Blake's Cottage at Felpham

The Blake Society’s Zoom meeting on Wednesday 20 October was devoted to MILTON AND THE COTTAGE. This is my belated response.

The climactic moment of Blake’s Milton is precipitated when the female figure Ololon appears as “a Virgin of twelve years.”

For Ololon step'd into the Polypus within the Mundane Shell
They could not step into Vegetable Worlds without becoming
The enemies of Humanity except in a Female Form
And as One Female, Ololon and all its mighty Hosts
Appear'd: a Virgin of twelve years

Ololon is the spiritual form of Milton’s Sixfold Emanation; she is the truth underlying his errors about woman. And there’s that striking designation of Ololon as “a Virgin of twelve years,” with its Biblical resonance and its evocation of the Virgin Mary. Ololon, like Mary, is a bearer of deliverance.

(Plate 36 of Milton shows the cottage at Felpham of William and Catherine Blake. The image shown is from Copy A of the poem, now in the British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings.)

  

(Plate 36 detail: the cottage.)

Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld
The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah

The illustration of “Blakes Cottage at Felpham” is clearly stolen from Tolson’s Hermathenae.

(Francis Tolson, Hermathenae (1740), page 120: EMBLEM XLI. No REASON above FAITH.)

(Emblem XLI, detail)

The engraving illustrates an episode in the life of St. Augustine of Hippo (“Austin” in the poem). The saint is shown in a seashore landscape with a humble cottage, an angel above. The third figure is of a boy emptying the ocean into a hole in the sand.

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Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal—IGOR STRAVINSKY.

The basic idea implicit in this aphorism is the contrast between “borrowing” as slavish imitation that actually diminishes both the original and the imitator, and “stealing” which results in the significant transformation of the original artist’s work.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.—T.S. ELIOT.

In Milton, Blake sees artistic creation as renewal, one that creates “new flesh”, from older material.

Milton took of the red clay of Succoth, moulding it with care
Between his palms: and filling up the furrows of many years
Beginning at the feet of Urizen, and on the bones
Creating new flesh upon the Demon cold, and building him
As with new clay a Human form in the Valley of Beth Peor.

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Tolson’s Hermathenae has sixty emblems, each consisting of title, copperplate engraving, and verse subscriptio. It is heir both to that neo-classical, humanist tradition which goes straight back to Alciato in the sixteenth century, and also to the type of spiritual and devotional emblem which had emerged in the seventeenth century. It adapts the materials of the Renaissance emblem to English Augustan taste.

Tolson writes lucid, polished and competent verse, much of it in heroic couplets of a quality which would not have disgraced Dryden or Pope, though with occasional octosyllabics (where appropriate) or quatrains. The title suggests the elegant expression of difficult subjects in its hybridisation of the characters of Hermes and Athena, wit and wisdom. Pagan gods of Greece are identified as symbols of the transcendent powers of the Divinity, and the emblematic mode justified as a way of giving concrete form to metaphysical ideas.

The double form united virtue shews,
So Hermathena to the world arose;
Learning and wit their flowing streams unite;
And mingle grave instruction with delight.

The eighteenth century saw itself as the Age of Reason; Blake’s antagonism to Reason arose from his awareness of its shortcomings. Tolson’s verses attached to Emblem XLI prefigure some Blakean ideas:

Boasting the Strength of Reason, they destroy
That Reason they so impiously employ;
Put out the Light of Nature in the Soul,
And tempt Heav’n’s Vengeance by a second Fall.

There is one further feature of Hermathenae to mention, the addition to each emblem of a prose commentary consisting of extremely learned notes keyed to particular words and phrases in the verse subscription; these gloss not only the classical allusions but also technical terms from philosophy, divinity, and philology, providing a highly erudite vade mecum for the “Minds of Youth” to whose needs the book is largely if not wholly directed.

The engraved illustrations to Hermathenae are the work of John Devoto, decorative history and scene painter, born in France but documented in England 1708-52. He merits an entry in the Oxford DNB. However, Tolson himself has no entry in the Oxford DNB, so I append here a brief biographical summary.

Francis Tolson (1694—1746), emblematist, poet, and dramatist, was the author of

Octavius Prince of Syra: Or, a Lash for Levi. A Poem (1719)

The Earl of Warwick: Or, British Exile. A Tragedy. As it is Acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane (1719)

A Poem on His Majesty's Passing the South-Sea Bill (1720)

Proposals for Printing, Hermathenæ: Or, One Hundred and Twenty Moral Emblems, and Ethnick Tales. With Notes (1739)

Hermathenæ, Or Moral Emblems, and Ethnick Tales, with Explanatory Notes (1740).

Tolson was born 27 January 1693 O.S. (1694 N.S.) in Albemarle Street, in the City of London, and baptised 3 February. He was the son and heir of Richard Tolson (1656-1720), of Lincoln's Inn, London, and Sarah Woodroffe (1656-1726).

Tolson was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, 26 July 1710, having previously been a pupil at Charterhouse school. He was married 6 April 1713 to Catherine Riches Puckle (born 1694) at Grays Inn Chapel, London. They had children: Catherine, Sarah, and Mary. His wife died December 1730 at Blackfriars, London. Tolson was swiftly remarried 2 February 1731 (N.S.) to Mary Remington in the village of Bolton, East Riding of Yorkshire. Charlotte and Wilfred were the children of the second marriage.

Francis Tolson was ordained deacon at Lincoln cathedral, 12 June 1720, and priest, 25 September. Appointed curate of Easton, Northants in 1732 and Vicar of Easton Maudit in 1737, he also held the vicarages of Grendon, 1737-46, and Market Harborough, Leicestershire. Additionally, he served as Chaplain to the Earl of Sussex.

The death of “Franciscus Tolson” is recorded on 1 Mar 1746 (N.S.) at Easton Maudit, Northamptonshire, where he was buried in St Peter and St Paul, the church where he had been vicar since 1737.

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There’s another Blake drawing of the cottage at Felpham in a faintly sketched and unfinished “Landscape at Felpham”.

(“Landscape at Felpham”; pencil and watercolour on paper; Tate.)

Click on image to enlarge.

The blue expanse is not the sea but the faded green of the cornfield between the cottage and the seashore.

(“Landscape at Felpham”: key.)

Click on image to enlarge.

1. Windmill (lost to the sea by 1879).

2. Church.

3. The Turret House (Hayley’s residence).

4. Blake’s cottage hit by a shaft of sunlight.

The faint pencil drawing is simple, direct, and uncorrected, quite unlike Blake’s usual drawing style or, indeed, that of anyone sketching a landscape freehand. The perspective seems exaggerated; note the bulk of the windmill looming on the left. This convinces me that the drawing was rapidly executed on the dry seashore with the aid of a portable camera obscura, probably borrowed from Hayley. (One would expect William Hayley, or perhaps his late wife, Elizabeth, to have possessed such an aid to landscape-sketching. It’s what the eighteenth-century English middle-classes did. And not only amateur artists. Sir Joshua Reynolds was an enthusiastic user of the camera obscura. )

(Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portable camera obscura; Science Museum, London. The device is fitted with a mirror and lens that allows an image to be projected onto a piece of paper inside the darkened box. It folds neatly into a book-shaped box.)

Art historians have long argued that certain painters used the camera obscura in their work—Canaletto and Vermeer, in particular, are often cited. No one before, as far as I am aware, has suggested that William Blake used optical aids. Some indeed, would be horrified. Is this not “cheating”. Where’s the innate artistic genius? But the optical device doesn’t produce the drawing, only the skilled hand of the artist can do that.

Moreover, many of Blake’s own drawings, the visionary heads produced in late-night seances held with John Varley, were copied using an optical device, the “graphic telescope”, a form of camera lucida, invented by John’s brother, Cornelius Varley, in 1809. Martin Butlin suggests that these copies were made by either John or Cornelius as preparation for publication in John Varley’s Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy. But I don’t think we can rule out the copies having been made by Blake himself.

Blake studies have been bedevilled by sentimental myths. First that he was an uneducated working man, an auto-didact. (Blake had, I would suggest, as good or better schooling than Alexander Pope who had no formal education after the age of twelve. No-one ever calls Pope an auto-didact.) Personally, I hold Blake to have been astonishingly well-read and here I cite his acquaintanceship with Tolson’s Hermathenae. The second myth is that with Blake the visual artist, there was an identity of invention and execution; that what was seen in the mind’s eye flowed effortlessly on to the copper plate. This ignores the evidence from Blake’s drawings of how the firm deliberate line emerges from a maze of incoherent scribbling or how the surviving copperplates of “Job” reveal the extensive use of répoussage—hammering the back of the plate, burnishing and re-engraving repeatedly. I think we can now add the use of camera obscura, Graphic Telescope, and maybe other optical devices to the Blakean skillset.

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Sources and further reading

Michael Bath.—Speaking Pictures : English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture.—Longman medieval and renaissance library.—London : Longman, 1994.
    Bath provides an introduction to the emblem’s importance in English renaissance culture, examining the relationship between emblem and formal rhetoric and exploring the place which the emblem occupied in the theoretical treatises on symbols of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the eighteenth century, Methodist and Evangelical communities fostered a tradition of Christian emblematics and allegory, and the emblems of Francis Quarles were adopted alongside the work of John Bunyan as a major part of the cultural inheritance of dissenting and nonconformist congregations.

Martin Butlin.—“Blake, the Varleys, and the Graphic Telescope”, in William Blake: Essays in Honour of Sir Geoffrey Keynes; edited by Morton D. Paley and Michael Phillips.—Oxford: at the Clarendon Press, 1973.—pp. 294-304.

David Hockney.—Secret knowledge: rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters.—London : Thames & Hudson, 2001.

Jonathan Roberts.—“William Blake’s Visionary Landscape near Felpham”.—Blake/an Illustrated Quarterly, Volume 47, Issue 2 (Fall 2013).

    I include Roberts’s essay, not because I think it worth reading. It isn’t. But if omitted, someone might think that it needed to be drawn to my attention.

Mei-Ying Sung.—William Blake and the Art of Engraving.—The history of the book, number 4.—London : Pickering & Chatto, 2009.
    In particular, Chapter 1: The history of the theory of conception and execution. Pp. 19-43.

Francis Tolson.—October 8, 1739. PROPOSALS For PRINTING, HERMATHENÆ: OR, ONE HUNDRED and TWENTY MORAL EMBLEMS, AND ETHNICK TALES. With NOTES, Explaining the more difficult Passages in Divinity, Philosophy, History, Mythology, &c. Necessary for the Imprinting RELIGION, VIRTUE, and a Knowledge of ANTIQUITY, in the Minds of YOUTH, and Others who have neither time nor Opportunity for deeper and more particular Enquiries. By FRA. TOLSON, Vicar of Easton-Maudit, in the County of Northampton and Chaplain to the Right Hon. the Earl of Sussex. Resicer Exemplar Vitæ, Morumq; jubelo. HOR. de Arte Po.—[London, 1739].
ESTC: t089310
    The purposes of Tolson’s emblem book are identified in this sixteen-page advertisement, published the previous year in order to raise subscriptions. The Proposals print samples of five of the emblems in Hermathenae complete with engraved illustrations and notes.

Francis Tolson.—HERMATHENÆ, OR Moral emblems, AND Ethnick Tales, with Explanatory Notes; VOL. I. By F. Tolson Vicar of Easton Maudit and Chaplain to the Rt Honble the Earl of Sussex. Respicere Exemplar Vitæ, Morumq; juvebo. Hor: de Art: Poet.—[London, 1740].
Engraved titlepage: “I. Devoto Sculpt”.
ESTC: t089308; Foxon T405.
    Sixty pictorial emblems each followed by a poem and explanatory notes. Woodcut tailpieces. The Proposals (1739) had announced that the work would eventually consist of two volumes, totalling 120 emblems, but the second volume was never printed.

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