Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  A year later Blake advertised and opened his exhibition; which he was about as qualified to manage as little Malkin might have been. Between anger, innocence, want of funds and sense of merit, he would assuredly have ruined a better chance than he ever had. With the exception of his Canterbury Pilgrims, the choice of pictures and designs for exhibition seems to have been somewhat unhappy. The admirable power and high dramatic quality of that singular but noble picture, the latent or superincumbent beauty which corrects and redeems its partial ugliness, the strong imagination and the fanciful justice of the entire work, were invisible to all but such spectators as Charles Lamb; if indeed there were ever another capable of seeing them to such purpose. Whatever portion of the like merit there may have been in the other works exhibited was still more utterly lost upon the few who saw them at all; for of these we have scarcely any record beyond Blake’s own. One journal alone appears to have noticed the exhibition. An angry allusion of Blake’s to some assault of the Examiner newspaper upon his works and character has been hitherto left unexplained, presumably through a not irrational contempt. That Blake may be cleared from any charge of perversity, a brief account of the quarrel is here appended. Contemptible as are both the journeyman writer and his poor day’s work, they have been found worth tracking down on account of the game flown at.

  In the thirtieth number of the Examiner (August 7th, 1808) there is a review (signed R. H.) of the Blair’s Grave, sufficiently impudent in manner and incapable in matter to have provoked a milder spirit than Blake’s. Fuseli’s prefatory note is cited with a tone of dissentient patronage not lightly to be endured; “none but such a visionary as Mr. Blake or such a frantic (sic) as Mr. Fuseli could possibly fancy,” and so forth; then follows some chatter about the failures of great poets, “utter impossibility of representing Spirit to the eye” (except by means of italic type), “insipid,” “absurd,” “all the wise men of the East would not possibly divine,” “small assistance of the title” (italics again), “how are we to find out?” (might not one reply with Thersites, “Make that demand of thy Maker?”), “how absurd,” “more serious censure,” “most heterogeneous and serio-fantastic,” “most indecent,” “appearance of libidinousness,” “much to admire, but more to censure,” and all the common-places of that pestilent old style which, propped on italics and points of exclamation, halts at every sentence between a titter, a shrug, and a snarl. Schiavonetti also “has done more than justice” to Blake, and Blair and his engraver are finally bidden to divide the real palm. Who this reviewer was, no man need either know or care; but all may now understand the point of Blake’s allusion. Next year however the real batteries were opened. It is but loathsome labour to shovel out this decomposed rubbish from the catacombs of liberal journalism; but if thus only we can explain an apparently aimless or misplaced reference on the great artist’s part, it may be worth while to throw up a few spadefuls.

  This second article bears date September 17th, 1809, No. 90 of the Examiner, and is labelled “Mr. Blake’s Exhibition.” The contributor has already lapsed from simple fatuity into fatuity compound with scurrility. Blake here figures as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement, and consequently of whom no public notice would have been taken, if he was not” (the man’s grammar here goes mad on its own account, but what then?) “forced on the notice and animadversion of the Examiner in having been held up” (the case by this time is fairly desperate) “to public admiration;” such is the eccentricity of human error. The Blair of last year “was a futile endeavour by bad drawings to represent immateriality by bodily personifications,” and so forth; once again, “the tasteful hand of Schiavonetti,” one regrets to remember, was employed to bestow “an exterior charm on deformity and nonsense. Thus encouraged, the poor man” (to wit, Blake) “fancies himself a great master, and has painted a few wretched pictures, some of which are” — any one may finish that for the critic. The catalogue is “a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness (sic), and egregious vanity.” Stothard and the irrepressible Schiavonetti are of course held up in contrast to the “distempered brain” which produced Blake’s Pilgrims. The picture of The Ancient Britons “is a complete caricature; the colour of the flesh is exactly like hung beef.” Here we will pull the man up short and have done with him. He shirks a signature this time; and whether or no he were the same as last year’s critic, those may find out who care.

  “Arcadiæ pecuaria rudere dicas;” would not one say that this mingling bray and howl had issued through the throat and nostril of some one among the roving or browsing cattle of our own daily or weekly literature, startled at smelling some incongruous rose in his half-eaten thistle-heap? Such feeders were always one in voice and one in palate: it were waste of wood and iron to cudgel or to prod them. Even when their clamour becomes too intolerably dissonant we may get out of hearing and solace our vexed ears and spirits with reflection on that axiom of Blake’s, which, though savouring in such a case of excessive optimism, we will strive to hope is true:

  “The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,

  Are waves that beat on Heaven’s shore.”

  This was not Blake’s only connexion or collision with the journals of his day. An adverse notice of Fuseli had excited him to more direct reprisals than the attack upon himself now did. The Monthly Magazine for July 1st, 1806 (vol. xxi. pp. 520, 521), contains the following letter, which is now first unearthed and seems worth saving. It is not without perversities; neither is it wanting in vigour and fervour of thought.

  “To the Editor of the ‘Monthly Magazine.’

  “Sir, — My indignation was exceedingly moved at reading a criticism in Bell’s Weekly Messenger (25th May) on the picture of Count Ugolino, by Mr. Fuseli, in the Royal Academy Exhibition; and your magazine being as extensive in its circulation as that paper, and as it also must from its nature be more permanent, I take the advantageous opportunity to counteract the widely-diffused malice which has for many years, under the pretence of admiration of the arts, been assiduously sown and planted among the English public against true art, such as it existed in the days of Michael Angelo and Raphael. Under pretence of fair criticism and candour, the most wretched taste ever produced has been upheld for many, very many years; but now, I say, now its end has come. Such an artist as Fuseli is invulnerable, he needs not my defence; but I should be ashamed not to set my hand and shoulder, and whole strength, against those wretches who, under pretence of criticism, use the dagger and the poison.

  “My criticism on this picture is as follows: ‘Mr. Fuseli’s Count Ugolino is the father of sons of feeling and dignity, who would not sit looking in their parent’s face in the moments of his agony, but would rather retire and die in secret while they suffer him to indulge his passionate and innocent grief, his innocent and venerable madness, and insanity, and fury, and whatever paltry cold-hearted critics cannot, because they dare not, look upon. Fuseli’s Count Ugolino is a man of wonder and admiration, of resentment against man and devil, and of humiliation before God: prayer and parental affection fills the figure from head to foot. The child in his arms, whether boy or girl signifies not (but the critic must be a fool who has not read Dante, and who does not know a boy from a girl); I say, the child is as beautifully drawn as it is coloured — in both, inimitable; and the effect of the whole is truly sublime, on account of that very colouring which our critic calls black and heavy. The German-flute colour, which was used by the Flemings (they call it burnt bone), has [? so] possessed the eye of certain connoisseurs, that they cannot see appropriate colouring, and are blind to the gloom of a real terror.

  “The taste of English amateurs has been too much formed upon pictures imported from Flanders and Holland, consequently our countrymen are easily brow-beat on the subject of painting; and hence it is so common to hear a man say, ‘I am no judge of pictures;’ but, O Englishmen! know that every man ought to be a judge of pictures, and every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of hi
s senses.

  “A gentleman who visited me the other day said, ‘I am very much surprised at the dislike which some connoisseurs show on viewing the pictures of Mr. Fuseli; but the truth is, he is a hundred years beyond the present generation.’ Though I am startled at such an assertion, I hope the contemporary taste will shorten the hundred years into as many hours; for I am sure that any person consulting his own eyes must prefer what is so supereminent; and I am as sure that any person consulting his own reputation, or the reputation of his country, will refrain from disgracing either by such ill-judged criticisms in future.

  “Yours, Wm. Blake.”

  This ready championship, erratic and excessive as it may be, is not less characteristic of the man than is that outspoken violence which helped to make his audience often deaf and unfriendly. The letter, as we said, did not happen to turn up in time for insertion in any niche of the Life or Appendix: it will not seem a valueless windfall if read by the light of the Catalogue, the Address, and other notes on art embalmed in the second volume.

  No part of Blake’s life was nobler in action or is yet worthier of study than the period of neglected labour and unbroken poverty which followed. Much of the work done is now, it appears, irretrievably lost. New friends gathered about him as the old ones died out; for indeed all men capable of seeing the beauty of greatness and goodness were drawn at once to such a man as he was. Violent and petulant as he may have seemed on some rare occasions of public protest, he endured all the secret slights and wants of his latter life with a most high patience, and with serene if not joyous acceptance of his fate. Without brute resignation, nay with keen sense of neglect shown and wrong done, he yet laboured gladly and without ceasing. Sick or well, he was at work; his utmost rest was mere change of labour. To relax the intense nerve or deaden the travailing brain would have been painful and grievous to him. Fervent incessant action was to him as the breath of every moment, the bread of every day. His talk was eager and eloquent; his habits of life were simple and noble, alike above compassion and beyond regret. To all the poor about him — and among the poor he had to live out all his latter days of life — he showed all the supreme charities of courtesy. From one or two things narrated of him, we may all see and be assured that a more perfect and gentle excellence of manner, a more royal civility of spirit, was never found in any man. Fearless, blameless, and laborious, he had also all tender and exquisite qualities of breeding, all courteous and gracious instincts of kindness. As there was nothing base in him, so was there nothing harsh or weak. This old man, whose hand academicians would not take because he had to fetch his own porter, had the habit and spirit of the highest training. He was born a knight and king among men, and had the great and quiet way of such. To say that he was not ashamed or afraid of his poverty seems an expression actually libellous by dint of inadequacy. Fear and shame of any base kind are inconceivable of him. The great and sleepless soul which impelled him to work and to speak could take no taint and no rest in this world. Conscious as he was of the glory of his gift and capacity, he was apparently unconscious how noble a thing was his own life. The work which he was able and compelled to perform he knew to be great; that his manner of living should be what it was, he seems to have thought but simple. “Few,” his biographer has well said, “are so persistently brave.” But his was the supreme valour which ignorantly assumes and accepts itself. It was natural to him not to cease from doing well or complain of faring ill, as it is natural to a soldier not to turn tail. That he should do great things for small wages was a condition of his life. Neither, with all his just and distinct self-assertion, did he assume any special credit for this. He did not ask for more of meat and drink, more of leisure or praise; he demanded only such recognition as might have enabled him to do more work and greater while strength and sight were left in him. That neglect, and the necessities of mere handiwork involved by neglect, should thus shorten his time and impair his capacity for higher labours, he did at times complain, not without an audible undertone of scornful and passionate rebuke. “Let not that nation,” he says once, “where less than nobility is the ‘reward,’ pretend that Art is encouraged by that nation.” There was no angry prurience for fame or gold underlying such complaints.

  His famous drawings, burlesque or serious, of visionary heads are interesting chiefly for the evidence they give of Blake’s power upon his own mind and nerves, and of the strong and subtle mixture of passion with humour in his temperament. Faith, invention, and irony are here mingled in a rare and curious manner. The narrow leer of stolid servile vigour, the keen smirk of satisfied and brutish achievement, branded upon the grotesque face of the “Man who built the Pyramids,” implies a good satire on workmen of base talent and mean success. Several others, such as “The Accusers” and the celebrated “Ghost of a Flea,” are grotesque almost to grandeur, and full of strength and significance. More important than hundreds of these are the beautiful designs to Virgil — or to Phillips. Reproduced at page 271 of Vol. I. with the utmost care and skill, they have of course lost something by the way; enough remains, and would remain had less favour been shown them, to give great and keen pleasure. In the first, the remote sweet curve of hill against a sky filled with evening, seen far above the rows of folded sheep, may recall a splendid former design in the “Blair.” In the second, which perhaps has lost more than any in course of transference, the distance of winding road and deepening gorge, woods and downs and lighted windy sky, is among the noblest inventions of imaginative landscape. Highest of all in poetical quality I should class the third design. Upon the first two, symbolic as they are of vision and of pilgrimage, the shadow of peace is cast like a garment; rest lies upon them as a covering. In the third, a splendour of sweet and turbulent moonlight falls across blown bowed hedgerows, over the gnarled and labouring branches of a tough tortuous oak, upon soft ears of laid corn like long low waves without ripple or roll; every bruised blade distinct and patient, every leaf quivering and straightened out in the hard wind. The stormy beauty of this design, the noble motion and passion in all parts of it, are as noticeable as its tender sense of detail and grace in effect of light. Not a star shows about the moon; and the dark hollow half of her glimmering shell, emptied and eclipsed, is faint upon the deep air. The fire in her crescent burns high across the drift of wind. Blake’s touch in this appears to me curiously just and perfect; the moon does not seem to quail or flicker as a star would; but one may feel and see, as it were, the wind passing beneath her; amid the fierce fluctuation of heaven in the full breath of tempest, blown upon with all the strength of the night, she stands firm in the race of winds, where no lesser star can stand; she hangs high in clear space, pure of cloud; but no likeness of the low-hung labouring moon, no blurred and blinking planet with edges blotted and soiled in fitful vapour, would have given so splendid a sense of storm as this white triumphal light seen above the wind. Small and rough as these half-engraved designs may be, it is difficult to express in words all that is latent, even all that is evident, in the best of them. Poets and painters of Blake’s kind can put enough into the slightest and swiftest work they do to baffle critics and irritate pretenders.

  Friends, as we have said, were not wanting to Blake in his old age; to one of them we owe, among other more direct obligations, an inestimable debt for the “Illustrations to Job,” executed on his commission. Another worthy of notice here was, until our own day called forth a better, the best English critic on art; himself, as far as we know, admirable alike as a painter, a writer, and a murderer. In each pursuit, perhaps, there was a certain want of solid worth and fervour, which at times impeded or impaired the working of an excellent faculty; but in each it is evident there was a noble sense of things fair and fit; a seemliness and shapeliness of execution, a sensitive relish of excellence, an exquisite aspiration after goodness of work, which cannot be overpraised. With pen, with palette, or with poison, his hand was never a mere craftsman’s. The visible vulgarities and deficiencies of his style went hardly
deeper than the surface. Excess of colour and levity of handling have not unjustly been charged against him; he does not seem to have always used the material on hand, whether strychnine or mere ink, to the best purpose; his work has a certain crudity and violence of tone; his articles and his crimes are both too often wanting in the most delightful qualities of which finished art is capable; qualities which a more earnest man of lesser genius might have given them. The main object in both seems wrong, or at best insufficient; in the one case he looked less to achievement than to effect; in the other he aimed rather at money-getting than at enjoyment; which is the more deplorable, as a man so greatly gifted must have been in every way fitted to apprehend, to relish, and to realize all noble and subtle pleasure in its more vigorous forms and in its more delicate sense. What he has done however is excellent; and we need not inquire with a captious ingratitude whether another could have done better: that meaner men have since done worse, we know and lament. Too often the murderer is not an artist; and the converse defect is no doubt yet more unhappily frequent. On all accounts we may suppose that in days perhaps not remote a philosophic posterity, mindful that the harvest of art has few reapers worthy of their hire, and well aware that what is exalted must also be exceptional, will inscribe with due honour upon the list of men who have deserved well of mankind the name of Wainwright. Those who would depreciate his performance as a simple author must recollect that in accordance with the modern receipt he “lived his poems;” that the age prefers deeds to songs; that to do great things is better than to write; that action is of eternity, fiction of time; and that these poems were doubtless the greater for being “inarticulate.” Remembering which things, the sternest critic will not deny that no kaiser or king ever “polished his stanza” to better purpose with more strenuous will.