William Blake, Illustration for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, frontispiece, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 2, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Except for his boyish acquaintance with Jacobean poetry, with the antique casts from which he had learned to draw under Mr. Pars, Blake’s youth was inspired solely by romantic or theological influences. Because the romantic was congenial to him, he could well afford to have been crossed with classical and humane traditions. It is interesting to consider what the effect might have been if the example of Michelangelo had been succeeded, not by Gothic, but by the Greek masters by whom Michelangelo himself was largely inspired. In the sunlit spaces between the columns of a Greek temple, in the open-air life that the Greek statues reflect, Blake’s visions would have assumed a very different form from that imposed by the shadowy interior of Gothic churches. The figures that people their gloom are like ghosts in a cavernous Hades, while the gods and heroes of classical sculpture have the happiness of health and the vigour of sunlight as they stand upon their plinths. The designs of Blake wanted the classic foundation, and his writings entirely missed the lucid beauty of classical literature, which he came to identify with the academic art that he despised. There is no classic form in romantic literature, though in romantic art the Gothic severity came near to taking its place. Circumstances led Blake to follow his line of least resistance, and in the Abbey, where, according to Malkin, he became “almost a Gothic monument himself,” he was completely absorbed.
Even in these precincts, however, the interruptions that he had encountered in the shop were not banished. Though Blake was free from the other apprentices, the Westminster schoolboys would intrude. Tatham says that “in the impetuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption, he flung one of the boys from a scaffolding,” and followed this by laying a formal complaint before the Dean. The dreamer proved himself a true mystic by this act, for exceptional insight and decisive action are the combination of qualities by which the great mystic is known. The contradiction is sometimes so startling that the lives of the great mystics puzzle those observers who do not understand them. The wrath of the lamb is the terrible manifestation of righteous anger in a heart of gentleness and peace.
All his life, Blake remained grateful to Basire for the gift of his freedom, not only when at work in the Abbey but on expeditions to the Gothic churches in and around London. He found in their stone monuments not only form and outline for his art, but also a mythic English history, a symbolic language, and the place that colour once had played in architectural sculpture. All these, the colour too, probably suggested the synthetic art that he, too, was later to create in his illuminated manuscripts, wherein poetry and design, handicraft and paint, were to evolve a new form of book by a new type of author: one who was to conceive, combine, and personally carry out every detail of the finished work. No place less splendid or mysterious than the Abbey was to be Blake’s private studio. Shut in there alone, month after month for five years, undisturbed even during the services, Blake’s boyish hand was ever busy, while a throng of thoughts pressed into every unoccupied corner of his mind. His visions returned; the statues and figures seemed to come to life. It was in the Abbey that Christ and the Apostles appeared to him, and the Gothic imagination itself seemed to return to life in the boy. The monuments that he went to sketch suggested to him the visions that had filled the minds of the original builders and sculptors. The figures became less his subjects than his friends; with their shadowy companionship his imagination was peopled. His mind teemed with ideas that took the likeness of the statuesque figures around him, and the men in the world outside to which he returned became the shadows of the sculptures, unreal intruders into the solitude in which he lived.
Blake’s brain and imagination became another Abbey, as remote from those of his neighbours as is the ancient building from the modern life outside its walls. No boy so susceptible had been exposed in his impressionable years to such an influence, and it led Blake to make a religion of Gothic art and to see Christ and his Apostles as artistic rather than religious symbols. In this way he reversed the process by which Christian art had been created, and without any intellectual basis for his reason he sought to interpret the Christian tradition solely by the works of art that it had inspired. A Christian by profession, he never went to church, and at the last conceived a scripture peculiar to himself and composed of fragments that had little bonds but the caprice of his ingenious prejudices. Approaching religion through art, Blake was induced to supply from his own mind the basis that the medieval workmen had inherited. His active mind was besieged in his boyhood by the symbolism of the Abbey, and it is to his lonely hours within its walls that we can trace the origin and leanings of his later mysticism.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 10, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 5, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 3, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 21, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Blake’s leisure-time was occupied with the continuation of these studies, engraving his drawings of saints and medieval kings. One of these that has survived represents Joseph of Arimathea among the rocks of Albion and is marked with the words: “Engraved by William Blake, 1773, from an old Italian drawing, Michelangelo pinxit.” Already one of Blake’s characteristic comments appears on the plate: “This Joseph is one of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, of whom the world was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages.” This is an extraordinary revelation of the state of Blake’s mind in his sixteenth or seventeenth year. It was never modified by a sense of proportion later, and when we compare it with his mature utterances we see that his mind remained to the end furnished with the imagery that his occupation of the Abbey in his boyhood had impressed. The Gothic artists were the only historical heroes that Blake’s imagination knew.
In Gough’s[15] Sepulchral Monuments, one of Basire’s commissions, we may trace Blake’s engraving at this time. Gilchrist, following Stothard, confidently attributes to Blake’s hand the Portrait of Queen Philippa from her Monument, though it is, of course, signed by Basire. In his Public Address, to be issued many years later, Blake mentions the rival engravers that he used to meet at this time in Basire’s studio. To the last a believer in his master’s severe method, the seductiveness of the softer