Stranger from Paradise: a Biography of William Blake. - book review

Criticism, Summer, 2002 by Kathryn Freeman

by G. E. Bentley. Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xxvii 532. $39.95 cloth.

In Stranger from Paradise, G. E. Bentley shapes the elements of William Blake's life, poetry, and designs into an evolving counterpoint between the generosity of spirit that came of Blake's powerful conviction about his visions and his resistance to the truisms of the fashionable artists and their patrons at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth centuries. Blake emerges from a life of perpetual disappointments with the commercial world to attain the understanding that he, not his successful contemporaries, was the fortunate one: he communed with spirits who commanded that he "be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity," leading Blake to state, "I wish to do nothing for profit. I wish to live for art--I want nothing whatever. I am quite happy--" (413).

Meticulously culling material from earlier biographies, his own previously published works, and the letters and journals of Blake's contemporaries, Bentley deftly weaves the various strands of Blake's workaday world, his political context, and ultimately the myth-making that evolved through his poetry and art. We are given the most nuanced and intimate portrait yet of Blake at each phase of a life that would not compromise vision with marketability and was thus circumscribed by rejection and poverty, up through to his squalid final home on Fountain Street. The mass of information in this extensive biography, including vividly detailed descriptions of Blake's relationships with his contemporaries and the places he lived and in which he worked, the minutia of Blake's financial struggles, and the ecstatic visions that typically estranged him from his world but also won him a devoted following late in life, is made coherent largely through Bentley's use of vignettes, chapters divided into short sections, enhanced by 136 plates and their pithy commentary.

Dividing chapters into short sections allows the inclusion of a wide range of brief though detailed discussions of Blake's relationships with contemporaries, from students to patrons, some well known, others less so, many who became enemies and others who remained loyal friends. Blake's experiences with various patrons emerge as the most complex of his relationships. By contrast to Thomas Butts, the ideal patron who commissioned paintings, bought Blake's poetry, and remained a life-long friend, Blake's troubled relationship with the well-intentioned and avuncular William Hayley is traced in detail, from Hayley's attempt to rescue Blake from drudgery in London, bringing him to his cottage in Felpham while Blake worked on Hayley's commissions, through Blake's growing resentment of Hayley's power over him, culminating in Blake's well-known trial for sedition from which Hayley again rescued him.

Between these two extremes were numerous efforts of Blake's friends to introduce him to patrons, to send him abroad, and to include him among the well-established artists of his time. The diary of Charlotte Bury captures Blake's social awkwardness among the art world's elite, describing a party given by Lady Caroline Lamb that Blake attended; Bury, also a guest at the party, observes that Blake lacked "that worldly wisdom and that grace of manner which make a man gain an eminence in his profession, and succeed in society," while admiring "the goodness of heart and discrimination of talent" that made lady Caroline Lamb "patronize this unknown artist" (350). In spite of such efforts as this, and that of John Hawkins, who proposed that Blake accompany him to Rome with the financial support of Hayley and Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, Bentley notes that "Blake never went more than sixty miles from London" (78). Most patrons disappointed Blake to varying degrees, from the admiring but unscrupulous Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, "gentleman-pupil of Fuseli, dilettante, essayist, and painter," about whom Bentley notes wryly, "Blake's skill in physiognomy was not sufficiently acute to tell him that the gay, the frolic Wainewright was paying him in 1826 with money derived from a forgery and that he would later poison several of his relatives in order to get their insurance," to those who left deeper scars (386, 388). Robert Hartley Cromek, the engraver-turned-picture-publisher, who approached Blake to publish engravings for Blair's The Grave and then the Canterbury Pilgrims, later betrayed Blake in both cases by commissioning Luigi Schiavonetti to engrave Blake's designs for the Blair commission and then giving the Canterbury commission to Thomas Stothard. Blake "erupted in fury," not only at the discovery of Cromek's betrayal, but at his "old friend Stothard," who made a design of "the same subject, style, and dimensions as his own which Cromek was publishing"; Blake memorialized his fury in a poem, dubbing Cromek and Stothard "Bob Screwmuch" and "Stewhard" respectively (300).

Blake was never so fully vindicated for the bitterness he felt towards the art world--having begun early, with Joshua Reynolds's "well-meant criticism" at the Royal Academy--as he was late in life with the devotion of the circle of young artists known as the Ancients (52). This new connection marks a fascinating turn in Blake's relationship to patronage, as exemplified by Blake's friendship with John Linnell, one of the most loyal of the Ancients: because Blake was unable to repay Linnell for the money he had loaned Blake after the Job illustrations were paid for, Linnell commissioned the "sublimest designs from Dante," praised by Blake's disciples and Bentley himself as "Blake at his best" (421, 424). The biography too is at its best here, with such observations as Bentley's interpretation of the painting, "Dante Adoring Christ": "Notice the absence of Beatrice, his constant companion in the Paradiso representing the Church," Bentley writes; "at last Dante approaches Christ without mediation" (423).