Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
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of the print-dealers’ shops and the sales of the auctioneers, who then took threepenny biddings, and would often knock down a print for as many shillings as pounds are now given, thanks to ever-multiplying Lancashire fortunes.
In a scarce, probably almost unread book, affecting – despite the unattractive literary peculiarities of its pedagogue author – from its subject and very minuteness of detail, occurs an account, from which I have begun to borrow, of Blake’s early education in art, derived from the artist’s own lips. It is a more reliable story than Allan Cunningham’s pleasant mannered generalities, easy to read, hard to verify. The singular biography to which I allude, is Dr Malkin’s Father’s Memoirs of his Child (1806), illustrated by a frontispiece of Blake’s design. The Child in question was one of those hapless ‘prodigies of learning’ who, – to quote a good-natured friend and philosopher’s consoling words to the poor Doctor, – ‘commence their career at three, become expert linguists at four, profound philosophers at five, read the Fathers at six, and die of old age at seven.’
‘Langford,’ writes Malkin, called Blake ‘his little connoisseur, and often knocked down a cheap lot with friendly precipitation.’ Amiable Langford! The great Italians, – Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano, – the great Germans, – Albert Dürer, Martin Hemskerk, – with others similar, were the exclusive objects of his choice; a sufficiently remarkable one in days when Guido and the Caracci were the gods of the servile crowd. Such a choice was ‘contemned by his youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at what they called his mechanical taste!’ ‘I am happy,’ wrote Blake himself in later life (MS. notes to Reynolds), ‘I cannot say that Raffaelle ever was from my earliest childhood hidden from me. I saw and I knew immediately the difference between Raffaelle and Rubens.’
Between the ages of eleven and twelve, if not before, Blake had begun to write original irregular verse; a rarer precocity than that of sketching, and rarer still in alliance with the latter tendency. Poems composed in his twelfth year, came to be included in a selection privately printed in his twenty-sixth. Could we but know which they were! One, by Malkin’s help, we can identify as written before he was fourteen: the following ethereal piece of sportive Fancy, ‘Song’ he calls it:
How sweet I roam’d from field to field,
And tasted all the summer’s pride, Till I the prince of Love beheld, Who in the sunny beams did glide!
He shew’d me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow, He led me through his gardens fair, Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir’d my vocal rage; He caught me in his silken net, And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.
This may surely be reckoned equal precocity to that so much lauded of Pope and Cowley. It is not promise, but fulfilment. The grown man in vain might hope to better such sweet playfulness, – playfulness as of a ‘child angel’s’ penning – any more than noon can reproduce the tender streaks of dawn. But criticism is idle. How analyse a violet’s perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly’s wing?
THREE Engraver’s Apprentice 1771-78 [ÆT. 14-21]
The preliminary charges of launching Blake in the career of a Painter, were too onerous for the paternal pocket; involving for one thing, a heavy premium to some leading artist for instruction under his own roof, then the only attainable, always the only adequate training. The investment, moreover, would not after all be certain of assuring daily bread for the future. English engravers were then taking that high place they are now doing little to maintain. Apprenticeship to one would secure, with some degree of artistic education, the cunning right hand which can always keep want at arm’s length: a thing artist and littérateur have often had cause to envy in the skilled artisan. The consideration was not without weight in the eyes of an honest shopkeeper, to whose understanding the prosaic craft would more practically address itself than the vague abstractions of Art, or those shadowy promises of Fame, on which alone a mere artist had too often to feed. Thus it was decided for the future designer, that he should enter the to him enchanted domain of Art by a back door as it were. He is not to be dandled into a Painter, but painfully to win his way to an outside place. Daily through life, he will have to marry his shining dreams to the humblest, most irksome realities of a virtually artisan life. Already it had been decreed that an inspired Poet should be endowed with barely grammar enough to compose with schoolboy accuracy.
At the age of fourteen, the drawing-school of Mr Pars in the Strand, was exchanged for the shop of engraver Basire in Great Queen Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields. There had been an intention of apprenticing Blake to Ryland, a more famous man than Basire; an artist of genuine talent and even genius, who had been well educated in his craft; had been a pupil of Ravenet, and after that (among others) of Boucher, whose stipple manner he was the first to introduce into England. With the view of securing the teaching and example of so skilled a hand, Blake was taken by his father to Ryland; but the negotiation failed. The boy himself raised an unexpected scruple. The sequel shows it to have been a singular instance – if not of absolute prophetic gift or second-sight – at all events of natural intuition into character and power of forecasting the future from it, such as is often the endowment of temperaments like his. In after life this involuntary faculty of reading hidden writing continued to be a characteristic. ‘Father,’ said the strange boy, after the two had left Ryland’s studio, ‘I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged!’ Appearances were at that time utterly against the probability of such an event. Ryland was then at the zenith of his reputation. He was engraver to the king, whose portrait (after Ramsay) he had engraved, receiving for his work an annual pension of 200/. An accomplished and agreeable man, he was the friend of poet Churchill and others of distinguished rank in letters and society. His manners and personal appearance were peculiarly prepossessing, winning the spontaneous confidence of those who knew or even casually saw him. But, twelve years after this interview, the unfortunate artist will have got into embarrassments, will commit a forgery on the East India Company: – and the prophecy will be fulfilled.
The Basire with whom ultimately Blake was placed, was James Basire, the second chronologically and in merit first of four Basires; all engravers, and the three last in date (all bearing one Christian name) engravers to the Society of Antiquaries. This Basire, born in London, 1730, now therefore forty-one, and son of Isaac Basire, had studied design at Rome. He was the engraver of Stuart and Revett’s Athens (1762), of Reynolds’ Earl Camden (1766), of West’s Pylades and Orestes (1770). He had also executed two or three plates after some of the minor and later designs of Hogarth: the frontispiece to Garrick’s Farmer’s Return (1761), the noted political caricature of The Times, and the portrait sketch of Fielding (1762), which Hogarth himself much commended, declaring ‘he did not know his own drawing from a proof of the plate.’ The subjects of his graver were principally antiquities and portraits of men of note, – especially portraits of antiquaries: hereditary subjects since with the Basire family. He was official engraver to the Royal as well as the Antiquarian Society. Hereafter he will become still more favourably known in his generation, as the engraver of the illustrations to the slow-revolving Archœologia and Vetusta Monumenta of the Society of Antiquaries, – then in a comparatively brisk condition, – and to the works of Gough and other antiquarian big-wigs of the old, full-bottomed sort. He was an engraver well grounded in drawing, of dry, hard, monotonous, but painstaking, conscientious style; the lingering representative of a school already getting old-fashioned, but not without staunch admirers, for its ‘firm and correct outline,’ among antiquaries; whose confidence and esteem, – Gough’s in particular, – Basire throughout possessed.
In the days of Strange, Woollett, Vivares, Bartolozzi, better models, if more expensive in their demands might have been found