Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his ‘first vision’. Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angel wings bespangling every bough like stars. Returned home he relates the incident, and only through his mother’s intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie…If these traits of childish years be remembered, they will help to elucidate the visits from the spiritual world of later years, in which the grown man believed as unaffectedly as ever had the boy of ten.
Gilchrist reverts continually to these visions: calmly asking what exactly they were, how Blake described them, and how they should be accounted for. Much apparently outlandish behaviour, such as the ‘scandalous’ Adam and Eve nude sunbathing incident at Lambeth, is given a reasonable and detailed explanation, in this case with a amusing reminder about the poet Shelley’s enthusiasm for the early naturist movement. It is interesting that clearly Anne had been able to prevent Macmillan from censoring this particular account.
Later, Blake’s poverty, social isolation and professional difficulties are shrewdly shown to have exacerbated the oddities of his temperament. Of the quarrel with the commercial publisher Cromek in 1815, a frankly ‘discordant episode’, Gilchrist writes, ‘In Blake’s own mind, where all should have been, and for the most part was, peace, the sordid conflict left a scar. It left him more tetchy than ever; more disposed to willful exaggeration of individualities already too prominent, more prone to unmeasured violence of expression. The extremes he gave way to in his designs and writings – mere ravings to such as had no key to them – did him no good with that portion of the public the illustrated Blair had introduced him to…Now, too, was established for him the damaging reputation “Mad”.’
All this is summarised in the decisive Chapter 35, boldly entitled: ‘Mad or Not Mad’. In many way this chapter is the psychological key to the entire biography. Here Gilchrist carefully defines the ‘special faculty’ of Blake’s imagination, and vindicates the profound spiritual sanity of the ‘gentle yet fiery-hearted mystic’. One after another, he calls to witness all Blake’s circle of friends, from Flaxman and Fuseli to Palmer and Linnell. In a robust passage Gilchrist rejects any modish Victorian interpretation of Blake’s visions. ‘No man, by the way, would have been more indifferent or averse than he (wide and tolerant as was his faith in supernatural revelations) towards the table-turning, wainscot-knocking, bosh-propounding “Spiritualism” of the present hour.’ Instead Gilchrist finally champions Blake in terms that Carlyle would have recognised: ‘Does not prophet or hero always seem “mad” to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world…?’
Gilchrist’s remaining narrative problem lay in the dearth of material during Blake’s ‘dark years’ in London in the decade between 1808 and 1818, when he met his great patron and supporter, the young painter John Linnell, the first of the Ancients. Broadly his solution is to introduce the engaging stories of some of the more colourful characters who knew Blake during this time: the rapacious art dealer Cromek; the exuberant astrologer John Varley (for whom Blake painted the visionary portrait of the Flea); and the dandy art critic and poisoner (later championed by Oscar Wilde), Thomas Wainewright.
The last chapters are structured round the unpublished Reminiscences of Crabb Robinson from 1825, and the interviews with Palmer, Richmond and Tatham who knew Blake in the last years at Fountain Court. Here, from Chapter 34 onwards (‘Personal Details’), the biography is at its most intimate and moving. The final picture of Blake ‘chaunting Songs’ to Catherine, as he lay on his deathbed in the little upper room above the Thames, is unforgettable.
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Gilchrist’s biography was immediately taken up by the Pre-Raphaelites and their circle. William Rossetti established himself as the leading nineteenth-century Blake scholar, and edited the first collection of Blake’s Poetical Works, published in the Aldine series in 1874. Algernon Swinburne, inspired by Gilchrist, wrote the first detailed assessment of Blake as a poet, which appeared as a long monograph, William Blake: A Critical Essay in 1868. In his Preface Swinburne spoke with admiration of Gilchrist’s ‘trained skill’ and ‘sense of selection’ as a biographer, and his ‘almost incomparable capacity of research and care in putting to use the results of such long and refined labour’.
Like Palmer, he felt the biography would endure, despite the tragic circumstances of its composition. This good that he did is likely to live after him; no part of it is likely to be interred in his grave.’ In saying this, Swinburne also gently re-opened the question of the posthumous collaboration between Anne and Alexander. ‘For the book, unfinished, was not yet incomplete, when the writer’s work was broken short off. All or nearly all the biographical part had been carried through to a good end. It remained for other hands to do the editing; to piece together the loose notes left, and to supply all that was requisite or graceful in the way of remark or explanation.’ Anne however remained strenuous in her denial of having contributed anything more than ‘editorial’ work.
Interest in Blake steadily revived, and within fifteen years Macmillan was ready to undertake a new edition. Anne Gilchrist had spent the previous four years in America with her children, writing about the work of Walt Whitman and forming an intense personal friendship with the poet. But on her return to England in June 1879, almost her first act was undertake the revision of the Blake biography for Macmillan. She had remained in close touch with the Rossettis, and with their advice began to correct minor errors of fact and dates. By March 1880 the work was being ‘pushed energetically through’.
Her son Herbert remarked: ‘Anne Gilchrist’s task of editing the second edition was not an easy one. It was a tradition in the family to avoid notes; to recast the text rather than to use them. Thus, too, as a consequence, her work as editor is not apparent.’ This is curious, as her editorial hand is much more evident in the 1880 edition, and its impact much more marked.
Her main task was to find a place for another major cache of correspondence, some forty newly discovered letters from Blake to his patron William Hayley. Thirty-four of them had been auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1878, and bought by the Rossettis. Dante Gabriel regarded them as ‘rather disappointing’, and largely concerned with mundane business matters. But together with the twelve letters to Thomas Butts, they filled in the picture of Blake’s middle years between 1800 and 1805. Clearly these could no longer be left in an Appendix.
Anne determined that they should be fully integrated into the narrative of the text. She inserted them with extraordinary skill between Chapter 16 and Chapter 20, adding short linking sentences, but largely allowing them to speak for themselves. By comparing the two editions, one can see how ingenuously she kept to Alexander’s original wording (often by the device of altering the order of his paragraphs), and how little she added of her own. She was, however, forced to delete a large part of Alexander’s account of the ‘soldier’ incident at Felpham, allowing it to be replaced by Blake’s own self-justifying letter to Butts. This was the one major cut she made in the entire biography, and it was not a happy one. It produced a smoother but more anodyne account.
Indeed overall, the changes in the second edition had a curiously muffling effect. The dramatic story of Blake’s Sussex period nearly doubled in length, but also halved in biographical impact. The picture of Blake’s strange inner life, was swamped and blurred by the mundane superfluity of Hayley materials. The fifty extra pages slowed the pace of the entire narrative.
This loss of pace was further increased by newly extended citations from the Prophetic Books. Though she still regarded any attempt to interpret Blake’s mythology as ‘a reckless adventure’, Anne hopefully read and re-read Jerusalem, finding ‘several more coherent and indeed beautiful passages’, and relating the poetry to the ‘sublime influence of the sea’ on Blake at Felpham. Finally she added half-a-dozen new extracts from both Jerusalem and Milton to Chapter 21, with a brief commentary on Blake’s use of names. She also referred the reader to Swinburne’s critical essay, as a possible guide ‘through the dark mazes of these labyrinthine, spectre-haunted books’. Further expansions included more quotations from the ‘Proverbs of Hell’, and further brief reflections on Blake’s