Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist. Richard Holmes
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would have nothing to do with it.
The most challenging editorial problem arrived last. In January 1863, when the biography was already printing, Anne was sent ten precious letters of Blake’s to his young publisher and patron, Thomas Butts. At a stroke, this doubled the number of surviving letters. They all dated from the crucial – and little known – period of creative renewal, when Blake retired to a tiny cottage in Felpham, Sussex, between 1800 and 1804. These gave a wholly new insight into Blake’s character, his views of his art and patronage, and some wonderful examples of his most limpid but visionary prose.
The villagers of Felpham are not mere rustics; they are polite and modest. Meat is cheaper than in London; but the sweet air and the voices of winds, trees, and birds, and the odours of the happy ground, make it a dwelling for immortals. Work will go on here with God-speed. A roller and two harrows lie before my window. I met a plough on my first going out at my gate the first morning of my arrival, and the ploughboy said to the Ploughman, ‘Father, the gate is open.’
One letter even gave a long and detailed account, from Blake’s point of view, of the fracas with a soldier in the garden at Felpham which lead to his trial for ‘seditious and treasonable utterance’ in 1804. This was one of the most dramatic events in Blake’s life, and perhaps a turning point in his professional career. Gilchrist had already given up a whole chapter to describing the incident. His account was based on Catherine’s memories, Hayley’s letters, and a local Sussex newspaper report of the trial. While defending Blake as certainly not guilty of real treason, Gilchrist allowed it to be tacitly understood that Blake did treat the soldier with some violence, ‘in a kind of inspired frenzy’, and probably did shout some ill-advised political things at him:’ “Damn the King, and you too,” said Blake with pardonable emphasis.’ Blake’s own account was far more exculpatory, and intriguingly different.
How should Anne handle this unexpected biographical windfall? Macmillan claimed he was too far advanced with the printing to allow Anne to insert these letters at such a late stage. However, since they were discovered nine months before the book was finally published, it seems that Anne herself was loath to disrupt Alexander’s narrative. Yet the letters were extremely revealing, and Anne could not bear to omit them. ‘I have all but finished copying Blake’s letters; a task of real enjoyment, for they are indeed supremely interesting, admitting one as far as anything he ever wrote into the “inner precincts” of his mind…’
In the end, the solution she chose was to print the ‘LETTERS TO THOMAS BUTTS’ separately, as an appendix to the Life (where they can now be found). This perhaps gives the clearest indication of the subsidiary way she saw her own editorial function. This solution (although clearly not ideal) allowed her carefully to retain Alexander’s perceptive narrative of the Sussex period without interruption (Chapters 16 to 19). But it also allowed her to appear modestly in her own role of Editor, remarking on the light that the letters now threw on ‘the undercurrents of Blake’s life’, and wishing only that Alexander had seen them before he died.
By autumn 1863, Anne had surmounted all these difficulties. Far from finding the work burdensome, she later said characteristically, that it had proved a support and a consolation to her in the time of mourning. That beloved task (the Blake) kept my head above water in the deep sea of affliction, and now that it is ended I sometimes feel like to sink – to sink, that is, into pining discontent – and a relaxing of the hold upon all high aims…’ The Life was finally published in two volumes in October 1863.
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Two thousand copies were printed, and reviews appeared rapidly. There were some initial doubts whether the biography would, as Anne put it, ‘shock devout minds’. One reviewer observed evenly: ‘a more timid biographer might have hesitated about making so open an exhibition of his hero’s singularities.’ But it was soon clear that the book would be a triumph. It was widely admired by the entire Pre-Raphaelite circle, Robert Browning wrote a fan letter, and Samuel Palmer spoke for the Ancients when he described it as ‘a treasure’. He added thoughtfully, ‘I do hope it may provoke a lively art-controversy in the periodicals, unless people have gone quite to sleep’. He had ‘read wildly everywhere’, and concluded tenderly, ‘already it is certain to be an imperishable monument of the dear Biographer.’
It was loyally hailed by Carlyle: ‘thankfulness is one clear feeling; not only to you from myself, but to you for the sake of another who is not here now.’ He considered it ‘right well done – minute knowledge well-arranged, lively utterance, brevity, cheerful lucidity’. Later he told Anne, with a tact surely designed to please the editor, that the whole biography was remarkable for ‘the acuteness and thoroughness with which the slightest clues had been followed out in gathering the materials, and with all this toil and minute accuracy on the writer’s part, nothing but pleasure for the reader – no tediousness.’
The great strengths of the work, which Anne had so faithfully preserved, were quickly apparent. Gilchrist’s approach is lively, personal, enthusiastic and often humourous – quite unlike much over-earnest mid-Victorian biography. The quick, informal, darting style of his prose lends a sense of continual discovery and excitement to the narrative, and yet allows for virtuoso passages of description and summary.
It is extraordinarily well-researched, especially in the use made of the previous memoirs by Malkin, Tatham, Linnell, Palmer, Crabb Robinson, and others. Although he had lacked the Butts Letters, Gilchrist draws effectively on some original correspondance with Flaxman in the early years, and the expressive series of short notes to John Linnell at Hampstead in the last years. He also quotes brilliantly throughout from Blake’s own works, both prose and poetry, much of it quite unknown to contemporary readers, such as the early ‘Notes on Lavater’ and the ‘Proverbs of Hell’. He was, too, the first Victorian writer to pick out and reprint in full Blake’s great ‘Jerusalem’ hymn from the preface to Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient times’, in Chapter 21.
There are two qualities in Gilchrist’s writing, which make him such an exceptionally vivid biographer. The first is his sense of physical place. Gilchrist had a gift for evoking particular London streets, characteristic clusters of buildings or courtyards, and beyond them certain rural landscapes and secluded villages, where Blake had lived and worked. He captured their appearance, mood and atmosphere, and gave hints of their visionary meanings, or auras, for Blake.
Gilchrist had spent endless days researching and identifying them, following meticulously in Blake’s footsteps. He could also add fascinating observations of how these sacred places had changed in the subsequent fifty or so years, giving a sense of historical continuity. In this way, the biography first gave Blake’s extraordinary imaginative life ‘a local habitation and a name’. The descriptions of the gothic interior of Westminster Abbey, or of Hercules Building (and its garden) in Lambeth, or of the cottage and seashore at Felpham, and the last, hidden lodgings at Fountain Court are especially evocative in this respect.
The second quality is his power to conjure up Blake’s pictures and designs for the reader. Only few of these were actually illustrated in black and white engravings, so a great deal depended on Gilchrist’s verbal descriptions. He found a remarkable way of bringing these to life in virtuoso passages of exquisite prose ‘dramatization’, the energy of his syntax matching the energy of Blake’s line, which became a major feature of his biography. Here the young art critic comes into his own. This, for example, is how he brilliantly evoked the life and movement of the thirteen designs for ‘A Memorable Fancy’, in Chapter 10.
The ever-fluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something sentient. A picture has been said to be midway between a thing and a thought; so in these books over which Blake had brooded, with the brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it – not with a mortal life, but with a life indestructible, whether for good or evil.
Gilchrist made the defense of Blake’s eccentricity,