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"The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled"
Having finally, earlier this year, gotten round to reading Peter Ackroyd's London biography, and with a London by Foot walk regarding William Blake happening very very soon, I thought it was time to finally take Ackroyd's book on Blake off my bookshelf and actually read the thing. At the very least it'd help me with research for the walk but, hopefully, on top of that, it'd be enjoyable in and of itself.
It's widely held that it's a good idea that you capture people's attention, and imagination, with your opening lines and Ackroyd managed it with his first sentence. One that seems to encapsulate a Blakean spirit. Which is not always easy to do. Blake's career was highly prodigious, his opinions went so far against the grain he suffered for them, and his mysticism and invented mythologies so Byzantine it's often hard to interpret exactly where he was coming from. Perhaps that's part of the appeal
"In the visionary imagination of William Blake there is no birth and no death, no beginning and no end, only the perpetual pilgrimage within time towards eternity", nevertheless, is a strong opener. Even for a biography of a man who doesn't believe in beginnings and when he speaks of an actual beginning, that of his own life, he seems more concerned with the angels he claimed were present than the actual family members or even his own mother.
William Blake - Jacob's Dream
Blake was born above a hosier's shop in Soho on the 28th of November 1757 to James Blake (whose hosier's shop it was) and his wife Catherine (Hermitage). Both James and Catherine were Dissenters and thought so little of state ceremony that they'd married in St George's, Hanover Square. St George's specialised in inexpensive and expeditious weddings. The Blake nuptials were carried out so quickly and efficiently they didn't even need to close their shop.
1757 had already been marked by Emmanuel Swedenborg, who was to become a great influence upon William Blake's life, as a year of 'peculiar significance'. The 'prophet and visionary' (Ackroyd's words, not mine) claimed "the former heaven and the former earth" would pass away and "all things become New" (capitalisation with these prophets and visionaries is often problematic). Years later, Blake replied to Swedenborg thus:-
"Now Art has lost its mental Charms
France shall subdue the World in Arms
So spoke an Angel at my birth
Then said Descend upon Earth
Renew the Arts on Britains shore
And France shall fall down & adore..."
A bit Brexity perhaps, and showing a wilful disregard for the possessive apostrophe, but, also, a fine indication of how Blake could turn a phrase and have you sympathising with ideas you may not agree with. Ackroyd goes on to tell of Blake's baptism in Christopher Wren's St James's Piccadilly (font designed by Grinling Gibbons), his first sighting of God ("above Albions dark rocks setting behind the Gardens of Kensington"), his in depth knowledge of stellar constellations, his profound discomfort with his own family (bar one younger brother), his close attachment to the Bible, and that his hatred for restraints and rules was so severe his father kept him from school before going on to speculate and theorise about how all of this came together in William Blake's poetry, art, and mythology.
"Thanks God I never went to school,
To be Flogd into following the Style of a Fool"
Although I could not disagree with his religious beliefs more, I do identify with his outsider identity. I'm also drawn to the way in which he tried to mix together various different influences to create his own art and I love the fact that, as a youth, walking was one of the things that most inspired him. He even walked to Peckham Rye, very near where I live now.
It was there Blake had his "first vision". A tree bespangled with angels. A story that when related nearly necessitated a sound thrashing from his father who did not believe him. Only a maternal intervention prevented young Blake's hide being tanned. A famous Blake quote is "a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees".
William Blake - The Song of Los
He went on to study at Henry Pars Drawing School on The Strand, he trawled around the auction rooms of central London earning himself a reputation as a "little connoisseur", became something of an expert on artists like Michelangelo, Durer, Raphael, and Rubens, and quoted poets like Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser. Precociousness hardly covers it.
He took to reading the verses of Thomas Chatterton he found in Town and Country Magazine and affected their medieval vocabulary in his own speech - which can't have won him many friends. His early career as an engraver found him apprenticed to James Basire of the medieval guilds in which he undertook not to fornicate, marry, play dice, or haunt taverns. Or even play houses!
His first original work was an image of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who assumed responsibility for the burial of Jesus following his crucifixion. Stories had circulated since the Middle Ages that Joseph had visited Glastonbury and was the father of British Christianity. It was an 'in' for Blake and he began to 'meditate further upon 'the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals''.
Trefoil arches, flagstones, sculpted foliage, ogees, and canopies seemed to have given Blake an almost physical sense of excitement. The writing of Milton, Shakespeare, and James McPherson further fired his already fervent imagination. He seems to have held up Raphael as the greatest artist the world had ever seen.
William Blake - Newton
He enrolled at The Royal Academy Schools (then in Somerset House) where, despite his later attacks on Joshua Reynolds (the founder and first president of the RA), he was an "assiduous and dedicated scholar". Here the Gothic statuary of Westminster Abbey was replaced with classical vases, medallions, and engravings from Michelangelo by Vasari and here he met with James Gillray, another artist who created his "own private mythology from the raw material of the world" and another who was condemned as insane. In Gillray's case this later proved true and he ended up locked in an upstairs apartment under the delusion that he was Rubens before throwing himself out of a window to his death in his late fifties.
The times, too, must have felt insane. England was waging an unpopular war with its American colony and London was caught up in rioting. On Friday 2nd June 1780 the Bavarian chapel and the house of the Bavarian ambassador near Golden Square were torched. Four days later Blake was swept up, most likely quite obligingly, by a mob of rioters on Long Acre on their way to the Old Bailey and Newgate Prison. Gates were attacked with pickaxes and sledgehammers and soon the whole gaol was ablaze. Fettered prisoners were pulled from the inferno and later rioters drank the streams of burning spirits when the abode of a local vintner was set afire.
William Blake - Nebuchadnezzar
Two years later, recovering from romantic heartbreak, Blake fell in love with Catherine Boucher and they were wed in Battersea where they also set up home before moving to Green Street on the corner of Leicester Fields which was fast turning into Leicester Square. It doesn't seem as if Blake's overtly libertarian assertion that wives should be shared 'in common' caused any friction above and beyond the normal domestic tiffs of a young marriage. It seems Blake spoke a lot about homosexuality, sexual magic, and troilism but there seems no evidence he ever partook of any of these things.
It seems Catherine, an uneducated woman, was an obedient wife who made his clothes, cooked for him, sang with him, prayed with him, and, accordingly so, he referred to her, somewhat unromantically, as his 'helpmate'. They moved to Hercules Buildings in Lambeth where they'd sit naked (freed from "troublesome disguises") in the front garden reciting verses of Milton's Paradise Lost and, even though the area became ever more slum like during Blake's tenure there, it gave him great inspiration for his poetry.
"There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find
Now can his Watch Fiends find it:tis translucent & has many Angles"
Bethlem (or Bedlam) moved from Moorfields to its new home in Lambeth (in the site now given over to the Imperial War Museum) and the Flora Gardens in the fields opposite Hercules Buildings hosted concerts and firework displays. In 1796 the owner of Flora Gardens was sent to Kings Reach Prison for keeping a 'disorderly house' and the gardens closed but nearby pubs like The Pineapple, The Canterbury, and The Adam-and-Eve maintained a thriving trade. The Dog and Duck doubled up as a pub and a school for the indigent blind!
Blake worked tenaciously and for long hours but no great reward came his way. Catherine always believed in her husband though. She believed in his art, she believed in his poetry, and she believed in his cosmogony. Blake believed in an arcane and esoteric wisdom that could be divined and understood by studying Plato, Paracelsus, and Swedenborg (and, of course, the Bible) and this would go on to inform all his work.
William Blake - The Agony in the Garden
It's not always easy to understand. It's a world of prophets, bards, and mythical figures from a sublime past who have the power of revelation. Job and Ezekiel feature heavily and his 'pantheon' includes characters like Luvah (the principle of sexual energy), Orc, Urthona, and Urizen. A set
of mythical characters that made up Blake's "mature vision" or his "complex system of action and impulse".
Blake believed the "dimensions of material existence" to be a "prison from which we must escape" and Orc (the principle of energy and rebellion), whose constant rivarly with Urizen (a tyrant, priest and lawgiver), was the spirit we must follow to free ourselves from this mental incarceration. Along the way other characters like Oithona, Tonthormod, Ijim, Ololom, and Brumo appear. It all gets very confusing to a layman such as I.
Of all Blake's 'illuminated' books, it was his next one, Songs of Innocence, that was most frequently reproduced and, possibly, most recalled and quoted. In some ways it was intended as a children's book but there were poems that referred to the slave trade and other more adult themes too.
"Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walked before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames water flow"
Blake never once left England (he rarely left London) and to our modern eyes there is something of the Little Englander about him in the way that, in Ackroyd's words, "England becomes the holy land, the seat of the ancient patriarchs and the home of the chosen race". Despite this a major friend and influence became the Zurich born painter of The Nightmate, Henry Fuseli.
Blake is rarely without contrasts or contradictions in form. Of Fuseli, Blake wrote "The only Man that eer I knew/Who did not make me almost spew" and, like the younger Blake, he was steeped in religion, he admired Milton and Shakespeare, he admired lachrymose 'graveyard poets' of the mid eighteenth century, and his output combined writing and poetry as well as painting. Fuseli could also swear in nine languages and, by most accounts, regularly did so.
William Blake - The Body of Christ Borne to the Tomb
Tom Paine, author of Rights of Man which inspired both the French and American Revolutions, was another who Blake admired. Afforded less affection where Prime Ministers (Blake never bothered to vote and saw both Houses, Commons and Lords, to be "something Else beside Human Life") and Kings. Specifically George III who ruled for most of Blake's life.
Blake never quite fitted in with other anti-monarchist rebels though. Most of them (Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine for example) were denounced as atheists while Blake remained "a heretic among the unorthodox" and paraded his spirituality around constantly. Blake believed he was on a "unique prophetic mission" which none of his associates seemed to notic. For the most part, Ackroyd writes, they saw him as "a journeyman engraver of eccentric views".
"A ha To Doctor Johnson
Said Scipio Africanus
Lift up my Roman Petticoat
And kiss my Roman Anus"
Blake left London for Felpham, Sussex at the turn of the century in a "deep pit of melancholy". The countryside offered him work while London life was starving him of food. As were many in London at a time when the city was rioting over the price of bread. Initially Blake loved Felpham. For a man who had never before even seen the sea to live within two minutes walk of it was hugely inspiring, he described his cottage as "the Spontaneous Effusion of Humanity, congenial to the wants of Man", and he considered nearby Chichester to be a "very handsome city" but things, it seems, soon turned sour.
Both Blakes (William and Catherine) fell ill with fevers. William was suffering with depression and he was becoming dissatisfied by being put to work on things he considered beneath him, believing the trivial tasks given to him to be getting in the way of his work a true artist. Ackroyd describes Blake's position during his time in Felpham as a 'factotum'. By 1803 he had decided he must return to London.
Following the Treaty of Amiens, peace had been declared with France and this led Blake to believe that London would now be full of "fine pictures" and "various improvements in Works of Art" and, with this, a chance for him to finally make some much needed money. After all, Blake had used his years in Felpham to reconsider his ability as an artist and had come to the conclusion that he was, in fact, the greatest that had existed since the passing of Raphael!
Blake believed the prospect of European peace meant that we were about to enter an age in which "The Reign of Literature & the Arts Commences" but, before he'd even fully packed up his belongings in Felpham, war with Napoleon's France had recommenced and Blake, in Ackroyd's words, "suffered the gravest crisis of his life".
William Blake - The Raising of Lazarus
An altercation with a soldier, Private John Scofield, led to Blake facing trial for sedition in Chichester at a time when it appeared highly likely that Napoleon's army would invade England. Scofield testified that Blakes William and Catherine had both avowed they would rather fight for Napoleon than for George III.
William Blake maintained he had simply ejected an angry, and probably drunk, trespasser from his garden and returned him to the nearby Fox Inn where it has been suggested Scofield concocted the story about sedition in an attempt at revenge and to make himself some money. Blake would not have been hanged but he was in danger of imprisonment.
The crisis plunged Blake into a period of anxiety and self-doubt. He was in agonies over his perceived complete inability to behave correctly like other men and, of course, he put his anguish into words:-
"O why was I born with a different face?
Why was I not born like the rest of my race?
When I look each one starts! when I speak, I offend;
Then I'm silent & passive & lose every Friend"
An hour long trial in which the soldier and his accomplice's testimony were seen to be infirm saw Blake acquitted but the dark nights of the soul he had suffered would, surely, affect him in ways immeasurable for the rest of his life. If his former acquaintance with the likes of Mary Wollstonecroft had come to light in court the verdict may have been very different. Ackroyd memorably describes Scofield as "the porter who opened the gate into Blake's private hell".
Back in London, the Blakes moved to South Moulton Street. London had not been eagerly awaiting William Blake's return. He was either forgotten or out of favour although Henry Fuseli provided him with some low level work designing Shakespearean scenes. This period of virtual unemployment, obscurity, and poverty was to last for eleven years.
Blake consoled himself with the thought that in Heaven his true genius was recognised but here, in London, his confidence, following the fear of possible incarceration, was at an all time low and he was, seemingly, losing track of himself and what his priorities in life were.
William Blake - Beatrice Addressing Dante from the Cat
This dark cloud, one he now backdated to 1784, finally lifted in the autumn of 1804 when he visited an exhibition in London's Truchsessian Gallery and saw works by Schongauer, Matsys, and Gossaert. Blake declared he was "again enlightened with the light" he had enjoyed in his youth. From then on he spoke of Rembrandt and Rubens only in terms of loathing and started to use the Swedenborgian term 'transulence' when speaking of his own work.
This lightening of the mood and the new 'exultant spirit in his art did not, of course, mean Blake could completely overlook financial problems. To ease his concerns he set up as a bookseller and one who would illustrate many of the books he'd sell. It went well for a while before his patron, Robert Hartley Cromek, became indifferent to Blake's work and dropped him.
Hindsight suggests Blake's work was, rather than indifferent, simply too different for Cromek. The fashion of the time was for soft, sweet, graceful, and tender illustrations. Blake's were definitively, and defiantly, not those things. The Examiner described his designs as 'absurd', a piece in the Anti-Jacobin called them 'the offspring of a morbid fancy' and suggested Blake should restrain his wanderings with a strait waistcoat! Ouch!
William Blake - The Sea of Time and Space
This didn't deter him though as his idea became more of a whole, a complete universe, than ever before. The idea of Albion as the Eternal Man was introduced, the concept of the Mundane Shell (a hardened crust that protects the material universe and its fallen dimensions) too, as well as a whole host of sexually explicit themes:- masturbation, dildos, anal penetration, fellatio, orgies, and coprophilia.
But mostly erect cocks. Blake was drawn to the historical idea of phallus worship and he felt repressed sexual energy was responsible for all the ills in the world, most notably war - which remained a very real threat throughout his life time. Blake, quite literally, wanted to make love not war.
He wanted to work too. 'Endless labour' was to become his lot. Both, it seems, from financial necessity and because he was determined to finish what starts to seem like (because it, eventually, was) a lifetime's work. Not that anyone else much was interested. An exhibition of his work (hosted in his brother's hosiery shop) barely attracted a soul. Even those who had supported him in the past had now fallen foul of him and rumours of Blake's madness and his violent temper abounded.
Blake angrily dismissed them all as calumnies. He verbally ripped into 'picture-dealers' who had a genteel, middle-class interest in art rather than passion for it or a true visionary understanding of it. Like he did. At times, he sounds insufferable.
William Blake - The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve
Others, you feel for him. At a time when we was at his most unpopular it seems his spiritual vision was more intense than ever. While he was carving out a meagre existence as a book engraver, his true passion was being indulged by starting work on two of his 'prophecies'. Milton and Jerusalem would, after his death, come to be two creations that we would most associate William Blake with.
He grew ever more apolitical, seeing politicians as something "beside life" and not of it. This was at a time of great political turmoil, riots, and scarcity of food due to the Napoleonic blockade. It was as if he was floating over the top of the everyday on a different plane altogether and he, gradually, lost track of all of his friends and barely left the house unless absolutely necesssary.
Sometimes Blake is plain bizarre. Ackroyd writes out how he "despised landscapes" and how he imagined a ghost of a flea so vividly that he believed it to be present. But he lived, as we all do, in a strange time. He grew up with heads of the condemned rotting on Temple Bar at a time when soldiers were still lashed on the streets, to the background of the American Revolution, the French Revolution and, later, war between England and France. A time of random and brutal violence dished out without either mercy or punishment on the streets of London. War and political repression darkened Blake's mood and he spoke often of expecting to either die or be killed soon, even in his mid-thirties.
William Blake - The Ghost of a Flea
It's to Ackroyd's great credit that he captures these feelings in print. Ackroyd is, of course, an astoundingly erudite and learned man and throughout the book there are references to Shakespeare, Keats, Yeats, Coleridge, Shelley, Hawksmoor, and Goethe. He's also partial to archaic spelling at times (witness 'chusing' instead of choosing) and he often reverts to his two favourite adjectives, heterogeneous and noisome!
Ackroyd paints a vivid picture of the London that Blake lived in. Apprentice chimney sweeps bathe in Islington's New River on Sunday mornings and the capital is populated by dancing dogs, will-o'-the-wisps, wherries, and underage prostitutes who were given the awful and demeaning title of 'chicken whores'.
It's instructive to learn that parts of London from Blake's time, like The Blue Posts Inn on Hanway Street for example, continued to exist until the last two decades. It's a pub I visited often. I drank in there, it had a good jukebox, and they served terrible toasties. It's now gone and, as with Blake, I am seeing history both made and destroyed before my very eyes.
William Blake - When the Morning Stars Sang together
Where I disagreed with him I also felt I could learn. If Blake was so certain of various beliefs that seem daft now it's certainly possible that I could be making the same mistakes too. Anyone of us could. We don't have all the information at our hands. Not even on Wikipedia.
Did I like the book? Yes - mostly. Some of the lengthy passages about the mechanics of engraving were a little dull and I did find myself getting distracted (checking Facebook instead of reading) at times. Other passages went on a little too long and told me very little but were, perhaps, necessary to give a sense of the longueurs that must have been been an integral part of Blake's penurious and, Catherine (his 'helpmate') aside, oft-solitary existence. It was unteresting when Ackroyd compared Blake's poetry to Handel's contemporary arias and the songs of Robert Burns that were so popular in London at the time and I learnt about Paracelsus and Jacob Boehme, people I had never even heard of before.
But, most of all, I learnt about William Blake. How he lived. How he worked. The times he lived in and the places that became part of his life. I also learnt that to create something that will stand the test of the time one needs to both work tirelessly and with sure direction and not be deterred by naysayers or indifference. One must simply create whether or not there is any demand for it and then trust that time will one day do its magic and the world, or at least one's own small part of it, one's own tribe if you like, will come round to the work and see that it was created with both love and passion and that it was underpinned by the purest of intentions. I'm no Blake, not even close, but I'm trying (with my walks and blogs) to create something that will mean something to somebody somewhere at some time. Ideally in my life but, if not, after I've gone will have to do.
William Blake - David Delivered out of Many Waters:'He Rode upon the Cherubim
When Blake died, on 12th August 1827, one of his best friends did not hear of his death until Christmas. He we buried unceremoniously in Bunhill Fields and, in fact, the site of his exact burial place has only been identified in recent years. After his death, Blake eventually went on receive the respect and reverence he was so cruelly denied throughout his entire life.
I don't always love Blake's art, I don't always admire his poetry. I do, however - as I have already written, find them both to be incredibly singular and highly impressive in their committed singularity. Blake had a passion that burned throughout his entire life and the incurious nature, cruelty, and complete indifference of those around him were unable to extinguish that fiery passion. Like the tiger, it still burns bright to this day. I don't believe there's such a place as heaven but if there is it'd be nice to think that William Blake was able to look down at us from there and see how influential he is now. See the Tate exhibitions and books like this in his name and, maybe, see me leading a walk devoted to him this Saturday.
"I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land"
