Chapter II

William Blake must have been the happiest man that ever lived; not the doubtful happiness of a fool's paradise, but a sharply defined ecstasy that was his companion from his earliest years to his very death-bed; that bed on which he passed away "singing of the things he saw in heaven," to the tune of his own improvised strange music. He seems to have been the solitary man in art history who really fulfilled Walter Pater's test of success in life: "To burn always with this hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy." Blake easily maintained it. His face shone with it. Withal he was outwardly sane in matters of mundane conduct, sensitive and quick to resent any personal affront, and by no means one of those awful prophets going about proclaiming their self-imposed mission. An amiable man, quick to fly into and out of a passion, a gentleman exquisite in manners, he impressed those who met him as an unqualified genius. Charles Lamb has told us of him; so have others. I possess an engraving of his head after Linnell's miniature, and while his Irish paternity has never been thoroughly established--Yeats calls him an Irishman--there can be little doubt of his Celtic origin. His is the head of a poet, a patriot, a priest..The brow is lofty and wide, the hair flamelike in its upcurling. The eyes are marvellous--true windows of a soul vividly aware of its pricelessness; the mystic eye and the eye of the prophet about to thunder upon the perverse heads of his times. The full lips and massive chin make up the ensemble of a singularly noble, inspired, and well-balanced head. Symmetry is its keynote. A God-kindled face. One looks in vain for any indication of the madman--Blake was called mad during his lifetime, and ever since he has been considered mad by the world. Yet he was never mad as were John Martin and Wiertz the Belgian, or as often seems Odilon Redon, who has been called--heaven knows why!--the "French Blake." The poet Cowper said to Blake: "Oh, that I were insane always.... Can you not make me truly insane?... You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us--over us all--mad as a refuge from unbelief--from Bacon, Newton, and Locke." The arid atheism of his century was doubtless a contributory cause to the exasperation of Blake's nerves. He believed himself a Christian despite his heterodox sayings, and his belief is literal and profound. A true Citizen of Eternity, as Yeats named him, and with all his lack of academic training, what a giant he was among the Fuselis, Bartolozzis, Stothards, Schiavonettis, and the other successful mediocrities.

His life was spent in ignoble surroundings, an almost anonymous life, though a happy one because of its illuminating purpose and flashes of golden fire. Blake was born in London (1757) and died in London (1827). He was the son of a hosier, whose real name was not O'Neill, as some have maintained. The boy, at the age of fourteen, was apprenticed to Ryland the engraver, but the sight of his master's face caused him to shudder and he refused to work under him, giving as a reason that Ryland would be hanged some day. And so he was, for counterfeiting. The abnormally sensitive little chap then went to the engraver Basire, with whom he remained a year. His precocity was noteworthy. In 1773 he put forth as a pretended copy of Michaelangelo a design which he called Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion. At that early age he had already begun to mix up Biblical characters and events with the life about him. The Bible saturated his imagination; it was not a dead record for him, but a living, growing organism that overlapped the spiritual England of his day. The grotesqueness of his titles, the mingling of the familiar with the exotic--the sublime and the absurd are seldom asunder in Blake--sacred with secular, were the results of his acquaintance with the Scriptures at a period when other boys were rolling hoops or flying kites. Blake could never have been a boy, in the ordinary sense; yet he was to the last day of his life a child in the naïveté of his vision. "I am ever the new-born child," he might have said, as did Goethe to Herder. At the age of four he said God put his face in the window, and he ran screaming to his parents to bear witness to the happening. He had seen a tree bright with angels at Peckham Rye, and his life long he held converse with the spirits of Moses, Homer, Socrates, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. He adored Michaelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer and Swedenborg completed the conquest--perhaps the unsettlement--of his intellect. He hated Titian, Rubens, and Rembrandt. They were sensualists, they did not in their art lay the emphasis upon drawing, and as we shall see presently, drawing was the chief factor for Blake, colour being a humble handmaiden.

In 1782 Blake married for love Catharine Boucher, or Boutcher, of whom Mr. Swinburne has said that she "deserves remembrance as about the most perfect wife on record." She was uneducated, but learned to read and write, and later proved an inestimable helpmate for the struggling and unpractical Blake. She bound his books and coloured some of his illustrations. She bore long poverty uncomplainingly, one is tempted to say with enthusiasm. Once only she faltered. Blake had his own notions about certain Old Testament customs, and he, it is said on the authority of a gossip, had proposed to add another wife to the poor little household. Mrs. Blake wept and the matter was dropped. Other gossip avers that the Adamite in Blake manifested itself in a not infrequent desire to cast aside garments and to sit in paradisiacal innocence. Whether these stories were the invention of malicious associates or were true, one thing is certain: Blake was capable of anything for which he could find a Biblical precedent. In the matter of the unconventional he was the _Urvater_ of English rebels. Shelley, Byron, Swinburne were timid amateurs compared to this man, who with a terrific energy translated his thoughts into art. He was not the idle dreamer of an empty day nor a mooning mystic. His energy was electric. It sounds a clarion note in his verse and prose, it reveals itself in the fiery swirlings of his line, a line swift and personal. He has been named by some one a heretic in the Church of Swedenborg; but like a latter-day rebel--Nietzsche, who renounced Schopenhauer--Blake soon renounced Swedenborg. But Michelangelo remained a deity for him, and in his designs the influence of Angelo is paramount.

Blake might be called an English Primitive. He stems from the Florentines, but _à la gauche_. The bar sinister on his artistic coat of arms is the lack of fundamental training. He had a Gothic imagination, but his dreams lack architectonics. Goethe, too, had dreams, and we are the richer by Faust. And no doubt there are in his works phrases that Nietzsche has seemed to repeat. It is the fashion just now to trace every idea of Nietzsche to some one else. The truth is that the language of rebellion through the ages is the same. The mere gesture of revolt, as typified in the uplifted threatening arm of a Cain, a Prometheus, a Julian the Apostate, is no more conventional than the phraseology of the heretic. How many of them have written "inspired" bibles, from Mahomet to Zarathustra. Blake, his tumultuous imagination afire--remember that the artist doubled the poet in his amazing and versatile soul--poured forth for years his "sacred" books, his prophecies, his denouncements of his fellow-man. It was all sincere righteous indignation; but the method of his speech is obscure; the Mormon books of revelation are miracles of clarity in comparison. Let us leave these singular prophecies of Blake to the mystics. One thing is sure--he has affected many poets and thinkers. There are things in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Shaw might have said had not Blake forestalled him. Such is the cruelty of genius.

Symons makes apt comparison between Blake and Nietzsche: "There is nothing in good and evil, the virtues and vices ... vices in the natural world are the highest sublimities in the spiritual world." This might have appeared over Nietzsche's signature in Beyond Good and Evil. And the following in his marginalia to Reynolds--Sir Joshua always professed a high regard for the genius of Blake. "The Enquiry in England is not whether a man has Talents and Genius, but whether he is Passive and Polite and a Virtuous Ass." The vocabulary of rebellion is the same. Still more bitter is his speech about holiness: "The fool shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven, let him be ever so pious." Blake glorified passion, which for him was the highest form of human energy. His tragic scrolls, emotional arabesques, are testimony to his high and subtle temperament. The intellect he worshipped. Of pride we cannot have too much! As a lyric poet it is too late in the day to reiterate that he is a peer in the "holy church of English literature." The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience have given him a place in the anthologies and made him known to readers who have never heard of him as a pictorial genius. "Tiger, tiger, burning bright, In the forests of the night," is recited by sweet school-misses and pondered for its philosophy by their masters. And has Keats ever fashioned a lovelier image than: "Let thy west wind sleep on the lake; spread silence with thy glimmering eyes and wash the dusk with silver"? Whatever he may not be, William Blake is a great singer.