HOW BLAKE'S WORK HAS COME TO US

When Blake died in 1827 at seventy years of age, he left
poetic work behind him in three different states. Some of it
was still in manuscript; some had been printed in ordinary
type, and some had been printed with his own hands from
copper and zinc plates on which he had first written in a kind
of italic letter with a dark varnish; then, having placed the
plates in a bath of acid till all the parts not protected by this
varnish were bitten away, he had rolled ordinary printing
ink over the lines thus left in high relief, and so had been.
enabled to obtain copies by simply placing paper over the
plates and passing them through a press. This process was
his own.

His manuscripts are very inaccurate. The actual words
are generally well written and properly spelled, but there are
hundreds of lines in which wrong words have been left un-
erased. Blake had an aversion to going over his work and
removing errors. The mere idea often made him nervous and
ill-tempered to such a degree that he became quite unfitted for
the task. He was even afraid, when in this state, that he
should injure his work in attempting to correct it, and his
text is therefore almost as full of slips of the pen as of poetry.
He wrote at a great pace, many lines at a time, and in a
perfect fever of poetic excitement. His earliest work, the
Poetical Sketches,' was published by his friends. He seems
never to have read the proofs. His engraved work has fewest
errors and misplaced or redundant words. He could not
improvise with the varnish on metal as quickly as with the
pen on paper. There is hardly any emendation necessary for
these, such as his other work, whether earlier or later, so
frequently requires. The paging of the books, however, is not
always the same, and he seems to have sometimes forgotten his
own intention in this matter.

We must always remember that whatever else Blake was, he
was the only man of whom we have any knowledge at all who
ever invented what may properly be called a myth. The
allegories of the Elizabethan period and 'Pilgrim's Progress'
belong to another order of symbolism. His myth is of value

for its beauty and its dramatic picturesqueness. It also has a philosophy at its back which it will take us all many years yet to estimate justly. But if the whole world had only one volcano that was not extinct, or only one tree that was not a fossil, that volcano and that tree would be of value to geologists and botanists much as Blake is of value to mythologists. We have living knowledge of him, and of no other man of his kind. His myth has not come to us completely. Much was lost, and a great deal which cannot be replaced was deliberately destroyed by the friend to whom he left the manuscripts that were in his hands when he died. The remainder consists of poems and rhapsodies written at odd times during nearly half a century without a connected system or a drawn-up and arranged plan. That such a system can be found in them, and such a plan drawn from them, is in itself a testimony to the vigour and sanity of his mind which nothing can set aside.

BLAKE'S PORTRAITS

We know now fairly well what manner of man we should have seen had we lived when Blake was still going about among us, a part of the daily life of our world. Not only the big, square jaw, the short, eager-breathing nose, and the immense rounded forehead, whose curves looked like the full-shaped muscles of an athlete, are known to us now by the portraits, but we can see him in the living expression that spoke out the soul before the first word was uttered. We can see the man of his race and of his time, the eighteenth century Irishman of good descent-his father was born O'Neil before his grandfather took the name of Blake with a wife to whom it belonged, and we can see the man of genius, for this face is positively flaring with life, conscious of power and of its own proud exuberance and generous giving out of mental wealth. It is resentful to the unappreciative, grim to the incompetent, kind to the simple, and savage to the pretentious.

We know also that if we had seen him while living, we should have seen with his greatness something of his evident deficiencies his half-educated scrappiness, his lack of the judicial spirit, and of any sympathetic mental patience. We should have understood his hasty adoption of new words that caught his fancy, and his vivacious incapacity to control his own genius, or to do justice to other kinds of genius that were repugnant to him.

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We should have seen in him the living spirit of rebelliousness, crowned with fidelity, so long as fidelity and partisanship were the same thing. We should have seen him incapable of saving, incapable of serving, and incapable of fearing.

But when all was balanced, we should have seen a man to love with some wonder, yet always to love; and to revere with some regret, yet always to revere.

And the man we should have seen was the man that truly' was; for of hypocrisy, deception, or even of reasonable reserve this face had no fragment, no suggestion, and no possibility.

And, last of all, we should have seen a face not easy to record in one picture-the face of two portraits at least.

Fortunately we have these two portraits of Blake; and of that on which the shadow of will, of pride, and of rebellion lies most deeply, we have several.

In Quaritch's facsimile edition; in Gilchrist's 'Life' (Macmillan); in Yeats's selections (Laurence and Bullen) and in Perugini's (Methuen), we have altogether more than half a dozen portraits from original and trustworthy sources. Tatham's drawing in the Quaritch edition shows Blake from the stern and fierce side of his character. lipped yet thin mouth, wide and sad, is held close with The longdetermination. The corners go downwards, the whole line of the lips forming a low-crowned arch, the line of stern and permanent sorrow. The eyes glitter and burn with a fanatic light. The brow-lines are seen not to have come by accident, nor without their full equivalent of mental and personal experience. The wide, open nostril and the wide, open ear seem to have been carved by a sculptor's imperious and unflinching hand to show how well he knew that the spirit that breathes and the spirit that hears needed a free passage for inspiration and life-for the air of this world and the messages of the other. At first this seems an exaggeration in the portrait, but the photographs taken from the cast made from Blake's head for Deville the phrenologist, show that it is not so. In the Works (Quaritch) and in Perugini's Selections (Methuen) this cast is given, once in profile, once threequarter face, from photographs. It is even more stern and uncompromising than Tatham's portrait, and the closed eyes do not suggest either sleep or blindness.

To turn to Linnell's portrait, engraved for Gilchrist and photographed from the original ivory for Yeats, is turning from fierceness to sweetness, from anger to happiness, from war to love.

The face is dimpled all over, right up into the temples, with the kindliness and innocence of the smile, in which kindness is the informing and moulding power. amusement and absolutely no sarcasm or derision in it. There is very little

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There is a curious look as though the man were smiling and whistling at the same time, as people smile and whistle to little pet birds.

What has happened to the face to change it so much; and, above all, what has become of the great, long, slit-like mouth? The upper lip used to be slightly pressed forward, as though air were blown behind it, which bowed it above the thin, long, sad red line in a curve just the reverse of the Greek line of beauty. In lips of Cupid's bow form, a smile widens and flattens the red part, but in Blake's the opposite is what happens. A smile shortens the mouth. The line takes two new curves, one upward, just on each side of the central point, which now descends a hair's-breadth, and again The Cupid's one at each corner, where is now a slight rise. bow form has come in the act of smiling-the very action that obliterates it in a face of Greek beauty. The result of this shortening of a mouth while the other lines of the face show that it is smiling, is to give that whistling look, that appear ance of addressing the smile along with little shrill sounds of endearment, to a bird.

To understand such a change in a face, it must be seen. Yet it is almost unknown outside Ireland. Even there it is not common in anything of the perfection which Blake's face possessed as an example of its paradoxical charms; but it is open well known, and is as distinctively Irish as were Blake's nostril, large flashing eyes, and the square jaw, wide mouth, short nose, and round head.

In Tatham's portrait, the depression below the under lip and above the large chin is sudden and deeply carved. In Linnell's it is flatter, and as if water-worn. This also is a change belonging to the passage from a serious to a smiling look, and it occurs as part of the same movement, while the nostril grows more oval and less defiant.

The portrait given as frontispiece to this volume, made up as it is from all the others, has neither the advantages nor the disadvantages of such a picture as must have been drawn from life. It represents a man of extremes at neither one nor other If two of Blake's own favourite of his extreme moments. terms may be used for art-criticism, this may be said to be neither a Spectre portrait, like Tatham's, nor an Emanation portrait, like Linnell's. It shows the man-perhaps as he listens to what some visitor was saying-passing from one stage to the other; and it is intended by the editor, who has made it for this purpose and has no other apology to offer for it, as a key by which the mystery of the transition may be unlocked.

PERSONAL IMPRESSION OF BLAKE

Blake's personality, as it impressed all those who came near him, has come down to us without the discussions that perturb our enjoyment of his work, and free from the miscomprehension that followed his poetry for so long, and alone caused the theory that he was a madman. No one who knew him thought him mad except Mr. Crabbe Robinson, who tried to understand him without taking the trouble to understand Swedenborg first. The greatest of his modern critics-D. G. Rossetti and Mr. Swinburne-always felt that he was sane, even if they could not prove it.

He was not only sane, but urbane. His politeness to every one, whether above or below him in social standing, only failed three times, and then it gave place to indignation, not to raving: once when he obliged his wife to apologise to his brother, who handsomely and lovingly repudiated the apology; once when he suspected a circus proprietor of being cruel to a boy; and once when he bodily turned a soldier out of his garden before knowing that the gardener had asked him into it.

He felt much wrath at different times against more than one person, but there is no record that it broke the firmness of his personal bearing, during his years of manhood.

Of those who in later days felt the charm of Blake's personality, Gilchrist, his biographer, has done most to cause it to come down as a valuable and pleasant influence to our own day. If there were nothing else than this personal impression to be got out of his book, it would be one of the best worth having and best worth remembering of biographies. Its author held firmly that Blake knew what he meant himself, and that some one would come some day and explain him. In fact, it was to a direct challenge (omitted since the first edition) to say what the poem 'To the Jews' meant in 'Jerusalem,' page 27, that the present editor owed so long ago as 1870 his own first impulse to investigate, and the first substantial results of investigation.

As an account of Blake's personality, no one could hope to improve on Gilchrist, but there is no space to quote a whole volume here.

Mr. Swinburne in the essay, in which he also calls for an interpreter, and avows his belief that there is sane matter for interpretation, has a few sentences, picturesque and stimulat ing, that are worth recalling now. He describes Blake as— beautifully unfit for walkNo one, artist or poet'

'A man perfect in his way and ing in the way of any other man.

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