Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
by a bob-wig) may be studied in the portrait by his son, engraved as frontispiece to the ninth volume of Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes. As a Designer, Blake was, in essentials, influenced by no contemporary; as engraver alone influenced by Basire, and that strongly – little as his master’s style had in common with his own genius. Even as engraver, he was thus influenced, little to his future advantage in winning custom from the public. That public, in Blake’s youth, fast outgrowing the flat and formal manner inherited by Basire, in common with Vertue (engraver to the Society of Antiquaries before him), and the rest, from the Vanderguchts, Vanderbanks, and other naturalized Dutchmen and Germans of the bob-wig and clipped-yew era, will now readily learn to enjoy the softer, more agreeable one of M’Ardell, Bartolozzi, Sherwin.
His seven years’ apprenticeship commenced in 1771, year of the Academy’s first partial lodgement in Old Somerset Palace – and thus (eventually) in the National Pocket. As he was constitutionally painstaking and industrious, he soon learned to draw carefully and copy faithfully whatever was set before him, – altogether to the Basire taste, and to win, as a good apprentice should, the approval and favour of his master. One day, by the way (as Blake ever remembered), Goldsmith walked into Basire’s. It must have been during the very last years of the poet’s life: he died in 1774. The boy – as afterwards the artist was fond of telling – mightily admired the great author’s finely marked head as he gazed up at it, and thought to himself how much he should like to have such a head when he grew to be a man. Another still more memorable figure, and a genius singularly german to Blake’s own order of mind, the ‘singular boy of fourteen,’ during the commencement of his apprenticeship, may ‘any day have met unwittingly in London streets, or walked beside: a placid, venerable, thin man of eighty-four, of erect figure and abstracted air, wearing a full-bottomed wig, a pair of long ruffles, and a curious-hilted sword, and carrying a goldheaded cane, – no Vision, still flesh and blood, but himself the greatest of modern Vision Seers, – Emanuel Swedenborg by name; who came from Amsterdam to London, in August 1771, and died at No. 26, Great Bath Street, Coldbath Fields, on the 29th of March, 1772.’ This Mr Allingham pleasantly suggests, in a note to his delightful collection of lyrical poems, Nightingale Valley (1860), in which (at last) occur a specimen or two of Blake’s verse. The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men the engraver’s apprentice was to grow up the likest to Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional temperament and endowment was so: in faculty for theosophic dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and in matter of fact hold of spiritual things. To savant and to artist alike, while yet on earth, the Heavens were opened. By Swedenborg’s theologic writings, the first English editions of some of which appeared during Blake’s manhood, the latter was considerably influenced; but in no slavish spirit. These writings, in common with those of Jacob Boehmen, and of the other select mystics of the world, had natural affinities to Blake’s mind, and were eagerly assimilated. But he hardly became a proselyte or ‘Swedenborgian’ proper; though his friend Flaxman did. In another twenty years we shall find him freely and as true believers may think – heretically criticising the Swedish seer from the spiritualist not the rationalist point of view: as being a Divine Teacher, whose truths however were ‘not new,’ and whose falsehoods were ‘all old.’ Among the leading engravings turned out by Basire, during the early part of Blake’s apprenticeship, may be instanced in 1772, one after B. Wilson (not Richard), Lady Stanhope as the Fair Penitent (her role in certain amateur theatricals by the Quality); and in 1774, The Field of the Cloth of Gold and Interview of the two Kings, after a copy for the Society of Antiquaries by ‘little Edwards’ of Anecdote fame, from the celebrated picture at Windsor. The latter print was celebrated for one thing, if no other, as the largest ever engraved up to that time on one plate – copper, let us remember, – being some 47 inches by 27; and paper had to be made on purpose for it.
‘Two years passed over smoothly enough,’ writes Malkin, ‘till two other apprentices were added to the establishment, who completely destroyed its harmony.’ Basire said of Blake, ‘he was too simple and they too cunning.’ He, lending I suppose a too credulous ear to their tales, ‘declined to take part with his master against his fellow-apprentices;’ and was therefore sent out of harm’s way into Westminster Abbey and the various old churches in and near London, to make drawings from the monuments and buildings Basire was employed by Gough the antiquary to engrave: ‘a circumstance he always mentioned with gratitude to Basire.’ The solitary study of authentic English history in stone was far more to the studious lad’s mind than the disorderly wrangling of mutinous comrades. It is significant of his character, even at this early date, for zeal, industry, and moral correctness, that he could be trusted month after month, year after year, unwatched, to do his duty by his master in so independent an employment.
The task was singularly adapted to foster the romantic turn of his imagination, and to strengthen his natural affinities for the spiritual in art. It kindled a fervent love of Gothic, – itself an originality then, – which lasted his life, and exerted enduring influences on his habits of feeling and study, forbidding, once for all, if such a thing had ever been possible to Blake, the pursuit of fashionable models, modern excellencies, technic and superficial, or of any but the antiquated essentials and symbolic language of imaginative art.
From this time forward, from 1773 that is, the then ‘neglected works of art, called Gothic monuments,’ were for years his daily companions. The warmer months were devoted to zealous sketching, from every point of view, of the Tombs in the Abbey, the enthusiastic artist ‘frequently standing on the monument and viewing the figures from the top.’ Careful drawings were made of the regal forms, which for five centuries had lain in mute majesty, – once amid the daily presence of reverent priest and muttered mass, since in awful solitude, – around the lovely Chapel of the Confessor, the austere sweetness of Queen Eleanor, the dignity of Philippa, the noble grandeur of Edward the Third, the gracious stateliness of Richard the Second and his Queen. Then, came drawings of the glorious effigy of Aymer de Valence, and of the beautiful though mutilated figures which surround his altar-tomb; drawings in fact, of all the mediaeval tombs. He pored over all with a reverent good faith, which, in the age of Stuart and Revert, taught the simple student things our Pugins and Scotts had to learn near a century later. The heads he considered as portraits,’ – not unnaturally, their sculptors showing no overt sign of idiocy, – ‘and all the ornaments appeared as miracles of art to his gothicized imagination,’ as they have appeared to other imaginations since. He discovered for himself then, or later, the important part once subserved by Colour in the sculptured building, the living help it had rendered to the once radiant Temple of God, – now a bleached dishonoured skeleton.
Shut up alone with these solemn memorials of far off centuries, – for, during service and in the intervals of visits from strangers, the vergers turned the key on him, – the Spirit of the past became his familiar companion. Sometimes his dreaming eye saw more palpable shapes from the phantom past: once a vision of ‘Christ and the Apostles,’ as he used to tell; and I doubt not others. For, as we have seen, the visionary tendency, or faculty, as Blake more truly called it, had early shown itself.
During the progress of Blake’s lonely labours in the Abbey, on a bright day in May, 1774, the Society for which, through Basire, he was working, perpetrated, by royal permission, on the very scene of those rapt studies, a highly interesting bit of antiquarian sacrilege: on a more reasonable pretext, and with greater decency, than sometimes distinguish such questionable proceedings. A select company formally and in strict privacy opened the tomb of Edward the First, and found the embalmed body ‘in perfect preservation and sumptuously attired,’ in ‘robes of royalty, his crown on his head, and two sceptres in his hands.’ The antiquaries saw face to face the ‘dead conqueror of Scotland;’ had even a fleeting glimpse – for it was straightway re-enclosed in its cerecloths – of his very visage: a recognizable likeness of what it must have been in life. I cannot help hoping that Blake may (unseen) have assisted at the ceremony.
In winter the youth helped to engrave selections from these Abbey Studies, in some cases executing the engraving singlehanded. During the evenings, and at over hours, he made drawings from his already teeming Fancy, and from English History. ‘A great number,’ it is said, were thrown off in such spare hours. There is a scarce engraving of his dated so early as 1773, the second year of