not been able to procure any documentary evidence of the statement. According to Messrs. Ellis and Yeats, Blake's father was Irish, and was originally called O'Neil. His father, John O'Neil, is supposed to have changed his name, on marrying Ellen Blake, from O'Neil to Blake, and James O'Neil, his son by a previous union, to have taken the same name, and to have settled in London, while a younger son, the actual son of Ellen Blake, went to Malaga. This statement rests entirely on the assertion of Dr. Carter Blake, who claimed descent from the latter; and it has never been supported by documentary evidence. In answer, to my inquiry, Mr. Martin J. Blake, the compiler of two volumes of Blake Family Records (first series, 1300-1600; second series, 1600-1700), writes: 'Although I have made a special study of the genealogies of the Blakes of Ireland, I have not come across any Ellen Blake who married John O'Neil who afterwards (as is said by Messrs. Ellis and Yeats) adopted the surname of Blake.' Mr. Sampson points out that Blakes father was certainly a Protestant. He is sometimes described as a Swedenborgian, always as a Dissenter, and it is curious that about half of the Blakes recorded in the Dictionary of National Biography were also conspicuous as Puritans or Dissenters. Mr. Sampson further points out that Blake in one of his poems speaks of himself as 'English Blake.' It is true that he is contrasting himself with the German Klopstock; yet I scarcely think an Irishman would have used the expression even for contrast. Blake is nowhere referred to as having been in any way Irish, and the only apparent exception to this is one which I am obliged to set up with one hand and knock down with the other. In the index to Crabb Robinson's Diary one of the references to Blake shows us Mr. Sheil speaking at the Academical Society while 'Blake, his countryman, kept watching him to keep him in order.' That this does not refer to William Blake I have found by tracking through the unpublished portions of the Diary in the original manuscript the numerous references to 'a Mr. Blake' who was accustomed to speak at the meetings of the Academical Society. He is described as 'a Mr. Blake who spoke with good sense on the Irish side, and argued from the Irish History and the circumstances which attended the passing of the bills.' He afterwards speaks 'sharply and coarsely,' and answers Mr. Robinson's hour-long contention that the House of Commons should, or should not, 'possess the power of imprisoning for a breach of privilege,' by 'opposing the facts of Lord Melville's prosecution, the Be version Bill, etc., etc., and Burke's Reform Bill'; returning, in short, 'my civility by incivility.' This was not the learning, nor were these the manners, of William Blake. I would again appeal to the evidence of the parish register. I find Blakes in the parish of St. James, Westminster, from the beginning of the eighteenth century, the first being a William Blake, the son of Richard and Elizabeth, who was born March 19, 1700. Between the years 1750 and 1767 (the time exactly parallel with the births of the family of James and Catherine Blake) I find among the baptisms the names of Frances, Daniel, Reuben, John Cartwright, and William (another William) Blake; and I find among the marriages, between 1728 and 1747, a Robert, a Thomas, a James, and a Richard Blake. The wife of James, who was married on April 15, 1738, is called Elizabeth, a name which we have already found as the name of a Mrs. Blake, and which we find again as the second name of Catherine Elizabeth Blake (the sister of William Blake), who was born in 1764. I find two Williams, two Richards, and a John among the early entries, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. It is impossible to say positively that any of these families, not less than nine in number, all bearing the name of Blake, all living in the same parish, within a space of less than forty years, were related to one another; but it is easier to suppose so than to suppose that one only out of the number, and one which had assumed the name, should have found itself accidentally in the midst of all the others, to which the name may be supposed to have more definitely belonged. All that we know with certainty of James Blake, the father, is that he was a hosier ('of respectable trade and easy habits,' says Tatham; 'of fifty years' standing,' says Cunningham, at the time of his death), that he was a Dissenter (a Swedenborgian, or inclined to Swedenborgianism), and that he died in 1784 and was buried on July 4 in Bunhill Fields. The burial register says: 'July 4, 1784. Mr. James Blake from Soho Square in a grave, 13/6.' Of his wife Catherine all that we know is that she died in 1792, and was also buried in Bunhill Fields. The register says: 'Sept. 9, 1792. Catherine Blake; age 70; brought from St. James, Westminster. Grave 9 feet; E.&W. 16; N.&S. 42-43. 19/-.' Tatham says that 'even when a child, his mother beat him for running and saying that he saw the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields.' At eight or ten he comes home from Peckham Rye saying that he has seen a tree filled with angels; and his father is going to beat him for telling a lie; but his mother intercedes. It was the father, Tatham says, who, noticing to what great anger he was moved by a blow, decided not to send him to school. 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!" said the brother, astonished at such a liberality, which he had never experienced before nor I dare say did afterwards.' Crabb Robinson had at first written 'as long as you like,' and this he altered into 'as long as you live,' as if fancying, so long afterwards as 1852, that he remembered the exact word; but in the entry in the Diary, in 1810, we read 'Oh! as often as you please!' so that we may doubt whether the 'honest, unpretending shopkeeper,' who was looked upon by his neighbors, we are told, as 'a bit mad,' because he would 'talk Swedenborg,' can be credited with all the enthusiasm of the later and more familiar reading. James and William no longer spoke to one another when, after retiring from business, James came to live in Cirencester Street, near Linnell. Tatham tells us that 'he got together a little annuity, upon which he supported his only sister, and vegetating to a moderate age, died about three years before his brother William.' Of John we know only that he was something of a scapegrace and the favorite son of his parents. He was apprenticed, at some cost, to a candle-maker, but ran away, and, after some help from William, enlisted in the army, lived wildly, and died young. Robert, the favorite of William, also died young, at the age of twenty-five. He lived with William and Catherine from 1784 to the time of his death in 1787, at 27 Broad Street, helping in the print-shop of 'Parker and Blake,' and learning from his brother to draw and engrave. One of his original sketches, a stiff drawing of long, rigid, bearded figures staring in terror, quite in his brother's manner, is in the Print Room of the British Museum. A story is told of him by Gilchrist which gives us the whole man, indeed the whole household, in brief. There had been a dispute between him and Mrs. Blake. Blake suddenly interposed, and said to his wife: 'Kneel down and beg Robert's pardon directly, or you will never see my face again.' She knelt down (thinking it, as she said afterwards, 'very hard,' for she felt herself to be in the right) and said: 'Robert, I beg your pardon; I am in the wrong.' 'Young woman, you lie,' said Robert, 'I am in the wrong.' Early in 1787 Robert fell ill, and during the last fortnight William nursed him without taking rest by day or night, until, at the moment of death, he saw his brother's soul rise through the ceiling 'clapping its hands for joy'; whereupon he went to bed and slept for three days and nights. Robert was buried in Bunhill Fields on February 11. The register says: "Feb. 11, 1787. Mr. Robert Blake from Golden Square in a grave, 13/6." But his spiritual presence was never to leave the mind of William Blake, whom in 1800 we find writing to Hayley: 'Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in remembrance, in the regions of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate.' It was Robert whom he saw in a dream, not long after his death, telling him the method by which he was to engrave his poems and designs. The spiritual forms of William and of Robert, in almost exact parallel, are engraved on separate pages of the Prophetic Book of Milton. Of the sister, Catherine Elizabeth, we know only that she lived with Blake and his wife at Felpham. He refers to her in several letters, and in the poem sent to Butts on October 2, 1800, he speaks of her as 'my sister and friend.' In another poem, sent to Butts in a letter dated November 22, 1802, but written, he explains, 'above a twelvemonth ago, while walking from Felpham to Lavant to meet my sister,' he asks strangely: 'Must my wife live in my sister's bane, But from the context it is not clear whether this is meant literally or figuratively. When Tatham was writing his life of Blake, apparently in the year 1831, he refers to 'Miss Catherine' as still living, 'having survived nearly all her relations.' Mrs. Gilchrist, in a letter written to Mr. W. M. Rossetti in 1862, reports a rumour, for which she gives no evidence, that 'she and Mrs. Blake got on very ill together, and latterly never met at all,' and that she died in extreme penury. IIOf the childhood and youth of Blake we know little beyond what Malkin and Smith have to tell us. From the age of ten to the age of fourteen he studied at Pars' drawing-school in the Strand, buying for himself prints after Raphael, DÜrer, and Michelangelo at the sale-rooms; at fourteen he was apprenticed to Basire, the engraver, who lived at 31 Great Queen Street, and in his shop Blake once saw Goldsmith. 'His love for art increasing,' says Tatham, and the time of life having arrived when it was deemed necessary to place him under some tutor, a painter of eminence was proposed, and necessary applications were made; but from the huge premium required, he requested, with his characteristic generosity, that his father would not on any account spend so much money on him, as he thought it would be an injustice to his brothers and sisters. He therefore himself proposed engraving as being less expensive, and sufficiently eligible for his future avocations. Of Basire, therefore, for a premium of fifty guineas, he learnt the art of engraving.' We are told that he was apprenticed, at his own request, to Basire rather than to the more famous Ryland, the engraver to the king, because, on being taken by his father to Ryland's studio, he said: 'I do not like the man's face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged.' Twelve years later Ryland was hanged for forgery. Blake was with Basire for seven years, and for the last five years much of his time was spent in making drawings of Gothic monuments, chiefly in Westminster Abbey, until he came, says Malkin, to be 'himself almost a Gothic monument.' Tatham tells us that the reason of his being 'sent out drawing,' as he fortunately was, instead of being kept at engraving, was 'for the circumstance of his having frequent quarrels with his fellow—apprentices concerning matters of intellectual argument.' It was in the Abbey that he had a vision of Christ and the Apostles, and in the Abbey, too, that he flung an intrusive Westminster schoolboy from the scaffolding, 'in the impetuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption,' says Tatham, and then laid a complaint before the Dean which has caused, to this day, the exclusion of Westminster schoolboys from the precincts. It was at this time that Blake must have written the larger part of the poems contained in the Poetical Sketches, printed (we cannot say published) in 1783, for in the 'Advertisement' at the beginning of the book we are told that the 'following Sketches were the production of untutored youth, commenced in his twelfth, and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year,' that is to say, between the years 1768 and 1777. The earliest were written while Goldsmith and Gray were still living, the latest (if we may believe these dates) after Chatterton's death, but before his poems had been published. Ossian had appeared in 1760, Percy's Reliques in 1765. The Reliques probably had their influence on Blake, Ossian certainly, an influence which returns much later, curiously mingled with the influence of Milton, in the form taken by the Prophetic Books. It has been suggested that some of Blake's mystical names, and his 'fiend in a cloud,' came from Ossian; and Ossian is very evident in the metrical prose of such pieces as 'Samson,' and even in some of the imagery ('Their helmed youth and aged warriors in dust together lie, and Desolation spreads his wings over the land of Palestine'). But the influence of Chatterton seems not less evident, an influence which could hardly have found its way to Blake before the year 1777. In the fifth chapter of the fantastic Island in the Moon (probably written about 1784) there is a long discussion on Chatterton, while in the seventh chapter he is again discussed in company with Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. As late as 1826 Blake wrote on the margin of Wordsworth's preface to the Lyrical Ballads: 'I believe both Macpherson and Chatterton that what they say is ancient is so,' and on another page, 'I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any poet whatever, of Rowley and Chatterton also.' Whether it be influence or affinity, it is hard to say, but if the 'Mad Song' of Blake has the hint of any predecessor in our literature, it is to be found in the abrupt energy and stormy masculine splendor of the High Priest's song in 'Aella,' 'Ye who his yn mokie ayre'; and if, between the time of the Elizabethans and the time of 'My silks and fine array' there had been any other song of similar technique and similar imaginative temper, it was certainly the Minstrel's song in 'Aella,' 'O! synge untoe mie roundelaie.' Of the direct and very evident influence of the Elizabethans we are told by Malkin, with his quaint preciseness: 'Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, Tarquin and Lucrece, and his Sonnets... poems, now little read, were favorite studies of Mr. Blake's early days. So were Jonson's Underwoods and his Miscellanies.' 'My silks and fine array' goes past Jonson, and reaches Fletcher, if not Shakespeare himself. And the blank verse of 'King Edward the Third' goes straight to Shakespeare for its cadence, and for something of its manner of speech. And there is other blank verse which, among much not even metrically correct, anticipates something of the richness of Keats. Some rags of his time did indeed cling about him, but only by the edges; there is even a reflected ghost of the pseudo-Gothic of Walpole in 'Fair Elenor,' who comes straight from the Castle of Otranto, as 'Gwin, King of Norway,' takes after the Scandinavian fashion of the day, and may have been inspired by 'The Fatal Sisters' or 'The Triumphs of Owen' of Gray. Blind-man's Buff,' too, is a piece of eighteenth-century burlesque realism. But it is in the ode 'To the Muses' that Blake for once accepts, and in so doing clarifies, the smooth convention of eighteenth—century classicism, and, as he reproaches it in its own speech, illuminates it suddenly with the light it had rejected: 'How have you left the ancient love In those lines the eighteenth century dies to music, and from this time forward we find in the rest of Blake's work only a proof of his own assertion, that 'the ages are all equal; but genius is above the age.' In 1778 Blake's apprenticeship to Basire came to an end, and for a short time he studied in the Antique School at the newly founded Royal Academy under Moser, the first keeper. In the Life of Reynolds which prefaces the 1798 edition of the Discourses, Moser is spoken of as one who 'might in every sense be called the Father of the present race of Artists.' Blake has written against this in his copy: 'I was once looking over the prints from Raphael and Michael Angelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said, "You should not study these old hard, stiff, and dry unfinished works of art. Stay a little, and I will show you what you should study." He then went and took down Le Brun's and Rubens' Galleries. How did I secretly rage: I also spoke my mind. I said to Moser, "These things that you call finished are not even begun: how can they then be finished? The man who does not know the beginning never can know the end of art."' Malkin tells us that Blake 'professed drawing from life always to have been hateful to him; and speaks of it as looking more like death, or smelling of mortality. Yet still he drew a good deal from life, both at the Academy and at home.' A water-color drawing dating from this time, 'The Penance of Jane Shore,' was included by Blake in his exhibition of 1809. It is the last number in the catalogue, and has the note: 'This Drawing was done above Thirty Years ago, and proves to the Author, and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential respects.' He also did engravings, during several years, for the booksellers, Harrison, Johnson, and others, some of them after Stothard, who was then working for the Novelist's Magazine. Blake met Stothard in 1780, and Stothard introduced him to Flaxman, with whom he had himself just become acquainted. In the same year Blake met Fuseli, who settled near him in Broad Street, while Flaxman, on his marriage in 1781, came to live near by, at 27 Wardour Street. Bartolozzi and John Yarley were both, then or later, living in Broad Street, Angelica Kauffmann in Golden Square. In 1780 (the year of the Gordon Biots, when Blake, carried along by the crowd, saw the burning of Newgate) he had for the first time a picture in the Royal Academy, the water-color of 'The Death of Earl Godwin.' It was at this time, in his twenty-fourth year, that he fell in love with 'a lively little girl' called Polly Wood. Tatham calls her 'a young woman, who by his own account, and according to his own knowledge, was no trifler. He wanted to marry her, but she refused, and was as obstinate as she was unkind.' Gilchrist says that on his complaining to her that she had 'kept company' with others besides himself, she asked him if he was a fool. 'That cured me of jealousy,' he said afterwards, but the cure, according to Tatham, made him so ill that he was sent for change of air to 'Kew, near Richmond' (really to Battersea), to the house of 'a market-gardener whose name was Boutcher.' While there, says Tatham, 'he was relating to the daughter, a girl named Catherine, the lamentable story of Polly Wood, his implacable lass, upon which Catherine expressed her deep sympathy, it is supposed, in such a tender and affectionate manner, that it quite won him. He immediately said, with the suddenness peculiar to him, "Do you pity me? Yes, indeed I do," answered she. "Then I love you," said he again. Such was their courtship. He was impressed by her tenderness of mind, and her answer indicated her previous feeling for him: for she has often said that upon her mother's asking her who among her acquaintances she could fancy for a husband, she replied that she had not yet seen the man, and she has further been heard to say that when she first came into the room in which Blake sat, she instantly recognized (like Britomart in Merlin's wondrous glass) her future partner, and was so near fainting that she left his presence until she recovered.' Tatham tells us that Blake 'returned to his lodgings and worked incessantly' for a whole year, resolving that he would not see her until he had succeeded' in making enough money to be able to marry her. The marriage took place at Battersea in August 1762. Gilchrist says that he has traced relatives of Blake to have been living at Battersea at the time of his marriage. Of this he gives no evidence; but I think I have found traces, in Blake's own parish, of relatives of the Catherine Boucher whom he married at Battersea. Tatham, as we have seen, says that she was the daughter of a market-gardener at 'Kew, near Richmond,' called Boutcher, to whose house Blake was sent for a change of air. Allan Cunningham says that 'she lived near his father's house.' I think I have found the reason for Cunningham's mistake, and the probable occasion of Blake's visit to the Bouchers at Battersea. I find by the birth register in St. Mary's, Battersea, that Catherine Sophia, daughter of William and Ann Boucher, was born April 25, and christened May 16, 1762. Four years after this, another Catherine Boucher, daughter of Samuel and Betty, born March 28, 1766, was christened March 31, 1766, in the parish church of St. James, Westminster; and in the same register I find the birth of Gabriel, son of the same parents, born September 1, and christened September 20, 1767; and of Ann, daughter of Thomas and Ann Boucher, born June 12, and christened June 29, 1761. Is it not, therefore, probable that there were Bouchers, related to one another, living in both parishes, and that Blake's acquaintance with the family living near him led to his going to stay with the family living at Battersea? The entry of Blake's marriage, in the register of St. Mary's Battersea, gives the name as Butcher, and also describes Blake as 'of the parish of Battersea,' by a common enough error. It is as follows:— 1782. Banns of Marriage. No. 281 William Blake of the Parish of Battersea Batchelor and Catherine Butcher of the same Parish Spinster were Married in this Church by License this Eighteenth Day of August in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty two by me J. Gardnor Vicar. This Marriage was solemnized between Us. William Blake The mark of X Catherine Butcher. In the presence of Thomas Monger Butcher. Jas. Blake Robt. Munday Parish Clerk. I imagine that Thomas Monger Butcher was probably Catherine's brother; there are other Mongers not far off in the register, as if the name were a family name. His handwriting is mean and untidy, James Blake's vague but fluent; Catherine makes her mark somewhat faintly. As the register lies open there are entries of seven marriages; out of these, no fewer than three of the brides have signed by making their mark. The name William Blake stands out from these 'blotted and blurred' signatures; the ink is very black, as if he had pressed hard on the pen; and the name has a 'firm and determinate outline.' Gilchrist describes Catherine Boucher as 'a bright-eyed, dark-haired brunette, with expressive features and a slim, graceful form.' This seems to be merely a re-writing of Allan Cunningham's vague statement that she 'was noticed by Blake for the whiteness of her hand, the brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his own notions of sylphs and naiads.' But if a quaint and lovely pencil sketch in the Rossetti MS., representing a man in bed and a woman sitting on the side of the bed, beginning to dress, is really, as it probably is, done from life, and meant for Mrs. Blake, we see at once the model for his invariable type of woman, tall, slender, and with unusually long legs. There is a drawing of her head by Blake in the Rossetti MS. which, though apparently somewhat conventionalized, shows a clear aquiline profile and very large eyes; still to be divined in the rather painful head drawn by Tatham when she was an old woman, a head in which there is still power and fixity. Crabb Robinson, who met her in 1825, says that she had 'a good expression in her countenance, and, with a dark eye, remains of beauty in her youth.' No man of genius ever had a better wife. To the last she called him 'Mr. Blake,' while he, we are told, frequently spoke of her as 'his beloved.' The most beautiful reference to her which I find in his letters is one in a letter of September 16, 1800, to Hayley, where he calls her 'my dear and too careful and over-joyous woman,' and says 'Eartham will be my first temple and altar; my wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels whenever she hears it named.' He taught her to write, and the copy-book titles to some of his water-colors are probably hers; to draw, so that after his death she finished some of his designs; and to help him in the printing and coloring of his engravings. A story is told, on the authority of Samuel Palmer, that they would both look into the flames of burning coals, and draw grotesque figures which they saw there, hers quite unlike his. 'It is quite certain,' says Crabb Robinson, 'that she believed in all his visions'; and he shows her to us reminding her husband, 'You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window, and set you a-screaming,' She would walk with him into the country, whole summer days, says Tatham, and far into the night. And when he rose in the night, to write down what was 'dictated' to him, she would rise and sit by him, and hold his hand. 'She would get up in the night,' says the unnamed friend quoted by Gilchrist, 'when he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the Muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent; only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot; this for hours, and night after night.' 'His wife being to him a very patient woman,' says Tatham, who speaks of Mrs. Blake as 'an irradiated saint,' 'he fancied that while she looked on him as he worked, her sitting quite still by his side, doing nothing, soothed his impetuous mind; and he has many a time, when a strong desire presented itself to overcome any difficulty in his plates or drawings, in the middle of the night, risen, and requested her to get up with him, and sit by his side, in which she as cheerfully acquiesced.' 'Rigid, punctual, firm, precise,' she has been described; a good housewife and a good cook; refusing to have a servant not only because of the cost, but because no servant could be scrupulous enough to satisfy her. 'Finding,' says Tatham '(as Mrs. Blake declared, and as every one else knows), the more service the more inconvenience, she... did all the work herself, kept the house clean and herself tidy, besides printing all Blake's numerous engravings, which was a task sufficient for any industrious woman.' He tells us in another place: 'it is a fact known to the writer, that Mrs. Blake's frugality always kept a guinea or sovereign for any emergency, of which Blake never knew, even to the day of his death.' Tatham says of Blake at the time of his marriage: 'Although not handsome, he must have had a most noble countenance, full of expression and animation; his hair was of a yellow brown, and curled with the utmost crispness and luxuriance; his locks, instead of falling down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like radiations, which with his fiery eye and expressive forehead, his dignified and cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appearance truly prepossessing.' In another place he says: 'William Blake in stature was short [he was not quite five and a half feet in height], but well made, and very well proportioned; so much so that West, the great history painter, admired much the form of his limbs; he had a large head and wide shoulders. Elasticity and promptitude of action were the characteristics of his contour. His motions were rapid and energetic, betokening a mind filled with elevated enthusiasm; his forehead was very high and prominent over the frontals; his eye most unusually large and glassy, with which he appeared to look into some other world.' His eyes were prominent, 'large, dark, and expressive,' says Allan Cunningham; the flashing of his eyes remained in the memory of an old man who had seen him in court at Chichester in 1804. His nose, though 'snubby,' as he himself describes it, had 'a little clenched nostril, a nostril that opened as far as it could, but was tied down at the end.' The mouth was large and sensitive; the forehead, larger below than above, as he himself noted, was broad and high; and the whole face, as one sees it in what is probably the best likeness we have, Linnell's miniature of 1827, was full of irregular splendor, eager, eloquent, ecstatic; eyes and mouth and nostrils all as if tense with a continual suction, drinking up 'large draughts of intellectual day' with impatient haste. 'Infinite impatience,' says Swinburne, 'as of a great preacher or apostle—intense tremulous vitality, as of a great orator—seem to me to give his face the look of one who can do all things but hesitate.' After his marriage in August 1782 (which has been said to have displeased his father, though Tatham says it was 'with the approbation and consent of his parents'), Blake took lodgings at 23 Green Street, Leicester Fields (now pulled down), which was only the square's length away from Sir Joshua Reynolds. Flaxman had married in 1781, and had taken a house at 27 Wardour Street and it was probably he who, about this time, introduced Blake to 'the accomplished Mrs. Matthew,' whose drawing-room in Rathbone Place was frequented by literary and artistic people. Mr. Matthew, a clergyman of taste, who is said to have 'read the church service more beautifully than any other clergyman in London,' had discovered Flaxman, when a little boy, learning Latin behind the counter in his father's shop. 'From this incident,' says J. T. Smith in his notice of Flaxman, 'Mr. Matthew continued to notice him, and, as he grew up, became his first and best friend. Later on, he was introduced to Mrs. Matthew, who was so kind as to read Homer to him, whilst he made designs on the same table with her at the time she was reading.' It was apparently at the Matthews' house that Smith heard Blake sing his own songs to his own music, and it was through Mrs. Matthew's good opinion of these songs that she 'requested the Rev. Henry Matthew, her husband, to join Mr. Flaxman in his truly kind offer of defraying the expense of printing them': to which we owe the 'Poetical Sketches, by W. B.'; printed in 1783, and given to Blake to dispose of as he thought fit. There is no publisher's name on the book, and there is no reason to suppose that it was ever offered for sale. 'With his usual urbanity,' Mr. Matthew had written a foolish 'Advertisement' to the book, saying that the author had 'been deprived of the leisure requisite to such a revisal of these sheets, as might have rendered them less unfit to meet the public eye,' 'his talents having been wholly directed to the attainment of excellence in his profession.' The book is by no means incorrectly printed, and it is not probable that Blake would under any circumstances have given his poems more 'revisal' than he did. He did at this time a good deal of engraving, often after the designs of Stothard, whom he was afterwards to accuse of stealing his ideas; and in 1784 he had two, and in 1785 four, watercolor drawings at the Royal Academy. Fuseli, Stothard, and Flaxman[1] seem to have been his chief friends, and it is probable that he also knew Cosway, who practiced magic, and Cosway may have told him about Paracelsus, or lent him Law's translation of Behmen, while Flaxman, who was a Swedenborgian, may have brought him still more closely under the influence of Swedenborg. In any case, he soon tired of the coterie of the Matthews, and we are told that it soon ceased to relish his 'manly firmness of opinion.' What he really thought of it we may know with some certainty from the extravaganza, An Island in the Moon, which seems to belong to 1784, and which is a light-hearted and incoherent satire, derived, no doubt, from Sterne, and pointing, as Mr. Sampson justly says, to Peacock. It is unfinished, and was not worth finishing, but it contains the first version of several of the Songs of Innocence, as well as the lovely song of Phoebe and Jellicoe. It has the further interest of showing us Blake's first, wholly irresponsible attempt to create imaginary worlds, and to invent grotesque and impossible names. It shows us the first explosions of that inflammable part of his nature, which was to burst through the quiet surface of his life at many intervals, in righteous angers and irrational suspicions. It betrays his deeply rooted dislike of science, and, here and there, a literary preference, for Ossian or for Chatterton. The original MS. is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and in this year, 1907, Mr. Edwin J. Ellis has done Blake the unkindness of printing it for the first time in full, in the pages of his Real Blake. Blake's satire is only occasionally good, though occasionally it is supremely good; his burlesque is almost always bad; and there is little probability that he ever intended to publish any part of the prose and verse which he threw off for the relief of personal irritations and spiritual indignations. In An Island in the Moon we see Blake casting off the dust of the drawing-rooms, finally, so far as any mental obstruction was concerned; but he does not seem to have broken wholly with the Matthews, who, no doubt, were people of genuinely good intentions; and it is through their help that we find him, in 1784, on the death of his father, setting up as a print-seller, with his former fellow-apprentice, James Parker, at No. 27 Broad Street, next door to the house and shop which had been his fathers, and which were now taken on by his brother James. Smith says that he took a shop and a first-floor; and here his brother Robert came to live with him as his pupil, and remained with him till his death in February 1787. IIIAfter Robert's death Blake gave up the print-shop and moved out of Broad Street to Poland Street, a street running between it and Oxford Street. He took No. 28, a house only a few doors down from Oxford Street, and lived there for five years. Here, in 1789, he issued the Songs of Innocence, the first of his books to be produced by the method of his invention which he described as 'illuminated printing.' According to Smith, it was Robert who 'stood before him in one of his visionary imaginations, and directed him in the way in which he ought to proceed.' The process is thus described by Mr. Sampson: 'The text and surrounding design were written in reverse, in a medium impervious to acid, upon small copper-plates, which were then etched in a bath of aqua-fortis until the work stood in relief as in a stereotype. From these plates, which to economize copper were in many cases engraved upon both sides, impressions were printed, in the ordinary manner, in tints made to harmonise with the color scheme afterwards applied in water-colors by the artist.' Gilchrist tells an improbable story about Mrs. Blake going out with the last half-crown in the house, and spending 1s 10d of it in the purchase of 'the simple materials necessary.' But we know from a MS. note of John Linnell, referring to a somewhat later date: 'The copper-plates which Blake engraved to illustrate Hayley's life of Cowper were, as he told me, printed entirely by himself and his wife in his own press—a very good one which cost him forty pounds.' These plates were engraved in 1803, but it is not likely that Blake was ever able to buy more than one press. The problem of 'illuminated printing,' however definitely it may have been solved by the dream in which Robert 'stood before him and directed him,' was one which had certainly occupied the mind of Blake for some years. A passage, unfortunately incomplete, in An Island in the Moon, reads as follows: "Illuminating the Manuscript—Ay," said she, "that would be excellent. Then," said he, "I would have all the writing engraved instead of printed, and at every other leaf a high finished print, all in three volumes folio, and sell them a hundred pounds a piece. They would print off two thousand. Then," said she, "whoever will not have them, will be ignorant fools and will not deserve to live."' This is evidently a foreshadowing of the process which is described and defended, with not less confident enthusiasm, in an engraved prospectus issued from Lambeth in 1793. I give it in full:— October 10, 1793. TO THE PUBLIC. The Labours of the Artist, the Poet, the Musician, have been proverbially attended by poverty and obscurity; this was never the fault of the Public, but was owing to a neglect of means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius. Even Milton and Shakespeare could not publish their own works. This difficulty has been obviated by the Author of the following productions now presented to the Public; who has invented a method of Printing both Letter-press and Engraving in a style more ornamental, uniform, and grand, than any before discovered, while it produces works at less than one-fourth of the expense. If a method of Printing which combines the Painter and the Poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the Author is sure of his reward. Mr. Blake's powers of invention very early engaged the attention of many persons of eminence and fortune; by whose means he has been regularly enabled to bring before the public works (he is not afraid to say) of equal magnitude and consequence with the productions of any age or country: among which are two large highly finished engravings (and two more are nearly ready) which will commence a Series of subjects from the Bible, and another from the History of England. The following are the Subjects of the several Works now published and on Sale at Mr. Blake's, No. 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth:— 1. Job, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 7 1/2 in. by 1 ft. 2 in. Price 12s. 2. Edward and Elinor, a Historical Engraving. Size 1 ft. 6 1/2 in. by 1 ft. Price 10s. 6d. 3. America, a Prophecy, in Illuminated Printing. Folio, with 18 designs. Price 10s. 6d. |
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