Behemoth and Leviathan. From the “Book of Job.” By W. Blake.
The end was now near. During 1827 Blake’s health greatly failed from catarrh and dysentery, and he could no longer go up to Hampstead to see Linnell. Linnell wished him to quit the damp neighbourhood of the river, and live in his own house in Cirencester Place, part only of which he used as a studio. But Blake said, “I cannot get my mind out of a state of terrible fear at such a step.” He also said, “I am too much attached to Dante to think much of anything else.” One of his last works was the colouring of The Ancient of Days for the elder Tatham, who paid him at a higher rate than he was accustomed to receive. Blake accordingly worked his hardest, and when it was finished “threw it from him, and with an air of exulting triumph exclaimed, ‘There, that will do, I cannot mend it.’” Later still he exclaimed to his wife, “You have ever been an angel to me, I will draw you,” and produced a sketch, “interesting, but not like.” On August 12 he died, “composing and uttering songs to his Maker.” He was buried in Bunhill Fields, in a grave which cannot now be identified. It is little to the honour of his countrymen that no public memorial of him should exist. A better one could not be than his own Death’s Door in the illustration to Blair’s Grave, treated as a bas-relief with the necessary modifications.
The artist whose life had been spent in a condition so little remote from penury did not leave a single debt, and the accumulated stock of his works sufficed to support his widow in comfort for the four years for which she survived him. Friends, indeed, aided, Linnell and Tatham successively giving her house-room, and others assiduously recommending her stores of drawings to wealthy patrons. She died in Upper Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, and was buried beside her husband in Bunhill Fields.
The artistic processes used by Blake are a subject of considerable discussion. Notwithstanding his constant description of his pictures as “frescoes,” it seems certain that he never resorted to fresco in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Linnell, who must have been exceedingly familiar with his work, told Mr. Gilchrist: “He evidently founded his claim to the name fresco on the material he used, which was water-colour on a plaster ground (literally glue and whiting); but he always called it either fresco, gesso, or plaster.” Linnell added that when he himself obtained from Italy the first copy that ever came to England of Cennino Cennini’s Trattato della Pittura, a sixteenth-century treatise, edited in 1822 from the original MS., Blake, who was soon able to read it, “was gratified to find that he had been using the same materials and methods in painting as Cennini describes, particularly the carpenter’s glue.” “Unfortunately,” says Linnell, “he laid this ground on too much like plaster to a wall,” and when this was so applied to canvas or linen the picture was sure to crack, and many of Blake’s best works have suffered great injury. Oil he disliked and vituperated. The reason probably was that, contrary to what might have been expected, his system of execution was by no means bold and dashing, but deliberate and even slow. He drew a rough dotted line with pencil, then with ink, then colour, filling in cautiously and carefully. All the grand efforts of design, he thought, depended on niceties not to be got at once. He seems, in fact, to have worked very much in the spirit of the mediæval illuminators, and the general aspect of a page of one of his Prophetical Books reminds us forcibly of one of their scrolls. Whether any direct influence from them upon him is traceable would be difficult to determine. Keats had evidently seen illuminated manuscripts, and been deeply impressed by them; but nearly forty years elapsed between the publication of the first of Blake’s Prophetical Books and the composition of Keats’s Eve of St. Mark. In one respect Blake certainly differed from the ancient miniaturists; he wrought mainly from reminiscence, and disliked painting with his eye on the object. His memory for natural forms must have been very powerful.
Blake is endowed in a very marked degree with the interest ascribed by Goethe to Problematische Naturen, men who must always remain more or less of a mystery to their fellows. In ancient times, and perhaps in some countries at the present day, he would have been accepted as a seer; in his own age and country the question was rather whether he should be classed with visionaries or with lunatics. A visionary he certainly was, and few will believe either that his visions had any objective reality, or that he himself intended them to be received merely as symbols. “You can see what I do, if you choose,” he said to his friends. He thus confused fancy with fact; unquestionably, therefore, he laboured under delusions. But delusions do not necessarily amount to insanity, and, however Blake erred in form, it may be doubted whether in essentials he was not nearer the truth than most so-called poets and artists. Every poet and artist worthy of the name will confess that his productions, when really good for anything, are the suggestion of a power external to himself, of an influence which he may to a certain extent guide, but cannot originate or summon up at his will; and in the absence of which he is helpless. In personifying this influence as the Muse, or howsoever he may prefer to describe it, such an one is usually fully aware that, in obedience to a law of the human mind, he is bestowing personality and visibility upon what is actually invisible and impersonal, but not on that account unreal. Some there are, however, whose perceptions are so lively, or their power of dealing with abstractions so limited, that the mental influences of which they are conscious appear to them in the light of personalities. Such was Blake, and the peculiarity in him was probably closely connected with the childlike disposition which rendered him so amiable as a man. As a child it naturally never occurred to him to question the reality of his visions, and he grew up without acquiring the critical habit of mind which would have led him to do so. With him “the vision splendid” did not
Die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
Such a state of mind is quite compatible with sanity. The question is not whether the person