The mental training which followed the physical one of
swaddling-clothes, go-carts, and head-puddings, was, in our
Poet's case, a scanty one, as we have cause to know from
Blake's writings. All knowledge beyond that of reading
and writing was evidently self-acquired. A ' new kind ' of
boy was soon sauntering about the quiet neighbouring streets
— a boy of strangely more romantic habit of mind than that
neighbourhood had ever known in its days of gentility, has
ever known in its dingy decadence. Already he passed half
his time in dream and imaginative reverie. As he grew
older the lad became fond of roving out into the country,
a fondness in keeping with the romantic turn. For what
written romance can vie with the substantial one of rural
sights and sounds to a town-bred boy .■' Country was not,
at that day, beyond reach of a Golden Square lad of nine
or ten. On his own legs he could find a green field with-
out the exhaustion of body and mind which now separates
such a boy from the alluring haven as rigorously as prison
bars. After Westminster Bridge — the ' superb and magni-
ficent structure ' now defunct, then a new and admired one —
came St. George's Fields, open fields and scene of ' Wilkes
and Liberty ' riots in Blake's boyhood ; next, the pretty
village of Newington Butts, undreaming its 19th century
bad eminence in the bills of cholera-mortality ; and then,
unsophisticate green field and hedgerow opened on the
.-KT. 8— lo.] CHILDHOOD. 7
child's delighted eyes. A mile or two further through the
'large and pleasant village' of Camberwell with its grove (or
avenue) and famed prospect, arose the sweet hill and vale
and ' sylvan wilds ' of rural Dulwich, a ' village ' even now
retaining some semblance of its former self Beyond,
stretched, to allure the }-oung pedestrian on, yet fairer
amenities : southward, hilly Sydenham ; eastward, in the
purple distance, Blackheath. A favourite day's ramble of
later date was to Blackheath, or south-west, over Duhvich
and Nonvood hills, through the antique rustic town of
Croydon, type once of the compact, clean, cheerful Surrey
towns of old days, to the fertile verdant meads of Walton-
upon-Thames ; much of the way by lane and footpath.
The beauty of those scenes in his youth was a lifelong
reminiscence with Blake, and stored his mind with lifelong
pastoral images.
On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after
years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps,
he has his ' first vision.' Sauntering along, the boy looks up
and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings be-
spangling every bough like stars. Returned home he relates
the incident, and only through his mother's intercession escapes
a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie. Another
time, one summer morn, he sees the haymakers at work, and
amid them angelic figures walking. If these traits of childish
years 'be remembered, they will help to elucidate the visits
from ihe spiritual world of later years, in which the grown
man believed as unaffectedly as ever had the boy of ten.
One day, a traveller was telling bright wonders of some
foreign city. ' Do you call that splendid .' ' broke in young
Blake ; ' I should call a city splendid in which the houses were
of gold, the pavement of silver, the gates ornamented with
precious stones.' At which outburst, hearers were already
disposed to shake the head and pronounce the speaker crazed :
a speech natural enough in a child, but not unlikely to have
been uttered in maturer years by Blake.
8 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1767—70.
To say that Blake was born an artist, is to say of course
that as soon as the child's hand could hold a pencil it began
to scrawl rough likeness of man or beast, and make timid
copies of all the prints he came near. He early began to
seek opportunities of educating hand and eye. In default of
National Gallery or Museum, for the newly founded British
Museum contained as yet little or no sculpture, occasional
access might freely be had to the Royal Palaces. Pictures
were to be seen also in noblemen's and gentlemen's houses,
in the sale-rooms of the elder Langford in Covent Garden,
and of the elder Christie : sales exclusively filled as yet with
the pictures of the ' old and dark ' masters, sometimes genuine,
oftener spurious, demand for the same exceeding supply.
Of all these chances of gratuitous instruction the boy is said
to have sedulously profited : a clear proof other schooling
was irregular.
The fact that such attendances were permitted, implies that
neither parent was disposed, as so often happens, to thwart
the incipient artist's inclination ; bad, even for a small trades-
man's son, as at that time were an artist's outlooks, unless he
were a portrait-painter. In 1767 (three years after Hogarth's
death), Blake being then ten years old, was ' put to Mr. Pars
drawing-school in the Strand.' This was the preparatory
school for juvenile artists then in vogue: preparatory to the
Academy of Painting and Sculpture in St. Martin's Lane, of
the ' Incorporated Society of Artists,' the Society Hogarth
had helped to found. The Royal Academy of intriguing
Chambers' and Moser's founding, for which George the
Third legislated, came a year later. 'Mr. Pars' drawing-
school in the Strand ' was located in ' the great room,'
subsequently a show-room of the Messrs. Ackermann's —
name once familiar to all buyers of prints — in their original
house, on the left-hand side of the Strand, as you go city-
wards, just at the eastern corner of Castle Court : a house
and court demolished when Agar Street and King William
Street were made. The school was founded and brought
^T. 10-13.] CHILDHOOD. 9
into celebrity by William Shipley, painter, brother to a bishop,
and virtual founder also, in 1754, of the still-extant Society
of Arts, — in that same house, where the Society lodged until
migrating to its stately home over the way, in the Adelphi.
Who was Pars ? Pars, the Leigh or Gary of his day, was
originally a chaser and son of a chaser, the art to which
Hogarth was apprenticed, one then going out of demand,
unhappily, — for the fact implied the loss of a decorative art.
Which decadence it was led this Pars to go into the juvenile
Art-Academy line, vice Shipley retired. He had a younger
brother, William, a portrait-painter, and one of the earliest
Associates or inchoate R. A.'s, who was extensively patronized
by the Dilettanti Society, and by the dilettante Lord Palmerston
of that time. The former sent him to Greece, there for three
years to study ruined temple and mutilated statue, and to
return with portfolios, a mine of wealth to cribbing ' classic '
architects, — contemporary Chambers' and future Soanes.
At Pars' school as much drawing was taught as is to be
learned by copying plaster-casts after the Antique, but no
drawing from the living figure. Blake's father bought a few
casts, from which the boy could continue his drawing-lessons
at home : the Gladiator, the Hercides, the Venus de Medici,
various heads, and the usual models of hand, arm, and foot.
After a time, small sums of money were indulgently supplied
wherewith to make a collection of Prints for study. To
secure these, the youth became a frequenter of the print-
dealer's shops and the sales of the auctioneers, who then took
threepenny biddings, and would often knock down a print for
as many shillings as pounds are now given, thanks to ever-
multiplying Lancashire fortunes.
In a scarce, probably almost unread book, affecting — despite
the unattractive literary peculiarities of its pedagogue authors
— from its subject and very minuteness of detail, occurs an
account, from which I have begun to borrow, of Blake's early
education in art, derived from the artist's own lips. It is a
more reliable story than Allan Cunningham's pleasant
lO LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1767—70.
mannered generalities, easy to read, hard to verify. The
singular biography to which I allude, is Dr. Malkin's Father s
Memoirs of his Child {i2>o6), illustrated by a frontispiece of
Blake's design. The Child in question was one of those
hapless ' prodigies of learning ' who, — to quote a good-
natured friend and philosopher's consoling words to the poor
Doctor, — 'commence their career at three, become expert
' linguists at four, profound philosophers at five, read the
* Fathers at six, and die of old age at seven. '
' Langford,' writes Malkin, called Blake ' his little con-
noisseur, and often knocked down a cheap lot with friendly
precipitation.' Amiable Langford ! The great Italians, —
Raffaelle, Michael Angelo, Giulio Romano, — the great Ger-
mans, — Albert Diirer, Martin Hemskerk, — with others similar,
were the exclusive objects of his choice ; a sufficiently re-
markable one in days when Guido and the Caracci were the
gods of the servile crowd. Such a choice was ' contemned by
his youthful companions, who were accustomed to laugh at
what they called his mechanical taste ! ' * I am happy,' wrote
Blake himself in later life {MS. notes to Reynolds), ' I cannot
' say that Raffaelle ever was from my earliest childhood
' hidden from me. I saw and I knew immediately the
' difference between Raffaelle and Rubens.'
Between the ages of eleven and twelve, if not before, Blake
had begun to write original irregular verse ; a rarer precocity
than that of sketching, and rarer still in alliance with the
latter tendency. Poems composed in his twelfth year, came
to be included in a selection privately printed in his twenty-
sixth. Could we but know which they were ! One, by
Malkin's help, we can identify as written before he was
fourteen : the following ethereal piece of sportive Fancy,
' Song ' he calls it : —
How sweet I roam'd from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the prince of Love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide !
MT. 10-13] CHILDHOOD. II
He shew'd me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow ;
He led me through his gardens fair,
Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May-dews my wings were wet,
And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage ;
He caught me in his silken net.
And shut me in his golden cage.
He loves to sit and hear me sing,
Then, laughing, sports and plays with me ;
Then stretches out my golden Aving,
And mocks my loss of liberty.
This may surely be reckoned equal precocity to that so
much lauded of Pope and Cowley. It is not promise, but ful-
filment. The grown man in vain might hope to better such
sweet playfulness, — playfulness as of a ' child-angel's ' pen-
ning — any more than noon can reproduce the tender streaks
of dawn. But criticism is idle. How analyse a violet's
perfume, or dissect the bloom on a butterfly's wing ?
CHAPTER III.
ENGRAVER'S APPRENTICE, 1771—78. [^t. 14—21.]
The preliminary charges of launching Blake in the career of
a Painter, were too onerous for the paternal pocket ; involving
for one thing, a heavy premium to some leading artist for
instruction under his own roof, then the only attainable,
always the only adequate training. The investment, more-
over, would not after all be certain of assuring daily bread for
the future. English engravers were then taking that high
place they are now doing little to maintain. Apprenticeship
to one would secure, with some degree of artistic education,
the cunning right hand which can always keep want at arm's
length : a thing artist and litterateur have often had cause to
envy in the skilled artizan. The consideration was not with-
out weight in the eyes of an honest shopkeeper, to whose
understanding the prosaic craft would more practically
address itself than the vague abstractions of Art, or those
shadowy promises of Fame, on which alone a mere artist had
too often to feed. Thus it was decided for the future de-
signer, that he should enter the, to him, enchanted domain of
Art by a back door, as it were He is not to be dandled into a
Painter, but painfully to win his way to an outside place.
Daily through life, he will have to marry his shining dreams to
the humblest, most irksome realities of a virtually artizan life.
Already it had been decreed that an inspired Poet should be
endowed with barely grammar enough to compose v^dth
schoolboy accuracy.
.ET. 14.] engraver's apprentice. 13
At the age of fourteen, the drawing-school ot Mr. Pars in
the Strand, was exchanged for the shop of engraver Basire, in
Great Oueen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields. There had been
an intention of apprenticing Blake to Ryland, a more famous
man than Basire ; an artist of genuine talent and even genius,
who had been well educated in his craft ; had been a pupil
of Ravenet, and after that (among others) of Boucher, whose
stipple manner he was the first to introduce into England.
With the view of securing the teaching and example of so
skilled a hand, Blake was taken by his father to Ryland ;
but the negotiation failed. The boy himself raised an un-
expected scruple. The sequel shows it to have been a singular
instance — if not of absolute prophetic gift or second sight
— at all events of natural intuition into character and
power of forecasting the future from it, such as is often
the endowment of temperaments like his. In after life
this involuntary faculty of reading hidden writing continued
to be a characteristic. ' Father,' said the strange boy, after
the two had left Ryland's studio, ' I do not like the man's
face : it looks as if lie ivill live to be hanged T Appearances
were at that time utterly against the probability of such an
event. Ryland was then at the zenith of his reputation.
He was engraver to the king, whose portrait (after Ramsay)
he had engraved, receiving for his work an annual pension
of 200/. An accomplished and agreeable man, he was the
friend of poet Churchill and others of distinguished rank
in letters and society. His manners and personal appear-
ance were peculiarly prepossessing, winning the spontaneous
confidence of those who knew or even casually saw him.
But twelve years after this interview, the unfortunate artist
will have got into embarrassments, will commit a forgery
on the East India Company : — and the prophecy will be
fulfilled.
The Basire with whom ultimately Blake was placed, was
James Basire, the second chronologically and in merit first
of four Basires ; all engravers, and the three last in date
14 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1771-72.
(all bearing one Christian name) engravers to the Society
of Antiquaries. This Basire, born in London, 1730, now
therefore forty-one, and son of Isaac Basire, had studied
design at Ronne. He was the engraver of Stuart and
Revett's AtJiens (1762), of Reynolds's Earl Camden (1766),
of West's Pylades and Orestes (1770). He had also executed
two or three plates after some of the minor and later designs
of Hogarth : — the frontispiece to Garrick's Farmer s Return
(1761), the noted political caricature of TJie Times, and the
portrait sketch of Fielding (1762), which Hogarth himself
much commended, declaring ' he did not know his own
drawing from a proof of the plate.' The subjects of his
graver were principally antiquities and portraits of men of
note, — especially portraits of antiquaries : hereditary subjects
since with the Basire family. He was official engraver to the
Royal as well as the Antiquarian Society. Hereafter he will
become still more favourably known in his generation as the
engraver of the illustrations to the slow-revolving Archceologia
and Vetnsta MoniLmenta of the Society of Antiquaries, —
then in a comparatively brisk condition, — and to the works 01
Gough and other antiquarian big-wigs of the old, full-bottomed
sort. He was an engraver well grounded in drawing, of dry,
hard, monotonous, but painstaking, conscientious style ; the
lingering representative of a school already getting old-
fashioned, but not without staunch admirers, for its ' firm
and correct outline,' among antiquaries ; whose confidence and
esteem, — Gough's in particular, — Basire throughout possessed.
In the days of Strange, Woollett, Vivares, Bartolozzi,
better models, if more expensive in their demands, might
have been found ; though also worse. Basire was a superior,
liberal-minded man, ingenuous and upright ; and a kind
master. The lineaments of his honest countenance (set
off by a bob-wig) may be studied in the portrait by his son,
engraved as frontispiece to the ninth volume of Nichols's
Literary Anecdotes. As a Designer, Blake was, in essentials,
influenced by no contemporary ; as engraver alone influenced
^T. 14.] engraver's apprentice. 15
by Basire, and that strongly — little as his naaster's style had in
common with his own genius. Even as engraver, he was thus
influenced, little to his future advantage in winning custom
from the public. That public, in Blake's youth fast out-
growing the flat and formal manner inherited by Basire,
in common with Vertue (engraver to the Society of Anti-
quaries before him) and the rest, from the Vanderguchts,
Vanderbanks and other naturalized Dutchmen and Germans
of the bob-wig and clipped-yew era, will now readily learn
to enjoy the softer, more agreeable one of M'Ardell, Barto-
lozzi, Sherwin.
His seven years apprenticeship commenced in I77i,year of
the Academy's first partial lodgement in Old Somerset Palace
— and thus (eventually) in the National Pocket. As he was
constitutionally painstaking and industrious, he soon learned
to draw carefully and copy faithfully whatever was set before
him, altogether to the Basire taste, and to win, as a good
apprentice should, the approval and favour of his master.
One day, by the way (as Blake ever remembered), Gold-
smith walked into Basire's. It must have been during the
very last years of the poet's life : he died in 1774. The boy
— as afterwards the artist was fond of telling — mightily
admired the great author's finely marked head as he gazed up
at it, and thought to himself how much/^^ should like to have
such a head when he grew to be a man. Another still more
memorable figure, a genius singularly german to Blake's own
order of mind, the 'singular boy of fourteen,' may during the
commencement of his apprenticeship, 'any day have met
' unwittingly in London streets, or walked beside, — a placid,
' venerable, thin man of eighty-four, of erect figure and
' abstracted air, wearing a full-bottomed wig, a pair of long
' ruffles, and a curious-hilted sword, and carrying a gold-
' headed cane, — no Vision, still flesh and blood, but himself
' the greatest of modern Vision Seers, — Emanuel Sweden-
' borg by name ; who came from Amsterdam to London, in
'August 1771, and died at No. 26, Great Bath Street,
l6 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1772—74. •
' Coldbath Fields, on the 29th of March, 1772.' This
Mr. Allingham pleasantly suggests, in a note to his delight-
ful collection of lyrical poems, Nightingale Valley (i860),
in which (at last) occur a specimen or two of Blake's verse.
The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men
the engraver's apprentice was to grow up the likest to
Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional tempera-
ment and endowment was so, in faculty for theosophic
dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and
in matter of fact hold of spiritual things. To savant and
to artist alike, while yet on earth, the Heavens were opened.
By Swedenborg's theologic writings, the first English editions
of some of which appeared during Blake's manhood, he was
considerably influenced ; but in no slavish spirit. These
writings, in common with those of Jacob Boehmen and of
the other select mystics of the world, had natural affinities
to Blake's mind and were eagerly assimilated. But he
hardly became a proselyte or ' Swedenborgian ' proper ;
though his friend Flaxman did. In another twenty years
we shall find him freely and — as true believers may think —
heretically criticising the Swedish seer from the spiritualist,
not the rationalist point of view : as being a Divine Teacher,
whose truths however were ' not new,' and whose falsehoods
were ' all old.'
Among the leading engravings turned out by Basire, during
the early part of Blake's apprenticeship, may be instanced in
1772, one after B. Wilson {jiot Richard), Lady Stanhope as the
Fair Penitent, (her role in certain amateur theatricals by the
Quality); and in 1774, The Field of the Cloth of Gold and
Interview of the ttvo Kings, after a copy for the Society of
Antiquaries by ' little Edwards ' of Anecdote fame, from the
celebrated picture at Windsor. The latter print was cele-
brated for one thing, if no other, as the largest ever engraved
up to that time on one plate — copper, let us remember, —
being some 47 inches by 27 ; and paper had to be made on
purpose for it.
^T. 14—16.] engraver's apprentice. 17
* Two years passed over smoothly enough/ writes Malkin,
* till two other apprentices were added to the establishment,
who completely destroyed its harmony.' Basire said of
Blake, ' he was too simple and they too cunning.* He,
lending, I suppose, a too credulous ear to their tales, 'declined
to take part with his master against his fellow-apprentices ; '
and was therefore sent out of harm's way into Westminster
Abbey and the various old churches in and near London, to
make drawings from the monuments and buildings Basire
was employed by Gough the antiquary to engrave : ' a cir-
cumstance he always mentioned with gratitude to Basire.'
The solitary study of authentic English history in stone
was far more to the studious lad's mind than the disorderly
wrangling of mutinous comrades. It is significant of his
character, even at this early date, for zeal, industry, and
moral correctness, that he could be trusted month after
month, year after year, unwatched, to do his duty by his
master in so independent an employment.
The task was singularly adapted to foster the romantic
turn of his imagination, and to strengthen his natural
affinities for the spiritual in art. It kindled a fervent love of
Gothic, — itself an originality then, — which lasted his life,
and exerted enduring influences on his habits of feeling and
study ; forbidding once for all, if such a thing had ever
been possible to Blake, the pursuit of fashionable models,
modern excellences, technic and superficial, or of any
but the antiquated essentials and symbolic language ot
imaginative art.
From this time forward, from 1773 that is, the then
* neglected works of art called Gothic monuments,' were
for years his daily companions. The warmer months were
devoted to zealous sketching, from every point of view, of
the Tombs in the Abbey; the enthusiastic artist 'frequently
standing on the monument and viewing the figures from
the top.' Careful drawings were made of the regal forms
Vvhich for four or five centuries had lain in mute majesty, —
VOL. I. C
l8 LIFE OF WILLIAM BLAKE. [1773—78.
once amid the daily presence of reverent priest and
muttered mass, since in awful solitude, — around the lovely
Chapel of the Confessor : the austere sweetness of Queen
Eleanor, the dignity of Philippa, the noble grandeur of
Edward the Third, the gracious stateliness of Richard the
Second and his Queen. Then came drawings of the glorious
effigy of Aymer de Valence, and of the beautiful though
mutilated figures which surround his altar-tomb; drawings,
in fact, of all the mediaeval tombs. He pored over all
with a reverent good faith, which in the age of Stuart and
Revett, taught the simple student things our Pugins and
Scotts had to learn near a century later. 'The heads he
considered as portraits/ — not unnaturally, their sculptors
showing no overt sign of idiocy ; — ' and all the ornaments
appeared as miracles of art to his gothicized imagination,'
as they have appeared to other imaginations since. He
discovered for himself then or later, the important part
once subserved by Colour in the sculptured building, the
living help it had rendered to the once radiant Temple of
God, — now a bleached dishonoured skeleton.
Shut up alone with these solemn memorials of far off
centuries, — for, during service and in the intervals of visits
from strangers, the vergers turned the key on him, — the
Spirit of the past became his familiar companion. Some-
times his dreaming eye saw more palpable shapes from the
phantom past : once a vision of ' Christ and the Apostles,'
as he used to tell ; and I doubt not others. For, as we
have seen, the visionary tendency, or faculty, as Blake more
truly called it, had early shown itself.