Henry G. Hewlett was an agnostic and a Gladstonian Liberal, concerned by the late Victorian religion of art and its appropriation of Blake as patron saint. His essay aims to debunk the idea that Blake enjoyed an out-of-the-ordinary genius or heaven-sent inspiration.
QQQ
To do anything like justice to Blake it is requisite to deal separately with his pretensions as poet, prophet, and designer. His earliest appearance before the world was as a poet. Commencing with the question of originality, can it be justly claimed for him that his ideas and language are substantially underived, or that he has so assimilated the influences which he imbibed
that their sources are undiscoverable? Remembering the language in which his first volume of Poetical Sketches, printed in 1783, but said to be written between 1768 and 1777, has been extolled as a literary phenomenon, not less unique than astonishing, we turn to the reprint in the aldine edition of his works, and invite the unprejudiced reader to accompany us. if he be tolerably familiar with earlier english poetry, especially of the elizabethan period, we shall be strangely mistaken if he does not pronounce the quality of the verse to be essentially imitative. That Blake was from boyhood a student of elizabethan literature we know as a fact, upon the authority of malkin,1 whose information was derived from Blake himself. Traces of imitation mr. Gilchrist does not deny, but would have us believe them superficial, and due to “involuntary emulation” of the great models which the youth set before him; while mr. Swinburne throws a little critical dust in our eyes by suggesting comparisons which distract attention from the real nature of the resemblances. To show this adequately, we ought to put the whole volume in evidence, but the main proofs lie near the surface. The unfinished drama of King Edward the Third reads like a boy’s crude effort to assume the manner and tone of Shakespeare. The types of character are drawn from his. The scene before Cressy is a modification of that before agincourt (Hen. V., act iV.), the imitation being carried to the point of mimicking Fluellen’s Welsh brogue. Some of the master’s most characteristic and hackneyed phrases are reproduced almost unaltered, sprinkled with others from milton and Ben Jonson. “Pass over as a summer cloud, unregarded,” “deathy dust,” “beaten brass,” “rich as midsummer,”
“native seats,” “feathered angels,” “ribs of death,” “silver Thames,” are notable instances. Turning to the songs, we find still larger contributions levied from Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher. “my silks and fine array,” in point of form and tone, is modelled upon “Come away, come away, Death,”
Fletcher’s Constancy (Maid’s Tragedy), and Dirge for the Faithful Lover (Knight of the Burning Pestle). The lines—
Bring me an axe and spade, Bring me a winding-sheet—
are simply copied from the Grave-digger’s song in Hamlet. in the song of
“memory,” “Tune your merry notes” is borrowed from As You Like It; “watery glass” from Midsummer Night’s Dream; and “fish for fancies” was probably suggested by a phrase of Gratiano’s in The Merchant of Venice (i.i.). Three other lines, “Places fit for woe,” and
Walking along the darken’d valley, With silent melancholy,
are adapted from a dirge in The Nice Valour of Beaumont and Fletcher—
Places which pale passion loves.
Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley;
Nothing’s so dainty-sweet as lovely melancholy.
The “mad Song,” so rapturously praised for its originality by mr. Gilchrist and mr. Swinburne, is really a mosaic of reminiscences. The opening lines—
The wild winds weep, and the night is a-cold—
were surely suggested by the scene in Lear (iii. iv.), where edgar, “disguised as a madman,” enters, in a stormy night, with the words:
Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind.
. . . . Poor Tom’s a-cold.
The next lines—
Come hither, Sleep!
and my griefs enfold—
remind of the invocation to Sleep in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Woman-hater.
The two next lines—
But lo! the morning peeps Over the eastern steeps
—are obviously a remembrance of milton’s ere the blabbing eastern scout,
The nice morn on the indian steep, From her cabin’d loophole peep.
“The vault of paved heaven” is Shakespeare’s, almost word for word. “like a fiend in a cloud” is from Hecate’s speech in Macbeth (iii.v.)—
my little spirit, see, Sits in a foggy cloud.
either Beaumont and Fletcher or Shakespeare suggested another line, “i turn my back to the east;”2 while its fellow, “From whence comforts have
increased,” is from Desdemona’s “comforts should increase” (Othello ii. i.). in some of the other poems, especially those addressed to the seasons, we have reminiscences of Spenser and of the eighteenth-century poets who followed him in their love of personification. The description of summer in the Faery Queene (“Canto of mutabilitie”) as “dight in a thin silken cassock,” no doubt prompted the line, “Throw thy silk draperies off.” That of autumn as “laden with fruits” occurs in the same canto. Such property-epithets as “jolly,” “lusty,”
“dewy,” “buskined,” and the like, are borrowed from the same master. The description of morning—
Roused like a huntsman to the chase, and with Thy buskined feet appear upon our hills—
is identical with Collins’s picture of “Cheerfulness” in The Passions, who also speaks of “Winter yelling” (Ode to evening)—a phrase reproduced in Blake’s invocation to that season. milton’s Comus supplied the phrase, “chambers of the east,” which occurs both in “morning” and “To the muses.” The opening verses of “i love the jocund dance” are a diluted paraphrase of a passage in “l’allegro.”
To point out the evidences of Ossianic influence in other parts of the volume would be superfluous, since none of Blake’s commentators have ignored them.
We are far from intending to disparage the real merits of these verses.
imitative to the verge of plagiarism as they are, they are often so skilfully composed, and relieved by such graceful touches of fancy and sweet snatches of melody, as to confer genuine pleasure in defiance of critical analysis. Here Blake’s artistic power makes itself felt, nor need we grudge him the praise that belongs to it because his panegyrists perversely claim for him honours to which he is entitled. it was most creditable to his taste that he rejected the inferior models of contemporary poetry in favour of the great masters, but from the pother that mr. Gilchrist and mr. Swinburne make about it, one would suppose that he was the only one of his generation who manifested such sympathy. in fact, his was an age of poetic revival, and he did but worship at shrines newly set up by others. it was an age of active Shakespearian criticism and study of elizabethan literature, the age of Warburton, Tyrwhitt, Birch, Farmer, Johnson, Garrick, Steevens, Warton, and malone. The middle of the century witnessed the publication of Dodsley’s Old Plays. New editions of Beaumont and Fletcher appeared in 1750 and 1778, of Ben Jonson in 1756.
Percy edited the poems of Surrey in 1763, and his Reliques, including many of the choicest sixteenth and seventeenth-century lyrics, appeared in 1765.
Gray and Collins were disciples of Spenser and milton; and avowed imitations of the former were written by Thomson and Shenstone. in 1770, Chatterton,
whose influence on Blake is recognized by mr. Gilchrist, put forth his elaborate mystifications; the product of an enthusiastic imagination kindled at antique fires. Was it very extraordinary that another youth of susceptible fancy and studious habit should display similar tendencies?
in Blake’s next volume, the Songs of Innocence, printed in 1789, it would be needless to seek for proofs of originality, as it was avowedly addressed to children, for whom any but the tritest themes and simplest language would have been unsuitable. it bears evidence in its purity of style that his husbandry in the fields of classical english had not been profitless. There is little or no imitation of his old models, save that the “laughing Song” is evidently prompted by Shakespeare’s in Troilus and Cressida, or Beaumont and Fletcher’s in The Nice Valour. On the other hand there is a flavour of the style of Dr. isaac Watts, whose Divine and Moral Songs for Children were popular enough to have attracted Blake’s notice, had he not been certain to meet with them in the Nonconformist circle in which he was bred. That this skilfully designed machinery for instilling Calvinistic ideas into infant minds suggested the plan of Blake’s work seems probable, and perhaps no better method could have been devised of counteracting their influence than by competing in the choice of subjects and language, while substituting the ideas of a milder Theism and a larger humanity. On comparing the “Cradle Hymn” of the one series with the “Cradle Song” of the other, it is tolerably clear that this motive was present to his mind. Of the strange tenets put forth in his later works there is but the faintest trace in these verses, their prevailing sentiment being pitched in the amiable Theo-philanthropic key then in vogue among his republican associates. Pope’s “Universal Prayer,” modified to the capacities of children, might be a pattern for such poems as “The Divine image” and “On another’s Sorrow,” and probably Blake had this too in his mind when writing them.
in the Songs of Experience such proofs as there are of his originality must, we think, be sought, but we are unable to allow that the “find” is a large one.
The design of the series is antithetical to that of the Songs of Innocence, most of the poems being addressed to youths upon subjects therein commended to the attention of children. The “lamb” is thus contrasted with the “Tiger;”
the “little Boy lost” and “Found,” with the “little Girl lost” and “Found;” the
“Divine image,” with the “Human abstract,” &c. To show by this comparison the “two contrary states of the human soul” was Blake’s avowed object; and admitting from his point of view that he was justified in thus attempting to disillusionize the minds of his young disciples, the plan was ingenious. Of the new ideas hereby conveyed, which are substantially identical with those of the prophetic books, we shall speak presently; but it may suffice to say here
that they are not of Blake’s minting. The language, however, is his own, and in three or four poems reaches a high pitch either of condensed force or musical sweetness. Other poems, of which the meaning is enigmatical or the language weak, are redeemed by a melodious quatrain or graceful phrase. Taken together, however, these make up scarcely a ninth part of the whole, and, except for its unique flavour of heresy, there would be nothing to distinguish the little volume, in point of poetic originality, from many another collection of fugitive verse.
The majority of Blake’s occasional poems, whether introduced into his prophecies or scattered among his note-books and letters, are so coloured by his peculiar notions of religion and morals that they cannot be considered apart. Herein, while there is no evidence of originality, its counterfeit, grotesqueness, does duty in its stead. No preliminary acquaintance with Blake’s creed is requisite for the reader’s appreciation from an artistic point of view of the following verses:—
The fields from islington to marybone, To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood, Were builded over with pillars of gold, and there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.
…The Jew’s Harp house and the Green man, The pond where boys to bathe delight, The field of cows by Welling’s farm, Shine in Jerusalem’s pleasant sight.
We doubt if many will be persuaded by mr. Swinburne’s ingenuity that any intention on the writer’s part to indicate “the hidden spirit and significance of which the flesh or building is a type,” and to vindicate the truth that “suburbs or lanes” have not less of a “soul than continents,”3 can succeed in elevating ludicrous doggerel into serious poetry.
Notes
1. a Fathers Memoirs of his Child. Preface, p. 34.
2. “i turn thy head unto the east.”—Faithful Shepherdess. “We must lay his head to the east.”—Cymbeline.
3. Critical Essay, p. 197.
—Henry G. Hewlett, from “imperfect Genius: William Blake,” Contemporary Review, October 1876, pp. 763–767