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Black Veil of the Ship of Theseus

(See Philosopher's Stone.) Blackwell, Anna : The most prominent disciple of Allen Kardec in this country, and the ablest exponent of his views. Miss Blackwell herself had psychic experiences-she had seen visions, and spirit forms had appeared on her photographs. Blake, William : (1757-1827) Poet, Mystic, Painter and Engraver, is one of the most curious and significant figures in the whole history of English literature, and a man who has likewise exerted a wide influence on the graphic arts. He was born in London on the 28th of November, 1757. It would seem that his parents and other relatives were humble folk, but little is known definitely about the family while their ancestry is a matter of discussion. Mr. W. B. Yeats, who is an ardent devotee of Blake, and has edited his writings, would have it that the poet was of Irish descent but though it is true that the name Blake is common in Ireland to this day, especially in Galway, Mr. Yeat's contention is not supported by much trustworthy evidence, and it is contradicted by Mr. Martin J. Blake in his genealogical work, Blake Family Records. William manifested æsthetic predilections at a very early age, and his father and mother did not discourage him herein, but offered to place him in the studio of a painter. The young man demurred however, pointing out that the apprenticeship was a costly one, and saying generously that his numerous brothers and sisters should be considered, and that it was not fair that the family's exchequer should be impoverished on his behalf. Thereafter engraving was suggested to him as a profession, not just because it necessitated a less expensive training than painting, but also as being more likely than the latter to yield a speedy financial return; and accepting this offer, Blake went at the age of fourteen to study under James Basire, an engraver whose plates are but little esteemed to-day, yet who enjoyed considerable reputation while alive, and was employed officially by the Society of Antiquaries. Previous to this a more noted manipulator Blake of the burin, William Ryland, a protégé of George III, had been suggested as one who would probably give a capital training to the boy: but the latter, on being taken to see Ryland, evinced a strong dislike for him, and refused stoutly to accept his teaching, declaring that the man looked as though born to be hanged. And it is interesting to note that the future artist of the Prophetic Books was right, for only a few years later Ryland was convicted of forgery, and forfeited his life in consequence.

Blake worked under Basire for seven years, and during the greater part of his time the pupil was engaged mainly in doing drawings of Westminster Abbey, these being destined to illustrate a huge book then in progress, the Sepulchral Monuments of Richard Gough. It is said that Blake was chosen by his master to go and do these drawings not so much because he showed particular aptitude for draughtmanship, as because he was eternally quarrelling with his fellow-apprentices: and one may well believe, indeed, that the young artist was convinced of his superiority to his confrères, and made enemies by failing to conceal this conviction. Whilst at the Abbey, Blake asserted that he saw many visions. In 1778, he entered the Royal Academy School, then recently founded: and here he continued his studies under George Moser, a chaser and enameller who engraved the first great seal of George III. Yet it was not to Moser that the budding visionary really looked for instruction, he was far more occupied with studying prints after the old masters, especially Michael Angelo and Raphael; and one day Rosa found him engaged thus, reproved him kindly but firmly, and told him he would be acting more wisely if he took Charles le Brun as his exemplar. He even hastened to show the pupil a volume of engravings after that painter, so redolent always of the worst tendencies of le grand siécle; and, with this incident in mind, it may be assumed that Blake was deeply grateful when, a little later he had shaken off the futile shackles of the Royal Academy, and began to work on his own account. He had to work hard, however, for meanwhile his affections had been engaged by a young woman, Catherine Boucher, and funds were of course necessary ere it was possible for the pair to marry. But Blake slaved manfully with his burin, engraving illustrations for magazines and the like; and in 1782 he had his reward, his marriage being solemnized in that year. His wife's name indicates that she was of French origin, and it would be interesting to know if she was related to François Boucher. or to the fine engraver of the French Empire, Boucher- Desnoyers; but waiving these speculations, it is pleasant to recall that the marriage proved a singularly happy one, Blake's spouse clinging to him lovingly throughout all his troubles and privations, and ever showing a keen appreciation of his genius. As regards Catherine's appearance there still exists a small pencil-drawing by Blake, commonly supposed to be a portrait of his wife; and it shows a slim, graceful woman, just the type of woman predominating in Blake's other pictures; so it may be presumed that she frequently acted as his model, or-for Blake had no fondness for drawing from nature - that her appearance gradually crystallised itself in his brain, and thus transpired in the bulk of his works.

After his marriage Blake took lodgings in Green Street, Leicester Fields; and feeling, no doubt, that engraving was but a poor staff for a married man to lean upon, he opened a print shop in Broad Street. He made many friends at this period, the most favoured among them being Flaxman, the sculptor; and the latter introduced him to Mr. Matthew, a clergyman of artistic tastes, who, manifesting keen interest in the few poems which Blake had already written, generously offered to defray the cost of printing them. The writer gladly accepted the offer and the result was a tiny volume, Poetical Sketches by W. B. Thus encouraged, Blake gave up his printselling business, while simultaneously he went to live in Poland Street, and soon after this removal he published his Songs of Innocence, the letterpress enriched by designs from his own hand. Nor was this the only remarkable thing about the book, for the whole thing was printed by the author himself, and by a new method of his own invention-a method which can scarcely be detailed here owing to lack of space, but which the reader will find described adequately in Mr. Arthur Hind's monumental History of Engraving and Etching. Blake lived in Poland Street for five years, and during this time he achieved and issued The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the first book of The French Revolution. In 1792 he removed to Hercules Buildings, Lambeth; and while staying here he was forced by dire poverty to do much commercial work, notably a series of illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts, yet he found leisure for original drawing and writing also, and to this period of his life belong the Gates of Paradise and Songs of Experience. In a while he tired of London however, and so he went to Felpham, near Bognor, in Sussex, taking a cottage there hard by where Aubrey Beardsley was to live at a later date, and here he composed Milton, Jerusalem, and a large part of the Prophetic Books, while he made a new friend, William Hayley, who repeatedly aided him with handsome presents of money. The Sussex scenery, besides-afterwards to inspire Whistler and Conder-appealed keenly to the poet, and in one of his lyrics he exclaims :- 66

Away to sweet Felpham, for Heaven is there," while to Flaxman he wrote:- 66

Felpham is a sweet place for study, because it is more spiritual than London. Heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours, voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard, and their forms more distinctly seen, and my cottage is also a shadow of their houses."

Yet Blake tired of Sussex as he had tired of his former home, and in 1803 he returned to London, taking a house in South Bolton Street. Here again he endured much poverty, and was then forced into doing illustrations to Virgil, and also a series of designs for Blair's Grave; but later his financial horizon was brightened by help from John Linnell, the landscape painter, and shortly afterwards the artist did some of his finest things, for instance his Spiritual Portraits, and his drawings for The Book of Job, while after completing these he commenced illustrating the Divine Comedy of Dante. In 1821 he again changed his home, taking up his abode now in Fountain Court, Strand, and here he continued to work at the Dante drawings; but only seven of them were ever published, for Blake's health was beginning to fail, his energies were slackening, and he died in 1827.

Sixteen years before his death Blake held a public exhibition of his drawings, engravings, illustrations and the like; and the affair was treated with haughty disdain, the only paper which saw fit to print a criticism being The Examiner, edited by Leigh Hunt. It is customary for Blake's idolators of to-day to attempt to heap scorn on those who thus expressed callousness towards his work, and to vituperate more particularly the many people among his contemporaries who showed him frank antagonism, but is not all this noisy blaming of his bygone enemies and critics unnecessarily severe? For it must be borne in mind that the artist came as a complete novelty, the mysticism permeating his pictures having virtually no parallel in English painting prior to his advent. And it should be remembered, too, that Blake as a technician has many grave limitations; and limitations which must have Blake been exasperating to people accustomed to the art of that amazing century which begot masters like Ramsay, Gainsborough and Romney, Watteau and Fragonard, De la Tour and Clodion, all of them producing works eminently graceful and pre-emenently decorative. Now comparing him to any of these men, Blake's modelling appears sadly timid and amateurish, as witness his drawing of himself, or his copy of Laurence's portrait of Cowper; while passing to his draughtsmanship, this is frequently inaccurate, and nowhere embodies the fluency and charming rhythm reflected by nearly all the artists aforesaid. His colour again is often thin and tawdry; while as to his composition, he is admirable only on very rare occasions, the incontestable truth being that, in the bulk of his pictures, the different parts have little or no relation to one another. This is true especially of those of his works which include a vast assembly of figures, yet even in various others of simpler cast this lack of anything like arrangement is equally paramount, and to choose an example, one need only look at "The Door of Death" in America. This is two pictures rather than one, and the spectator's gaze wanders from side to side, fretted and bewildered.

It were injustice to Blake himself, to omit noting these technical flaws in his workmanship, yet it were no less unjust, if not actually ridiculous, to write at any length contrasting him with the other masters of his century; for his outlook and intention were wholly different from theirs, and, lacking their charm and decorative value, he transcends these men withal in divers respects. He is a prince among mystics, his finest drawings are flushed with weirdness and mystery, and he reincarnates visions and phantasies as no one else has done in line and colour, not even Rosetti. For Blake contrived to remain a child throughout the whole of his life, and so, for him, dreams were an actuality, the things he saw in his trances were real and living, and he perpetuated all these things with just that obvious and definite symbolism which a child would naturally use. When he wants to express "Vain Desire" he draws a man trying to reach the stars with the aid of an enormous ladder; in the "Resurrection of the Dead" he delineates actual bodies soaring heavenwards, and when his topic is morning, he shows a nude form shining from the dusky mountain tops; while for Blake "The Door of Death" is an actual stone portal, and when illustrating the text in Job, "With dreams upon my bed Thou scarest me," he is not content to depict a sleeper with a frightened expression on his face, but draws all around the sleeper the imaginary horrors which tormented himserpents, chains, and distorted human creatures. Now in the hands of most men all this sort of thing would yield nothing but the laughable, yet somehow Blake's drawings, even those which are weakest technically, invariably possess just that curious air of distinction which is the dominant characteristic of all truly great pictures. In fine, he expressed the outlook of a child with a sublime mastery never vouchsafed to children.

If Blake the draughtsman and illustrator was a fierce iconoclast, turning his back resolutely on the styles current in his time, most assuredly Blake the poet, enacted a kindred role, evincing a sublime contempt for the trammels of Augustanism, and thus making straight the way for Burns, for Wordsworth, and for the divine Shelley. Yet just as Burns was tinged slightly by the typical failings of the pastoral century, so also Blake would seem to have found it difficult originally to break his shackles: for occasionally one finds him employing expletives, and this. suggests that at first he thought with Pope and his school that verse is futile unless precise; while some of his pictures of child life in Songs of Innocence are unduly pretty and idyllic, almost as idyllic as the scenes in Goldsmith's Deserted Village. Unlike Lowry and Mr. Kenneth Grahame those exquisite adepts in the delineation of children, Blake shows only one side of childlife: for his children are nearly all out for a holiday, they are seldom vexed, or cross, or angry, and their eyes are hardly ever dim with tears. At least, however, they are prone to dream dreams and see visions: and it is significant that, in one poem, the writer describes a child unto whom are revealed things hidden from his father's eyes :- 66 Father, O father! what do we here, In this land of unbelief and fear ?

The land of dreams is better far Above the light of the morning star."

That verse and many others besides, charm at once by a fusion of complete naturalness with rare beauty: and the genius of Blake in his earlier poems is really this, that with the simple language of childhood, and out of the simple events of childlife, he makes a noble and enduring art-an art, charged as surely as his own drawings with an air of distinction.

Had Blake contented himself with writing his Poetical Sketches, his Songs of Innocence and the subsequent Songs of Experience, the charge of madness could not well have been levelled at him by his contemporaries. It was his later writings like The Book of Thel and the Prophetic Books which begot this imputation, for in these later poems the writer casts his mantle of simplicity to the winds, he sets himself to give literary form to visions, and he is so purely spiritual and ethereal, so far beyond the realm of normal human speech, that mysticism frequently devolves into crypticism. His rhythm, too, is often so subtle that it hardly seems rhythm at all; yet even in his weirdest flights Blake is still the master, he still embodies that curious something which differentiates great art from the rank and file of æsthetic products. And if, as observed before, the colouring in many of his water-colour drawings is sadly thin and poor, the very reverse is true, and true abundantly of the poems written towards the close of his life. Glowing and gorgeous tones are omnipresent in these, they have the barbaric pomp of Gautier's finest prose, the glitter and opulence of Berlioz' or Wagner's orchestration, nay the richness and splendour of a sunset among towering mountains.

No account of Blake would be complete without some account of the literature which has grown up around his name, a literature whereof many items are more than worthy of the topic they celebrate. The earliest systematic biography of the master is that by Alexander Gilchrist, 1863, a book, the more valuable inasmuch as it contains many reproductions of Blake's drawings, notably the whole of the Job set: and since Gilchrist's day the artist's life has been rewritten by Alfred I. Story, 1893, and by Edwin J. Ellis, 1907, while his letters have been collected and annotated by Frederick Tatham, 1906. Much interesting and important matter concerning Blake is contained in The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, by A. W. Palmer, 1892 in A Memoir of Edward Calvert by Samuel Calvert, 1893, and in The Life of John Linnell by A. T. Story, 1892, while as regards critical studies of the master, perhaps the best is Swinburne's eloquent tribute, 1868, and further works of note are those of Richard Garnett, Mr. Arthur Symons and M. Basil de Selincourt. The student should also consult Ideas of Good and Evil by W. B. Yeats, 1903, and The Rosetti Papers by W. M. Rossetti, 1903, while he will find it advisable to look also at an edition of the Job illustrations containing an able introduction by Mr. Laurence Binyon, 1906. To speak finally of editions of Blake's own writings these are of course numerous, but the only one which is really complete is that edited by E. J. Ellis, W. G. B-M.

Bodin