WILLIAM

WILLIAM BLAKE is a curiosity whether as man or artist, he is one of those exceptional persons who invite analysis, and of whom very opposite estimates will be formed. For while some are disposed to exaggerate the genius which is accompanied by eccentricity, others are so offended at the inordinate conceit, the ignorance, the presumption, the wilful self-deception, and general want of truthfulness which, for the most part, characterise the eccentric individual, that they are slow to recognise the real merits that may be found in such disagreeable companionship. We should have thought, for our part, that the slight and interesting sketch given by Allan Cunningham, in his 'Lives of the Painters,' of this remarkable man, was all that the subject required. It seemed otherwise to Mr Gilchrist. He has wrought out an elaborate biography in two very ornate volumes. We must thank him for the many specimens he has laid before us of the artistic talent or genius of Blake; and we ought to thank him, we presume, for the further insight he has given us into the man himself. But much of the charm which hung over Allan Cunningham's sketch (so far as we can recall that sketch to mind) is dissipated and lost in this more full and faithful portraiture.

Truth requires, it will be said, that we see a man in more than one aspect. Blake, the visionary, writing snatches of poetry which Wordsworth might have adopted, and striking out designs which Flaxman admired and which Fuseli pronounced as excellent "to steal from,"-living throughout an earnest, laborious, temperate,retired life,in the constant society of one woman, who most faithfully kept her vow "to love, honour,

BLAKE.

and obey,"-forms a charming picture for the imagination. But when Mr Gilchrist throws the full light of biography upon this picture, other features are revealed by no means attractive. The neglected artist was angry at the fame of those who had really won the world's applause, and he was utterly blind to the excellence of any but one school in painting; he pours out insane diatribes against Sir Joshua Reynolds, and against his successful rival, Stothard. This retired poet, singing of his lamb and his tiger, is also a dreary mystic, and, notwithstanding his naturally energetic mind, is so ignorant and uncultivated, that he does not even perceive the gross presumption of his haphazard attacks, whether on great men or on great subjects. This earnest visionary, whom we left living amongst the angels, is also a good hater, vain and quarrelsome, and very much given to that sort of fibbing which is intended to make people stare and marvel at us.

The

We must not let it be supposed that Mr Gilchrist deals severely with his subject; on the contrary, he is very laudatory. He is very indulgent to the man, Blake, and gives to the artist a measure of praise which we, not being artists ourselves, can only receive with mute wonder and surprise. painful and damaging impressions we speak of are the results of the bare facts he states, or of the words of Blake himself which he puts before us. Mr Gilchrist sustains, for his part, the traditional idolatry of the biographer-that is, be it understood, in a certain offhand, patronising style. For our modern modish biographer is not apt himself to kneel at any shrine, though he is well enough disposed to order and

superintend the worship of others. He pooh-poohs the old saints in the calendar, and, with infinite amusement to himself, gives you one, for your especial adoration, with the glory quite new about its head.

The author of this book did not live to see it through the press, or even entirely to complete it a melancholy fact which in a manner disarms criticism. But it would be difficult to proceed with any notice of the work whatever without at least noticing the class of biographical compositions to which it belongs. Our observations shall be as impersonal as possible. We wish, indeed, it were in our power at all times to discourse of books, to classify and characterise them, without wounding the susceptibilities of the author or his friends. How pleasant it would be if one could do as the botanist, who classifies his plant, describes the form of the calix, the number of the petals, the soil in which it grows, the length of days allotted to it, without being accused of feeling the least enmity or disrespect to any member of the vegetable kingdom. In one respect it may be said that the analogy is complete between the critic and the botanist. Both may classify and describe to their heart's content: neither of them will have any influence over the form, or the growth, of book or vegetable. The botanist cultivates his own mind and the minds of those whom he addresses by his observation of nature; it never entered into his imagination to control the course of vegetation. Whether the critic can reap for himself any similar benefit from his classification of books may be doubtful; but unless he can, we are constrained to confess that his occupation is wellnigh useless. He may still give a little pain or a little pleasure; he may help to gratify the legitimate love of praise, which is one of the most respectable elements of our human nature, or he may help to wound that inordinate vanity which may, indeed, be

wounded, but never is corrected : but as to that influence on the living literature of his age-on the book that will be produced tomorrow, which he has flattered himself that he possessed-this influence, if he ever possessed it, is gone from him. The stream of literature flows too fast; it sweeps by him, not only too potent for his control, but too swift for his watchfulness. The book that he is analysing is gone before his analysis is complete, and another is there in its place. Nothing lives much longer than the critic's own ephemeral production. Success, immediate success, is the sole test of merit. It has been gained, enjoyed, lost, before the critic has had time to speak.

Here and there a history or a philosophical work is written for duration, and appeals to the leisure judgment of a critical reader; but our biographies, poems, novels, almost all that ranks under the old title of belles lettres, are written for the day and the hour; captivate in some way-by some good quality no doubt the popular taste, and sufficiently fulfil their destiny if, within the year, they sweep rapidly and uproariously through all the circulating libraries of the kingdom. Where now is the function of the periodical critic? We are all periodical-we are all but portions of the same mighty stream.

This ephemeral nature of our literature is not due to want of talent, but to the very opposite cause, to the redundancy of talent. One novel obliterates another, not because the first was unworthy to live, but because the second is as worthy as the first. To the second comes a third equally worthy. The public, hundred-handed as it is, cannot hold them all, and as the newest is the most attractive, it must, of force, drop the old ones while it stretches forward to the new. Can you expect the charm of style to preserve a book? The English language could not be better written

than it often is for a composition confessedly intended to last for a single day. It is true, however, that a great audience is to be spoken toin that single day. A 'Times' newspaper, in its short life, has had more readers than Milton's poem gained through half a century. It holds the position of the orator rather than of the writer. We all, in a measure, rather speak than write. The very advance of our knowledge tends to abridge the life of our best books. Science can hardly be said to have any literature; it has only a record of its progress. The ablest text-book is superseded in a few years. Our books of science, like our law-books, are worth nothing if not of the last edition. And, of late years, history has been much in the same predicament as science. So many new sources of information have been opened, and so many new points of view revealed to intelligent criticism, that our most advanced historians rather give us contributions to the history of some period than attempt the final record of that period.

But, let the fate of criticism be what it may, our concern at present is with the biography of Blake. There has been apparently some difficulty in collecting materials for two octavo volumes, but an ingenious biographer, aware of all the resources which modern practice has rendered, we presume, legitimate, is not easily to be balked. Can he not glance from time to time at the contemporaries of his hero? If that hero -Blake or another-did not know them personally, he might have known them. They and Blake walked the earth together at the same time. That, at all events, is a striking fact. Then we take care to describe every locality which our hero has lived in or visited. If it is a street in London, we inquire whether anybody known to fame has ever lived in that street; whether any great calamity has happened, or any great crime has been ever perpetrated, in that street. Perhaps we

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search the Newgate Calendar, with or without success. If the environs of London are mentioned, we take a ride down to Battersea or Camberwell and explore the neighbourhood, and look at old prints, and are diffusely topographical. Always, if any event is to be narrated, we note the day of the month and the hour of the day, and make a guess at the state of the weather. It is that fine May morning or that bleak December afternoon. We then glance round from man to nature and introduce some landscape into our historical picture. If in the course of our reading any anecdote turns up that belongs to the period, and is itself amusing, we seize upon it as lawful prize. The reader, if amused, will certainly raise no difficulties about its relevancy. As to our general style, it must be understood, once for all, that we are perfectly at our ease, supremely contemptuous of all conventionalities. We dash our sentences at you, with or without the usual verb or noun, just as they come to hand. Some would say that our ease is, after all, the ease of the posture-master; or perhaps would even insinuate that there is great effort and contortion to appear at ease -ease itself, which has ever some element of grace in it, not being really attained. Such carping we thoroughly despise. The world embraces us with open arms. It laughs at our impudence and extols our talent. If the embrace is not long, it is longer than it would have been if, without more of talent, we had less of impudence.

Blake was born in London in the year 1757. Mark how pictorial a statement may be made of this:

"William Blake, the most spiritual of artists, a mystic poet and painter, who lived to be a contemporary of CobNovember 1757, the year of Canova's bet and Sir Walter Scott, was born 28th birth, two years after Stothard and Flaxman; while Chatterton, a boy of five, was still sauntering about the

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winding streets of antique Bristol. Born amid the gloom of a London November at 28 Broad Street, Carnaby Market, Golden Square (market now extinct), he was christened on the 11th Decem

ber-one in a batch of six-from Grinling Gibbon's ornate font in Wren's noble Palladian Church of St James's. He was the son of James and Catherine Blake, the second child in a family of four."

An inconvenience attends this style of writing; there is no limit to the curiosity it excites, or the demands that a lively reader might make upon his author. "One in a batch of six". - why stop there? The reader, awake to the interest of this fact, that six children were christened at the same time, from the same font, demands at least a brief sketch of the lives of the other five. Why is this mysterious connection mentioned at all, if we are to lose sight of it so soon? We ourselves are not so exacting, but patiently follow the author into the topographical details which fill the next very lively paragraph. "Dashing Regent Street as yet was not!" so that our Golden Square neighbourhood "held then a similar status to the Cavendish Square district, say, now: an ex-fashionable, highly respectable condition, not yet sunk into the seedy category." Here the father of Blake flourished as "a moderately prosperous hosier." What Broad Street is now, the reader will find described with a minuteness which looks like a rivalry of Dickens.

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It seems that the prosperous hosier gave his son a very scanty education. William Blake was left to saunter about the streets, and, when he grew older, to rove out alone into the country. For try," we are told, was not, at that day, beyond reach of a Golden Square lad of nine or ten. On his own legs he could find a green field without the exhaustion of body and mind which now separates such a boy from the alluring haven as rigorously as prison-bars." It was on the occasion of one of these

country rambles that we hear, for the first time, of that peculiarity which distinguished Blake through life, and the nature of which has been the subject of some discussion.

"On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill), it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his first vision.' Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. Returned home he relates the incident, and only through his mother's intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father for telling a lie. Another time, one summer morn, he sees the haymakers at work, and amid them angelic figures walking. If these traits of childish years be remembered, they will help to elucidate the visits from the spiritual world of later years, in which the grown man believed as unaffectedly as ever had the boy of ten."

Was Blake mad? is a question which was often asked during his life, and is sometimes asked even now. We agree with the present biographer in repudiating the idea of insanity. Did he, then, really see angels in the forms of departed heroes? Nothing of the kind. But if he believed that he saw them, was not this of the nature of an insane delusion?

We, for our part, doubt that Blake, as man or boy, ever believed that he saw veritable angels or the spirits of departed men. Our impression is, that although in him imagination was so vivid that the thing imagined came before him with something of the same distinctness as a thing perceived, yet he never in fact confounded imagination with reality. He always knew the difference between the solid objects which reflected light to his eye, and the visionary forms which his vivid fancy projected into space. But as such visionary forms did appear to him with an abnormal distinctness, he spoke of seeing them. There was no absolute departure from truth in this assertion; but if he had

been asked to examine himself, he would probably have confessed that his reason was sufficiently awake to draw the distinction between appearances that were due only to the activity of his brain, and the objects of vision lit up for him, and for all the world, by the light of day. There may have been intervals when he lost the power to draw this distinction, and when he entered the borders of insanity, but those intervals must have been very

rare.

This abnormal activity of the imagination is well worthy of the attention of the psychologist or physiologist. Sometimes it is evident that the unusual vividness of the thing imagined is rather the result of a weakness of our perceptive faculties than of a peculiar strength of the imaginative. Either way the balance is overthrown, the just equilibrium is disturbed between perception and imagination. Long fasting will bring on this peculiar state, in which men's thoughts or memories assume the aspect of external realities. In such cases the senses are half asleep, and the thought approximates to the character of a dream.

We see, and we remember what we have seen, and the remembrance, we say, is altogether a different state of consciousness. It is so to the man in full possession of wellbalanced faculties. But physiologists teach us that memory and vision are not so very different in their nature as they appear. The memory is a reproduction of the original perception. All memories of a visible object must therefore have a tendency to assert for themselves a place in the external world. But to the man of vigorous perception that place is already filled; and to the man who remembers other matters equally well, the memory of this object is (by association with those other memories) relegated to the past. The comparative faintness of the impression, together with this place in time past,

prevents it from assuming a given space amongst present objective realities. In sleep, when this external space is left entirely unoccupied, and mere individual memories or imaginations come up before us

(the connected series of the past being no longer recalled) — the thought does mimic perception. And in men awake, in whom there is some peculiar cerebral exaltation, or some enfeebling of the senses and of that connected remembrance to which, in common parlance, we give the name of reason, there is observed to be the same tendency for thought to assume the form of perception. It is true that both in the dream and the wide-awake imagination there is something more than a reproduction of a former perception. There is a combination and modification of the perception which we do not here. undertake to explain. But it is clear that those imaginations which do assume to us the character of visible realities have been in the first place received through the organ of vision. He who sees angels in the air had seen pictures of angels; he who dreams of dragons had seen a serpent, or the picture of a dragon.

In some way this balance between imagination and perception seems to have been disturbed in the case of William Blake. But not, we think, to that extent that he was no longer conscious of the difference between them, or was unable to summon up his reason to determine the nature of the apparent object before him. But he loved the marvellous, and he loved to astonish his friends with marvellous stories. When he came home from Peckham Rye and told his parents that he had seen angels up a tree, he probably knew even then that there was a wide difference between the reality of those angels and the reality of so many apples that he might have also seen hanging upon the tree. If the "honest hosier" had been a psychologist he