between Miss Bramston and Blake. Blake wrote poetry, Miss Bramston prose. Blake had metaphysical opinions about "imagination" and "eternity," due to considerations about his experiences which do not seem to recommend themselves to Miss Bramston's mind. Blake was stimulated to the "creation" of his personages by thoughts of a myth-making, impersonating kind, such as the ancients had when meditating on the moods of human character. Then he mounted the tripod and surrendered himself to oracular impulse. Miss Bramston, when preparing herself for the exercise of similar faculties, only yields to the novelist's artistic pleasure in conjuring up personalities. Therefore Miss Bramston has produced picturesque and impressive dialogue and romance, and Blake a great, if fragmentary, philosophic myth. At this moment, while the Preface is still in proof, a volume of Blake's Letters appears, containing also his Life by F. Tatham, published by Methuen under the editorship of Mr. G. B. Russell. Tatham's Life does not quite fill fifty pages, though printed in large type with widely separated lines. It is the contemporary memoir bound up in MS. with Blake's one coloured copy of Jerusalem, formerly owned by Mr. Quaritch, and lent to me when the Memoir for the facsimile edition of Blake's works was prepared for him. Afterwards Mr. Quaritch sold this Jerusalem with Tatham's MS., and made a trade secret of the purchaser's name. I am glad that it has at last come to light and is published in full. Not having my old notes by me here, I now look through Mr. Russell's volume to see if any essential matter from Tatham's Life has passed unnoticed. I find pleasant personal descriptions of Blake's good looks, good manners, good temper, and patience under pain during his last illness, his knowledge of languages, and the fact that Mrs. Blake always kept for him a guinea in the house more than he knew of, and kept him well fed and "comfortable," though not "portly"; also that in his later years he always dressed neatly in black (Gilchrist says, in knee-breeches), and wore his hair falling down on his shoulders-facts not indicated in the life-mask. Tatham defends, by a curious sentence telling how Blake 'enjoyed in the early part of his life not only comforts but necessaries," the story that Blake was really robbed of £60 worth of plate at Hercules Buildings. Whether £60 worth of plate was a comfort or a necessary to a quiet man whose entertainments consisted, so far as we know, of sometimes giving Fuseli a chop or Flaxman a cup of tea, does not appear. Perhaps Blake, who had fashionable pupils at this time, received presents of plate from them which his enthusiastic gratitude valued at £60, along with what he himself bought. Tatham gives no hint that he disapproved of any of Blake's views, only saying that much of his poetry was "unintelligible," that he "wrote a good deal," and that he published those of his works that were "most mysterious." Perhaps the tale that Tatham committed wholesale destruction after Blake's death may prove to be an exaggerated report, and some "prophetic works" may yet be found. Passing to the letters collected by Mr. Russell, I find, besides the one containing the few lines to Flaxman quoted above, two or three that were unknown to me. They are about a Dr. Trusler who was nearly persuaded by Mr. Cumberland to employ Blake, but found his designs too symbolic. They contain passages about art of interest to artists, and show Blake's views at the period before the eighteenth century was quite over, when, as his own designs to America show, he was not yet out of sympathy with Greek art—a state at which he seems to have arrived later through rebellion against the frigidities of Flaxman and Hayley. This collection also includes part of a letter from Flaxman in which there is indicated an unfulfilled project at one time existing among Blake's friends to get him taken to Rome to study art there; and Mr. Russell in some of his brief and useful notes adds to the sparse allusions made by Blake to a Work on Art (much of whose intended material is given in the present volume from the MS. book, and collected under the title " Public Address") which went no farther towards production than Blake's announcement that he had "found a publisher" for it. The biographical contributions, therefore, for which I am indebted to Mr. Russell's volume consist of information about how a journey was not taken, a book was not published, and a patron did not employ. Mr. Russell's book, however, contains some good reproductions, notably of Blake's engraving of a horse from his own design, perhaps the most unreal horse ever drawn; and the picture of the Last Judgment, whose first pencil sketch is given here. This reproduction, which might have been larger, is very valuable, as it is enough to prove that this is the most beautiful, poetic, and decorative picture the world contains, and also perhaps the most populated. Its figures are literally innumerable. It is a sufficient answer to all doubts that Blake's feebler drawings suggest as to the overwhelming value of his genius. He was always drawing, almost always "out of his own head"; and living as he did under depressing and distracting artistic influences, he not only sometimes did badly, but when he did so was too enfeebled by the eighteenthcentury influence to know it. In this picture and in the Job he takes a supreme place among the world's artists. Mr. Russell does ill to express a fear that Rome would have done Blake harm. It is true that the "school" of Michael Angelo, a school of mannerism and little else, influenced him for a moment when, as a boy, he engraved his "Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion." But the roof of the Sistine Chapel was painted many years before Michael Angelo acquired the mannerism that his imitators exaggerated, and would have been like new wine to Blake. Some apology is perhaps due to the reader for the very slender account given in the present work of what was real and essential in Blake that may be found in the artistic story of his life. But only poetic artists who have vision themselves would understand it. These are few, and their experiences will explain to them better than words can even the most paradoxical of the doctrines, and most puzzling of the changes, in Blake the Artist. PARIS, December 1906. EDWIN J. ELLIS. |