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WILLIAM BLAKE The Unfading Vision
Blake, by Peter Ackroyd
Blake was one of those for whom, in William James’s definition, ‘religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.’ He spoke with his visions on equal terms, sat down with them and answered them back. They came as welcome visitors: Jesus Christ, the angel Gabriel, Socrates, Michelangelo, his own younger brother Robert, dead at the age of nineteen. What seemed external reality he called a cloud interposed between human beings and the spiritual world, which would otherwise be too bright to bear. He wanted us all to know this. At one point in his biography of Blake, Peter Ackroyd speaks of him as ‘keeping his own counsel,’ but, as the book shows, Blake didn’t. It was his mission to recall us from materialism to the freedom and joy of the imagination, and it was humanity’s duty to listen to his prophecies.
The Blakes were a plain-living London tradesman’s family, pious, sober, dissenting and radical. William (1757—1827), the third child of James and Catherine Blake, was born on Broad Street, a little to the southeast of what is now Oxford Circus. A workhouse and a slaughterhouse were just around the corner, but so too, to the south, was Golden Square, where the gentry lived. William saw the face of God at the window when he was seven or eight years old, wrote poetry as a child, and was apprenticed at fourteen to James Basire, engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. A republican his whole life, he was involved (we don’t quite know how) in the riots of 1780, when the London crowds battled the militia and set fire to Newgate prison.
Perhaps on this account, perhaps because of an illness and a disappointment in love, William was sent across the river to recuperate at the house of a market gardener in Battersea. A year or so later he married the gardener’s daughter, Catherine Boucher. He started well enough, opening his own print shop and developing what he called ‘W. Blake’s original stereotype.’ This was a method of relief printing on copper, each impression being hand-tinted, so that no two were alike. In this way the Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, and the great series of prophetic books were offered (quite unsuccessfully) to the public. His work as a jobbing engraver began to run out, and he had to retreat to a cottage at Felpham, on the south coast. But although Felpham was a place of inspiration—it was the first time Blake had ever seen the sea—he was back three years later in the soot-and-dung-laden air of London that suited him and his wife so well.
‘In his later life,’ Mr Ackroyd writes, ‘he was known only as an engraver, a journeyman with wild notions and a propensity for writing unintelligible verse. He laboured for his bread, eccentric, dirty and obscure.’ It might be added that he was childless, and there is no way of calculating the pain that caused him. But Blake is also the poet of joy, and it could be argued that he was a fortunate man. Although he created the overwhelming tyrant figure Urizen, or old Nobodaddy, his own father seems to have been mild enough, never sending William to school because ‘he so hated a blow.’ Blake’s loyal wife, illiterate when they married, was, as he said, ‘an angel to me.’ (He had fallen in love with her because she pitied him, which seems to surprise Mr Ackroyd, but pity was the great eighteenth-century virtue that Blake most earnestly tells us to cherish.)
Although his earnings ran out, he was never without a patron, and although he had always kept radical company, he never got into serious trouble. When he was living in Felpham he was arrested after a row with a drunken soldier who accused him of speaking seditiously against the King—and so he very well may have done—but at the quarter sessions, where poor Catherine deposed that yes, she would be ready to fight for Bonaparte, Blake was miraculously acquitted. And at the end of his life he acquired a new circle of much younger admirers, artists who called themselves Ancients and understood, partly at least, Blake’s transcendent view of history and eternity. One of them, George Richmond, closed Blake’s eyes when he died in 1827 in his two-room lodgings, and then kissed them ‘to keep the vision in.’ ‘Yet there was really no need to do so,’ says Mr Ackroyd, feeling perhaps he has earned the right to a fine phrase. ‘That vision had not faded in his pilgrimage of seventy years, and it has not faded yet.’
Mr Ackroyd’s Blake is much more reader-friendly than his Dickens. This time he doesn’t make what have been called his Hitchcock-like appearances in the text, but he is there at your elbow, a brilliant guide and interpreter. Blake, he says, ‘is a “difficult” poet only if we decide to make him so,’ and he fearlessly expounds the prophetic books and the technique of their illustrations, which conjure up in dazzling orange, green, violet, and crimson ‘a wholly original religious landscape.’
Like all his predecessors, Mr Ackroyd is left with the (possibly not true) ‘familiar anecdotes.’ Did Thomas Butts (a respectable civil servant) really find the Blakes sitting naked, in imitation of Adam and Eve, in their back garden? Did Blake really encounter the Devil on his way down to the coal cellar? Mr Ackroyd tells the stories as they come. Blake, like Yeats, mythologized (but never falsified) himself, and the best thing is to accept the myth. More important to Mr Ackroyd is the re-creation of the poet as a great Londoner—part of his long-term biography of his home city. He invites us to accompany Blake, in his knee breeches and wide-brimmed hat, on one of his long walks through the streets. This is not in itself a new idea. Stanley Gardner, in 1968, was one of the first to study the county survey of late-eighteenth-century London inch by inch and to suggest (for example) that Blake’s Valley of Innocence must have been the green fields of Wimbledon, where orphans at that time were put out to nurse. Mr Gardner didn’t supply his readers with a map, nor does Mr Ackroyd, but he is immensely more detailed. ‘A woman filling her kettle at the neighbourhood pump, the washing hanging out from poles…the bird cages and pots of flowers on the windowsills, the shabby man standing on a corner with a sign in his hat saying “Out of Employ,” while another sells toy windmills, the dogs, the cripples, the boys with hoops.’ These things, of course, aren’t what William Blake saw: he saw walls reddened with soldiers’ blood or blackened with the soot that killed off young chimney sweeps, while a single bird cage was for him enough to set heaven in a rage.
But this is emphatically not a political biography. Its object isn’t to enlist Blake as a primitive Marxist but to show him as an individual of genius, awkward to deal with, sometimes nervous, often contradictory, but incorruptible. Blake himself believed there were eternal ‘states’ of rage and desire, even of selfhood, through which a man passes, keeping his soul intact. ‘He knew precisely what he saw,’ says Mr Ackroyd affectionately, ‘and with the sturdy obstinacy of his London stock he refused to be bullied or dissuaded.’
Blake was unaccountably true, indeed, even to his strangest prophecies. He had promised his wife that he would never leave her, and after his death he came back, she said, for several hours a day, sat down in his usual chair, and talked to her.
New York Times Book Review, 1996
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE Talking Through the Darkness
Coleridge: Darker Reflections, 1804—1834, by Richard Holmes
Ten years ago, in 1989, Richard Holmes left Coleridge under the stars on an April night in Portsmouth, starting out, in one of the many impulsive moves of his life, for Malta. He asked us to imagine how it would have been if the poet had died on the voyage, as he and all his friends clearly expected. He would then have been remembered as the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a brilliant young Romantic early extinguished. But he didn’t die, and the next three decades, Holmes told us, would be more fascinating than anything that had gone before. This second volume, he said, would be subtitled ‘Later Reflections,’ but it has turned out to be ‘Darker Reflections.’ Possibly he himself has changed a little in this time. In any case, ‘darker’ suggests the water imagery that haunted Coleridge even more closely as his life flowed to an end. Holmes hoped to make him ‘leap out of these pages—brilliant, animated, endlessly provoking—and invade your imagination (as he has done mine).’ Certainly, in his superb second volume, he has succeeded in this.
He also has to show his subject as frequently sunk in melancholy, constipated, a heavy drinker and addicted (as he had been since the winter of 1801) to opium. Coleridge went to Malta in 1804 partly on account of his health, partly to escape from his marriage and perhaps from his long-term infatuation with Wordsworth’s sister-in-law Sara Hutchinson, partly—since Malta was a wartime base for the British fleet—in hope of getting some kind of administrative post. He did get employment, as diplomatic secretary to the Governor, for whom he wrote what are now called position papers on Britain’s strategic situation in the Mediterranean. As a hardened journalist, quick to seize the main points of any situation, Coleridge, as long as he was sober, had no difficulty with the work.
On his return to England he made it clear that he was not coming back to his wife, although he always did his erratic best to support her and their three children. Lecturing seemed the ideal occupation for the great talker who rarely paused for an answer, and he lectured, on and off, for almost the whole of the rest of his life—at Bristol (where he was an hour late for his first appearance, having been secured by his friends and deposited on the platform), at the Royal Institution (where he collapsed into opium and missed five engagements), at the Philosophical Institution, at the Surrey Institution, at the Crown and Anchor, at the Royal Society of Literature (on Prometheus). Organizers were always ready to book him, audiences almost always ready to hear him. What did he look like? Like a wildly dishevelled Dissenting minister. What did he sound like? Sometimes he was unintelligible, but when he caught fire (as for instance in his celebrated lecture on Hamlet) it was agreed that he talked as no man had talked before him.
In 1809 he was taken with the idea of writing and publishing his own journal, The Friend. This, he thought, could be done from the Lake District. He stayed there at first with Wordsworth, whose household, with its dutiful womenfolk, was always under good control. But The Friend lasted for only twenty-seven numbers.
It was at this point, when Wordsworth saw little or no hope of his recovery, that Coleridge absconded to London and began what started as a fortnight’s stay (it turned into six years) with the Morgans, whom he had known in Bristol. John Morgan took down whatever Coleridge could be persuaded to dictate; his wife and daughter put in order Coleridge’s papers and notebooks. In January 1813 a play, which he had written many years earlier and now renamed Remorse, was put on at the Drury Lane Theatre. It was an unexpected success, and he received £400 (although in a few months he was penniless). Meanwhile, news came that the Wordsworths’ dearly loved little son Tom had died. Coleridge dithered, delayed, and did not go to Grasmere. Can he be forgiven? On the other hand, during one of his worst periods of opium overdose and suicidal depression he rallied himself, Heaven knows how, to write five articles in praise of the paintings of his old friend Washington Allston. His manic energy and generosity have to be set against his recurrent paralysis of the will, when he could be becalmed like the Mariner on his stagnant sea.
Remorse had been put on partly at the request of Lord Byron, who, however impatient he might be with Coleridge’s metaphysics (‘I wish he would explain his explanation’), shared the impulse felt by so many that he was worth saving at all costs. Charles Lamb, who had been at school with him at Christ’s Hospital, continued a faithful friend; so did the publisher Joseph Cottle, who attributed Coleridge’s ills not to alcohol and opium but to satanic possession; so did the young De Quincey and Daniel Stuart, the sage editor of The Courier. He had, of course, plenty of unsparing enemies who couldn’t forgive him for deserting the radical cause. But for forty disorganized years Coleridge was never at a loss for someone to give him a home. Would the twentieth or the twenty-first century take him in so generously?
In his Notebooks Coleridge is a witness, often deeply remorseful, to his own life, creating a double viewpoint. Holmes is perfectly attuned to this, and in addition creates what he calls a ‘downstage voice’ in his footnotes, ‘reflecting on the action as it develops.’ Anything less than this would not represent the multiplicity of STC. This often unexpected downstage commentary is particularly valuable when Holmes comes to discuss the Biographia Literaria, which Coleridge wrote while he was with the Morgans and which he described to Byron as ‘a general Preface’ to his collected poems, ‘on the Principles of philosophic and genial criticism relative to the Fine Arts in general; but especially to Poetry.’ In fact, it began as a dialogue, or rather an argument at a distance, with Wordsworth. But that was not enough. He had much more to say on his own personal philosophical journey from the materialism of Locke to the perception that faith in God is not only beyond reason but a continuation of it. He produced forty-five thousand words in six weeks, anxiously watched by the faithful Morgan. Hard pressed, he borrowed passages wholesale from the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling. Holmes admits the plagiarism, but you can rely on him for a spirited defence. The plagiarisms, he claims, ‘form a kind of psychodrama within the heart of the Biographia.’ We have to wait for the true Coleridge to free himself and emerge.
Coleridge’s last years were spent in Highgate, then a hill village just north of London, with the humane Dr James Gillman and his motherly wife, Ann. Gillman regulated the opium taking, tactfully overlooking the extra supplies secretly bought from the local chemist, and arranged for Coleridge something quite new, holidays by the seaside. The Gillmans’ fine house and garden was a retreat where he could receive visitors—Thomas Carlyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Fenimore Cooper. A familiar figure by now in the village, Coleridge, looking twenty years older than he was, had become a ‘white-haired, shuffling sage,’ walking, according to young John Keats, like an after-dinner alderman but, as he talked, casting the same enchantment still.
‘At 6.30 a.m. on 25 July 1834 he slipped into the dark.’ I could wish that Richard Holmes hadn’t felt that here, at the very end, ‘dark’ was the right word. But it’s impossible to describe the extraordinary quality of this biography, felt on every page. ‘There is a particular kind of silence which falls after a life like Coleridge’s,’ Holmes says, ‘and perhaps it should be observed.’
New York Times Book Review, 1999
SARAH ORNE JEWETT The News from Dunnet Landing
Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories, edited by Michael Davitt Bell
The author of the novel The Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett, born in 1849, was widely read at the turn of the century, much less after the First World War. Now that a selection of her works is in the Library of America series, perhaps she will be read again.
Sarah Orne Jewett was a New Englander, descended from a well-to-do merchant family in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a doctor with a local practice (although he later became Professor of Obstetrics at Bowdoin), and she was brought up as one of an extended family in the ‘great house’ of her grandfather Jewett in South Berwick. It was a place of hospitality where she could listen to the stories told at leisure by visitors, among them superannuated sea captains and ship owners and relatives from the lonely inland farms.
As a child she was not a great scholar, preferring hopscotch and skating and her collections of woodchucks, turtles, and insects. ‘In those days,’ she wrote, ‘I was given to long childish illnesses, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up in school,’ so that her father, trusting in fresh air as a cure, took her with him on his daily rounds, teaching her at the same time to keep her eyes open, and telling her the names of plants and animals. He recommended her to read (in her teens) Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, Milton’s L’Allegro, and the poetry of Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. Her mother and grandmother advised Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pearl of Orr’s Island.
In 1867, Jewett graduated from Berwick Academy with serious thoughts of studying medicine. The echo of her debate with herself can be heard in her novel A Country Doctor (1884). Nancy Price, ‘not a commonplace girl,’ has been left alone in the world. Her guardian is the beloved country practitioner Dr Leslie, whose principle is ‘to work with nature and not against it.’ He believes the wild, reckless little girl is born to be a doctor, and he turns out to be right. Although on a visit away from home she meets a young lawyer to whom she is in every way suited, she gives him up. In the face of criticism from nearly everyone in her small-town community, she goes back to her medical training.
Jewett herself never had to face the test of society’s disapproval. She gave up the idea of becoming a doctor simply because she was not well enough. Rheumatism became a familiar enemy, tormenting her all her life long. A legacy from her grandfather meant that she would never have to earn a living, and she decided against marriage, perhaps because she felt she was not likely to meet anyone to match her father. But her writing, which had begun with small things—stories for young people, occasional poems, and so forth—had become by 1873 ‘my work—my business, perhaps; and it is so much better than making a mere amusement of it, as I used to.’
Like so many great invalids of the nineteenth century, Jewett continued, with amazing fortitude, to travel, to make new friends, to move according to the seasons from one house to another. Wherever she went she answered letters in the morning and wrote in the afternoons. For twenty years she spent the summer and winter months with Mrs Annie Fields (it was one of those close friendships known as ‘Boston marriages’) and spring and autumn in ‘the great house’ in South Berwick, making time, however, for trips to Europe to meet pretty well everyone she admired. In July 1889 she visited Alice Longfellow (the daughter of the poet) at Mouse Island, in Boothbay Harbor, Maine. This was her first visit to the district of the ‘pointed firs.’ She made several more before 1896, when her novel The Country of the Pointed Firs appeared, first as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and then in November from the publisher Houghton Mifflin.
This short novel is her masterpiece, no doubt about that, but it is difficult to discuss the plot because it can hardly be said to have one. Dunnet Landing is ‘a salt-aired, white-clapboarded little town’ on the central coast of Maine, more attractive than the rest, perhaps, but much like them. ‘One evening in June, a single passenger landed upon the steamboat wharf.’ She is a writer who has taken a lodging in the town, in search of peace and quiet. Her landlady, Mrs Almira Todd, is the local herbalist, being a very large person, majestic almost, living in the last little house on the way inland. In a few pages Jewett establishes forever the substantial reality of Dunnet Landing. We know it, we have been there, we have walked up the steep streets, we taste the sea air. Now we have got to get to know the inhabitants, slowly, as the narrator does herself, and, in good time, to hear their confidences. Jewett knew all about fishing and small-holding and cooking haddock chowder, about birds, weather, tides, and clouds. She had a wonderful ear for the Maine voice, breaking the immense silences. She quotes, more than once, what her father said to her: ‘Don’t write about things and people. Tell them just as they are.’ And she understood the natural history of small communities, where you will find impoverished, lonely people, often old but proud, self-respecting and respected.
The narrator of The Country of the Pointed Firs rents the local schoolhouse, for fifty cents a week, as her study. Here her first visitor, apart from the bees and an occasional sheep pausing to look in at the open door, is Captain Littlepage, an ancient retired shipmaster. His reminiscences are not what we expect: he tells a story of the unseen—a voyage west of Baffin Island which fetched up ‘on a coast which wasn’t laid down or charted’ where the crew saw, or half-saw, the shapes of men through the sea-fog ‘like a place where there was neither living nor dead.’ These were men waiting between this life and the next. Captain Littlepage offers no further explanation, and, indeed, it’s generally felt in Dunnet Landing that he has overset his mind with too much reading, but Mrs Todd, with a sharp look, says that ‘some of them tales hangs together tolerable well.’
Loneliness and hospitality are the two extremes of the hard existence on the coast of Maine. Elijah Tilley, one of the old fishermen, thought of as a ‘plodding man,’ has been a widower for the past eight years. ‘Folks all kept repeating that time would ease me, but I can’t find it does. No, I just miss her the same every day.’ It is his habit to lapse into silence. What more is there to say? Towards the end of her life, Sarah Orne Jewett gave some words of advice to the young Willa Cather: ‘You must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up.’ Otherwise it may remain unexpressed, as it often does in Dunnet Landing.
Joanna, Mrs Todd’s cousin, whose young man threw her over, withdrew to live alone on tiny Shell-heap Island, ‘a dreadful small place to make a world of.’ She had some poultry and a patch of potatoes. But what about company? She must have made do with the hens, her one-time neighbours think: ‘I expect she soon came to making folks of them.’ But Joanna maintained the dignity of loss. She lived, died, and was buried on Shell-heap Island. We are in a world where silence is understood.
When the time comes for the narrator to leave, Mrs Todd, who has become a true friend, hardly speaks all day, ‘except in the briefest and most disapproving way.’ Then she resolutely goes out on an errand, without turning her head. ‘My room looked as empty as the day I came…and I knew how it would seem when Mrs Todd came back and found her lodger gone. So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.’
Jewett is an expert in the homely and everyday who gives us every now and then a glimpse of the numinous. (That, perhaps, is why Rudyard Kipling wrote to her about The Country of the Pointed Firs, ‘I don’t believe even you know how good that work is.’) She does this, for instance, in a short story, ‘Miss Tempy’s Watchers.’ Upstairs lies the outworn body of kindly Miss Temperance Dent, while in the kitchen, two of her old friends, keeping vigil before the next day’s funeral, gradually nod off. ‘Perhaps Tempy herself stood near, and saw her own life and its surroundings with new understanding. Perhaps she herself was the only watcher.’ In one of the later Dunnet Landing stories, ‘The Foreigner,’ Mrs Todd observes: ‘You know plain enough there’s something beyond this world: the doors stand wide open.’ There are moments, too, of communication or empathy between friends that go beyond understanding. Friendship, for Sarah Orne Jewett, was the world’s greatest good.
On 3 September 1902, her fifty-third birthday, she was thrown from her carriage when the horse stumbled and fell. She suffered concussion of the spine and never entirely recovered. ‘The strange machinery that writes,’ as she described it, ‘seems broken and confused.’ For long spells she was in fact forbidden by her doctors to read or write, which must have been a cruel deprivation. In 1909 she was back in South Berwick, where she had the last of a series of strokes, and died in the house where she was born.
Books and Company, Winter 1999
