The ‘prentice work as assistant to Basire of these years (1773-78) may be traced under Basire’s name in the Archæologia, in some of the engravings of coins, &c., to the Memoirs of Hollis (1780), and in Gough’s Sepulchral Monuments, not published till 1786 and 1796. The Antiquaries were alive and stirring then; and enthusiastic John Carter was laying the foundations in English Archæology on which better-known men have since built. In the Sepulchral Monuments, vol. 1, pt 2 (1796), occurs a capital engraving as to drawing and feeling, ‘Portrait of Queen Philippa from her Monument,’ with the inscription Basire delineavit et sculpsit, for which, as in many other cases, we may safely read ‘W. Blake.’ In fact, Stothard often used to mention this drawing as Blake’s, and with praise. The engraving is in Blake’s forcible manner of decisively contrasted light and shade, but simple and monotonous manipulation. It is to a large scale, and gives the head and shoulders merely. Another plate, with a perspective view of the whole monument and a separate one of the effigy, accompanies it. In Part I. (1786) are similar ‘Portraits’ of Queen Philippa, of Edward III. &c.
From Basire, Blake could only acquire the mechanical part of Art, even of the engraver’s art; for Basire had little more to communicate. But that part he learned thoroughly and well. Basire’s acquirements as an engraver were of a solid though not a fascinating kind. The scholar always retained a loyal feeling towards his old master; and would stoutly defend him and his style against that of more attractive and famous hands, – Strange, Woollett, Bartolozzi. Their ascendancy, indeed, led to no little public injustice being done throughout, to Blake’s own sterling style of engraving. A circumstance which intensified the artist’s aversion to the men. In a MS. descriptive Advertisement (1810) to his own Canterbury Pilgrimage (the engraving not the picture), Blake expresses his contempt for them very candidly – and intemperately perhaps. There too, he records the impression made on him personally, when as a boy he used to see some of them in Basire’s studio. ‘Woollett,’ he writes, ‘I knew very intimately by his intimacy with Basire, and knew him to be one of the most ignorant fellows I ever met. A machine is not a man, nor a work of art: it is destructive of humanity and of art. Woollett, I know, did not know how to grind his graver. I know this. He has often proved his ignorance before me at Basire’s by laughing at Basire’s knife-tools, and ridiculing the forms of Basire’s other gravers, till Basire was quite dashed and out of conceit with what he himself knew. But his impudence had a contrary effect on me.’ West, for whose reputation Woollett’s graver did so much, ‘asserted’ continues Blake, ‘that Woollett’s prints were superior to Basire’s, because they had more labour and care. Now this is contrary to the truth. Woollett did not know how to put so much labour into a hand or a foot as Basire did; he did not know how to draw the leaf of a tree. All his study was clean strokes and mossy tints…Woollett’s best works were etched by Jack Brown; Woollett etched very ill himself. The Cottagers, and Jocund Peasants, the Views in Kew Gardens, Foot’s Cray, and Diana and Actæon, and, in short, all that are called Woollen’s were etched by Jack Brown. And in Woollett’s works the etching is all; though even in these a single leaf of a tree is never correct. Strange’s prints were, when I knew him, all done by Aliamet and his French journeymen, whose names I forget. I also knew something of John Cooke, who engraved after Hogarth. Cooke wished to give Hogarth what he could take from Raffaelle; that is, outline, and mass, and colour; but he could not.’ Again, in the same one-sided, trenchant strain: – ‘What is called the English style of engraving, such as proceeded from the toilettes of Woollett and Strange (for theirs were Fribble’s toilettes) can never produce character and expression.’ Drawing – ‘firm, determinate outline’ – is in Blake’s eyes, all in all: – ‘Engraving is drawing on copper and nothing else. But, as Gravelot once said to my master, Basire, “De English may be very clever in deir own opinions, but day do not draw.”’
Before taking leave of Basire, we will have a look at the house in Great Queen Street, in which Blake passed seven years of his youth; whither Gough, Tyson, and many another enthusiastic dignified antiquary, in knee-breeches and powdered wig, so often bent their steps to have a chat with their favourite engraver. Its door has opened to good company in its time, to engravers, painters, men of letters, celebrated men of all kinds. Just now we saw Goldsmith enter. When Blake was an apprentice, the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, though already antique, was a stately and decorous one, through which the tide of fashionable life still swayed on daily errands of pleasure or business. The house can yet be identified as No. 31, one of two occupied by Messrs Corben and Son, the coach-builders, which firm, or rather their predecessors, in Basire’s time occupied only No. 30. It stands on the northern side of the street, opposite – to the west or Drury Lane-ward of – Freemasons’ Tavern; almost exactly opposite New Yard and the noticeable ancient house at one side of that yard, with the stately Corinthian pilasters in well wrought brick. Basire’s is itself a seventeenth century house refaced early in the Georgian era, the parapet then put up half hiding the old dormar windows of the third story. Originally, it must either have been part of a larger mansion, or one of a uniformly built series, having continuous horizontal brick mouldings; as remnants of the same on its neighbours testify. Outside, it remains pretty much as it must have looked in Blake’s time; old-fashioned people having (Heaven be praised!) tenanted it ever since the first James Basire and after him his widow ended their days there. With its green paint, old casements, quiet old-fashioned shop-window, and freedom from the abomination of desolation (stucco), it retains an old-world genuine aspect, rare in London’s oldest neighbourhoods, and not at war with the memories which cling around the place.
FOUR A Boy’s Poems 1768-77 [ÆT. 11-20]
The poetical essays of the years of youth and apprenticeship, are preserved in the thin octavo, Poetical Sketches by W. B., printed by help of friends in 1783, and now so rare, that after some years’ vain attempt, I am forced to abandon the idea of myself owning the book. I have had to use a copy borrowed from one of Blake’s surviving friends. In such hands alone, linger, I fancy, the dozen copies or so still extant. There is (of course) none where, at any rate, there should be one – in the British Museum.
‘Tis hard to believe these poems were written in the author’s teens, harder still to realize how some of them, in their unforced simplicity, their bold and careless freedom of sentiment and expression, came to be written at all in the third quarter of the eighteenth century: the age ‘of polished phraseology and subdued thought,’ – subdued with a vengeance. It was the generation of Shenstone, Langhorne, Mason, Whitehead, the Wartons; of obscurer Cunningham, Lloyd, Carter. Volumes of concentrated Beauties of English Poetry, volumes as fugitive often as those of original verse, are literary straws which indicate the set of the popular taste. If we glance into one of this date, – say into that compiled towards the close of the century, by one Mr Thomas Tompkins, and which purports to be a collection (expressly compiled ‘to enforce the practice of Virtue’) of ‘Such poems as have been universally esteemed the first ornaments of our language’, – who are the elect? We have in great force the names just enumerated, and among older poets then read and honoured, to the exclusion of Chaucer and the Elizabethans, so imposing a muster-roll as – Parnell, Mallett, Blacklock, Addison, Gay, and, ascending to the highest heaven of the century’s Walhalla, Goldsmith, Thomson, Gray, Pope; with a little of Milton and Shakspere thrown in as make-weight.
Where, beyond the confines of his own most individual mind, did the hosier’s son find his model for that lovely web of rainbow fancy already quoted? I know of none in English literature.