CHAPTER XXXVI SAMUEL PALMER SAMUEL PALMER recalls of Blake in his old age that He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence, an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter, and the high, gloomy buildings between which, from his study window, a glimpse was caught of the Thames and the Surrey shore opposite assumed a kind of grandeur from the man dwelling near them. Those may laugh at this who did not know such an one as Blake, but of him it is the simple truth. He was a man without a mask, his aim single, his path straightforward, his wants few, so he was free, noble, and happy. His voice and manner were quiet, yet all awake with intellect. Above the tricks of littleness or the least taint of affectation, with a natural dignity which few would have dared to affront, he was gentle and affectionate, loving to be with little children and to talk about them. "That is heaven," he said to a friend, leading him to a window and pointing to a group of them at play. . . . I can never forget the evening when Mr. Linnell took me to Blake's house, nor the quiet hours passed with him in the examination of antique guns, choice pictures, and Italian prints of the sixteenth century. Those who may have read some strange passages in his catalogue, written in irritation and probably in haste, will be surprised to hear that in conversation he was anything but sectarian or exclusive, finding sources of delight along the whole range of art, while as a critic he was judicious and discriminating. of the Samuel Palmer is writing of the time after the subduing Spectrous Fiend," that Blake too hopefully had believed had been quite accomplished by his visit to the Truchsessian Gallery, was really a fact. He thought-with Fuseli and Flaxman (or perhaps he assented when reminded that Fuseli and Flaxman thought)-the Elgin Theseus, however full of antique savour, could not as ideal form, rank with the very finest relics of antiquity. He fervently loved the early Christian art, and dwelt with peculiar affection on the memory of Fra Angelico, often speaking of him as an inspired inventor and as a saint, but when he approached Michel Angelo, the Last Supper of Da Vinci or the Torso Belvidere, and some of the inventions preserved in the Antique Gems, all his powers were concentrated in admiration. He was fond of the works of St. Theresa, and often quoted them with other writers on the interior life. Among his eccentricities will, no doubt, be remembered his preference for ecclesiastical government. He used to ask how it was that we heard so much of priestcraft, and so little of soldier-craft and lawyer-craft. It is to be regretted that he did not open a stall on the threshold of the Vatican for the sale of an Italian translation, dedicated to the Pope, of his Marriage of Heaven and Hell and First Book of Urizen. The Bible, he said, was the book of Liberty, and Christianity the regeneration of nations. In politics a Platonist, he put no trust in Demagogues. His ideal home was with Fra Angelico; a little later he might have been a reformer, but after the fashion of Savonarola. (Samuel Palmer here reveals a dream-like state of illusion based on infantile misconception worthy of Blake himself, whose books would never have reached Fra Angelico's home, and would have been burned in the market-place by Savonarola.) Samuel Palmer's account goes on: He loved to speak of the years spent by Michel Angelo, without earthly reward and solely for the love of God, in building St. Peter's (he evidently never read Michel Angelo's letter saying that but for the necessity of keeping his father supplied with money he would give up art). . . . I asked him how he would like to paint on glass for the great west window (of Westminster Abbey) his Sons of God shouting for Joy, from the designs to Job. He said, after a pause, "I could do it," kindling at the thought. (Ought it not to be done? We have his pictures, we have processes of enlargement, we have the technique of translation into glass. Where is the Blake Society? Where is the necessary Dean? Where are the subscriptions?) He made a copy of a picture of Giulio Romano's; it hung in his room near Dürer's Melencolia. There are living a few artists, then boys, who may remember the smile of welcome with which he used to rise to receive them. After mentioning Wordsworth's pleasure in his Songs of Innocence, and Flaxman's general admiration of his poems, Palmer goes on in this priceless letter: To the multitude they (his poems) were unintelligible. In many parts full of pastoral sweetness, and often flashing with noble thoughts or terrible imagery, we must regret that he should sometimes have suffered fancy to trespass within sacred precincts. The italics are ours. They point out the real tragedy of Blake's life-its isolation. Samuel Palmer is quite unconscious that he understood just as little of Blake's poems as the multitude to whom they were unintelligible, and John Linnell, with his vague remark about "sound doctrine," certainly understood no more. Had there been one man who knew what Blake meant, he could have read the Prodigal Son without a tear. He was alone. But Samuel Palmer was not at all foolish or shallow. His next words are full of good sense of a kind. Thrown partly among the authors who resorted to Johnson the bookseller, he rebuked the profanity of Paine, and was no disciple of Priestley, but, too undisciplined, and cast upon times that yielded him neither guidance nor sympathy, he wanted that balance of faculties that might have assisted him in matters extraneous to his profession. He saw everything through art, and in matters beyond its range exalted it from a witness into a judge. Yet Samuel Palmer must have often heard from Blake that ultimate maxim carved on the Laocoon plate The whole business of man is: the Arts, and all things in common. In considering this view, if we are to find any religion at all in it, we must in fairness to Blake remember that almost every one who interprets the Bible does so by building all his ideas on something that he thinks God must have meant. We have the Latin Church in Europe now that says, “Since God cannot have meant to mock man by leaving an incomprehensible Scripture that could not be understood when read privately, therefore He must have left an interpreter, and we are that interpreter." It is true that outsiders view the interpretation with hair on end, whether they are considering its fitfulness, its insufficiency, or its policy. Swedenborg, in the same "God-must" spirit, said, "Since the Bible is the Word of God, it must be about the Lord, and the degrading and ridiculous story of Abraham, for example, must be a sacred symbol from which to learn the Divine life," -and he learns it. The Scots "Minister" says, " Since the group of southern ecclesiastics that pretends to the interpretation of Scripture was a scandal to Europe for centuries, God must have meant me to understand it without such help,-and I do." Blake, in the same spirit, said, "Since all is Mind, and Brotherhood is the Divine purpose in man, the only form of Mind free from covet, aloof from argument, and resting on vision supplied straight from God Himself, must be the true religion, and that is Art." Samuel Palmer, after recording, as others have done, Blake's boyish pleasure in upsetting the dignity of people who tortured him with matter-of-fact unappreciativeness, concludes: Such was Blake as I remember him. He was one of the few to be met with in our passage through life who are not in some way "doubleminded" and inconsistent with themselves, one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect, and to whose name rank and station could add no lustre. Moving apart in a sphere above the attraction of worldly honours, he did not accept greatness, but conferred it. He ennobled poverty, and by his conversation and the influence of his genius made two small rooms in Fountain Court more attractive than the threshold of princes. With this peroration Palmer is silent, though on general grounds we must regret that he did not tell us why he thought the threshold of princes was attractive. On June 13, 1826, Crabb Robinson records: I saw him again. He was as wild as ever, says my journal, but he was led to-day to make assertions more palpably mischievous, if capable of influencing other minds, and immoral, supposing them to express the will of a responsible agent, than anything he had said before. This is probable from a man who did not wear a mask, and who thought morality wrong, notwithstanding that he thought nothing wrong, yet who did not quite think that morality was nothing. (It was the state in which we are willing to sacrifice our brother to our censoriousness.) If we wish an absolutely complete view of Blake's system on its moral and religious side, as well as its practical or social side, we need add only a few words to his formula. After, The whole business of man is the Arts and all things in common, the addition might take some such words as these, The whole virtue of man is productiveness and sympathy. The whole hope of man is imagination and union. But we must understand that the phrases are to be used in their best sense. Productiveness is to imply conscientious worship of beauty, sympathy is to imply disinterestedness and pity; imagination is to include vision and inspiration, and union must be taken to develop into an eternal merging of all men in One Man, the only Immortal. CHAPTER XXXVII LAST FRIENDS AND LAST HOURS BUT Blake's whole business in life was now nearly over. The constant strain of his nervous system from drawing out of his own head, and from feeling emotions of love, hatred, admiration, and even desire for the visions that his head presented to him, just as we feel in sleep personal feelings about the beings of our dreams, was now to have its revenge upon him. He even thought that these things were no tax on him, no source of "dissipation," but just the contrary, being mercifully given in the dull world, where, as he says, The Angel who presided at my birth Said, Little creature formed for joy and mirth, and that they were divinely sent to repose his burning thirst and freezing hunger (Milton, p. 3, line 4). Doctors tell us that a man has two great nervous centres, that of the brain and spine, and that of, or at least near, the stomach. One or the other must now break down. Both had been overstrained for years. Old age had come with its reckoning. If Blake had not been the sanest of men, the nerves more closely connected with the brain (the cerebro-spinal system, as they are called) would have been wrecked, and he would have become a dangerous madman. As it was, the apparatus that enables digestion to keep the blood alive was the portion of his physique whose coherence began to be lost. Deathly chill, and symptoms resembling the sort of cholera that is said to be produced by fear in otherwise healthy subjects, began to come at intervals to this fearless man. Warmth and rest would drive the attack away. The keen air of Hampstead, where he lived for a while in his last years, or a |