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
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal
eyes
Of Man inwards into the worlds of thought, into
eternity,
Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human
imagination.'
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 BLAKE]
I
The 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,
Or my sister survive on my Love's pain?'
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.