Читать книгу Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist - Richard Holmes - Страница 9

Two thousand copies were printed, and reviews appeared rapidly. There were some initial doubts whether the biography would, as Anne put it, ‘shock devout minds’. One reviewer observed evenly: ‘a more timid biographer might have hesitated about making so open an exhibition of his hero’s singularities.’ But it was soon clear that the book would be a triumph. It was widely admired by the entire Pre-Raphaelite circle, Robert Browning wrote a fan letter, and Samuel Palmer spoke for the Ancients when he described it as ‘a treasure’. He added thoughtfully, ‘I do hope it may provoke a lively art-controversy in the periodicals, unless people have gone quite to sleep’. He had ‘read wildly everywhere’, and concluded tenderly, ‘already it is certain to be an imperishable monument of the dear Biographer.’

It was loyally hailed by Carlyle: ‘thankfulness is one clear feeling; not only to you from myself, but to you for the sake of another who is not here now.’ He considered it ‘right well done – minute knowledge well-arranged, lively utterance, brevity, cheerful lucidity’. Later he told Anne, with a tact surely designed to please the editor, that the whole biography was remarkable for ‘the acuteness and thoroughness with which the slightest clues had been followed out in gathering the materials, and with all this toil and minute accuracy on the writer’s part, nothing but pleasure for the reader – no tediousness.’

The great strengths of the work, which Anne had so faithfully preserved, were quickly apparent. Gilchrist’s approach is lively, personal, enthusiastic and often humourous – quite unlike much over-earnest mid-Victorian biography. The quick, informal, darting style of his prose lends a sense of continual discovery and excitement to the narrative, and yet allows for virtuoso passages of description and summary.

It is extraordinarily well-researched, especially in the use made of the previous memoirs by Malkin, Tatham, Linnell, Palmer, Crabb Robinson, and others. Although he had lacked the Butts Letters, Gilchrist draws effectively on some original correspondance with Flaxman in the early years, and the expressive series of short notes to John Linnell at Hampstead in the last years. He also quotes brilliantly throughout from Blake’s own works, both prose and poetry, much of it quite unknown to contemporary readers, such as the early ‘Notes on Lavater’ and the ‘Proverbs of Hell’. He was, too, the first Victorian writer to pick out and reprint in full Blake’s great ‘Jerusalem’ hymn from the preface to Milton, ‘And did those feet in ancient times’, in Chapter 21.

There are two qualities in Gilchrist’s writing, which make him such an exceptionally vivid biographer. The first is his sense of physical place. Gilchrist had a gift for evoking particular London streets, characteristic clusters of buildings or courtyards, and beyond them certain rural landscapes and secluded villages, where Blake had lived and worked. He captured their appearance, mood and atmosphere, and gave hints of their visionary meanings, or auras, for Blake.

Gilchrist had spent endless days researching and identifying them, following meticulously in Blake’s footsteps. He could also add fascinating observations of how these sacred places had changed in the subsequent fifty or so years, giving a sense of historical continuity. In this way, the biography first gave Blake’s extraordinary imaginative life ‘a local habitation and a name’. The descriptions of the gothic interior of Westminster Abbey, or of Hercules Building (and its garden) in Lambeth, or of the cottage and seashore at Felpham, and the last, hidden lodgings at Fountain Court are especially evocative in this respect.

The second quality is his power to conjure up Blake’s pictures and designs for the reader. Only few of these were actually illustrated in black and white engravings, so a great deal depended on Gilchrist’s verbal descriptions. He found a remarkable way of bringing these to life in virtuoso passages of exquisite prose ‘dramatization’, the energy of his syntax matching the energy of Blake’s line, which became a major feature of his biography. Here the young art critic comes into his own. This, for example, is how he brilliantly evoked the life and movement of the thirteen designs for ‘A Memorable Fancy’, in Chapter 10.

The ever-fluctuating colour, the spectral pigmies rolling, flying, leaping among the letters; the ripe bloom of quiet corners, the living light and bursts of flame, the spires and tongues of fire vibrating with the full prism, make the page seem to move and quiver within its boundaries, and you lay the book down tenderly, as if you had been handling something sentient. A picture has been said to be midway between a thing and a thought; so in these books over which Blake had brooded, with the brooding of fire, the very paper seems to come to life as you gaze upon it – not with a mortal life, but with a life indestructible, whether for good or evil.

Gilchrist made the defense of Blake’s eccentricity, and the rejection of his supposed insanity, a commanding theme from the beginning of the biography.

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 angel wings bespangling 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…If these traits of childish years be remembered, they will help to elucidate the visits from the spiritual world of later years, in which the grown man believed as unaffectedly as ever had the boy of ten.

Gilchrist reverts continually to these visions: calmly asking what exactly they were, how Blake described them, and how they should be accounted for. Much apparently outlandish behaviour, such as the ‘scandalous’ Adam and Eve nude sunbathing incident at Lambeth, is given a reasonable and detailed explanation, in this case with a amusing reminder about the poet Shelley’s enthusiasm for the early naturist movement. It is interesting that clearly Anne had been able to prevent Macmillan from censoring this particular account.

Later, Blake’s poverty, social isolation and professional difficulties are shrewdly shown to have exacerbated the oddities of his temperament. Of the quarrel with the commercial publisher Cromek in 1815, a frankly ‘discordant episode’, Gilchrist writes, ‘In Blake’s own mind, where all should have been, and for the most part was, peace, the sordid conflict left a scar. It left him more tetchy than ever; more disposed to willful exaggeration of individualities already too prominent, more prone to unmeasured violence of expression. The extremes he gave way to in his designs and writings – mere ravings to such as had no key to them – did him no good with that portion of the public the illustrated Blair had introduced him to…Now, too, was established for him the damaging reputation “Mad”.’

All this is summarised in the decisive Chapter 35, boldly entitled: ‘Mad or Not Mad’. In many way this chapter is the psychological key to the entire biography. Here Gilchrist carefully defines the ‘special faculty’ of Blake’s imagination, and vindicates the profound spiritual sanity of the ‘gentle yet fiery-hearted mystic’. One after another, he calls to witness all Blake’s circle of friends, from Flaxman and Fuseli to Palmer and Linnell. In a robust passage Gilchrist rejects any modish Victorian interpretation of Blake’s visions. ‘No man, by the way, would have been more indifferent or averse than he (wide and tolerant as was his faith in supernatural revelations) towards the table-turning, wainscot-knocking, bosh-propounding “Spiritualism” of the present hour.’ Instead Gilchrist finally champions Blake in terms that Carlyle would have recognised: ‘Does not prophet or hero always seem “mad” to the respectable mob, and to polished men of the world…?’

Gilchrist’s remaining narrative problem lay in the dearth of material during Blake’s ‘dark years’ in London in the decade between 1808 and 1818, when he met his great patron and supporter, the young painter John Linnell, the first of the Ancients. Broadly his solution is to introduce the engaging stories of some of the more colourful characters who knew Blake during this time: the rapacious art dealer Cromek; the exuberant astrologer John Varley (for whom Blake painted the visionary portrait of the Flea); and the dandy art critic and poisoner (later championed by Oscar Wilde), Thomas Wainewright.

The last chapters are structured round the unpublished Reminiscences of Crabb Robinson from 1825, and the interviews with Palmer, Richmond and Tatham who knew Blake in the last years at Fountain Court. Here, from Chapter 34 onwards (‘Personal Details’), the biography is at its most intimate and moving. The final picture of Blake ‘chaunting Songs’ to Catherine, as he lay on his deathbed in the little upper room above the Thames, is unforgettable.