ESSAY ON BLAKE, BY JAMES SMETHAM. Reprinted from the London Quarterly Review, January 1869. For a reference to the author of this essay see the Supplementary Chapter to the Life of Blake, Vol. I. pp. 428-9. The omitted portions are extracts or summaries from the foregoing "Life of Blake," as a review of which the essay originally appeared. THE great landscape-painter, Linnell-whose portraits were, some of them, as choice as Holbein's-in the year 1827 painted a portrait of William Blake, the great idealist, and an engraving of it is here before us as we write. A friend looking at it observed that it was "like a landscape." It was happy observation. The forehead resembles a corrugated mountain-side worn with tumbling streams "blanching and billowing in the hollows of it;" the face is twisted into "as many lines as the new map with the augmentation of the Indies" it is a grand face, ably anatomised, full of energy and vitality; and out of these labyrinthine lines there gazes an eye which seems to behold things more than mortal. At the exhibition of National Portraits at South Kensington, there was a portrait of the same man by Thomas Phillips; but very different in treatment [see Frontispieces to Vols. I. and II]. The skin covers the bones and sinews more calmly; the attitude is eager, wistful, and prompt. Comparing the two so fine and so various portraits, you are able adequately to conceive the man, and in both you feel that this awful eye, far-gazing, subduing the unseen to itself, was the most wonderful feature of the countenance. It is the countenance of a man whose grave is not to be recognised at this day, while Linnell lives on in venerable age, producing his glorious representations of the phenomena of nature as she appears out of doors; and, we believe, enjoying a large success which he would merit, if for nothing else, as the reward of his kindness to William Blake. * * * If we wished by a single question to sound the depths of a man's mind and capacity for the judgment of works of pure imagination, we know of none we should be so content to put as this one, "What think you of William Blake?" He is one of those crucial tests which, at once, manifest the whole man of art and criticism. He is a stumbling-block to all pretenders, to all conventional learnedness, to all merely technical excellence. Many a notorious painter, whose canvases gather crowds and realise hundreds of pounds, might be, as it were, detected and shelved by the touch of this "officer in plain clothes." In him there is an utter freedom from pretence. Mr. Thackeray with all his minute perception of human weaknesses and meannesses could not have affixed upon this son of nature any, the smallest, accusation of what he has called "snobbishness." As soon might we charge the west wind, or the rising harvest moon, or the greyplumed nightingale with affectation, as affix the stigma upon this simple, wondering, child-man, who wanders in russet by "the shores of old romance," or walks with "death and morning on the silver horns," in careless and familiar converse with the angel of the heights. You may almost gather so much if you look on this engraving alone. Say if that upright head, sturdy as Hogarth's, sensitive as Charles Lamb's, dreamy and gentle as Coleridge's, could ever have harboured a thought either malignant or mean? It is a recommendation to the biography. He must have a dull soul indeed, who, having seen that face, does not long to know who and what the man was who bore it; and it shall be our endeavour, in our humble way, to act as a guide to the solution of the inquiry. But before we give some account of " who," we must be permitted to offer some preliminary reflections, enabling us better to understand "what" he was. No question in art or literature has been more discussed and with less decisiveness than that of the relations of subject-matter to style or form, and on the view taken by the critic of the comparative value of these relations will depend the degree of respect and admiration with which he will regard the products of Blake's genius. To those who look on the flaming inner soul of invention as being of far more importance than the grosser integuments which harbour and defend it, giving it visibility and motion to the eye, Blake will stand on one of the highest summits of excellence and fame. To those who, having less imagination and feeling, are only able to comprehend thought when it is fully and perfectly elaborated in outward expression, he must ever seem obscure, and comparatively unlovely. There can be no doubt that the true ideal is that which unites in equal strength the forming and all-energising imagination, and the solid body of external truth by which it is to manifest itself to the eye and mind. There are moments when the sincere devotee of Blake is disposed to claim for him a place as great as that occupied by Michael Angelo; when, carried away by the ravishment of his fiery wheels, the thought is lost beyond the confines of sense, and he seems "in the spirit to speak mysteries." In more sober hours, when it is evident that we are fixed, for the present, in a system of cmbodiment which soul informs, but does not blur, or weaken, or obscure, we are compelled to wish that to his mighty faculty of conception Blake had added that scientific apprehensiveness which, when so conjoined, never fails to issue in an absolute and permanent greatness. But, having |