PICTOR IGNOTUS.
Human nature is impatient of mysteries. The occurrence of an event out of the line of common causation, the advent of a person not plastic to the common moulds of society, causes a great commotion in this little ant-hill of ours. There is perplexity, bewilderment, a running hither and thither, until the foreign substance is assigned a place in the ranks; and if there be no rank to which it can be ascertained to belong, a new rank shall be created to receive it, rather than that it shall be left to roam up and down, baffling, defiant, and alone. Indeed, so great is our abhorrence of outlying, unclassified facts, that we are often ready to accept classification for explanation; and having given our mystery a niche and a name, we cease any longer to look upon it as mysterious. The village-schoolmaster, who displayed his superior knowledge to the rustics gazing at an eclipse of the sun by assuring them that it was "only a phenomenon," was but one of a great host of wiseacres who stand ready with brush and paint-pot to label every new development, and fancy that in so doing they have abundantly answered every reasonable inquiry concerning cause, character, and consequence.
When William Blake flashed across the path of English polite society, society was confounded. It had never had to do with such an apparition before, and was at its wits' end. But some Daniel was found wise enough to come to judgment, and pronounce the poet-painter mad; whereupon society at once composed itself, and went on its way rejoicing.
There are a few persons, however, who are not disposed to let this verdict stand unchallenged. Mr. Arthur Gilchrist, late a barrister of the Middle Temple, a man, therefore, who must have been accustomed to weigh evidence, and who would not have been likely to decide upon insufficient grounds, wrote a life of Mr. Blake, in which he strenuously and ably opposed the theory of insanity. From this book, chiefly, we propose to lay before our readers a slight sketch of the life of a man who, whether sane or insane, was one of the most remarkable productions of his own or of any age.
One word, in the beginning, regarding the book before us. The death of its author, while as yet but seven chapters of his work had been printed, would preclude severe criticism, even if the spirit and purpose with which he entered upon his undertaking, and which he sustained to its close, did not dispose us to look leniently upon imperfections of detail. Possessing that first requisite of a biographer, thorough sympathy with his subject, he did not fall into the opposite error of indiscriminate panegyric. Looking at life from the standpoint of the "madman," he saw how fancies could not only appear, but be, facts; and then, crossing over, he looked at the madman from the world's standpoint, and saw how these soul-born facts could seem not merely fancies, but the wild vagaries of a crazed brain. For the warmth with which he espoused an unpopular cause, for the skill with which he set facts in their true light, for the ability which he brought to the defence of a man whom the world had agreed to condemn, for the noble persistence with which he forced attention to genius that had hitherto received little but neglect, we cannot too earnestly express our gratitude. But the greater our admiration of material excellence, the greater is our regret for superficial defects. The continued oversight of the author would doubtless have removed many infelicities of style; yet we marvel that one with so clear an insight should ever, even in the first glow of composition, have involved himself in sentences so complicated and so obscure. The worst faults of Miss Sheppard's worst style are reproduced here, joined to an unthriftiness in which she had no part nor lot. Not unfrequently a sentence Is a conglomerate in which the ideas to be conveyed are heaped together with no apparent attempt at arrangement, unity, or completeness. Surely, it need be no presumptuous, but only a tender and reverent hand that should have organized these chaotic periods, completing the work which death left unfinished, and sending it forth to the world in a garb not unworthy the labor of love so untiringly bestowed upon it by the lamented author.
To show that our strictures are not undeserved, we transcribe a few sentences, taken at random from the memoir:—
"Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired."
"The unusual notes struck by William Blake, in any case appealing but to one class and a small one, were fated to remain unheard, even by the Student of Poetry, until the process of regeneration had run its course, and, we may say, the Poetic Revival gone to seed again: seeing that the virtues of simplicity and directness the new poets began by bringing once more into the foreground, are those least practised now."
"In after years of estrangement from Stothard, Blake used to complain of this mechanical employment as engraver to a fellow-designer, who (he asserted) first borrowed from one that, in his servile capacity, had then to copy that comrade's version of his own inventions—as to motive and composition his own, that is."
"And this imposing scroll of fervid truisms and hap-hazard generalities, as often disputable as not, if often acute and striking, always ingenuous and pleasant, was, like all his other writings, warmly welcomed in this country."