thump on the head, and then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it. This recalls a still earlier note made in the same book in the same quaint and grotesque style, like that of some Gothic ornaments. It was made after he had written the dedication to Stothard (who had a long nose) of the "everlasting gospel," that begins The vision of Christ that thou dost see Is my vision's greatest enemy. Thine has a long hooked nose like thine, I always thought that Christ was a snubby, or I should not have worshipped him, if I had thought he had been one of those long spindle-nosed rascals. Returning to the book of Dante drawings, once Blake makes a cartoon where Homer is seen crowned with laurels and armed with a sword in the centre ("the classics devastated Europe with wars "), and a series of circles surround him. The first is labelled "Swedenborg"; the rest are illegible. A note tells us Everything in Dante's Paradise shows that for tyrannical purposes he has made this world the foundation of all, and the goddess Nature, -Memory, not the Holy Ghost . . . in her empires. As poor Cha-Bell said, "Nature, thou art my goddess." Round Purgatory is Paradise, and round Paradise is vacuum, or limbo. Homer is the centre of all-I mean the poetry of the heathen-stolen and perverted from the Bible, not by chance, but by design, by the kings of Persia, their generals, the Greek heroes, and lastly the Romans. Swedenborg does the same in saying that the world is the ultimate of heaven. This is the most damnable falsehood of Satan and the Antichrist. This is one of the "old falsehoods" of which Swedenborg is accused in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, where, unfortunately, they are not specified. This is all that we have of Blake's ideas about Dante. He learned Italian in order to read him in the original after studying Cary, whose translation he spoke of approvingly. It was as easy to win Blake's praise as to incur his vituperation. Any faithful service done to a visionary or even to an outlining artist-any receiving a prophet as a prophetwould be rewarded by his blessing. As for the contrary, we must be either sheep (of the true fold) or goats-outcast in the wilderness, or, as he calls it, "the indefinite," an expression whose amusing inappropriateness when it is applied to Newton he did not see. Of the many designs made in the third book for John Linnell, only seven were engraved. The subjects are (1) Paolo and Francesca, (2) Devils tormenting Ciampolo, (3) Devils tormenting each other, (4) Brunelleschi and the serpent, (5) Donati and the serpent, (6) The falsifiers, (7) The traitors. It is easy, and melancholy, to see what cause for application to his own experience Blake had in his mind while engraving these designs. None is carried very far. The style of Marc Antonio is almost distressingly evident in the shading. The figures contain Blake's usual merits and defects, and it is exceedingly difficult to find in the figure of Dante himself any attempt to bring before us the "longnosed rascal" that it is supposed to represent. Death interrupted the engraving of the series. CHAPTER XXXIV 'JOB' AND LINNELL PERHAPS the chief work, however, of Blake's last years-for the exact date of the hundred designs to Gray in the Duke of Hamilton's collection is not known to the present writer -and surely the chief artistic work of his life, is the series of twenty-one engravings to the Book of Job, for which two sets of drawings were made. These engravings are well known from the reproductions that have been published from time to time since they were first printed from very good "photointaglios" in the second volume of Gilchrist's Life. Their presence here will always make that book sought after till a comfortable edition of them replaces it. They were produced in Fountain Court, and "published as the Act directs" on March 8, 1825. It will be noticed that in the first picture of Job and his family the date is 1828. Of course, in numbering so many it is not surprising that the figure 8 from "8th of March" was repeated once by error at the close of the date of the year, which is given as 1828, for all the dates were added together on the outer margins of the twenty-one plates. This trifling error is probably responsible for the belief of the earlier biographers that Blake died in 1828, and makes the year of his death unforgettable by the sadness of the mistake, for as he died the year before, in 1827, this plate can by no possibility be accepted as engraved in the year to which Blake assigns it. The work was all done after Blake left South Molton Street and went to Fountain Court, Strand (again a household move for economy's sake), where he had rooms on the first floor, whose back windows looked between two high houses on to the river. Great reduction and destruction of the contents of the sixteen packages that made up his luggage when he went to Felpham must have now been necessary. He had less room than ever. When Crabb Robinson called on him there was not even a sound spare chair, so that the visitor sat on his bed. Gilchrist says (on page 321 of the Biography) that No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, was a house kept by a brother-in-law named Baines," who was, as Tatham records, the husband of Mrs. Blake's sister, who is only mentioned once, and then in this connection. The removal from South Molton Street, and the consequent break in daily poring over one class of work, had its usual effect of putting a new edge on Blake's artistic nerves-which his misguided belief in industry was continually deteriorating. To this is due the vigour and freshness of the Job designs, which contain nothing to suggest that when they were published the artist was an old man, worn and ready to sink under an illness that would never have attacked him had he sat less constantly at his work-table. That he ate only just enough to support life for years, and that he was often at his press turning its handle, explains why he was alive at all and had not died of sedentary habits. For two years, it is said that he never left the house. His only relaxation was reading the Bible, which he consulted in several languages. That it was a relaxation, and not a pious and stupefying duty, is his debt to Swedenborg. At Fountain Court he was able to forget all the old Hayley trouble and Cromek struggle. From now-in fact, from a little before the removal-he had never a moment's real anxiety about being able to find enough to eat while doing his own best work. John Linnell has to be thanked for this. Butts, Blake's other best patron, full of his drawings, and losing the eyesight that enabled him to see them, after buying the first set of Job drawings, is no longer heard of. He had been a true believer and a persistent supporter in a very quiet and inexpensive way. But he had never been a real mental companion. In John Linnell Blake had at last found, if not a reader who could follow his symbols, at least some one who would give him help and employment and sympathy that was not patronage. The days are over now of the "injurious doubts" with which Hayley had, in his kindest moments, done his artistic nerve much irreparable harm, and obliged him to labour like "Milton" striving with "Urizen." There is a direct reference in many passages that spring from this experience. Freedom from employers, unsympathetic, however well-meaning and affectionate, accounts for the value of the Job as a work of art, and is in itself an indictment against Hayley, whose memory will never be able to answer it. Little fragments of encouragement from different sources came now to Blake, as it were, spontaneously, like the sun and rain. Wainewright, who used to write in the London Magazine under the name of "Janus Weathercock," replaces the unknown enemy on the Examiner, who vanishes from the stage. Gilchrist tells us that Wainewright wrote under other pseudonyms also. He concealed cleverness under an air of flippancy. He recognised the value and seriousness of the figure in art, whether drawn by the great German outliner Moritz Retzsch, or our own Stothard (the Walter Crane of his day), or Etty (its Sir Edward Poynter). He also took up Blake, tried to puff his Jerusalem smilingly, a hopeless task, and bought a copy of his Songs of Innocence and Experience. He painted also, and Blake said, pointing to a picture of his in the Academy of 1823 or 1824 (as Samuel Palmer recalls), that it was "very fine." Samuel Palmer remembers that Blake wore that day his plain black suit and rather broad-brimmed, but not Quakerish, hat. He used to wear knee-breeches-then already becoming old-fashionedout-of-doors, and the more modern trousers at home. He must have despised this garment, and looked upon it as a sort of pinafore for the legs, for he used to lay his engraved plates on his lap till the knees of his trousers were shiny. It is to be hoped that Wainewright has been admitted to heaven as an appreciator of Blake, at least to the corner of it to which holiness does not give access, for he ended by using strychnine to poison a beautiful girl who was his sister-in-law, in order to obtain £18,000 from the life-insurance offices. After committing this and some lesser acts of infamy, he died wretchedly as a convict (also perhaps of his own strychnine), and his memory forms a curious comment on the Latin tag about study of art tending to soften the manner of life and forbid its ferocity, which is one of the few really humorous passages in our school Latin grammar. Among the little bits of good fortune that came to Blake at Fountain Court was a donation of £25 from the funds of the Royal Academy in recognition of the merit of the designs to Blair's Grave. It is to be hoped that the critic of the Examiner heard of that gift. If Cromek had ever known of it he would have attributed it to his own " herculean labours" for a man who was "predetermined not to be served." Gilchrist |