BL WILLIAM BLAKE LAKE has had many admirers; he is a laudatis laudatus; that he should have called forth the outspoken and elaborate admiration of Mr. Swinburne and the two Rossettis is of itself a title to consideration. He has had, and will have detractors, though they are mostly of the kind that are converted to an artist's merits when high prices are paid for his work : and that has long been the case with Blake. When some drawings of his were shown to George III., the King cried out pettishly, "Take them away, take them away"; yet we do not hold this to be a crowning proof of Blake's artistic merits, as some of his critics have done. The observation may have been purely fretful, but we believe that it arose from a deeper psychological cause than mere want of appreciation -the timid sympathy of insanity. Blake's sweeping fiery forms, his globular ebullition of light, his insight into all that coils and writhes, are the instinctive creation of a brain which, if not under the actual pressure of madness, was, as Dr. Johnson said, "at least not sober." Blake has had, we say, his admirers and his detractors, but he has never had a critic. Rossetti, Mr. Swinburne, Gilchrist, Ellis, Yeats, they are sympathetic, appreciative, instructive. Given the admiration for Blake they are the most delicate of commentators; but they are none of them critical. It will be convenient to summarise shortly Blake's life. He was born in 1757, his father a comfortable hosier; he received a haphazard artistic education, writing original verse at the age of twelve, apprenticed to an engraver at fourteen, under whom he acquired a love for Gothic art which never deserted him-the fact was that to avoid collisions between Blake and his other pupils, Basire, his master, sent him sketching in the summer months in the old London churches. He engraved an original print in 1773. In 1778 he began to earn a precarious existence by engraving for the booksellers; in 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, daughter of a market-gardener, and went to live in Queen Street, Leicester Fields. After a brief and unsatisfactory venture as a print-seller, he began to work for himself, but could find no market for Songs of Innocence. His brother Robert, then lately deceased, revealed a secret method of working up these designs, "in a dream," and the book went out into the world, printed, coloured and bound by the husband and wife. Four years later followed Songs of Experience. In 1793 he moved to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth-there designing forty-three illustrations for Young's Night Thoughts. In 1800 he settled for three years at Felpham, under the auspices of Hayley, a Sussex squire and littérateur, author of a Life of Cowper, but grew weary of Hayley's polite disapprobation, and returned to South Molton Street. In 1820 he moved to 3, Fountain Court, Strand, where he died in 1827. He seems to have had the same feeling for London that Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb had: he could not live elsewhere. It was in these last years that he executed his finest work-Inventions to the Book of Job. He was always very poor. The object of this essay will be to criticise, and, if possible, to define Blake's position as a poet and as an artist. We will turn to his writings first. The union of artistic and poetical gifts is not an uncommon combination: artistic success argues a certain depth of poetical qualities, and if it is rare to find artists who have achieved a marked success in literature, it is simply accounted for by the exigencies of technical study-a high vocation is apt to drain a life dry of other excellences, and in literature, as in art, there are few instances of permanent success apart from the quality of patient elaboration. In our own days we may quote Rossetti and Thackeray as instances of this alliance of gifts, though in the case of the latter such artistic success as he achieved was the result rather of natural facility than technical excellence. Michael Angelo's sonnets, Henry VIII.'s music, Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography, Mr. Lecky's poetry, Archbishop Sumner's water-colour drawings, Mr. Gladstone's Homeric studies, Mr. Arthur Balfour's philosophical works, are dependent for their interest not so much upon the qualities of the work, as on the revelation in an unfamiliar medium of great personalities. Sometimes, it is true, we have instances such as Spohr's autobiographya singularly unimpressive book-Lord Tennyson's dramas, Milton's Paraphrase of the Psalms, which seem to prove that excellence in one line is apt to be a limited, almost a mechanical faculty -that the artist is, so to speak, ahead of his own personality in one respect, and that in such cases the art is not the casual efflorescence of a vivid nature, but the concentrated bloom of an otherwise unproductive or mediocre stock. Blake, in spite of the extravagant claims made for him by his admirers, must be held to have been primarily an artist. If he had not been an artist his poems could hardly have survived at all. Mr. D. G. Rossetti says of the Songs of Innocence that they are almost flawless in essential respects. But few will be found to endorse this verdict. The fact is, that those who are carried off their feet by the magnificent originality of Blake's artistic creations, read in between the lines of his delicate and fanciful, but faulty and careless verse, an inspiration to which he laid no claim. Blake's poetry is, from beginning to end, childish; it has the fresh simplicity, but also the vapid deficiences of its quality-the metre halts and is imperfect; the rhymes are forced and inaccurate, and often impress one with the sense that the exigencies of assonance are so far masters of the sense, that the word that ends a stanza is obviously not the word really wanted or intended by the author, but only approximately thrown out at it. This may be illustrated by a line from the Nurse's song in the Songs of Experience, where he says Your spring and your day are wasted in play, where the sense requires some such word as "disgust" or "weariness." Again, his use of single words is often so strained and unnatural as to rouse a suspicion that really he did not know the precise meaning of some word employed. We may cite such an instance as the |