Blake after two Centuries

BLAKE AFfER TWO CENTURIES INorthrop Frye The value of centenaries and similar observances is that they call attention, not simply to great men, but to what we do with our great men. The anniversary punctuates, so to speak, the scholarly and critical absorption of its subject into society. From this point of view, a centenary date might well be more impressive for those interested in William Blake than his birth on November 28, 1757. The year 1857 would bring us to a transitional point in the life of Alexander Gilchrist, who had recently got a life of Etty off his hands, married, moved to Chelsea to be near his idol Carlyle, was busy winding up some family business, and was preparing to start in earnest on The Life of William Blake, Piclor 19nolus. This last was no empty phrase. Scattered notices of Blake had appeared in collections of artists' biographies , but nothing like a full volume had been devoted to Blake in the thirty years since his death. Blake was fortunate in his first posthumous group of admirers. Gilchrist was a remarkable person, his wife Anne equally so, and Rossetti and Swinburne, if not exactly emancipated spirits, were at least sufficiently free of the more lethal Victorian virtues to admire Blake without undue inhibitions. They make an instructive contrast to the Ruskin who cut up one of the two coloured copies of Jerusalem, the anonymous worthy who apparently destroyed the great "Vision of the Last Judgement," and the member of the Linnell family who erased the genitalia from the drawings on the Four Zoas manuscript . Gilchrist died in 1861 with his masterpiece unfinished: Anne Gilchrist brought it out in 1863 in two volumes. The first volume was Gilchrist's biography: no better biography has been written since, for all our advance in understanding. The main part of the second volume was Rossetti's edition of the lyrics, where Blake, however expurgated and improved in his metres, still did achieve something like a representative showing as a poet. Swinburne's critical essay appeared in 1868, and 10 BLAKE AFTER TWO CENTURIES 11 soon afterwards there began, a slow trickle at first, then a flood sti11 in full spate, of critical studies, biographies, editions, illustrated. editions, collections of paintings and engravings, handbooks, catalogues, appr~cia­ tions, research articles, chapters in other books, and specialized studies pouring out of the presses of at least twenty countries. Max Beerbohm's Enoch Soames sold his soul to the devil in exchange for a glance at the future British Museum catalogue of critical work on him, only to discover that posterity took the same view of him that his contemporaries had done. Such irony is not for Blake, who in his lifetime was something of an Enoch Soames too, but an Enoch Soames who was right. Much more than a Cinderella success story is involved here. In her little British Council bibliography, Miss Kathleen Raine remarks on the spontaneous personal affection shown in the public response to the recent discovery of a large and rather confused allegorical picture by Blake in a house in Devon. A new Michelangelo would have been more important, but it wonld not have aroused that specific reaction of affectionate pride. Blake's deep love of England is clearly not an unrequited love, nor is the sense that he is one of us confined to Englishmen. People get attracted to him through feeling that he is for them a personal discovery and something of a private possession. I constantly hear of doctors, housewives, clergymen, teachers, manual workers, shopkeepers, who are, in the most frequent phrase used, "frightfuJly keen on Blake," who have bought every book on him they conld afford, and kept him around like an amiable household god. I have taught Blake to Jesuits and I have taught him to Commuuist organizers; I have taught him to deans of women and I have taught him to ferocious young poets of unpredictable rhythms and unprintable (or at least privately printed) diction. His admirers have nothing in common except the feeling that Blake says something to them that no one else can say: that whatever their standards and values may be, Blake has...