DEAR B. B.—I
am oppressed with business all day, and Company all night. But I will snatch a
quarter of an hour. Your recent acquisitions of the Picture and the Letter are
greatly to be congratulated. I too have a picture of my father and the copy of his first love verses;
but they have been mine long. Blake is a
real name, I assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he be still living.
He is the Robert [William] Blake, whose wild designs
accompany a splendid folio edition of the “Night Thoughts,” which you may nave
seen, in one of which he pictures the parting of soul and body by a solid mass
of human form floating off, God knows how, from a lumpish mass (fac Simile to
itself) left behind on the dying bed. He paints in water colours marvellous
strange pictures, visions of his brain, which he asserts that he has seen. They
have great merit. He has seen the old Welsh bards on Snowdon—he has seen the
Beautifullest, the strongest, and the Ugliest Man, left alone from the Massacre
of the Britons by the Romans, and has painted them from memory (I have seen his
paintings), and asserts them to be as good as the figures of Raphael and Angelo, but not better, as they had precisely the same
retro-visions and prophetic visions with themself [himself]. The painters in
oil (which he will have it that neither of them practised) he affirms to have
been the ruin of art, and affirms that all the while he was engaged in his
Water paintings, Titian was disturbing him, Titian the Ill Genius of Oil Painting. His Pictures—one in
particular, the Canterbury
| 1824 | WILLIAM BLAKE | 643 |
“Tiger, Tiger, burning bright, Thro’ the desarts of the night,” |
With the exception of an Epilogue for a Private Theatrical, I have written nothing now for near 6 months. It is in vain to spur me on. I must wait. I cannot write without a genial impulse, and I have none. ’Tis barren all and dearth. No matter; life is something without scribbling. I have got rid of my bad spirits, and hold up pretty well this rain-damn’d May.
So we have lost another Poet. I never much relished his Lordship’s mind, and shall be sorry if the Greeks have cause to miss him. He was to me offensive, and I never can make out his great power, which his admirers talk of. Why, a line of Wordsworth’s is a lever to lift the immortal spirit! Byron can only move the Spleen. He was at best a Satyrist,—in any other way he was mean enough. I dare say I do him injustice; but I cannot love him, nor squeeze a tear to his memory. He did not like the world, and he has left it, as Alderman Curtis advised the Radicals, “If they don’t like their country, damn ’em, let ’em leave it,” they possessing no rood of ground in England, and he 10,000 acres. Byron was better than many Curtises.
Farewell, and accept this apology for a letter from one who owes you so much in that kind.
Yours ever truly,
