William Blake, The Crucifixion, ‘Behold Thy Mother’, c. 1805.
Pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 41.3 × 30 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
William Blake, Pity, c. 1795.
Colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper, 42.5 × 53.9 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
William Blake, The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (formerly called Hecate), c. 1795.
Colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper, 43.9 × 58.1 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
William Blake, Newton, c. 1805.
Colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper, 46 × 60 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
Mr. Pars’ establishment was the recognised preparatory school for the Academy of Painting and Sculpture in St. Martin’s Lane, an outgrowth of the Incorporated Society of Artists which Hogarth had helped to found. The Royal Academy itself was not started until 1768, a year later. William Shipley, the painter, had founded this preparatory school, and on his retirement Pars took it over. Thanks to the generosity of his younger brother William, a portrait painter much in request at the time, Pars had previously visited Greece to study its ruins. He returned with portfolios of drawings, which were doubtless instructive to the pupils in his school, and from the hints contained in them Blake probably won the precarious knowledge that he was to assume so confidently later in his career. Mr. Pars’s pupils were taught to draw from their master’s plaster casts of the antique models. There was no life-drawing class, and its absence led Blake’s father to present his son with copies of the Gladiator, the Hercules, and the Venus de Medici, so that his son could continue his drawing at home. At the same time, Blake was anxious to enlarge his little collection of prints; his father gave small sums to him for this purpose. His parents were encouraging and helpful once they had come to understand where his heart and talents lay.
From the age of ten to fourteen Blake remained with Mr. Pars, and out of school was busily occupied with drawing, collecting prints, and looking at pictures. He also read and had apparently begun to write verses. The Advertisement to the Poetical Sketches, printed by his friends in 1783 and presented unbound to the young author to distribute as he liked, states that they contain “the production of untutored youth, commencing in his twelfth and occasionally resumed by the author till his twentieth year.” At the age of twelve, Blake had still two more years to remain at Pars’s school, and the lovely song “How sweet I roam’d from field to field,” which, Malkin says, was “written before the age of fourteen,” must, therefore, have been composed during his schooldays. If we accept this date, the song becomes the lyric of his childhood with its rambles and its visions, to remind us independently of the Elizabethan lyrics that the boy had been reading with delight. While the early works of genius are invariably inspired by memories, those of Blake emphasise how susceptible he was, and how important it was, especially for him, to fall under the best influences. He had, to an exceptional degree, the desire to surpass every one of his chosen models, and it is hardly too much to say that the influences that came his way were – for better or for worse – the determining factors in his work. If his father had been a man with different tastes, and Swedenborg had been an accidental discovery, Blake’s work might have been very different, for he was easily influenced by his environment. Under the spell of the Elizabethans, Blake’s produced many works illustrating his love of nature, and in his early poetry this nature can be found, although it is slightly transfigured. In his drawings, for which he went to school, he had to work to control his exuberant fancy. In his writings, which were at the mercy of his boyhood’s casual reading, his imagination at first tended toward more traditional, though unfashionable, themes. When he outgrew this earliest influence, he had no standard but his own waywardness to guide him. He was at the mercy of his loneliness and chance, and thought that the best way to move forward was to cherish and to emphasise his idiosyncrasies. Had he been born in the humanistic age, he would have allowed himself to be disciplined by a school sympathetic to his imagination, but finding himself a lonely voice he grew to insist on its peculiarities as if they were additional virtues. The result to literature was to be an outburst of experiment rarely successful in itself, if never to be neglected for its implications. Few men succeed in two arts. Fewer still have an equal capacity for two of them. When, like Blake, an artist happens to possess this dual faculty, it is not to be wondered that the better disciplined of the two shall be the greater glory.
William Blake, Illustration for The Book of Thel, frontispiece, 1789.
Relief etching, watercoloured by hand, 29.6 × 23.2 cm.
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
William Blake, Illustration for The Book of Thel, plate 4, 1789.
Relief etching, watercoloured by hand, 29.6 × 23.2 cm.
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 1, 1789 and 1794.
Relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
King’s College, Cambridge (United Kingdom).
William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, plate 3, 1789 and 1794.
Relief etching, with pen and watercolour, touched with gold.
King’s College, Cambridge (United Kingdom).
The Poetical Sketches show Blake at the only period of his life when he read books simply as works of art. Already his artistic zeal was being transferred to drawing; left entirely to his own devices in his intellectual studies, for which the atmosphere of his home supported his peculiarity of opinion, he soon came to read only to confirm, and never to correct, his eccentric views. His voluntary apprenticeship to literature ended with his departure from Pars’s school. After Blake’s boyhood was over, he read to justify his visionary intuition, not to learn how best to reach his readers by adapting his ideas to their expectations. He sometimes wrote so well in spite of his unpredictability; perhaps, in circumstances more favourable to his development, he might have become of equal accomplishment in letters as in art had he been taught the art of writing as thoroughly as the art of design. It is his glory as a writer to have evoked the age of innocence and the dawn of reflection. His latest works were fated to be the monument of a genius in intellectual ruin, and perhaps it took an intuitive energy as fierce as Blake’s to remind the world that the excesses of insight and private judgment are no less disastrous than the formalism against which he was protesting. He was perfectly equipped with talent and skill to write the Songs of Innocence. He was sufficiently equipped to divine the age of experience that lies immediately ahead. He was not equipped at all to create a new literary form for his profounder imaginings, and he remains a warning that genius which disdains the tools of tradition and all critical discipline risks being punished for its beauty. To endeavour, as Blake was to endeavour, to make the sublime the foundation instead of the crown of poetry is to sacrifice the means to the end, to rebuild the Tower of Babel, and to incur the penalty of confusion. In place of the epic temple that he promised, we have sublime ruins, only less artificial and picturesque than those visible constructions