THE PROPHETIC MASK

ONE

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757; he married Catherine Sophia Boucher on 18 August 1782; and he died about six in the afternoon of 12 August 1827. We know little more of his life. A poet whose poems were unknown; a painter whose painting was disliked: he would have been glad to salvage something less than a life, a living. For Blake had not chosen to be a poet and a painter. At fourteen Blake had chosen to be an engraver; and he held to that choice until he died. He served seven years as an apprentice; he engraved for booksellers; he ran a print-shop. His friends were the men with whom he worked: the designer Thomas Stothard, the sculptor John Flaxman, the painter Henry Fuseli. They helped him to find work and patrons, and they did what little was done to make his poems and his painting known. Blake was nearly forty before he was asked to engrave the first large book of his own designs, to Edward Young's Night Thoughts. It was printed in the slump of 1797, and failed. Thereafter Blake seldom had enough even of hackwork, and lived when he could by patronage. A second book of his designs, to Robert Blair's The Grave, was printed in 1808; but it had been given to another to engrave. Blake held a show of his paintings through the summer of 1809. It failed. We do not know how he lived for the next ten years. The slumps had deepened; inflation and unemployment were growing unchecked; Blake was an old man who felt himself shouldered out of work. One by one he quarrelled with the fellow craftsmen who had been his friends. He was lucky after 1818 to find friends in their place, among younger painters who happened to be religious cranks. Their leader, John Linnell, got the Royal Academy to give Blake £25 in 1822. But to keep Blake alive, he had to commission most of his work. Only thus did Blake at last salvage half a dozen years of passable comfort and dignity. He used them to make his best engravings, for The Book of Job, and his finest designs, for Dante's Divine Comedy. Yet when Job was printed, a year before Blake died, it failed.

It is a story to put its age to shame: decent, humdrum, and hopeless. But it is not an uncommon, it is not even a personal story. Blake lived the impersonal life of a craftsman, using his hands as he had been taught, and keeping his mind his own. The disaster was not in his gifts but in the everyday of his world; the disaster was the world. Change marched masterfully and marched violently through his world: this crippled his livelihood, and this cowed him and made him helpless. There is nothing odd in what happened to Blake; for it was happening to many thousand others. The fine London watchmakers were becoming hands in sweat-shops. The learned societies of the Spitalfields silk-weavers were rioting for bread. The small owners were losing their place, and their skilled workers were losing their livelihood. It is a murderous story, and it is Blake's story. But it is not the poet's story, nor the painter's. It is the story of Blake the engraver.

Blake had become an engraver, at a fee of fifty guineas, as he might become an advertising draughtsman to-day: because he could not afford to become a painter. He may have hoped to work his way from craftsmanship to design. So, in the generation before his, Clarkson, the elder Catton, and John Baker had first worked as coach painters. So, in Blake's own generation, Stothard had drawn patterns in Spitalfields; and Flaxman designed pottery for the Wedgwoods. But when Blake was apprenticed, the English painters had just won the social standing which they had long coveted; and had at once shut out the engravers. Hogarth had set his face against an English academy all his life, because he feared this rift. But Hogarth had died in 1764. In 1768 his Society of Artists, to spite its bigwigs, chose another one-time coach painter for president. The bigwigs walked out and founded the Royal Academy, with Joshua Reynolds for president. Engravers could not become members of the Royal Academy. When later the Academy allowed them six lesser seats as associates, the engravers fought back by not putting up for them. This is why Blake's bitterness, at fifty, against Reynolds's Discourses to the Royal Academy, is aimed above all at their smugness.

The Enquiry in England is not whether a Man has Talents & Genius, But whether he is Passive & Polite & a Virtuous Ass & obedient to Noblemen's Opinions in Art & Science. If he is, he is a Good Man. If Not, he must be Starved. [453]

Liberality! we want not Liberality. We want a Fair Price & Proportionate Value & a General Demand for Art. [446]

This Whole Book was Written to Serve Political Purposes. [451]

And Blake's dislike of the classical manner of the Royal Academy was of a piece with this social anger. Blake had been apprenticed to James Basire, one of a family of craftsmen, engravers to the Society of Antiquaries. Here he learned the growing fashion, to set store by old things: among them Basire's rather old-fashioned style. Today we recall this as the fashion of a nobility gracefully mourning its decay. But the dislike of the vulgar Court which this Gothic taste spoke was not the monopoly of exquisites like Horace Walpole, privately printing Gray's The Bard. A print of 1771, which shows Welsh counties paying homage to John Wilkes, has the verse,

Thus Ancient Britons, gen'rous, bold & free,

Untaught at Court to bend the supple Knee,

Corruption's Shrine with honest Pride disdain

And only bow to Freedom's Patriot Train.

For the newly made folk-lore of a Druid Albion had also been seized by those who fought George III's Court more robustly. The Freemasons, the Ancient Family of Leeches, the small men who made Wilkes and Liberty a symbol for their discontent, took the Ancient Britons for forefathers of their brotherhoods. It was their Gothic, not Walpole's, which Blake made his own; it had for his age the same force that primitive art has had for ours. When later, in the French wars, not long after the end of the Albion newspaper, Blake painted The Ancient Britons, he saw them

naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after-ages. They were overwhelmed by brutal arms. [577]

TWO

I make it plain at the outset that, in the social struggle of that time, my sympathy is with Blake. But I must make it as plain that such a sympathy cannot take the place of a judgement of Blake's work. When we know what prompted him to do what he did; even when we find these promptings just; we have not shown that what he did was also well done. And I do not think that it was always well done. I think that Blake himself commonly made this mistake, of letting his sympathy master his judgement. A sound sympathy drew Blake to the Gothic; nevertheless, that rootless taste did him harm. For it misled Blake, who could have faced the new, to give a false prophetic worth to the fakes of Ossian and the Sublime.

I Believe both Macpherson & Chatterton, that what they say is Ancient Is so.

I own myself an admirer of Ossian equally with any other Poet whatever, Rowley & Chatterton also. [783]

It made Blake, one of the few English painters who had not seen the Italian paintings between which he chose with passion, also one of the few who did not know the paintings shown by Count Truchsess in 1803 for fakes.

Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters. [852]

And it is the taste in which Blake reasoned that because the sages had beards, all bearded men are sages.

There is here a conflict in Blake between a strong invention and an awe for random scraps of tradition, which is common in self-taught men. It is marked in Blake's designs: the more marked, because they are the designs of an engraver. For though the Royal Academy shut out the engravers from snobbery, the grounds which they gave against them were reasonable. Engraving was, in large part, a mechanical craft. It did not readily make a designer, it did not make a painter, either of Hogarth or of Blake. Hogarth could not force his invention beyond the harsh mechanics of caricature, because he believed that design is merely

as clear a knowledge of the figure as a man who can write freely hath of the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and their infinite combinations.

These are matters of which I cannot claim to judge; I set down only my own likes. But it seems to me that Blake's designs are written in the same engraver's hand, and that it is at odds with the invention. The design peters out absent-mindedly in pattern; the figures are taken from standard prints and primers. The drawing is commonly flat and of surface only: the work of a man taught to make his pictures from those of others. Blake made a virtue of such impatience.

To learn the Language of Art, 'Copy for Ever' is My Rule. [446]

Natural Objects always did & now do weaken, deaden & obliterate Imagination in Me. [783]

But it is...