Incapable of compromise
Lloyd Evans Big date for Bohemians next month: 28 November marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Blake whose memory is honoured by every moth-eaten visionary, every babbling poet and every garret-bound artist flinging paint at a canvas. Nowadays, Blake's eminence is universally accepted but the great mystery of his career is that his achievements, as both illustrator and poet, made such a feeble impression on his contemporaries.
It didn't help that he was widely thought mad. And he complained throughout his life of a 'Nervous Fear' that made him uneasy in company. Because of his visions his behaviour was often weird. He thought nothing of breaking off a conversation to address the spirit of Lucifer, Moses or Julius Caesar who had just shimmied in through an upstairs window. (And though Blake was indifferent to earthly pedigree, his spiritual callers tended to be of the highest standing: he was rarely visited by a cherub below the rank of Archangel.) He lacked the material ambition of an artistic man-about-town. Having married a maid he lived in a few simple rooms and kept no servants. Hardly the style to propel him up the social ladder. He exhibited sporadically at the Royal Academy but was never invited to join. Instead he made a living as a jobbing engraver, supplementing his income with gifts from patrons.
Blake blamed everyone but himself for his failure. The fact is he had atrocious commercial judgment. You only have to look at his beautiful early lyrics, 'Songs of Innocence & of Experience', to see why they didn't sell. Blake was determined to exhibit his graphic and lyrical skills side by side when they're best appreciated separately.
The poems are engraved in a precise flowing copperplate script which is handsome but much harder to read than a regular typeface. His unstoppable imagination is evident in the illustrations. Each poem has a border of gaudily foaming vegetation whose branches and tendrils come spiraling through and around the verse. It's like reading between the fronds of an overdecorated Christmas tree. And the imagery is entirely at odds with the subject matter. To illustrate the sublime and mysterious 'The Tyger', he draws a cartoon of a loping feline crossbreed, like a leopard with the head of a smug baby camel. This completely destroys the poem's enormous suggestive energies. Likewise, the nightmarish revolutionary poem 'London' (In every voice, in every ban/The mind-forg'd manacles I hear') is decorated with a scruffy, sentimental image of a ragged old man being comforted by a child. This bears no relation to the text itself, a thundering and unforgettable denunciation of Church and state. Perhaps that's just as well. Blake was living in an age of political repression and he may have intended, semi-consciously, to camouflage his seditious message with ornamental doodles. As a result the collections have an unsettling 'busy' look, and even today they're rarely printed as Blake originally engraved them.
The commercial failure of the 'Songs' left Blake reliant on hackwork and the goodwill of his patrons. He seems gradually to have become accustomed to his dependent status, and there's even a sense of debonair presumption about this begging letter to the fashionable poet William Hayley. 'Now, my Dear Sir, I will thank you for the transmission of ten Pounds to the Dreamer.' No small sum. Ten pounds could support Blake and his wife for a couple of months.
All his life Blake was incapable of compromise. He believed in the sovereignty of the imagination, despising nature as 'the vesture of Satan', and pouring forth his paintings and engravings as a helpless response to supernatural inspiration. A letter to Hayley from Lady Hesketh, a cousin of the poet Cowper, shows how violently Blake's style inflamed the sensibilities of his time. Quaking at a sketch of Cowper made by Blake, she writes, 'The sight of it has in real truth inspired me with a degree of horror which I shall not recover from in haste ... I cannot restrain my pen from declaring that I think it horrid, shocking.'
Failure deepened Blake's belief in his own genius whilst intensifying his contempt for his rivals. He was particularly exercised by the dominance of Joshua Reynolds. 'This man was Hired to Depress Art,' he scrawled across his copy of Reynolds's works. Blake regarded himself as the superior not just of every other Regency artist but of Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt as well. Only Raphael and Michelangelo were his equals. He explained the source of his 'confident insolence' to the artist John Flaxman. 'I am more famed in Heaven for my works than I can well conceive. In my brain are studies and chambers filled with books and pictures of old which I wrote and painted in ages of eternity before my mortal life and those works are the delight and study of archangels.' This must be the most impressive statement of self-confidence ever made by a creative artist. 'Why then,' he goes on, 'should I be anxious about the riches or fame of mortality?' This is disingenuous. Blake was never indifferent to money.
Writing in the early 1800s, he notes that `the profits arising from publications are immense and I now have it in my power to commence publication with many very formidable works'. And in a letter to his brother he outlines his plan to make 500 guineas by selling engraved poems. The nearest he came to this ambition was a one-man show in 1808 held in the meagre surroundings of his brother's hosiery shop in Soho. The advertisement was written in the style of bolshie grandiloquence that Blake adopted when he felt himself neglected or under attack. 'The ignorant Insults of Individuals will not hinder me from doing my duty to Art.' His lack of self-awareness is spectacular. He tries to defend himself against the accusation that his work is nothing more than 'a Madman's Scrawls' and in the very next breath he announces that `the Artist' (i e , himself) has been 'taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies and patriarchates of Asia'. No wonder the show attracted so few visitors. A single review, in the Examiner, gently denounced Blake as an 'unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement'.
Undaunted, Blake continued producing work with scant prospect of commercial gain. 'I labour upwards/ Into Futurity,' he wrote prophetically in his declining years. Every artist must to some extent adapt his work to suit his public. Blake represents the supreme example of the refusal to do so. He died, at 69, still sketching on his deathbed. His integrity was intact. And ultimately of course he received all the fame and honour he deserved. But he never got his 500 guineas.
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