for it was frequented by all sorts of people, including Emanuel Swedenborg, who was then living in London, where he remained until his death in 1772. The sight of the famous novelist is the only external recorded incident of Blake’s first three years at Basire’s, but a casual occurrence of great importance that interrupted his placid course after he had been working in the shop for two years.
There were, we are told, several apprentices beside Blake, and the harmony of the place depended on the ease with which the youngsters worked together. In 1773, two new apprentices arrived who indulged in frequent quarrels with Blake “concerning matters of intellectual argument.” These quarrels created disorderly scenes, and when, according to Malkin,[14] Blake refused to side with his master against his fellow-apprentices, Basire’s kindly comment was: “Blake is too simple and they too cunning.” In order to restore harmony without sacrificing either party, Basire sent Blake, whose industry could be trusted not to abuse the privilege, out of the shop to draw the Gothic monuments in Westminster Abbey and other old churches, monuments which Basire’s patrons, the antiquaries, were always wanting to have engraved. Blake would spend the summer making these drawings, and the winter sometimes in engraving them. Lost in the corners of these old churches, Blake’s romantic imagination was completely Gothicised, and for the future he closed his mind to every other influence or interpreted it by the light of these impressions, for which he had been unconsciously prepared by the religious atmosphere of his home.
We have only to imagine Blake transplanted from Westminster Abbey to the ruins of the Parthenon, walking the road to the Piraeus, and apprenticed at the same age to a sculptor occupied in classical studies, to see a different development for him, and to admit that his future was as nearly now a foregone conclusion as that of any boy of genius can be. As it was, Blake never met a man with feelings as ardent as his own, who was not some sort of eccentric, a heretic, a revolutionary, or an astrologer. No humanist ever came his way, and the tameness of the one poet with whom he was to be thrown continuously in contact led him to make an idol of idiosyncrasy.
William Blake, Illustration for The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, frontispiece, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 2, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
Except for his boyish acquaintance with Jacobean poetry, with the antique casts from which he had learned to draw under Mr. Pars, Blake’s youth was inspired solely by romantic or theological influences. Because the romantic was congenial to him, he could well afford to have been crossed with classical and humane traditions. It is interesting to consider what the effect might have been if the example of Michelangelo had been succeeded, not by Gothic, but by the Greek masters by whom Michelangelo himself was largely inspired. In the sunlit spaces between the columns of a Greek temple, in the open-air life that the Greek statues reflect, Blake’s visions would have assumed a very different form from that imposed by the shadowy interior of Gothic churches. The figures that people their gloom are like ghosts in a cavernous Hades, while the gods and heroes of classical sculpture have the happiness of health and the vigour of sunlight as they stand upon their plinths. The designs of Blake wanted the classic foundation, and his writings entirely missed the lucid beauty of classical literature, which he came to identify with the academic art that he despised. There is no classic form in romantic literature, though in romantic art the Gothic severity came near to taking its place. Circumstances led Blake to follow his line of least resistance, and in the Abbey, where, according to Malkin, he became “almost a Gothic monument himself,” he was completely absorbed.
Even in these precincts, however, the interruptions that he had encountered in the shop were not banished. Though Blake was free from the other apprentices, the Westminster schoolboys would intrude. Tatham says that “in the impetuosity of his anger, worn out with interruption, he flung one of the boys from a scaffolding,” and followed this by laying a formal complaint before the Dean. The dreamer proved himself a true mystic by this act, for exceptional insight and decisive action are the combination of qualities by which the great mystic is known. The contradiction is sometimes so startling that the lives of the great mystics puzzle those observers who do not understand them. The wrath of the lamb is the terrible manifestation of righteous anger in a heart of gentleness and peace.
All his life, Blake remained grateful to Basire for the gift of his freedom, not only when at work in the Abbey but on expeditions to the Gothic churches in and around London. He found in their stone monuments not only form and outline for his art, but also a mythic English history, a symbolic language, and the place that colour once had played in architectural sculpture. All these, the colour too, probably suggested the synthetic art that he, too, was later to create in his illuminated manuscripts, wherein poetry and design, handicraft and paint, were to evolve a new form of book by a new type of author: one who was to conceive, combine, and personally carry out every detail of the finished work. No place less splendid or mysterious than the Abbey was to be Blake’s private studio. Shut in there alone, month after month for five years, undisturbed even during the services, Blake’s boyish hand was ever busy, while a throng of thoughts pressed into every unoccupied corner of his mind. His visions returned; the statues and figures seemed to come to life. It was in the Abbey that Christ and the Apostles appeared to him, and the Gothic imagination itself seemed to return to life in the boy. The monuments that he went to sketch suggested to him the visions that had filled the minds of the original builders and sculptors. The figures became less his subjects than his friends; with their shadowy companionship his imagination was peopled. His mind teemed with ideas that took the likeness of the statuesque figures around him, and the men in the world outside to which he returned became the shadows of the sculptures, unreal intruders into the solitude in which he lived.
Blake’s brain and imagination became another Abbey, as remote from those of his neighbours as is the ancient building from the modern life outside its walls. No boy so susceptible had been exposed in his impressionable years to such an influence, and it led Blake to make a religion of Gothic art and to see Christ and his Apostles as artistic rather than religious symbols. In this way he reversed the process by which Christian art had been created, and without any intellectual basis for his reason he sought to interpret the Christian tradition solely by the works of art that it had inspired. A Christian by profession, he never went to church, and at the last conceived a scripture peculiar to himself and composed of fragments that had little bonds but the caprice of his ingenious prejudices. Approaching religion through art, Blake was induced to supply from his own mind the basis that the medieval workmen had inherited. His active mind was besieged in his boyhood by the symbolism of the Abbey, and it is to his lonely hours within its walls that we can trace the origin and leanings of his later mysticism.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 10, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 5, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William
Benjamin Heath Malkin (1769–1842) was a British writer. He had a close connection to Blake, although historians cannot determine under which circumstances the two met. Malkin mentions Blake in his book
