The Sun.
London, England, 1863-12-22 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The life of William Blake. By the late Alexander
Gilchrist. Two Vols. Macmillan and Co.
It was Glorious John who wrote in Absalom and
Achitophel the witty and imperishable distich—

"Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide."

Of the miserable truth imbedded in the poetic am-
ber of which couplet, William Blake, the hero of
Mr. Gilchrist's posthumous biography, is as surely
one of the most extraordinary illustrations any-
where discoverable. There, too—in Blake's instance
—the partition was not only thin indeed ; it was
of the very thinnest And this thinnest of all
possible partitions between the bounds of Genius
and of Madness was, moreover, as it appears to us,
perforated like the section of a honeycomb,
like the framework of a colander, like the skele-
ton of a leaf. -Besides, it should be said, the pro-
portions in which the Genius and the Madness of
Blake's nature or idiosyncraey stood relatively to
each other, were, to our thinking, such, were
so widely contrasting, were so painfully dis-
proportionate in the predominance of the
one over the other, that when the two, i.e., the
Genius and the Madness, through the medium of
that thinnest of perforated partitions (still to em-
ploy Dryden's simile) became mingled together,
the drop of Genius, so to speak, got to be so diluted
in the surging ocean of Madness as to be hardly
recognisable, save upon the subtlest researches
being instituted by whet one may call the very
chemistry of criticism. Already, since the recent
publication of these two singularly hand-
some volumes—volumes the superb " getting
up" of which reflects the very highest
credit upon the publishers—we have remarked a
disposition, on the part of a good many among the
ablest of our contemporaries, to exaggerate in an
astounding manner, in a manner to ourselves alto-
gether incomprehensible, the infinitessimal modicum
of Genius in any way (at any rate to our limited
apprehension) discernible in the intellect of
William Blake. Born, this Pictor Ignotus was, it
appears, in the November of 1757, though we
should most assuredly have expected him to have
been born rather within the month of March, for mad
as a March hare he certainly continued to be, off and
on, all through his eccentric life, until the time when
(within three months from the completion of his
seventieth year) he breathed his last on
Sunday, the 17th of August, 1827. Seventy
miserable, anxious years, moreover, they must have
been to poor Blake—in the flesh. For, all through
his career he was constrained to exercise the most
rigid economy—sometimes even being driven to
the direst straights from a lack of the mere bare ne-
cessaries of existence. \Ve have said, advisedly, that
in the flesh, his life of seventy years duration must
have been full of, and running over with, wretched-
ness, But—in the spirit—enjoying, in that way, the
privilege of all madmen, he doubtless had many ex-
quisite consolations. To begin with,he—in common
with another Pictor Ignotus, to wit, Benjamin
Robert Haydon—to begin with, like Haydon,
William Blake believed in himself. Nay—in this,
better off than poor Haydon (who, by the way, had
that direst of intellectual curses, the ambition of a
great genius, with scarcely any particle of genius
at all through the aid of which to realise his aspi-
rations)—better off than poor Haydon, William
Blake not only believed in himself, but found
others (infatuated people, as it seems to us, we
must confess it!) who believed in him also.
Varley, for one, and divers other clever men, abler
and wealthier men than Varley. It should be pre
wised at once, however, before we pen another
syllable about the strange, erratic, bewildering
hero of this biography, that we must not be sup-
posed to imply other than the fullest and the most
cordial appreciation on our part of the rare and noble
powers here applied to the task of writing Blake's
Life, and of analyzing his various works, both pic-
torial and literary, by the gifted biographer—since
unhappily deceased—that ripe scholar and large-
hearted gentleman, whose worthier privilege, as it
appears to us, it was, to be the Biographer of William
Etty the Royal Academician. The late Alexander
Gilchrist, to whose indefatigable industry and as•
siduous devotion to the task he had voluntarily
selected as the last and crowning labour of his own
life, we owe this highly elaborated Life of William
Blake—the deceased Mr. Gilchrist has undoubtedly,
in this posthumous work of his, offered another
notable contribution to the art-literature of Eng-
land. Whatever our estimate of Blake, the hero of
the biography, that at least, in honest truthfulness,
must be here asserted in regard to this final literary
achievement bequeathed to the public by Mr. Gil-
ehrist as the writer of so very singular a biography.
Thanks, moreover, to the earnest co-operation in a
labour-of-love upon a labour-of-love—thanks, we
say, to the earnest co-operation of Mr. D. G. Ros-
setti and of Mr. W. M, Rossetti, in collecting toge-
ther the materials here compacted within the
compass of the second of these two volumes— the
literary performance now before us, as a whole,
appears to us, as such, almost as satisfactory as
though it had been watched, as a completed work,
through the press by Mr. Gilchrist himself. What-
ever friendly devotion could do, to the end of per-
fecting Mr. Gilchrist's hardly completed labours
upon this his "Life of William Blake," has
certainly been done (Mr. Gilehrist's widow may
securely laying that comforting "unction to her
soul") by the affectionate zeal of men as gifted and
as peculiarly well qualified for the task intrusted
to them as the Messrs. .Rossetti. Returning, how-
ver, to the work itself as a work of art, we must
frankly acknowledge that it is to our view the
veriest puzzle among puzzles. To say nothing
whatever of the man's " Life," look, we would
simply ask, at his works—look at his pictures!
look at his writings ! Here, of course, the very
pick of those works, of the drawings and of the
writings of William Blake, the very choicest among
them are here, we say, as a matter of course, pre-
sented to us, manifestly with a view to command
our admiration. Several among the ablest
of our contemporaries, as already hinted, have
forthwith, thereupon, at once, and quite in-
continently, gone into a sort of ecstasy of
admiration. Paaens have been chaunted to
the memory of the genius of Blake, to
the memory of his genius both as an artist
and (ye Gods !) as a Poet. For ourselves, we
have come to the examination of the " Life of
William Blake, Pictor Ignotus" (and so be it, in
perpetuo !)—we have come to the examination of
these selections from his Poems (!) and other
writings, and of these fee similes of the very choicest
among his pictorial productions, with a judgment
altogether unbiassed. And having now scanned
the two volumes, these two splendidly appointed
volumes, upon which the eminent publishers,
the gifted biographer, the fair editress, and
her two distinguished colaborateurs in perfecting
so farce could be perfected the present poethum-

ous biography having now very carefully
scanned these two attractive volumes of the Life of
William Blake by the late Alexander Gilchrist,
we, for one, certainly can affect no sort of
admiration whatever for the mad genius of
William Blake himself, assuredly none what-
ever for his doggrel verses, nor yet for the
grotesque and often hideous productions of a
pencil that seems to have had the capacity
chiefly of jotting down, in black and white, so many
fantastic nightmares! A sample or two of Blake's
poetry will be quite sufficient for our purpose—as
affording a perfect justification to every syllable we
have written, hero, about it. Take this very amaz
ing production, for example, from p. 33 :

THE LITTLE BOY LOST.
Father, father, where are you going ?
O do not walk so fast;
Spoak, father. speak to your little boy,
Or else I shall be IJst.
The night was dark, no father was there,
The child was wet with dew ;
The mire was deep, and the child did weep,
And away the vapour flew.
Can anything be—more distinctly—drivel? Or take
the pendant to it—

THE LITTLE BOY FOUND,
The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wandering light,
Began to cry, but God, ever nigh,
Appeared like his father, in white.
He kissed the child, and by the hand led,
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale,
The little boy weeping sought,
Or let us excerpt from page 40 the subjoined jingle :

SPRING.
Sound the flute!
Now 'tie mute;
Birds delight
Day and night,
Nightingale
In the dale,
Lark in sky,—
Merrily,
Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.
Little boy,
Full of joy;
Little girl,
Sweet and small;
Cock does crow,
So do you;
Merry voice,
Infant noise;
Merrily, merrily to welcome in the year.
Little lamb
Here I am ;
Come and lick
My white neck;
Let me pull
Your soft wool ;
Let me kiss
Your soft face ;
Merrily, merrily we welcome in the year.
Or again at page 57 the following :
THE FLY.
Little Fly,
Thy summer's play
My thoughtless hand
Has brushed away.
Am not I
A fly like thee ?
Or art not thou
A man like me ?
For I danne,
And drink, and sing,
Till some blind hand
Shall bruda my wing.
If thought is life,
And strength, and breath;
And the want
Of thought is death ;
Then am I
A happy fly,
It I live,
Or if I die.
About equivalent to this kind of poetry (save the
mark !) are the choice exemplars here given of
Blake's pictorial performances. Opposite p. 129,
vol i., is a drawing of a spider's web, such as any
school-boy, not an incorrigible dunce, might scrawl
on his slate in a few minutes. In the same vol., at
p. 137, there are a few wriggling lines representing
a flame, and used as the tail-piece to a chapter. At
p. 89 (do.) is a horrible hobgoblin of an old man,
on all fours, that the before-mentioned schoolboy's
younger brother might readily have pencilled on
the margin of his copybook in a moment of
hallucination or of indigestion. It bears—this
crawling old man in scrawling outline—a ter-
rible resemblance, in its way, to the effigies
of the patriarch Job, as represented by Blake
in a series of frightful drawings that we suppose,
from the elaboration with which they are all given
in a cluster, are to be looked upon as very high
up, indeed, among Blake's artistic masterpieces.
Job himself, in these drawings by Blake, when
he is at his worst, looking for all the world as
though he had the measles rather than those boils
Pet Marjorie used to be so thankful for not
having, herseif, like the great Patriarch of old. In
brief, the series of drawings by Blake in illustration
of the Book of Job, are, according to our sense
of the awful or the beautiful, very much, indeed,
like a series of profane caricatures. The very
archangels in the background of one of them—a
cluster of three of which archangels will be
found here reproduced in gilded emblazonry on
the cover of the two volumes—look, as the phrase is,
as like as two pins, to a row of double teeth, when
looked at from a little distance. Let either of the
two volumes be held up at the opposite side of a
room, to any one who knows nothing whatever
about the contents of the books, and we are perfectly
well satisfied that the impression produced on the
majority of individuals will be that the volume so
displayed is some gorgeous work upon the science of
Dentistry. According to our view of it—the work
altogether is a mistake : the Life of William
Blake, as we estimate it, not being worth the
writing, his poems not worth the printing, his
drawings not worth the engraving. As one of
Cruikshank's funniest pictures, representing a
landsman dreadful sea sick, had inscribed under-
neath it, " A very good man, no doubt, but a bad
sailor;' so we should be, here, disposed to pro.
nounce upon this Life of Blake an opinion some-
what similar, namely, one to the effect, that
William Blake also, in his way, was a very good
man, no doubt, but neither a Poet, nor yet a
Painter.