Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 3.djvu/823

Rh in the Strand, and at the same time he was already cultivating his own taste by constant attendance at the different art sale rooms, where he was known as the &quot; little connoisseur.&quot; Here he began to collect prints after Michel Angelo, and Raphael, Durer, and Hemskerk, while at the school in the Strand he had the opportunity of drawing from the antique. After four years of this preliminary instruction Blake entered upon another branch of art study. In 1777 he was apprenticed to James Basire, an engraver of repute, and with him he remained seven years. His apprenticeship had an important bearing on Blake s artistic education, and marks the department of art in which he was made technically proficient. In 1778, at the end of his apprenticeship, he proceeded to the school of the Royal Academy, where he continued his early study from the antique, and had for the first time an opportunity of drawing from the living model. This is in brief all that is known of Blake s artistic educa tion. That he ever, at the academy or elsewhere, systema tically studied painting we do not know ; but that he had already begun the practice of water colour for himself is ascertained. So far, however, the course of his training in art schools, and under Basire, was calculated to render him proficient only as a draughtsman and an engraver. He had learned how to draw, and he had mastered besides the practical difficulties of engraving, and with these qualifications he entered upon his career. In 1780 he exhibited a picture in the Royal Academy Exhibition, con jectured to have been executed in water colours, and he continued to contribute to the annual exhibitions up to the year 1808. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market-gardener at Battersea, with whom he lived always on affectionate terms, and the young couple after their marriage established themselves in Green Street, Leicester Fields. Blake had already become acquainted with some of the rising artists of his time, amongst them Stothard, Flaxman, and Fuseli, and he now began to see something of literary society. At the house of the Rev. Henry Mathew, in Rathbone Place, he used to recite and sometimes to sing poems of his own composition, and it was through the influence of this gentleman, combined with that of Flaxman, that Blake s first volume of poetry was printed and published in 1783. From this time forward the artist came before the world in a double capacity. By education as well as native talent, he was pledged to the life of a painter, and these Poetical Sketches, though they are often no more than the utterances of a boy, are no less decisive in marking Blake as a future poet. For a while the two gifts are exhibited in association. To the close of his life Blake continued to print and publish, after a manner of his own, the inventions of his verse illustrated by original designs, but there is a certain period in his career when the union of the two gifts is peculiarly close, and when their service to one another is unquestionable. In 1784 Blake, moving from Green Street, set up in company with a fellow-pupil, Parker, as print-seller and engraver next to his father s house in Broad Street, Golden Square, but in 1787 this partner ship was severed, and he established an independent business in Poland Street. It was from this house, and in 1787, that the Songs of Innocence were published, a work that must always be remarkable for beauty both of verse and of design, as well as for the singular method by which the two were combined and expressed by the artist. Blake became in fact his own printer and publisher. He engraved upon copper, by a process devised by himself, both the text of his poems and the surrounding decorative design, and to the pages printed from the copper plates an appropriate colouring was afterwards added by hand. Tho poetic srenius already discernible in the first volume of Poetical Sketches is here more decisively expressed, and some of the songs in this volume deserve to take rank with the best things of their kind in our literature. In an age of enfeebled poetic style, when Wordsworth, with more weighty apparatus, had as yet scarcely begun his reform of English versification, Blake, unaided by any contemporary influence, produced a work of fresh and living beauty ; and if the Songs of Innocence established Blake s claim to the title of poet, the setting in which they were given to the world proved that he was also something more. For the full development of his artistic powers we have to wait till a later date, but here at least he exhibits a just and original understanding of the sources of decorative beauty. Each page of these poems is a study of design, full of invention, and often wrought with the utmost delicacy of workmanship. The artist retained to the end this feeling for decorative effect ; but as time went on, he considerably enlarged the imagina tive scope of his work, and decoration then became the condition rather than the aim of his labour. Notwithstanding the distinct and precious qualities of this volume, it attracted but slight attention, a fact per haps not very wonderful, when the system of publication is taken into account. Blake, however, proceeded with other work of the same kind. The same year he pub lished The Book of Thel, more decidedly mystic in its poetry, but scarcely less beautiful as a piece of illumination ; The Marriage of Heaven and Hell followed in 1790 ; and in 1793 there are added The Gates of Paradise, The Vision of tJie Daughters of Albion, and some other &quot; Prophetic Books,&quot; It becomes abundantly clear on reaching this point in his career, that Blake s utterances cannot be judged by ordinary rules. The Songs of Experience, put forth in 1794 as a companion to the earlier Songs of Innocence, are for the most part intelligible and coherent, but in these intervening works of prophecy, as they were called by the author, we get the first public expression of that phase of his character and of his genius upon which a charge of insanity has been founded. The question whether Blake was or was not mad seems likely to remain in dispute, but there can be no doubt whatever that he was at different periods of his life under the influence of illu sions for which there are no outward facts to account, and that much of what he wrote is so far wanting in the quality of sanity as to be without a logical coherence. On the other hand, it is equally clear that no madness imputed to Blake could equal that which would be involved in the rejection of his work on this ground. The great ness of Blake s mind is even better established than its frailty, and in considering the work that he has left we must remember that it is by the sublimity of his genius, and not by any mental defect, that he is most clearly distinguished from his fellows. With the publication of the Songs of Experience Blake s poetic career, so far at least as ordinary readers are concerned, may be said to close. A writer of prophecy he continued for many years, but the work by which he is best known in poetry are those earlier and simpler efforts, supplemented by a few pieces taken from various sources, some of which were of later production. The body of Blake s intelligible verse is now made accessible to the public, in Mr W. Rossetti s edition of his works, published in the Aldine series, and to this volume those readers may be referred who desire to know the foundation upon which the poet s fame has been built. But although Blake the poet ceases in a general sense at this date, Blake the artist is only just entering upon his career. In the Songs of Innocence and Experience, and even in some of the earlier Books of Prophecy, the two gifts worked together in perfect balance and harmony; but at this point the supremacy of the artistic faculty 