engravers of the day, we should have had the distressing picture of Blake moulded different and moulded wrong by a Woollett, a Bartolozzi, or an Angelica Kaufmann, and his whole soul in rebellious and ineffectual protest. As it was, Basire was master of the technical part of his craft, he believed in accurate, definite outline, and not being a man of genius, did not think it necessary that his pupils should turn out servile copies of himself. Blake learnt to handle his tools, to lay a good foundation, and technical proficiency. In after years, when engraving was to be a chief means of expressing his own original vision, he was saved from the painful necessity of having to unlearn much or all of his master’s teaching.

After two quiet years with Basire a providential thing happened. Two more apprentices were taken on by him. These were wholly products of the time, and Blake found himself in violent collision with them in aims, methods, and tastes. To keep the peace, Blake was separated from them and sent to draw in Westminster Abbey.

Gothic architecture was as intoxicating a revelation to Blake as the discovery of Michael Angelo and Albert Dürer in the sale-rooms of Christie and Langford. The Chapel of Edward the Confessor, recently piled up with sand-bags to protect it from the desecration of German bombs, became to Blake a little sanctuary. Here his thoughts travelled without fatigue many hundred years back, and the dim background of the Chapel became a fit setting for his bright visions of the past. He copied with silent intensity the monuments of the Confessor, Henry III, Queen Elinor, Philippa, and the beautiful work of Aymer de Valence. These days were decisive for his lifetime. Gothic architecture was germane to his own soul. Its spirit sank inwards and appeared again and again in the architectural fragments of his own designs. There remained for him one more great formative heritage from the past, and then, with his roots well set, he was to reach forward to the future and prophesy in rhythmic words that are meat and drink to us in the twentieth century.

Blake remained with Basire for seven years. During these years he had glimpses of a world different from the one in which his family moved. Oliver Goldsmith, with his fine head, came as a shining messenger, and actually walked into Basire’s. Oh! that he might grow up to have such a head! Woollett was a visitor, and a sufficiently frequent one to cease to be dazzling even to an overtrustful and enthusiastic apprentice. “One of the most ignorant fellows I ever met,” he wrote of him who never at any time could have been congenial to his spirit. Many others appeared there also—silently marked and measured in a way that would have astonished them had they been worthy to know.

Blake’s time was not wholly spent in copying the works of others. In his spare hours he threw off songs and designs of his own. These latter were sometimes partly copies of a much-loved master. Thus, Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion was suggested by Michael Angelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter in the Vatican, and the figure of Joseph is a copy.[1] Blake himself had written “engraved by W. Blake, 1773, from an old Italian Drawing”; “Michael Angelo, Pinxit.” But already there is more of Blake in this design than of his master. He wrote between the lines, “This is one of the Gothic Artists who built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, wandering about in sheep-skins and goat-skins; of whom the World was not worthy. Such were the Christians in all ages.” From which we may gather that Blake was fully conscious that his being a Christian—and his Art was inseparable from his Christianity—had already consigned him to a solitary life in which he might expect persecutions, but certainly not a resting-place.

Blake’s apprenticeship with Basire came to a peaceful end in 1778, when he was twenty-one years old. He was now a man, peering forward into a dim and cloudy future, looking backward on a childhood of clearest visions that were already passing, and as it was, according to all precedent, had overstayed their time. One thing was entirely clear—he must earn his own living. Another thing he was conscious of was that he was slowly and surely leaving the past behind. Yet so far, seated amidst the ruins of the Old World, he knew not whither his religious aspirations would lead him. He had fine memories, he had religious and art instincts that refused to be separated, he was finding himself daily in opposition to the admired religionists and artists of his time, and he felt within the strength of immense passion which would surely drive him to the building of the heavenly Jerusalem if he could but get his vision clear again, and know the path which God had before marked out for him to walk in. His vision was to clear after many years. Meanwhile there were tempests and storms to be endured that would reduce still more effectually to wreckage the last remains of the Old World. That World had spoken with dignity and power through the lips of Dr Johnson, who was himself breaking up and died in 1784. With the death of Johnson the Old World died, to reappear only in a kind of after-mirage; and young Blake was struggling through the tempestuous years of his passionate youth, turning with pain his eyes from the Past to the Future, and wistfully hoping that the mighty creative power that was already astir in him might fashion a new order in which he and his fellows could live at peace.

CHAPTER II

COMING OF AGE AND MARRIAGE

The Royal Academy is a British Institution which we all patronize once a year, and then abuse that we may keep our self-respect. We go, impelled by a sense of high duty; but we presently relax and take our pleasure in Bond Street. In 1778 Bond Street did not lay itself out to encourage revolutionary artists, and Burlington House was not yet finished. The Royal Academy was turned out of Somerset Palace and was still waiting to turn into its new quarters.

Blake, on leaving Basire, immediately joined the Academy and studied in the Antique School under Mr Moser. This was not an auspicious beginning. Moser had scant respect for Michael Angelo and Raphael, while he extolled to the skies the more fleshly works of Le Brun and Rubens. Some of us may wish that Moser had taught Blake to admire Rubens. But an angel from Heaven could not have done that. Clear outline was a necessity to keep him sane; blurred outline always gave him nightmare. Only the mystic who loves the flesh can rejoice in the roly-poly curves and tints of Rubens’ fat Venuses. Moser did his best, and being an old man of seventy-three, felt he might advise a young man in his art studies. But Blake had now known for some years what he really liked, and his impetuosity led him to speak to Moser as if their positions were reversed.

Blake drew at the Academy not only from the antique but from living models. This was distasteful to him, because it was never his aim to reproduce exact portraits of outward things. Always his imagination must pierce through and illumine the object before him, and he found the posed model baffled him in this attempt, and made him scent death rather than life.

These were crowded days for Blake. He could not continue to live under his father’s roof in Broad Street without contributing towards the household expenses, and therefore he must do work of marketable value. To this end he received orders for engraving from Johnson and