William Blake, the Man

by Charles Gardner

Even among those chosen three, there were no sons of thunder.

Edward Calvert caught Blake’s spirit in his lovely and simple woodcuts, but quite rightly followed his own bent, which led him ultimately along a different path from Blake’s zigzag lightning tract. The master always transpierced Nature, and lived in a transcendental region: Calvert, serene and calm, detected the heart of the Divine beating equally in Nature, and reproduced what he heard and saw in musical and sweet landscapes, where storms never come, and which modern artists would probably prefer to see disturbed by an earthquake.

Samuel Palmer, with youthful impulse and generosity, gave himself to Blake, and, rendered receptive by his love and enthusiasm, soon assimilated all the master’s principles. Palmer’s rich nature allowed of much reverence for Linnell too, and in his early work it is easy to find examples first of Blake’s influence and then of Linnell’s. Like Calvert, he was deeply and equably devout. He did not demand that austerity which drew Linnell to the baptist, John Martin; nor that passion for which Blake went to hell. The gentler elements of his soul led him away from harsh sects to the more temperate Church of England, which can, among other things, still nourish those souls that require the kind of diet that George Herbert could provide so bountifully.

We look with extreme interest to see how Blake’s professed disciples set about to unite their religion and art. They did it as many other Christian artists have done it, as Fra Angelico did supremely well; yet they missed Blake’s daemonic energy, and so have failed to meet that demand of our own age which will at all cost have passion for the driving force of religion if it is to have religion at all. Samuel Palmer painted and etched some exquisite pictures; but he was in after years gently apologetic for Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and he left the problem of the synthesis of religion and art in the light of Christianity precisely where it was left by the best Italian Christian artists.

George Richmond completed the little inner circle of three disciples. He was only sixteen when he met Blake at John Linnell’s, North End, and then walked with him back to Fountain Court, Strand, thrilling with a unique impression as if he were verily walking with the prophet Isaiah. For a while he was plastic clay in the hands of Blake, revealing the master’s influence in Abel the Shepherd and Christ and the Woman of Samaria, but like his friends, Calvert and Palmer, he had sufficient native energy to follow his own instinct, and when he found himself in portrait painting there is nothing to remind us even remotely of Blake. His sitters appear a noble family. Cardinal Newman, Bishop Wilberforce, Charlotte Brontë, Mrs Gaskell, and many others are extraordinarily beautiful, and might all be taken for brothers and sisters. Richmond’s religious feelings brought him into fellowship with the tractarian movement, which of all recent religious movements in England allows most standing-ground for one devoted to religion and art. He did not paint Titans, but he puts us in love with his beautiful family, and that surely is no mean achievement.

Among Blake’s friends must be mentioned Crabb Robinson and Frederick Tatham, not because of their intrinsic importance to Blake, but their use to us. Robinson was often sorely perplexed by the vehement paradoxes that Blake wilfully poured into his ears; but at the same time, he thought it worth while to jot them down in his diary.

Tatham came near enough to Blake to enable him to fulfil several of the indispensable qualifications of the biographer. Afterwards he became an Irvingite, and, conscience-ridden, destroyed many of Blake’s works that had come into his hands because he reckoned them unsound.

One other very curious friendship stands out, that with Thomas Griffiths Wainewright.

Wainewright was born out of due season. He might have avoided the unpleasant and ugly things that befell him if he had been a contemporary of the Borgias. He was an artist, and art is no respecter of persons. We are tempted to say that art is fallen man’s supreme consolation. It is assuredly the meeting-place between a certain kind of saint and a certain kind of sinner. The highest artist-saint, like Jesus Christ, appears to create himself rather than works of art, and such always makes an irresistible appeal to the artist-sinner, as we see that Christ did to Oscar Wilde in his De Profundis and to George Moore in his Brook Kerith. The latter seems to be as far as the artist can reach without religion, and it could teach most Christians something about their Master. When Blake discovered that the Real Man in each one of us has imagination for his chief and working faculty, he overcame once for all the provoking dualism of art and religion, and at the same time he became an attraction to those who live an imaginative life, especially among sinners. Wainewright was drawn to Blake for precisely the same reason that many modern enthusiasts are who could hardly be reckoned religious. He is permanently interesting to the psychologist as to the artist, and hence he could not escape the notice of Lord Lytton, who introduced him into his Lucretia, and above all of Oscar Wilde, who darted upon him, and who, with such a subject, was loosened to write in his most witty, brilliant, and characteristic style.

Here I must mention, in order, Blake’s chief works from 1810 to the end.